“I can’t imagine that Jean-Claude Brisseau will find himself among the critically coddled members of the art-house canon, or that his American premieres will someday be greeted with polite, eager reviews in hip city papers,” wrote Reverse Shot’s Nick Pinkerton in his assessment of 2005’s Secret Things. And while Nick—whose stalwart advocacy for this perviest of all contemporary French directors (edging out countryman Benoît Jacquot by several hairs) inspired me to look through his back catalogue—is probably right, there’s something to be said for the fact that Brisseau’s À l’aventure is being showcased in the Film Comment Selects programme alongside such art movies of the moment as Gotz Spiellman’s Revanche and Philippe Garel’s Frontier of Dawn.
Given its pedigree, it’s surprising that The Panic in Needle Park has been so overlooked in the decades since its 1971 release. Director Jerry Schatzberg has enjoyed a modest career as a filmmaker (other films include Scarecrow, the heralded but largely unknown Puzzle of a Downfall Child, and the Willie Nelson vehicle Honeysuckle Rose), but his work as a photographer is widely recognized and includes the iconic cover shot of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. First couple of hard-nosed sophistication Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne adapted the script from a novel by James Mills, and Dominick Dunne (of Vanity Fair fame) produced. The young, electric, and untested lead, Al Pacino, turned out to be the biggest star of the project—a year later, he’d enter the annals of cinematic superstardom as Michael Corleone. Legend has it that the producers of The Godfather wouldn’t greenlight his casting until Coppola screened Panic for them. Even so, the film itself—a portrait of two junkies in love—largely faded from memory, but it proves well worth revisiting.
As evidenced by Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima and Steven Soderbergh’s separable diptych Che, paired feature films have recently become common occurrences. But, as usual, Jean-Luc Godard was there first, and long before. Produced at the same time as Two or Three Things I Know About Her (literally—Two or Three Things was shot in the mornings and its counterpart in the afternoons), Godard’s 1966 Made in U.S.A. serves as a sort of cinematic B-side to the far more canonical former film, a playful, yet ominous, inversion of its companion piece’s Lego block¬–colored realism—Godard even suggested, in the spirit of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, that the two films be projected together in alternated reels. Two or Three Things gets the good stuff, the philosophic, sociological, and semiotic highlights—haunting voice-over musings on being and nothingness, investigations into economic and spiritual prostitution, Bouvard and Pécuchet-style/Dadaist book excerpt mishmashes—while Made in U.S.A. takes up generic experimentation and allusion, the kind of through-the-looking-glass venture into the subversive possibilities of Hollywood B-movies that Godard, on the cusp of his political allegiance to Marxist anti-commercial filmmaking, was just beginning to lose interest in. Needless to say, it’s a qualitative imbalance to the often-confused Made in U.S.A.’s considerable disadvantage.
Gravitating toward Two or Three Things has long been the common-sense bet for the critic, an act of favoritism helped by Godard himself, who wrote in May 1967, just after the release of that film a few months following Made in U.S.A., “Two or Three Things I Know About Her is much more ambitious (than Made in U.S.A.), both on the documentary level, since it is about the replanning of the Parisian area, and on the level of pure research, since it is a film in which I am continually asking myself what I’m doing.”
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
—Cassius in Julius Caesar
“Now, in our own words, why did Cassius refer to Julius Caesar as a Colossus?”
—Ed Avery in Bigger than Life
Ed Avery’s question, asked of one of his students at the beginning of the second act of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 film Bigger than Life, is one that may well be asked of Ray himself: Why did Ray refer to Ed Avery—male schoolmarm, beloved husband and father, and soon-to-be cortisone addict—as a Colossus? To stir up trouble: this would seem to be the answer to both questions, or at least that’s the usual point of view in the latter case. Most critics writing about Ray’s film point to its subversive elements, its incisive critique of 1950s America, keeping up with the Joneses, and slavish consumerism. Avery is an underling, dull by his own admission, and yet his aspirations to a better life—of getting away to one of the many exotic locales framed in the interior of his drab, suburban home; of meeting the standards of affluence even if it means secretly taking a second job as a taxi dispatcher—suggest a man desirous of mastering his fate. Cortisone seems to offer Avery the stance of a Colossus, as does Ray’s low-angle framing, if at the expense of the safety of Lou and Richie, his wife and son.
But if subversion and trouble are in Ray’s arsenal in Bigger than Life, to what ends? Critical readings tend to differ on the precise thrust of Ray’s critique of middle-class America: Is it that Avery’s addiction exacerbates a perversely conservative Fifties mentality, one stressing “the good old virtues of hard work and self-discipline and a sense of duty,” into self-destructive megalomania? Or is it the catalyst he needs to break through the repressive environment of home and society in order to control his destiny? In short, is Avery right, or does Ray at least want us to think so?
As those little white flakes of instant nostalgia and poignancy blow through New York City the weekend before both Chanukah and that other winter holiday, Anthology Film Archives offers—only half-intentionally, I presume—avant-garde cheer for Jews and gentiles alike. The annual solstice showing of Joseph Cornell shorts covers the Christmas front with the appropriately initialed surrealist’s toys-in-the-attic found footage chronicles of childlike wonder and whimsy and also originally shot (with the help of Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt) documents of ephemeral 50s NYC, from the Third Avenue El to an old world Mulberry Street. It’s snow globe cinema I’d write about in length if I hadn’t already: Learn more.
So, yes, Cornell = Christmas. But did Anthology realize it was giving a shout-out to the Festival of Lights by capping an extraordinary year for Ken Jacobs (whose Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World is one of 2008’s best) with a well-timed celebration of the work of one of the Chosen People’s greatest cinematic representatives? Starting tonight there will be a two day screening of a quartet of updated and compiled Jacobs, including Blonde Cobra and The Whirled, the two with which I’m familiar. Neither are “new,” but then rarely are Jacobs’ films new to begin with. Blonde Cobra can be seen in a restored 35mm blow-up of the original 16mm print, but the thing was a salvage job in the first place, with “composer” Jacobs performing a rescue mission from 1959 to 1963 of original color and black and white footage Bob Fleischner shot of legendary underground troubadour and Flaming Creatures director Jack Smith, thus transforming it into one of the great avant-garde freak-outs. Cobra is what Parker Tyler would call a “pad” “philm” (the latter Jacobs’ designation), with the action more or less consisting of the irrepressible Smith (and others, including Jack Sims) cavorting in a bathtub, kissing his mirrored reflection, and donning white face and drag as “Madame Nescience” before dressing as a gangster to enact a stabbing.
Such playtime would only be as fun as one’s appreciation of Smith if it weren’t for the intervention of Jacobs, who abandons visuality altogether with long, black leader passages that flicker on during soundtrack recordings of bizarre Smith monologues and even, at one point, “turns off” the soundtrack in favor of in-theater sound provided by the management’s boom box radio (making every “performance” of Cobra unique). The mania of Smith needed a channel, and Jacobs is that channel, at moments giving full reign to Smith’s psychosexual nightmares (“I burnt the little boy’s penis with a match” Smith’s warbled tenor intones as maudlin music buoys the sentiment) and at moments counterpointing Smith’s flamboyance with editorial commentary (a haunting silence accompanies a series of close-ups of Smith half-handsome/half-childlike countenance just before a typical gallows humor JS voice-over: “Horoscope: I think you’d be better off dead”)
Over the course of several decades Jacobs’ project, whether in the form of found footage films or Nervous Magic Lantern flicker projections, has been to unleash or reveal the hidden, usually Thanatotic stories threading through popular culture. His magnum opus in this regard is Star Spangled to Death—a sort of American avant-garde Histoire(s) du Cinema that’s been continually edited for fifty years—but one can see Jacobs’ sensibility applied to Cobra, one of his first efforts. Smith’s natural proclivity for both despair and the absurd (“Why shave, when I can’t even find a reason for living”) was a perfect foil for Jacobs, the kind of filmmaker who genuinely loved seeing images of Smith joined to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” even though his idea of “the whole thing” is much more morbid than the song’s intended meaning. Sensing his subject’s death-obsessed wildness (Smith would eventually alienate himself from most of his friends, including Jacobs, and live a dissolute lifestyle before dying of AIDS in 1989), Jacobs structures the film to become itself constantly in danger of self-destructing. Never truly conceived, never quite pulled together (image and sound separating and colliding like reckless bumper cars), Blonde Cobra is a marvel falling apart at the seams, chaotic, uncaged and announcing a personal apocalypse from the top of a marauded junkyard.
The Whirled groups four failed projects, including a recording of a 1963 guessing game TV quiz show on which Jacobs appeared (! and with Carolee Schneeman!) presenting a moment of his Smith-starring romp Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (also compiled in The Whirled). But the highlight (once one gets over the utter strangeness of that occurrence) is the outtake from Death of P’town, “one last stab at friendship and filmmaking in Provincetown, Summer ‘61” between Smith and Jacobs that takes place, appropriately enough, in a graveyard with the former playing the “Fairy Vampire,” wielding a skull club with stones. It might not exactly provide holiday warmth, but “should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Blonde Cobra and The Whirled play tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives.
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