Death Proof

I saw the DVD version of "Death Proof" (2007), the one that's 1 hour 55 minutes long, and I found it a perfectly nice movie: an homage to a handful of action films of the 60's and 70's. It's filled with ontological details: little things that refer to the piece of film running through the projector, and I found it all funny and not intrusive at all.



It's a period piece, and here's a filmmaker who really wants to get all the details right, just like those fellows who do those awful Jane Austin movies.



I had forgotten how compelling real stunts are, and this movie goes out of its way to remind you, or, if you're young, to show you something you've never seen before (shades of Lumiere).



The final chase sequence involves a young woman holding onto the hood of a car and a deranged stranger who keeps crashing his car into hers in an effort to kill her. Why doesn't her friend, driving the car, simply slow down and stop so she can jump off to safety? Well, the movie has established the fact that no one here is very bright. So the chase is one extended stunt: she really is on that car hood and that car really is moving and I don't care how fast, because the whole thing feels dangerous. The blue screen comparison is the scene in "Minority Report" (2002) with Tom Cruise jumping from moving car to moving car. It probably cost ten times more to make that scene. Sorry, Quentin's girl on the hood version is much more visceral and much, much better. You knew you were watching something your mother would not want you to do. And it's a "B" movie thing: the Bond films always have great stunts, but Bond never dies. Here, we've already seen this guy kill four women with his car, so this woman definitely felt imperiled.


And isn't this plot line familiar? A heroine uses knowledge from the movie business to kill the bad guy at the end. Here, the brunette behind the wheel is a fearless movie stunt driver who uses her car, her gun and finally her heel to finish off the bad guy. In Quentin's very next film, the heroine uses flammable reels of 35mm film to send Hitler to Hell. And it was the "B" movie that was the plausible one.

Quentin's List

Somebody asked Quentin Tarentino to make a list of the 20 most important movies of the last 20 years. So, in no particular order, he posts the list.

I saw the first movie on the list a week ago: "Battle Royale" by Kinji Fukasaku. Terrible.

Then I saw another movie: "Audition" by Takashi Miike. Even worse.

I guess I had a right to be suspicious: "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" are on the list, but "The Departed" is not.

I can be fair (despite the fact that I spent my time watching those awful movies): the list tells you more about the list maker than anything else. And if the list maker is a filmmaker then the movies are ones that are intriguing to that artist. Maybe they're inspirational, maybe they're future source material, but artistic merit takes a back seat. It's OK. Tarentino doesn't pretend to be a critic.

You can say the list is useful to help you understand the filmmaker, but what's the point? You'd just be travelling down Intentionality Lane, trying to figure out what's going on in sombody's head instead of looking at what's on the screen.

Re-making Italian movies

Peggy told us about a new Robert DeNiro film that's a re-make of an Italian film she saw in college.
So I went to Netflix and instead of finding the DVD I found this grumpy Netflix review:

Why are studios remaking so many movies? Can't they find an original decent script? Everybody's Fine is a remake of the Giuseppe Tornatore film (the director of Cinema Paradiso) called "Stanno Tutti Bene" which translated means - hold your breath - "Everybody's Fine". The Italian film is charming, and beautifully shot. Why not just watch the original instead - rather than some Americanized remake. It would be a great addition to the library here.

So maybe they'll take this guy's advice. I have seen Cinema Paradiso and it was pretty good, but a real tearjerker.

BTW: Netflix lists "Everybody's Fine" under "Tearjerkers"

It's a fact: some very good re-makes of Japanese films have been made, but when anybody tries a re-make of an Italian movie, the results are usually pretty terrible. (Can anyone think of a good one?) On top of that, every movie where Robert DeNiro plays somebody's father has been bad so far, so I'll struggle to be open-minded about "Everybody's Fine." The omens are not good.
I wasn't going to bring up "Harry and Tonto" (1974) although I just saw it last week for the first time, but it fits the pattern. Art Carney won the Oscar that year (he beat Al Pacino in "The Godfather" and Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown") by playing an old man who's evicted from his NYC apartment and goes on a road trip - yes, it's a road movie. It's slow-going and poorly made and while I'm watching it I realize that the director, Paul Mazursky, took the subject matter of "Umberto D" (the indignities of modern old age), the structure of "La Strada" (a road trip with a lot of kooky characters) and the ending from "La Dolce Vita" (the beach - with all its fuzzy symbolism). Sure enough, yesterday I read the synopsis of a documentary about Fellini and it includes an interview with, you guessed it, Paul Mazursky, no doubt talking about Fellini's "influence."

A feminist critic from the 70's or 80's once said that if they re-made "Bicycle Thief" (1948) with a mother and a daughter instead of a father and a son, the movie would just be a tiresome melodrama and - maybe not for the reasons she was thinking of - she was right.

About Ridley Scott

The auteur theory holds that bad movies made by auteurs are more interesting than good movies made by lucky amateurs. Think Ridley Scott's worst ("GI Jane"? "Hannibal"?) vs. "Rocky."




Scott's style used to be described as "atmospheric." As if he'd been hypnotised as a young boy by the dust particles trapped in the beam of a movie projector, he'd fill up his movies with shots of dusty, steamy air, with lightbeams aimed at the camera, alternating with the darkness of some moving barrier. I'm thinking of all those electric fans in "Black Rain" and, the smoky Film Noir exteriors of "Blade Runner" and of course, those slimy dripping interiors of "Alien." You know you're looking at good mise-en-scene when you can identify the director from a still. I just saw "American Gangster" and he seems to have tired of all this and is now working in a no-frills Hollywood action style.



When "Alien" was first released, I read that Scott had "previewed" the film and had re-cut the last 15 minutes based on the audiences reaction (or lack of reaction.) I remember being very turned off by this, thinking "Here's a guy who's given millions to make a movie and he's learning on the job." Turns out this previewing business is a common Hollywood practice that I had never heard about. Even Hitchcock did it. (Speaking of Hitchcock, the actress Veronica Cartwright, one of the crew gobbled up in "Alien" played the little sister in "The Birds.")



And speaking of movie stills, are you guys familiar with Cindy Sherman? She's just the greatest living American photographer (go ahead and name a better one). She's been photographing herself dressed up every which way and she's been doing it for awhile now and she's very, very funny. Anyway, she made a series of photos (Untitled Film Stills) that look like movie stills from movies from the 50's and 60's. None are inspired by a specific movie, and that's part of the trick: the more movies you've seen, the more you look at her photos and think you've seen that movie.

Metasystems - a brief note

Talking about metasystems was fun in the 70's and 80's, but once the print journalists got hold of the concept, they beat it to death, and it's still dead. (My favorite metasystem is from TV: those two old guys on the balcony cracking jokes on "The Muppet Show." The jokes all reference the show in progress, so it's all there: self-referential humor in a framing device that criticises criticism.


I'll be brief: after looking over my blog entries I'm not seeing well-reasoned arguments, I'm seeing an outline. The whole thing looks more like a lesson plan for a Film Appreciation course that I may teach someday.


The current technology for watching movies suits me just fine: Netflix DVD's (soon to be replaced by all-streaming-all-the-time-every-movie-ever-made). This gives movie-watching an anti-historical feel. So why should I be cranky about the state of film comedy today, when I can watch Fatty Arbuckle tonight?


I'm thinking of William Butler Yeats. (Remember him? He's what you guys would have read in Chaminade, if we were in Ireland, instead of "Invictus".) Yeats had this rather terrifying way of looking at cultures: there are great ones, and then there are worthless ones. Worthless ones! I was raised in the 60's: "It's a Small World" and "The Family of Man." We were taught to try to appreciate all cultures: everyone must have something good to contribute...

Instead Yeats had this attitude that some cultures were (I think he used the words) "tired, infertile, weak." Well, if he could think that about an entire culture, then I don't feel so bad being disappointed about the decline of (what's now called) physical comedy.

On a more positive note, I can quote Richard Ellman, the biographer, that "we're still struggling to be (James) Joyce's contemporaries." And that's how I feel about some of the more difficult movies of the 20th Century: they speak to us now, even if the presentation (on the small screen) may not be perfect.

Rashomon (1950)

During last year's election, the NYT made fun of European political commentators (especially French ones) who could only talk about American politics using metaphors from Westerns with their gunslingers, show-downs, and high-noons. I think we're in the same frame of mind when it comes to Japan, thinking of samurai and sword-play.

"Rashomon" is a great antidote to that: a crime story involving poor, rural Japanese peasants of the 19th century. The same story is told four different ways. The movie won the Oscar for best foreign film and was, in its day, the highest grossing foreign film in the US. So this is not an obscure movie: it was mentioned in the Watergate tapes made in Nixon's office. One of Nixon's aides is describing how different viewpoints can change how a story's told, "you know, like "Rashomon."

That business of telling the same story different ways has been imitated by a few movies and, for some reason, quite a few knuckle-headed TV shows, but none worth mentioning. The best example, is culturally far away, indeed, the first four books of the New Testament. But it's not as far away as you might think: the truth is, the director, Akira Kurosawa, although successful in Japan, was looked upon by the Japanese as an American-style director. He admitted that his biggest influence was... John Ford.

So "Rashomon" is a "must-see", not only for original story-telling, but for a great performance by Toshiro Mifune, great B&W cinematography and for a taste of the most influential Japanese director of the 20th Century.

PS - Nowadays it's Japanese horror movies that get American re-makes. Forty years ago, it was Akira Kurosawa movies: "The Seven Samurai" was re-made as "The Magnificent Seven" and "Yojimbo" was re-made as "A Fistful of Dollars."

Costa Gavras and "Z"

I work with someone from Guinea, a country that has just been taken over by its military. The NYT referred to the new government as a "junta" and Alpha - that's just his cool nickname as, like me, he doesn't want to deal with people mispronouncing his real name all the time - asked me, just last week, what a junta is. I realized that everything I know about juntas - militarized governments - I know from "Z".
"Z" was one of the "must-see" movies of the 60's: you had to see it to be "educated". Otherwise you were ignorant. Even though the movie is about Greece, we all saw it the same way, as a cautionary tale: "it could happen here."
Like "Battle of Algiers", "Z" owed quite a bit to Italian Neo-Realism and it had a sense of immediacy about it because (I think) the Greek junta was still in power.
Costa-Gavras became one of the symbols of 60's High Seriousness, which unfairly pigeon-holed him, but he's a living link to those too-too serious artists of the 50's and 60's that Fellini made fun of in "8-1/2". The fact that Americans never saw any other movies by him probably says more about our movie distribution system than it does about Costa-Gavras as a film maker.
My bet is that he's now a very interesting speaker, funny and relaxed, and worth the trip.

Inglourious Basterds vs. Rudolf Arnheim

Spoil the ending of a summer movie in October? Sounds OK to me.

A little ironic, isn't it? That the ending of IB is the worst part of the movie precisely because it breaks with movie convention, yet the director and distributor count on the conventions of the media machine, the TV and print reviewers, not to "spoil" the movie by talking about the ending. Well, now that the big money has been made, let's talk:
American movie conventions are very simple and they must be understandable to a 12-year old boy. (Comic book conventions cover much of the same storytelling ground, although they seem to be more complex. I'm not qualified to cover them, but here's a relevant question: "Why couldn't Superman kill Hitler?")
From Buster Keaton's "The General" (1924) through Victor Fleming's "Gone with the Wind" (1939) to Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) the convention remains the same: your fictional characters can do whatever they want, except change the course of history.
That's it: it's basically the "War and Peace" model, wherein the fictional characters always seem to be at the right place at the right time. This is the model that Woody Allen lampooned in "Zelig" (1983).
Tarantino is the only writer credited with the script for IB, so I cannot even lay the blame elsewhere. The set up is one big red herring: you've got two simultaneous plots to kill Hitler at about the same time in the same place. The movie convention would dictate that they cancel each other out in a way that could be, in turns, suspenseful, frustrating, comical, but in the end, satisfying. But what did we get? This reverse-holocaust thing that was neither suspenseful nor satisfying. As someone else said in a different context: "overwrought and under thought."
Hitchcock would go over scripts with his writer day after day after day, just to eliminate silly stuff (the leader of the Third Reich is in the house and a black man just wanders around backstage, not a soldier in sight, until he's ready to burn the place down) and make some pretty far-fetched events seem plausible.
In film school they made us read Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" which was very, very old-fashioned, but which had a solid basic premise: it's the limitations of a medium which make it art. (For him, the opposite of art would not be reality, it would be communication: think film vs TV). I cannot make the full Arnheim case here, but I can say that the movie convention to stay within historical bounds makes "The Dirty Dozen" a great movie and IB an unsatisfying 2-1/2 hour mess with a bunch of good scenes.

Back to Touch of Evil

1958 was a great year to work in Hollywood. I remember reading an interview with Orson Welles about his directing style: he said that the abilities of the crew allowed him to make "Touch of Evil". That the highly skilled camera operators allowed him to make those camera movements and that, after 1960, as the studios declined, he had to change his style to suit the decreased resources and talents available to him.

Having seen "Touch of Evil" again last night I can only describe this as an "expressive" style: that the camera not only moves to track and frame, but to "express" a feeling or idea. Certainly there's been a lot of head scratching about the point of some of these movements (the camera dollies upward as it's pointed at an almost motionless scene: the motel in the desert, with maybe a little sand swirling around behind it). It adds a "kinetic" element that adds a sense of imbalance and foreboding. It occured to me that this is the kind of movie that Martin Scorcese is always trying to make.
And I never noticed all that music before: the "teenager music" used to terrorize Janet Leigh in the motel, the "pianola" music from Marlene Dietrich's saloon, and the carefully changing music of the first shot: I think this is an element of the "restored" version of the movie, so perhaps that's why I never noticed it: as the camera moves along the street, the music changes every time we pass the front of a different bar. It's like we're stuck in Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."

Eternal Sunshine and back to the Auteur Theory

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - I'm a sucker for a movie with a good premise and so, apparently, is the director of this pretentious movie, a Frenchman named Michel Gondry. He also directed "Be Kind, Rewind", another movie with a really good premise that I wanted to see. Now I'm not so sure.
Here's the fun local angle: Jim Carrey lives in Rockville Centre and takes the train into Penn to go to work (we never find out what he does for a living). One day he decides to skip work and take the train to Montauk, so he runs around and barely catches the train in the other direction. We are forced to watch this action twice in the movie: so there was plenty of time for me to realize that he wasn't in Rockville Centre train station at all, but in Ronkonkoma. I guess you take your fun where you can get it...
The screenplay is by the same fellow who wrote "Adaptation" which Mike liked a lot and said I should see - and it's on the queue - and the screenplay is definately better than the movie. For instance, the Jim Carrey character keeps a journal, complete with cartoon drawings, but, for a movie supposedly about the interior life of it's main character, the director just doesn't know what to do with his character's journal writing which, you'd think, expresses his innermost thoughts.
And here's something else: he meets Kate Winslet out there in Montauk, and she's beautiful, kooky and has blue hair and she keeps pursuing him like he's the last man on earth, despite the fact that he says and does absolutely nothing interesting at all. Now, this is a screwball set-up that the script provides, but this 46-year-old director is tone-deaf: he just doesn't know what to do with it. Let me get into a little film history here:
"Screwball comedy" has come to mean any crazy, zany, madcap movie, but that's imprecise. A "screwball" is a scriptwriter's term for a woman who chases a man for no apparent reason. Two really good examples are "Bringing Up Baby" (1938 - Katherine Hepburn pursues Cary Grant) and "Ball of Fire" (1941 - Barbara Stanwyck pursues Gary Cooper). And they're both directed by Howard Hawks, a guy who, if he's known at all, is remembered for directing Westerns. The point is, Hawks was a director who could take a formula, a convention, and turn it into a great movie, time after time.
Which brings me back to the Auteur Theory, because after all this time, I can't think of a better predictor of whether a movie is going to be good or bad than who directed it.

PS - The exception to the rule is Victor Fleming. Mary was lucky enough to take a film making class with Ken Jacobs, one of the best comic directors who ever lived (there, I said it). Without mentioning the Auteur Theory at all, he pronounced during one class that "Gone with the Wind" was the worst Hollywood film ever made and that"The Wizard of Oz" was the best Hollywood film ever made, without saying (and without any students noticing) that they were both directed in 1939 by the same man, Victor Fleming.

Comedy Part two: Steamboat Bill, Jr.

This is the Buster Keaton film with the hurricane sequence at the end. The one where the house falls on Keaton, but the strategically placed window allows him to walk away unscathed. One of the reasons the movie holds up is this: the 1928 special effects are kept to a minimum (wavy etched cartoon lines to simulate electricity and a flying house that lands on someone, 11 years before "The Wizard of Oz").

Like Chaplin, we're left with an astounding record of a physical performance.

This time, I was struck by his acting style. "The Great Stone Face" is really a way of describing a very modern, barely minimalist technique. Here, he's surrounded by actors and they're acting, acting acting: not really that awful silent movie style - it was 1928, after all - but they all could have been in a Frank Capra movie, while Keaton seems to exist in his own space, sometimes just barely moving his eyes in reaction. He's Clint Eastwood for laughs.

But then, when he has to, he does something really great. Americans seem to hate clowns and they really hate mimes, but when Keaton has to mime something, he really shows us how it should be done: he has to "tell" his father silently, behind the back of the jailer, that there are tools for escape hidden in the stupidly large loaf of bread he's brought to the prison. So, sitting in a chair, using just his arms and the upper half of his body, he mimes his plan: the father can saw through the bars, bend them out of the way, climb out the window, and run away from the jail.
It's a lot like the Chaplin "Parker House Roll" bit that, I think, everybody knows.

And then there's that one shot: the camera backs away, the hurricane is in full swing, you're looking at two inches of mud as far as the eye can see, and there's Keaton right in the middle, really little more than a silhouette, slipping and falling and fighting against the wind. It's a real man-against-nature existential moment and I'm not sure if it affects everyone in the same way - it's really almost a cartoon at that point - but it's a moment when Keaton is really human, really funny, and really stands-in for all of us.

Movie Music II: The Third Man

No discussion of outstanding movie music is complete without "The Third Man" 1949. Directed by Carol Reed (a man) with a screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his own book. It starred Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles (together again after "Citizen Kane") and was a British film which won an Oscar - for cinematography.

But the other star of the film is Anton Karas, who plays the only instrument heard on the soundtrack, the zither. This would have been absolutely impossible to do in Hollywood in 1949. And it's difficult to say why the zither works so well in a movie about criminals in post-WWII Europe. It makes the film seem exotic and off-beat and it's one of the most memorable things about the movie. In fact, more people recognize "The Third Man Theme" than remember the movie itself. Karas seems to have done it all: wrote the music and played his solo instrument.
You can hear the music on the pompous David Selznick trailer on IMDB.

The music should be an inspiration to low-budget film-makers everywhere.

Ontology of Film

Talking about film ontology is a lot sillier than it sounds. Ontology is the "philosophy of being" and I'm using the term anytime film refers to itself. For example, I was lucky enough to see "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971) in a movie theatre. It's a road movie about a cross-country race between two cars and their drivers (it's better than it sounds). After 1-3/4 hours or so, one of the cars gets on the road again after being repaired and then something happens: the film appears to get stuck in the projector, we see the sprocket holes, the film jams, then burns, then the screen goes black. After 12 long seconds, people started yelling: "Hey", "Fix it!" etc. About 20 seconds of silence later, the credits roll. The whole thing was fake, and we - the whole audience as far as I could tell - was definitely fooled. (And the whole stunt did have an existential point; what's been called in another context "instant Ingmar.")

A more recent example - I think you're ahead of me here - is that "inserting the porno frame" business in "Fight Club." But the whole lesson that Brad Pitt delivers in the middle of the movie was just that, a lesson. The true ontological moment of "Fight Club" was 1/24 of a second long: it's the porno frame that's inserted just before the film ends.



Now I had wanted to expand this to include the times when a film forces you to ask "What am I watching here?" Which is the effect "The Blair Witch Project" was going for. I suppose there were some people when it was first released who were drawn into that whole internet-tie-in-thing, but after that, we all just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

But reality TV has drained all the fun out of this impulse. When you're watching TV, and you ask "What am I watching here?" nine times out of ten you're simply watching something that's been staged. It's fake in some way so we just stop caring.



Brakhage - especially in his late films - may have been 100% ontological. I'm not sure. But there are very few ontological moments in commercial cinema, so if anyone can think of one, please let me know.

Chaminade Cinema of 2008

So I finally saw, on Mike's recommendation, "In Bruges" and was bowled over because, in my ignorance, I thought that Sean's recommendation, "Eldorado" (2008) was the Chaminade Film of 2008. But now I realize that these are two very serious contenders, indeed. So what is it with you Chaminade guys? Picking these movies that are thinly veiled morality plays? I'm scratching my head trying to come up with imaginary ad copy that sounds like: "If you liked "In Bruges" you'll love...." And I did come up with one: "State of Grace" (1990) with Sean Penn and Ed Harris which is a film about NYC Irish mobsters, but, wait, now I'm the one who feels guilty: you guys should be studying hard now and not watching movies...

It turns out that "In Bruges" (2008) is the first feature-length film by Martin McDonagh, the Irish playwright who wrote "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" (1996) which Mary and I saw and liked quite a bit.

"In Bruges" is a Catholic "Pulp Fiction." The screenplay and the acting are both really good. It seems unfair to quibble with his directing, since he's new at it (a soon as the guns come out, do we have to go to slo-mo?) His situation really reminds me of Preston Sturges, a writer from the 30's and 40's who got tired of what other people did with his screenplays and became a director. He made some very good movies, including "The Lady Eve" (1941) and "Sullivan's Travels" (1941) which is kind of an American "8-1/2."

In a dumb coincidence, I just saw "Cassandra's Dream" (2007) in which Colin Farrell plays another guy who's remorseful about killing someone...

Not so trivial Irish postscript: Uncle Don, if you're reading this, this one's for you, and I'm not making this up: Brendon Gleeson, one of the two male leads of "In Bruges"(the heavy-set one) is currently working on the film version of "At Swim-Two-Birds" set to be released in 2010.

Comedy Part One: The Glance

My appreciation of Oliver Hardy goes way back. I've got a home movie of my brother and I (I was the fat one, about 10, while my brother was a skinny 8 year old) in what looks like a shoving match, but was really our Laurel and Hardy imitation, the result of many hours of TV time.
Hardy mastered "The Glance": Laurel or someone else would do or say something particularly stupid, and Hardy would glance at the camera, as if to say: "Do you see what I've got to put up with?" or "Can you believe this?" And now I am absolutely certain that the root of this glance is Shakespearean: in "Midsummer's Nights Dream" Puck turns to the audience and says: "What fools these mortals be."
Hardy wasn't the first to do this in a movie. Fatty Arbuckle did it a few times in shorts made between 1915 and 1919. Arbuckle was the Godard of Comedy: he'd toss off idea after idea after idea, then he'd just walk away from them and let everyone else use them.
"The Glance" forms a bond between performer and viewer and gives us that ontological tension too: just who is it looking at the camera? the character in the script? or is it Oliver Hardy himself?
All this, and it's funny, too.
Charlie Chaplin tried it once (I think), Eddie Murphy does it, and Steve Martin has tried it. But Oliver Hardy, the master of economical comedy, perfected it.
The most famous glance at the camera is not funny at all, and it's the glance of Raymond Burr (the murderer) in "Rear Window."I'd say the whole movie is built around that glance.

Two movies - and that's a wrap

Paths of Glory (1957) - banned in France and Spain for many years - This is a great example of a concise screenplay. Clocks in at 1-3/4 hour. Compare it to big, baggy, and ponderous Schindler's List at way more than 2 hours. (And I like Schindler's List!) Sorry, but this is why you have to see Citizen Kane, because those deep-focus shots inside the general's drawing room are lifted right out of "Kane" made 16 years earlier. Everyone remembers the tracking shots inside the trenches, but my favorite is the tracking shot in the courtroom from behind the backs of evenly spaced soldiers, setting up a visual rhythm worthy of Maya Deren "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943).

I had never realised that it's Ralph Meeker behind that beard who's one of the executed soldiers. He's one of my favorite actors and he's the leading man in my next Must See Recommendation: "Kiss Me Deadly" 1955, by Robert Aldrich.



Cassandra's Dream (2007) Woody Allen in serious mode and not successful at all. Here's an example of why you cannot blame the actors for a bad movie. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell really do good work here, but they can't save a sinking ship.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Critics

Regarding movie critics, I'd like to start with recommendations and end with a request.
My favorite film critic, Camille Paglia, really doesn't write about movies very much. I check in with her at Salon.com once in a while, where she mostly writes about politics. (She teaches at a college in Philadelphia... I wonder if she ever gives public lectures.) She may be the smartest person in America, now that Jane Jacobs has passed on. Anyway, her little paperback "The Birds" is one of the best examples of film criticism I know. You have to see the movie, then read the book, then you'll want to see the movie again.
The best guy with information about "forgotten" American directors is Andrew Sarris, who's really informative about directors of the 40's and 50's. He's the guy who really popularised the Auteur Theory.
But my favorite criticism occurs during the movie: the DVD of "Basic Instinct" (1992) had, instead of a director's commentary (Paul Verhoeven), a commentary by Camille Paglia. It was great! There may be other versions of the DVD that do not have this commentary and I cannot find reference to it on Amazon where, presumably, someone would be purchasing the DVD. I highly recommend listening to this commentary (whether you like Sharon Stone or not) but I wish I could find a directory of DVDs with critics instead of directors (remember Intentionality?) doing the talking.
If anyone has any guidance on this subject, let me know.

Zoeisms

Right now - September 3 - you can go to imdb.com, then look in the upper left corner "videos", and press the blue arrow until you come to "Rachel Zoeisms" which is one minute's worth of pure Michael Costagliola video editing.
It's a cliche that many movie trailers are better than the movies. And it's true. And it's true here, too. Take it from me: Mary and I sat through one hour of Rachel Zoe and, I promise, we will never do it again.
Here's what I like: Mike starts off with some sound that's (just barely) in sync, but then, after establishing that (for people who've never seen the show) it's the blond woman doing the talking, he mixes up synch shots with voice-over with those video-stuttering effects because, he's realized, that you really don't care if anything is in sync or not. The sound is so good and the camerawork is so poor that I think this could work as a radio commercial, too.
Anyway, I think Bravo will miss Mike. If they were smart, they would have made him sign a contract or something...

Movie Music

What's your favorite movie score? The question just reminds me of the days (the 60's) when my mother would see a movie, then go out a buy the record (Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia) and we'd listen to those lush symphonic arrangements while images of the movie danced in our heads.

Hollywood types used to say that they'd want you to be whistling the score as you're walking out through the lobby of the movie theatre. And, I must admit, this happens to me when I watch a Marx Brothers movie; they just hammer the same tune dozens of different ways throughout the film, and always end with it.

When Mike asked me the question (or I asked him - I forget which) I tried to sharpen it to: Which films use music most successfully? And I thought of "A Clockwork Orange" right away because the classical music (played with synthesizers, Mike reminded me) gives a retro feel to it's dystopian view of the future. And Beethoven, after all, is part of the plot.

But "8-1/2" is really a film where it's impossible to separate the music from the images. Marcello Mastrianni actually hums the soundtrack music as he goes about his business.

And "Psycho", once again, is pretty amazing. Three or four notes on a violin can still make people recall the movie.

For 60's minimalism, I have to mention "The Birds." There's no music whatsoever on the soundtrack (really- even when the credits roll at the end) and the only motivated music is from the radios people use when they're trying to get the latest news on the bird attacks.

My personal favorite is "Mean Streets." I don't think there is a single note written for the movie. The soundtrack is a collection of hits from the 50's and 60's, so the music tells you something: this is what these guys listen to.

Back to School Special

With everyone, it seems, getting ready for the start of the new semester, I'd like to share a position, an attitude really, concerning (film or art) criticism or aesthetics that can be summed up in one adjective: "received."
For the first year and a half studying art history (in the late 70's) at SUNY-Binghamton, we, the graduate students soaked up the following message from our professors: "You missed it. The golden age of art history followed World War II. The humanistic greats like Panofsky and Gombrich drew the broad outlines of the art historical discipline and the most we little guys can do is fill in some details."
But by dipping into current scholarly journals - no Internet, remember - a few of us realised that in places like Princeton and Yale a wave of new stuff - mostly labelled semiotics - was washing through the art history departments of the better universities and we were missing that wave.
Then a new professor arrived who had written a doctoral dissertation on Minoan Art using semiotic techniques. He basically spread the new gospel, and luckily, we were able to graduate without looking like complete idiots with useless degrees from upstate New York.
And here's one of the things he said: "Everything you read, everything you study, and everything those old professors told you is received art history." In other words, it's old, it's done, it's finished. And by implication, our job was to make a new art history.
So that's what I want you to remember when you go to class: take with you the attitude that everything is "received" and you have an obligation to move forward.
PS- And the moral of the story is: send your kids to the best college they can get into, because the quality of the faculty determines which side you're on, the wasting-your-time side, or the moving-forward side.

Tarentino and Mannerism

I've described Quentin Tarantino as a Mannerist and I'd like to explain myself.

Here's my proposal: if I define a Mannerist as an artist who creates from his knowledge of art, not nature (or real life), then the label fits Tarantino, with his famous knowledge of not-famous movies, from his years working at a video rental shop.

Here's the history: the original Mannerists worked in Italy from about 1520 - 1580. Michelangelo, a High Renaissance painter, didn't die until 1564. So if you were a young painter and this great artist was still working, what did you do? You copied. And that's how people learned to paint in those days: they moved away from painting from real life, and began to practice, practice, practice, by copying all the great Renaissance art around them. And this was not a bad thing. Many great painters came out of this tradition: Parmagianino, Pontormo, and Bronzino in Italy. And El Greco ("The Greek") working mostly in Spain. Sculptors and architects did the same thing.

Just so this does not sound like a minor chapter in art history, let me digress and describe something that happened at the same time: the Italians called it "Desegno" (which translates as "drawing", but which really refers to the intellectual component of art, the part that is the ideas, and the rest is just "coloring") The Italians realised that artists could design all the new things of the world and make it beautiful. And what was new? Books, not just Bibles, but books for everybody. And in those books were words made up of letters and those letters could be designed, and what did you get: Typefaces. And a great age in typeface design began. And so today we use Bodoni, and, you guessed it, Giambattista Bodoni was an Italian artist who came out of this tradition.

So Quentin is not a Rossellini, who lives through the German occupation of Italy, then makes a movie about it ("Open City"). He's a guy who watches "The Great Escape" and "The Guns of Navarone" and "The Dirty Dozen" and then he makes "Incorrigible Basterds" using all he's learned. And that's not bad at all, but it's what makes him an American Mannerist.

Umberto D

I saw "Umberto D" again (Vittorio de Sica, 1952) last night. I must have first seen it about 30 years ago.


I'm not sure why it's commonly lumped together with the other great Italian Neo-Realist Films, because it certainly looked very smooth and polished to me. The other films (I'm thinking of "Open City" again, and even "Battle of Algiers" 1966, are a lot rougher around the edges in every way: lighting, framing, editing, and even acting.


And it's difficult not to seem like a hard-hearted American when discussing the plot: here's a man who has a sore throat. He dials the phone, two men show up at his door, and drive him to the hospital, where he stays for about a week, for free.


When Hollywood tackled the same subject, we got "About Schmidt" 2002, with Jack Nicholson, a comedy.


I really sat down and looked for original framing, a la Antonioni, and found none, but this is certainly not a Hollywood movie, and the best example I can use is the one everybody remembers about "Umberto D": the dog.


A Hollywood film would "personalize" the dog - make him into a character. Think about it, every Hollywood comedy goes for it: the "reaction" shot of the dog. An actor does or says something, and we cut away to the dog for a reaction shot. It's cheap, easy comedy, and it works every time.


Not in "Umberto D." This dog is a stunt dog in the best sense of the word: he does everything he has to do to move the scene along, but that's it. We move in close only when it's important to know what the he's doing, like holding the hat to beg. Otherwise, no closeups, no ground-level shots, no dog POV. And that's what makes this Neo-Realist.


So there's my appreciation: none of that Hollywood baloney and, still, everyone remembers that dog.

The Storyteller's Aesthetic Part One

Improbable Basterds- So I saw my big summer movie last night and it makes me a little sad, because it means that summer's almost over and Quentin's best wasn't all I'd hoped it would be. I'm sensitive to the fact that I don't want to spoil it for others, so I'm going to wait awhile before talking about it.

I've settled on The Storyteller's Aesthetic as a title to describe how I want to talk about American movies. It's a very unsexy label, but it helps me describe a decade that has no name.("The first decade of the 21st Century" appears to be the best we can come up with.)

I see the impressionists making commercials for Cialis and the storytellers struggling along, trying to Make It New, but forgetting all the lessons of the past.

Which reminds me: everyone should see "Breathless" the Goddard film that really turned everyone's head around in the 50's. Here's the thing about Goddard: every shot represents an idea. His cameraman has said that Goddard would be referencing dozens of films every time the camera changed position and would drive him crazy.

The Germans seem to take their storytelling very seriously. They have two words, which have to be loosely translated, which they use to categorise their entire oral tradition.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

"Märchen," loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.
"Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events.

So - without meaning to - I'm back to Impossible Basterds again: the movie starts with the letters "Once upon a time..." on the screen, which the audience takes as a joke, but is really a warning about the ending.

So let's see how this works in the movies: I'm thinking "The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars" are Marchen, or fairy tales, because the characters and events have no direct space/time relationship to us. But all Westerns and war movies and even horror movies are Sagen or legends, because they "draw much of their power" from their connection to us, here in real-time.

So there, I said it: Impossible Basterds starts off as a Sagen and ends up as a Marchen.

Dialogue

Just having read Sean's comment on August 6 regarding film dialogue, I'm compelled to pass along the sum total of NYU film school guidance on the subject: Harold Pinter.

Pinter (who died just last year) wrote those great 20th century plays: The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker. I think they've all been turned into BBC productions. We studied "Accident", one of those films where the main character(s) die in the first scene (remember 'Lawrence of Arabia"?) and then the rest of the movie is an extended flashback.
For sheer nastiness, his dialogue, and his characters can't be beat. I saw a movie based on a minor screenplay of his, "The Quiller Memorandum" as a kid, and it was a formative experience: it was the first time I was in the movie theatre when (adults) actually yelled at the screen to tell a character to watch out.

As far as more recent efforts are concerned, I'm impressed by "Pulp Fiction" as everyone else is, and by anything David Mamet writes. Regarding any Mamet movie: even when many things are bad, the dialogue is still great.

Touch of Evil again

I last wrote about "Touch of Evil" (1958) on August 11 and I keep thinking about it.

So I have to point out a couple of things:

Janet Leigh in that motel room in 1958: and I've never seen a reference to this in all the Hitchcock literature but, come on, when Hitchcock was casting Psycho (1960), he had to remember that image of Janet Leigh in her underwear opening that motel room door with all those crazy Mexicans running around.

And then there's that character played by Dennis Weaver (who is most famous as the star in the TV series, "McCloud"), the motel room night manager. I don't know my Shakespeare well enough, but it's been said that his character is lifted right out of a Shakespeare play. Remember, Welles knew his Shakespeare, so it's not an outrageous assertion, but I'd be interested in any parallels anyone can come up with. Remember, there's that night watchman Mike played in "Much Ado About Nothing"?

One of my favorite shots is: Charlton Heston, in the convertible, and it appears that the camera has been mounted right above the hood, so you get this great sense of motion, and the wind whipping around, and he's there, like a rock, right in the middle of this world.

This is a pure Film Noir shot. Among other things, Film Noir got rid of a lot of Hollywood camera trickery, like "day for night", and "process shots" out of car windows. You know the ones: the actors are riding in a fake car and you watch fake images out the windows in the background. So this shot must have been eye-opening to those who first saw in on screen: it's the real thing.

(And Sam Peckinpah remembered that shot when he made "The Getaway"1972.)

The Movie is Better Than the Book

I was re-reading Sean's comment from August 5 concerning the mannerist connection to "A Clockwork Orange" (I don't think so, but the subject's up for discussion after we see "Bastards") and I thought I'd like to start an ongoing list of movies that are better than their source material. Let me say right here that this is not film criticism, this is just for fun, or just stupid, depending on whether you're in the mood or not. You don't need a fancy degree to know that comparing media is a waste of time and critically unsupportable. (But, and this is a big but, that's what makes movie music so interesting: the tension between what you see and what you hear. Brakhage knew this, and that's why his movies are (really) silent.)

"A Clockwork Orange" tops the list. And, I'll admit, Anthony Burgess is one of my favorite authors, but his novel is really mediocre. It's the film that's great. And "Singin' in the Rain" is not mentioned in the book.

Another one is "The Searchers" by John Ford. The book is awful. Although I think that may hold true for any Ford source material.

And any Hitchcock source material too. Even "The Birds" is just a creepy short story by a good author (Daphne du Maurier) made into a great movie.

I'm so old that I remember when "The Godfather" was a book: a bestseller by Mario Puzo... it seemed like everyone in my family was reading it. And the book is OK, but...

Finally, there's West Side Story. If we put aside the quality of the acting in the movie, I have to admit that I like all the cuts and all the changes they made to whip that movie into shape (152 minutes running time). I think Mike disagrees with me on this, but I'd like hear if there are any specific changes that stand out as bad decisions....

Eldorado

I think Eldorado is my first Belgian film...

No disrespect intended, but I think this film should be shown at Chaminade, with an essay on Sin and Redemption due afterward.
It's hard to talk about the subject matter in any terms but Catholic terms.
Let's face it, the main character does nothing but good deeds for the entire movie.
But it was Sean's Pick, and Sean, among other things, wanted to talk about mise en scene.
(The Jesus Prologue was really the worst part of the movie. If the director really felt like he had to leave the only thing that was heavy-handed in the movie, that's fine, but someone should have talked him out of it.
The real first shot, of the main character driving his car, seems to go on forever, but it really sets you up for the rest of the film with a warning: this is going to be a slow-moving film, so get used to it.
My favorite use of mise en scene: the homecoming.


The two guys drive up to the parent's house, they meet the mother, and the three of them talk at the kitchen table. Then the son goes to talk to the father. Instead of following him, we stay in the kitchen, listening to the argument that ensues. You can envision how it could have been done, cross-cutting between the kitchen and, say, the living room where the argument is taking place. Instead, we stay with the mother for a very long time, with pain and sadness registering on her face. This was a really good cinematic moment and pure mise en scene.


In the end, the prophesy is fulfilled.

The literary connection may be obvious, but I will spell it out anyway: There should be a good name for it but we'll call it "This is really about something else" just as most road movies are not travelogues. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, which was published after WWI and for next decade or so everyone talked about the Odyssey connection, but after WWII people started to realise that the book was not "an ordinary day in the life of Dublin" but was the story of what Leopold Bloom does on a day when he finds out that his wife is planning to spend the afternoon in his bedroom with another man. Hemingway read Ulysses and said "I can do this" and wrote the short story "Big Two-Hearted River" which seems to be about a fishing trip but is really about dealing with the nightmares of war. My screenwriting teacher, Jackie Parks, told us that the master of "not saying what you really mean" is the playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter.
(And by the way, this is one of the reasons that TV shows are so bad: everyone always says what they mean.)

Eldorado is 100% linear except for the home-movie excerpt of the two brothers playing in their bathing suits.


If there were a Road Movie Hall of Fame, we'd have to include La Strada and Easy Rider (a slow-moving relic of the 60's). Two of my personal favorites are Wild at Heart (David Lynch) and Y Tu Mama Tambien (which definitely cannot be shown at Chaminade). If there's a list of road movies out there, I'd be interested.

Silent Pictures

Last night we saw "Singin' in the Rain" the play, based on the film. I've seen the film recently.



The film perpetuated the myth of all the silent film stars that lost their jobs because their voices were squeaky. In reality, since most film people came from vaudeville, their voices were just fine. The real problem was that the technical limitations of sound made most camerawork so bad for a few years there: between 1927 and 1932. There's one, only one actor I can think of who didn't make it to the talkies because of his voice, and that's John Gilbert ("The Big Parade").



Anyway, it turns out that now is the best time to see early films, because so many are available on DVD, and they're being restored at a pretty good clip.



Between comedy, horror, and drama, I think only comedy is really appreciated, and I really have to talk about that later. Horror would be a fun subject to deal with - I actually had a professor pitch an idea for a Master's Thesis to me with a movie horror theme - so I will try to see what I can see.



Drama may be hopeless. It's hard to take early dramas seriously, unless they're offensive, like "The Birth of a Nation."



And "Silent Pictures" is a pretty dumb label anyway, since all Hollywood productions were made to be shown with musical accompaniment. And the music is part of what's being "restored" as those new DVD's are coming out. "Early Film" sounds better, but is not precise. "Pre-Talkie" is good but dull. I'm looking for better suggestions....

Intentionality

I want to explain something that I'm not writing about: film maker's intentions. And here I'm borrowing a page from art history.

Since the Renaissance, artists have been writers, too. Michelangelo wrote quite a bit.
Journalists (I mean newspaper journalists) have always been happy to get quotations from artists, especially with the advent of "shows" and "exhibitions" in the 19th century. They'd ask questions like, "What was your inspiration for this? Why does it look like that? What did you intend?"
Artists were always happy to promote their work and would give the best answers that they could, sometimes boring, sometimes pompous, and most times, elitist. Just after the turn of the 20th century, the Surrealists came along, and decided to play the game their own way: they would say the most outrageous things they could think of, they would lie, and they would deliberately mislead. The journalists were all too happy to oblige by taking it all down and printing it, and sometimes what was said would cause a sensation and everyone would buy more newspapers.
Serious historians, however, were horrified. They were used to self-serving liars but Surrealists were taking lies and turning them into something new and strange.
And what came out of this is: intentionality, for an art historian or an art critic, is a waste of time. The work of art is, among other things, the fact in front of you. What the artist says he thought or what he intended is at best, irrelevant, and at worst, deliberately misleading.

I'm not saying intentionality is not important. It's important in law ("Did you intend to steal that laptop or did you just forget you had it when you walked out of the store?) and it's important for Catholics ("the intention of sin" being just as bad as the sin itself) and I'm sure it's important somewhere in psychology, too.

But if you want to talk about art, you just don't have to deal with intentionality, and probably shouldn't deal with it.

Addendum - posted August 19:

OK - so I did not realise that this idea has a name, "The Intentional Fallacy", and that it's at least as old as an essay in 1946, and did not originate amongst art historians. Here's what wikipedia says:
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy," a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."

I could not have said it better myself.

Coraline and animation

Coraline - We had two personal connections to this movie. We just had dinner in Chicago with Neil Gaiman (and 750 other people). He wrote the book "Coraline" and was being honored with the 2009 Newberry Medal for "The Graveyard Book". And Mary went to elementary school in New Jersey with Henry Selick, the director of "Coraline" the movie.

Children's movies cannot be long (this one was 1 hour and 45 minutes) and that's a good thing. And I really liked this one, mostly, for what it was not, which is Shrek - possibly the worst animated film ever made. There were none of those wink-wink adult references to adult things, put in there to keep Mom and Dad from getting bored. There were no stupid movie references that- once again - are designed to make adults feel smug and superior. (Like the references to "The Matrix" in "Shrek") And the artistic references were motivated: the trapeze lady recites Shakespeare (Mike thinks Hamlet) because she's a retired actress/showgirl.



Animated movies are free to use space in ways that are difficult, expensive or just impossible in live-action films, especially those without special effects. There was quite a bit of moving toward and away from the camera in "Coraline" and, now that I think about it, was probably put in there to justify the 3D version (I'm thinking of that trapeze again and any scene involving the acrobatic neighbor).



I'm not sure why, but spatial relationships are just more interesting in live action than in animation, possibly because it's just so easy to do in animation (you start with Wile E. Coyote's eyeball as he falls off the edge of the mesa until he becomes a little puff of smoke as he lands on the desert floor below) and it's so hard to do in live action.



I'm thinking of that opening shot of Touch of Evil. It starts off with what we think of as a traditional close-up: the clock. But it's not a close up at all -and it's not just a clock either. Instead of a cut, the camera pulls away (or, I should say, the clock is pulled away), and we see that the clock is really the timing device for the dynamite, and the space of the whole movie opens up before our eyes. It's a mise en scene tour de force. The camera keeps creating more and more space; more and more of the world; until the things we've been following, the car and the people, are destroyed in the explosion.

(The shot is supposed to be about seven minutes long. And now I'm wondering if the clock/timer is set for 7 minutes... but anyway the whole thing is also an exercise in real time, as opposed to movie time, because there are no cuts.)

I'll have to deal with this animation/space thing again. And I've got to see Touch of Evil again, too.



Historical footnote: that shot was, famously, not done in one take.

Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia: So I want to start on a positive note: It's great to go to the movies with a lot of people who are having a great time. Mary and I saw Julie & Julia last night and it was like a meeting of the Meryl Streep fan club. They laughed and applauded through the whole thing. The movie itself was just a machine for making money: so conventional it made my teeth hurt.

Here's another critical thought: I was thinking that I couldn't describe this movie as plot-driven. It's a "comedy of manners." Which is a theatrical term, which makes me think that if the whole thing would have worked as a play, then what (or where) was the cinema? And the answer is: maybe there's no cinema there.
I know I've seen movies that would have worked better as radio plays, with zero visual coefficient. And this is not a bad place to be: asking what is the (visual) point?

Vermeer alert

At the Met:

Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid
September 10, 2009–November 29, 2009

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage to Manhattan from Amsterdam, that city’s Rijksmuseum will send The Milkmaid, perhaps the most admired painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) to the Metropolitan Museum. To celebrate this extraordinary loan, the Metropolitan Museum will present Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid, a special exhibition that will bring together all five paintings by Vermeer from its collection, along with a select group of works by other Delft artists, placing Vermeer’s superb picture in its historical context. Along with The Milkmaid, important works will be on view by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet, and Hendrick Sorgh, all masters who, like Vermeer, were active during the remarkable period of exploration, trade, and artistic flowering that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will mark the first time that the painting has traveled to the United States since it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair 70 years ago.

I know everybody's going back to college before September 10, but look: this exhibit doesn't close until the Monday after Thanksgiving, so mark your calendars. Maybe I can drag Mike and anyone else who's interested on the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving, that's 11/27 or 11/28, so mark your calendars...

Herzog and Antonioni

"Encounters at the End of the World" - Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary - I was disappointed. But Herzog sure is honest: he says, he saw some underwater photography of the Ross Sea at the South Pole and was "invited" to go (I think that means that someone gave him the money to make the movie) and then he shows us what, and who, he found there. And the answer is: what he found just wasn't all that compelling. But someone who loved the movie wrote on IMDB that you have to see it on the big screen, and maybe he's right...

What's my favorite movie? (It's a good question because it's revealing.) I have to say L'avventura (1960) by Antonioni. (Which is a real conversation stopper because so few people have seen it.) But I have to warn you, people who see it for the first time usually find it infuriating. When it was first shown (I think at Cannes) people actually yelled at the screen.

It does seem like everyone sees 8-1/2 before they see all those other Italian movies that Fellini makes fun of. That was certainly my experience. It's great to see the really hard core Italian neo-realist films - I'm thinking of "Open City" as a great example - so you can understand where Fellini, Rossellini and Antonioni came from. I think the Italians had a conversation with each other, as opposed to the French New Wave, which seemed to be having a conversation with Hollywood.

I'm going to see Umberto D again, so I can talk about it.

A list: there's so much to say

Here's a list of things I want to talk about, in no particular order. I invite comments, though, if someone wishes to prioritize...

-ontology of film: this is more fun than it sounds, and I think Mike will back me up here

-comedy, with a subset of situation comedy or "Why I hate Seinfeld"

-Italian movies

- intentionality: I must talk about this (pun intended) because, whether you're involved with art criticism or film criticism, it's an incredible time saver

-the one must-see movie by Orson Welles; no, not Citizen Kane, it's Touch of Evil

-mannerist cinema: this will be more relevant after the new Quentin Tarrentino movie comes out

And what's not on the list: semiotics of film. I'm not sure if semiotics is worth it anymore, but I'm thinking about it, and will let you know what I come up with.

Storytelling and film school

I want to circle around the idea of the storyteller again, this time with examples from the NYU film writing department. I learned from three teachers: Jackie Parks, Mardik Martin, and Charlie Russell. Mardik Martin wrote the screenplay to "Raging Bull."

The film school was filled with students who wanted to hold a camera, be on a film shoot, and have their name on the screen. Martin Scorcese had taught there, and his early film "Mean Streets" with Robert Deniro seemed to be the quintessential post-NYU film.

The writing department seemed resigned to the fact that no undergraduate wanted to be a writer. I hope that they at least had graduate students that were more motivated.

The cliche was, "I can write a script, but I can't write dialog." The word "improv" was not commonly used outside of acting classes in the 70's. I think we all felt that improvisation was a way for a director to give up control and we hadn't learned to get control yet.

In retrospect, I realise that Jackie Parks had read theories of semiotics and was kind of testing them out with us -but she never used the word and we weren't even vaguely interested.

Mardik Martin had one big message for anybody who would listen: "Conflict. Every scene has to have conflict." I thought I got it at the time, but I've come to realize that this was the most important critical lesson I learned at film school, and I still use it to think about films. If you ever wonder why a film is so boring, it's usually because someone has written a scene that moves the plot along (at least), but has no conflict.

Now, is conflict the essence of storytelling? I don't know for sure, but you can see how someone could make the case for it. The contrasting viewpoint is: "No. Conflict is great for comic books, but characters make the story." (In fact "Characters Make the Story" is a pretty influential scriptwriting guide.

Let me try to sum up where I'm going with this: film making is not a fine art. That's not news. There are only three fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. And I don't give a damn what anybody in any theatre department says (or, in my experience, hints at): film making is not some modern branch of capital T Theatre. In the past 50 years, film making has become the greatest method of storytelling ever invented.
I know it would be cute to come to the defense of campfires and puppet shows, but nobody serious really would. Someone really serious would come to the defense of Theatre, and that's where a real argument exists. (To use the word "argument" is a real 60's thing, but at least I know when I'm being old-fashioned.)
And, of course, we're in Visual Arts World here. I have no bone to pick with the written word, because words just exist in a different world, and that's just how I see it (pun intended.)
Even Brakhage said, "A picture is worth a thousand words, except when a poet is speaking." (No, that does not sound quite right, but you get the idea. He wrote a lot, but never well.)

This is my prejudice completely: "suspension of disbelief" works much better for me at the movies than at the theatre. And, to be honest, it does not require a complicated philosophy to be truthful about that.

Jan Vermeer: it's all about the light

I want to address a few things, mostly things Sean addressed in his comment.

But first, I want to start naming movies I see as I see them. Not as recommendations, but as opportunities to use them as examples if we wish. And I cannot help myself from saying a few words as I go along:

Doubt: a waste of great acting talent. A movie by John Patrick Shanley who thinks that because he can write a play, that he can direct a movie. He cannot. I cannot think of a single playwright who's adapted his own play for the movies well. (OK - I can think of one: David Mamet) I usually come away with the feeling that they're really telling us - underneath all that money and effort - that you really should have seen the play.

Maya Deren: Stan Brakhage said (in that NYU class) that Maya Deren was the greatest film editor who ever lived. That she had an impeccable command of timing. She was older, and I thing she was something of a mentor to him, as was, I think, Norman McClaren.

I saw that trailer for Eldorado and it looks very funny, so I'm putting it close to the top of my Netflix list, right after Coraline.

I want to use two painters to talk about Storytellers and Impressionists again: Johannes Vermeer and Caravaggio. You can check out the paintings online, although - I'm warning you - you can't make any judgements based on a computer image. Especially about Vermeer.

Caravaggio came first. He's one of the most influential painters of the Western World (although "influence" is not what it used to be). He's a classic storyteller. You stand in front of one of his paintings, and ask, what's going on?, and if you're pretty good with your New Testament you can figure it all out. But one of the ways he told his stories was his use of (what we'd call now) theatrical lighting. It all very dramatic: like spotlights on a dark stage. His light picks out the details and emphasizes what he wants you to see, and at the same time, makes it special.

Vermeer, on the other hand is very Dutch, very Protestant, and very un-dramatic. He shows you people in everyday situations, and you look and you realise that the subject is the light itself(connotation? denotation? I'm sorry, but I think they get in the way) No one had painted light like that before. So, for me, it's a very Brakhage moment: he's saying, look, just look at that light. And everybody who saw those paintings learned from them and it was not until Monet that you got that same obsessiveness with light. (Haystacks in the morning, haystacks at twilight, haystacks in the cold, frosty air.)

Tony the tour guide says: the best Caravaggios in NYC are at the Met and the best Vermeer in NYC is at the Frick. And if you have never been to the Frick, well, you just have to go...

Impressionist History

Impressionism started in France in the 1860's and went through the rest of the 19th century, spreading throughout the Western world as painters in country after country caught on. Up until that time, painter's were judged by how closely they could render the surfaces of the world: flesh, glass, steel and lace. Photography was invented in France in the mid-19th century, and in some people's minds, photography started making this "realistic" painting obsolete. So all those painter's you've seen, Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh, turned to an "impressionistic" style where the brushstroke could capture the essence of something - light, summer air, frost. And they moved away from the subjects of their fathers and grandfathers, the large history paintings with characters and action and moralizing ("The Death of Socrates" by David).



So what I'm suggesting is that something very similar happened in movies and, more importantly, continues to happen today. It happened very fast and very simply: D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein hammered out the film language we now use: long shot, medium shot, close up; head shot and reaction shot; linear- and cross-cutting. That freed up the hundreds of hacks to churn out thousands of movies, increasing in length until we got to the one and a half hour feature that was good enough until the pretentious 70's arrived and started making those bloated two hour features we're stuck with today.

I've described the Storytellers and the Entertainers.
The most pure Impressionists were those experimental film makers who dispensed with plot entirely.

At this point (yesterday, in fact) Mike said, "So Bergman is an Impressionist, right?"
The question implies that I'm describing styles here, and that because plot is not the most important element of a Bergman film, it follows that he's an Impressionist, and more interested in getting certain responses from his audience than he is in telling a story.

And, I think, that's not what I mean at all.

(And I think if I were a better writer I would have explained my point better by now.)

My point is a little more extreme (please don't say radical) than what Mike implied: what I'm saying is that all Hollywood movies today are made by storytellers and entertainers. And the impressionists are not making movies at all. They're making music videos and commercials. I'm saying that commercials (drug and alcohol commercials in particular) have become the impressionist visual form of the 21st century.

The weekend is here. Jack is one week old. Comments are encouraged

The Impressionists

I'm going to borrow a label from Art History, Impressionism, to describe films labeled "Experimental Cinema" or "Avant Garde Cinema."
The most well-known American film makers in this category are Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs. Also, (you may have heard of) Jonas Mekas, who is now mostly known for helping other filmmakers.
These people made short independent films before Sundance. They worked in the 50's and 60's and I think I can say that with the arrival of MTV in the 70's, Experimental Cinema in America was gone.
There's a point in Ken Burn's Jazz documentary about black musicians picking up brass instruments left over from the Civil War and using them to make great music. That's kind of what happened with 8mm movie cameras in the 50's and 60's. (I'm speaking from personal experience here.) Kids borrowed Dad's home movie camera and made short movies with very little money. And as it has been said elsewhere, these movies bore little resemblance to what was in the theatres and on TV. The 60's was a time when it seems like everyone took themselves very seriously indeed, and these little movie makers were no exception.

Stan Brakhage was a true American original, an outstanding film maker. He was obsessed with vision, and I'm not talking about the metaphoric kind. You can find some of his films on YouTube, which is a good thing. As you can imagine, you lose a lot, watching on a computer in a well-lit room. The title sequence to the movie Seven is a Brakhage homage. I think I should write about the films of Brakhage at a later date, when more people have seen a little of his work. I should also say that I attended a five week summer course with him at NYU.

People who study art history seem obsessed with labels and I am no exception. So this subject is -to be continued. I want to say what I mean by Impressionism in this context, what happened, and how this ties into our list of ways to look at movies.

Storytellers and Entertainers

I want to introduce one more way of thinking about movies, and because I'm borrowing terms from art history, I'll be using terms that may evolve in time.

You assemble people together, have them sit down, then you tell them a story, in the dark, by a flickering light. You want to hold their attention, so you keep them in suspense, and make them keep asking, "What happens next?" This is what movies and campfires have in common.

Most great filmmakers are great storytellers who are good at putting it all together on film.

When movies became feature-length, in the 30's, your typical Hollywood director was a loud, heavy-drinking tough guy. He was good at bossing people around and getting them to do what he wanted.

And he was good at telling stories.

I'm thinking of John Ford, William Wellman, Victor Fleming and, later, John Huston. I remember a quote from someone describing John Huston before he came to Hollywood as "just a guy who was good to go out drinking with." Most directors made terrible movies (as they do today), but a handful matched that storytelling talent to a vision and... the rest is history.

Then there were another bunch of directors in the 30's: sound came in, and the studio bosses wanted pictures that appealed to women and pictures for people too poor (it was the Depression after all) to see live theatre shows, whether it be vaudeville or legitimate theatre. The bosses hired a lot of theatre people and vaudvillians and put them to work and they made many, many bad movies. But one special guy came out of this: Busby Berkeley.
Berkeley made great movies with amazing camera movements that had never been done before, but he just was not interested in telling stories. And the funny thing is, nobody cared. He made movies that were advertised as "all singing, all dancing" but they really were the avant garde cinema of the early sound era: surreal and weird and it's amazing that they were so popular.

Tomorrow: the Impressionists.

The Movie Grab Bag

Jack Anthony Costagliola was born on Friday. Both he and his mom are doing very well.

Back in the 70's, Mary and I saw what I can only call a horror film: we were enrolled in a natural birth class in the local hospital and they ran this thing called "You and Your Baby" or something like that. In the movie, masked people grab this 2 minute old human, pry his eyes open, one at a time, and shine a flashlight right into his cornea. Call it excess empathy if you wish, but we were truly horrified. And then they moved on to the circumcision...

I'm detouring from my list of ways to think about movies to address some issues raised by the comments. It's easy to think about mise en scene and montage as objects in a director's movie grab bag and it would seem as though if you had total control, and big budget and a lot of time, that you would just pick a style that fits each scene. And maybe that's so, once in a while. But then you would have swallowed the Hollywood Kool-Aid: that a movie is just a string of filmed scenes. Scenes of actors who could just as well be on a stage, except there's no money in it.

If this was a book, I would rent the Departed so I could really go over that scene in the elevator that Sean referred to, before writing about it. But this is a blog, and I want to address Sean's comment right now, today.

With this scene, Scorcese has made an original visual connection to give us a little Theatre of Death. The action starts on the upper floors in the elevator, but he yanks us out and away and puts us, dead center, outside, in front of the elevator. We know the doors will open just like we know - and here's the connection - that the theatre's curtain will rise, and the show will begin. So here we are, in front of this little stage. The doors open, and we look at: mayhem. And here's the horror film connection: we cannot look away. We're trapped in the mise en scene. The actor raises the gun and we want to yell No! Stop! Cut! But still the film rolls. It's like a little horror movie inside this psychological cops and robbers thing.

Auteurs

Since the 50's, the Auteur Theory has dominated critical thinking about the movies in all places but a few college campuses. Although I've never seen it described this way, it's really movie criticism hijacked by the English Department, but instead of Famous Authors we get Famous Directors or Auteurs.

Auteur Theory is so pervasive, it's hard to believe it's only 50 years old.

(Once again, I'm struggling to make this believable: that people really used to think another way about things. It's easier to talk about the Middle Ages in this regard because it's a given that "it was a different time." In fact, the reverse is true: people can't think of St. Francis as a troublesome teenager singing songs (from another country - it was the "French Invasion" instead of the British Invasion) that drove his parents crazy, but it's true.)

Anyway, to describe life before auteurs, I have to talk about Tom Hanks.
People say: Have you seen the latest Tom Hanks movie? Did you like the last Tom Hanks movie?
If I say, answer quick: Who directed the last Tom Hanks movie? or, in desperation: Can you name any directors of any Tom Hanks movies? (I think you can name only one.)
Before the auteur theory, there were a lot of Tom Hanks-style actors: (going backward in time) John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. Each one was the Tom Hanks of his day. I cannot think of a single Gary Cooper movie where he plays the bad guy. Not only that, he always played the role that the audience principally identified with. His career seems to have been micro-managed to keep his fans happy all the time.
So the Auteur Theory was developed in reaction to this mind-set.
Now we live and breathe in the world of auteurs. It's a cliche: if you talk seriously about movies, then you're talking about directors.

Mise en Scene and Montage

The second way to organize movies is by form. The action of the movie is propelled by montage or by mise en scene. It's hard to describe these terms historically and without prejudice because each one is loaded with passionate critical baggage. So I feel like I'm discussing the history of the Trinity in a room full of Protestants.
Montage is easy to describe if you've seen a film by Eisenstein. He took small pieces of sometimes very static shots and created great motion and emotion. The shower sequence in Psycho is a great recent example.
Mise en scene is a theatrical term that's been applied to movies: the director positions the actors, positions the camera, and says,"roll 'em!" Sometimes the actors move, sometimes the camera moves and sometimes they both move. We were taught in film school that the master of mise en scene was Jean Renoir ("Grand Illusion") and recent good examples can be found in anything by Stanley Kubrick.
But this is Formalism, and it's so old fashioned that I'm not sure I can convince you that people once believed that movies can fall into one of these two categories. But they did.
Everyone can see that the most heavily edited film still has "scenes" which are "set" and that even the film with the longest, most boring shots still has them strung together, but look at it this way: Where is the passion of the director? Is it in creating something purely filmic, purely synthetic (people used to talk this way) in the editing? Or is the director interested in capturing the perfect motion, the perfect gesture in the scene?
Once again, it's fun to think about which movies fall into which category:
I've said that Kubrick is the right stuff, but on the bad side, 100% of what's made for TV (excepting commercials -- more about this later) is mise en scene's bad stuff.
Montage has been given a bad name by those wordless "montage sequences" where the two lovers get to know each other by going to the beach, the playground, the park, you get it.
If I just say great editing and you think of the Corleone Baptism sequence in Godfather I, you'd be right.

Lumiere and Melies

Instead of covering the dreaded Terms and Conditions, I thought I'd introduce other people's ways of organizing movies, before I get to mine.
This will give me a chance to change my mind.
I have a hazy memory that this Organizing Principle (this will not be the last time that I start sounding like Winnie-the-Pooh) was spoken by a character in a film by Francois Truffaut, a member of that same New Wave to which Goddard belonged.
The idea is this: all movies are descendants of two French filmmakers, Lumiere (really the Lumiere brothers, there were two) and Georges Melies.
The Lumiere brothers came first. In the 1890's they made films like "Train Entering the Station" and "A Lion at the Zoo". We'd call these documentaries now. Straightforward, no actors, but exciting to those who saw them new because they were, well, new. People said they were "real" and "real life" until someone, many years later, pointed out how much they owed to French Impressionist painters.
Melies saw what the Lumieres had done and started making his own movies, except these were "trick films" with disappearing people in stage sets and all sorts of film magic. In other words, "special effects" movies. He's most remembered for "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902.
A pandering note to twentysomething readers: the Smashing Pumpkins music video for "Tonight, Tonight" was done in the Melies style.
And the children's librarians among us have insisted that I mention the 2008 Caldecott Award Winner, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" which uses Melies biographical details and images.
So there it is. On one side there's Lumiere with documentaries, dramas, and even comedies. And then there's Melies with fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
It's fun to argue about the movies that have trouble fitting:
"Fight Club"? I'd say Lumiere.
"Mission Impossible"? I'd say Melies.
What do you go to the movies to see? Real people? With real stories that make you laugh and cry?
Or do you want to see things you've never seen before, like a bunch of aliens drinking pina coladas at a bar and listening to jazz?