Pierrot le fou (1965) is, unignorably, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s goofiest movies. Just as Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character’s name freely alternates between his real one, Ferdinand, and that of the film’s titular symbol of anarchy, Pierrot—the latter chosen by Anna Karina’s betraying lover Marianne, only to be repeatedly rejected by its intended recipient—so does the film freely bounce among subject matter serious and silly until the two are virtually indistinguishable. At its extremes Pierrot le fou offers some of the most gratuitous and wacky indulgences of Godard’s entire career: low-production musical numbers in half-finished apartments and shaded forests, mustachioed dwarfs squawking gibberish into walkie talkies, Belmondo eating an enormous cheese, a cameo by the exiled princess of Lebanon, a netted booby trap capturing a gangster-driven car, etc., etc. These are the logical results of the brand of free cinema Godard has always simultaneously preached and practiced (“One Should Put Everything Into a Film” declared his title to a short published statement, and, man, he sure put his money where he his mouth was), the movie equivalent of the notebook scribbles from Ferdinand/Pierrot’s journal that offer fragments, in-jokes, references, diversions, and off the cuff ideas alongside quintessential set-pieces.
But it’s Godard’s counterbalance of melancholic longing (Rimbaud, Céline, Renoir, the shimmering infinity of the natural world, "the sea gone with the sun") with cartoonish whimsy (the Nickel-Footed Gang, pulp fiction comic inserts, the bold, Mondrian primaries of JLG's pop art-inspired color palette) that makes Pierrot so uniquely and indescribably haunting. This alchemy comes through in the fatalistic gloom pervading the couple’s carefree, liberating flight from the shackles of Ferdiand/Pierrot’s bourgeois respectability into crime thriller intrigue and then Mediterranean coastline refuge (and then back again in an almost completely incomprehensible plot), as in the magnificent scene—one of the most beautiful in the history of cinema, I’ll be so bold as to say—of the two lovers renewing their love in the darkness while a passing stream of multi-colored lights reflects off their car windshield, or when Ferdinand/Pierrot dolefully, unforgettably stares back at Marianne during a break in the wishy-washy ode she sings to him after they’ve completed their break with the outside world. Even in the film’s nihilistic conclusion hi-jinks (Marianne and Ferdinand/Pierrot are, after all, low-rent actors, hustling money by telling fanciful stories to café patrons and performing aggressive dumb shows of the Vietnam War for American tourists) mix with death—Ferdinand/Pierrot, ambivalent to the end, clumsily fails to stamp out the lit wick of the two rolls of dynamite strapped to his blue-painted head.
So many of Godard’s heroes and heroines die tragically, but with Ferdinand/Pierrot’s demise comes the poignant sense that something had come to an end at this stage of Godard’s career. Pierrot is a culmination in the sense that it references all his previous movies, but he was still a relative ways away—three years, five films—from entering his militant Maoist phase, while the “playful” strain of his sensibility would always be evident even when severely muted. Yet things would never be quite the same after Pierrot. Godard dubbed Marianne and Ferdinand/Pierrot “the last romantic couple”; Pierrot would be Godard’s last romantic movie. Its follow-up, Masculin féminin, includes these immortal words: “We’d often go to the movies. We’d shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed . . . . It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make . . . and secretly wanted to live.” This was Godard’s first admittance of disillusion with cinema, his holy shrine. No coincidence, then, that in Pierrot—where cinema was still, to quote Samuel Fuller’s drop-by monologue, “a battleground”—love goeth before the Fall.
“You speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings,” Marianne explains to Ferdinand/Pierrot of their communication breakdown. Godard’s rift between the genders is patently personal and just the slightest bit sexist (men think abstractly, read literature, are content in nature; women want sensations, listen to pop music, dream of cities like Las Vegas and Monte Carlo), but the search for an existential purpose amidst the ruins of romance—Pierrot is often cited as an autobiographical rendering of Godard and Karina’s break-up—assumes greater significance. Fittingly, Godard goes all the way back to Jean Seberg for advice, Belmondo watching her across time through the transportation device that is the movie theater: “We were looking carefully for the moment when we had abandoned the fictional character to return to the real one, if it ever existed,” she says on the screen within the screen, camera in hand. If Pierrot is Godard's most frayed dividing line between cinema and real life it’s because the film becomes real life in the daring exhortation to its audience—through the delirious enactment of Ferdinand/Pierrot’s frenzy to be—that there isn’t any difference. It’s making cinema to live to make cinema to live . . . the way out of the maze is only provided by a way deeper into it. If such a strategy didn’t salvage romance for Godard, and if cinema itself would be the next to prove disloyal to his demands on truth and beauty, then it surely rescues life, allowing it to be truly free, in gravitas and goof. And that’s where we should begin in answering Pierrot’s call, by way of Rimabud, that “Love" -- and, therefore, cinema -- "must be reinvented.”
What does Godard mean to us in 2008? It's a question that's surely been asked, or could have been asked, in any given year since 1960, but it's one worth asking again now, certainly on the occasion of Film Forum's extensive retrospective, Godard's 60s, starting today and running through the beginning of June. And with Richard Brody's already acclaimed biography, Everything Is Cinema, hitting bookshelves the week after next, and the fact that we're currently "celebrating" (always an emotionally contradictory task) the events of May '68, now on their fortieth anniversary, it's obvious that Jean-Luc Godard is on a lot of people's minds these days (not that he's ever really gone). Yet when we talk of Godard, certainly in terms of post-68 France, we're talking about a cinema not just politically engaged but transformed into a medium for political confrontation: filmic missives that refuse to cloak their agenda in tangential details like narrative or character.
Godard's first film, then, was to always remain unlike any of those that followed; political only as it related to genre representation and the decimation of his beloved art form in the hopes of rebuilding something new in its place, Breathess was both a new beginning and a full stop. Even in his subsequent New Wave genre plays, like Alphaville and Band of Outsiders (whose "lightness" betrayed an increasing discomfort with their own rules and built-in hegemonies), he had already moved past Breathless, with its deceptively simple subversions that still relied on emotional interplay and cause-and-effect narrative strategies. The effortless casualness of Breathless (which by all accounts had been worked out to the minutest detail by Godard beforehand, despite the film's appearance of slapdash ingenuity) was to be so swiftly replaced by a harsher, more rigorous formalism that the film promptly became something of an orphan. Immediately following its buzzy Cannes premiere, in a May 1960 television interview, "Reflets de Cannes," Godard said, "I feel like I love cinema less than I did a year ago, simply because I made a popular film. I hope that people hate my second film so that I can enjoy making movies again. Audiences trust me now. I hope I disappoint them so they don't trust me anymore." Though Godard has changed his interrogatory political and aesthetic approach countless times over the years, this last statement still rings true to Godard's intentions—and if he ever begins to let audiences trust him, then his exhilaratingly confounding career would be as good as defeated.
Maybe the more pertinent question then, if Godard's debut remains such an anomaly, is what does Breathless mean to us in 2008? Naturally, the film is the opening weekend feature of the Godard's 60s series, and it's the spark that's meant to set off the rest of the month's fireworks. It's a deflating cliché to call something "remarkably fresh after all these years," but, yes, Breathless does stand as an exciting and fitting opener: it's so packed with seemingly off-the-cuff moments and little flickers of spontaneity that no matter how many times you've seen it, there's always something you either hadn't noticed or had forgotten was there. Upon this last viewing I was struck and moved when Jean-Paul Belmondo's macho tomfoolery, while waving goodbye to Jean Seberg as she's on her way to that robustly irritating airport interview with Jean-Pierre Melville, is interrupted by an extra exiting a door and walking right into him; Belmondo's little grimace of surprise is the perfect response, and further grants the film the sense that Godard's experiment was to capture those interstitial moments that would never make it into the final cut of other "gangster films." Likewise, there's endless joy in watching Belmondo and, specifically, Seberg, who's constantly reckoning with both her character and her own movie persona—so rudely had she been thrust into the limelight and then cast aside after Saint Joan and Bonjour tristesse that she seems both exhilarated and fearful of the freedom the camera afforded her in Breathless. When she's on-screen, her exquisitely symmetrical features providing necessary contrast to his pugilist's mug, she fitfully becomes the protagonist: she's the one who must make the moral choices, after all.
Breathless was a one-off, but never arbitrary. And unlike those other monolithic, epochal films that changed the face of narrative cinema (Citizen Kane, 2001, Pulp Fiction), Godard's film still feels slippery, and so self-consciously clever that we feel like we may never fully grasp its intentions. It's fun, but never easy, even if it seems like Godard's most accessible. All filmmakers should strive for such simultaneous clarity and obfuscation. So maybe that's why we should still care about Breathless—not as a designated Classic, preserved in amber and placed on the shelf, but as a call to arms for filmmakers, not to repeat what they've seen but to use current technologies to reject narrative formulas and properly confound audiences and themselves. There will be plenty of more visually mesmerizing or intellectually stimulating films on display this month during the Godard's 60s series, but none of them as sprung from youthful zeal to overturn the status quo.
Manoel de Oliveira celebrates his centenary this month with a royal workup at BAM’s Cinématek—their tribute to the Portuguese master stretches over three weeks (March 7-30) and includes 18 features and a program of shorts. Though he's largely unknown outside of true cinematic circles here (and probably elsewhere), his slight, but moving I’m Going Home (screening in the series) and the staid eccentric A Talking Picture (not screening, but available on DVD) are about the only films in his ever-growing filmography to receive small-scale U.S. distribution pushes, even if retrospectives of his work are ever more common. He’s been cranking out films at a rapid pace through the 1990s and 2000s—about a film a year, and the BAM series focuses on the highlights of this period, while dipping back into the sixties and seventies to round up his rare early works (his first feature, 1942s Aniki Bóbó screens this evening).
You’ll read (or will have read) that Oliveira’s been making films since the silent period, and that he’s the world’s oldest living filmmaker, but what’s interesting about Oliveira is not his longevity or productivity per se, but how those secondary characteristics of his career have played out into a tenacious, tough bunch of films that reverberate along certain fixed axes—art, religion, history, culture—that truly define his art. He’s been around for a long time, and this affords him a unique perspective on our world and ways of life. When his filmmaking career ends (not for another few decades, I hope), Oliveira will be remembered as the most rigorous cinematic chronicler of that dying beast we call Western Civilization (he literally murders it in A Talking Picture). With a wink and a sad smile he’s surveyed our cultural landscape, ferreted out the worthy and worthless bits, and captured the ways life has changed around him on film for nearly eighty years.
I’ve only seen about a dozen of his features (nine of which BAM is screening), so there are plenty of discoveries I’m hoping to make over the next few weeks (I’m told Abraham’s Valley is terrific), but if I could implore anyone reading this to see just one film in the series, make it Inquietude, my favorite of the bunch. Broken into three segments, each of which flows fluidly from one to the next, it’s a broad commentary on art, artmaking and myth that implicates the viewer in its mechanisms by a neat, inviting formal trick. It’s also the most singularly beautiful of the films of his I’ve seen, high praise for a warmly glowing cinema that seems constantly lit from within. If you can see a second, make it Doomed Love, his lengthy adaptation of an epic swooning romance placed against artificial sets and rendered via performances that make Bresson’s models look traditionally expressive. It’s not an easy sit, but is rewarding nonetheless—with its extensive use of titles it feels nearly as though one’s read the source novel by the time it's over (this is the kind of film for which one knows instantly their degree of tolerance). Seeing a third? I like The Uncertainty Principle—the title invokes physics, but the film is more of an odd little thriller—quite a bit as well…
Those into self-referential cinema (and completists) should check out Oliveira's "Tetraology of Frustrated Love" films, Pasado e presente (more naturalistic and recalling Buñuel's late comedies, but definitely transitional), Benilde, or The Virgin Mother, Doomed Love, and Francisca. Benilde's the turning point in his career, basically a filmed play about a virgin mother that opens and closes with the theatrical artifice unpacked—Oliveira leads us to and away from his characters via tracking shots through the soundstage surrounding his sets. The meat of Benilde feels like an intensely Ibsen-esque experience, but constant references to the empty space off-screen highlight the nature of a film as fake. The following two titles in the Tetralogy expand and deepen this same exploration. By the time the series is finished, you’ll have witnessed a complete cinematic metamorphosis.
For everyone who finds this stuff literate, urbane, and slyly witty (see the club sequences in The Uncertainty Principle or John Malkovich's performances in The Convent and A Talking Picture), there will be plenty who will exit theaters dulled by boredom (the thankfully absent The Fifth Empire) or feel as though they’ve witnessed some of the most hermetically sealed cinema going (his seemingly marathon dialogues for two don’t always play like the intellectual fencing matches they were intended to be). His is a cinema that somehow seems both airless and relevant, though to his detractors, this is a point that will certainly be up for debate. I’m a true believer but on occasion I’ve questioned the place of puzzling (usually intentionally so) films like these in the world. Fun, frustrating, serious, suffocating—whatever mode he’s in, Oliveira is never anything but himself, and at 100 years of age he seems absolutely unstoppable.
New York's venerable Anthology Film Archives kicks off a retrospective of the later films of Reverse Shot favorite Olivier Assayas tonight which runs though February 10th. Pretty much complete from his 1994 masterwork Cold Water until the present (excepting only his recent music doc Noise and the forthcoming bizarro Boarding Gate), it's that rare retro without a dud in the bunch. Though it sadly omits his fascinating, underscreened early films.
Longtime Reverse Shot fans will remember our Assayas symposium from all the way back in the Fall of 2003 (our fourth issue!), so in honor of Olivier, undoubtably one of the world's greatest filmmakers and a terribly nice guy to boot, here are a few of our "greatest hits" on his films:
Anthology's currently playing host to a retrospective feting the enigmatic works of Portugal’s other famous—and famously difficult—filmmaker, Pedro Costa. I caught his latest Colossal Youtha few months back and I’m planning a return to trip to see if the film’s many teasing strands coalesce more fully with a bit of foreknowledge, or if the film remains stubbornly (albeit pleasurably) diffuse.
Also showing are his earlier features O Sangue, Casa de lava, Ossos, and No Quarto de Vanda, a documentary he made about Straub-Huillet and a few of his shorts. I caught the first two features on Friday, and while both are wildly flawed ventures, it's fascinating to watch the assured filmmaker behind Colossal Youth pushing the boundaries of narrative which he’d bust apart a few features later.
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer: "Maidstone" and "Tough Guys Don't Dance"
Clash of the Titans
If there's one film in the Mistress & the Muse series that should convince you that Norman Mailer's foray into filmmaking was not in vain, it is Maidstone. Nay, more than that, I'll go so far as to say that Maidstone is an extraordinary film, maybe even a masterpiece, the sort of passion- and ambition-fueled endeavor that through the madness of unguided improvisation arrives at truths movies infinitely more seamless and desperate for importance fail to even touch.
The background: in 1968, the same year as two previous film failures and a a week removed from the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Mailer started shooting Maidstone on several Hamptons estates with a circus of friends, drinking buddies, fellow pugilists, and even one or two professional actors. The scenario: Mailer himself plays Kingsley, an art director/pornographer running for the President of the United States. His motley crew of models and various hangers-on is called the Cashbox, which the nefarious Prevention of Assassination Experiments, Control is trying to infiltrate to off the subversive candidate. Maidstone departs from Wild 90 and Beyond the Law in not only containing actual coherence, but in sliding between multiple realities, from representing the chaotic politics of the time, where liberals and revolutionaries war over strategy, to satirizing the controversial public figure that was Mailer, who here plays a blustery, egotistical sexist who prides himself on being "not spiritual, but diabolical." Indeed, there's Mephisto magic in Mailer's political fantasyland -- in one section of the twelve-part film Maidstone transforms into a dream montage that rearranges the madness all over again into new concoctions and epiphanies. But the best is saved for last where, in succession, Mailer assembles his soldiers (he compares the film to a military operation, "an attack on the nature of reality") to talk about the making of the "spooky experience" of making a film. And then comes one of the most infamous scenes in underground film history, where the one and only (and I mean only) Rip Torn, playing Mailer/Kingsley's half-brother, "assassinates" him using a blunt hammer. For real. Check out the clip above -- it's a brilliant, harrowing moment, made all the more so because of Mailer's wife's overreaction. We are watching the inevitable conclusion to a film that's so flagrantly disobeyed the line between being and acting, and Mailer and Torn's post-fight taunts (Torn: "Fraud!" Mailer: "Cocksucker!") end the film at a fever pitch of late 60s disillusionment.
Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) is an entirely different beast, a glossy studio picture half-intentionally bad soapy neo-noir that does little justice to Mailer's 1984 novel of the same name. Made after Mailer's falling out with Jean-Luc Godard over King Lear and coming seventeen years after Mailer abandoned his late 60s cinematic ventures, Tough Guys fails to fully translate the macabre black humor and metaphysical musings of Mailer's writing, but there's a special quality to this misunderstood oddity that is best captured in the wild performances by Wings Hauser as a psychotic detective and Debra Sandlund as Ryan O'Neal's white trash wife (and if you don't appreciate the extremities of ridiculousness this film reaches, you're probably a humorless writer for the Village Voice). It's about a thousand miles away from Maidstone, but not from the wide-ranging universe of Mailer, who even when he fails is more interesting than when most people succeed.
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer: "Wild 90" and "Beyond the Law"
& the Man
Let's get this cruel fact out of the way to make room for more substantial inquiries: Wild 90 and Beyond the Law -- the first two of legendary novelist/journalist/raconteur/would-be mayor Norman Mailer's four directorial efforts -- aren't good films. In fact, due to their technical limitations (their recorded sound is atrocious), both 1968 films might be fairly labelled disasters. Andrew Sarris once said Wild 90 wasn't the worst film he had ever seen but the worst he had ever sat all the way through. I wouldn't go as far as that (a piece of self-satisfied comformity like Eagle vs. Shark is far worse an insult to the senses), but I also wouldn't evaluate the Walter Reade, Anthology Film Archives, and the Paley Center for Media's film retrospective of all things Mailer based exclusively on quality. That's because Mailer's films are fascinating documents of a brilliant writer's uncontainable ambition to at one time become King of All Media not just through shock and irreverence, but through a serious, albeit underground and therefore marginalized, challenge to the conventions and norms of filmmaking itself.
Wild 90 and Beyond the Law combine the cinema verite of D.A. Pennebaker (who shot each of Mailer's first three films) and the improvised performances of Cassavetes while going further than both of those better filmmakers -- further because Mailer stirs up storms in front of the camera himself and further because he doesn't allow a script to provide shelter lest things run completely amok.
Wild 90 features Mailer and two friends trading insults, grunts, punches, and jokes in a Brooklyn loft while planning a heist. Beyond the Law also features Mailer as a police chief presiding over a long night of charged and sadistic interrogations. In them Mailer gives up his precise, hallucinatory prose for the unknowable contingencies of the filmmaking process in pursuit of an existential (that is, lived in the moment) exploration of the limits of human behavior. There are scenes -- and yes, they must be patiently awaited -- amidst the chaos where these films create combustive situations from which the delirious truth of a person or a character emerges. Maidstone, showing tomorrow night, is much more of an accomplishment in this sense (and a brilliant film in its own right), but in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law the seeds are planted for Mailer's goal to discover "the moment when a fantasy, which is to say a psychological reality in the mind, transcends itself and becomes a fact."
At Anthology Film Archives tonight, July 28, and July 29.
I set off on Saturday morning, a few friends in tow, to scale what Andrew Sarris had claimed to be “the Mount Everest of modern cinema.” Though it was a crisp, sunny spring afternoon, perfect for a stroll in the park, I braced myself for the first seven and a half hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 1/2-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Museum of Modern Art. It was inevitable that I would one day see it, after all, and how better to do so than to push through it and, honestly, to get it out of the way and thereby graduate to the cinephilic equivalent of Webelos?
So lesson learned, and woe to the critic who goes around talking about movies as mountains. “It is one of those hybrid cinematic works that demand immersion and endurance,” writes A.O. Scott of the film in the New York Times, “an element of punishment to sweeten the pleasure.” Except that Berlin Alexanderplatz isn’t a “hybrid cinematic work”, and whatever punishment there is in watching Berlin Alexanderplatz in two nearly eight-hour installments is pretty much self-inflicted. The grainy quality of the projected image, blown up to a (beautiful) 35mm print from a 16mm negative, offers constant reminder that, whatever its pedigree, Berlin Alexanderplatz was meant to be seen on television, as a miniseries, in installments, and I worry a bit about an art-movie culture that fetishizes “endurance” over an authentic viewing experience, likening monumental works to landscapes, waiting to be traversed by those strong, courageous, and dedicated enough to give themselves to the task.
While episodes one to seven, with a few exceptions, didn’t resonate with me as strongly as other Fassbinder films I’ve seen, I liked quite a bit of the first half of Berlin Alexanderplatz. But it certainly suffered by the method of presentation: around the sixth hour, the music became maddening; by episode three, the narrative jumps and repetitions began unnerving me; and throughout, the episodic quality of it wore me down as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, mentally segmenting the screenings into episodes, the episodes into minutes, counting down until my liberation. So my friends and I decided, some more quickly than others, to forego day two of Alexanderplatz and to catch up with it in installments in our respective living rooms. When I’m through with all 15 hours, I may well think the whole thing a masterpiece, though it’s just as likely that I’ll pronounce it “very good.” Regardless, I’ve learned to take my punishment and pleasure in small doses and to content myself with watching Berlin Alexanderplatz as it was intended to be seen, whatever other critics who climb mountains in their seats and toss down gauntlets with their pens (or keyboards) have to say about it – and I’m sure my ass, spared a second day of Titus 1, will thank me.
“Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs” is about as accurate a title as one’s likely to find heading up a retrospective of the works of the recently deceased Japanese master Shohei Imamura. A filmmaker who trained under Ozu, but whose maxim “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure” is actively woven throughout a body of work which relates to Ozu’s only in opposition, Imamura’s films are indeed populated by pimps, prostitutes and pigs, and that’s just a very small part of what’s on offer. Step into an Imamura movie and you’re likely to run across anything from an uncomfortably detailed examination of the zany home life of a two-bit pornographer, to a wife murderer establishing an unusual relationship with an eel, to a mushroom cloud morphing into the shape of a giant, molten liver, to a woman whose prodigious ejaculate brings life to flora and fauna alike. Or, on a more harrowing note—a truly devastating depiction of the physical and societal fallout from the atomic destruction of Hiroshima.
Given the company he keeps, it probably says more about me than I’d like to admit that Imamura is easily my favorite filmmaker from Japan. While having spent more time with Ozu, Kurosawa, and Naruse thanks to recent retrospectives, I’ve only been able to catch up a handful of Imamura’s movies, but each one, with their madcap blends of genre and wild tonal shifts has left an indelible impact—seeing The Eel and Dr Akagi when I did had an unquantifiable impact on how I watch movies. Less overtly intellectual than contemporary Nagisa Oshima, but no less intelligent, Imamura’s films exist in a truly unclassifiable space defined by post-war Japan, but are far from bound by it. The relative unavailability of his works here has long been a source of frustration, so thanks to the folks at BAM for putting together a comprehensive program which runs from tonight until the end of March. Our picks of the series would have to be “all of them,” but Imamura’s rare documentary A Man Vanishes has us especially excited. In the face-off between the filmmaker he once shared the Palme d’Or with up at MOMA, I’ll give a personal edge to Imamura, unless someone can point me to an instance in Kiarostami’s films where a charming young prostitute performs a bit of unspeakableness with a hardboiled egg and a piece of anatomy that Imamaura seems to take special interest in. A filmmaker who’s sorely missed (even if he did give Miike his start), here’s a golden opportunity to find out what we’ve all been missing.
A good month for Iranian cinema in New York. Not only is Jafar Panahi’s superlative Offside opening here in the beginning of March, but also thanks to the Museum of Modern Art, Abbas Kiarostami will be honored with a major retrospective, Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker. Running from March 1 to May 26, the series will encompass the director and artist's films, photography, and installations. In total, thirty-three of his films, including shorts and features, will be shown, among them, the umissable Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry, Ten and, of course, The Wind Will Carry Us.
And there will always be a special place in our hearts for Close-Up, one of the best films of the past twenty years and maybe my all-time favorite fiction-documentary hybrid. If you haven’t yet experienced this formally dazzling, utterly humane work of art, which uses the true tale of a man who claimed to be filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf as a springboard to get into all sorts of ethical, spiritual, and (duh, it’s Kiarostami) meta-cinematic debates, then don’t forego the Monday March 5 and Thursday March 15 screenings. The Number 23 can wait another day.
Film Forum’s Essentially Woody series comes to a screeching halt, leaving tire-marks (and a whiff of sulfur, courtesy of Satan himself), with 1997’s surprisingly excoriating and properly revolting Deconstructing Harry. Though its basic narrative framework initially makes it seem like another Wild Strawberries/8 1/2 retread (and thus another Another Woman/Stardust Memories, Harry is nevertheless possibly the closest cinematic approximation Woody has ever come to those caustic, slapdash humor compilations he published in the late Sixties—even more so than in his earlier anything-goes Groucho wannabes. It’s endlessly funny, but tuned to a darker channel, observant of people’s penchants for self-ruination. One year after the joyous movieness of Everyone Says I Love You, this is particularly shocking—not merely ribald, Deconstructing Harry is full of jokes spiked with pain, and they come at such a clip that a proper reaction might be to shield yourself from the nakedness.
If this is Borscht Belt comedy, it feels a lot closer to that of Don Rickles than traditional Woody—starting with Julia Louis-Dreyfus giving Richard Benjamin a “chewy” blowjob and then him giving her a rear-entry quick fuck in front of her blind grandmother, and climaxing with a literal trip to hell, overflowing with pitch-forked demons, busty naked women in pits of lava, and aluminum-siding salesmen, Harry means to bare all in its depiction of a writer named Harry Block, who has turned every single person in his life (save his young son, a sassy hooker, and a suicidal friend) against him by spinning their real miseries into comic gold on the page. While Woody has consistently denied that this film is autobiographical, there’s an essential distrust of the artistic process here, as well as a paranoia about others’ perceptions of the artist and his profession being somehow opposed to human connection, that betray any distancing effect: it’s rough stuff for any artist to admit, and there’s less self-delusion in it than in any Woody film, save Husbands and Wives.
When Block is tagged for an honorary award from his alma mater (which he was thrown out of, incidentally), he sets out on the road with his ignoble entourage, and the film weaves in and out of flashbacks of his past relationships and grievances, staged moments from his own fictional works, which often include inverted versions of people from his real-life, and some tossed-off fantastical sketch-comic asides, which include Tobey Maguire as a wannabe playboy “schmuck” visited by Death (shades of Woody’s story ‘Death Knocks’ from Getting Even, which in turn was a riff on Seventh Seal, natch), and Robin Williams’s delightfully subdued Mel, who wakes up one morning to find himself literally out of focus (the prolonged joke’s clever, poignant punchline is that he refuses to adjust himself, while his family, forced to buy prescription glasses to see him, must change themselves to fit his distortion). It’s a constant, disorienting zig zag in and out of reality, with jokes both high and incredibly low (the dyslexia-tampon comment instantly comes to mind).
Most refreshing is that Woody doesn’t make Harry out to be merely misunderstood, or at least, troubled in his personal life . . . this is a New Yorker’s tale, and this guy is a therapist’s worst nightmare, an Alvy without an Annie, a Mickey Sachs without Dianne Wiest’s Holly, funneling his depression and rage into an endless parade of hostile, self-loathing, misogynistic fiction. Those opening credits, traditional white on black, but interrupted by repeating images of Judy Davis frantically exiting a cab, foretell of a jagged, angry narrative, and the film doesn’t compromise, even as it wants us to laugh. Harry leads to a touching conclusion, marked at least by his own self-awareness, but it’s far from a traditional narrative of redemption. Curb Your Enthusiasm is kid’s stuff compared to this.
Considered a failure when it was first released as Woody Allen's first "serious" movie and widely derided as an imitation of Ingmar Bergman, Interiors is an ambiguous portrait of a familiar but rarely dramatized situation: a middle-aged father leaving his wife for another woman when his children are grown. The very American subject matter is quite far from Bergman's violent Swedish eroticism, though the off-putting, arch dialogue sometimes sounds like Ingmar. Allen sketches in the clubby alliances of a family, the on-the-surface resentments, and the longing we feel for the one family member who ignores us; all the detailed self-analysis is chillingly enclosed by Gordon Willis' "perfect" cinematography. Allen's characters here are evasive, selfish Seventies narcissists who boast of their anxiety and are forever ringing variations on, "This is a very bad time for me," or "Dammit, I have my own problems." The most memorable person in the film might be Frederick (Richard Jordan), the ultimate self-loathing, alcoholic writer harrowed by his own lack of talent and driven to write mean reviews of friend's novels out of spite. "It's been a long time since I made love to a woman that I didn't feel inferior to," says Frederick, as he attempts to get some action with his wife's pretty sister. "Or am I being tactless?" he asks, sweetly.
There are jokes in Interiors, but they're as nasty and pitch-black as the ones that dot Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry. Perhaps the best, most subtle joke is the classic moment when perfectionist Eve (Geraldine Page), bent on asphyxiation, hesitates for a moment when forced to switch to a thinner, less dramatic brand of tape as she blocks off air on her windows. Funnier yet is the way Page tries to convince her daughters how well she's doing, hilariously insisting that she has found an "inner tranquility" while trying to keep her habitual facial spasms at bay. The central thematic opposition between the wife and the other woman, which stages an inspired Actor's Studio smackdown between Geraldine Page, the twitching queen of Method neuroticism, and Maureen Stapleton, the chief proponent of earthy Method common sense, is rather hard to read. Like Gena Rowlands's later Marion in Another Woman, we're not quite sure how we're supposed to react to Page's girlish, tyrannical Eve, with her schoolgirl sulks and her thin, strangled voice. Clearly she's a cunning, even absurd lunatic who torments her family, yet her search for perfection does start to seem heroic, and it's consistently matched in the film's glacial style of cinematography.
Stapleton's bawdy, precisely observed Pearl, a "vulgarian" in a red dress, is a literal breath of fresh air at the movie's mid-point, bursting in with the likeability and vitality of Allen's early comedies. Yet we don't know quite how to take this simple, clearly uneducated woman: is she a positive, even moral force amid the film's desiccated intellectuals, or a gold-digging interloper invading a crumbling WASP stronghold? And what are we to make of a strange scene where Eve lets her hair down for once and watches a TV show where a man is interviewed about what it means to be Jewish? It's difficult to judge, finally, just why Allen wrote Interiors, and just what he was trying to say with its sometimes tidy yet often unresolved and schematic domestic drama. But it's a film that stays with you, visually and emotionally, and it acts as a bridge to his assured, complex films of the Eighties. Its key image, searingly acted by an apoplectic Page and excitingly shot by Willis, is when Eve angrily smashes some red candles in a church when her husband makes the definitive break with her—it’s as if Allen himself were awkwardly smashing forward to another part of his career as the candles come clattering to the floor and Eve huffs and puffs her way out of the church. A distant tracking shot discreetly observes her breakdown into total incoherence, a loss of words that the hyper-verbal Allen sees as a portent of death, his biggest fear, alluded to constantly in his dialogue and made manifest in Eve's eventual suicide by drowning, which Allen seems to view as courageous. Left behind is the life-affirming, food-loving, sexual Pearl, who is seen gyrating to Allen's beloved Dixieland jazz, an oddly empty earth mother who destroys art (one of Eve's vases) in her instinctive pursuit of pleasure.
A decade after his first foray into pure drama with the woefully self-conscious Interiors, and only a year removed from the awkwardly staged September, 1988’s Another Woman announced with quietly assured bravura Woody Allen’s mastery of what theretofore had alluded his directorial grasp: the psychological character study, entirely absent of humor. Initially the prospect of an Allen film sans slapstick, neurotic riffing, or charming whimsy might seem egregious, if not downright pretentious—take away the laughs and what’s left might be a platitudinous existentialism (how does man cope in a godless universe, et al) probed by insufferable academics (always WASPs in these pure dramas, all traces of Allen’s Jewishness vanishing in the Manhattan air when he foregoes the anxious relief of irony) within the stuffy confines of Upper East Side penthouses and Vermont getaways. But no. Putting aside the question of god and relegating to a relatively less important status Allen’s obsession with romantic relationships, Another Woman focuses on an individual’s dealings with the people around her—husbands, lovers, friends, family—and herself, revealing a censorious, emotionally isolated life in need of thoughtful reconsideration. It’s a well-trodden “journey of self-discovery” from cold intellectualism to warm humanism, but Allen’s generous understanding of character and the delusions that deform it yield unique findings: his sympathetic treatment (literally—Another Woman is one of the cinema’s most positive portrayals of psychoanalysis) of Gena Rowlands’s middle-aged professor pays fitting homage to personal hero Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which would later find its humorous, testosterone-fueled update in Deconstructing Harry. Here the journey is instead delicately, soberly undertaken, but no less devastatingly cathartic for all of that.
Philosophy professor Rowlands’s self-evaluation gets set in motion when, in the apartment she has rented to begin writing a book, she overhears through a grate therapy sessions taking place on the same hall. It’s the disparity between sound (the anguished confessions of Mia Farrow) and image (the expressions of reawakened sorrow and regret playing out on Rowlands’s countenance) in these scenes that demonstrate Another Woman’s two finest assets: the cinematography of the late, legendary D.P. (and, not coincidentally, Bergman’s career-long collaborator) Sven Nykvist, working with Allen for the first of four times and creating in his signature style naturalistic compositions imparting, but not overstating, interior distress; and the heartbreaking performance—perhaps, along with Sean Penn’s in Sweet and Lowdown, the most moving in any Allen film—of Rowlands. Allen gives her some of his best dramatic material to work with in Another Woman, from her regretful push-pull affair with amorous Gene Hackman, to her loveless, logical marriage to Ian Holm (“I accept your condemnation”), to painful encounters with Harris Yulin, the brother kept at arm’s length out of a sense of superiority, and former best friend Sandy Dennis, in one of those teeth-on-edge sessions of brutal honesty that Allen loves almost as much as a pithy one-liner. These and other encounters play out as memories, fantasies, and, in the one sequence where Another Woman nearly stumbles over its own feet, a dream that lead toward Rowlands’s gradual realization of her suffocating inability to feel and love even with a life of comfort, privilege, and success. If that sounds trite—and the prospect of Farrow as a pregnant symbol named Hope sounds like the absolute last straw—consider that Another Woman—out of its stylized verbiage, modest aesthetic, and glorious use of an orchestral version of Satie’s “Gymnopedies,” and despite the off-putting remoteness of its intelligentsia milieu—really must be seen to know just how effective its mode of inquiry really is. In only 82 minutes Allen develops a nuanced portrait of a lady that cinematically earns the lines from Rilke it (following Philip Roth) unapologetically quotes: “For here there is no place that will not see you . . . You must change your life.” Plays January 4 at Film Forum.
Wading in the psychosexual muck somewhere between the despairing depths of September (conspicuously, predictably absent from Film Forum’s lineup) and the kiss-and-don’t-tell roundelays of Hannah and Her Sisters and Manhattan, Woody Allen’s 1992 Husbands and Wives looks, with each passing year, more and more like the director’s one true post-Crimes and Misdemeanors masterpiece. Here, every barb, every carelessly tossed off remark stings with its full impact, whether it’s between longtime married couples, mismatched romantic newbies, or ill-advised May-December flirtations; yet Husbands and Wives never feels misanthropic, even as it was made in the death throes of the Woody-Mia relationship and released amidst their split and Mia’s devastating allegations. There’s even something conciliatory in its compellingly layered portrait of the concessions that go into a relationship, and the film feels like it’s genuinely made up of a plurality of voices; usually, Allen’s ensembles feel mostly like a stringing together of Woody surrogates, yet here he’s often giving up center stage to his costars, and letting them speak for themselves. The result feels something like a work of crosshatch art, where actions pile one on top of the next, both hiding and revealing, and characters’ words are later used against themselves—everyone’s contradictions and hypocrisies are exposed by a precise editing that pits everyone in sharp, dialectical opposition, even if they don’t know it. If you’ve only seen the film once, and especially if it was amidst the 1992 scandal, you simply have to see it again, and get ready for a revelation.
It’s difficult to think of any American film made since that has taken such a raw, off-putting approach to male-female relationships; no romantic comedy this, even with Judy Davis’s hilarious neurotic-cum-psychotic Sally often stealing the show. Yet Davis’s endless apoplectic, tactless rages (usually uncorked at inopportune moments during calm, white wine–tinged dinner dates) are but one of so many memorably excoriating moments: Sydney Pollack’s terrifying sudden switch to abusive tyrant when embarrassed by his infantile “tofu-crystals” girlfriend, Lysette Anthony; Farrow and Allen’s devastating final conversation before the split, moving between attempted reconciliation, misplaced sexual come-on,s and mutual pity, so intimate and close-to-home it feels absolutely wrong to even be watching it; and (my personal favorite, and one of the best standalone scenes Allen’s ever shot) Juliette Lewis’s star pupil in the back of the taxi cab, trying to give constructive criticism to teacher Woody’s manuscript, only to be met with condescension, screeching self-defense, and insults. Wisely, Allen keeps his camera the entire time on Lewis’s face, which shifts from defiance to incredulousness; Woody’s voice is the cruelest it’s ever been (a precursor to the self-flagellation of Deconstructing Harry), and by keeping it off-screen he enhances his character’s disconnectedness from both his own work as well as this young object of desire.
As had been often mentioned at the time of its release, Husbands and Wives was shot by Carlo DiPalma in a handheld look fairly radical for a Hollywood studio picture. Right from the beginning, with its single-take, verité style, the camera vertiginously moves around Mia and Woody’s apartment with the abandon of a housefly, trying to capture every turn and revelation as Davis and Pollack’s Sally and Jack announce their impending separation to the astonished, and in Mia’s case, horrified, other couple. Unadventurous viewers once upon a time complained of motion-sickness while watching this, though it’s doubtless, with the advent of reality TV and handheld-happy action pics, anyone would kick up much of a fuss these days; Allen’s normal method is to plunk down the camera as actors wander in and out of the frame with controlled panic, and certainly this new form of “artlessness” was another smart way to foreground technique, something he’s been bringing to American film from the very beginning.
There’s obviously a Cassavetes quality here (as noted in the title itself), which is a proper “indie” close to Woody’s studio Eighties. With Orion going bankrupt, he moved to Columbia TriStar for this and Manhattan Murder Mystery, before moving out on his own to work with the independent company Sweetland Films, with his highly contentious producing partner, Jean Doumanian. Not surprising that for the next twelve years, it was all about comedy again: this is raw stuff, bereft of crowd-pleasing moments, happy endings, or even the bittersweet wrap-ups of his earlier neurotic love stories Annie Hall and Manhattan. There’s no rapture in Husbands and Wives, only rupture. “It’s over, and we both know it,” Farrow says in quiet defiance, looking haunted, like a latter-day Rosemary Woodhouse: It’s the closest Woody Allen’s come to a horror film.
Lest we forget (but who could?), before there was Woody Allen the major filmmaker lionized in the series of blog posts below, there was, of course, Woody Allen the former stand-up man taking hesitant, awkward steps into a brand new medium. On a visual level, the early stuff isn’t pretty, and the tension between his love for the careful aesthetics of his European idols and his own rumpled comedy find no better expression than the hysterical Bergman parodies/homages in Love and Death. It’s perhaps telling that he hit his stride aesthetically following that film and hasn’t really looked back.
Working in the same budget future-shock vein as Alphaville and Je t'aime, je t'aime (it also makes a nice dystopian double bill with the terrific Children of Men), 1973’s Sleeper was Allen’s most coherent stab at a semblance of three-act narrative to date. “Semblance” is key—weighing in at 84 minutes, the film’s pretty loose and more than a little padded. But even if there may be two or three too many Keystone Kops-esque chase sequences, stretching out into a beginning, middle, and end hasn’t dulled Allen’s satire a whit. Indeed, as in Cuarón’s film (just lighter), Allen uses his future-on-five-dollars-or-less setting as an empty vessel into which he can pour a fair bit of scathing commentary about the mess that is/was the 20th Century. His vision of the future as a collection of bulbous household amenities and shoddily constructed cars isn’t too shabby, either.
Also notable in that it marks the director’s first collaboration with his longtime muse Diane Keaton (looking astonishingly lovely) Sleeper serves as a ready reminder of just how little Allen’s comedy has changed through the years—even as recently as last summer’s Scoop, the director still relies on lodged camera setups that allow him space to rant and worry at length. Conventional wisdom suggests that the late comedies (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Small Time Crooks, etc.) don’t hold up nearly as well as his earlier works, but I find it hard to really draw a distinction. All the films seem to hit a fairly consistent groaners-to-laughs ratio, and putting Woody Allen into almost any scenario (private eye, vaudeville magician, time traveler, Russian solider) is about as close as you can get to a sure bet in my book. Perhaps Dave Kehr, writing for the Chicago Reader nails Sleeper (and many of Allen’s comedies) best: “…An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a ‘movie.’ But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.”
Though it’s plainly obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a Woody Allen film, the point must still be made: in his ability to direct actors—or at least, to direct great performances—Allen has few peers in contemporary American cinema. The Essentially Woody retrospective offers more than ample evidence, packing at least a dozen great performances into three short weeks, from Mia Farrow’s fragile loveliness in The Purple Rose of Cairo through Gena Rowlands’s restrained desperation in Another Woman to Alan Alda’s riotous idiocy in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Of course, Allen can’t take all the credit, since he tends to work with exceptional performers on a regular basis, but still, it took a special talent to direct then-future Bride of Chucky, Jennifer Tilly, to an Oscar nomination, a feat he achieved with the 1994 backstage period comedy Bullets Over Broadway, which stands as one of the director’s funniest and most accomplished films of the past two decades—cleverly written, beautifully designed, and well-shot, to be sure, but a movie that truly soars on the quality of its extraordinary performances.
An ensemble piece in the truest sense of the word, Bullets Over Broadway boasts at least a half dozen inspired comic turns (in practically any other film, Jim Broadbent, Rob Reiner, and Tracey Ullman would all be the scene stealers; here, they’re amusing diversions). Still, towering above them all is Allen-mainstay Dianne Wiest as the boozy, aging Broadway star Helen Sinclair. Wiest had previously brought a wounded, human quality to films like Radio Days and Hannah and Her Sisters; here she bursts into the film, hurling a script down a flight of stairs, “You must be joking!” Wiest’s Helen is a thunderous presence, her narcissism, insecurity, and theatricality providing the center of gravity for the play within the film and the film itself. Her over-the-top bravado swept almost every supporting actress award that year (on the male side, Martin Landau, who should’ve received every award on the planet for Crimes and Misdemeanors, picked up equally well-deserved accolades for his work in Ed Wood); a decade later, I remain convinced that Wiest’s performance is one for the ages—endlessly quotable (“Don’t speak!”; “The world will open to you like an oyster. No, not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina!”), side-splittingly funny, and absolutely transfixing.
The performers have the benefit of a deft and clever screenplay, co-scripted by Allen and Douglas McGrath, which tackles serious intellectual issues (Do artists create their own moral universe? Where do an artist’s aesthetic commitments end and ethical responsibilities begin?) with a playful dexterity. Bullets Over Broadway takes an amusing enough setup—a mobster bankrolls a lousy play so his mistress, herself a lousy actress, can have her big break—and twists it into a richly textured morality play. When it first came out, many critics were quick to read Bullets Over Broadway as Allen’s mea culpa, his artistic response to the well-publicized affair that had tarnished his public reputation a few years prior. Personally, I think that’s too easy: Bullets Over Broadway may have asked the same ethical questions that were dogging Allen himself during those tumultuous years (after all, he’s always been an extremely personal filmmaker), but like his best work, it leaves the tough questions unanswered—it’s a cry of moral confusion masquerading as a titter of delight. Today at Film Forum.
When you're coming of age as a movie-watcher, and just growing aware of the idea of auteurism, or at least that there are certain filmmakers who have attained a grandeur that sets them apart from the vast landscape of movies, you also grow a steely resolve against such notions. It's difficult to jump right into an oeuvre; and tenfold if you're still just a kid. In my case, I needed a gateway film into the work of Woody Allen--growing up in a Jewish household, of course, his name had always been spoken well of, accompanied by a few chuckles, as well as a certain degree of reverence usually withheld when it came to mere comics. My first encounters with Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters didn't go over well, their mix of headiness and froth was confounding and even downright unpalatable to an undeveloped intellect such as mine; and the shenanigans of Sleeper truly boggled the mind with the film’s plus-sized sight gags, political commentary, and disregard for narrative conventions.
I needed to be eased in, and that chance came with Manhattan Murder Mystery, which not only moved along with a buoyancy that didn't preclude linear narrative; it was a new film, when I first saw it in 1993, so it had the bonus of freshness--something I could embrace as a film of my generation rather than of my parents', something that wasn’t seemingly trapped in amber (yes, Hannah was a mere seven years old, but in kid years that was an eternity). Hilarious that a film that takes as its subject the restlessness of middle-age should appeal to a kid of fourteen, but by some alchemy, Woody Allen clicked for me with Manhattan Murder Mystery--the actor/director's nebbish persona, the New York adoration, the individualized aesthetic, the film history recall. Coming right after the drenched-in-scandal Husbands and Wives surprised the mainstream movie world by employing jittery, handheld camerawork, Murder Mystery used the same shaky-cam for a completely different effect, lending the film's intricate and silly crime-caper plot a scatterbrained immediacy.
Whereas Annie Hall was totally alien to me (young neurotic love in New York City might as well have been raking pebbles on the moon), an aging couple with empty-nest syndrome spying on their neighbors had a vivacity and a tender, domestic recognition. It also helped that Diane Keaton was given front and center this time around; it's one of her most fine-tuned, joyous performances, and she's allowed to run the comical gamut, from daffy nosiness (regarding her seemingly normal little old Jewish neighbors) to marriage frustration (with her "fuddy-dud" husband, Woody's unadventurous book editor Larry) to giddy flirtation (with her best friend, Alan Alda's unmarried restaurateur wannabe) to seething jealousy (against Anjelica Huston's hotshot writer, one of Larry's star clients).
"Too much Double Indemnity," Larry warns Carol when he fears she's becoming too manic in her pursuit of her neighbor's guilt over the sudden heart-attack death of his wife--yet Allen's obviously the one doing the studying of classical Hollywood crime thrillers. Murder Mystery's got a surprisingly sturdy plot; though it moves along via wild coincidences and slapdash logic gaps, it's full of enough twists and turns and has so many virtuoso surprises up its sleeve that it could have stood on its own without having to go all mega-meta hall of mirrors-ish in that Lady from Shanghai climax. Again, there are moments you look forward to like favorite tracks of a CD: Keaton's middle-of-the-night spy session, in which an exasperated Allen unsuccessfully "forbids" her to peek on the neighbors (“I forbid you to go! Is that what you do when I'm forbidding? ? Well, if that's what you're going to do then I'm not going to be forbidding you a lot...."); Huston's backfiring ruse to trap the killer, in which the group uses an unreliable spliced-together tape to try and blackmail him over the phone ("Yes, they're keeping it refrigerated!"); Larry and Carol sneaking into a hotel after hours, checking up on a lead, only to be trapped in a dark elevator with a dead body.
It's the perfect updating of the bumbling detective, perfectly wedded to Allen's eternal fish-out-of-water persona and Keaton's game resolve. With musty memories of Murder, She Wrote, that concurrent Dick Van Dyke geriatrics-on-the-trail show, and now Monk, it seems that only Woody could make the aging-sleuths subgenre seem fresh. And it still does. It's said that Annie Hall’s origins were as a comical murder mystery itself ("Anhedonia"), and if that's the case, it seems to have been a good move to wait until these two actors hit their peak. To paraphrase Keaton's Carol, the roles fit them like an old pair of shoes ("but never comfortable," Larry adds), and this is the sort of chemistry that can only be honed over a course of many years.
Filmed in the months following V-E Day, and nebulously set sometime in the year before it, Rome Open City was Roberto Rossellini’s first attempt to grapple with the lingering effects of World War II. It is one of the director’s great rubble symphonies, forming an ad-hoc trilogy with Paisán and Germany Year Zero, which taken together explore the downfall of the European Axis in all three phases, respectively: before, during, and after. Rome Open City also boasts one of cinema history’s great legends, surrounding the circumstances of its production. Story goes that Rossellini overcame the scarcity in postwar times—what precious little film stock produced during the conflict inevitably made its way into the hands of propaganda machines, and even in postbellum days, there was scarcely any left over for commercial production—cobbled the film together using whatever leftover scraps of film he could find. The scarcity story explains why many shots are improperly exposed, and the effect of blown-out or murky cinematography supposedly lends Rome Open City the weight of documentary realism (the reasoning being shabby=truth; pretty=artifice, which when truly interrogated, emerges just as arbitrary any other of cinema’s conventions). Problem is: the legend might not true. David Forgacs’ BFI monograph on the film supposedly implodes the hardscrabble production tale by suggesting the original camera negative consisted of a few specific film stocks, not a scattershot multitude; the visual imperfections are now thought to be the result of shoddy labwork when the negative was developed.
Still, even without the myth of Rossellini as visionary laboring against and ultimately transcending his material limitations, Rome Open City is a fine work in spite of its politics, showing flashes of the aesthetic and heart-rending humanism that would find fuller and more subtle expression in his next two films. I hate to keep hammering on it, but Rossellini’s postwar stance, more forcefully felt here than anywhere, is one of queasy and staunch collaboration denial. Rome is exclusively populated by earnest, hardworking folks, perhaps guilty of petty immoralities—really, who could indict the starving mob ransacking a profiteering bakery?—but on the whole sincere, ethical, religious, and intractably defiant of the occupying force. For their part, the Nazis are decadent, immoral, and indifferent, a band of rapacious, closeted homosexuals hell-bent on torturing the daylights out of the Partisans. Rossellini’s grappling with his country’s difficult and uncomfortable Fascist legacy, and so I’m inclined to understand his blunt polarities, especially in an era when rhetorical subtlety was scarce across the board; this is not to condone Rossellini’s approach, but rather to appreciate where it comes from. Rome Open City can be seen as a necessary myth to buoy the country out of a particularly fraught period of his history (though the film was relatively unsuccessful at home in its original run). However in such storytelling, he does chip away at this marbled block of morality not with a fine chisel, but with a brutal jackhammer. (“Do you think Americans exist?” asks one dejected Roman; “It seems so,” another replies, as the camera tilts up to an apartment building whose top floors have been obliterated by Allied bombs.)
In this spirit of persecution, Rome Open City ripples with unease, as a resistance leader is rousted out of bed by a pre-dawn SS patrol. Manfredi finds his way into the refuge of his underground friends, and the story deflects slightly, onto a widowed pregnant mother on the eve of her wedding and a benevolent, rotund priest who becomes a particularly effective errand-boy for the Partisans because he’s naturally above suspicion. In absolute terms the stances each takes are verboten—particularly the out-of-wedlock kid thing—but the film is about the war’s exigent moral relativism and probing its acceptable limits. Amidst all the despair, poverty and hunger, which Rossellini depicts with relentless exactitude, petty jealousies arise, mostly in the form of Manfredi’s lover Marina who can’t get past the idea that the resistance could relegate her charms to the second tier. She exacts some shocking—yet immediately regretted—revenge, and it occurs to me that though Rome Open City is hailed as the father of neorealism (nonprofessional actors, location shooting, etc. being among its most readily assimilated traits), the emotional excesses and machinations of its characters make the film play more like melodrama. It all ends badly of course, during which Rossellini unleashes a handful of breathless sub-human atrocities made all the more potent by their simple execution. Show me someone who isn’t shattered by a Nazi moll stripping the overcoat off a prostrate Mariana overcome with grief, or a cadre of kids marching downhill to face another day of Rome strewn with ruins, and you’ll find someone who’s insensible to sunlight, air, puppy dogs, and ice cream.
If Paisan is a balm to soothe the pains of war, then Germany Year Zero (1947) is its verso: the festering scab that refuses to heal. Indeed, all of Berlin is one great open wound, with most buildings and recognizable landmarks reduced to rubble by the Allied forces’ nightly bombing campaigns; the few left standing are charred skeletons barely hospitable for human habitations. This is un-monumental Berlin captured unlaquered at its very nadir, a post-WWII ground zero before the term took on its American connotation, a country starting from square one (or year zero) after Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich fell 988 years short of its murderous proclamations. Humanity leaks out from gaps in the rubble, where folks eke out a ration-book bolstered existence, with five families routinely squeezed into an apartment that can comfortably hold just one. With a sickly father unable to work and a brother afraid register for fear of reprisal (his regiment fighting to the last as the city fell, Karl-Heinz must have done some seriously gruesome shit), the breadwinning falls to twelve-year-old Edmund. Wandering the hardscrabble streets, Edmund becomes privy to all the petty black-market stratagems deployed by the packs of apparently children wandering about like wild dogs and sleeping out-of-doors. He also learns (but does he fully understand the ideology?) that der Fuhrer’s ethos still thrives in the city’s alleyways and blind corners. In one of the film’s creepiest interactions, a schoolteacher and sometime Hitler Youth-recruiter trying to pawn off vinyl recordings of Hitler’s speeches on the black market, with kids serving as go-betweens. While weaselling into his business proposition, the teacher sits Edmund on his lap, and begins stroking his face and neck like a covetous pederast. Literally, and figuratively the moral order has crashed down with the city’s edifices, and clearly, there are things worse than hunger and despair still lurking in Berlin.
Playing the speech on a portable gramophone for a pair of interested soldiers, the sound emanates louder than it ought to be. We cut away to broken streets as Hitler proudly trumpets the inevitability of his victory, his words rebounding emptily off bare walls. Though Rossellini claims a desire to observe only, and not to indict, with the unrelentingly bleak spectacle he presents, it’s hard not to rage and storm against the German military. But they’re not the only ones guilty of some pretty ugly transgressions. American soldiers tour the site where Hitler and von Braun immolated themselves as if it were just another photo-op, and the French—Tommies, as they are derisively known—indulge in Cognac and cigarettes when most have barely enough to eat. Wealthy Germans too swindle their own kind; Edmund is taken by portly a man in a town car, who trades the scale Edmund’s trying to hawk for two tins of meat. (Noticeably absent is the Italian presence; if there’s one disturbing element to this and Paisan, it’s Rossellini’s refusal to satisfactorily interrogate his country’s own complicity and Fascist legacy.) Against all this, there’s the morbid mathematics of food supply and the elderly on their deathbeds—that awful calculus between saving one life versus the many. It leads to an impossible, absolutely devastating decision and not one, but two deaths—a murder and a suicide—which could be taken as sinking into a nihilistic morass, or reaching some kind of sorrowful transcendence. (I’m inclined to align with the former; after Edmund plainly and simply jumps to his death, which just ripped my heart out again, as it did when I first saw it at college, the camera tilts up to capture a tram trundling by, an avatar of a world that keeps on spinning, heedless of peoples’ pain.)
Rossellini’s act of filmmaking, unfettered and in the streets, is nearly unimaginable in a modern controlled-media context where caskets of fallen soldiers coming back from Iraq are the great black hole, the one slice of morbid pageantry censored from the public eye; it’s nothing short of revolution (or at least, it should have been taken that way) given the epoch-shaking schism that the war was for Europe and its citizenry. Representing the physical, awful fact of being in a world rent asunder and giving no quarter, irrespective of the cries of “Too soon! Too soon!” is just an astonishing process. The film is also remarkable for its awareness of history transpiring at this very moment. As Edmund’s father decries how he once soldiered on as part of the Nazi war machine, the camera fixes its gaze on Edmund the entire time, making manifest who will bear the eventual and lasting brunt of his transgressions. So Rossellini doesn’t let Germany off the hook, but he’s magnanimous enough to understand that real people were (and are) suffering real torment in the war’s aftermath, irrespective of nationality, ideology, or any of the other roadblocks thrown in the way of people connecting with each other. For that reason, Germany Year Zero is the most sublimely empathic vision ever committed to the screen.
With a sparkly new symposium on the books, Oscar-bait movies starting to stir and quake their creaky limbs, and Rivette looming out in Queens, something had to spill over from the RS main site. It’s no small news that the Museum of Modern Art is putting up this season’s other great retrospective of an ill-seen European master, proffering up as much Roberto Rossellini as can be comfortably stomached through to the end of the December. The hope is that I’ll post here about Rossellini over the coming weeks, subject to the vagaries of slobbering Gotham film obsession (I was, for instance, shut out of MoMA’s opening night Rome Open City because of schlubs willing to line up for tickets at 10am. Something about the world’s hottest 54 year old. Perhaps Isabella.) As such, this journal will not unfold chronologically, but in the order I see the films.
I’d rather not recycle the established wisdom on Rossellini and then pass it off as my own, so head on over to the Times, where Manohla Dargis has written an elegant introduction to the director (registration required). As cnw mused, it’s a fine piece, not merely because she’s surveyed the biographical-sociological-aesthetic currents of Rossellini’s work in a way that doesn’t feel reductive. If I may add something to Dargis, it’s from a more modern context: though he may have fallen out of favour, without Rossellini, we simply wouldn’t have many of the cinema’s current realist traditions, from Mike Leigh through to the brothers Dardennes. So put that alongside the other thoughts of life caught unawares, exigencies of reality, etc. etc. With that in mind, on with the more subjective thoughts.
Paisan (1946) was Rossellini’s postwar omnibus project, an amalgam of six vignettes directed by Rossellini, for which he solicited scenarios from the likes of Sergio Amidei, Klauss Mann, and most notably, Frederico Fellini (though the credits are so poorly laid out, I could not tell who was responsible for each). It’s a military travelogue through, following Allied (mainly American) soldiers during six particularly notable stops along the 1943 invasion of Italy as they eventually wrested the country from Fascist control. Moving from Sicily to Naples to Rome, then onto Florence, and the north, the characters have nothing to connect one another save for the inexorable tide of liberating troops marching across the landscape. After the pessimism of Rome Open City is a film primarily of healing, an expression of regeneration and hope now that the long nightmare has come to an end—yet tempered by the legacy of rampant material and social destruction. Rossellini and cinematographer deploy a familiar trope of discreet, respectful observation to capture life unvarnished, and also in media res, with scenes usually ending as abruptly as they began, with closure as frequently as without. Romantic entanglements are left dangling because of military duty, and characters are left dangling, trying to cope with the weight of what they’ve just seen.
Each vignette is prefaced by a Voice of God narration talking over a map showing the advancing tide of invasion, which then frequently stock war footage of rolling American tanks, and troops liberating various cities. Lending a note not just of realism, and of documentary veracity (though we should always be wary of asserting propaganda footage as truth), Rossellini deploys these traditions against his dramatic scenes also to suggest their inadequacies. The preface footage may be accurate in its delineation of times, and places, but they are ill-equipped to convey the depth of the fractured zeitgeist, which is the director’s project.
In the first few sketches, we get the expected repertoire of devices (I’d seen both Rome Open City and Germany Year Zero a few years back)—rubble, aimless children, poverty, etc.—which in Rome, are oddly filtered, through a sense of optimism: life may have been bad before, but seems to be getting better now in the rosy glow of Fascism newly-banished. It’s momentarily unsettling in light of the dourness of the two works that bookend Paisan. Six months later however, those feelings are banished: one sketch addresses the disenfranchisement that happens with the passage of time, highlighting the divide between initial concord with the Americans and half a year removed when old, petty jealousies once put aside begin to resurface, because complacency can allow them to. Beautifully-executed revelations abound: an American MP in Naples, bristling when he finally catches the kid that stole his boots one drunken evening, suddenly softens once he learns that the kid lives, along with countless other families, in a mossy catacomb; a nurse and her friend running trying to cross into occupied Florence, run though the Uffizi, whose treasures are packed in crates; a Catholic military chaplain, treasures the generosity and open-mindedness of the monks offering him shelter up, until they (the monks) go into an tizzy over the “fallen souls” of his Protestant and Jewish compatriots, and try, subtly, to evangelize them. The dawning of social responsibility, personal peril, and cultural differences, respectively, resound with heft and warmth. The last tale is a nightmare of swamp-dwelling partisans (the Italian underground/soldiers working with the Allies against the Axis) brutally massacred near the northern border, and brings a crashing sobriety to the affair. It begins with a dead Partisan stuck through a life saver, floating in the river with a placard scrawling out his crime. Mid-story, the poor man is buried, with the placard serving as his tombstone: Rossellini is fiercely proud of these men who courted certain death to fight an absolute evil. Once can appreciate that pride, but Rossellini doesn’t attend well to a more unpleasant side of the equation: he doesn’t explore the uncomfortable fact of Fascist sympathizers, which is rather like leaving out slave-owners in a tale of the Underground Railroad. The Fascist sympathizers are a structuring absence, their presence experienced mainly through gunshots and puffs of smoke in a Florence street standoff—and only two are ever seen in closeup.
It’s the only qualification I can muster in a film that seeks to represent the variety of experience—military, civilian, medical, religious, rebel, etc.—near the end of World War II, and does it wonderfully.
