Film Notes From the CMA Series

The Great Detectives Sleuth Again

2010-04-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves a mystery, or so it seems from the continued popularity of the genre. Certainly, the puzzle-like structure of mystery novels and films offers both a challenge and a satisfaction rarely found in other genres. It is with this in mind that we present another series of films full of shocking murders, stunning deductions, and a host of unlikely suspects with even more unlikely alibies.

We begin this year's series with the 1938 production of the Sherlock Holmes tale Silver Blaze. The film was the last in the series starring Arthur Wontner, one of the most noteworthy actors to play the role prior to Basil Rathbone. Wontner played the part in five films made during the 1930s and, though each film varied in its fidelity to the source, Wontner's interpretation of Holmes remained faithful to Doyle's stories.

Though essentially based on the short story of the same name, Silver Blaze also borrowed plot elements and characters from The Hound of the Baskervilles and "The Adventure of the Empty House." Although the film was updated to a contemporary setting and given a few "modern" touches, it retains the spirit of the original stories and a strong sense of authenticity.

One of the more popular movie detectives of the 1930s was Philo Vance. First portrayed by William Powell, the role of Vance established him as an important leading man. When Powell left the Vance series for the Thin Man films, he was replaced by Warren William. By the mid-1930s, Warren William had become known as a second-string William Powell--an ironic twist considering that in the early 1930s William had been a major romantic leading man.

The Philo Vance films starring Warren William tended to experiment with the material. A film which we have previously shown in this series, The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), was essentially a parody of the Vance films. This year we are showing The Dragon Murder Case (1934), which was produced as a mixture of murder mystery and horror film. The film's central plot device, a pool which is supposedly haunted by a ghostly dragon, allowed the photography and set design to exploit the gothic style that was common to horror movies of the 1930s.

While the character of "Bulldog" Drummond is little known today, during the 1930s numerous films were made about his adventures. The character of Drummond was played by a long and distinguished list of actors including such performers as Ronald Colman, Jack Buchanan, Ralph Richardson, and Ray Milland. Such was the popularity of these films that, by the mid-1930s, as many as two to five Drummond films were released per year.

The original character of Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, as created by H. C. "Sapper" McNeile, was an ex-soldier who turned to crime fighting because he found peace time life too boring. The literary Drummond tended to be a rough and violent figure, but the screen-version of the character was the epitome of sophistication. His cases also tended to be a bit on the fantastic side, filled with daring escapes and beautiful women. In this regard, Drummond is the direct forerunner to the character of James Bond.

Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) was the first film in the American-produced Drummond series of the late 1930s. Both the film's narrative and Ray Milland's performance were based on the earlier Drummond films which had starred Ronald Colman. It was also the last Drummond film of the 1930s produced on an adequate budget before the series began to suffer from diminished popularity caused by overexposure.

Even though his career went through a gradual decline during the 1930s, Warren William frequently appeared in the mystery films of this period. By the middle of the decade he was appearing on screen as Philo Vance, the Lone Wolf, and Perry Mason. William would originate the role of Mason in four films, beginning with The Case of the Howling Dog (1934).

As the first in the series, The Case of the Howling Dog was produced on the largest budget. While this film takes certain liberties with the original novel, it contained the best-structured plot of the series and was devoid of any unnecessary comedy relief.

In contrast, humor is the central focus of the four Miss Jane Marple films made in England in the early 1960s. The series began in 1962 with Murder, She Said, a loosely derived adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel 4:50 From Paddington. The film retained the basic plot points of the novel, but was extensively revamped in order to showcase the unique and eccentric talents of Margaret Rutherford, who played Jane Marple.

Rutherford, an actress, comedienne, and amateur psychic, represented a distinctly British combination of stubborn determination and whimsy. Though her portrayal of Miss Jane Marple was far removed from the character conceived by Christie, Rutherford did succeed in creating one of the more striking detectives to ever grace the screen.

The Great Detectives Part Two

2010-04-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

In the thirties, the mystery film was one of the most popular genres of the Hollywood film industry. The audience's demand for the films was enormous and every studio had at least one detective series in production. Not only were many mystery novels filmed, they even had their plots recycled into other films in order to meet this demand. Though prints of many of these films no longer exist, there are still copies from some of the major detective series from the period. In this continuation of last summer's program, we present five examples of the genre, many of which have seldom been screened since the thirties.

For many viewers, Basil Rathbone is the definitive Sherlock Holmes. When he initially appeared as Holmes, however, Rathbone was unfavorably compared to Clive Brook, who played the role in only three films (The Return of Sherlock Holmes [1929] , Paramount on Parade [ 1930],and Sherlock Holmes [1932]), but made a major impression on viewers. Of the three films, the last is considered critically the best.

Based both on the play by William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and on the short story "The Red Headed League," the film Sherlock Holmes is best remembered for its confrontations between Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty. Like many of the Holmes films of the thirties, the story was updated to the period and Moriarty's antics were modeled after the gangster tactics of Al Capone. The possible incongruity of the part of Moriarty were smoothly handled by Ernest Torrence, whose performance was an excellent counterpoint to Brook's droll and extremely self-assured Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is also notable for its photography which was strongly influenced by the German Expressionist cinema of the twenties.

The best of the Philo Vance films are those starring William Powell. Unfortunately, the only one of those films still known to exist is The Kennel Murder Case (shown last summer). Of the other actors who played the role, Warren William came closest to equaling Powell. In the 1939 film The Gracie Allen Murder Case, William made his last appearance as Vance in one of the strangest films of the series.

S. S. Van Dine, the author of the Philo Vance mystery novels, was a fan of Gracie Allen and wrote the original story for her. Critics were often annoyed by Vance's intellectual arrogance and demanding logic and the film may have been Van Dine's rebuttal to his detractors. In The Gracie Allen Murder Case, Vance remains coldly deductive, even when faced with Gracie Allen's puns and farcial comedy. It is not surprising that The Gracie Allen Murder Case has become a major cult film at repertory theaters.

Of the three versions of The Maltese Falcon, the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart is undoubtably the best known. It was, however, modeled after the 1931 version starring Ricardo Cortez. Both films were faithful to the original novel by Dashiell Hammett and the two productions rival each other in the exactness of their casting of the major characters. Though Cortez was fashioned as a Latin lover in the Valentino mold during the twenties, he changed to playing tough guys and made an effective Sam Spade in the thirties.

The visual similiarities between the two versions are very striking. It is believed that John Huston, prior to directing the 1941 film, watched the earlier production and used it as a visual outline. That the compositions in many scenes are almost identical would seem to support this theory. Though Huston's version is still superior, the original The Maltese Falcon is one of the most engaging mystery films of the early thirties.

Only two Nero Wolfe films were made in the thirties before author Rex Stout withdrew the film rights to his other stories. Stout was appalled by the two films due to certain liberties taken with the main characters. In spite of their less than faithful approach, the two films were well crafted mysteries. Meet Nero Wolfe (shown last summer) had Edward Arnold more suitably cast in the title role rather than Walter Connolly who played Wolfe in The League of Frightened Men. But the second film had a better plot which compensated for any failings on Connolly's part.

The narrative of The League of Frightened Men is unique in that Nero Wolfe must first establish that a murder has taken place before he can solve it. Matching wits with Wolfe is a deranged playwright who was superbly played by Eduardo Ciannelli. The comedy relief provided by Lionel Stander will annoy the purist, but The League of Frightened Men is generally considered to be one of the better mystery films of the period.

The most successful mystery series of the thirties were the Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. Combining murder with sophisticated comedy, the Thin Man films maintained an unequaled level of quality. The interplay between Powell and Loy was graceful and effortless and the films were produced by MGM as large budget productions.

The third film in the series, Another Thin Man, was based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. Viewers familiar with Hammett's novels will notice that the story was derived from The Dain Curse. While Hammett provided the story, screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett supplied the witty dialogue. Another Thin Man veers so close to screwball comedy that the mystery is often less memorable than the funny banter between Powell and Loy. While many mystery films of the thirties attempted to include comedy relief, the Thin Man films were the only ones to successfully make comedy an integral part of the story.

The Great Detectives

2010-04-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Nowhere is the seductive lure of the narrative more evident than in the mystery genre. The puzzle-box of a mystery story traps even the most disinterested viewer into the inevitable desire to know "how does it end." The mystery genre follows a simple yet riveting set of rules: a respectable facade or order is disrupted by murder; an outside force in the person of the detective proceeds to expose the potential chaos behind the facade; the final discovery of the murderer restores order, but usually at some physical or psychological cost to the original order. Since Oedipus first demanded to know "who did it," the structure of the genre has remained relatively unchanged.

The thirties and forties were the two most active decades for mystery movies. While crime didn't pay, people were certainly willing to pay to see it and every studio had its various sleuths, gumshoes, Oriental masterminds, and bumbling policemen. So many mystery films were made during this period that plots were literally recycled with only the names of the characters changed to protect the screenwriters. The program The Great Detectives presents four of the best examples from this hectic period of gentlemanly mayhem.

Having appeared in over a hundred films since the silent era, the team of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson was undoubtedly best represented by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. When they first appeared together as Holmes and Watson in the 1939 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the studio was uncertain about the match but the film was so successful that a sequel was quickly produced the same year. This second film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, remains the best of the series due to the cleverness of its plot and the high quality of its production (it had the largest budget of any of the films). The film's greatest asset is the creation of a villain who is Holmes's equal. Professor Moriarty may be mad, but he is a brilliant and often engaging madman who divides his time between plotting elaborate crimes and lecturing people on the difference between a slave and a superman.

The snobbish and excessively erudite Philo Vance was one of the most popular detectives of the early thirties. Vance didn't simply solve the crime, he did a thesis presentation on all of the psychological nuances which led to the murder. A member of the velvet smoking jacket school of detection, Vance's early success on the screen was largely due to the abilities of William Powell to make the character both believable and sufferable. Previously type-cast as a villain, Powell proved himself as a leading man by breathing life and wit into a perpetual doctoral candidate.

The Kennel Murder Case is one of the most complex of the Vance mysteries and is still notorious for having one of the longest denouement scenes ever. This excessive attention to detail eventually led to the unpopularity of the Vance films as the Dashiell Hammett school of tough-guy detectives introduced a quicker and more physical method. It is ironic that the one flaw to The Kennel Murder Case is an incorrect detail. The set designer for the film altered one of the townhouses in a way that made the solution to the mystery impossible.

Perhaps fewer films where made about Nero Wolfe than about any other famous detective. Wolfe's creator, Rex Stout, disliked the media in general and films in particular, and while two Wolfe films were made in the thirties, Stout felt that they were not faithful enough to his stories and he refused to allow any further productions. The films, Meet Nero Wolfe and The League of Frightened Men, were taken out of circulation and were not commercially re-released until 1982. The reputation of the films, especially Meet Nero Wolfe, has remained strong, however, and Stout's criticism of the films is largely indicative of his own demanding temperament.

The casting of Lionel Stander as Wolfe's assistant was, admittedly, a mistake. One of the major flaws of the thirties mystery movie was the conviction that every film needed some broad comic relief. Edward Arnold as Wolfe, however, was an amply appropriate choice. An excellent character actor, Arnold specialized in playing arrogant, overbearing figures. Plump more than fat, Arnold made up for his lack of excess poundage by zeroing in on Wolfe's domineering personality. While the recent television series (with William Conrad) portrayed Wolfe as a gruff but lovable old bear, Arnold went directly for the jugular. His Wolfe is good at what he does and only does it because his client pays him very large sums for doing it. As Wolfe points out in the novels, his layers of fat insulate him from trite sentimentality.

Though not well known in the United States, the Inspector Cockrill novels have a strong following in England. The one film taken from these books, Green for Danger, is considered by many critics to be one of the best "whodunits" in the cinema. The director, Sidney Gilliat, had been one of Hitchcock's chief collaborators in the thirties and the film gave him an opportunity to pay homage to his mentor.

The role of Inspector Cockrill gave Alastair Sim's droll talent a near-perfect showcase. With his shabby mackintosh and crumpled, ill-fitting derby, Cockrill is seemingly slow and inept. Prone to rambling comments and pointless anecdotes, Cockrill actually has a shrewd, steel trap mind which seizes significant clues from seemingly innocent details.

By the mid-forties, the mystery film began to vanish from the screen. It is possible that the conflict inherent in the genre between chaos and stability ceased to make sense in an increasingly unstable world. In popular literature, the last detective to achieve widespread fame would be Mike Hammer, a character totally submerged in violence and brutality. The intellectual game of the mystery was irrelevant as the new anti-hero did his detecting with gun powder rather than brain power. Perhaps the secret charm of the thirties mystery film is our own nostalgia for an era when murder was a sport for gentlemen.

Modern Japanese Cinema

2009-08-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Japanese began producing films at approximately the same time as the West, but while the Western cinema was quickly taking shape, the Japanese cinema remained relatively stagnant. By the time the cinema became the major narrative art form in the West, the typical Japanese film served as a form of illustration for the bensei, the traditional storyteller. The center of attention was the bensei as he told the tale and the film was used primarily as a visual enhancement for tales that may (or may not) have been related to the original narrative of the movie. Meanwhile, film as an art in its own right for the Japanese only existed at certain specialty theaters which showed the major Russian, American and German films of the era.

It was not until the 1920s, when various film directors began resisting the use of the bensei, that the Japanese cinema began moving in its own unique direction. The foreign films of the 1920s were the original models copied by such early Japanese filmmakers like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, but this foreign influence was only the raw material that was quickly adapted and altered into distinctly Japanese forms. By the 1930s, the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi were considered too Japanese to be understood by foreign viewers.

The Japanese cinema is also one of the few national film industries in the world (the other main example being Hollywood) that has had a long, continuous history since the silent era. However, quantity does not always correspond with quality (as Hollywood also amply demonstrates) and the Japanese cinema's history has gone through periods of immense creatively - such as the late 1930s and the 1950s - followed by other, less interesting stages of standard genre melodramas, potboilers, and the occasional soft-core porn.

Unfortunately, the Japanese film industry is currently in the midst of such a period and the exciting and innovative films of the 1960s has been followed by economic problems within the industry and a reluctance on the part of producers to finance anything beyond quickie exploitation films. American movies dominant the marketplace and an upsurge in television viewing in Japan has not only made it more profitable for a Japanese director to work in television, but allows the director to achieve greater artistic independence on the small box rather than on the large screen. The few important artists still making films have found it necessary to either make blatantly commercial thrillers (which is what Kon Ichikawa has done) or else seek international backing for Japanese films (e.g. Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses was produced by a French company). After years of frustration, Akira Kurosawa found it necessary to accept the Soviet's offer to direct the non-Japanese film Dersu Uzala - either that or retire from film making altogether.

The 1960s stands out as the most recent period of major innovation in the Japanese cinema. It was a period that was fueled by national and international upheavals in the arts and by a growing sense of disenchantment among the younger generation of Japanese artists with many aspects of the society in which they lived. The spirit of compromise and mild optimism found among the Humanist filmmakers of the post-World War Two era was replaced with a more formalistic and rebellious attitude. New forms and structures were developed to deal more critically with contemporary subject matter while those filmmakers who dealt with historical subjects did so in a highly self-conscious effort to re-evaluate Japanese history and culture in light of the present situation. Double Suicide by Masahiro Shinoda takes a Brechtian approach to the traditional form of the Bunraka puppet play, purposefully exposing both the manipulations of the puppet-masters upon the actors and the film making process itself.

The avant-garde in Western art and literature had a strong influence upon many of the Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s, a "coming full circle" considering the influence of Japanese art upon the original avante-garde movement in the West. When Nagisa Oshima began working in the cinema, he was more impressed with the films of the French New Wave than he was with his own country's cinema and the stylistic similarities between his films and those of Jean-Luc Godard has not been overlooked by Western critics. Likewise, Woman in the Dunes is obviously derived from Franz Kafka's The Castle and novelist/screenwriter Kobo Abe's concerns are those of a European Existentialist. The allegorical content of the film is structurally austere and visually Woman in the Dunes is highly similar to a European "art" film.

As previously mentioned, Japanese culture was targeted for a critical re-evaluation. The new filmmakers were acutely aware of the changes that had taken place in modern Japan and of the apparent failure of traditional values. This failure in the face of recent history is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the way that Oshima chronologically structures The Ceremony. The various ceremonies of the film are set during politically important years of the post-war era. 1947, at the beginning of the film, was the start of the Cold War and the first wave of "Red Purges." In 1952, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was signed and Japan began to reap a profit from U.S. involvement in the Korean War. That same year, Japan's Communist Party broke with the students (one of whom was Oshima) in the radical movement. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was renewed in 1961 despite violent protests. 1964 was the year of prosperity and the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. In the year the film was made - 1971 - the Security Treaty was renewed again and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima led a small private army in a take-over of the National Security Force headquarters. Mishima's siege - his impassioned speech in support of the Emperor and "true" Japanese culture - and his act of ritual suicide afterwards, had stunned his fellow artists. In spite of his fanatical right-wing politics, Mishima was an influential voice to both sides of the Japanese political spectrum and his spectacular death forced to the surface the self-destructive contradictions which the Japanese intellect is seemingly incapable of resolving.

These contradictions - the disastrous outcome of military imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s; the massive disruption of an age-old culture and the overly enthusiastic embracing of things American; the attempt to build a democracy out of the remains of a politically feudalistic nation while simultaneously maintaining the Emperor; the deep relevance for the beauty of nature while the modern landscape is transformed into an industrial wasteland - has produced, according to Kon Ichikawa's Odd Obsession, a particular kind of impotency in the Japanese soul.

Bitter, ironic and a lover of macabre humor, Ichikawa has been a major influence upon the Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s because, says Shinoda, "he makes films only for the sake of making films, (his) work has a kind of innocence and very pure pleasure. In the technical realm he has been the most influential in pointing out directions for the avant-garde...." His willingness to experiment (he made one film told from the point of view of a cat) and sheer audacity in subject matter (after Odd Obsession he made Fires on the Plains in which a group of stranded soldiers resort to cannibalism) is often combined with an ambiguous moral viewpoint. Unlike many of the other Humanist directors of the 1950s, Ichikawa ask questions rather than teach lessons and the vague optimism of his contemporaries is replaced with a biting pessimism.

The Debonairs: Gary Grant and William Powell

2009-06-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

The art of film acting is a difficult skill. Unlike the direct and immediate impact of the live theater, a film actor pokes his way through small, disorderly pieces of a screenplay, and the quality of his performance is often more dependent upon lighting directors, photographers, and editors than his own thespian talents. At best, a film actor can develop a personality, a distinctive style which becomes his "character" through a series of films. In other words, he comes to represent a specific type of character to such an extent that to cast him in a film would, in part, determine the nature of the film. Such actors do not merely play at being a character in a film but instead play "themselves." That is, they play a consciously created character that becomes their screen personality.

Of this type of performer, perhaps two of the most distinctive yet under-rated have been Gary Grant and William Powell. Both Grant and Powell became identified with a certain type of role, that of the urbane, sophisticated leading man in romantic comedies. As masters of the debonair, Grant and Powell developed personalities which allowed them to move through a performance with a smoothness and an apparent lack of effort which made their acting look all too easy and natural to be considered acting. Because of this, recognition of their talent was not given until late in their careers. Yet their popularity with audiences remains strong and, in spite of numerous recent attempts, no contemporary performer has been capable of matching them for grace, wit, and charming self-assurance.

The transformation from Archibald Leach to Gary Grant was, in itself, a major performance. As a shy and introverted child from a middle-class family in Bristol, England, Grant was surprisingly determined when, at the age of thirteen, he left home to join the Bob Pender Troupe. It was with this group that Grant learned acrobatics, dancing, pantomime,and a variety of other skills, as well as a motto which he later adopted as his own: "Never stay on too long. Never let the audience get tired of you. Always leave them laughing and wanting more."

Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Kansas City, William Horatio Powell seemed an even more unlikely candidate for the debonair school of acting. Powell originally entered law school at the University of Kansas before he decided to defy his father's wishes. Borrowing $700 from his aunt, Powell left the legal profession after two weeks of classes and enrolled in New York's American Academy of Dramatic Art. While the English music halls became Gary Grant's training ground, Powell studied his craft through the more conventional route of stock companies and the Broadway theater.

The films in this program have been selected to emphasize particular aspects of both Grant's and Powell's screen personalities. The two films starring Gary Grant represent his portrayal of a distinctly masculine male who undergoes a series of humiliations that become a test of both love and character. In The Awful Truth, he plays the role of a philandering husband who discovers his own enormous potential for jealousy in the first ten minutes of the film. The mutual attempts of Grant and Irene Dunne to sabotage each other's love affairs become not only the proof that they still love each other, but is also the force by which they achieve a new equality in their relationship. Their romantic rivals (Ralph Bellamy and Molly Lament) are not so much sexual contenders as they are pawns in the marital game. By the end of the film, Grant and Dunne have to be reconciled because no one else can put up with them.

I Was a Male War Bride goes even further with sexual humiliation. Beginning with an antagonistic relationship of equality (Ann Sheridan's WAC lieutenant behaves in almost as masculine a manner as Grant's captain) the film follows a progressively unequal path. The more romantically involved Grant and Sheridan become, the more humiliation Grant must suffer, whether in the form of an errant motorcycle or the rigid bureaucracy of the U.S. Army. Grant's impersonation of a woman officer during the final third of the film is not only a travesty of his own masculinity, but also a satire on the military mentality. Never has a man looked less like a woman (even Grant's wig is obviously a bobbed horse's tail), but the fact that he's dressed like a woman and has signed all the forms as Mrs. makes him a woman according to the rules and regulations of the army.

The William Powell films are representative of the type of comedies which made him famous during the thirties and forties. In both films he is teamed with Myrna Loy, his most popular leading lady. Double Wedding is an ideal sample of the type of romantic screwball comedy films which they made during the period; films in which logic took a highly circular route and the most improbable events came about in probable ways. The central plot in Double Wedding, Powell's conviction that the only way to win the woman he loves is by courting her sister, only makes sense within the uniquely whimsical confines of a Powell-Loy comedy. Like the other films of its type, Double Wedding does not convince the viewer with its narrative rationale, but instead succeeds in winning our suspension of disbelief.

Shadow of the Thin Man presents Powell in his most famous persona as private detective Nick Charles. The fourth of a series of six Thin Man films, Shadow of the Thin Man was the last film of the series to be directed by W.S. Van Dyke before his death. Van Dyke had directed the previous three films, which accounts for their consistent wit and style. The two films which came after this one (The Thin Man Goes Home and The Song of the Thin Man) are noticeably lacking the urbane polish of Van Dyke's productions which lead to the films' loss of popularity at the time. As murder mysteries go, the Thin Man films became increasingly marginal, but as witty comedy films they remained fresh and inventive and were the best showcase for the "perfectly married" teamwork of Powell and Loy.

Point Blank: Films of Disenchantment

2009-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Film Noir genre has functioned in the American cinema as a powerful fulcrum for the disturbances and discontent of modern society. The genre's tendencies toward glib cynicism and dark shadowy photography result in nightmarish reflections of a treacherous and claustrophobic world. Through this genre, numerous filmmakers have been able to express the negative underside to the optimism and complacency of mainstream culture. With its codes and generic conventions, Film Noir has created a large and substantial text of critical disenchantment.

The program "Point Blank: Films of Disenchantment" presents three significant examples of Film Noir from the late 1960s to late 1970s, when the genre reached its most extreme and experimental stage of development. Jack Shadoian, in his book Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film, writes that at this time the genre "is forced inward, toward its own procedures, which become increasingly sophisticated. It used to be that well established procedures could be used to move outward toward an audience they could securely engage. Now the audience must be seduced into accepting new aesthetic resources and complex (and at times schizophrenic) attitudes."

The program begins with a screening of Point Blank (USA 1967), the second theatrical film to be directed by the English filmmaker John Boorman in his first, and nearly last, American production. The audacious and highly experimental style of the film alienated the American distributors, who proceeded to dump Point Blank on the second-run market. In spite of this, the film has proven to be one of the more important and influential works of the 1960s. It is also one of the most difficult to interpret. Even the existence of the film's central character is left open; Boorman himself has stated that Point Blank must be viewed as either a dream or as a ghost story.

The rampant ambiguities of the narrative are magnified by a visual structure based upon fragmentation and non chronological association. When Walker, the main character, traverses the length of the Los Angeles International Airport, his footsteps are inter-cut with scenes from the past and present. The ending shot is a duplicate of the opening shot. In addition, mythic references are invoked; for example, at the beginning of the film, Walker ascends from the water and, ultimately, descends into darkness and nothingness -- both suggestive of Boorman's interest in Arthurian legend.

Remember My Name (USA 1978) was the first of three overt excursions into Film Noir genre by the maverick American filmmaker Alan Rudolph. It is also an important example of a relatively recent proto-feminist variation on what has been traditionally a male dominated genre. This conversion of Film Noir into Femme Noir initiates a series of major shifts in the sexual codes of the genre and changes the traditional image of the femme fatale into an avenging angel.

The illusion of feminine vulnerability is one of the central themes of Remember My Name. Throughout the film, Geraldine Chaplin's waif-like appearance is suggestive of physical and psychological fragility. She displays, however, an iron-will and a sense of determination which is symbolized by her peculiar habit of stamping out her cigarettes in the palm of her hand. Several of the men in Remember My Name act on the mistaken assumption that they are either protecting her or manipulating her. Behind her doe-like eyes, however, Chaplin has a strength and a sense of personal justice that gives her control over the men around her.

Rudolph's mentor is filmmaker Robert Altman. Though Altman is today a virtual nonperson in Hollywood, during the 1970s he directed some of the finest films of the period, including M*A*S*H (USA 1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (USA 1971), Thieves Like Us (USA 1973), and Nashville (USA 1975). Subsequently, many of Altman's films were revisionist critiques of Hollywood conventions and established genres. With his production of The Long Goodbye (USA 1973), Altman entered into a problematic debate with the noir genre and the near-mythic stature of one of the genre's most important fictional figures, Philip Marlowe.

In the novels by Raymond Chandler and the films adapted from them -- including The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and Lady in the Lake -- Philip Marlowe has come to represent the archetypal private eye, a tattered and worn gumshoe whose verbal flippancy masks a surprisingly chivalrous code of honor. In the film The Long Goodbye, however, Altman views Marlowe as an anachronism of the 1930s; an honorable man adrift within an uncaring and amoral culture. When Marlowe awakens at the beginning of the film, he is like a modern Rip Van Winkle who finds that the world as he knew it has irrevocably changed. Though Altman views both Marlowe and his moral code with nostalgic sympathy, he also realizes the degree to which modern society has turned cold and decadent. In making The Long Goodbye, Altman presents and shares in Marlowe's genuine sense of disenchantment.

Sembene: The African Screen

2009-04-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

"We must understand our traditions before we can hope to understand ourselves."
--Ousmane Sembene

Though the typical American film goer is largely unfamiliar with the African (and especially the country of Senegal)cinema, nonetheless the name of Ousmane Sembene has emerged to great critical prominence on the international screen. As the leading filmmaker of the surprisingly active Senegalese cinema, Sembene has created a body of works that artistically probes the historic and contemporary problems of Africa. In the process, his films has given an expressive voice to the thoughts and feelings of his fellow countrymen and Africans.

Sembene was born in 1923 in the village of Ziguinchor in southern Senegal. At an early age he choice not to follow in his father's profession as a fisherman. Instead, he drifted through a series of jobs as a mechanic, a mason, and a sharpshooter in the French army during World War Two. By 1948, he had traveled from Senegal to France where he worked as a longshoreman in Marseilles and became a militant union organizer.

It was also during this time that Sembene began to write poems and stories. His first novel, Le Docker Noir, was published in 1956 and earned critical praise in both Africa and Europe. With such other novels as Xala, Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu, and Dombaye, Sembene established himself as a major writer.

By 1961, Sembene had become increasingly interested in film making and he received a grant to study at the Moscow Film Institute under the Soviet director Mark Donskoi. When he returned to Senegal, Sembene began working on a series of short films and, in 1965, made his first feature with the production of Black Girl.

The films in this program represent two specific aspects of Sembene's concerns. The October 10 presentation of Ceddo (1977) is a major example of Sembene's interest in critically reconstructing the events and issues of Senegalese history.

The word "ceddo" refers to the common village people who live under the feudalistic system presented in the film. While the power struggles and revolutions of the film are motivated by the political desires of the various tribal and religious leaders of the film, it is the "ceddo" who are presented by Sembene as the heroes and victims
of historic events.

The October 17 screening of Xala (1974) presents Sembene's caustic view of modern Africa and the problems of the independent African state. The main character of Xala is a successful African businessman who, despite his talk of African heritage and identity, speaks in French instead of his native language, drinks only bottled water from Europe, and can't live without the air conditioner. Then he is struck by the "xala," a curse of impotence which sends him on a panic-ridden search of doctors, soothsayers, and shamans, a journey which forces him to face his own identity. Sembene's unrelenting attack upon hypocrisy and self-deceit has made Xala one of his most controversial films.

The film Emitai (1971), to be shown on October 31, invokes recent African history and tribal mythology and religion. The film is set during the final days of World War Two and describes the clash which took place between the French army and the Diolas tribe in the Casamance region of Senegal.

The word "Emitai" is the name for the god of thunder in the religion of the Diolas people and the unique relationship between these people and their gods is one of the major themes of the film. For the Diolas, the gods and spirits are real and Sembene attempts to capture in Emitai the unique sense of reality as it is felt and seen by these people.

The 1968 film Mandabi concludes the series on November 7. In Mandabi (translation: the money order), Sembene creates a poignant satire in which he details the bizarre clashes which exists between the influences of European culture and ancient African customs. The film's main character quickly discovers that the simple task of cashing a money order can, and does, become a major point of conflict between Third World bureaucracy and the surviving structures of European colonization.

Mandabi also becomes, for Sembene, a study of the vices and virtues of the common people of Africa. Sembene is sharp and bitter in his attacks on the deceptions used by many of the characters in Mandabi. In turn, he finds in his hero an ultimate expression of traditional virtue.

Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective

2009-04-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

It is generally known, though not often well appreciated, that the Italian Neo-Realist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s had a profound effect on the direction of the modern cinema. It was not simply due to the fact that the Neo-Realist movement rejected the artificial and illusionistic tendencies of the Hollywood dream factory, though the documentary-like photographic style and open-ended narratives of the early Neo-Realist films did defy the sleek yet empty artifice of the commerical cinema. But the Italian Neo-Realist movement had several more serious objectives and it is these larger concerns, rarely dealt with by contemporary filmmakers, that still makes the movement supremely important to a critical understanding of film images and their relationship to society.

For the Neo-Realist filmmakers, the cinema was crucially concerned with ethical and political issues. To believe otherwise was not just an evasion of the artist's responsibility, but also invoked the false notion that any artist lived apart from the history and culture surrounding him. Further, for the Neo-Realists, the cinema had an obligation to critically confront the actual day-to-day realities of their society. Most Western filmmakers simply do not do this, instead they work within the confines of genre conventions, mock mythic perspectives, and predetermined middle-class ideology. The Italian Neo-Realist cinema, however, took to the streets and countryside of Italy, searching for the sense and feel of how people really lived, with an admitted bias toward the otherwise forgotten faces of the poor.

Roberto Rossellini is often wrongly credited with being the founder of the Neo-Realist movement. There was no single founder and Rossellini was one of several major Italian filmmakers who emerged from the fascist era with a vigorous desire to steer the cinema away from the banalities and lies of the Mussolini period. Rossellini was, however, one of the most gifted of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and was the first to reach a wide international audience through his production of Open City (Italy 1945). He was also the one filmmaker of the movement who adhered to the principles of Neo-Realism throughout his career and who most extensively explored the visual, moral, and historical ramifications of the main philosophical concerns of the movement.

Though Rossellini had directed several films during the fascist period, it was only with the impending liberation of Rome that he was able to create a work fully expressive of his experience of life under war and dictatorship. Open City was largely shot on location while the German army was still retreating from advancing American forces and some of the troops in the film were actual German soldiers who were unaware of the cameras. But the vivid documentary look of the film is not to be confused with objectivity. Part of the raw emotional power of Open City (and it still remains an emotionally potent experience on first viewing) is derived from its subtle use of comic and melodramatic conventions. Further, the seemingly improvised structure of the film belies its overt political agenda. Like all of the Neo-Realist filmmakers,Rossellini was a leftist and,while he was not a member of the Italian Party, he was interested in forging the foundation for a possible coalition between the party and the Catholic Church. The central narrative of Open City is an attempt to present points of commonalty between the two major social forces in post-war Italy.

The legacy of fascism and World War Two were two of the major subjects of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and Open City was the first installment in Rossellini's war triptych in which he relentlessly examined the personal and ethical conditions of the war and its aftermath. The other two films in this triptych, Paisan (Italy 1946) and Germany, Year Zero (Italy/Germany 1947), expanded beyond the immediate concerns of Open City as each work focused on the larger social and cultural effects of fascism.

Paisan is centered on the points of contact and misunderstandings that directly and indirectly arose between the Italians and Americans during the liberation of Italy. Even the film's title refers to this since the word "paisan" was a relatively archaic and unused term that was imported back to Italy by Italian-American troops. Throughout most of the short stories of Paisan, Americans and Italians confront each other through a series of linguistic confusion, cultural contradictions, and, in the film's finale, mutual sacrifice.

While Paisan deals with the war's final days in Italy, Germany, Year Zero explores the persistence of the fascist mentality in post-war Germany and Europe. It was a basic tenet of the Neo-Realist movement that history had to be critically examined, not forgotten, and that the failure to do so would merely pave the way for a resurgence of history's most recent horrors. Rossellini sensed that all of Europe was at a crossroad and that, like the character of Edmund in the film, the European mind was still conditioned to the mental and social structures of the recent past.

The satiric vein of The Machine to Kill Bad People (Italy 1948) was an unusual departure for Rossellini and it is no secret that he lost interest in the film just before the end of filming, leaving it to be completed by another director. Yet the film not only works as a surprisingly deft comedy, but its allegorical narrative actually delineates the philosophic attitudes of the Neo-Realist filmmakers to the photographic image. The camera was not a passive instrument for them, but rather a powerful weapon. The gaze of the lenses was not impassive, but rather a forum for moral judgement and political determination. Neither film nor photography were neutral, but rather loud voices in the greater struggles of the society.

Stromboli (Italy 1949) was the first of several collaborations between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who had grown intensely dissatisfied with both her life and career in Hollywood, was extremely impressed by the film Open City and contacted Rossellini about the possibility of working together. It was not long after their first meeting that Bergman and Rossellini began their romantic relationship and when she left her Swedish husband for Rossellini, Bergman was systematically blacklisted from Hollywood for "immoral" behavior. She would spend most of the 1950s in Italy with Rossellini, raising their children and acting in his films. While the films they made together tended to be more melodramatic than his other works, Stromboli and the other films not only offered Bergman some of her finest opportunities for displaying a very naturalistic form of acting, but they also created an extensive portrait of the many emotional and psychological faces of a woman.

Self-Reflections: the West German Cinema

2009-04-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Since its beginning in the late sixties, the New German cinema has reflected the major social and political concerns of West Germany. These concerns have led the filmmakers of the New German cinema to focus either directly or indirectly on the moral and political problems of recent German history in a manner previously unexplored in the West German cinema. While older Germans would prefer to forget the Nazi era, younger Germans have felt it necessary to confront this problem. Contemporary German filmmakers realize that they must, in one way or another, deal with this legacy because they know their present world was shaped by these experiences.

The films presented in this program are four of the more important works which deal with the problem of fascism. David (1979) and Germany, Pale Mother (1980) are direct confrontations with the Nazi era. Young Torless (1966) explores the roots of fascism in German culture, while Katzelmacher (1969) presents a parable on the latent potential for fascism in modern Germany. Like mirrors, all four films present a critical self-reflection of the filmmakers and their culture.

Peter Liltenthal, the director of David, is the son of a Jewish family which immigrated from Germany to South America in the early 1930s. This, combined with his own experiences after returning to Germany as a film student, gives Lilienthal's direction of David a very personal intensity. His earlier films, which were concerned with totalitarianism in South America, were politically astute, but lacked the more intimate feel of David.

For Lilienthal, David is more than a search for his cultural identity as a German Jew. It is also a tribute to those who managed to escape the brutality of the Third Reich and to survive with their culture and spirit in tact. While the film is about the Holocaust, it is also about one person's ability to resist and survive and, ultimately, to find a renewed sense of personal strength.

Volker Schlondorff is one of the best-known filmmakers of the New German cinema. He learned film making in France while working as an assistant director to Louis Malle, and it was with Malle's help that he was able to produce his first feature film, Young Torless. The film was based on a novel, written by Robert Musil in 1906, which was a critical attack on the Prussian education system. The novel presented a system which encouraged the strong to prey upon the weak; a frightening study in sadism which foretold of later events in Germany.

Some critics felt that Schlondorff's film version was heavy-handed in its political viewpoint, and it is true that Schlondorff has the advantage of hindsight over Musil. The film is, however, faithful to the original novel, and Schlondorff may be right in his assumption that it is impossible to view Young Torless in any way other than hindsight.

When he made his second film, Katzelmacher, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was emerging as one of the most important figures in the New German cinema. He was already an extremely controversial actor, writer, and director whose theater pieces were considered both daring and outrageous. Fassbinder based Katzelmacher on a short play he had previously improvised for the "Anti-Theater" company he belonged to. It was the second of ten feature-length films made during a two year period that marked the
first phase of Fassbinder's artistic career.

The word "katzelmacher" is a derogatory slang term for foreign workers in Germany and it is the name the youths in the film use for the Greek portrayed by Fassbinder. The young gang in Katzelmacher lack both ambition and direction, and the hostility they feel for the Greek worker is a meaningless attempt to justify their own aimlessness. The youths have created a closed society in which an outsider, such as the Greek, is an open target for the venting of their frustrations. In this respect, Fassbinder reminds us that the basic driving force toward fascism is still active and can be found in any setting.

One of the most important women filmmakers currently working in Germany is Helma Sanders-Brahms. She has previously made several documentaries for German television as well as a biographical film about the writer Heinrich von Kleist. It was Germany, Pale Mother, however, that brought her to international attention. The controversy surrounding the film when it was released in Germany is not surprising, for it is the most direct confrontation with the Nazi era ever made by a German filmmaker.

Based upon her parent's own experiences during World War II, Sanders-Brahms deals with the actions and moral responsibilities of the average German during this period. Further, she is concerned with the manner in which this legacy has affected her own generation. In doing this, she attempts to remove the silence that has existed for so long in Germany regarding this period. For this alone, Germany, Pale Mother may be one of the most daring films of the New German cinema.

John Ford: A Changing Vision of the West

2009-03-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

"John is half tyrant, half revolutionary; half saint, half Satan; half possible, half impossible; half genius, half Irish."
-Frank Capra

"(I admire)the old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford."
-Orson Welles

"He sees more out of one good eye than two producers see out of four."
-Martin Rackin

"I'm John Ford. I make Westerns."
-John Ford

He was born John Augustine Feeney on Feb 1, 1895 in a farm house on Cape Elizabeth, Maine., Later, when he followed his older brother Francis to the desert boom town of Los Angeles, he changed his name to Ford and picked up odd jobs as an extra (in Birth of a Nation he's the Klansman wearing glasses) and stuntman in the blossoming movie industry. Francis Ford, already established as an actor, went on to direct silent films while his layabout brother spent most of his time hanging around the back lots with out of work cowboys (the last of the real ones) and making the acquaintance of a retired US Marshall named Wyatt Earp. Then in 1917, John Ford got his first chance to direct because he was the only member of the crew to show up sober one morning.

The West of cowboys and Indians, gunfights and Tombstones, had ended a mere twenty years before and now a new West was taking shape on dusty back lots under the guidance of a young, half blind Irish-American who would, between 1917 and 1966, direct over one hundred films, win six Academy awards, a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and the Medal of Freedom from the US government. It is ironic that before he died from cancer in 1973, Ford commented that: "I certainly had no desire to go into pictures or have anything to do with them. Still haven't."

Ford's work ranged from the stark fatalism of The Long Voyage Home and The Fugitive to the bucolic humor of The Quiet Man; the social concerns of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley to the anti-social slapstick of Donovan's Reef and the just plain anti-social in Seven Women. The Western films, however, are the ones Ford is best remembered for. Not merely, as Howard Hawkes once said, because he did corn good, but because he took the Western genre and so extensively reshaped and personalized it that virtually every Western made within the past thirty years has been indebted to him. Of modern Westerns, the Italians pay him tribute in the Monument Valley sequences of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and Sam Peckinpah - possibly the most self-consciously anti-Fordian director to ever work in the genre - gave homage in Ride the High Country before biting back in Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch.

The period of films this program is concerned with are the Westerns Ford directed between 1939 and 1962 and specifically with the changes that took place in the text of his films during that time. With Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine, Ford creates his most eloquent statements on the survival of civilization against the hostile personifications of the wilderness. Nomadic and rootless, both the Ringo Kid (in Stagecoach) and Wyatt Earp (My Darling Clementine) appear out of the desert and they each carry with them a basic, primitive need for revenge, a need that could pose a threat to the community (the stagecoach and Lordsburg; Tombstone) they enter. Likewise both must confront evil families (the Palmer brothers and the Clantons) that are perversions of the values celebrated by Ford and both Ringo and Earp become a defender of communal life and values (even though the Kid and Dallas leaves Lordsburg and the "dubious gifts of civilization,"they do so only to go somewhere else and start their own families).

Their victories over these evil families (in effect, over the wilderness itself) reaffirms the moral and social order of the community, even if Ford does show at the beginning of Stagecoach some distrust of the self-righteous elements of society such as the Ladies Law and Order League.

In The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the nomadic figures of Ethan Edwards and Liberty Valance are at best destructive forces which must ultimately be rejected by society (the closing of the door at the end of The Searchers) and at its worst, a deranged thug who must be eliminated by a similar wilderness figure whose act of murder is in turn an act of self-destruction. The ceremonies and dances in My Darling Clementine re-enforces the shared values of the community,, In Fort Apache, the military and social rituals suggests the problems which divides the fort's self-contained society. The wedding ceremony near the end of The Searchers dissolves into chaos with Marty's and Ethan's return,. The fight which breaks out between Marty and Charlie is presented by Ford as rough house comedy but what it suggests within the larger context of both the film and Ford's work is a darkening of vision, a sense that what once seemed good and noble has turned sour and the values Ford once embraced are brought under critical scrutiny and found wanting. With The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford grows nostalgic toward the wilderness past and, while recognizing the historic inevitability of the emerging civilization, he seems to dismiss the future as a cruel sham.

That Ford became disillusioned with the society around him is evident from most of the films he made after the Second World War,, How deep his despair went is most noticeable in his Westerns. Ford once said that when in doubt, make Westerns and he followed his own advise only to carry his doubts with him into a genre that is often (and wrongly) assumed to be morally simplistic,, Even in his lesser films of this period, such as Cheyenne Autumn, his faith gives way to pessimism as he shows his much loved Seventh Cavalry mowing down unarmed Indians. The Wyatt Earp of My Darling Clementine is a near mythological hero, but in the Dodge City sequence of Cheyenne Autumn Earp is presented as a cross between a card shark and a pimp and, though he is slightly more honorable than the cowboys around him, both he and society carries the smell of corruption.

Ford was the cinema's folklorist and his hopes, and later cynicism, on the myths of the American West act as a barometer for the changes which were to come. As Andrew Sarris wrote, the films of John Ford are "a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and also in its ultimate memory-image on the horizon of history,"

The Laughmakers: The Comedians of the '30s and '40s

2009-03-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

One sign of the changes that took place in American culture between the 1930s and 1940s can be found within the comedy film genre of the period. The comedy films of the 1930s were dominated by the "zanies," broadly played and clownish figures who represented a mix of vaudeville and the circus. The 1940s was increasingly represented, however, by comedians whose talents had been honed on radio and who were more comfortable with the one-liner rather than the baggy pants. Slapstick, the physically expressive humor of the silent cinema, had already been tempered by the 1930s to the verbal demands of the "talking picture." It became almost extinct, however, in the 1940s as the ear became more important than the eye.

Aside from being one of the greatest comedy teams of the era, the Marx Brothers also represented the changing spectrum of American comedy. Harpo was an overt throw back to the silent period as he combined his nonverbal tantrums and barrages with an anarchistic sense of innocence. Chico was a continuation of the vaudeville ethnic humor tradition in which bad accents and fractured English played to a sympathetic ear among the immigrant laborers who were a prominent part of the early vaudeville audience. Groucho, on the other hand, was the verbal specialist of the team and his nonstop banter of puns, non sequiturs, and one-liners more closely resembled the audio gags of radio rather than the broad farce of vaudeville. The Marx Brothers' successful transition from stage to screen in the 1930s was not surprising. Groucho's ability to continue his own career as a radio, and then television, comedian was due to his unique position within the changing context of American comedy.

W. C. Fields was the embodiment of the vaudeville performer. First trained as a juggler, Fields was able to use his skills to develop an extremely idiosyncratic form of physical humor. He also had a reputation for his fast wit and sharp tongue and he began interjecting his own brand of commentary into his sight gags. Further, Fields had a deep conviction that humor was based on cruelty and that the audience was laughing at you, not with you. Fields had a distinctive, though erratic, film career and his screenplays (usually written by him under a preposterous pseudonym) veered between surrealism and barroom braggadocio. His jaundiced view of the world was developed, in part, from Fields own harsh upbringing and he had a strong distaste for hypocrisy and conventional morality. He was also not particularly fond of either children or dogs.

Laurel and Hardy were one of the few comedy teams of the silent period who discovered a successful niche in the sound era. Though they rarely received great critical support and their films were mostly "B" productions, they retained a surprisingly strong sense of affection from their audience. This was due, in part, to the "everyman" nature of their characters. Throughout their films, they portrayed men of limited skills, dreams, and ambitions who simply wanted to get through the day with the least amount of agony. Repeatedly, they discovered themselves in a world in which petty pride, misplaced envy, and duplicity would systematically reduce their existence to a state of violence and anarchy. They would wade through the chaotic universe of their films with a nonchalance based not upon bravery but rather upon their inability to completely comprehend the world round them. In the face of adversity, they neither overcame nor endured. They simply muddled through.

At the height of his career, Bob Hope was the ideal radio comedian. His brand of humor was based on story gags and so-called "groaners," jokes that were meant to be bad so that he could milk the real laugh by his defensive come back to a groaning audience. Hope lacked the slapstick skills and strong personality of the earlier generation of film comedians and throughout his numerous movies he always played variations of the same character, an average guy with a smart mouth. This was indicative, however, of the direction of the comedy genre in the 1940s. Increased competition from radio programs steered comedy films toward the verbal rather than the physical and a form of comic realism began to take precedent over the extreme exaggeration of an earlier era. Hope was indicative of these changes in which the large screen found itself increasingly influenced by radio and, by the end of the 1940s, television.

Like Hope, Red Skelton was most successfully connected with radio and television. Unlike Hope, however, Skelton was able to create comic characters and handle physical humor. Originally trained as a mime, Skelton also benefited greatly from the comedy coach that M-G-M Studios hired to direct him through his scenes. That Buster Keaton, his coach, never received any credit for his labor is a mute testimony to Keaton's "nonperson" status by that time in Hollywood. Yet it was through his direction of Skelton that Keaton was able to stage the silent cinema's last stand as he created some of his final visual gags on the screen. Through this connection, as well as his own talents, Skelton provided a bridge between two generations of film comedians.

The American Cinema of the 1930s

2008-10-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

The American society of the 1930s was shaped by several powerful factors. The stock market crash of 1929, and the economic depression which ensued, created the greatest amount of social unrest since the Civil War. Widespread poverty and unemployment in the early 1930s resulted in an increased sense of cynicism and a heightened disrespect for authority throughout American society. Further, the global spread of fascism and the increasingly belligerent posture of Germany and Italy in Europe during the 1930s added to the anxieties of the period.

The Hollywood film industry attempted to grapple with the social and political problems produced by the Great Depression, although Hollywood itself was not severely affected by the Depression.

Likewise, the film industry was feeling the effect of technical changes. The new technology of sound recording in the cinema was sending the film industry through its own very intensive crisis. In the 1920s, the silent cinema had reached a highly developed level of visual aesthetics and had produced a generation of extremely well-known stars. By 1930, the unique conditions of the sound cinema, including the very sensitive microphones on the sets, had forced the camera to assume a static role in film production, and an entire generation of silent era stars became, within a few years, unemployable hacks because of their unimposing voices. In the wake of this "mass extinction," new performers began to emerge. Now that the cinema could talk, Broadway stars who had previously been disdainful of the silent cinema began boarding Los Angeles-bound trains. Even writers who had held Hollywood in total contempt found it easier to complain while basking in the California sun.

Broadway-trained directors, such as George Cukor and Rouben Mamoulian, made the westward journey. The effect that these new filmmakers would have on Hollywood, as they made the transition from stage to screen, would be widely varied. Cukor would make the stage, directly or indirectly, the central concern of his films. In contrast, Mamoulian would embrace the camera with a giddy fascination for its unique visual possibilities.

Though the theatre itself is only directly invoked in a sub-plot of Dinner at Eight, the theatrical nature of life is Cukor's subject matter. The film is rigidly divided into a series of tableaux, with the chiming of a grandfather clock periodically interjected as a coda. Cukor keeps his camera at a slight distance from the performers and maintains a sense of the proscenium arch throughout the film.

The narrative of Dinner at Eight presents an understated but provocative view of societal collapse. The film suggests that the Jordans, the film's old money family, have lived lives built upon illusions and, in the aftermath of the stock market crash, those illusions have proven false and pathetic. They belong to an age that has ceased to exist and the world is about to be dominated, the film suggests, by such new barbarians as Wallace Beery's vulgar industrialist.

The fall of the old order presented in Dinner at Eight represented the degree to which American society had developed both a fear and a fascination with anarchy in the 1930s. Hollywood found an appropriately violent and primordial forum for anarchy in the gangster genre. Though the gangster genre only retained its enormous popularity for a brief time (roughly from 1929 to 1933), it rapidly evolved an interesting set of codes and meaning.

In an early gangster film, such as Mamoulian's City Streets(USA 1931) a sense of moral integrity and innocence could still be viewed as a strong oppositional force to the urbanized corruption of crime. In The Public Enemy (USA 1933), there is no innocence and the gangsters' violence becomes an extension of the society around them. In City Streets, Cooper's character is a superb shooter who must be seduced into killing. In The Public Enemy, Cagney portrays a killer who is enamored by his own remarkable capacity for violence.

While the gangster film was expressive of the anarchistic impulses of the 1930s, the screwball comedy genre attempted to use momentary chaos as the means toward achieving a new democratic vision. In many screwball comedies, such as It Happened One Night (USA 1934), the social class structure is turned topsy-turvy. This comedic upset was especially overt in the comedy films of Frank Capra as he attempted to articulate his own concept of populism. In Capra's It Happened One Night, as well as in his other films of the 1930s, the common man is presented as the exclusive bearer of common sense while the wealthy, the intellectual, and other members of "privileged" society are presented as having lost touch with the basic core of humanity. Often, Capra's populism depended upon a raw and very overt appeal to sentiment--yet the decade which gave us the toughest of hoods also relished "Capracorn" and the emotional catharsis which it provided.

Throughout this period, the film studios remained one of the largest employers in Southern California and, while the price of a movie ticket was low, box office receipts were at an all-time high. The massive social unrest caused by the Depression did, however, worry many of the studio moguls. Some even feared the possibility of a revolution and felt that the film industry had a moral duty to avert political catastrophe. Many studio moguls became supporters of Herbert Hoover. Others, such as Harry Cohen of Columbia Pictures, became admirers of Benito Mussolini.

Of all the Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers maintained the most consistent approach to the production of social protest films. Budgets, more than politics, dictated the film production schedule at Warner Brothers and many of their films of the early 1930s were inexpensively made. Further, the films were usually about controversial, and highly exploitable, subject matter — a guarantee for quick returns at the box office. Many of these films, such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (USA 1932) and Wild Boys of the Road (USA 1933). were among some of the finer productions of the period.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang remains one of the most uncompromising social protest films ever produced by a Hollywood studio. The film was adapted from the real life experiences of Robert E. Burns, a man who was wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced to a Southern chain gang from which he repeatedly escaped. The film successfully invokes a nightmarish world in which an entire state's legal system is seemingly intent on destroying one man and, in the process, it delineates the means by which a man is ultimately forced to become the thing he is accused of being.

Likewise, William Wellman's production of Wild Boys of the Road attempts to present a vivid portrait of one of the major social problems of the Depression-era. Unemployed, homeless youths were, by the early 1930s, drifting across the country by the thousands. Forming into loosely-netted gangs, they would hop trains and hobo from city to city in search of jobs and their next meal. At its best, Wild Boys of the Road captures the dangers and unique despair that beset its characters.

While Warner Brothers articulated the anger that was rampant during the Depression, Columbia Pictures attempted to appeal to feelings of populism and patriotism. In a film like Washington Merry-Go-Round (USA 1932), Columbia attempted to merge fictional narrative with news-reel footage of one of the major events of the early 1930s, the Veterans Bonus Marches. In these marches over 20,000 veterans of World War One marched on Washington, D.C., demanding their army bonus pay. After a series of riots and takeovers of federal parks and buildings, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to break up the tent cities and other encampments erected by its own veterans. Machine guns and tanks were used to clear out the marchers. Somehow, in Washington Merry-Go-Round, this event becomes the basis for patriotic reaffirmation.

In American Madness (USA 1932), the bank runs of the 1930s are presented as being caused by human weakness and individual villains, not by the collapse of the economic system. Likewise, the heroic efforts of a single man could, in the film's view, prevent and alter the problems of the period. Despite the fact that both America and the world at large were in the grip of complex and enormous historic forces, Hollywood still clung to the myth that heroic individual action is the catalyst for economic and social stability and growth.

The belief that a single individual could change and cure the problems of the Depression fostered many illusions among Hollywood moguls and other prominent Americans, especially the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, along with certain other powerful Americans, became an admirer of the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini and felt that the United States could learn from Il Duce's model. Although Hearst was not directly involved in the production of Gabriel Over the White House (USA 1933), his nationally published editorials did influence the values purveyed in the film. Its vision of a benevolent American dictator, who is possessed by the archangel Gabriel, presents one of the more extreme, but by no means inauthentic, manifestations of a deeply troubled and volatile era.

One of the most influential directors of the 1930s was Frank Capra, and his films, especially his comedies, seemingly reflect the realities and illusions of the Great Depression era. His work, however, has long been the subject of intense controversy, and modern critical estimations of Capra1s films range from extreme reverence to respectful loathing. Despite this critical debate, Capra has retained an enormous popularity with many audiences and his film It's a Wonderful Life (USA 1946) has become a virtual institution in its own right. But it is the 1930s that stand as the period during which Capra as a filmmaker seemed to have been completely in artistic and mental union with his audience.

Capra was born to a Sicilian peasant family in 1897 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 6. His early career was divided between studies at the California Institute of Technology, work as a ballistics instructor during World War One, as well as time as a pool hustler and occasional con artist. He essentially bluffed his way into the film industry during the silent era and quickly became one of Hollywood's more successful comedy directors — especially with the films he made with the silent comedian Harry Langdon. The critical debate as to who was the more important creative force behind these films is presumably resolved by the fact that after Capra and Langdon ceased their work partnership, Capra's career flourished while Langdon's did not.

By the start of the sound movie era, Capra was already a well established director with a polished technical style, and because of the commercially successful track record of his films he was allowed a remarkable degree of directorial freedom as he became Columbia Pictures' most prominent filmmaker. With an unusual degree of artistic control, Capra began to shape his own distinctive cinema.

During the 1930s, the elements of Capra's ambivalent attitude began to manifest themselves loudly in his films. A disdain for the wealthy class appears in many of his films, especially in Ladies of Leisure (USA 1930), Platinum Blonde (USA 1931), It Happened One Night (USA 1934). and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (USA 1936).On the other hand, Capra could present quite agreeable portraits of individual members of this same class, such as Ralph Graves in Ladies of Leisure and Walter Connolly in It Happened One Night. In each case, the characters' capacity for sentimentality rather than the sum of their bank account is used to determine their virtue. Even Capra's caustic presentation of spoiled heiresses in both Platinum Blonde and It Happened One Night seems more determined by his sense of masculine prerogatives rather than the characters' social status.

While Capra was a proponent of the wisdom of the common people, he also distrusted them anytime they assembled into a group numbering more then 12. In such films as The Miracle Woman (USA 1931), American Madness and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the people are viewed as a mindless mob that can be goaded into action by lies and chicanery. This message is most overt in The Miracle Woman in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a radio evangelist who views her flock as being ripe for financial shearing and who manipulates them through the irrational forces of blind faith and emotionalism. In these instances, Capra views the people as an angry rabid crowd ready to perform either a hanging or a crucifixion. Likewise, the crowd can only be controlled by a strong, determined man (e.g., Walter Huston in American Madness and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) who can withstand public humiliation and the threat of potential violence. The implicit message seems to be that the greatest virtue of the common man is that he can be led by a decent, sentimental leader.

Capra's attitude toward the common man is in sharp contrast to his defiantly anti-intellectual bias. Even when his heroes are writers, such as Robert Williams in Platinum Blonde and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, their working method is more intuitive than analytical and their concerns are emotional rather than rational. Byproducts of intellectualism, such as the law and psychoanalysis, are viewed by Capra as either nonsense or a crooked scheme. Despite the fact that the main character in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is something of a rustic philosopher, he is untainted by any overt education and his philosophy appears to have been gathered by osmosis while sitting in a New Hampshire woods. In turn, his adversaries are lawyers who resent his natural intelligence almost as much as they envy his money.

The contradictory messages and attitudes in Capra's films are neither strengths nor flaws. Rather, they are some of the very elements of his work which reflected the emotional and mental composition of his audience, Capra's popularity was based upon his ability to identify and portray the inherent beliefs and subconscious concerns of his period. His films did not so much express the physical realities of the 1930s, but rather they articulated the apprehensions and mythic constructs of that era. The contradictions and confusions found in his films were not just his, but were also those of his viewers. Capra represented his time, for both better and for worse, to a degree unparalleled by any other filmmaker

Harold Lloyd: Slapstick and the American Success Story

2008-10-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

"Comedy comes from inside. It comes from your face. It comes from your body."
—Harold Lloyd

The cinema of the 1920s is often referred to by historians as the Golden Age of comedy. It was during this time that three extremely talented film comedians were at the height of their popularity and prowess. This triumvirate of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd reflected in their films the changing social conditions of the period. Chaplin's Little Tramp appealed to the large population of newly arrived, and often impoverished, immigrants who were forming the manual work force of an expanding industrial society. Keaton represented the new class of the technocrat and many of his finest films concerned the battle between man and machine. Lloyd, however, did not concern himself with either poverty or machinery. He was the clown prince of America's first generation of aspiring managers.

The 1920s was a time of economic growth and the aggressive expansion of business. The Horatio Alger myth, in which the right combination of hard work and good luck would result in great financial reward, prevailed in popular culture. Lloyd's films embodied this belief and their humor is derived from the increasingly bizarre means by which his character achieved success.

The archetype of Lloyd's films is perhaps Safety Last (1923). Lloyd's character is that of a young man from a small town who has gone to the big city to achieve his fortune in the world of business. His job, however, is that of a clerk in a department store and his only chance for advancement is through a death defying promotional stunt for the store. Lloyd's hero ultimately achieves his dream of success, but he achieves it through guile and
extraordinary good luck rather than hard work.

In spite of their belief in the American success story, Lloyd's heroes rarely succeed through merit. A polite degree of deceit and trickery is presented as a moral necessity for his characters' survival. At the climax of Safety Last, for example, Lloyd's hero is the one who finally climbs the skyscraper when his plan to secretly change places with a professional building climber backfires. He scales his way to the top, but only because he is tricked into doing the stunt himself.

This idea of deceit as the means to success appears in many of Lloyd's films. The world of boxing presented in The Milky Way (1936) is one of fixed fights and tightly scripted bouts. Further, Lloyd's milkman-turned-pugilist is launched on his career due to a feat he didn't actually perform. The hero of The Milky Way has only one vital move as a boxer, an incredibly fast ability to duck, and it is on the basis of this minor skill that he attempts to win fame.

This contradiction in Lloyd's films was repeatedly expressed by the dual nature of his characters. His screen persona was that of a basically likable, average man who contained a striking degree of optimism and innocence about the world. This same man, however, was also capable of conman ship and his repeated display of ingenuity was concerned with avoiding the legitimate ways he was supposed to perform his tasks.

This recurring narrative pattern, in which the hero must deceive in order to win, is a major theme in such fairy tales as Cinderella, which was the original inspiration for Lloyd's The Kid Brother (1927). The family of women in Cinderella is changed to a family of men in The Kid Brother. The bucolic landscape presents a world that is almost as remote to the urban sensibility as the mystical kingdom of the original story. Unlike the fairy tale, however, Lloyd depends upon his wits rather than magical intervention in order to claim his new position within the rural society of the film.

The Kid Brother creates a highly romanticized statement on the American success story and it was one of Lloyd's personal favorites. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946) attempted a more satiric, critical look at the assumptions which under lied his screen persona. Not surprisingly, it was one of Lloyd's least favorite films.

Certainly, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock represented an unusual collaboration between two very different comic minds. The film was written and directed by Preston Sturges and his more flippant, caustic sense of humor contrasted with Lloyd's image of eternal optimism. Despite their use of deception and guile, Lloyd's heroes viewed society as being essentially good. Sturges did not particularly believe in goodness and his characters knew how to lie, cheat, and steal and then argue that anyone who didn't lacked ambition. Lloyd was like a shy smile and a glass of milk; Sturges was more like a leer with a scotch chaser.

Sturges's viewpoint is best represented by the opening and ending scenes of the montage sequence which begins The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. At the beginning, a young Diddlebock sits at the desk of his new job with his hands poised, eager to start working on an account ledger. His eyes are fixed on a calendar portrait of President Warren G. Harding. The year is 1923, the year Lloyd made Safety Last. At the end of the scene, twenty-two years later, an older, extremely frayed Diddlebock sits at the same desk with the same ledger and stares in shock at the calendar portrait of President Harry S. Truman. No longer an aggressive young man, Diddlebock has been stuck in the same position for his entire career.

Despite his slapstick presentation of the American dream, Lloyd was an idealistic believer. Sturges was not and he seemed to have been interested in Lloyd's persona primarily to discredit it. The tension between these two opposing views in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock created a strange, and not uninteresting, battle concerning the myth of the American success story.

The Hollywood Screenwriter

2008-10-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

"Writers are a necessary weasel."
--comment allegedly made by Harry Cohen, chief of production at Columbia Studios

"Help! I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese laundry."
--Anonymous note thrown out the window of a screen writer's office building in Hollywood

The role of the screenwriter is one of the more mysterious parts film making process. The fact that the screenwriter works in a medium that is visual rather than literary seemingly marks him as an odd wheel, yet his work is the essential first step that must be taken before a director or cinematographer is hired. Historically, the the screenwriter has been treated as a dispensable part of the creative process and it was not unusual for one screenwriter to find himself rewriting the work of another screenwriter who was, likewise, ghost writing another writer's script. In short, the Hollywood screenwriter was an all important part of the film industry and nobody in their right mind would admit to being one.

The plots of Hollywood films were not, however, magically invented during the film's shooting. Likewise, the actors did not make up their own dialogue. Without the screenwriter, many directors would have wandered lost through their narratives and countless "stars" would have mumbled incoherent, monosyllabic lines. While the history of the Hollywood screenwriter would fill many volumes, this festival tribute at least pays homage to some of the major writers whose wit, vision, and sheer determination has shaped the American cinema.

As both a writer and director, Preston Sturges redefined the American comedy film during the 1940s. His unique combination of broad slapstick and verbose verbal humor allowed him to create a series of cinematic portraits of America in which an energetic sense of naivete was mixed with a well seasoned cynicism. As a hyphenate (that is, a writer who became a writer-director), Sturges achieved virtually total control over his films and was able to pursue his most idiosyncratic of whims.

Sturges first directorial effort, The Great McGinty (USA 1940), amply represents his view of American politics as a lively bag of hooey. In lampooning both political corruption and reform movements, Sturges surveys the gap between democratic ideals and the realities of American society. Further, Sturges maintains a curious sympathy with corruption and the superficial impression of worldly knowledge attached to the corrupt.

While Sturges sense of satire was thoroughly American, Billy Wilder retained his native Viennese respect for stylish decadence. Wilder was often fascinated by the American capacity for simplistic ideals, but he also viewed parts of the American sensibility has being both puritanical and a little bit crazy.

As a writer-director, Wilder was able to maintain, like Sturges, a strong control over his material. Unlike Sturges, his influence carried well past the 1940s and he was able to work equally well in both comedies and dramas. His comedies, however, represents some of his most important contributions as Wilder was most freely capable of flaunting the contradictions that existed between his sentimental tendencies and sophisticated appreciation for worldly delights. In the film A Foreign Affair (USA 1948), he plays havoc with these irreconcilable differences between America and Europe.

One of the major screenwriters of the 1930s and 1940s was Dudley Nichols. Though his work would range from farce to melodrama, his vision tended toward a moody and fatalistic view of the human condition. He often worked best as a collaborator with strong directors as demonstrated in John Ford's production of The Long Voyage Home (USA 1940) and Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (USA 1947) and in each film he successfully adapted himself to Ford's tragic sense of Irishness and Lang's Teutonic notion of predestination.

More often than not, a screenplay is a collaborative effort and the credit-line for some scripts reads like the starting lineup for a ball game. That is often especially true with a director like Alfred Hitchcock who traditionally viewed screenwriters as the people whose job it was to explain how the main characters ended up dangling from Lincoln's nose. For Hitchcock, the screenplay's main function was to make the highly improbable seem almost possible. The writing team responsible for Foreign Correspondent (USA 1940) consisted of two of Hitchcock's more trusted collaborators, Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, as well as James Hilton and Robert Benchley. While Bennett and Harrison were responsible for wrangling sense out of the film's wildly convoluted plot line, Hilton assisted with the extensive rewriting that took place during the filming as Hitchcock attempted to keep pace with the rapidly changing political conditions of Europe at the beginning of World War Two. Likewise, the humorist Benchley contributed to the film's jaundiced presentation of journalism.

Despite their importance to film making, screenwriters are largely ignored by the viewing public. During the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, and the industry blacklist that ensued, screenwriters were an easy target. Studio executives found it convenient to appease reactionary organizations by blacklisting the more anonymous figure of the screenwriter rather than an actor or director and nearly half of the original Hollywood Ten, a group of subpoenaed witnesses who refused to testify before the House on Un-American Activities Committee, were writers.

One of the original Ten was Albert Maltz, who was often responsible for creating tense thrillers such as This Gun For Hire (USA 1941). The overt political subject matter of the film, especially its critical presentation of a traitorous industry magnate, was as indicative of the film's time period as it was of Maltz's politics. While Maltz was later accused of "premature anti-fascism," Pearl Harbour took place during the film's production.

The blacklist, and the general degree of moral cowardice displayed in Hollywood during that period, was the basis for Carl Foreman's screenplay High Noon (USA 1952). During the time he was writing the screenplay, Foreman was himself being investigated by the House Committee and, after completing the film, was blacklisted from the industry. His sense of "standing alone" against overwhelming forces was fueled into the film's bitter observations on the failure of integrity.

One of the most notable victims of the blacklist was Abraham Polonsky. His two most important screenplays, Body and Soul (USA 1948) and Force of Evil (USA 1949), presented an overall scathing view of American society that led to him being dubbed "the most dangerous man in America" by a U. S. congressman. In turn, he was blacklisted until well into the 1960s. Yet his early screenplays represents a powerful legacy that details the betrayed hopes and ambitions of a generation.

One screenwriter who did "name names" was Budd Schulberg. Schulberg's brief membership in the American Communist Party was most notable for its acrimonious ending and, by the 1950s, he was welling to testify though his reasons for doing so are not quite clear. Schulberg would later claim that he didn't trust secret societies and felt that these names should be brought out into the open. Others felt that it was Schulberg's way of getting back at Party members who attacked his novel What Makes Sammy Run. A mix of both reasons is possible. Yet during the 1950s, Schulberg would both directly and indirectly provide the cinema with two extremely bitter attacks on the corruption and mercenary state of living in America during this time period. Both On the Waterfront (USA 1954) and The Harder They Fall (USA 1956) presents portraits of morality warped by greed and power. In this respect, Schulberg successfully created a more critical and nasty view of American society than most of the blacklisted screenwriters would have ever attempted and the contradictory nature of Schulberg's art and personal actions remains the subject of intensely heated debate.

Olivier and Shakespeare

2008-09-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

Laurence Olivier may be one of the greatest actors of the 20th century. He is also, undeniably, one of the major interpreters of the plays of William Shakespeare in the cinema. While other filmmakers rival Olivier's Shakespearean work -- most notably Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa -- he has demonstrated a striking and intuitive sense of the language, and its meaning, of the Elizabethan bard. In our program, "Olivier and Shakespeare," we present three films -- two of which were directed by Olivier -- in which he presented his skills as both an actor and as a Shakespearean student.

It is appropriate that Olivier, who was born in 1907, would make his stage debut at the age of 14 as Kate in a school production of The Taming of the Shrew. Soon afterwards, he devoted his studies to acting at various schools and the Birmingham Repertory Company. He was encouraged in his dramatic studies by his father, an Anglican minister whose delivery of sermons were notoriously theatrical. His extensive training, combined with his own natural good looks, made it possible for Olivier to enter film acting in 1930.

His earliest films are, on the whole, uninteresting. Though he grew a moustache in order to emulate his screen idol, Ronald Colman, he did not succeed as a romantic leading man. His screen career would not really begin until 1935, when he signed a contract with the British producer Alexander Korda. It would be these early Korda films, as well as a variety of stage roles, that would begin to attract critical attention to Olivier. By 1937, he had joined the Old Vic theater company and had successfully played such roles as Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth.

Though Olivier was the star of one of the few major Shakespearean films of the 1930s, As You Like It (England 1936), he was not totally pleased with the stylistic approaches which the cinema had taken to Shakespeare's plays. Paul Czinner's production of As You Like It was most opulent and avoided the excessive superficiality of some of the other Shakespearean productions of the period. Like the other films, however, it made extensive cuts to both the text and the language in an attempt to reach a broader audience.

Fidelity to the text was not, however, Olivier's chief concern. In his own production of Hamlet (England 1948), he was willing to make numerous cuts to the text (in fact, he removed nearly an hour's worth' of footage from the film in order to bring it down to its release length). A fidelity to both the language and the spirit of the text were, however, very important to Olivier.

It is not surprising that his first film as director would be the 1944 production of Henry V, a role which was a favorite of his. The film was made by Olivier as a patriotic epic and it was produced by the British Ministry of Information as a morale booster during World War Two. Prior to the war, Olivier felt a hesitation about performing the part on stage because he felt that the audience might not accept the role's suggestively jingoistic sensibility. The hardships and devastation brought about by the war, however, convinced Olivier to produce the film.

In directing Henry V, Olivier attempted to unite the theatrical language of Shakespeare with the naturalistic qualities of the photographic image. The film opens and closes within the confines of the Globe Theater, Shakespeare's own theater. By bracketing the vividly realistic scenes of the film between the opening and ending shots of the Elizabethan stage performance, Olivier attempted to bridge the distance between the artificiality of the theater and the realism of the cinema.

The making of Henry V had exhausted Olivier and he swore that he would never attempt a Shakespearean film ever again. With the 1948 production of Hamlet, he fortunately proved incapable of keeping that oath. He had also intended to only direct Hamlet, not to act in it. Money for the production, however, was only available if Olivier played the role. With great reluctance, he again functioned as both actor and director in a demanding production.

The filming of Hamlet took place during a difficult period in Olivier's career. He and his wife, Vivian Leigh, were just recovering from a Hollywood boycott against them that was allegedly sponsored by David 0. Selznick when they had bolted from their contract with him. In turn, a variety of strains were being placed on the marriage due to Leigh's increasingly deteriorating mental condition. Likewise, rumors of an alleged affair between Olivier and his co-star, Jean Simmons, did not help either.

In filming Hamlet, Olivier selected black and white as the photographic tone for the work, contrary to the vibrant colors which dominated Henry V. He also decided upon using "deep focus" for the photographic structure of the film, thereby stressing the spatial relationships of the film's sets and giving an equal compositional balance to the film's characters. The fact that he achieved this complex balance in Hamlet is a tribute to Olivier's skills as an artist.

Orson Welles: The Artisitc Ego

2008-09-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

"I believe, thinking about my films, that they are based not so much on pursuit as on a search. If we are looking for something, the labyrinth is the most favorable location for the search. I do not know why, but my films are all for the most part a physical search."
- Orson Welles

In 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio production of The War of the Worlds which so frightened the nation that many people actually fled for the hills. For an actor, writer, and director at the age of 23, it was an amazing acknowledgement of his talents and the first of many controversies that this wunderkind would provoke. His off-Broadway Richard Wright's Native Son in 1941 caused great social discussion just as his 1955 verse-play of Moby Dick provoked a storm of literary debate. When he made his film debut with Citizen Kane (USA 1941), a thinly disguised biography of William Randolph Hearst, Welles provoked more than just controversy, he also provoked Hearst. Hearst's power as a newspaper tycoon was waning when Citizen Kane was made, but he and his associates were still able to harass Welles for years.

The controversies are, however, insignificant in regards to Welles's films. He is one of the greatest, and one of the most idiosyncratic, filmmakers in the cinema. His combination of brilliance and megalomania delight and annoy the viewer simultaneously. He refuses, however, to bore the audience and even his detractors cannot deny that his films are at least lively enough to enrage them.

Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father was an inventor, industrialist, and hotelier and his mother was a concert pianist. His parents loved to travel and their friends included such people as Harry Houdini and William Randolph Hearst. His parents died while he was a child and Welles was raised by his guardian, Dr. Bernstein. When he was 16, Welles left school and traveled to Ireland where he attempted a career as a painter. Painting, however, was the one art form in which Welles failed. Finding himself stranded in Dublin with little money and an interest in working in the theater, he attempted to convince the owners of the Dublin Gate Theater that he was a famous American actor who had decided to grace them with his talents. They did not believe him, but were impressed by his audacity and hired him to play minor parts. By 1932, when he was barely 17, he was directing plays by Ibsen and Chekhov at the theater.

Welles returned to America in the mid-1930s and went to work in both theater and radio. He directed an all-black production of Macbeth and, for a brief time, provided the voice for The Shadow radio series. During this time, he and a group of other performers banded together as the "Mercury Theater" and produced a series of radio plays, the most infamous being The War of the Worlds. It was the "Mercury Theater" that Welles took with him to Hollywood for the production of Citizen Kane.

Welles was given total control over Citizen Kane, an unprecedented act by any Hollywood film studio. He filmed on a closed set and the details of the production were kept secret. Prior to the film's release, however, word leaked out that it was loosely based on Hearst's life and his newspapers began a protracted campaign against both Welles and the film. The release of Citizen Kane was delayed and Welles, who was already listed as 4-F, was repeatedly drafted by the Army, courtesy of Hearst's influence.

Hearst's outrage over Citizen Kane can be appreciated, for the film freely borrows from the various scandals which surrounded him. It is Welles, however, who is most exposed in the film. Welles lost both of his parents at the age of 8, the same age that Kane is sent away from his parents. The character of Bernstein in Citizen Kane was modeled after Welles's guardian. Kane's megalomania seems, in retrospect, to be a mirror image of Welles's own ego. In an interview, Welles once stated that Hearst did not have enough style to be Kane. Welles is notorious for style.

Perhaps Hearst should have been offended by the fact that his life was used as a stage upon which Welles strutted his own self-absorption. The dominant theme in all of Welles's films is that of the supreme egotist who must ultimately fail due to his inability to truly control the world around him. Welles may flaunt his own megalomania, but he does so in order to critique it and no other filmmaker has ever been so harsh when it comes to self-criticism.

For many critics, Welles's other films are elaborate footnotes to Citizen Kane. Though this is not true, and many of these films are unique in their own right, they certainly continue the concerns of Welles's original work. The Trial (France 1962) presents society as a cruel, irrational force which has an ego of its own; an ego to which the individual must either adapt or be punished. In this respect, it is as if Charles Foster Kane had succeeded in creating his artificial universe (the Xanadu of Citizen Kane) and we, the viewer, are trapped within it.

The Lady From Shanghai (USA 1948) deals indirectly with the destruction of the universe. All of the characters, except Welles's, are self-absorbed with their own fears, desires, and need to control others. The film's finale, a shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, presents the world as a complex series of self-reflections which are eventually shattered by a barrage of gunfire. In no other film has the self-destructive nature of megalomania ever been presented with such fascination as well as contempt.

With Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight - Spain/Switzerland 1966), Welles attempted in to explain himself. Like Kane, Falstaff is an egotist who seems concerned only with himself. His need, however, for love and approval from others is far greater and his inability to achieve this is painful to him. Kane's wealth insulated him from his own feelings. Falstaff has nothing but his feelings and in this regard, he is like a child. Unlike Kane, Falstaff knows that he does not control the world and, at the same time, he knows that he cannot change his nature.

Falstaff's ego is tempered by the fact that he knows better, and this conflict in his character makes him the most humane, and ultimately tragic, figure in all of Welles's films, It is as if Welles is saying that the overbearing nature of his ego is due to the fact that he has no other perspective from which to view the world. His self-absorption is actually a dynamic form of introspection.

The Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism

2008-09-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Italy became the national force behind one of the most important movements in the modern cinema: the Italian Neo-Realist movement. Beginning with such films as Rome: Open City (Italy 1945) by Roberto Rossellini and La Terra Trema (Italy 1947) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica, the Italian cinema brought to the art of film making an overt social and political consciousness. With the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government and the end of the Fascist controls which had stifled the Italian cinema of the 1930s, an energetic spirit of film making literally took to the streets of Rome.

Though the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement were very different from each other, they shared certain common concerns. The recent political history and diverse social conditions of modern Italy were the central subject matter of the original Neo-Realist productions. Likewise, the Neo-Realist filmmakers combined a seemingly objective cinematic style with subjective, and overtly political, viewpoints. Whether they were moderate democratic figures like Rossellini and De Sica, or avowed Marxists like Visconti and, later, Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement immersed themselves in the vivid turmoil of contemporary Italy.

Aesthetically, the Neo-Realist movement presented the triumph of spatial realism over editing and montage. Long-takes and camera motion became the chief tools of this cinema. In these films, the artificial reconstruction of reality through the editing process was replaced by an intense concern for the ever changing nature of an open-ended sense of composition and perspective. The Neo-Realist camera would prowl the set (which often would be a real location), delineating the spatial dimensions perceived through the lens and allowing the compositional elements of the image to shift and change.

By the mid-1950s, the Italian cinema began to change, but the basic tenets of Neo-Realism remained an important influence. Increasingly, new forces were being felt by Italian filmmakers and the Neo-Realist cinema had to adapt to the unique demands of the period. The need for increased production monies led Italian filmmakers into a series of co-production ventures. This meant, however, that Italian films had to address themselves to broader European concerns and risk losing some of their Italian perspective. The Italian filmmakers also began shifting away from the special realism of the early films and toward the more internalized concerns of psychoanalysis. The short-lived economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of modern industrialization created an increasing sense of alienation in Italian society as the ancient landscapes and cities were seemingly replaced by the dehumanizing forms of modern technology. This resulted in a nostalgia for the pre-Fascist past, especially the 19th century and the agrarian culture of the Italian countryside. This nostalgia was not, however, uncritical; Italians explored their past in search of the roots of their contemporary problems.

It was because of these complex and diverse forces that the Italian cinema entered its second great period during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, a second generation of major filmmakers emerged and many of the earlier artists of the Neo-Realist movement entered new stages in their own development, producing films which were sometimes even more impressive than their original work. It was an active and dynamic decade that still overshadows the minor achievements of the 1980s. In this program, we present some of the significant films in the Italian cinema during this last great period.

One of the most famous of the second generation filmmakers to appear in the 1960s was Bernardo Bertolucci. Though The Conformist (Italy/France/W.Germany 1970) was his first film to receive wide international attention, Bertolucci was already known in Italy for his work both as a filmmaker and as a poet. His earliest films, such as Before the Revolution (Italy 1964) and The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), were expressive of his political concerns with Marxist ideals as well as his revisionist view of recent Italian history. He became increasingly concerned, however, with Freudian psychology and sexuality, as demonstrated in his production of Last Tango in Paris (Italy/France 1972) and Luna (Italy/USA 1979). While Marxism and Freudianism are not necessarily contradictory, Bertolucci's growing interest in psychology paralleled his disenchantment with conventional Marxist politics. Both The Conformist and, especially, 1900 (Italy/USA 1976) are indicative of this developing contradiction in his films.

The question of sexual identity and political commitment are central to The Conformist. The film's narrative, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's character attempts to hide a homosexual episode from his youth by mindlessly conforming to the Fascist society around him, suggests the coercive nature of ideology. Though his father is an imprisoned Leftist, Trintignant's character joins Mussolini's political party and becomes a member of the Fascist secret service. The meaninglessness and banality of his actions are ultimately exposed by a series of political, sexual, and finally, murderous confrontations in which his lack of convictions results in brutality and betrayal.

Though his best-known films are those of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni originally emerged as part of the Neo-Realist movement. His earliest feature films, such as Cronaca di un Amore (Italy 1950), were already moving toward a cool, austere stylization which prefigured the abstract and demanding aesthetics of his later works. With the production of L'Avventura (Italy 1959), La Notte (Italy 1960), L'Eclisse (Italy 1962), and Red Desert (Italy 1964), Antonioni created a stunning series of films which successfully redefined the spatial concerns of the Italian cinema.

In Red Desert, as in his other films, the spatial relationships of Antonioni's compositions emphasize negative space and accent the strange and ugly appearance of the industrial landscape surrounding the film's characters. This was also Antonioni's first film in color; he used a striking range of garish contrasts and monochromatic design in order to invoke the madness and alienation felt by Monica Vitti's character. With Red Desert, Antonioni created a genuinely disturbing vision of a world dominated by slag heaps, factories, and industrial waste.

Like Antonioni's career, Pietro Germi's went back to the beginning of the Neo-Realist movement. Though Germi had a long film making career and had produced a substantial range of works, he is probably best known for two comedy films of the 1960s--Divorce, Italian Style (Italy 1962) and Seduced and Abandoned (Italy 1964).In these films, Germi presented a series of bitingly savage satires on Italian society and mores.

In Seduced and Abandoned, Germi deals with the contradictions of Sicilian culture and the self-serving mentality of the Italian male. The film's black humor systematically exposes the hypocrisies of the characters' actions and outlines the particular conditions of Sicilian life. As in Germi's other comedy films, the slapstick and farce of Seduced and Abandoned succeeds in chastening the more dubious aspects of Italian behavior.

As a filmmaker, novelist, poet, and essayist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important — and most controversial — Italian artists of the 1960s, Even his violent death in 1975 remains a subject of heated debate. His films, however, provide a complex legacy which ranged from the harsh Neo-Realist statement of Accattone (Italy 1961) to the psychological and political subject matter of Teorema (Italy 1968) and Pigsty (Italy 1969). The abrasive, and often extreme, nature of Pasolini's films made him an unusual director for a religious film. Yet his production of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Italy 1966) is one of the few serious and intelligent works ever made on the life of Christ.

The film was a fairly close adaptation of Saint Matthew's gospel, tracing the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection. By using a documentary style of photography and a cast of non-professionals for his cast, Pasolini invoked the spirit and stylization of the Neo-Realist cinema. In the film, he places a strong emphasis on Christ's place within the context of the politics and history of the gospel's time period. In making The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Pasolini attempted to create a grand synthesis of Christianity and Marxist politics. In the process, he created a film of unique intensity and integrity.

The paradoxical life and career of Luchino Visconti parallels the contradictions of modern Italy. A direct heir to the Visconti title, he rejected his aristocratic heritage and became a member of the Italian Communist Party. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Realist movement, Visconti actually lived with Sicilian peasants and fishermen during the production of La Terra Trema. Yet Visconti was a supreme aesthete whose films contained an odd combination of Marxist analysis and operatic grandeur. By the 1960s and 1970s, his films were obsessed by history and decadence as he articulated a series of visual treatises on the futilities and failures of politics and art.

Visconti's production of Death in Venice (Italy/France 1971) was a curiously personal production for him. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, the theme of both the story and film were close to Visconti's own personal situation and concerns. His failing health and growing estrangement from the modern world was similar to that of the central character of Death in Venice and the eulogistic tone of the film was indicative of Visconti's own feeling of nostalgia as well as knowledge of the deceits of history and the social bankruptcy of the past.Bern

Ingmar Bergman: Major Works

2008-09-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

"There are many filmmakers who forget that the human face is the starting point in our work. To be sure, we can become absorbed by the aesthetic of the picture montage, we can blend objects and still life's into wonderful rhythms, we can fashion nature studies of astonishing beauty, but the proximity of the human face is without doubt the film's distinguishing mark and patent of nobility.'
--Ingmar Bergman

Since 1945, Ingmar Bergman has produced a series of films that are critically notable for their emotional intensity and extensive philosophic reach. His films have consistently dealt with a highly defined set of evolving themes that have, at their core, an overwhelming concern with individual consciousness. With this acute sense of self-awareness, Bergman has repeatedly explored the repressive side of human nature, the potential sterility of intellectual ism, and God's apparent indifference to mankind. Firmly rooted in the literary and philosophic traditions of August Strindberg and Soren Kierkegaard, Bergman is an artist whose films asks questions rather than present answers and his search for meaning within a possibly meaningless universe brings Bergman to the forefront of existentialist inquiry in the cinema. Though some critics have periodically accused him of latent narcissism, Bergman is one of the few filmmakers whose work transcends the flat and shadowy limitations of the screen.

Bergman was born in 1918 to the family of a stern and aloof Lutheran minister. In his childhood, he received an extensive exposure to religious doctrine and education. The theatre, however, became Bergman's great interest and one of his fondest childhood memories would be of magic lantern shows. The magic lantern, a primitive forerunner to the cinema, would be an all important reference point for the mature Bergman in the 1930s and 1940s as he became a theatre playwright and director and, beginning in 1944, a regular screenwriter for Svensk Filmindustri.

His transition from screenwriter to writer-director would take place in 1945 with the production of Crisis. This was the first of 12 minor films directed by Bergman that would, in retrospect, present his crucial first steps toward his major works of the 1950s. While most of Bergman's early films were realistic studies on the increasing potential for alienation within modern Swedish society, these works also provided Bergman with a good training ground in which he finely honed his skills for narrative structure while collecting round him the actors and actresses who would form a virtual repertory company under his command.

By the early 1950s, Bergman was increasingly directing films whose unique themes and stylization clearly identified them as the artistic achievement of his own singular vision. This was first, and most genuinely achieved in Sawdust and Tinsel (Sweden 1953). The film's barren landscape mirrors its emotional theme in which the bluster of masculine sexuality and pride is exposed as a shallow reservoir of guilt and spiritual impotency.

By the second half of the 1950s, Bergman created some of his most ambitious efforts. The Seventh Seal (Sweden 1957) became his supreme statement on the human condition. In the film, idealism and pragmatism are divided between Max von Sydow's knight and Gunnar Bjornstrand's squire. Suggestively, through out the film, neither God nor devil exists and only Death, who engages the knight in an ongoing game of chess, seemingly represents the greater cosmic order. It is against this "silence of God" that Bergman also directed such films as The Virgin Spring (Sweden 1959) -- the one film by Bergman in which God answers -- and The Silence (Sweden 1963), a film in which even human communication ultimately fails.

Age and death are the final arbitrators of life in both Wild Strawberries (Sweden 1957) and Autumn Sonata (Sweden 1978). With age comes a lifetime accumulation of memories, regrets, and the deep self-awareness of a once possible happiness that was never achieved. The surrealistic veneer of Wild Strawberries contrasts sharply with the realistic and intimate structure of Autumn Sonata, but both films address themselves to Bergman's concern with mortality and the complex, and often failed, inter-relationship between love and family.

Bunuel's Mexico

2008-09-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

"Whether he uses the device of dream or poetry or cinematic
narrative, Bunuel the poet penetrates man's profoundest being and
reaches the most unexpressed, deep-lying areas of his inner self.
His hell. And his heaven...."
--Octavio Paz

Luis Bunuel's reputation as an important and daring filmmaker was first established in France with Un Chien Andalou (1928)and L'Age d'Or (1930), as well as the Spanish documentary film Las Hurdes (1932). In these three early works, Bunuel's social and political concerns were already evident along with his surrealist convictions. For Bunuel, the difference between the surrealistic experimentation of Un Chien Andalou and the stark realism of Las Hurdes was only a matter of a slight shift in perception. Often, his surrealism was used to express a scathing sense of social criticism. In turn, his more realistic productions contained a striking sense of the dream-like nature of reality.

This unique quality of Bunuel's cinema is especially evident in the films which he made in Mexico during the 1950s. Virtually all of his Mexican films were made as "commercial" productions, ranging from light comedies to musicals to melodramas. Within the context of the commercial cinema, however, Bunuel was able to interject his own personal vision. With a combination of artistic skill and subversive charm, Bunuel created some of his most provocative films.

Two examples of Bunuel's ability to undermine a film's narrative context can be found in The Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953) and El Bruto (1952). The Illusion Travels by Streetcar is intended to be a picaresque comedy in which a junked streetcar becomes the central stage for a minor gesture of working class rebellion. The theft of the streetcar results in the creation of an extended feeling of community among the workers who travel on the car, and a sense of disturbance among the wealthy. The slight joke of The Illusion Travels by Streetcar allowed Bunuel to fashion a satiric presentation in which the streetcar becomes a microcosm of class-consciousness and anarchistic impulses.

The melodramatic conventions of El Bruto are subverted by Bunuel into a covert form of political criticism and a very overt expression of destructive sexuality. The principal character in El Bruto is largely incapable of understanding his role within a system of oppression until he himself becomes a murderous agent in the system's employ. His progression from butcher in a slaughterhouse to hired assassin for a landlord is presented as a logical step in a brutal social order.

El Bruto's class awareness is raised, marginally, by the love he feels for a rent striker's daughter, but the more chaotic force of sexual desire finally consumes him. While the pure love he feels for one woman causes him to reassess his previous actions, he cannot cope with the seductive gestures of his employer's wife which, literally, reduce him to barking like a dog.

In both El Bruto and Los Olvidados (1950), Bunuel explores the condition of people who live on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The children who live in the slum presented in Los Olvidados exist within an environment in which the moral notions of good and evil have, for all practical purpose, no meaning. The innocence of Pedro, one of the film's main characters, renders him weak as opposed to the stronger, more corrupt figure of Jaibo. The horrific conditions of the slum world depicted by Bunuel essentially negates any and all moral possibilities.

The severe pessimism of Los Olvidados is balanced by the more dialectical structure of The River and Death (1955). The film's narrative is concerned with the irrational force of an ongoing blood feud and the need to overcome such impulses with reason and humanity. The village community of The River and Death is near feudalistic in its customs and behavior and Bunuel is not unduly optimistic. The pattern of reconciliation which forms in The River and Death is achieved only after a protracted process of systematic slaughter.

Bunuel once stated that "In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon." During his Mexican period, Bunuel worked within the confines of commercial concerns and budgetary limitations. In spite of this, he produced a series of works which are unique in the cinema. He remained, most defiantly, a free spirit.

Hitchcock: Two Lost Works

2008-09-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

Though he directed nine feature-length films during the silent era, Alfred Hitchcock's early works are rarely revived. With the exception of The Lodger (England 1926), Hitchcock's silent productions were non-thrillers and for most of the 1920s he was best known for directing domestic melodramas and, occasionally, comedies. Yet it was during this period that Hitchcock learned his skills as a filmmaker and his silent productions often display a surprisingly strong sense of visual daring and technical virtuosity. Further, his silent melodramas tend to reveal aspects of Hitchcock's thematic concerns that are often hidden beneath the more overt chills of his suspense films.

A film that was of major importance in the critical advancement of Hitchcock's reputation was The Ring (England 1927). Written by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, the film was his first production for British International and the producer John Maxwell. Though the work relationship between Hitchcock and Maxwell would last until 1932, it was often strained by Maxwell's insistence on producing films adapted from the theater. Hitchcock was more interested in exploring his own emerging sense of cinematic art and The Ring was a determined effort to combine photographic naturalism with the experimental techniques of the Russian Avant-Garde and German Expressionist cinemas.

The Ring was also the first of ten films in which Hitchcock collaborated with the cinematographer Jack Cox. Together they successfully created images of stark light and dark, smoke-filled shadows that would have a profound effect upon a generation of English photographers, including Bill Brandt who was especially attracted to the visual structure of The Ring. Within the traditionally stage-bound English cinema of the 1920s, The Ring was like a gauntlet being thrown by a young director who was already in command of his art and was anxiously attempting to test the limits of film further than the constraints of the British film industry would allow.

His second film for Maxwell, The Farmer's Wife (England 1928), was based on a popular play of the period. This gesture of appeasement to Maxwell's sense of standards persuaded Hitchcock to approach the film as an act of mere craftsmanship. It did, however, allow him a chance to display his gift for comedy, a skill that Hitchcock would slyly use in many of his later suspense films.

In a way, The Farmer's Wife represents a light-hearted variation on one of the major themes in The Ring. The conditions of marriage, the illusions of love, and necessary betrayals forced by conflicting social and psychological, was a recurring concern that dominated much of Hitchcock's work. In The Ring, these contradictions can only be resolved through a perverse combination of pain and sentimentality. In The Farmer's Wife, a surprising act of good common sense is all that i takes to end the ever escalating humiliations suffered by the film's romantically inclined character. In both cases, masculine pride proves worthless against the forces of love and matrimony.

The 1920s: Films of the Deco Decade

2008-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

Art deco, art nouveau, and the Viennese secession styles are all prevalent in the vibrant photography and set designs of many of the grandiose and decadent films of the 1920s. This unique combination of grand, sweeping visual gestures and, at times, delirious excesses embodies a dominate strain of the culture and, in some cases also reflects, the contradictions that were evident in both the cinema and the history of the period. This program presents four of the major films of the deco decade -- works that represent a distinctive sampling of the period's popular aesthetics and its own unique image.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden (England/Germany 1925) was a co-production between the British producer Michael Balcon and the German Erich Pommer who was one of the key figures in the development of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Hitchcock was an unknown quantity in 1925 since, prior to his directorial debut on The Pleasure Garden, he had worked primarily as an art director on Balcon's films. The film was made as an English production set in London and Africa and totally filmed in Pommer's studios in Munich. It was to be a challenging introduction to film making for the future "master of suspense."

The heavy German Expressionistic influence found in The Pleasure Garden is due not only to the location of the film's actual production, but also to Hitchcock's great fascination with the works of such directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Added to this was an unusual mix of set designs, ranging from the gaudy glitz of the theatre scenes to the pseudo-exotical of the English's notion of colonial Africa. The film's narrative of betrayal, madness, and miscegenation is, in part, indicative of the racial ideology that underlined British Imperial thinking. It also represents, however, a first-step in Hitchcock's recurring theme of marriage as a state of danger rather than bliss.

Hitchcock once stated that he learned how to make movies by watching repeated viewings of Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Germany 1922). This film, which was the first part of the epic-length production Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit, presented Lang's vision of a modern Germany collapsing under the weight of economic chaos, social instability, and extreme decadence. Against this backdrop, the half-mad master criminal Mabuse thrives through combined cunning and pure will as he murders and extorts his way to power. The obvious political implications of the story were developed further by Lang in his two sequels -- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1932) in which Mabuse directly prefigures the Third Reich, and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1961) in which the doctor's will power proves strong enough to transcend both death and the passage of time in order to attempt the creation of a new Germany in his own image.

Lang utilized a variety of stylistic designs in the film's photography in order to invoke the period. Sharp angles and distorted perspectives create a subtle sense of disorientation through out the film as Lang depicts a society increasingly dominated by Mabuse's paranoid megalomania.

Though he was critically considered to be one of the major filmmakers of the 1920s, Rex Ingram remains largely unknown by modern audiences. His most successful film of the period, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (USA 1921), has become mainly a footnote in movie history books, despite the fact that this production not only made Rudolph Valentino a star but also made it financially possible for M-G-M Studios to be formed. Yet the film still has a striking pictorial power that may come as a surprise for viewers unfamiliar with the expressive qualities of the silent cinema. In fact, many of the scenes in the film were based on oil paintings, especially the works of Maxfield Parrish. This, combined with Ingram1s almost obsessive quest for exotic details, gave his films a stylistic polish that helped to balance his unpredictable wavering between excessive profundity and sentimental superficiality.

Based on the popular novel of the period by Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was originally intended as an anti-war epic in which World War One is literally shown as fratricide. The film's noble aspirations, however, were presented within the context of a very American view of Europe, and upon its release, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was protested against by the English, French, and German governments. Even though it is now clearly dated, the film remains a fascinating and vivid document of its era.

If sentimentality was one of Ingram's flaws, the lack of it was worn as a virtual badge of honor by Erich von Stroheim. In his production of Foolish Wives (USA 1921), von Stroheim proceeded to scandalize the American film audience by presenting a caustic portrait of European cynicism and debauchery that would reconfirm his title as "the man you love to hate." While he was overtly flaunting his self-created image of European corruption, von Stroheim was also attacking American naivete, xenophobia, and middle-class hypocrisy while simultaneously insulting the honor and privileges belonging to the alleged nobility. That an artist like von Stroheim was able to make Foolish Wives is a testament to both his skills and his special self-destructive nature.

Though at the time it was claimed to have been the first film ever to cost a million dollars, the actual production of Foolish Wives was not that expensive. Von Stroheim did, however, pursue his notion of realism to new extremes as he completely reproduced Monte Carlo as a full scale working model on Universal's back lots, including a completely operational casino. For von Stroheim, his sets had to be as authentic as possible since his artistry was based upon the massive accumulation of physical details. As with the naturalist writers of the late 19th century, von Stroheim was interested in presenting the realities of the world with all of its warts and blemishes carefully cataloged. It was in this manner, he felt, that something resembling truth could be reclaimed from the lies and illusions of society.

New Films From Taiwan

2008-09-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

In recent years, the film industry of Taiwan has gained increasing prominence in the East Asian film market. Many recent Taiwanese films represent the rise of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers whose work displays a significant break from the traditional concerns of the past in favor of a more idiosyncratic, personalized approach to film making. The six films presented in this series is a major sampling of the films and filmmakers who are currently reshaping the Taiwanese cinema.

The development of the Taiwanese cinema has proceeded in three stages. The first major period, during the 1960's, was characterized by the work of writers and directors who were part of the Shanghai film studios of pre-Revolutionary China. The second, and most commercial period, occurred in the 1970's when a large number of martial arts films and contemporary melodramas were produced. This development coincided with the formation of close commercial ties between the Taiwan and Hong Kong film industries. While some critics view the 1970's as an artistically unsatisfying period, the cultural and commercial contact with Hong Kong helped to produce the more personal and daring cinema of the current period.

One of the most important figures of the new Taiwanese cinema is writer/ director Hou Hsiao-hsien. He is represented in this program by two of his own films — Green, Green Grass of Home (1982) and A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) - as well as his script for Ch'en K'un-hou's production of Growing Up (l983). The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien are often concerned with the feelings and perceptions of children. This concern for childhood and the child's perception of the adult world is a common theme in the East Asian cinema, but for many Taiwanese filmmakers it takes on a special significance. Hou, like many of his fellow Taiwanese directors, is sharply aware of the immense changes which have taken place in Taiwan during the past 30 years; an essentially rural culture has been transformed into a highly urban, Westernized society. This has resulted in a "coming of age" for Taiwanese society—one that closely parallels the growth and experiences of the children in Hou's films.

The complex nature of the cultural ties between mainland China, Hong Kong,and Taiwan were strained with the production of If I Were For Real (1981), directed by Wang T'ung. The film, a Taiwanese-Hong Kong co-production, adapted from a play by three mainland writers who were, supposedly, jailed after the play had been banned by authorities in the People's Republic. The completed film was also banned from public screening in Hong Kong for fear of offending mainland China. This complex system of give-and-take between the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, is not uncommon in the East Asian film industry.

An important development in the Taiwanese cinema of the 1980s has been a sharp increase in realism and social criticism. This is especially evident in Chang Yi's production of Kuei-Mei, A Woman (1985). Based on the novel by the Taiwanese feminist writer Sho Sa, the film presents a surprisingly bleak view of working-class life in Taiwan. This film is also an example of the degree to which modern Taiwanese filmmakers are willing to explore controversial issues despite the traditional censorship previously imposed upon Taiwanese cinema.

One of the most important and critically acclaimed films to be made in Taiwan is Edward Yang's That Day, On The Beach (1983). The film attempts to encapsulate, through the memories and feelings of two female friends, the past 13 years of Taiwanese history. The film's ambitious scale and complex experimental structure started a critical debate which still rages in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It has also been an increasingly influential film on the East Asian cinema, an achievement that speaks well of the promise of the new Taiwanese cinema and its filmmakers.

The New Australian Cinema

2008-09-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

An innovative group of filmmakers has emerged from Australia within the last ten years. Their films have combined a unique blend of traditional narrative film making with themes and concerns that are indigenously Australian.

George Miller has become one of the most successful film makers of the New Australian cinema as a result of his highly charged visual style. Such films as Mad Max (1979)and its sequel Road Warrior (1981) have established a strong commercial niche for Australian films on the international market. In the process, Miller has fashioned a distinctly Australian form of film genre. Although his Mad Max films borrowed heavily from Hollywood examples, he reshaped the conventional forms of American cinema into a strange and fatalistic new manner that defies easy classification.

The first Mad Max film is derived from such traditional genres as police thriller, and motorcycle gang movies, but is combined with a darkly satiric tribute to the Australian's obsession with automobiles. Miller has stated that Australia has a car culture in much the same way as America has a gun culture. In Mad Max, Miller depicts a crumbling future society in which the automobile has become the chief weapon in a manic fight for survival.

While Miller has created Australia's commercial cinema, Peter Weir is the creator of its philosophical context. When Billy Kwan, a character in Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), says that "We are not quite at home in this world," he speaks for all of Weir's protagonists. Weir is sharply aware of the fact that Australia is a land in which European culture has been transplanted and that Australians are not exactly Westerners. In all of Weir's films, the ultimate conflict exists between the materialistic-based rationalism of modern Western society and the metaphysical, seemingly irrational beliefs of non-Western cultures.

In The Plumber (1979), Weir presents an absurdist comedy in which a well-ordered academic household is turned topsy-turvy by the increasingly illogical and aberrant behavior of a plumber. The apparent insanity of the plumber proves to be a force which nearly overwhelms reason. The film also suggests that the plumber is somehow an agent for revenge by a tribal shaman, who the wife admits to having previously insulted. Weir repeatedly returns to the photograph of this shaman and this visual counterpoint reinforces the film's main theme concerning the inevitable clash between a well-ordered universe and the irrational forces which lurks within it.

Even before the international success of My Brilliant Career (1980), Gillian Armstrong had received attention for several short films. She especially won praise for her direction of The Singer and the Dancer (1976), the film which launched her professional career.

The film was adapted from a short story by the Australian author Alan Marshall. With Marshall's approval, she changed the original characters from two young boys to two women, one young and the other old, and restructured the story into an emotionally charged critique of women's role within Australian society. With The Singer and the Dancer, Armstrong provided a balance to the chiefly masculine concerns of the Australian cinema.

Phillip Noyce is best known to American viewers for his feature film Newsfront (1978), but he has also made an impressive series of documentaries and short films. One of the best of these early films is his dramatic production Backroads (1977).

The film explores the darker aspects of racial problems in Australia. The two main characters, a white drifter and an Aboriginal, are both presented as outsiders from mainstream society. Together, they steal a car and travel through the Australian wasteland, picking up hitchhikers and forming their own makeshift society. During the journey, however, the Aboriginal remains an outsider who is refused admittance even within this limited white social group.

For many critics, the New Australian cinema came of age with the production of Sunday Too Far Away (1975). It was the first film made by the South Australian Film Corporation which had been specifically created to produce and encourage regional film making.

The extreme realism of Sunday Too Far Away was achieved by the use of real locations and exact recreation of the harsh, dangerous lives of shearers in the Australian Outback. The cast and crew spent several months living under primitive conditions in this hostile environment, which took both an emotional and physical toll on the cast members. In one scene, when Jack Thompson's character begins weeping from the physical strain of his life, both the strain and the tears were real.

Originally three hours long, the producer of Sunday Too Far Away cut the film in half. Even with the drastic cuts, the film was highly praised by both Australian and foreign critics. It was presented at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where it played to an enthusiastic audience and its critical success paved the way for the international respect which the new Australian cinema now enjoys.

Billy Wilder's America

2008-08-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

Throughout his film making career, Billy Wilder has displayed an unusual appreciation for the mannerisms and slang-filled language of American culture. As a native European, Wilder's foreigner status made it easier for him to perceive the unique, to him even exotic, nature of American customs and mores. His hasty approach to learning English through radio programs, baseball games,and tabloid newspapers allowed him to develop a strong sense of how the language was actually spoken by various Americans. His early experience with destitution when he first arrived in California (for a brief while, Wilder lived in a deserted ladies room in a hotel), as well as his later wealth and success, gave Wilder a sharp Knowledge of society's highs and lows.

As much as Wilder admired his adopted country, however, he never completely abandoned either his Viennese accent or his European-based perspective. This dichotomy between the two cultures directly and indirectly infuses his films with a sensibility that often reveals new angles on common sights, an outsider's more critical view on the very things that we take for granted.

This peculiar mix of America and Europe became evident early in Wilder's life. Born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, he got the nickname Billy because of his mother's fondness for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Raised primarily in Vienna, Wilder spent his childhood witnessing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing social and economic chaos that followed after World War One. He became a newspaper reporter in Berlin during its most extreme period of decadence and run-away inflation in the 1920s and occasionally worked as a dance instructor and gigolo just to survive financially. His great passions, however, were American movies and jazz.

Through a lucky, and rather bizarre coincidence, Wilder was able to gain entry into the Berlin film industry and, beginning with Menschen am Sonntag (Germany 1929), he was quickly established as a major new screenwriter. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party forced Wilder, who is Jewish, to flee to Paris. There he was able to find work as the co-director of the low-budget production of Mauvaise Graine (France 1933). Wilder's preference, however, was the role of screenwriter and it was this talent that first brought him to work at Paramount Pictures in 1935.

The German director Ernst Lubitsch was at this time not only Paramount's most successful filmmaker, but also one of the most influential people at the studios and he was able to secure jobs for many Central European emigres, especially in the screenwriting department. This unusual mix of accents among the writers once led to a sign being hung on the Writers Building's door: "You must work here. It is not enough to be Hungarian." Wilder was hired to lend a sense of authentic Viennese wit to a few minor productions and was otherwise so under-used that he spent many of his days reading the Help Wanted ads. It was not until he was teamed on a script with Charles Brackett that Wilder's own best qualities came forward, The extreme differences between the two men inspired their scripts as Wilder's liberalism and European worldliness squared off with Brackett's New England-bred conservatism and idealism.

It was, however, Wilder's transition from screenwriter to director that allowed his own themes and concerns to become overt. Initially, Wilder became a director in order to protect the integrity of his and Brackett's scripts. Increasingly though, he found his directorial vision at odds with his collaborator and finally, when Wilder's macabre sense of humor took control on Sunset Boulevard (USA 1950), their work relationship ended.

The similarities and differences between Wilder and Brackett's work can be traced through the dark and light qualities of The Lost Weekend (USA 1945). Brackett had a very personal interest in the film due to his wife's own alcoholism and, in certain ways, Jane Wyman's character is a stand-in for him as she attempts to comprehend the nature of the illness. Wyman's sense of ideals and feelings is indicative of Brackett's own combination of despair and a strong sense of self. However, the film's vivid sense of degradation and madness, especially the infamous bat/mouse nightmare, was gleaned from Wilder. The increasing destitution experienced by Ray Milland's character was familiar to Wilder from his own days of extreme poverty and the nightmare scene has been described by him as a conflict between two sides of his own subconscious, a conflict in which one side feels compelled to devour the other.

Brackett's concerns in The Lost Weekend were central to the script. His intentions in Sunset Boulevard were ignored. Brackett originally conceived the idea for Sunset Boulevard as a screwball comedy. As he and Wilder repeatedly rewrote the screenplay, the narrative evolved into a dark, gothic vision that was uniquely Wilder's. Brackett continued to provide his sense of craftsmanship to the script, but he realized that he was now involved in making someone else's film. Further, his own sensibilities were now submerged beneath the weight of Wilder's propensity toward megalomania, decadence, and black comedy.

It was not so much that Wilder had changed. Instead, Sunset Boulevard represented the complete emergence of the caustic, hard-edged vision already obvious in his earlier production of Double Indemnity (USA 1944). The novel's tale of adultery and murder played out against a Southern California milieu of bright sunlight and quiet stucco houses intrigued Wilder. The ambivalent psychology and poetic texture of Cain's book were less appealing to Wilder. With the help of Raymond Chandler, he fashioned the narrative into a flinty, flippant view of corruption and betrayal, all played out against the most banal of settings. In a way, the American author Cain wrote a very European novel and the European Wilder directed an extremely American film.

Further, while Brackett was an idealist, Wilder was often capable of being a sentimentalist. Despite the cynicism and seeming fatalism of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Wilder often seems to be a pessimist with a romantic dreamer screaming to get out. That is especially evident in the contrary tendencies of Ace in the Hole a.k.a. The Big Carnival (USA 1951). The film offers a sarcastically devastating critique of American journalism and commerical exploitation. It also contains an abrupt sense of belated spiritual redemption through the power of emotional release. If a worldly spark of cynicism is Wilder's European heritage, then this latent streak of romanticism and sentimentality is, in part, what led him to America.

The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci: Marx and the Oedipus Complex

2008-08-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

A long-standing, and often antagonistic, division has existed between Marxist political theory and Freudian psychology. One example of this split was the official Soviet rejection of psychoanalysis during the rule of Stalin. Likewise, there have been numerous accounts from the Hollywood blacklist period of Party members who were convinced by their psychoanalysts to "name names" as part of their therapy. For many Marxist thinkers, the subjective universe of Freud was a narcissistic rejection of scientific materialism. In turn, many psychoanalysts treated communism as a neurotic manifestation of the Oedipus complex. Within the orthodox views of both camps, no point of reconciliation seemed possible. It is within this framework that the films of Bernardo Bertolucci occupy a unique position.

Bertolucci first became prominent in Italy for his work as a poet and critical essayist. He was, however, increasingly drawn to the cinema through his friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini and his work as assistant director on Pasolini's production of Accattone (Italy 1961). Pasolini's own position as poet and filmaker, as well as his status as a renegade Marxist, demonstrated to Bertolucci that a complex synthesis of politics, art, and psychology was possible. Further, the cinematic legacy of Italian Neo-Realism gave Bertolucci a model from which he could freely borrow, even while he was rejecting much of its simpler, more sentimental vision of left-wing politics (though his 1977 production of 1900 is virtually the last Neo-Realist epic ever filmed).

From Pasolini, Bertolucci derived a sharp awareness of the interaction between the personal and political worlds, especially in the arena of sexual politics. From the previous generation of Neo-Realist filmakers, he inherited an appreciation for the formal and moral possibilities of the cinema. With his discovery of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci learned to view the cinema as a uniquely political medium. This pedigree enabled Bertolucci to mix his commitment to radical politics within a framework of psychoanalytic concern.

A recurring theme in Bertolucci's films is the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex. This theory concerning infantile sexuality, in which the child subconsciously wishes to usurp the position of the father in relationship to the mother, is traditionally presented in psychoanalysis as the primal event in a person's mental development. Further, the resolution of this conflict through the repression of the oedipal urge is viewed not only as the first step toward therapeutic adjustment but also as one of the major foundations of the social structure. Bertolucci sees the Oedipus complex as a primary component to both psychological and political awareness. He does not, however, view repression as the only correct resolution of the complex. In turn, the father figure represents more than simply parental authority, but also the patriarchal structures of the state.

The failure to resolve this conflict in either direction is part of the text of Before the Revolution (Italy 1964). Though the title of the film is taken from Talleyrand -- "He who did not live in the years before the (French) Revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is" -- the emotional tone of the work is more directly summarized by the hero's admission that for him, "life will always be before the revolution." This alienating sense of being suspended between a complacent middle-class and a radical proletariat permeates the film as its central character finds himself dissatisfied with his own class, but also realizes that he is not capable of being culturally aligned with the communist workers. He rejects the world of his father (and the affair with his aunt is a substitution for the mother), but he cannot sucessfully follow the revolutionary path advocated by his intellectual mentor, the second father figure in the film. He fails to come to any significant resolution of the crisis and, seemingly, is destined to drift.

In The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), the enigmatic figure of the father still controls the son despite the father's own death years earlier. Supposedly, the father died a martyr in the fight against fascism. History, however, can be a deceptive web through which one generation is capable of ensnaring the next. The degree to which the father has imposed himself upon the son is reinforced in the film by the fact that the same actor plays both parts. Throughout The Spider's Stratagem, the romantic entanglements and political betrayls of the father systematically envelop the son, entrapping him within a personal history of deceit.

Bertolucci's most direct confrontation with the Oedipus complex is presented in Luna (USA/Italy 1979). The title symbolically refers to the mysterious qualities of sexuality contained within the figure of the mother in relationship to the ambivalent sensibilities of the adolescent male. Framed within the context of opera (the mother is a prima donna on tour in Italy), Bertolucci uses the artificial stage worlds of Verdi and Mozart as a means of reflecting the potentially destructive psychological events within the film's narrative. Like the myth that is its namesake, the Oedipus complex contains within it the brutal possibilities of tragedy, and the son's passage through his interior crisis will be critical in determining his entry into maturity. The ambiguous ending of Luna, in which the father must finally assert himself, is not so much a reconciliation as it is a brief pause in a process of psychological development that must continue long after the film has ended.

Luna recongizes that the Oedipus complex, when viewed from the position of the mother and son, contains a potential for tragedy. In The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Italy 1981), the complex is presented from the father's perspective. From this viewpoint, the complex becomes the basis for black comedy. The father is the ridiculous man of the film's title, the contradictory representative of a previous generation who must eventually be replaced by the new. The convoluted, and ultimately unresolved, mystery plot of the film is indicative of the father's inability to accept his powerlessness in resolving, and eventually manipulating, his son's crisis. In turn, he only gradually realizes that the crisis is actually his own and that he must simply accept the fact that "the son always replaces the father."

Women Film Makers: An Outline of Herstory

2008-08-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

The history of women filmmakers in the American cinema is often most visible by its absence from the history books and movie theatres rather than by its works or artists. This is caused, in part, by Hollywood's long standing bias against employing women as directors as well as by the traditional male domination of the film critical establishment. As a consequence, much of the work of women filmmakers has traditionally taken place on the periphery of the established film industry. In turn, much of this history has been largely forgotten due to genuine ignorance combined with willful neglect. Only recently has this hidden history been given some measure of attention and study and, in the process, been historically placed within the growth and development of the cinema.

Alice Guy Blache is generally believed to have been the first woman filmmaker. Born in Paris in 1873, she began working in France as a filmmaker before the end of the 19th-century. Her most active period of work, however, occurred in the United States where she eventually formed her own production company. From her studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she created a series of short films and, along with Georges Melies and Edwin S. Porter, was one of the original architects of the narrative cinema. Her works range from romance to comedy to science fiction, and the few surviving prints of her films attest to her innovative approach as an early filmmaker. Girl in the Armchair (USA 1912) is especially interesting for its use of color tinting as well as Blache's expedient handling of melodramatic conventions.

The first American born woman filmmaker was Lois Weber who, with occasional collaboration with her actor-husband Phillips Smalley, wrote, produced, and directed a series of dramas that she filmed in a studio leased from Universal. These independent productions were notable for both their technical polish as well as their willingness to confront controversial social subject matter; during her career, Weber produced films in support of birth control, women's suffrage and interracial love. Not surprisingly, she had tremendous difficulty in getting some of her films distributed and, by 1927, she found it financially impossible to continue producing films.

The Blot (USA 1921) is one of the few of Weber's feature-length films that has survived intact. Like most of her films, it overtly deals with an area of social concern, specifically the need for teachers and the even greater need to provide educators with equable pay. The Blot presents its social message within the larger context of its narrative, and one of the most striking aspects about Weber's work is her ability to present overt political concerns without being either heavy-handed or didactic. If anything, her films display a matter-of-factness that eschews the more excessive melodramatic conventions of the 1920s American cinema.

Through her work as both a filmmaker and as a mentor figure, Maya Deren was one of the major founding figures of the modern American Avant-Garde movement. With the production of such early experimental films as Meshes of the Afternoon (USA 1943), At Land (USA 1944), and Choreography for Camera (USA 1945), Deren established the basic directions the avant-garde cinema would follow throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her brief fall from critical grace during the 1970s was, in part, a late rebellious reaction to the enormous shadow she cast throughout the early American experimental cinema movement.

Deren was strongly influenced by the theoretical principles of modern dance as well as by the surrealist cinema of the 1920s. Her films were often autobiographical in their references as she created a cinematic form of psychodrama. In At Land, she created a set of symbolic references while pursuing a study on the illusory structure of cinematic space.

Shirley Clarke began her career in the 1950s as both a dancer and an experimental filmmaker. She emerged most forcefully, however, as a documentary and narrative artist with such films as The Connection (USA 1960), The Cool World (USA 1963), and Portrait of Jason (USA 1967), films in which the romanticism of her early works gave way to a raw and direct look at people who existed on the edge of mainstream American society. In turn, her films achieved a sense of gritty realism rarely attempted within the American cinema. Clarke's career as a filmmaker and videographer has taken place totally outside the context of the American commercial media which has resulted in the limited amount of exposure her work has received. Yet, she remains firmly committed to this independent path which has allowed her to deal with a range of subject matter that is, for all practicable purposes, forbidden for presentation within the mainstream.

The Cool World was filmed on location in Harlem, using a cast composed of professional actors and local residents. Clarke's use of naturalistic photography and direct sound recordings was influenced by the original films of the Italian Neo-Realist movement and her non-judgmental presentation of the film's narrative forces the viewer, in part, to experience the ghetto environment and gang psychology on its own terms.

Before her untimely death, Kathleen Collins was a teacher and filmmaker of increasing critical prominence. Her work, as represented by her best known feature film Losing Ground (USA 1982), dealt with both feminist and African-American issues and concerns in ways that were both politically complex and narratively engaging.

Hitchcock: Variations on a Theme

2008-08-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

In his nightclub routine, Woody Allen once joked that he had written a short story about his first year of marriage. No one would publish it, but Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in the film rights. The joke is surprisingly accurate in what it says about Hitchcock. Marriage, and the tangled relationships between men and women, is a major theme which Hitchcock would hammer away at in all of his films. While the conventional dogma of the happy ending in the traditional Hollywood film stated that marriage brought continued bliss, Hitchcock saw it as merely a transition in the tense, and usually tainted, nature of sexual relationships. In the 1964 film Marnie, the couple's ultimately therapeutic relationship is rooted in their mutually sick, pathological behavior patterns. Sabotage (England 1936) concludes with the wife stabbing the husband to death over the dinner table. The newlyweds in Rear Window (USA 1954) are, by the end of the film, on the same path to mutual hatred that had led to the murder at the beginning of the film. Instead of happiness, marriage caused paranoia, distrust, and many violent deaths.

That marriage may be built upon mutual weakness rather than strength was examined by Hitchcock in two films: Marnie and Suspicion (USA 1941). The two films bear some striking similarities. Sean Connery's obsessive love for Tippi Hedren is caused by the fact that she is both frigid and a pathological liar. Not only is his love for her sick, but his method of curing her involves a subtle use of psychological torture. In Suspicion, Cary Grant plays an amoral, pathological liar whose obvious illness makes him romantically attractive to Joan Fontaine. She, in turn, is not only exceedingly naive, but is also willing to nurse and even protect his sickness up to a certain point. Her own behavior is remarkably child like and her constant fumbling with her eyeglasses is a visual indication of her own blindness. Her love for Grant's character is largely based on her need to escape from her parents, just as his love for her is based on an innate need for nurturing, yet the only thing she nurtures within him is a continuation of his pathological behavior. The film's climax (which was not the original ending of the film) literally pushes them to the edge of their relationship, a point at which they must make the decision to mature.

Their mutual illness even takes certain mutual forms. One of the few times that Fontaine's character shows signs of great vitality is when she is horseback riding. Likewise, Grant's great passion is betting on the horses. Grant plays an immature man, and when they first meet she is reading a book on child psychology. The weakness that threatens to separate them is also the very bond that holds their marriage together.

For Hitchcock, things other than mental illness can hold a marriage together. In Rich and Strange (England 1932), the banality of middle-class life is the thread that ultimately binds. The couple in the film are bored with life and each other and their unexpected inheritance enables them to take an exotic world cruise, a trip that quickly turns into a surrealistic journey of the soul. Taking the title from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea-change/ into something rich and strange"), the film's visual strangeness clearly demonstrates the influence of Luis Bunuel on Hitchcock, but the central theme is strictly his own. The couple's escape from banality leads only to a false glamour and a realization of the precarious nature of life. The security of boredom is seen by Hitchcock as being preferable to the horrors of reality.

Spellbound (USA 1945), like Marnie and Suspicion, returns to the notion of romantic love and mutual mental illness. While Fontaine's character in Suspicion is symbolically blind, Peck's character in Spellbound is an amnesic whose loss of memory is needed to blind him to his inner sense of guilt. Ingrid Bergman's own aloof and cold personality in the film is a facade covering her own vulnerability and her protectiveness of Peck becomes obsessive.

The film may now be best known for its dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, although only a fragment of the complete sequence was actually used in the film. An element of surrealism is always evident in Hitchcock's films, but in very subtle ways, and he felt uncomfortable with the extreme artificiality of the sequence. During the forties, when he made Spellbound, Hitchcock had adopted a classical, invisible film technique more in line with Hollywood film making of the period. An important aspect of this kind of film making is maintaining the illusion of reality, and while Hitchcock was not a realist, he was fond of the illusion. His films of the forties were more subdued than either his more experimental films of the thirties or his great masterpieces of the fifties.

Perhaps one of the most under-rated films ever made by Hitchcock is Mr. and Mrs. Smith (USA 1941). Directed as a favor to Carole Lombard, the film was a late entry by Hitchcock in the screwball comedy genre. Lacking the larger subject matter of his other films, Mr. and Mrs. Smith concentrates completely on the theme of marriage. The couple in the film are a pair of egotistical, over-grown children whose behavior pattern holds them together as much as it drives them apart. They are clearly made for each other as their petty destructiveness makes them unsuitable for anyone else.

The weak critical reputation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith may leave the viewer unprepared for what is actually a genuinely funny film. Hitchcock's flair for comedy is evident in many of his thrillers. Certainly Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a minor film in that it limits itself only to this one idea, making it a sonata when compared to the grand symphony of a film like Vertigo (USA 1958). As a sonata, however, it is delightful and is especially light-hearted as opposed to Hitchcock's own darker viewpoint.

Sci-Fi: The Early Classics

2008-08-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once suggested that science-fiction would increasingly have to deal with the immediate past rather than the future. The theory behind this thought is that the acceleration of technological advancement makes it impossible to second guess the reality of tomorrow without that gadget or gizmo appearing in the most recent issue of Time magazine. With the advent of the atomic bomb, space travel, computers, robots, and the digital watch, the future seems ridiculously close (films like Dark Star and Blade Runner are already viewing a future in which all the sci-fi gadgetry is breaking down). For this reason many science-fiction films age badly. The first lunar voyage in the pseudo-documentary film Destination Moon (USA 1950) comes too close to reality to be accepted as stylization (as opposed to the 1902 trick-film A Trip to the Moon) yet is too inaccurate to be acceptable in comparison to the actual event. Viewing early science-fiction films tells us more about the way we were rather than the way we shall be, and films like Metropolis (Germany 1926) and The War of the Worlds (USA 1953) actually are perceptive symbols of their own time periods.

The early science-fiction cinema can be divided into two periods. The first age was from 1926 to 1936, beginning with Metropolis and ending with Things to Come (England 1936). Industrial development and its consequences; the effect of World War I and the possibility of another world war; and the sprawl of urban society comprised the subject matter of this period. Fritz Lang's Metropolis set the basic themes and standards for the films that came afterwards. One of the most expensive productions of the twenties, Metropolis used massive sets to articulate its vision of a futuristic industrial society. The fact that the society in the film is industrial and not technological (the creation of the robot in Metropolis is magical rather than technological), clearly demonstrates that Lang is not concerned with the year 2000, but with the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the 19th century.

Borrowing heavily from Ignatius Donnelly's novel Caesar's Column, Lang creates a vision of an industrial society in which the working class is literally enslaved by the machines they operate. (In one scene, a worker is strapped to the erratically moving hands of a gigantic clock.) Rigidly organized masses of workers are marched through geometrically designed areas of space, emphasizing their entrapment within a system of industrialized slavery. However, Metropolis avoids political analysis and concludes with a compromise built upon nothing more than emotional response. After the rise of Nazism, Lang rejected the film as politically naive, and the fact that Metropolis was one of Hitler's favorite films caused Lang to completely reject his early masterpiece.

Four years later, the American film Just Imagine (USA 1930) would attempt to imitate the grandiose sets of "Metropolis." Part science-fiction and part musical, the failure of Just Imagine to predict what life would be like n 1980 has made the film an inadvertent camp classic. Just how seriously the producers intended their predictions to be is anyone's guess, but the visual impressiveness of the film is undeniable and many later works have referred to it — often sardonically. The film's plot, in which vaudeville star El Brendel awakens from a state of suspended animation, was also the basis for Woody Allen's Sleeper. While the society in Metropolis was grounded in the misery of the Industrial Revolution, the futuristic city in Just Imagine was a combination of American optimism and Busby Berkley.

The last significant film of science-fiction's first era was the 1936 production Things to Come. Authored by H.G. Wells, the film was a didactic overview of future history. In this respect, Things to Come is an epilogue to Wells's massive book The Outline of History and the film is generally locked into academic observations. Wells's faith in the enlightened glories of scientific development may seem, in retrospect, too naive, and the film's explicit equation that technology means democracy would be undercut twenty years later by George Orwell. However the key scenes of Things to Come still have a strong, dramatic sweep, aided in no small part by Raymond Massey's sonorous authority figure.

The second era of science-fiction film making took place in the fifties and, superficially at least, was dominated by the special effects technician's passionate desire to destroy the world in ninety minutes or less. The atomic bomb, radioactive beasties and irrepressible bug-eyed monsters from outer space repeatedly staged their own version of an apocalypse now and the creatures who weren't busy wiping out humanity were preoccupied with taking over your neighbors' brains. While the first era retained a basic optimism about the future, the fifties science-fiction films left little hope that there would be a day-after-tomorrow. Mankind had entered a cataclysmic funhouse as film goers contemplated the world's — and their own — destruction.

In Things to Come, science is mankind's last hope. In the 1953 production of Wells's The War of the Worlds, science is helpless against the Martians' attack. Divine intervention (in the form of the common cold) is the answer as the science-fiction films of the fifties became increasingly theological in their concerns. In the finale of The War of the Worlds, the survivors of the invasion seek refuge in a series of religious sanctuaries, progressively moving from a simple Protestant church to a Catholic cathedral. Science-fiction increasingly began using science not as an end in itself (as was advocated by Jules Verne), but as a device with which to structure allegorical tales.

One of the most overtly allegorical films of the fifties was Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (USA 1957). The fear of atomic annihilation — man's ultimate helplessness against his own technology — is reduced to the poetic symbol of a mysterious, radioactive cloud. Its effect, an irreversible process of shrinking, becomes a form of impotency not just for the shrinking man but for the world in general. Science has become, inadvertently, the enemy, and the film's metaphysical finale expresses a meek acceptance of the problem rather than a solution. Everything has gone out of control and the film opts for humility and a final mystic union with the universe. In this respect, The Incredible Shrinking Man anticipates the conclusion of 2001: a Space Odyssey, the film which began the current era of science-fiction cinema.

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge

2008-08-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Rainer Werner Fassbinder became during his brief life one of the most dynamic and controversial figures in the modern cinema. Before his death in 1982, he completed over 40 film and television productions and created numerous works for the stage and radio. He performed as an actor in over a dozen other films and was one of the central artists in the New German cinema movement of the 1970s. Despite the fact that his career lasted for less than two decades, he was a torrential force whose self-destructive behavior was capable of producing an energetic degree of inventiveness and creativity. He continually led his life on the edge of a great abyss and became the poet laureate of angst, perversity, and a powerfully genuine emotionalism.

Fassbinder was born in 1945, though he would later change his birth date to 1946. His parents divorced when he was six and Fassbinder spent his childhood being moved back and forth between his aloof father and his seemingly disinterested mother. While his mother spent time in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, his father lived in Munich and was a doctor whose patients mostly were prostitutes and their clients. Except for the sporadic company of his father's patients and a few friendly relatives, Fassbinder grew up primarily alone and once boasted, "I'm my own father." If he was his own father, then the movies were his mother as he spent hours each week in darkened theaters watching American films. He was especially intrigued by gangster pictures and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. By his late teens, after displaying an indifference to school and leading a brief career as a street hustler, Fassbinder became convinced that he had to make films.

He attended drama school intermittently in Munich and, by 1967, was acting with a small group called the Action Theater. Fassbinder systematically took control of the group through the combined forces of hard work, an overmastering ego, and sexual liaisons with theater members. By the time the police had closed the theater during the May 1968 uprisings, Fassbinder had already formed the core of the Anti-Teater which he would use on stage and in film.

Improvisations and guerrilla theater tactics formed the basis for the Anti-Teater and, in 1969, Fassbinder directed the group in his first four feature films. Each film was made within a matter of a few weeks and represented a mix of experimental stylization, psycho-drama, and autobiographical details. These earliest films ranged wildly from the extremely studied and classical design of Effi Briest (West Germany 1974) to the excessive Gotterdammerung mentality of The American Soldier (West Germany 1970); yet the common ground among all the films was a focus on redefining the structure of narrative film making. Each film also exposed, directly and indirectly, glimpses into Fassbinder1s psychology.

Effi Briest is a close adaptation of Theodor Fontaine's 19th century novel which was, in turn, a variation on Madame Bovary. When developing some of his previous adaptations of novels to film, Fassbinder simply neglected to read the novel. In producing Effi Briest, he deviated from this practice, actually reading the book, and quoting directly from it throughout the film. The narrative of Effi Briest attracted him as it provided a compelling delineation of Fassbinder's own overwhelming need for love, his inability to achieve it, and the underlying sadomasochistic pursuit of power that can so easily dominate the emotions.

Brutality as a substitute for love is part of the subtext of the early gangster trilogy including Love is Colder Than Death (West Germany 1969), The Gods of the Plague (West Germany 1969), and The American Soldier. In these films, he created a Teutonic underworld of smoke and shadows in which preposterously laconic hoods kill and are killed amid the bathrooms, bars, and supermarket aisles of modern Germany. Sex is reduced to a ritualistic game of power and the characters behave with the somnambulistic motions of "B" movie automatons.

Indirectly, the films in the gangster trilogy express Fassbinder's own ambivalence concerning his sexuality and his artistic methodology. Fassbinder had an enormous and even, perhaps, desperate need to be loved, yet he would eventually reject virtually every lover he had, and psychologically drove two to suicide. Likewise, despite the fact that his method of work relied heavily upon the contributions of his cast and crew, he would periodically "punish" them in films like Satan's Brew (West Germany 1976), one in which many of the film's characters are caustic caricatures of the cast members. Fassbinder even parodied part of himself in the form of the film's half-demented poet.

The ambivalent characteristics and attitudes that surfaced in Fassbinder's personal life also permeated his political perceptions of modern Germany as well as his directing practices. He viewed Germany as still being a proto-fascist state and his political beliefs were ostensibly committed to the collective ideal as formulated by the original Anti-Teater group. However, the Anti-Teater group was never a collective in its actual method of operation: Fassbinder ruled as a "Fuhrer" figure, a manifest contradiction between his actions and beliefs which he recognized and lampooned in Satan's Brew. Similarly, he was extremely ambivalent about the radical terrorist movements of the 1970s, although some of the original members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were his acquaintances.

In his production of The Third Generation (West Germany 1979), Fassbinder set forth the conclusion that terrorism and the modern security state fed upon and needed each other in order to exist. He viewed his contemporaries as a lost generation doomed to "act in danger but without perspective." Likewise, he suspected the state of using terrorism as a pretext in order to justify its own repressive policies. With the vitriolic satire of The Third Generation, Fassbinder attacked the growing nihilism of power politics.

Despite his outpouring of bitter commentary on the modern state, a combination of decadence and nihilism were becoming increasingly obvious in Fassbinder's own life. His omnivorous sexuality was proving increasingly destructive to his friends and lovers; his consumption of drugs and alcohol was reaching life-threatening proportions; and he was rapidly gaining weight from compulsive eating. The recurring line in Berlin Alexanderplatz (West Germany 1980), "There is a reaper and his name is death," became a virtual leitmotif for Fassbinder. He had always lived on the edge, but increasingly he seemed to have been dancing on his grave.

In many respects, In a Year of Thirteen Moons (West Germany 1979) was Fassbinder's most personal film. Written, photographed, edited, and directed by him and starring only his closest associates, including his ex-wife, mother, and several ex-lovers, the film was Fassbinder's curious act of contrition for the suicide of his most recent male lover. The film's highly experimental structure and conflicting blend of pathos and black comedy reflected Fassbinder's own confusion over his contradictory emotional drives. In a way, Fassbinder was both a seducer and a spurned lover, a man who was ruthlessly incapable of accepting the emotional needs which he compulsively sought to fulfill. The title of his first film, Love is Colder Than Death, would prove to be prophetic of his real role throughout his career.

His sudden death in 1982 did not come as a real surprise to those who knew him. Fassbinder's overindulgence in virtually everything consumed him and he died, ironically, while in bed. His battered felt hat still on his head and a clinched cigarette in his hand, watching an old American film on the television set. His final epitaph surfaced inadvertently in the documentary film The Wizard of Babylon (West Germany 1982), the filming of which had ended earlier that day. One of the policemen who were originally called to the death scene later commented to reporters, "Even Fassbinder's just a man." His own mortality which he had tested and challenged during the final years and finally won out.

To some critics, Fassbinder's death practically marked the end of narrative film making in the New German cinema. Fassbinder's demise did mark the closing of a unique and extra-ordinarily vital chapter in the modern cinema. He remains an audacious and combative figure and his work retains the power to shock and offend. Yet, his stylistic control and diversity are virtually unequalled in the cinema and his boldness of vision and purpose railed against the increasing banality of the modern screen.

The New German Cinema

2008-08-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

During the 1920s, Germany was the center for one of the most artistically ambitious cinemas in the world. Such artists as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Georg Wilhelm Pabst created a body of work unsurpassed for its boldness, originality, and expressiveness. The rise of Nazism, the ensuing war, and the protracted period of reconstruction, however, left the German cinema in shambles. By the early 1960s, the German cinema consisted largely of pseudo-English detective mysteries and mediocre film versions of Karl May's Westerns.

This artistic vacuum made the rise of the New German cinema especially unique. An entire generation grew up without any immediate film heritage except that of Hollywood movies and American rock 'n' roll. The pre-war culture seemed distant, aloof, and essentially meaningless, while the period prior to the American occupation was rarely discussed. Because of this, the New German cinema had to formulate an aesthetic response to the gap in German culture. As Wim Wenders stated in Kings of the Road (W. German 1976), the Americans had colonized the German sub-conscious. The roots of this New German cinema is, in part, a response to this colonization.

Nowhere is this influence more evident than in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An incredibly prolific director, Fassbinder's work is remarkably diverse, yet the influence of Douglas Sirk pervades his style. Sirk used the conventions of melodrama to produce films which were critical of the American society of the 1950s and many of Fassbinder's films operate with a calculated sense of melodramatic excess.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (W. German 1969) represents an important early statement of one of Fassbinder's major themes. Fassbinder essentially sees society as a dehumanizing set of structures and institutions which are designed to deny an individual's need for love and affection. The alienated, and ultimately psychotic, figure represented by Herr R. is simply the logical result of a society which crushes a person's basic capacity for affection and sense of self-worth, and the film's title is rhetorical. For Fassbinder, the mystery of Herr R.'s behavior is that it should be mysterious to anyone in the first place. What else could one have expected?

While Fassbinder adapted certain American influences, Werner Herzog created his own unique form of film language. Reaching back to the Germanic Romanticism of the 19th century, Herzog's protagonists are either obsessed by a singular, overwhelming vision (as in his recent Fitzcarraldo - 1982) or else driven mad by it. In Signs of Life (W. German 1968), a landscape filled with wildly twirling windmills is, like the landscape in all of his films, elevated to the level of visionary experience. Proclaiming that "I am my films," Herzog does not make films about madness, he champions it instead. Unceasing circular movement, traditionally a symbol of chaos, is Herzog's recurring motif.

Though not as well known as either Fassbinder or Herzog, Volker Schlondorff is nonetheless of equal importance as a director. His best films, such as The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (W. German 1970) and Coup de Grace (W. German 1977), delved into the repressive nature of traditional German society. While these films are unremitting in their critical nature, Schlondorff has been remarkably successful at producing a more commercial form of film making. A Free Woman (W. German 1972), retains its integrity even while operating in a more conventional manner than some of his other works. A Free Woman, like many of his other films made in collaboration with his wife Margarethe Von Trotta, intricately examines the problems faced by an ordinary woman in contemporary German society.

While Schlondorff's subtle commercialization makes him more immediately accessible to American audiences, Reinhard Hauff often works within the conventions of extremely Germanic genres. Primarily a social realist, Hauff's films contrast sharply with that of his fellow artists. The Brutalization of Franz Blum (W. German 1974) rigorously details the everyday, banal cruelties of life in prison. Striving for authenticity rather than dramatics, Hauff's camera work is often flat and matter-of-fact in its presentation. This authenticity is further accentuated by Burkhard Driest who based his screenplay on his own experiences after serving five years for bank robbery.

Of all the filmmakers in the New German cinema, undoubtedly the most difficult and experimental is Jean-Marie Straub. Along with his wife and co-director Daniele Huillet, Straub has created some of the major works of structuralist cinema. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (W. German 1968) was constructed by Straub not to be a biography of Bach and his wife, but a series of sound and images, attempting to preserve the integrity of Bach's music. The musical performances are interspersed with calmly composed visuals and the reciting of letters written by Anna to her husband. By not predetermining the film in advance (as happens in a narrative film), Straub allows the audience to construct the film themselves and to do so by way of Bach's own work.

Dreyer: From the Real to the Transcendental

2008-08-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

"Realism in itself is not art, but there must be harmony between the genuineness of feelings and the genuineness of things. I try to force reality into a form of simplification and abbreviation in order to reach what I call psychological realism."
—Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889 - 1968)

Carl Theodor Dreyer once referred to himself as the leader of an artistic movement without any followers, and certainly the unique nature of his sparse and rigorous cinematic aesthetics has few equals in the cinema. Though Dreyer was one of the three artistic founding figures of the Scandinavian cinema, the extreme asceticism of his films is only suggested in the works of a more conventional filmmaker such as Ingmar Bergman.

Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on February 3, 1889. Originally interested in journalism and theater, he worked briefly as a reporter and critic for the Copenhagen daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende. By 1912, he began working for the Nordisk Films Kompagni as a script reader and, eventually, scriptwriter. His success as a screenwriter led to the opportunity to direct his first film, The President (Denmark 1918).

Most of Dreyer's films made during the silent era are generally considered to be relatively minor works, though some are-currently experiencing critical reevaluation. The Passion of Joan of Arc (France 1928) has long been considered his first truly important film in which Dreyer begins to break away from the rules and structure of the conventional Western cinema.

The screenplay for The Passion of Joan of Arc was based upon the actual transcripts of St. Joan's trial in 1431. Marie Falconetti, an actress whom Dreyer had discovered in a comedic play in Paris, was selected for the role largely on the basis of her appearance without make-up. This became an important attribute, for The Passion of Joan of Arc is largely composed of an unrelenting series of extreme close-ups in which Falconetti's face becomes one of the most expressive elements of the film.

Dreyer explored the suffering and martyrdom of St. Joan through an intensely detailed presentation of visual reality. The nearly claustrophobic series of close-ups which dominate the images of The Passion of Joan of Arc forces the viewer into an intimate and contemplative relationship with the film. It is through the over-powering nature of these images that Dreyer communicates the strength of St. Joan's spiritual faith in the face of doubt and persecution.

While the dominant form of expression in The Passion of Joan of Arc is the vividness of the photographic image, verbal language is the chief concern of Gertrud (Denmark 1964). In this film, Dreyer gives equal weight to the dialogue and image, allowing a series of extreme long-takes and protracted monologues. By choosing to use a highly rhythmic and artificial-sounding form of Danish for all the dialogue, Dreyer creates a distinct form of intonation.

Gertrud presents an inwardly focused, psychological form of spiritual conflict and an emotional sense of isolation which is so prevalent in Dreyer's films. In this regard, Gertrud is one in a series of Dreyer's portraits of women faced with either an overt or covert form of martyrdom. Along with The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath (Denmark 1943) it forms a thematic triptych.

Day of Wrath was filmed by Dreyer during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Although Dreyer had already firmly established an interest in portraying themes about intolerance and persecution, this film shows an almost obsessive concern with this subject matter.

The central character is a woman accused of witchcraft, although her only real crime is the rejection of a system of organized deceit fostered by her society. The film creates a frightening portrait of a society controlled by repressed hatred and systematic brutality. Although the story is set in 1623, the society depicted is hauntingly parallel to the modern age in its capacity for organized murder.

The bleak vision presented by Dreyer in Day of Wrath is, in a way, the counter-point to his vision of faith in the film Ordet (Denmark 1954). The Christ-like figure of Johannes in Ordet is the personification of Dreyer's view of pure faith and, despite the tragic narrative of the film, Ordet represents the optimistic side of Dreyer's theological viewpoint.

Ordet was based on the play by Kaj Munk, a prominent Danish playwright and Lutheran minister who was executed by the Nazis during their occupation of Denmark. The film was made with the cooperation of Munk's widow and filmed in Munk's native village. Dreyer clearly felt a special affiliation to Munk's work, once stating: "I was so much happier doing Ordet when I felt myself very close to the conceptions of Kaj Munk."

When Dreyer died on March 20, 1968, he was preparing the screenplay for the film project Jesus, a detailed study on the beginning of Christianity and the origins of anti-Semitism. The surviving screenplay of this project attests to Dreyer's intense concern with prejudice as well as the unique nature of his artistic gift and vision.

Dementia: The Gothic Influence in the American Cinema

2008-08-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

The traditional stylization of classical Hollywood cinema was dominated by the desire to present a carefully crafted appearance of reality. This photographic presentation of reality was achieved using an elaborate arsenal of optical illusions, beguiling the viewer into accepting the cinematic image as an accurate vision of the real world. This form of pseudo-realism remains one of the major legacies of the American cinema.

Not all American films, however, worked within that stylistic vein. The unreal subject matter of horror films allowed for a variety of styles which created a world more akin to a nightmare than to reality. The film noir genre also allowed an entire generation of filmmakers to create bleak and expressive films which presented a dissonant view of the turmoil and contradictions present in the American society of the post-World War Two era. Many of these "non-classical" Hollywood films were also strongly influenced by European film movements such as the German Expressionists.

The 1955 production of The Night of the Hunter was Charles Lauqhton's only work as a film director. Though he had worked extensively on stage as both an actor and director, the box office failure of The Night of Hunter abruptly ended Laughton's attempt to make more films. This was extremely unfortunate as Laughton displayed both a highly developed visual sensibility and an audacious gift for narrative in this film.

The screenplay for The Night of the Hunter, adapted by James Agee from a novel by David Grubbs, was largely ignored by Laughton who actually wrote the final shooting script himself. Therefore, the idiosyncratic quality of The Night of the Hunter is probably an accurate reflection of Laughton's own temperament.

Designed as a combination of morality play and modern fairy tale, The Night of the Hunter contained one of the most memorably deranged characters of the 1950s, Robert Mitchum's "preacher." Most importantly this character is the personification of the film's central theme: morality can exist only within the context of the never ending struggle between good and evil. The words "love" and "hate" tattooed on each of the Mitchum character's hands express this dichotomy.

A pair of hands are also of great importance in the 1935 film Mad Love, directed by Karl Freund. The film suggests the possibility that one's hands can control a person's character -- a bizarre premise that nonetheless becomes frighteningly logical within the nightmare world of the film.

Mad Love (USA 1935) was originally intended to be a remake of the 1924 German Expressionist film The Hands of Orlac by Robert Wiene. While Mad Love used this earlier film as its primary inspiration, the themes of the narrative were developed to a more excessive conclusion. The influence of the German Expressionist cinema is overtly evident in the film and derived not only from the mvoie's original source but also from the photographic skills of director Freund. Though he only directed a few films during his career, Freund was one of the greatest cinematographers of the period; some of his earliest photographic credits include such German films as The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1926).

Mad Love also marked Peter Lorre's American screen debut. Lorre had gained critical attention for his portrayal of the murderer in Fritz Lang's M (1931) and as the spy in Alfred Hitchcock's original English production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). He was able to convert this screen notoriety into a Hollywood film career which allowed him to leave Germany and Europe where his name was on a Nazi death list.

Perhaps the most peculiar film in the program is Nightmare Alley (USA 1947). How this film was produced by a major Hollywood studio during a time when caution and compromise were major considerations in the making of so-called "Grade-A" films, remains something of a mystery to film critics and historians. Its bleak and caustic view of American society seem excessive even for the film noir genre of the late 1940s. The film's narrative, in which a cynical con-artist manipulates his way through an even more cynical society, was totally contrary to the mainstream cinematic mood of the time.

The oddity of Nightmare Alley becomes even more obvious when one considers those who made it. The film was produced by George Jesse, who had previously produced only a few musicals, and directed by Edmund Goulding, a "prestige" director best known for such high-class dramas as Grand Hotel (USA 1932) and The Razor's Edge (USA 1946). It is most likely that the caustic sensibilities of Nightmare Alley can be attributed to the film's scriptwriter, Jules Furthman. It is also possible that Furthman was one of the few people involved in the film who actually grasped the unusual nature of Nightmare Alley.

In retrospect, some critics now feel that the film is more indicative of its time that was realized upon its original release. In the aftermath of World War Two, many American films attempted to create an artificial sense of normalcy. In rejecting this, Nightmare Alley offered a powerful antithesis, presenting the dark underside of that period's culture.

Ken Russell: The Early Films

2008-08-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

"Biographies seem to me rather like detective stories. You're given the clues of a man's life and you supply the motive for the crime, the crime being the work of art or the body of art produced by the man."
--Ken Russell

For the past 30 years, Ken Russell's work in British film and television has been the subject of praise and, often, intense condemnation. Though his films have ranged from experimental productions to Hollywood-style indulgences, Russell's most notable achievements have been within the genre of biography films. Virtually the entire first half of his film making career was dominated by this form, which he has recently returned to with his 1987 British television production of Clouds of Glory on William Wordsworth and the Romantic movement in English poetry. Granted, Russell's concerns are not necessarily rooted in either the facts of history or of the individual artist's life. Rather, he is obsessed by the larger and more fantastic meaning of an artist's life in relationship to the society and culture around him. In this regard, Russell's biography films are meant to be phantasmagoric evocations rather than strict documentaries and his own subjective viewpoint as the film's director is used freely as a referential guide to the facts and fictions surrounding the object of his attention.

Russell began his career as a photographer and independent filmmaker in the 1950s. Through the early critical success of his experimental films, especially Amelia and the Angel (England 1957), he was able to secure a film making position with the British Broadcasting Corporation. From 1959 to 1970, he directed 4 features and 30 shorts on subjects ranging from the British comedian Spike Milligan to the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. His 4 feature films for the BBC would, however, bring him his first taste of critical acclaim and near ruinous controversy. His last BBC film, The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss (England 1970), was permanently banned after its only telecast and Russell found it best to pursue a "theatrical" film making career.

Yet his early BBC films remain, in many respects, among his finest accomplishments as a filmmaker. The 3 films that are available for public viewing—Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World (England 1966), Dante's Inferno (England 1967), and Song of Summer (England 1968)--represent Russell at his most disciplined and artistically controlled level. Arguably, the tight shooting budgets and greater aesthetic restrictions of television provoked him to a high degree of imaginative circumvention. The smallness of the screen, as well as Russell's perception of the potential narrowness of the viewer's mind, led him to develop a biographical cinema based upon shock values (e.g., the opening scene of Dante's Inferno); an editing structure built upon abrupt transitions; and an ability to radically shift in his films from the sublime to the ridiculous, from placid beauty to surreal absurdity. Most of the techniques he would expand upon in his "theatrical" films had their origins in his early television productions.

Russell's first feature-length television film was Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World. It was produced at about the same time as Karel Reisz's theatrical film Isadora (England 1969) and Russell was handicapped by the fact that the producers of the other film had acquired the rights to virtually every biography that had been written on Duncan. The one biography that they had overlooked was an obscure book about Duncan's travels in Russia and South America. Further, one of Duncan's biographers, and personal acquaintances, Sewell Stokes, was still alive and Russell correctly reasoned that they couldn't have bought the film rights to Stokes' memories. This eclectic set of sources formed the basis for Russell's perspective in the film.

In Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, Russell created one of his first sustained statements on the artist as part genius and part posturer. The film swings wildly between moments of near transcendental splendor and sudden outbreaks of vulgar showmanship as Russell mediates upon the gap between Duncan's artistic drives and the effect of time that gnaws at the dancer's physical and personal stamina.

The painful distance that can exist between an artist's ideals and his or her own life is a central concern of Dante's Inferno. In his approach to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Russell was less concerned with the minute details of history than with the larger philosophical and psychological significance of the movement's failure. For Russell, Rossetti is a paradox of idealism and crude appetites. Rossetti's poetic concept of platonic love is contradicted by his overt sexual desires and his idealized art is increasingly consumed by the dictates of merchandising. As he dissipates himself, Rossetti increasingly realizes how he has failed both his art and those around him. The film's final image, an abrupt cut from a drugged and aging Rossetti to the ending credits played out to a calliope version of the song "I Just Want to be Happy," summarizes the elusive nature of his desires.

The contrast that can, and often does exist, between great art and the personality of its creator is the subject matter of Song of Summer. Co-written by Eric Fenby, Frederick Delius' personally selected biographer, the film avoids the one-dimensional tract of a mere hagiography. Rather, it concentrates upon the demanding nature of art and the sacrifices that are made for the artist by those around him. Song of Summer is based upon the brief work relationship between Delius and Fenby and the philosophical difference that existed between Fenby's Catholicism and Delius' atheism. Russell's own unorthodox, and occasionally heretical, notion of Catholicism allowed him a strangely emotional and sympathetic attitude toward Fenby's biographical viewpoint and, in that regard, toward Delius himself.

Godard: The Last Revolutionary

2008-08-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

"The Right is stupid because they are cruel; the Left is stupid because they are sentimental,"
--Jean-Luc Godard (from Made in USA)

When the French New Wave movement swept through the cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard quickly became the most prominent and, increasingly, most controversial figure among.this unique collection of critics turned filmmakers. Even at the beginning of his career, with the production of Breathless (France 1959), he was the most experimental of the New Wave artists. During the 1960s, however, he also became the most overtly political filmmaker in France as his cinema increasingly maneuvered between post-Modernist aesthetics and Maoist politics. Not that Godard viewed film as a mere platform for political expression. For Godard, the cinema was already an extension of the political world and the film maker's sense of camera framing and editing were the equivalent of an ideological statement.

During the 1960s, Godard became concerned with the dismantling of narrative cinema and the eradication of the potentially reactionary political content inherent within traditional cinematic forms. Rather than create comfortable "stories" for his audience to watch, Godard concentrated on exposing and fragmenting the techniques and structures of film making itself. In turn, his films increasingly juxtaposed the narrative text with the actual process of film making, thereby forcing the viewer into an active engagement with the screen instead of a merely passive acceptance of the film. Further, Godard's experiments were not simply an intellectual exercise. They were the first steps toward a new, and highly radical, reassessment of art, language, society, and political ideology.

Pierrot le Fou (France 1965) is loosely based on a second-rate American paperback novel that was originally a cross between a mystery thriller and Lolita. Godard, however, was more interested in the political crisis that dominated the early 1960s, including the wars in Vietnam, Yemen, and Angola, the aftermath of the Algerian Revolution, and the Kennedy assassination. His producers were, on the other hand, hoping for a gangster film. In Pierrot le Fou, Godard essentially took all of the above references and mixed them into a colorful wide screen collage in which the greater whole of the narrative is purposefully meant to be less important than the contradictory statements of the film's various scenes.

For Godard, the political world expresses itself through the structures of personal life. Une Femme Mariee (France 1964) is, on the surface, a sardonic view of modern marriage. However, the film really concerns itself with the way in which advertising controls our subconscious and thereby conditions the attitudes of society. Godard has accused advertising of being a form of fascism because of the way it attempts (often successfully) to bypass rational thought and manipulate people's needs and desires at an irrational level. The title character of Une Femme Mariee is framed through-out much of the film against a backdrop of billboards, neon signs, and other ads. She is a product of a society controlled by the marketplace.

A recurring motif in Godard's films is the idea that modern society is predicated upon the buying and selling of people's bodies, minds, and talents. In such films as Une Femme Mariee and Vivre sa Vie (France 1962), prostitution is presented as the major metaphor for modern life (or as Bertolt Brecht wrote when he worked in Hollywood: "Each morning I go into the marketplace to sell my wares"). The need to sell one's self in the marketplace is, according to Godard, what modern society has reduced humanity to.

Vivre sa Vie is also the first film in which Godard completely integrated style and subject matter, Divided into twelve tableaux, Vivre sa Vie is constructed more as an essay than a novel. Each section of the film is a different paragraph in the discourse, and the fragmented theme music by Michel Legrand is used as a punctuation. Godard's camera movements and long-takes are the methods by which he constructs his sentences. As in a fugue, the soundtrack in Vivre sa Vie is meant to counterpoint the visual images rather than to accentuate them.

Superficially, Masculine-Feminine (France 1966) is a character study of three Parisian youths. The personal details of their lives, however, are actually an extension of the events surrounding them and throughout the film the violent schisms of society intrude into the film's foreground. Further, the film freely flaunts the artificiality of the narrative form by interjecting into the text references to other narratives, including the play Dutchman by LeRoi Jones and a film-within-the-film which presents a sadomasochistic Swedish version of a story by Guy de Maupassant. The real subject matter of Masculine-Feminine is the decade itself and the contradictions of the 1960s.

The production of Le Gai Savoir (.France 1968) marked a crucial transition in Godard's cinema. The experiments of the early and mid 1960s, and Godard's attempt to reform narrative film making, were over. Now, Godard was determined to destroy narrative film making and force the cinema to a "zero-degree" style from which a new, politically radical, form of film making could emerge, Further, Godard's critical concerns had gone beyond the limited world of the cinema as he became increasingly preoccupied with language and its ideological content. The meaning of words, and the way these meanings shape our understanding of the world, is presented in Le Gai Savoir as the first major battleground for revolutionary change.

Milos Forman: The Human Comedy

2008-08-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

The difference between the cinema of Eastern and Western Europe is, in part, a difference in history. The post-World War II period - from 1945 to the present-widened the gap. Western European cinema has been largely influenced by the commercialism of the United States. Eastern European cinema, however, has been dictated by the ideological demands socialist state. Not that Eastern European cinema has been reduced to simple propaganda. Instead, the filmmakers of such countries as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland have developed their own unique traditions and the concerns of their films are complex and surprisingly non-dogmatic.

The mid-sixties in Czechoslovakia, prior to the 1968 Soviet invasion, was an especially active and inventive period. A new generation of filmmakers were breaking away from the legacy of social realism and the Stalinist era. Artists like Milos Forman, Jan Kadar, and Ivan Passer began exploring contemporary subjects and the realities of life in modern Czechoslovakia. Highly satirical, and often controversial, the filmmakers of the Czech New Wave recorded the minor triumphs and major defeats of the human spirit when confronted with the burdens of politics, history, and life in general. In a land where Franz Kafka is considered a humorist, comedy is a little darker and largely derives from the subtle observations of one's own entrapment.

One of the most important of the Czech New Wave filmmakers of the mid-sixties is Milos Forman. Born in 1932, Forman grew up during the critical periods of the Nazi rule of Czechoslovakia in the forties and the purges by Stalin in the fifties. As with every filmmaker in Eastern Europe, history was an important force in shaping Forman's attitudes. He studied at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Prague and by the late fifties he was writing screenplays and radio scripts. It was not until 1963, however, that Forman would direct his first film, a short called The Audition (Czech 1963). This film also marked the beginning of the collaboration between Forman and co-screenwriter Ivan Passer.

Though a minor film, The Audition is worth noting for two aspects that became common traits in Forman's films. The first is the performance of music, in particular the actual act of playing music and the personalities of the performers. The second is the generation gap. Like many of his fellow Czech New Wave filmmakers, Forman explored the aspirations and disappointments of young people confronted by a society made rigid by political dogma, a strict social structure, and an official obsession with recent history (i.e. World War II and the fight against fascism). This, along with the increasingly liberal policies of the Czechoslovakian government during the sixties, allowed Forman to humorously explore the problems and contradictions of present society. Though his films were never as controversial as those of other Czech New Wave filmmakers like Jan Nemec (whose film A Report on the Party and the Guests - Czech 1966 - has been banned forever in Czechoslovakia), Forman humorously dealt with the disappointments and bewilderments of his generation.

Forman's first feature film, Black Peter (Czech 1964), has a strong resemblance to the Antoine Doinel films by Truffaut. Peter, like Antoine, is a young man who seems unsure of his place in society. His job as a store detective places him in a position as an agent of established order, yet he looks on complacently when a stout woman shoplifts candy from the store. His father, a part time bandmaster, is a petty dictator who becomes embarrassed when lecturing his son about a book on the human body. As is so often the case in Forman's films, the older generation lacks any direction for the future and the new generation is confused and adrift.

Black Peter has a very improvised, cinema-veritie appearance which would change in Forman's work to a progressively more structured approach. His second feature, Loves of a Blonde (Czech 1965), is more carefully constructed than Black Peter. However, Forman retained his strong sense for the details and ironies of everyday life. Forman once said in an interview, "All the most important and immediate conflicts in life are between different, equally well-intentioned people's conception of what the best is." This conflict of intentions, which is first stated in Loves of a Blonde, would become the central thesis of Forman's films. Andula, the blonde of the title, discovers that the forces of society, family, and propriety are stronger than romantic love. Though her lover's parents are distrustful and protective, they have only the best of intentions.

The ruthless tyranny of good intentions is the central point of Forman's best known and, perhaps, greatest work. Although the subject of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (USA 1975) seemed quintessentially American, Forman's sensibilities added depth which the novel essentially lacked. In the novel, the character of Big Nurse was a crude, two dimensional figure of malevolence. But in the film, with Forman's rewrite and Louise Fletcher's understated performance, the character's evil stems from her blind adherence to official policy. Her intentions are, arguably, better than those of Nicholson's McMurphy, but McMurphy's instinctive misbehavior may be more therapeutic.

The novel's essentially Freudian viewpoint is still evident in the film, in which the central battle is between McMurphy's father figure and Big Nurse's mother figure and McMurphy's ultimate fate is a form of castration, but Forman is more interested in the social implications of the narrative rather than the psychological. As is the case in Eastern European films about the Stalinist era, the real evil comes from the unbending and unforgiving rule of a supreme authority figure. Having fled Czechoslovakia in 1968 in order to escape the Soviet invasion, Forman has a strong intuitive knowledge of authority figures who forcefully impose their own particular notions of good intentions.

Forman arrived in the United States during the turbulence of the late sixties. His first American film, Taking Off (USA 1971), attempts to summarize his bemused first impressions of his adopted country. It is not surprising that Forman's first American film would concern the generation gap, but unlike Black Peter, Taking Off viewed the gap from the parents' perspective. Their attempts to bridge the gap takes the parents through a series of misunderstandings and failed intentions before they realize that they, like their daughter, are equally confused. In this respect, Buck Henry's father in Taking Off is directly linked with the young man in Black Peter. Being older does not mean greater wisdom, but only an increase in perplexity. For Forman, perplexity is the one thing in life you can be sure of.

Hitchcock: The Deceptive Screen

2008-07-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

In the world of Alfred Hitchcock, everything is in doubt. Throughout his films, he repeatedly demonstrates that all forms of knowledge, including visual information, are unreliable. For Hitchcock, the notion that nothing is as it seems is a vehicle for suspense, but it also takes on a far greater importance. The visual deceptions in Hitchcock's films are actually indicative of his deep concern with the extremely deceptive nature of the real world. For Hitchcock, perception only provides clues to the truth and these clues must be scrutinized carefully before the viewer can understand their importance.

The deceptive nature of the world, and of visual perception, appear in many forms in Hitchcock's films. The film Strangers on a Train (1951) is structured upon a system of duality which creates its own pattern of connections within the narrative. The film's photographic compositions contain many carefully balanced "pairs" and the characters and scenes are presented in terms of "two's." There are two fathers, two merry-go-round scenes, and two women in glasses who are either strangled or nearly strangled. The first key to understanding Strangers on a Train lies within the film's repetition of images.

At the core of Strangers on a Train are the characters of Bruno (Robert Walker) and Guy (Farley Granger). On the surface, Bruno's decadent and psychotic personality is in sharp contrast to that of Guy, a professional tennis player. It is Guy, however, who accidently sets the stage for Bruno's act of murder. In turn, it is Bruno who represents a sense of strength rather than Guy, although Bruno's strength is manifestly bizarre. The apparent differences between Guy and Bruno are superficial, for they are actually perverse reflections of each other.

he 1953 production of I Confess is an intense elaboration on Hitchcock's theme of guilt. The film tells us at its very beginning who committed the murder when the man confesses the crime to the priest played by Montgomery Clift. The murderer does not even intend, at first, to frame the priest for the crime. The killer had worn at the time, however, the priest's coat and hat and despite the difference in their physical appearance, the priest-like wardrobe is the only detail noticed by witnesses to the crime.

More importantly in I Confess is the degree to which the priest inadvertently implicates himself in the murder. The murderer's sense of guilt compelled him to confess to the priest, but the priest's feeling of guilt for his own act of adultery is something which he is afriad to confess. Thematically, as well as narratively, the sins of murder and adultery become interlinked in the film, and the admission of the crime eventually becomes dependent upon the priest's admission of his sin.

The conflict between guilt and innocence is the central concern of Shadow of a Doubt (1943). In the film, the niece named Charlie yearns for a sense of worldly sophistication and views her Uncle Charlie, her name sake, as an enviable figure of urbane knowledge. Uncle Charlie is, however, an obsessive killer who has returned to the niece's small town because the police are searching for him across the country. In a way, the uncle does have worldly knowledge, but it is a disturbed and genuine knowledge of evil.

The visual effect of Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock's most deceptive. The myths and illusions of small town America evoke a placid and banal existence. But beneath the film's surface presentation of the small town is a complex reality of fears, repressions, and unfulfilled lives. While Uncle Charlie represents the darkest manifestation of these fears and repressions, he is nonetheless a plausible product of this small town society.

The ease with which film viewers can be mislead by the visual information presented to them in a film is one of the prime concerns of Stage Fright (1950). One assumes that the visual information is true, yet it is this very assumption which Hitchcock attacks in Stage Fright. While the narrative of the film suggestively plays with the illusionary nature of acting and the theater, the film's visual imagery clearly demonstrates that seeing is not the same as understanding.

While Stage Fright challenges the verisimilitude of film, The Wrong Man (1957) creates a complex series of contradictions between observation and truth. There is no question as to the innocence of the film's main character, yet all of the evidence points increasingly to his guilt. The investigative police work presented in The Wrong Man, which was based upon a real case, is routine and thorough and yet the conclusions are persistently wrong. Empirical evidence, Hitchcock suggests, is not enough to pierce through the misleading nature of reality.

Fritz Lang: the Cinema of Fear

2008-07-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

In the films of Fritz Lang there were no accidents, only pre-determined events. The seemingly coincidental details of life were actually manifestations of a greater force which manipulated and propelled his characters along a complex path of preordained action. His villains were madmen driven by impulses beyond their control, and his heroes were forced to discover the contradiction which existed between their moral ideals and the accelerating brutality of their actions. Lang was a moralist for whom freewill was a debatable concept. His films' intricate, geometric structures are a visual representation of a world in which the most inconsequential act could result in death.

A quick comparison of four of his films, such as the German productions of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) and M (1931) opposite the Hollywood movies Man Hunt (1941) and The Woman in the Window (1944), present a study in the continuation of themes and concerns. Though Lang's American films were stylistically different from his early German productions, his fatalism made it difficult for him to believe in the American legislated right to the pursuit of happiness. No wonder his American heroes had a limited, often bleak, set of choices.

With M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Lang created his most extensive vision of pure evil. The obvious villain in M is the mass murderer portrayed by Peter Lorre, a grotesque figure who is driven by an uncontrollable compulsion. Lorre's character is viewed by the film as the result of a corrupt and decadent society. Throughout the film, Lang cuts back and forth between the police and the equally organized underworld. The mentality and motivations of both worlds are presented as essentially the same, though the underworld is slightly more proficient at finding Lorre. In M, the traditional moral basis of society has become meaningless and a general atmosphere of decay is prevalent.

Ironically, part of the controversy which surrounded M on its release in Germany was caused by the Nazis who felt that the film was a critical attack on them. The original title of the film, The Murderer Among Us, was changed to M because the producer feared possible reprisals by the increasingly powerful Nazi party. If Lang did insult the Nazis in M, it was minor compared to his next film, for The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was a direct attack upon them.

In the first Mabuse film, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (German 1922), the doctor was presented as a master criminal who thrived on the social and financial chaos of Berlin in the 1920s. At the film's climax, during a shoot out with the police, Mabuse is driven mad by the appearance of the ghosts of his numerous victims. Hopelessly insane, Mabuse is sent to a prison asylum to serve his life sentence.

In The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Lang presents Mabuse's psychosis as the incarnation of Nazi philosophy. Many of Mabuse's speeches in the film were directly taken from Nazi slogans and the film's plot concerned Mabuse's bizarre plan to create a new social order by way of mass destruction. Supported by a willpower which even proves to extend beyond the grave, Mabuse attempts to undermine society through a series of terrorist actions.

Not surprisingly, the film was banned by the Nazis and Lang began to realize that his own prestige as Germany's leading filmmaker was not enough to protect him. The Nazis, however, admired Lang's ability to create large visual scenes in such earlier films as Metropolis (Germany 1927). In 1933, Lang was summoned to the Ministry of Propaganda where Joseph Goebbels offered him the position of head of the German film industry under the Third Reich. That night, Lang fled Germany.

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang quickly adapted himself to the American film industry. However, his films retained a unique sense of pessimism and despair. By now, Lang fully understood that the choices a person made would ultimately limit one's future possibilities. In Man Hunt, for example, the hero's entire future is determined at the beginning of the film by an ambiguous act. The hunter portrayed by Walter Pidgeon in Man Hunt is not necessarily interested in assassinating Hitler. He first toys with the idea and aims an unloaded rifle. His decision to place a bullet in the chamber is a spontaneous gesture. That decision, however, determines everything that follows as Pidgeon realizes, in the course of the film, that he must commit the act which he had only contemplated.

In a similar manner, the psychology professor in The Woman in the Window sets in motion a murderous chain of events when he merely has one drink too many at his club. The professor's slight inebriation leads to a minor flirtation, which leads to murder. His efforts to hide one murder requires him to commit more.

In Lang's German films, such as M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the characters were committed to their behavior patterns at the beginning of the film. In his American works, the characters had the limited freedom to make certain choices. Once the choices were made, their consequences were inevitable. The fear felt by all of Lang's characters was generated by this fatalistic certainty. In this regard, he created a cinema of fear.

Fellini: the Early Films

2008-07-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Praised by some as one of the great visionaries of the cinema and condemned by others as the betrayer of Italian Neo-Realism, Fellini has the satisfaction of knowing that critics are not indifferent to his work. Since 1949, he has created some of the most extraordinary images of the modern cinema and, although the charge of self-indulgence is accurate, his skill and imagination allow his indulgences to be both fascinating and memorable.

Many of Fellini's films are suggestively autobiographical, yet this is somewhat misleading since he enjoys making up preposterous stories about himself. Fellini was born in 1920 in the small provincial town of Rimini on the Adriatic sea coast. He was educated at a series of strict Catholic schools and claims to recall little except for their oppressive discipline. As a child, he ran off and joined a circus, an environment which he found more stimulating than provincial life. Dragged back to school, Fellini submerged himself in the only subjects which interested him: drawing and art history. His skills as a cartoonist proved profitable after the liberation of Rome in 1945, when he made his living in the Italian capital by selling caricatures to American servicemen. By this time, he also wrote satiric stories for several Roman magazines, and it was on the basis of these tales that he was invited by Roberto Rossellini to collaborate on the screenplay of Rossellini's film Rome: Open City (Italy 1945). Fellini's first film, Variety Lights (Italy 1949), was co-directed by Alberto Lattuada due to Fellini's own doubts about his ability to make a film on his own. The theme and visual texture of Variety Lights clearly identifies it, however, as a Fellini film and the storyline is loosely based on his own experiences as a traveling actor in the late 1930s.

Checcho, the self-proclaimed impresario of the film, and his troupe of performers have convinced themselves that they are bringing great musical acts to the rustics in the countryside, but the film's harsh photography betrays their tawdriness and ineptitude. As in Fellini's later films, the conflict between illusion and reality cannot be resolved, and Checcho blindly continues in spite of the well deserved indifference he receives. Like the men in I Vitelloni (Italy 1953) and Zampano in La Strada (Italy 1954), Checcho discovers his own inability to change. He ultimately comes to a limited realization of the inadequate nature of his own ambition but he is incapable of changing his character.

Even when a change does take place, as in The White Sheik (Italy 1952), it is not necessarily a progressive step. In The White Sheik, the wife finally gives up her romantic illusions, yet the film has already shown that the reality she accepts is no better. Reality is tedious and oppressive, and Fellini constantly suggests that even a ludicrous fantasy figure like the White Sheik is, in its own way, a needed salve to soothe the pains of real life. Even the fumetti, an Italian comic book composed of photographic images, has its place, and even though the White Sheik is a farcical, foolish figure, it is the image and not the person that matters. Likewise, the husband in The White Sheik is enveloped in his own fantasy. While the wife wishes to flee from the banality of provincial life, the husband completely embraces it. It was from this kind of life that the youthful Fellini attempted to flee when he joined the circus, and it is not surprising that his films contain a circus-like atmosphere. Unlike the wife in The White Sheik, Fellini will not compromise.

Another important motif in Fellini's films is the need to believe in miracles even if they remain unfulfilled. The prostitute in Nights of Cabiria (Italy 1957) prays for a miracle to happen: for her life to change and to find a man who truly loves her. Just when she thinks she has found such a man, she discovers that he only wants to steal her money. Throughout the film, Cabiria waits for the miracle that will never arrive, yet in the film's finale it is obvious that she will continue hoping for the impossible. Nights of Cabiria is a study of faith and survival, and Cabiria, in her own small way, is one of Fellini's most tragically heroic figures. She will continue to struggle and believe, even though the reality of her life totally argues against it.

While Nights of Cabiria presents a minor triumph of faith, La Dolce Vita (Italy 1959) offers the end of faith and visually explores the ultimate corruption of both reality and illusion. The opening shot of the film shows a statue of Christ being flown by helicopter over modern Rome. The final shot of the film shows a horribly mutated fish that has washed ashore. The film is bracketed by these two symbols of Christianity and La Dolce Vita delineates a progression from its satiric opening image to its final vision of total decadence and grotesqueness. Marcello, the central figure of La Dolce Vita, wanders aimlessly through a world that has seemingly come to a dead end. Like Cabiria, Marcello secretly hopes for the miracle that will change his life but unlike Cabiria, he cannot bring himself to truly believe in it. Empty, disillusioned, and completely alienated, Marcello is a modern man who finds it impossible to return to the innocence he longs for. More than any of Fellini's previous characters, Marcello realizes the problem but is the least capable of responding to it.

Africa Real-to-Reel

2008-07-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

One of the important, overriding concerns of the Third World cinema is the need to achieve control over the media images of one's own people and culture. Further, as in the case of the African cinema, there is also the struggle not simply to control the images, but also to purge from the screen the inaccurate and dehumanizing stereotypes that have predominated in the Western controlled film and television industry. The modern history of the African cinema has been an on-going process of reclaiming, as well as reexamining, their traditions and history in a vital effort to rediscover their identity. Or as the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene once stated: "We must understand our traditions before we can hope to understand ourselves."

Sembene's pursuit of this understanding has predominated in his work as a poet, novelist, critic, and filmmaker and his seminal position in the African cinema is due not only to the fact that he directed the first totally African film with his 1963 production of Borom Sarret, but also because of the consistently precise and audacious perspective that he brings to his cinematic studies of modern Africa. In his early films, such as Borom Sarret and Black Girl (Senegal 1965), Sembene concerned himself with the realities, and disparities, of post-colonial Senegal as reflected within the interiorized thoughts and feelings of the central characters in each film. In part, Sembene is attempting to force the viewer into a direct confrontation with the inner pain and despairing humanity of characters who are otherwise denied a voice within the social arena. Further, Sembene presents a bitter portrait of an alienated African psychology that is forced to define itself within the context of an unsympathetic, European derived system of values.

A recurring history of exploitation has long plagued such African countries as Senegal. Even before the period of French colonization, the region of Senegal was vulnerable to the political manipulations of empire-builders and religious proselytes. Islam, which arrived in the region soon after the religion's founding, originally offered a vocal force in opposition to slavery and feudalism. In turn, the early Islamic imams were willing to co-exist with the fetishistic shamans of the various cultures in the area. In time, however, Islamic leaders became increasingly concerned with aggregating their political power and, in the process, they began collaborating with both colonial forces and elements in the slave trade. This history is the background to the narrative of Njangaan (Senegal 1974) by Manama Johnson Traore. This film, which is the most critically praised of Traore's work, also offers an introduction to the second generation of Senegalese filmmakers who emerged during the 1970s.

Liberation through violent revolution was a necessary process for many modern African countries and the film Sambtzanga (Angola 1972]. presents an incisive and intimate view of Portuguese oppression and Angolais resistance and its effects upon one individual woman. The director of the film, Sarah Maldoror, was the wife of an Angolais resistance leader and, as part of her training in film production, had worked as the assistant director on Gillo Pontecorvo's production of The Battle of Algiers (Italy 1966). While the film contains a highly charged and vibrant sense of agitprop similar to Pontecorvo's work, Sambizanga also offers an emotional sense of one's own personal loss in the wake of historic forces.

The traditional structures of the African folktale has had a profound influence on the African cinema. Wend Kuuni (Burkina Faso 1982J, directed by Gaston Kabore, uses the poetic rhythms and narrative concerns of the African folktale and successfully attempts a recreation of a style of storytelling that predates European influence. In so doing, Wend Kuuni experiments with this oral tradition as the basis for a visual art form.

The merger between cinematic language and traditional African narrative forms is taken even further in Jom, the Story of a People (Senegal 1982) by Ababacar Samb Makharam. The film presents an epic overview of the history of Senegal within the structure of a tale told by a griot. Griots are the itinerant poets and musicians of Senegal who has the responsibility of recounting and maintaining the history of a tribe or people and, because of their duty in preserving the memories of their people, the griots hold an especially important place within the West African cultural community. The role of the griot was, perhaps, best stated by Sembene: "His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles, and the hopes of his people," In Jom, the Story of a People, Makharam's creates the film equivalent of a griot1s tale with all of its musical and moral strengths intact.

American Scenes

2008-07-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Some of the most direct and unique expressions of this country's social and cultural realities have appeared within the documentary genre of recent American cinema. With the zeal of anthropologists discovering a strange new tribe, modern documentary filmmakers have turned their cameras toward their fellow citizens and have successfully stalked them through their urban environs.

Perhaps one of the most unusual filmmakers to emerge in the last ten years is Errol Morris. In his documentaries Gates of Heaven (USA 1978) and Vernon, Florida (USA 1981), Morris presents a view of a society which is seemingly adrift. The small town citizens of Vernon, Florida attempt, in their rambling monologues, to create a meaningful context for their lives even though they are totally awash in a massive accumulation of banality. The subject matter of Gates of Heaven, a film ostensibly about pet cemeteries, actually deals with the content of the American soul.

Throughout both of his films, Morris uses a technique which could best be described as reflective passivity. Using static camera compositions, and refusing to interject himself into the film, Morris allows his subjects to discuss their concerns and feelings without adding any judgmental commentary. As a result, Morris captures a haunting sense of the fears and deep despairs that lurk beneath the placid exteriors of the people caught by his lenses. For Morris, the documentary film is a mirror which reflects the strange alienation of his fellow countrymen.

While Morris operates like an observant sociologist, Les Blank throws himself into his subject matter with overt affection and an easygoing sense of enjoyment. Blank's films have covered a remarkable range, from the problems of film making (Burden of Dreams -- USA 1982) to gastronomy (Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers -- USA 1983). Music and the various ethnic subcultures of America are, however, Blank's chief concern. During his career, he has made documentaries about Cajun music (Hot Pepper), Polish-American polkas (In Heaven There is No Beer?), Appalachia (Sprout Wings and Fly), Mexican-American society (Del Mero Corazon), and Afro-American culture (The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins and A Well Spent Life).
With his production of Always For Pleasure combines his ethnic concerns, his interest in music, and his taste food into a single cinematic extravaganza.

Blank's Always For Pleasure is a collage of the sounds and images of New Orleans. Though Blank partly centers the film around the Wild Tchoupitoulas (a group of Blacks who annually dress as Indians for the Mardi Gras), he captures the dynamic and highly anarchistic feel of the entire city. In the process, Blank recreates the joyful energy of a community rich in its own traditions and identity.

A very different part of the South is viewed in Space Coast (USA 1979). Filmmakers Ross McElwee and Michel Negroponte went, in the late 1970s, to the towns and shopping malls of Cape Canaveral, Florida. What they found were the curious, and very Southern, residents who lived amidst the fading remnants of the Apollo Moon Program.

The film presents a series of sharp contrasts as it observes the lives of such Cape Canaveral citizens as Papa John, an aging biker who also plays music for his church group. Other local residents attempt to form a company that will salvage and sell parts from disused launch pads. The local reporters follow, with diminishing interest, minor rocket tests and all the while, the camera probes the process by which a hi-tech boom created a sundrenched ghost town.

One of the most important documentary filmmakers of the American cinema is Frederick Wiseman. Beginning with his production of Titicut Follies (USA 1967), Wiseman became a crucial figure in reshaping the style and content of contemporary documentary cinema. His original training as a lawyer provided Wiseman with a sharp insight to how the internal structures of social institutions really work. Repeatedly, in his films, he critically observes the inherent contradictions of such social institutions as education (High School -- USA 1969), the police (Law and Order --USA 1970), the Army (Basic Training -- USA 1972), and religion (Essene— USA 1972). Most recently, Wiseman has examined the commercial processes of consumer manipulation and image-making in the documentary film Model (USA 1981) and the narrative film Seraphita's Diary (USA 1982).

Working with a small crew, hand-held cameras, natural lighting, and location sounds, Wiseman makes himself as unobtrusive as possible. In turn, he succeeds in photographing the subject of his films in an amazingly off-guard manner. In Model, he captures the sense of mad perfectionism and, often, wasted energy which takes place during the laborious task of making an ad. The film does more, however, than merely capture the essence of an observed process. Through the images he portrays, Wiseman brings into question both the means and the purpose of manufacturing fantastic images in order to sell products. By directly exposing the dream merchants of advertising, Wiseman reaffirms the independent moral values and integrity of the documentary cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Logic of Poetry

2008-07-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

Though he directed less than a dozen feature films during his career, Andrei Tarkovsky's work represents one of the most unique and profound contributions to the history of the cinema. Neither an entertainer nor a mere aesthetician, Tarkovsky was a genuine visionary which explains, in part, the complex and oddly disturbing nature of his films. Throughout his films, Tarkovsky sought a form of film language that was closer to the rhythms of poetry rather than the traditional narrative structures of the cinema, and through this poetic form, he explored the possible redemption of the human race. Like Tolstoy, who was one of his influences, Tarkovsky embraced a metaphysical view that is still only partially understood. In turn, the philosophical density of his work was fueled by an increasing sense of emotional urgency as he searched for a spiritual rebirth within the crumbling structures of civilization.

Tarkovsky was born in Savrashye on the Volga on April 4, 1932. His father was the Russian poet Arseniy Tarkovsky, whose work would be another major influence on his son's career. It was his mother, however, who guided him toward the arts, ranging from music to drawing and eventual admission into the Institute for Oriental Languages. He left his studies, however, to join a geological expedition to Siberia and, upon his return in 1954, he was accepted into the Moscow Film School. The eccentric nature of his studies delayed his work and his first feature film, My Name is Ivan, was not made until 1962.

My Name is Ivan was originally begun under the direction of E. Abalov. Abalov's direction, however, was viewed as artistically unsatisfactory and the project was about to be abandoned until Tarkovsky agreed to take over as director. Tarkovsky was less than impressed with either the original story or screenplay and extensively restructured the film during shooting. Though he viewed My Name is Ivan as one of his least personal films, his critical attitude can only be understood in regards to the idiosyncratic nature of the works that were to follow. Otherwise, the film was an unusual and surprising production within the Soviet cinema of the 1960s. Further, it contained most of Tarkovsky's distinctive trademarks.

The narrative of My Name is Ivan invokes the traditionally realistic tone of the Soviet cinema of the period, but Tarkovsky's stylization uses an unusual free association between dreams, reality, and memory; music, art, and religion. The past and present are interwoven into an emotional tapestry that reflects the central character's psychological states. Recurring images and symbols create a thematic world in which the dead must return to console the living and the destiny of a people are etched onto the face of one young boy. Ivan's final destiny is presented as a testament to the strength of one human being against the overwhelming assault of history.

This sense of the cruel progression of history forms part of the basis of Tarkovsky's epic Andrei Rublev (USSR 1969). Its presentation of the violence in 15th century Russia was initially considered too disturbing by Soviet censors, who also rejected its over-all theme of the artist as. a man working in opposition to his society. Though very little is known about the real Andrei Rublev, and the film is largely a fictional treatment of the icon painter's life, Tarkovsky's production presents a vivid and controversial view of Russia during the time of the Tartar invasions. In between its many sudden and violent deaths and pagan rituals, Andrei Rublev offers Tarkovsky's own deep faith in humanity, a faith that manages to survive despite the butchery and hypocrisies surrounding the film's hero. Andrei Rublev was also the first film by Tarkovsky to suggest that the salvation of the human race may be possible only through faith and miracle.

The need to confront oneself is, in part, the underlying thesis of The Mirror (USSR 1975). Largely autobiographical, the film's highly experimental structure presents Tarkovsky's experiences with the horrors of World War Two, his father's departure from his family, and the political fears of intellectuals in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 1950s. Composed of dreams, recollections, and newsreel footage, The Mirror presents the viewer with questions rather than answers, mysteries rather than explanations. Instead, Tarkovsky seeks a form of non meditated introspection of his emotional and biographical existence and, through this introspection, attempts to discover a reflection of both himself and of the history that has shaped him.

In both The Mirror and Nostalghia (USSR/Italy 1983), this process of introspection allows Tarkovsky to reach beyond the limits of materialism as he began searching for some more meaningful sense of humanity. Part of this process was motivated by Tarkovsky's growing concern that the human race was on the verge of extinction and his later films became increasingly apocalyptic in their visual content. For Tarkovsky, modern technology was devouring the natural world and mankind was becoming alienated and spiritually dead. An urgent sense of catastrophe filters through out his final films as he desperately sought ways by which mankind might redeem itself. He viewed this redemption as being possible, in part, by the rediscovery of a spiritual world that extended beyond the normative ranges of reality. Admittedly, Tarkovsky seemed to have been in the process of rejecting the materialistic venue of the modern Western world even while he was in the process of defecting to the West. As Nostalghia suggests, Tarkovsky felt the need to quickly expand his vision to a level that he might not have been able to achieve in the Soviet Union, yet his deepest concerns and longings remained firmly committed to the moods and spirit of his Russian homeland.

The Anti-Heroine: Women and the Hollywood Fantasy Role

2008-07-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

During the Thirties and Forties, actresses dominated the Hollywood film industry. Famous leading men existed, but they were leading men who were paired with leading women. The buddy-buddy pictures, a phenomenon of the seventies, were generally unthinkable then. The satisfaction one received from a film like Red Dust (1932) came from the bickering romantic interplay between Gable and Harlow. In a modern film like The Sting (1974), the closest comparable thrill comes from watching Redford and Newman winking at each other. In the past, an actress could be the lead in a film; today an actress is either the victim or the victim's best friend. The era of Katharine Hepburn has given way to the screams of Jamie Lee Curtis.

This is not to imply that the era of the actress was also an age of liberation. Far from it, the actress films of the Thirties and Forties operated with a double system. In a film like Christopher Strong (1933), Katharine Hepburn could be assertive, aggressive, and masculine in behavior but she still had to commit suicide when the man she loved was unattainable. The 1939 film The Women excludes the male entirely, yet the unseen men are the total objects of the women's lives, and with their compulsive scheming and backstabbing, the women of the film are in need of more than mere consciousness raising. Subjugation, and not liberation, was the moral of these films. Barbara Stanwyck died repeatedly for being more masculine than the men in her films, and Hepburn always gave way in the end to Tracy's male chauvinism. Hollywood drew the bottom line and an actress either cooked or died.

Unlike their male counterparts, the anti-heroine was never allowed to ride off into the sunset. The anti-hero was given mythic respect; the anti-heroine was merely an unnatural competitor in the male dominion. The anti-hero was allowed total individuality; the anti-heroine was expected to marry and conform. The anti-hero needed no one and preferred his isolation; the anti-heroine needed both her man and the trappings of society. Freedom was fought for by men; the anti-heroine waited to surrender to Mr. Right.

A critical key to this double standard was the Hollywood view of feminine sexuality. Excess or suppression were the two forms of sexuality, leaving women with a choice between nymphomania and frigidity. In the 1946 film Gilda, Rita Hayworth avoids frigidity with great success. When Hayworth announces that "If I'd have been a ranch, they'd have named me: 'The Bar Nothing'," her character is neatly slotted into a masculine view of women. The divinity of the Divine Rita was largely based on her sexual availability, and the psychology of Gilda, her most famous role, has the same level of sophistication as Norman Mailer analyzing Marilyn Monroe, for Gilda is a man's notion of female behavior. This is not to imply that Gilda is not a good film, quite the opposite is true. It does achieve what it sets out to do, which is the final-reel suppression of the very impulses which it has had a lot of torrid fun.

Traditionally, filmmakers have been much more comfortable with frigidity. The woman who succeeds in a man's world cannot be normal, according to such films as Lady in the Dark (1944). Ginger Rogers' character may be a successful magazine editor, but that doesn't mean that she's emotionally stable. Her father-complex drives her toward men with equally large mother-complexes, creating incompatibility and an emergency trip to the psychiatrist's couch. A woman must be like a man in order to succeed in business, according to Lady in the Dark, and thereby lose her place as a woman. Her need for fulfillment is only achievable through fantasy, as the outrageous excessiveness of the film takes her through the Dali-like dream scape of the subconscious.

If the business woman had to overcome frigidity, Hollywood also suggested that the housewife had to acquire it. Proclaiming that "Love is a liability in marriage," Dorothy Arzner's 1936 production of Craig's Wife arguably delivers a double message. Rosalind Russell's obsessive concern with maintaining the perfect household is the societal image of woman pushed to its most alarming extreme. Her house becomes an extension of her personality, and both are cold and austere. The Hollywood housewife is supposed to be concerned with dust balls under the cabinet, but Arzner takes it to the point of neurosis, and thereby questions the social structure which has created the problem in the first place. While Arzner does not necessarily have a feminist viewpoint, she does successfully raise questions often avoided in early Hollywood films.

Perhaps one of the best expressions of this contradictory view of woman is contained in the 1945 film Mildred Pierce. The film was made at that crucial period at the end of World War Two when returning servicemen discovered that their wives and girl-friends were now competing with them in the work force. With a shortage of male workers during the war, a woman's place became the assembly line, and after the war many women were not ready to turn their jobs back to men. The threat of women invading male territory became frighteningly real and men had to quickly regroup to meet the home front challenge. Mildred was not just a woman, she was a potential front line soldier.

Mildred Pierce splits the attack in half by allowing Joan Crawford to be redeemable through her repeated acts of self-sacrifice, while her daughter Veda takes on an increasingly monstrous and despicable form. With the persona split in two, Mildred can ultimately become an acceptable woman who can finally make the "right" compromise, while Veda can take the contempt and moral outrage. A rule in any battle is to divide and conquer.