KINO SLANG

2012-01-25T21:54:00.000-08:00

"I grew up in a small town hidden from the outside world, and the films from the '40s and '50s were like a window into the future, like classic literature, and had great meaning. It's hard to explain that, especially in this age of narcissism and self-surveillance. A lot of people wouldn't know they are alive unless they have photos of themselves to prove it — from the cradle to the grave, actually. The movies that we grew up watching seemed to be tuned to a higher vibration. They weren't about us, they were about people bigger than us, living more on the edge than us — strange morality tales, more like Greek theater. Individuals overcame problems instead of merely surviving them, so you knew you could do that too. The people we saw on the screen were more real than real people. They were exemplary. Cult figures. Heroes and heroines. Anti-heroes. Top of the world. Brute force. Themes of salvation. Echoes of Shakespeare and of Aeschylus. Those films had a powerful effect on all of us who grew up with them. Like schoolboy lessons. Sure, I see a relationship. There's always been a relationship."

— Bob Dylan, 2012 (here. Thanks to Craig Keller for hoisting this one up first.)

2012-01-02T23:42:00.000-08:00

2011-12-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

2011-11-26T22:39:00.000-08:00

"At the risk of being a bit pompous, political cinema is the one that ends with saying: 'Sickle and hamer, cannons, cannons, dynamite!'

This is where we're at, there are no alternatives, we shouldn't be afraid of saying this. But when it happens, it will be very costly. "

2011-11-18T15:48:00.000-08:00

Another fine translation by friend of Kino Slang Ted Fendt on the films of Huillet and Straub; this time a phenomenal talk by Jacques Rancière, mainly on WORKERS, PEASANTS... in full HERE -

The people always recite texts that talk about community, power, people, property, classes, the shared world, communism.

(...)

It’s the idea of a people’s theater. The people are both in the audience and on stage. There is a similarity between theater and democratic assembly.

(...)

There again, it’s particularly striking in Workers, Peasants where, precisely, the community is not in the past: these are stories and yet one could say that everything is in the present, one could say that the community remains in the present in the text that talks about it.

(...)

Comolli tells the story (a utopian community of Italians in Brazil), we see people leave, we witness their misfortunes, their contradictions, and we see, finally, how this crumbles. And that is what the Straubs absolutely refuse. In their films, the community may be done with, but it is always there and it will always be there. It’s like kinds of visible blocks of intensity that are always present and always in the present.

(...)

we are no longer in the dissociation between words and the visible but rather in the relationship between equality itself in the visible – that is there, this stays, this continues – and speech, both dramatic and lyric. By dramatic speech, I mean words exchanged by characters in conversation. The construction of Workers, Peasants is remarkable from this point of view. Groups oppose one another: workers and peasants, leaders and masses, men and women... Each speaks in turn, lays out his or her problem. Each is in his own shot – it is very rare in the Straubs’ films that partners in an exchange are in the same shot; when they are, it’s generally from behind. Each one reads his text or looks at it or looks in front of him in an undetermined direction. None of the characters look at those that they are talking to. It’s like a kind of absolutizing of words, it’s as if everything was in the words.

(...)

This communist people exists. It exists in its own division and, at its core, by its capacity to affirm the division.

(...)

Thus to declare is the occasion to demonstrate a communist ability, to begin by an ability to speak.

At this moment, communism becomes an intensity, a degree of intensity of perceptible experiences.

(...)

And the prosecutor and the partisans explain to the others that they are rather backward: together, they form the tribunal of history.

(...)

Likewise, when the one who I’m calling the prosecutor explains these rules to them, it is a speech worse than a legal speech, and he delivers it with a wild look and a ventriloquist's manner of talking, which makes what should be a brief statement become a funeral dirge, so that the dialectician clearly refutes himself.

(...)

on one side, there are workers and what one could call the soviet ideology that wants to put nature to use, to make roads, to transform it and so on, and to order total mobilization, and, on the other side, one finds peasants, those who agree on the time of germination, of waiting, of the harvest, of rest, of respect for the earth. That is the first aspect. Next, there is nature, which is before speech, and which eventually gives up its place and its power to speech. It’s what is there, what is always there without reason, before all reason, and what does not stop acting, reproducing itself and altering itself at the same time. From which comes the importance of the continual agitation while the men and women are talking: nature doesn’t stop moving. These are insect noises, bird songs, the effects of light on the plants, the trees, on the moss-covered rocks and the dead leaves... The activity of this undomesticated nature is constant. You’ll note that we’re talking about a peasant community but that at no time do we see it in the shot, for example: this is clearly voluntary. The partner is the wild nature, the ravine, undomesticated nature; and, after all, communism, for the Straubs, in this last part of their work, must necessarily be linked to a nature without rhyme or reason.

There is also a dispositive that pronounces a rupture with the idea of nature that accompanied Marxism for a long time: nature as transformable material that man must model in his image and the idea of history as the humanization of nature. One could say that, now, the Straubs’ politics and mise en scène stands up for a certain inhumanity of nature. Nature is like a continual power and rumble that limits humans.

(...)

We move to a peasant or ecological communism, opposed to a communism of Soviet engineers. After all, this nature has no pastoral qualities. It is an ancient nature: a play of forces, a play of conflicting elements

(...)

the film is always in the present tense

(...)

– fire, not electricity –

World War II

2011-11-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

2011-10-12T00:02:00.001-07:00

A review of

A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma
Emilie Bickerton
160 pages
ISBN: 9781844677603
August 2009

by Bill Krohn

CAHIERS FOR DUMMIES

In which the reviewer ponders the role of taste in writing History

Emilie Bickerton, a young cultural journalist who is on the editorial board of England's venerable New Left Review, has written A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma as a follow-up to an article she published in NLR two years ago, "Adieu to Cahiers: Life Cycle of a Film Journal." Her book not only restates the main polemical point of her article (that the Cahiers is dead as a doornail) but reproduces several passages from it virtually intact. (1)

As someone who has been writing for the Cahiers during the thirty-year period that Bickerton judges to have been one of steep decline, I'd better limit myself to quoting her thesis and saying that I don't agree.

"What followed [the departure of Serge Daney in 1980] was a period of protracted death for the review: its once dereglante or troublemaking presence became a mouthpiece for the market, bound within the covers of a standard monthly glossy….There were of course some peaks in the otherwise constant trough: good writers penning interesting articles, a number of fresh, imaginative editors coming on board. But none had any sway over the general direction [established and maintained after Daney's departure by Serge Toubiana] to reposition Cahiers at the centre of the film industry."

Even if I were the right person to do it, there's no point in trying to disprove a negative judgment that is accompanied by that kind of blanket disclaimer, since any counter-examples I might cite could be dismissed as exceptions that test the rule.

Instead of quarrelling with the historian's taste in film criticism, I'll focus on the main question: how good is this Short History of Cahiers du cinéma — meaning not only how accurate and reliable, but how well does it do the job a historian is supposed to do? Taste in film will nonetheless have to figure in the discussion, because we are talking about the history of taste.

The book gets off to a good start and holds up pretty well through the first half, where the author is deftly stitching together secondary sources, many in English. An online critic of the original article (see footnote 1) wrote at the time that it "provides very little insight and information that can't be easily found in all the standard English academic publications on the French New Wave and Cahiers legacy," and while the same could be said of the first half of the book, the historian is on firm ground here with scholars like Richard Abel to rely on.

But that useful summary of the history of French film culture before the advent of the Cahiers is already being undermined by remarks like the following, made parenthetically while chronicling the demise of the Popular Front's cineclub, Ciné-Liberté, as a force in film culture:

"Ciné-Liberté's lifespan was no longer than the popular front. An over-budget La Marseillaise — Renoir's sympathetic but light history of the storming of the Bastille — sounded its death knell in 1938."

There is no accounting for taste, and the historian has every right to consider La Marseillaise "sympathetic" (which is being used here, I’m afraid, with its French meaning: "pleasant and likeable") but "light," although she shouldn't describe it as a film about the storming of the Bastille when that event occurs before the film begins. What seems to me more serious is the fact that "sympathique mais leger" is not a judgment that would ever have appeared in the pages of the Cahiers du cinéma.

Bickerton's passing comment on La Marseillaise would be more at home in the article on the Popular Front written by the Italian communist critic Goffredo Fofi in 1966 and reprinted in the British film magazine Screen in Winter/Spring 1972:

"This updating of the Revolution is a sweetening, a castration. The film is the product of these contradictions [the contradictions of the Popular Front] and of this approach: confused, tired, good-natured, sometimes insipid."

While La Marseillaise has no doubt been dismissed this conclusively elsewhere, that judgment would always have to come down to the visceral conviction, which Bickerton appears to share, that this is not how the history of the French Revolution should be filmed. But no historian who feels that way about La Marseillaise can be expected to understand the role played in the history of the Cahiers by this particular film, from the 50s to the present.

Bazin, of course, loved La Marseillaise, and so did Truffaut, who started Mississippi Mermaid with Renoir's depiction of the reconciliation between the revolutionary troops and the Swiss Guard during the taking of the Tuileries. Two years earlier, when La Marseillaise was re-released on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, Michel Delahaye and Jean Narboni, a future editor-in-chief who already had strong political convictions, had interviewed Renoir about it, and Jean-Louis Comolli, Narboni's future co-editor, had written a piece about the film where he claimed that it was better than Rules of the Game. Nine years after Mississippi Mermaid, and after the Maoist period of the Cahiers had ended, Comolli reiterated the magazine's position on La Marseillaise in one of a series of articles by various hands about how to film History. In another of those Pascal Kané favorably compared Renoir's Brechtian use of the scene where Louis XVI discovers tomatoes, which had been cited with pride by the director himself in a 1957 interview with Truffaut and Rivette, to the voyeuristic way Pasolini had filmed the past in his Trilogy of Life. And when Thierry Jousse and Frederic Strauss invited Cahiers critics and a number of filmmakers to write about "Tout Renoir" on the occasion of the big retrospective at the Cinématheque in 1994, New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rozier wrote his own tribute to La Marseillaise, where he skewered as ham-fisted and irrelevant the political positions adopted by critics to view the film in 1938 (referring to a dossier that had been published in La revue du cinéma: Image et Son with the help of Truffaut and Janine Bazin) before evoking some of its sounds and images to show that this film maudit (his description) is in fact "a great Renoir film." In other words, this "lightweight" Renoir has not been a passing fancy for the Cahiers. It is a strand of our DNA.

This raises a methodological question. Should a historian undertake to write the history of a magazine that has been a tastemaker as well as a source of esthetic theories if she doesn't share the magazine's tastes? Doesn't the author at least have a responsibility to declare, so to speak, an esthetic interest, by saying where her own judgments are coming from? Because esthetic assumptions bring other assumptions in their train, as Bickerton well understands — hence the brisk overview of French politics and culture that introduces her history of the magazine.

At times Bickerton's lapses of taste look like something worse: its total absence. Alfred Hitchcock's name is cited frequently in the book, almost always coupled with the name of Howard Hawks, but never to any purpose — the Dioscuri of auteur heaven are just signposts along a route that is being constructed out of something other than appreciation of their films, much less of what has been written about them. One encounters few names from the classical period of Hollywood cinema besides the cliché pairing of Hitchcock and Hawks, and when a different name does come up, the author's comments aren't reassuring. No one writing for the Cahiers would refer contemptuously to "Vincente Minnelli's pap Technicolor biopic of Van Gogh, Lust for Life" — at least after the departure of Bazin, whose reproving opinion (which was more politely stated) Bickerton cites in support of her own. (2)

Leaping ahead to the aftermath of the "Red Years," why is Marguerite Duras absent from this Short History? Although they're hard to see today, her films were once mentioned in the same breath as those of Godard and the Straubs, who formed the Trinity (to extend Bickerton's habitual religious metaphor) that served as the editors' touchstone after emerging from the Maoist phase — like Godard, Duras even edited her own issue of the Cahiers. But at the end of a lukewarm article Bickerton wrote about Duras' war memoirs for The Times Literary Supplement, she reveals that she prefers Simone de Beauvoir.

In the overly internalized world of Duras, she writes, "reality and how that reality is experienced become two distinct things. In Beauvoir’s work, the two remain soldered together …. In La Femme brisée (1967), for example, Monique is alone at her dining table: her husband has left her and her children have married. She stares at her abyss: the non-life she created, where she put everything into existing for others. But there is a sense of a beginning here: 'I’m scared', she says, as an introduction to what she might now begin to initiate."

Let's hope Monique hops in her car and drives like mad to Rock Hudson's farm to tell him that she loves him rather than continuing to stare at that abyss, into which Duras' Vice-Consul vanishes, howling with despair, at the end of the film version of India Song, joining the invisible beggar whose offscreen voice represents (according Pascal Bonitzer) the Durasian notion of an Other that is completely Other: "a class of violence" that includes not only mad Vice-Consuls but the bored bourgeois women in Nathalie Granger. "These couplings can only provoke laughter from serious people," Bonitzer says in his article on India Song, "and in fact they compose a class that's strictly for laughs, the class of lepers, beggars and vice-consuls."

Bickerton's TLS piece on Duras, which firmly situates its author on the side of serious people, at least declares an esthetic interest: a preference for a certain kind of fiction, which would probably lead to a preference for certain kinds of films. Hence, I assume, Duras' absence from the book. By the same token, the fact that Jerry Lewis is never mentioned in this Short History, which seems refreshing at first glance given the reflexive way his name is always linked with the Cahiers, raises an unnerving question when one starts noticing other discreet omissions and sweeping dismissals: doesn't she like him either? But how can someone write a history, however brief, of the Cahiers du cinéma who doesn't understand the importance of Jerry Lewis — and of La Marseillaise — to that history?

In which the reviewer discerns a resemblance between History and a roast turkey

Here is one more outright slam, which illustrates the havoc wreaked by lapses of taste in this Short History:

"[F]or all the eulogies that have subsequently been devoted to the New Wave, the movement was brief, over by 1965. Its influence was absolutely definitive, but the work itself was insubstantial."

The "insubstantial" work in question includes Breathless, Le petit soldat, A Woman's a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Les carabiniers, Le mepris, Une femme mariée, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, The Four Hundred Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, The Soft Skin, Fahrenheit 451, Paris nous appartient, La religieuse, Le Beau Serge, Les cousins, Les Godelureaux and Le Signe du Lion.

Bickerton's flip assertion covers so many highly regarded films that its audacity rather takes one's breath away, which is presumably the point. Even so, the stunning arbitrariness of the judgment — which the historian makes no attempt to justify, quite unlike the Cahiers critics she admires: Rivette, she says, practiced "a style of criticism always conscious of the spectator he had to convince" — doesn't blot out the added arbitrariness of the assertion that the movement that produced them was "over in 1965." After all, Eric Rohmer had only made one feature by 1965, and his colleagues would continue making films long after that date, but Bickerton neither explains nor justifies her cut-off date, which accidentally reads Rohmer out of the New Wave. That brings us to a second question about how to write history.

Apart from its shock value, the stern judgment on the New Wave serves to introduce an assertion about the magazine: "The ideas developed at Cahiers during its first ten years also faced the challenge of moving on from its first success to grasp a transformed cinematic landscape in the sixties" — presumably starting in 1965, which is also when the magazine got its first new look (in November of 1964, to be precise). Unfortunately, when one begins to understand the historical method behind this book, that articulation of a new cover "look" with a date that otherwise seems to have been picked out of a hat cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence. Yet this is the historian's first attempt to articulate the story she's telling into a series of periods. They will always be introduced with an air of crisis, because History (according to an unstated historiographic assumption) can only be articulated as a series of ruptures.

Cutting up History into its constituent pieces is like cutting up a turkey: if you find the natural articulations, the result is delectable; if you miss them, you end up with something that looks like it fell out of Jeff Goldblum's telepod in The Fly, and that is what has happened to the Cahiers in this Short History. The result may appear sturdier than it is because a few other kinds of articulation are thrown in for reinforcement. La politique des couvertures can always be counted on, as can Politics with a big P and the Great Man theory: Bazin dies and is replaced by Rohmer, who is replaced by Rivette, who is replaced by Narboni and Comolli, who are replaced by Daney and Serge Toubiana. Then Daney leaves and History stops, although there have actually been six editors-in-chief (a role Toubiana didn't assume for long) since Daney, if one includes the very short reign of Laurent Roth.

But while Bickerton presumably knows that chronologies of dates and names and changing "looks" are not how one writes this kind of history, the articulations she selects to carve up the years between the late sixties and the present are false ones that simply can't do what they are supposed to do: the death of the auteur and the death of mise-en-scene, which we're told happened simultaneously, followed after the "Red Period" by the return of Hollywood (the Big Sellout) and the triumph of television, or more recently the introduction of digital technology in filmmaking, which the book tends to conflate with the effects of tv, a much older innovation. These ideas can't be used to articulate a history of the Cahiers du cinéma because they are phantoms conjured up by skimpy research. None of them ever happened.

The first point of rupture selected by the historian is the roundtable discussion of American cinema and the politique des auteurs that appeared in November 1965. Setting the agenda, Jean-André Fieschi promises at the outset that confusions surrounding the idea of mise-en-scene will also be cleared up in what follows. What follows, however, to borrow Bickerton's favorite comparison (Cahiers = Catholicism), is like a roundtable of Jesuit theologians debating the death of God. As she grimly notes, the magazine's first attempt to replace "the vague, non-transferable quality of taste" with a more rigorous methodology "brought no immediate breakthroughs."

Another attempt to get rid of the outmoded notion of directorial authorship is said to have been led by a former editor and filmmaker — one who was, of course, a consummate example of the outmoded notion: Jacques Rivette in L'amour fou, for which Rivette directed the scenes of fiction and André S. Labarthe's documentary crew filmed rehearsals for the play-within-the-play. Bickerton could also have cited Godardian experiments beginning with the "Paris-Levallois" episode of Paris vu par six and ending with the unsuccessful attempt by a post-68 collective to make Vent d'Est, which fell apart, according to the director, when "the anarchists all decided to go to the beach."

But when Rivette, interviewed by the editors about L'Amour fou, spoke of the disappearance of the auteur, the editors told him they thought this was a myth, and indeed, the auteur remained a central concept for the Cahiers du cinéma, along with the editors' high regard for Hollywood auteurs of the classical period, despite Bickerton's claim that "Cahiers still covered the latest releases from ageing auteurs, but without the passion and loyalty that the old politique des auteurs had produced." Anyone who has read Comolli's articles from this period on Man's Favorite Sport and Red Line 7000, or Serge Daney's theoretical magnum opus (still unavailable in English), "Rio Lobo: The One Grows Old," knows that this is wishful thinking. As Daney explained to me in a 1977 interview, the deconstruction of the Cahiers heritage during this period, far from being a patricidal act, "was obviously a last homage, more or less avowed, that we rendered to what we have always loved. We wanted to reread Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not René Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael. Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure."(3)

According to Bickerton the pesky politique was finally given the boot in Comolli and Narboni's position paper "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," which set out the new Cahiers line "with scientific precision." (Even Jerry Lewis was enlisted in the cause of science, as a maker of films whose content is "not explicitly political but becomes so through the criticism practiced on it through its form [The Bellboy, Persona]."). But the typology spelled out in that famous manifesto just restated the politique in new terms, which led eventually to the best revision that I know of, Jean-Claude Biette's Trafic essay "Qu'est ce qu'un cinéaste?", where the lazy use of thematic consistency to define an auteur is accepted with a shrug and a new term, "cinéaste" ("filmmaker"), is used to designate the directors previously referred to as "auteurs." A cineaste is a filmmaker who has transformed the tool he inherited to portray the world in a new way (Rossellini), instead of using hand-me-down forms to convey received ideas (De Sica), however consistently he recycles the particular subset of received ideas that make him, in Biette's reduced sense, an "auteur."

The fact that an essay published in the magazine Daney started after leaving the Cahiers restates in a finer tone the formulations in that 1969 manifesto, thereby finally responding to the gripes about the misuse of the politique in that 1966 roundtable, illustrates how what we conveniently refer to as the Cahiers du cinéma is an evolving tradition (and something of a floating crap game) whose continuation depends, first of all, on familiarity with what has been written in the magazine before, and not just with editorials and position papers, which Bickerton relies on — and trusts in — far too much to write her Short History.

In which things that never went away continue to come back

Prominent among Bickerton's bogus articulations is the death of mise-en-scene. She quotes as definitive an editorial by André S. Labarthe, "Death of a Word," calling for "the end of mise en scène as a concept" because (as Rivette put it) too many critics were writing as if "a sublime camera movement" could excuse bad writing and acting. Bickerton detects in this an echo of Bazin's argument in 1953 that "Huston's Red Badge of Courage was far better than either Strangers on a Train or Rope because 'the subject also counts for something.'" But Bazin was wrong (that "vague quality of taste" again) because Hitchcock was one of cinema’s great inventors of forms, as Chabrol and Rohmer say at the conclusion of their Hitchcock book, while as Biette notes wryly in “What Is a Cineaste?”: "With each new film John Huston seems to present a card that reads 'Excused from mise-en-scene.’"

"Mise-en-scene" is a more slippery concept than "auteur," as Bickerton demonstrates when she says that in the late sixties the Cahiers writers "discarded the whole notion of mise en scène, much as abstract painters had done away with figuration." First of all, that's an odd analogy for what she describes two sentences later as a re-assertion of the importance of the subject, for if the Cahiers has been, as she says earlier (quoting Peter Wollen), "the last modernist project," it's because of the initial bracketing of questions of content, which subsequently crept back into the politique des auteurs disguised as "thematic consistency."

The idea of mise-en-scene also lived on in many disguises, with or without the word, during the post-structuralist period inaugurated by "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism." The heart of the theories elaborated between 1969 and 1972 is Jean-Pierre Oudart's theory of suture, which Bickerton summarizes in a way that makes it sound like a nerve-shredding amusement park ride, when it is the erotic art that permits the pleasurable unfolding of a film while articulating that seamless hypnotic flow into signifying units. For our purposes a simple way of summing up Oudart would be: "A shot of a cross hanging on a wall doesn't signify Christianity; it signifies someone looking at a cross."

That nuance defines mise-en-scene and the "someone" who is being secreted as the film unfolds, who occupies what Oudart and Daney called, writing about Death in Venice, "The Offspace of the Auteur [emphasis mine]." The various ways in which the onscreen surrogate for the filmmaker is portrayed as "out of it," cut off from economic, sexual and linguistic exchanges with society, were in turn the key to what Oudart called, precisely, modernism (the New Wave and its descendants), based on the model created by Bresson, although the grandfather of the suture tradition is Fritz Lang. As Biette once observed, "Include me out," the Sam Goldwynism Lang uses to refuse a lunch invitation in Contempt, sums up the essence of Lang's style, which is adapted to progressive but not revolutionary aims in modernism.

Oudart's theoretical texts drew on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, but during the "Red Years" Daney gave them a linguistic twist in his distinction between the image as "statement" and "enunciation," which Bickerton summarizes without realizing that she's talking about mise-en-scene. In our interview he called mise-en-scene "writing" (in the Derridean sense), as in "camera-stylo," again making the point that whatever the engagements of the moment, the Cahiers du cinéma is fundamentally conservative, like any tradition.(4)

However you slice it, the concepts of "auteur" and "mise-en-scene" are inextricably entwined in the history of the Cahiers, and any historian who tries to put them asunder by announcing a series of historical breakthroughs that never happened will find herself with a bloody mess on her hands, and be constantly obliged to backpedal, qualify and logic-chop in order to live down resounding generalities uttered only two pages earlier, as Bickerton does throughout this often unreadable book.

One more example of a false articulation: the triumph of television. We have now jumped to the end of the 70s, when Serge Daney was still running the Cahiers but was preparing to move on to Libération. Bickerton guesses that Daney left because

"[he] was increasingly interested in pursuing a new kind of writing and engagement with cinema, namely journalism and the reviewing of films on television. He experimented with this at the Cahiers initially, through the 'Journals des Cahiers…' The 'Journals' allowed a platform for Jean-Claude Biette and Louis Skorecki, both filmmakers as well as critics, to address more closely an issue given little attention in the main magazine: the paradigm shift in the image world accomplished by the triumph of television. Their column was a last gasp of really innovative criticism at Cahiers as they sought a new language to register the relationship between both [sic] media."

Truthfully, in most cases the "Movies on TV" section of the Journal was a transparent excuse to write about old films by the same beloved auteurs who were put under the electron microscope in the deconstructive texts of the early 70s, like the famous "collective text" on Young Mr. Lincoln.

Once a false articulation has been announced, however, it has to lead somewhere -- for example, to Bickerton's footnote describing Biette's "Rewatching Wichita" as an article about "the experience of re-viewing on television Jacques Tourneur's western from 1955." Television is nowhere mentioned in this article, which is Biette's thoughtful reply to the famous Young Mr. Lincoln text. (Not coincidentally, Wichita, which he had almost certainly seen in a movie theatre — it's a 'Scope film —, retells the story Ford told in My Darling Clementine.) In Biette's polemic, Tourneur's cinema, which was and is the ne plus ultra of Cahiers cinephilia, is proposed as a model for subverting the ideological messages of the Hollywood studios by purely esthetic means, as Lincoln was said to have done through the cinematic equivalent of Freudian slips, but the reader of this Short History will never know that. Such is the cost of mistaking an eruption of critical brilliance that rivals Rivette's legendary review of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt for one more dusty signpost on a road whose real destination appears to be England's gray, subsidized Screen International, where tv has long been le plat du jour. (5)

In which the reviewer starts to smell a rat

But the main reason for all these false articulations, I suspect, is that once the historian has declared that the politique des auteurs, say, was made to walk the plank in 1969, any return of the politique in the 80s, the 90s or the first decade of the new millennium can be excoriated as backsliding or worse, which is the business of Chapters 6 and 7 of this Short History. That seems to be the principal purpose of the articulation we might call exorcising Hollywood — entirely mythical as we've just seen — and its inevitable counterpart, the return of Hollywood (the Big Sellout).

Here is where the fact that Bickerton doesn't share the tastes of the magazine she's writing about really pays off. Among the filmmakers for whom she expresses no small disdain are Francis Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Joel and Ethan Coen, Tim Burton (that Batman cover!), Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino (and in France, André Techine, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin), all written about in the Cahiers during the period of decline, defined as a period in which films have been championed that aren't to the historian's taste.

Realizing, perhaps, that the main argument supporting her thesis of decline tends toward the circular, she cites Peter Wollen to the effect that "the movie brats ushered in a kind of 'reactionary modernism'…. Innovative and experimental work was initially visible in early Scorsese and Kubrick, for example, but en masse this generation accepted the terms of the game: earn more with each new film, and tailor the work almost exclusively to the youth market. Over time this has resulted in a repetitive cycle of variations on the same high-tech, speed-and-action, in-your-face thriller, heart-warming tear-jerker or rom-com."

Grateful as we should be to Wollen and Bickerton for that last insight, one again has to wonder if Bickerton (as opposed to Wollen) knows anything at all about the generation of Hollywood filmmakers the mainstream press dubbed "the movie brats." She is certainly shaky on the filmographies of the two she cites, who made, during the period she's writing about, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ ("earn more with each film"?), The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut ("tailor the work almost exclusively to the youth market"?). And for the record, Stanley Kubrick has never been considered one of the "movie brats" — he made his first films in the early 50s.

Ironically, Bickerton's taste may overlap more with the Cahiers during its supposed period of decline than she realizes from her cursory inspection of recent issues. She cites Wang Bing's West of the Tracks as the sort of film the Cahiers should be paying more attention to, but the Cahiers did, in fact, publish an interview with Wang Bing and an article by Emmanuel Burdeau that goes a little deeper than Bickerton's comment that "given its running time, location and the nature of the project, Wang could only have used a digital camera to record the interviews." She also seems to think that this nine-hour documentary belongs on the small screen, which will of course "invigorate critical work" by encouraging criticism to "incorporate a more phenomenological element to [sic] its interpretations and analyses," but I'm told that West of the Tracks has gotten its main exposure, in France at any rate, on the big screen. To which I might add, "So what?"

False articulations are tough to get a knife into, and Bickerton makes a particularly bad job of the Return of Hollywood. The sellout started early on, she says:

"In March 1976, uncertain, essentially symptomatic reviews of Jaws and Pinocchio appeared. Returning to Hollywood brought Cahiers closer to its approach in the yellow years….[But i]n truth, Hollywood made its comeback at the magazine for reasons of accumulation and assimilation: we'll write about what people seem to be watching, rather than address readers with our interventions…."

Actually the sellout had started even earlier than that, when the magazine was still a Maoist publication, with Pascal Kané 's article about Avanti, an autumnal romantic comedy by Billy Wilder, whose Sunset Boulevard had adorned the first issue of the Cahiers in 1951. (The sense of tradition again.) In skimming through the covers of back issues, Bickerton may have been thrown, as I was when I grabbed the new issue off the shelf at Rizzoli's in New York many years earlier, by the laconic announcement (in red ink): "Sur La Chine, sur Avanti."

Seeing it squashed under weighty titles like "For a Revolutionary Cultural Front" and "The Palestinian Resistance and Cinema," I at first assumed that “Avanti” was an Italian militant group the Cahiers had thrown in their lot with, but it turned out to be the Wilder film, in which a middle-aged man and woman from different classes come to an Italian hotel to bury their respective parents, who passed away there in the middle of an adulterous fling, and end up reliving their story. Kané treats Avanti sternly but respectfully as a film in which "the insistence of the referent…cleaves the discourse of the auteur [emphasis mine]," whereas La Chine, Antonioni's documentary about the slumbering giant, is flatly dismissed by Jacques Aumont as a cinematic running-dog lackey of imperialism.

Having missed the real Return of Hollywood, which makes Hollywood's absence from the magazine so fleeting that you could blink and not know it ever happened, Bickerton zeroes in on those articles on Jaws and Pinocchio, missing the point in a couple of ways. First, while Daney's reading of Jaws is symptomatic, it is hardly uncertain: he forthrightly describes Spielberg's mise-en-scene as "proto-fascist." He later replaced that with "reactionary" when the article was reprinted in La rampe, a change that Bickerton would consider a dead giveaway if she knew about it, and not mere common sense. Later, more sensibly still, he would just call it “popular."

Second, and most important, Narboni's reading of The Adventures of Pinocchio doesn't have to be “essentially symptomatic” because the film in question wasn't even made in Hollywood. Released theatrically in France in 1975, The Adventures of Pinocchio is a cutdown of the successful 1972 Italian miniseries by leftwing director Luigi Comencini, who rediscovers in it the true meaning of a satirical fable that was extracted from peasant culture by Carlo Collodi, an anti-monarchist with anarchist leanings, only to be subsequently co-opted by the bourgeoisie (for example in the 1940 Disney version). So Narboni's conclusion is not tentative either. Pinocchio's task in the Comencini version of the tale, he says, is "to continue the struggle and refuse to sell his labor (force de travail). Not … to sell it at the best price. Pinocchio's struggle is not a syndical one."

Taking down the famous Cahiers du cinéma was the purpose of Bickerton's original article, and since that presumed notch on her gun got her a book deal, she hasn't risked diluting its shock value with lots of further research. Hence the frighteningly short list of people who were interviewed for the book, where she frequently just pastes in a passage from the article and embellishes it. A good example would be the last barb directed at Jean-Pierre Oudart, of all people. In Bickerton's original article, after noting that the magazine had stooped to covering Apocalypse Now in 1979, she wrote: "After Coppola, Oudart welcomed Kubrick's Shining in 1980 as 'a work of great culture, and a culture that is not dead.' (6) In the book Bickerton rewrites that sentence as: "After beatifying Coppola in the eighties, Oudart ushered Kubrick's Shining into the canon, calling it" etc.

Here the historian, hastily seizing the chance to deploy another anti-Papist zinger, misreads her own earlier sentence, while again raising the question of just how much of the material she's writing about she has actually read: anyone who knows the first thing about Oudart, the fiercest Bolshevik writing for the magazine during the "Red Period" and its aftermath, would know that he never wrote a line about Francis Coppola and that if he ever did, it would not have been to "beatify" him. The two versions of this sentence are a kind of Tiny Hadron Collider where we can observe how false articulations are created when rhetoric collides at high speed with sense. Suddenly Coppola idolater Oudart is ushering The Shining into the canon…but didn't he already do that for Kubrick in his long polemic about A Clockwork Orange, where he declared Kubrick and Robert Kramer to be better filmmakers than Godard? (7)

Bickerton ends with a list of constructive suggestions about how the Cahiers might yet be saved — for example, by publishing Frederick Jameson, consecrating filmmakers as auteurs only after they have spent a lifetime earning the title the way Sam Fuller did (although Sam really didn't have to wait all that long — Manny Farber, for example, instantly recognized him as an auteur in the 50s), blowing off that damned cinephile Deleuze, or "engaging in more collective discussions by sharing an experience of watching with other viewers or the director." Actually, that idea has been tried. The last roundtable dedicated to a single film in the Cahiers was the one on Man of Iron, which I thought was a pretty good roundtable, but when Godard edited the 300th issue of the Cahiers he reproduced a photo of the Comintern and pasted chunks of verbiage from the Man of Iron roundtable over the heads of Lenin and his commissars like word balloons in a comic strip. That was the end of that.

The point of the joke was, ironically, the one Oudart was making when he opposed A Clockwork Orange to Godard's pedagogical enterprises during the 70s: that it's helpful, especially in making a political film, if the spectator doesn't need a Ph.D. in semiology to "read" it, and that the time had come anyway to discard the whole idea of "reading" a film — which the Cahiers had been promoting during its "Red Period" — by scraping away the Derrido-Marxo-Lacanian scholastic verbiage and getting back to seeing the images. This position, announced by Godard when he returned to commercial filmmaking with Sauve qui peut (la vie), led to the rare beauty of films like Passion and Hail Mary, as well as inaugurating a new period in the Cahiers' reflection on cinema. But that's another story, which doesn’t begin to be told in this high-minded but dilettantish book.

Footnotes

1. The article is available online for £3 at http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2645, and blogmeister Girish Shambu summarized it at http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2007/02/cahiers-du-cinema.html for those who didn't want to spend the money. Shambu described the article as "terrific," but the string of comments on his post by people who appear to be familiar with the magazine in its most recent incarnation were less complimentary.

2. My own unraveling of the "French Minnelli" genome has been reprinted in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, ed. Joel McElhaney.

3. LES CAHIERS DU CINEMA 1968-1977: Interview conducted and translated by Bill Krohn http://home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_1977.html

4. "The cinema that interests us is haunted by writing. Writing implies spacing, a void between two words, two letters, a void which permits the tracing of meaning.…So, when the Cahiers were politicized, they took their examples more and more from the Soviet cinema of the twenties, but again it was to distinguish between Eisenstein (who 'wrote') and Pudovkin (who 'didn't write'), and this was the same as the distinction between Hitchcock and Huston. Today it may well be that with people like Godard and Straub we have reached the extreme limit of writing." - ibid.

5. This is a very parochial book. Consider Bickerton's footnote to her claim that the Cahiers writers, in yielding to market forces by writing about Hollywood's "movie brat" generation, covered their shame with "commentary in the cultural studies mold." She continues in the footnote: "This model was derived from the discipline first developed in 1961 at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Britain, founded by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall." There is a tidy sum sitting in a Swiss bank account for anyone who can convincingly show that the Cahiers du cinéma ever heard of the Birmingham Centre or even of Raymond Williams, one of its leading thinkers, an excellent Marxist critic who would no doubt have been shocked to hear that his work was being put to such uses by the likes of Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana.

6. Oudart continues: "a film that says to me today: it's good to cultivate the piece of America that many films have deposited in us and to use it to discover new ideas about cinema, and about the media." The rest of his writing for the Cahiers would carry out that program without ever returning to the subject of Hollywood cinema.

7. I know a thing or two about false articulations, having been turned into one myself. "Much editorial energy in the last years of the seventies was spent playing catch-up, with America top of the list. The 'Letter from Hollywood' written by man-on-the-ground Bill Krohn was instituted from 1978, establishing for the first time in Cahiers' history a permanent connection with the US and its industry's cinema." Actually Herman Weinberg's successor, Axel Madsen, was in Hollywood for many years before me, and while Bickerton would have no way of knowing it, the decision to move from New York to Hollywood after Daney hired me was mine and mine alone. Needless to say, by the end of "my" paragraph, things are heading south faster than a fleeing embezzler with the Feds in hot pursuit.

another effort, americans

2011-10-11T21:28:00.001-07:00

The United States is a very young country, in swaddling clothes.

I even have a diaper, I'll show it to you, that's the country -

I have a real diaper in the corner there.

Every time I look at it reminds me when I'm writing anything:

make sure you're writing about a baby.

***

They say "More more more,"

The reply is: "There is no more".

-30-

(means end of story.)

--Samuel Fuller (1983, The South Bank Show)

percentage of survival (4)

2011-10-07T23:54:00.000-07:00

"I am very much in favor of the Chicago plan, under the condition that errand boys who can't run errands will also be employed."

-- Kafka [Prague, July 13, 1920], marginal note in a letter to Milena Jesenská

percentage of survival (1)

percentage of survival (2)

percentage of survival (3)

THE CIVIL WAR (John Ford, '62)

2011-09-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

Say Mr. Peterson, what's that suit you got on?

Uniform Mrs. Rawlings. A uniform.

JERRY LEWIS

2011-07-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

"This business is scrounging around for what to do," he said. "The medium is busy knocking its brand out to display the fat lady at 375 pounds (who) in two months is gonna be 240. Who gives a shit?" He continued, "The industry has destroyed themselves. It's no longer relevant because it puts out all of its product on a stupid phone. You're going to put 'Lawrence of Arabia' on that goddamned stupid sonofabitch?" (Speaking of Twitter and Facebook) "They're wonderful technical advances. But once people see how much it's cluttering their life, they'll figure it out for themselves. ... We're not going to have human beings in 20 years. People won't be talking to other human beings."

(Said earlier this afternoon. From Deadline Hollywood, this)

2011-07-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Cosmic Film

2011-06-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

Puissance de la parole (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988)

by Luc Moullet

(from Bref no. 68, September 2005)

The basis of Puissance de la parole (The Power of Speech) is the eponymous lyrical-scientific-metaphysical dialogue, written by Edgar Poe in 1846, between Oinos and Agathos, two angels (“in the period when we were mortal,” says Oinos) – from which Jean-Luc Godard takes 58 out of 149 lines, only replacing the word “ion” with “atom,” – and two pages of dialogue between ex-lovers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, written by James Cain in 1936, quoted in alternation. Godard wrote nothing: what good is writing when so many things have already been written. Such is his motto.

A somewhat iconoclastic association, as if Arthur Rimbaud and San Antonio were mixed together, Poe represents literature with a capital L, and Cain the pulp, dime store novel. In fact, the chosen passage is more like a melancholy tragedy than a trashy novel. There is even a common denominator, an intermediary, the “forever” written by Cain and by Poe, the pathos, among other things, often coming from a Bresson-like repetition of a word (“beyond, beyond,” etc.).

A difference from the Poe: here Oinos is a beautiful, feminine* angel (Laurence Côte), next to old Agathos (Jean Bouise, who died not long after). They are fashionably dressed, suit and tie and elegant dress, in contrast to the more average heroes of Postman, Franck and Velma (Velma is the first name of the heroine in Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, replacing Cain’s Cora: one more author in the bag). Those two, following a breakup, only talk to each other over the phone, Franck hoping for an impossible reconciliation (powerlessness of speech), Velma now living with stereotypically French, passive Jules.

The Telephone Rings

The telephones are rotary-style and old, which is rather funny because the film was financed by France Télécom, interested in unveiling their latest product, and because this instrument is the vehicle of miscommunication (aggravated by a technical problem in the connection). Certainly, we see, as a minor equivalent, splendid radio transmitters in the style of the RKO logo (hardly effective, in fact) confirming the film’s overarching dialectical principle. Godard adores enraging his financial backers who only go to him for his name. He always manages to make the film an anti-advertisement and to displease his backer (see King Lear). Using Cain’s Postman is understandable since the postman is the antithesis of France Télécom. It is even funnier since there isn’t actually a postman in Cain’s book.

JLG loves to fool the public. At the beginning, he shows an old Moritone** that creakily advances with film inside, while this film, with its innumerable superimpositions – whose younger brother would be Furtado’s L’Ile aux fleurs – could obviously only have been done on video.

Multiple Stratums

The dialectic intensifies as the buffoon from Rolle summons the mixed and even overlapping sounds of Ravel, Strauss, Bach, Beethoven, Cesar Franck, Bob Dylan, John Cage, and Leonard Cohen; and the images of Van Gogh, Bacon, Ernst (the sublime and the trivial), the bottle of red wine at the edge of the table from Diary of a Country Priest with the red checkered tablecloth, Karina’s slender silhouette (Pierrot le Fou), and Haroun Tazieff’s volcanic orgy. The most beautiful example of this is the scene where the luscious Lydia Andrei – a Rubens in opposition to the Botticellian Laurence Côte (the two possible appearances of the ideal woman) – washes herself, naked, in the sink of a kitchen with a dirty water heater, while luxuriant vegetation can be seen through the window, and it all suddenly resounds with the “sublime nostalgia” of Leonard Cohen. There is here a succession of contradictory elements, moving in and of themselves, that becomes more moving with the unusual accumulation, as if it was a matter of stratums of every époque finally brought together – Sinemurian, Burdigalian, Priabonian, Kimmeridgian, Ladinian, Oxfordo-Callovian, even Bajocian.

The accumulation is often situated not only in the rapid passing of time, but in the unity of the visual and sonorous image, sometimes composed of five superimposed shots: better than Gance’s Napoleon! The strongest is when, on the famous checkered tablecloth, five planes like the ones in Top Gun show up, twirling close to the face of a steep mountain (another inserted image).

All of this happens in a mere two seconds. Godard never dwells on an effect. Each one, often duplicated by another, fits in like the note or the chord of a piece of music, the art conjured most often by Puissance de la parole (independent of Bach, Cage, and tutti quanti).

The abstraction of a metaphysical text releases an emotion that becomes ten times stronger by the return to familiarity: Laurence Côte, with a sense of lived experience, pronounces naturally the most abstract words as if it was a matter of something from within her or the choice of a dress or a key ring.

Fluorescents and Video

Video is exploited to an intense degree: the fluorescent colors, strangers to visual reality, shock and stun; so too do Laurence Côte’s pink stockings and berets and Jean Bouise’s green cardigan and tie. But they are even more striking when, towards the end, they are suddenly wearing clothes of identical and unreal colors, suggesting an unusual, profound, and loving communion solely by the clothing of the old man and the young beauty (a theme taken up by most of Godard’s films for a quarter of a century). The movements of the assassin, young Franck, are repeated, through the editing, by the old angel Agathos: their legs bend in the same way, in the same rhythm. He is his double.

The nature of everything is ambiguous, thrown into doubt. A terrestrial sphere resembles Franck’s skull, as well as the moon, glowing an instant as if Franck was sanctified. Is that a tear that falls slowly from his eye or a shooting star, a fly on the screen, or a hair? The sand close to the lake, was it actually snow? There are a thousand elements, but even unity is varied.

An Academic Film?

The movement of the music, the torrent, the lava, and the fire takes us toward the dimension of the academic film, but JLG vanquishes this risk by unceasingly cutting, breaking the emphasis, the frenzy, and the rhythm with syncopations and freeze frames, as if he wanted to both (repeating Sauve aui peut) show time – majestic, inexorable – pass by, and to stop it, break the pathos, stop the flowing water, to have both movement and immobility at once. All of this is pierced by the aggressive gulls from Prénom Carmen (a bit abusively, Godard will take them in his later films to the most unseemly places: a call to order of possible horrors). This density – dense because it is brief – makes the film the equivalent of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Valéry’s Cimetière marin.

Geometric forms – circle and square, triangle but also geometric moth – tend to get confused. Godard seems obsessed by the wild wish to square the circle. With Puissance de la parole – sixty-nine screenings of which have not exhausted its riches – the cinema, as Chabrol said, becomes an “art of relationships,” following the first age of the ontological art (Rossellini, Renoir) which has come to pass. The death of ontology. Puissance de la parole, whose only TV broadcaster, la Sept, showed it recently at five past midnight, figures among the top ten films in the history of cinema. And this evaluation seems fairly timid and deprecating to me. I have a hard time imagining that in the centuries ahead another film will surpass it.

* The importance of the angel theme is noteworthy – or the outsider, the uncle, the fool, that JLG frequently has identified himself with since his accident in 1971 – and is even more perceptible in Hélas pour moi. We owe to this theme the most beautiful erotic shots, the very pure face of Laurence Côte, with superimposed clouds for a moment, as well as the nostalgia for impossible love.

** A flatbed film editor model.

Translation by Ted Fendt, 2011

2 on CLASS RELATIONS: An Interview and Shooting Methods

2011-06-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

The following 2 texts are from Cahiers du Cinéma number 364, October 1984: An interview with Straub and Huillet "Something That Burns Within the Shot" and a report on their shooting methods "Straub-Huillet: The Smallest Planet in the World" by Alain Bergala. The translations are by Ted Fendt who has graciously donated them to Kino Slang. Extreme thanks go to him and the authors for these very comprehensive pieces on Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations, 1984).

SOMETHING THAT BURNS WITHIN THE SHOT

AN INTERVIEW WITH JEAN-MARIE STRAUB AND DANIELE HUILLET (1984)

Jean-Marie Straub: We began by wanting to make a short film that actually turned into the first reel of the film and that corresponds to the short story that Kafka published in 1913 and to the first chapter of the novel. It was only after I looked at what he had added to this short story that I said to myself, “We could try to do the whole thing.” But I wasn’t sure we’d be able to. If it had been The Castle, which I’m just now reading and which I consider to be one of the most important books in contemporary literature, I would have held onto my short film because I find that it’s so literary, The Castle, it exists so much on its own that I would have abandoned it.

Cahiers: But where did the desire to make a film of the first chapter of Amerika come from?

J.-M. Straub: It came from the desire to make a film in German because it had been clear right away that we didn’t want to shoot it in the United States. And then we always go back and forth a bit between films where there is less fiction and those where there is more fiction. After History Lessons, we made Moses and Aron, after Moses and Aron, we made Fortini/Cani. Then, after Too Early, Too Late, we wanted to do another fictional film and to go back to the tone of Machorka-Muff, with an element of Ubu. The back and forth is also between 16 and 35mm and between large and small budgets.

Between Too Early, Too Late, which is by all appearances our least fictional film, and this one, which really is a return to fiction, there was the short, preparatory exercise of En rachâchant, which was like an instigator for Amerika. But the Kafka was the extra push and firm return to the beginning, Machorka-Muff.

Cahiers: Amerika is a pre-war novel since for the most part it was written between 1912 and 1914. You’ve called your film Class Relations. For you, what is similar between the period in which the text was written and today?

J.-M. Straub: The economic crisis. We wanted to make a film that confronted the period in which Kafka wrote with our own, to see how things are similar and how they are different. Alas, they are too similar! That’s why we immediately threw out the idea of doing a period film. And that’s something that I’m very proud of in this film, this equilibrium between old things, like the police officer costumes, the cars, the sets, and the architecture, and things that are entirely modern like electric trains, telephones, and modern typewriters.

Kafka, for us, is the only major poet of industrial civilization, I mean, a civilization where people depend on their work to survive. That’s why there is this permanent fear of losing your job, there are traces left by the fact of having been afraid, and there is constantly misery that appears and is threatening.

Danièle Huillet: It’s a world where a sense of justice has no place. It isn’t the fact that Kafka didn’t go to America that made us not want to shoot in the US. It’s because in this book the relationships between people are much more German than American. For Germans, Karl is a “Tor,” a fool, not in the clinical sense but like in Parsifal.

J.-M. Straub: A fool in Hölderlin’s sense of the word. It’s a voyage across communities of German immigrants in the United States. Even their linguistic community is German.

Cahiers: There’s something profoundly democratic about the way that your film poses the question of main character/secondary characters. When a character that Karl meets appears, he exists in a whole and immediate manner, the film takes him completely into consideration until he leaves the screen and we meet another one. In your film you also chose to get rid of groups and masses of people. In Orson Welles’ The Trial, on the contrary, we often see Anthony Perkins in the foreground and masses of people behind him.

J.-M Straub: When Kafka talks about 40 girls typing, he puts his camera on the ceiling and he films 40 of them.

D. Huillet: It’s true that there’s a choice there: we show one elevator and not 40. In fact, there is one filmmaker who could have shown 40 elevators, he’s dead, and the machine that would have helped him to do it is dead as well. It’s not Welles, it’s Stroheim.

J.-M. Straub: That’s how Amerika had to be done; the way Stroheim reconstructed Monte Carlo. But since we weren’t able to do that, it was more worthwhile to go entirely in the opposite direction.

Cahiers: Apart from that choice, you also took out the scenes with groups, like the ones in the bellhop’s quarters.

D. Huillet: We tightened certain scenes, like the first conversation with the head cook. At that moment, in the book, he was turned towards a very dirty, smoky bar where people were on top of each other. There were spectators, extras, and we didn’t want to show any extras.

J.-M. Straub: We also got rid of what happens after the audition for the Oklahoma Theater where there was a banquet before they get on the train. And in the train there’s a compartment where the people he’s with are smoking, playing cards, making noise, and where they are so close together that Karl has trouble getting to a window to see the landscape. None of that is in the film.

D. Huillet: But that’s an old thing for us since already in the Bach film we were reproached for not showing the people who were listening, below, in the church. When we saw Heaven’s Gate, we said that audiences have even learned to see clearly and that you can no longer “sell” them the extras. But filmmakers are no longer able to film scenes like that because one no longer manages to bring back to life…

J.-M. Straub: The other day, at the Cinematheque in Beaubourg, we saw a film by Stroheim that we didn’t know, Hello Sister. It’s great to see all that we’ve lost, in cinema, along the way. Because democracy shouldn’t only play a part among the characters but also at the equilibrium between the characters and the space in which they are shown. When Stroheim shows a street, the street exists. When a character crosses a street, it’s terrifying; you feel the danger of a street, the traffic, and a human being in a street. And the human being isn’t more important than the traffic, the traffic isn’t less important than the human being. And when you see a dog who throws himself against the curb – it’s a shot that lasts only a moment – it’s really terrifying. There are very few people who are still able to do that. I think that Kafka has that sense and it’s what interested us and what we modestly tried to do, not as well as Stroheim, with other means, but in that way.

Cahiers: Two things that have practically disappeared in most films are the sets, because television has none of that…

J.-M. Straub: Even space has disappeared. Today spectators are shown a space that doesn’t exist. It’s what bored me so much in Fassbinder’s last films, except maybe Querelle: we no longer know that we have two feet on something or on what planet we were on. Today, in films, you know longer know that it’s a wall or a door that opens. To film doors that open, to put people in a car, to film them in the street is very difficult. You have to pose the question of what three dimensional space is. In films made for TV, it’s cleared away, it isn’t necessary for it to be there, if so it’s a bad TV movie.

Cahiers: Concretely, what does it mean for you to pose that problem?

J.-M. Straub: Well, at the editing phase we find ourselves with 25 hours of synched film. We’ve burned 245,400 ft. of negative.

D. Huillet: Which makes the shooting ratio 1:20.

Cahiers: Why so much?

D. Huillet: Because it’s short shots. That’s when you realize that Bresson isn’t crazy.

J.-M. Straub: Neither was Chaplin, who shot even more still. Because he filmed action. If you film action, either the first take is good or you have to shoot 30 more, and it’s only the 27^th that’s good. Sometimes with a guy who opens a door, sits down and moves a pinky, it’s only on the 27^th take that he manages to do it freely in a frame, that’s the rhythm (partition) that imposed itself and that we discovered with him. And that, that is never produced before the 13^th take. We noticed during the editing – it’s a bit pretentious to say it like this but it also brings us back to the question of democracy – that that’s how Sade should be filmed if you were filming Sade. We thought about that while looking at Klara and Karl’s relationships in particular. This film could have been called Karl Rossmann or the Misfortunes of Virtue.

Cahiers: You’ve made the character of Karl a figure that is a bit blank, he isn’t characterized…

D. Huillet: I believe that the fact that he wasn’t characterized is what seduced us, at the beginning, in the choice of this actor and it’s what then scared us a bit. But at the same time – and I hope that this is felt in the film – he always judges what happens to him.

J.-M. Straub: It’s true that you could talk about a blank slate there…What happens, I believe, is that he has no specific social existence.

D. Huillet: Except for when he is with people who are below him on the social ladder.

J.-M. Straub: In his relations with the stoker, for example, it’s a sentimental petit-bourgeois side that comes out.

Cahiers: At the end of the film, there is this amazing shot on the train where, for once, Karl is entirely equal, in the image, with the boy who is seated next to him.

J.-M. Straub: If that shot is impressive, it’s because for once there is no longer the third dimension. And moreover, it’s the only handheld shot.

Cahiers: Do you consider this ending to be the end of the novel or not?

J.-M. Straub: Max Brod says that Karl had to find his parents, that he would find them in heaven, so to speak. Others claim that that’s not true. I don’t know, but for me it stops there. I was totally incapable of inventing a utopia. The ending is the moment that he gets out of this mess and goes to a place where he will finally no longer be threatened, where the machine of lies will cease to function (we’ve never invented a character where the steam roller, the spiral of lies goes as far as in the extremely strong arguments of the hotel manager: it’s horrifying). At the end, he’s sitting with someone who will no longer threaten him and he is going towards a place where one hopes everything will be different.

Cahiers: If you consider that the whole film is a descent, then at the end we rediscover a kind of innocence.

J.-M. Straub: Yes, the whole film could be a vertical line and there, on the contrary, is the first time that you are on the planet. Everything becomes horizontal. Or should become so.

Cahiers: At that moment there is also the rediscovered innocence of the countryside.

D. Huillet: It’s funny. For this shot of the landscape seen through the train window, Jean-Marie was disappointed, he had imagined a sort of flash of the landscape…

J.-M. Straub: Let’s say that I didn’t want to do a “Straubian” shot. We had filmed entire reels of the landscape but I thought I was going to only use a few seconds. Danièle said to me, “There’s nothing you can do, this landscape supports itself.” Finally I let myself be convinced by Danièle and by the material.

Cahiers: This moment where Karl Rossmann begins to escape the steamroller of lies is the moment that you chose to inscribe the truth of the landscape, since you actually shot those shots in America.

J.-M. Straub: Yes, it’s no longer a set at all there, the United States of 1920 in Germany today. They take off for a new world, towards possible utopia.

Cahiers: Why did you shoot in Hamburg?

J.-M. Straub: When I left France in 1958 and I had been sentenced to a year in prison, I wanted to live in Hamburg. And that’s where I had been, after Amsterdam (where Gustav Leonhardt, who we wanted to act in our first project, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, practically ready in 1959, lives) and after East Germany (where most of Bach’s manuscripts and partitions were located). But we said to ourselves that it would possibly be easier to find money in Munich. So we had lived in Munich and we shot Chronicle in 1967!

I really loved Hamburg. When we thought of the Kafka film, I immediately thought of the house where Karl makes himself put back the letter from his uncle. That’s a house where we already shot some shots from Chronicle. Once the permission to shoot for 10 nights in this house was obtained – which was not certain – we abandoned the idea of Berlin as a possible location and we began scouting locations in Hamburg. Why Hamburg? Because it’s a port, and it’s from there that he leaves. What you see at the beginning and what should help the projectionists to find the frame before the opening credits is a monument in the port of Hamburg, a pirate who had his head cut off with several others in 1411 by the patricians in Hamburg, because he threatened the nascent business of the Hanse. Let’s say that it’s the last image that Karl Rossmann has of the old continent.

Cahiers: What determined the choice of the black and white?

J.-M. Straub: At first, I wanted to return to black and white, that’s why in between we did En rachâchant in black and white, a bit as an exercise. Then I had to give it up, saying to myself, “Orson Welles shot The Trial in black and white, why does Kafka have to necessarily be in black and white?” Finally, I came back to it, a bit impulsively…

D. Huillet: It was important in facilitating the back and forth between the present and the past.

J.-M. Straub: Especially in Germany, where everything is so American, colors aren’t American.

Cahiers: How did you do the subtitles?

J.-M. Straub: Danièle worked on her translation, all alone for 3 years, every time she had a free moment during the rehearsals, the location scouts, etc…

D. Huillet: I must say that in French, Kafka doesn’t exist. It’s extremely difficult to translate into French: it becomes too weighty or unfaithful. When you do the subtitles, you’re lucky because the text is there. The subtitles are only an aid to hear the text. I don’t translate everything but what I translate I translate as literally as possible.

J.-M. Straub: The untranslated things never interrupt the continuity of the discourse. What is missing is often purely descriptive. But what is translated respects the spoken rhythm as much as possible. People have to be able to see the image without spending their time reading subtitles and those who don’t know German have to hear a bit of German for once, without being there to catch any concepts from the reading.

Cahiers: What does this film represent, for you, in your cinematic progression?

J.-M. Straub: What we try to do, with each film, is to open up a whole range. In From the Clouds to the Resistance, we tried to open the range of feelings as much as possible, from extreme horror to the extreme joy of life. Here we tried to open up the range of emotions as much as possible…

I believe that what we’ve looked for, consciously since Moses and Aron, is monumentality (that’s Seguin’s word). The monumentality of the character in relation to the set, the monumentality of the set in relation to the character. Something that in the spirit of two painters who I never think about while shooting but who I think about while imagining. The first is Giotto, not Giotto in general, but the one who I discovered in 1951 by riding my bike to Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Films don’t have anything worthwhile if you don’t manage to find something that burns somewhere in the shot. And most filmmakers no longer have any relationship to the language they were born into, in which they work. There are films where the manner that people talk has nothing to do with the house in which they were born which is the same as their mother tongue. A specific language, not a universal language, because cinema is not a universal language the way the Italians, Lizzani and others pretend. Speech is a touchstone for judging films: there are films where the German or Italian language becomes sick (those by the Taviani brothers or Francesco Rosi, for example). The other aspect is that at each second of each shot, what Renoir called the magical, the magic of reality, must be felt. And that’s why Stroheim is the most important, more important than Griffith and John Ford, even though for me the most important thing that I know is Civil War in How the West Was Won. That everything you show is both magnificent and the opposite must be felt. Bunuel’s idea that we don’t really live in the best of all possible worlds, but that in spite of everything it’s the best of all possible worlds because we haven’t yet found a better one… The other painter is the one who painted Montagne Sainte-Victoire so often and who said “Look at this mountain.” He was trying to capture it as a mountain and not something else. It wasn’t abstract painting although it already went beyond that, it was already cubism and something that was richer than cubism. He said, “Look at this mountain, it was once fire.” And that, that goes for everything that we show: it’s like this but it could be different, it’s magnificent and horrible, man is not the center of the universe. Or again Rosa Luxemburg’s idea: the death of an insect is no less important than the death of the revolution.

(Interview by Alain Bergala, Alain Philippon and Serge Toubiana, Cahiers du Cinema no. 364, October 1984)

Translation by Ted Fendt, 2011

********************

STRAUB-HUILLET: THE SMALLEST PLANET IN THE WORLD

Or how Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s aim is to scrupulously respect the state of the world, as they find it, and to construct their little planet according to the inviolable laws they set upon themselves.

By Alain Bergala

THE STRATEGIC POINT

Jean-Marie Straub’s aim, for each scene in the film (meaning each set, each location) is to find the single, strategic point from which he will then be able to film every shot of the scene, changing only the angle and the lens. “Directors today,” he says, “no longer give themselves the trouble of reconstructing the reality of a location. Cameramen frame shot by shot, so they come up with shots that are not linked in relation to a location. It’s a lot easier to make small corrections, shot after shot, than to find the single, strategic point for the scene you want to shoot.”

This single height and position of the camera is not easy to find, in practice, even if it is already determined on paper. JMS arrives at the shoot with a map of the set on which is already designated, shot by shot, all the angles and all the positions of the actors. The lenses are already decided for each shot because the Straubs have already decided upon them on set several months in advance with a viewfinder. During the shoot, says Caroline Champetier, “all the work is to manage to respect as intelligently as possible the location as it exists, to understand its lines of force. The lines cannot be distorted.” And it’s a complicated problem when filming a small room of only a couple square feet involves 5 or 6 different angles and several lenses, sometimes including the 18mm or even the 16mm that JMS uses a lot in this film.

The actual search for the strategic point can take two or three hours. Once the camera’s placement is determined, Straub can spend over an hour solely to find the right height, to the exact inch, of the camera, and all of this of course with the actors in position, in costume. A direct consequence of the imperative of the “strategic point” is that William Lubtchansky does not plan his lighting shot by shot, but one time in each location for all the shots to be done there. This forces him to affix everything to the ceiling so that no bothersome light stand is in frame during a change of angle.

THE RESPECT FOR SOUND

The sound for a shot, in a film by the Straubs, is absolutely and always reduced to the real and direct sound that was recorded by the soundman during the take. “They never dub a word, they never add any sound effect or any ambience. They never take a sentence said off screen from another take. It has to be the sound from the take, and that alone. They are the only ones I know who do that.” And yet, Louis Hochet, who began to record sound in movies at the beginning of the sound era, has seen it all in an over 50 year career. With the Straubs, his collaboration began with Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, and today, while he is long past the age of retirement, it is for them alone that he agrees to take out his Nagra and microphones again. Because with them he feels a real demand, but a true respect for his work: “The Straubs attach major importance to the recording. They are terribly demanding but they organize things too. If there is the slightest undesirable noise, they do another take.”

As “everything happens during the take,” without the possibility of fixing something during the mix or editing, Louis Hochet tries to take all necessary cautions during the shoot, “all while looking for simplicity in the recording.” He has complete confidence in his boom operator, Georges Vaglio, with whom he has worked for many years (“with him, I know that the microphone is well placed”), and he uses equipment that he has known for a long time. After trying the new Agfa reel-to-reel tape, he went with the old version of the same brand which he finds to be of better quality (on the new kind he hears small cracklings). For the microphones, he remains faithful to the Neumanns that he remembers being the first in France to use, at a time when soundmen found them to be too “small”!

The recording is done with a stereo Nagra, most often with two microphones, one fixed on a stand, the other boomed, allowing him to avoid problems of boom shadow when the actors move. In some difficult situations, he ends up being constrained to using a wireless mic, but he always mixes this sound, during the take itself, with sound from a microphone outside the edge of the frame, giving it a bit of ambience and sonic space. “Wireless mics,” he says, “are inaccurate. I’m horrified by them, but sometimes I’m obliged to use them.”

If he almost always works with two mics, Louis Hochet prefers to balance the relative relation of the two levels during the recording; he mixes down the Nagra’s two inputs onto one track, without changing the levels.

As you can guess, with such a method, “the mix becomes purely and simply a re-recording, a report. There isn’t even any equalization because the sound is already equalized at the moment it is recorded. “In short, at the mix,” says Louis Hochet, “since not a single sound or ambience is ever added, not much remains to be done.”

What continues to astonish Louis Hochet, after a 50 year career, is the attention the Straubs bring to the precision of the sound. They came up with the idea of shooting at night, for the sound, scenes that everyone else would have shot during the day on sets where daylight doesn’t even reach. “Even an actor who is out of the shot has to stay the whole night to read a line offscreen, and in costume!” Jean-Marie Straub, for his part, declares, “I don’t have enough imagination to be able to imagine during the day something that happens at night.”

But the crew and the actors pay for these high standards with difficult working conditions, even if they were accepted at the start. During this shoot there were eleven nights of work in a row. “Ah,” concludes Louis Hochet,” you have to love them to work with them.”

ONE AT THE FRAME, THE OTHER AT THE LIGHT

From the beginning, the Straubs thought it would be impossible, for this Kafka film, to do both the framing of the shot and the lighting. They first proposed that William Lubtchansky operate the camera while Henri Alenkan (with whom they had done as a test, in black and white, a short film, En rachâchant) would do the lighting. Then they proposed that W.L. do the lighting while Caroline Champetier was at the camera. W.L. told them that, according to the conception that he has always had about his work, he cannot do the lighting if he is not at the camera as well: “I light while looking through the camera; I see the light in the viewfinder.”

But it seems that, in the end, the tasks redistributed themselves and that, in practice, after some time on the shoot, the discussion of the framing began to be between Jean-Marie Straub and Caroline Champetier. Danièle Huillet, omnipresent on the shoot and who discusses everything with J.M.S., never involves herself with the framing. According to C.C., “Danièle doesn’t talk about the frame. She leaves it entirely up to Jean-Marie, in all confidence. That power – cutting in space with a knife – she leaves to him.”

In so far as the framing is Jean-Marie Straub’s business (“I imagine the frame,” he says, “before finding the sets”), William Lubtchanksy is free to light as he pleases. The only direction Straub gave him, before the shoot (and because he asked him), is that the light should be “like Duelle, but in black and white.” “Then,” says W.L., “he left me very very free and I did the whole film without him saying a word about the lighting. Even though so much time is spent talking about the framing during the shoot.”

Caroline Champetier confirms this: “it quickly became clear that the lighting was a job at which W.L. was extremely alone, without there being any discussion or questioning, the planning of the lighting was entirely up to Willy. On the other hand, while he is used to being delegated the task of framing the shots for Rivette, here it’s Straub who does it.”

In spite of the constraints of the “strategic point” (one lighting set up per scene and not per shot, the lights on the ceiling), W.L. chose to create precise set ups, the opposite of ambient lighting spilling all over the place. He thus works mostly with Fresnel lights that allow him to precisly direct and focus the lights with shutters. Straub gives him all the time needed to set up and control the lighting. So for interiors, everything goes well.

Things are bit more of a problem in exteriors, where Straub wanted to rediscover the humility in front of natural (or “divine” if you like) light that presided over Too Early, Too Late, where the director of photography’s role consisted in observing, nose pointed upwards, the natrual variations in the light, the clouds that passed...and to choose the right F-stop at the right time. “Now,” Straub would say to W.L., “you aren’t lighting anymore, we’re going to just let it exist.” While W.L. agreed with this principal for a film like Too Early, Too Late, he doubted the possibility of integrating such “brutal, naturally” lit shots in a film in which 90% of the images are done with constructed light. This was the only point of friction between them on the film’s lighting.

WHY ALL THE TAKES?

For a well-off French film with stars, the director uses an average of 100,000 feet of film, which is already a luxury. The Straubs shot 250,000 feet. From that perspective, says C.C., “their cinema is a cinema of great luxury.” But the real luxury is that every take is printed and synched. While editing, the Straubs find themselves with 25 hours of film with sound. This isn’t surprising when you know that the Straubs never stop doing new takes of a shot as long as there aren’t at least two good takes on two different rolls and that they always finish a roll on the scene that they began it with.

Why all these takes? What progress are they hoping for?

First, it is clear that if there is any progress, they refuse to judge on set. Contrary to Rohmer, they never decide in advance to print such or such a take that they consider to be good. They have practically all the takes printed, except for the ones that were interrupted or during which there was an obvious mistake. “We noticed,” declares Danièle Huillet, “that there is real progress, almost with each take.” This progress, for J.M.S. is consistent. “Altogether, at the material level, it snowballs, to take an expression from Bergson, and it isn’t idealistic to say so.” He estimates that as far as the sound goes, there is constant progress from one take to the other, from the first take to the thirtieth take. For the image, on the other hand, an error or a mistake is always possible at the 15th take, especially outside, in natural light (thereby variable and unpredictable), or if there is a camera movement.

The film’s crew, for its part, is unanimous in thinking that these many takes make sense mainly in relation to the actors, because they have a feeling that as far as their work is concerned, on a strictly technical level, the preparation was so detailed that progress from one take to another quickly becomes minimal. “After several takes,” says Louis Hochet, “you can’t do better.” On this subject, William Lubtchansky raises a more paradoxical hypothesis, considering the Straubs’ concern for control, “Jean-Marie perhaps hopes that there will be something different, in the actors’ performances, or, outside, in the light. He waits to be suprised by something.” Caroline Champetier observed that if the whole crew, at one time or another, broke under the systematic repetition of all these takes (while everything seemed in place to them), “the actors never resist in the slightest in having to redo a take.” The Straubs, in her opinion, ask them to do something very difficult, even contradictory, and the repetition of the takes helps them no doubt to overcome this difficulty. “The actor must,” she says, “manage to be absent from the text and, at the same time, present to himself. The text must exist, with its own autonomy, and the actor’s body must also exist autonomiously in relation to the text.” It is true that in the Straubs’ films, the text must be performed by the actors with the precision of a musical partition. The definitive version of the text, that from which the actors work before the shoot is separated like free verse by the rhythmic cuts imposed by the Straubs and different colored marks mark the intonations, the tonic accents, the pauses, and everything that makes up the musicality of the language in their films. “Sometimes,” remembers W.L., “a take was started over because a tonic accent wasn’t in the right spot.” Over the course of a take, it is above all the respect for the text and its musicality that is important to them, witnesses say. “During a take,” says C.C., “it can very well happen that neither he nor she is watching what is happening. Jean-Marie looks at his feet and Danièle has on headphones to hear if the actors respect the pauses.” “When a scene is finished,” confirms L.H., “Danièle always listens to all the takes that were done before moving on to the next one.”

MEASURE SEVEN TIMES, CUT ONCE (proverb)

“With them,” Louis Hochet insists, “you check everything.”

“These are people,” says W.L., who has known them for a while, “who are dramatically worried. With them, you take precautions the way no one does on any film.”

For example, on most sets, a shot is filmed until a take is considered good from both a technical and performance perspective. Most often, as a precaution, a second, equally good take is done (the “safety” take) for the case in which an unforeseen accident makes the first one unusable. Since a lab accident during the shooting of Un coup de dés made them permanently lose a scene, the Straubs go even further in their safety measures. The systematically guarantee every scene on two different magazines for the case in which one of the two is damaged at the laboratory. Meaning that when they are sure that there are two or three good takes on one magazine, they stop the shooting of the shot unless there are two or three equally good takes shot on another magazine.

“I would rather give up a shot,” says J.M.S., “than to have to reshoot it three weeks later on the same set. That’s a nightmare. We’ve never done it, we’ve been lucky.”

At this level of care and precaution, can chance still be talked about? After an entire night’s shoot, when everyone hopes for a well-deserved rest, the Straubs refuse to allow just anyone to take the exposed film and they go take it to the lab themselves, 25 miles away, while the assistants who could do that go to sleep. W.L. says that Straub only goes to the sees the (silent) rushes to discover any accidents – hairs, scratches, etc. – that could have happened to the film. “For the rest,” says J.M.S., “I know what is on the screen.”

Can the unforeseen still find its way into a Straub shoot and foil this luxury of precautions? Yes, on the condition that two or three grains of sand manage to combine their effects to jam the precision of the machine. For example, for this film, principally shot in Hamburg, the Straubs made the trip to the United States, with two actors and the essential crew members, to shoot only a few shots: the Statue of Liberty, the inside of the train with the two young people, and the landscape on the edge of the river seen outside the train window. This train trip had obviously been minutely planned long in advance. “With them,” says W.L., “nothing is left to chance. They begin by scouting the locations two or three years in advance with a viewfinder. Two or three months before, I scout with them, we decide where to put the camera and what lens to use, and when the shoot begins we have an hour by hour shooting schedule with all the shots, etc. and we do what was decided in advance. Everything is planned and filmed as planned.” But this time, things didn’t exactly work as planned. “In the train,” says W.L., “we had a tiny scratch, we noticed it and said to the Straubs that what we had shot up until then of the landscape was useless. At that moment, the train had already passed the place they had chosen to film the landscape from. But it turned out that that day, moreover, because of work being done on the track, the train followed a route that it never follows and instead of following the river for 12 miles as usual, it followed it for 37 miles. So, we took off on an adventure and shot landscapes that had never been scouted...During this same trip to the United States, every precaution was taken to not lose the film and of course we lost the camera. When we arrived in Saint Louis, cases were missing. They were found pretty fast...but they are so pessimistic about everything that problems end up happening to them. When we left Saint Louis for New York, they said to the baggage people at the airport, ‘Take care of these bags, they already lost once.’ The guy, it was a black guy, said to them jokingly, ‘If you talk like that you’re going to lose them a second time.’”

As for William Lubtchansky, who declares himself to be a natural optimist and not especially worrisome, was it through infection that for this film he made recourse to the old practice of screen tests, abandoned today (it’s true it’s much easier to do with that black and white), which consisted of Christophe Pollock, the second assistant, developing on set several images from each shot?

(Cahiers du Cinema no. 364, October 1984)

Translation by Ted Fendt, 2011

2011-06-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

"A shot of a cross hanging on a wall doesn't signify Christianity; it signifies someone looking at a cross." (Jean-Pierre Oudart)

Doctor (looks at the above): A souvenir from the campaign in Italy

Worker: That's going a little too far

Doctor: It surprises you?

Worker: All the same...

Doctor: Why do you care? You don't believe in God.

Worker: Yeah, but some do...

Doctor: You don't appreciate war.

(CELA S'APPELLE L'AURORE, Bunuel)

2011-06-06T14:00:00.001-07:00

(You wanna start something?)

(Did you ever see a film that you admired, which you considered to be...)

(efficacious...)

(on an unconverted audience...)

(...a film that you admire which defended a cause implicitly or explicitly?)

(Oh boy, now you get to a real problem!)

(Maybe film can't do this,)

(down in the street.)

Kwame Ture (aka Stokeley Carmichael) on film, Hollywood, democracy (virtues and vices), the news, and not reading the philosophers themselves...

2011-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

2011-05-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

rest in peace Jackie Cooper

2011-05-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

MAY DAY

2011-05-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

"(...)
When we designed the posters for NOT RECONCILED and we brought them to the person in charge at the theater where the film was released she told us: "Ach! Das ist nicht unser Geschmack" (It doesn't suit our taste). We said: "Very well, we'll pay for them ourselves" and at the time we were completely broke and we had to find a thousand marks. Of course you could say it's still a privilege: a working stiff certainly can't do that. But strangely enough, when you listen to the longshoremen in Saint-Nazaire, at the time of the great strikes, what they talked about most wasn't money or the differences among them, what they talked about was freedom, being able not to go to work if they want to, being able to change location, "just being able to change wharves whenever we feel like it!" This was the longshoreman status they were fighting for. It's quite extraordinary that they should be the ones talking about freedom...
(...)"

Happy Birthday Madame Huillet

Quote from:

"Sickle and Hammer, Cannons, Cannons, Dynamite! - Conversation with Straub and Huillet", François Albera, March 19th 2001. Translation by Jean-Pierre Bedoyan and George W. Antheil.

Luc Moullet's latest (trailer)

2011-04-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

TOUJOURS MOINS
Luc Moullet
(France, 14’, 2010)

In 1993, I filmed "Toujours plus". The indispensable complement was missing, "Toujours moins ", my fortieth film. It evokes in 13 minutes the development and expansion, from 1968 to 2010, of the devices based on computers, automats, interactive terminals and others that can be found in all areas. The aim of our current system appears to be to employ a single individual in each sector of activity. We are not there yet, but we're getting there... A schizophrenic world, since, at the same time, businesses are having to pay the price of these suppressions in an indirect way. We can't leave millions of human beings jobless. An observation that is both bitter and funny: the methods of this perpetual reduction are surprising and comical...

2011-04-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

The United States is a very young country, in swaddling clothes.

I even have a diaper, I'll show it to you, that's the country -

I have a real diaper in the corner there.

Every time I look at it reminds me when I'm writing anything:

make sure you're writing about a baby.

***

They say "More more more,"

The reply is: "There is no more".

-30-

(means end of story.)

--Samuel Fuller (1983, The South Bank Show)

Film Her Her Film

2011-04-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles: playing tonight at the Egyptian: the extraordinary THE DARK MIRROR by Robert Siodmak (cinematography by Milton Krasner). It's a symphony of interior grays, an astonishing double role, and roll: Olivia de Havilland plays twin sisters through trick photography. All codes of cinema are questioned by this film. The medium shot psychoanalyzes the close-up, and the close-up the reverse shot: a film that makes you think twice.

2011-03-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

1978

Jean Narboni and Serge Daney

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA INTERVIEW:
Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana with Fabrice Ziolkowski -- July 1978

FZ: I’d like us to talk about the period of the Cahiers from the time when there was still an interest in the American cinema (1968-70) up to today. Specially what you’ve been doing in the last three years and what you’re moving towards.

Toubiana: It’s interesting to start that way. Why did texts stop being translated in the U.S. and elsewhere? Effectively this period which begins in mid-1972 (#242) is a typically French period when the Cahiers really enter French ideology of the moment. It was a period of crystallization on the political discourse, we tightened ourselves around the master’s discourse of the Marxist-Leninist movement with our thoughts turned toward the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This period is not really translatable and would most likely be of no interest in translation. We entered a period, if you like, of the French context, context of the Leftist French Intellectual.

Daney: We can also make a point here. The English translation of Cahiers by Sarris was happening at a time when American Cinema was still very important for the French critic, from this period (1966) up to now there hasn’t been anything translatable into an Anglo-Saxon context, political or intellectual, from Cahiers. We come to the specificity of the French situation, be it on a theoretical level and on the political level. The theoretical texts can always be re-appropriated after ten years, which is what seems to be happening in the U.S. and in England. It’s evident that the purely political period of Cahiers is untranslatable, that if it was, it would give birth to monsters given the differences in American and French intellectual lives. Of course, I saw people in New York like Bill Starr who are “militants” and their discourse is poor including in relation to what was already poor here then. It’s totally without life, while we can say that this hard and rigid discourse, at the time, was also accompanied by a certain passion, which is important. When people today come back on those texts, the passion has left, and all that is left is the letter of the texts which is frightening, like any letter.

FZ: Fred Guynn’s article in JumpCut* is an example of this. It only supports its arguments through the texts.

Toubiana: That’s something we also did though. In the little world of Marxism-Leninism, everything is judged by the text. This comes from a Bolshevik tradition. The dogmatics have always claimed that truth and falsehood were written. We did the same thing: "X thinks this, because he wrote this.” There’s nothing surprising about somebody else doing it to us.

Daney: Something irritated Narboni and I a little bit in Edinburgh last year. The problems of art, culture and theory that we had faced in this time of politicization, were coming to a country like England quite a bit late, and were being dealt with by people who were calling themselves Althusserians, but who were forgetting to do what Althusserians everywhere do, that is history. They had no curiosity for this specificity, of the history of the relationship between intellectuals and Leftist politics in France. On this, there’s the risk of doing an ahistorical work, university-like and academic. There’s a debate about the intellectual and the masses that’s been going on for 100 years and we’re only one part of that debate. It’s evolved differently in the States, that’s a text for YOU to do.

FZ: How long did this period last?

Toubiana: Properly speaking, the Marxist-Leninist period lasted from #242-43 in which we got rid of the photos. Which instead of fetishizing the photos, fetishized the texts. It went to issue #250 in which there is the editorial re-defining the review’s stand, leaving the Marxist-Leninist ghetto.

FZ: Why have you entered and then left the Marxist-Leninist movement?

Daney: All the cultural people were behind in politics. The height of Marxism was probably 1970, Cahiers plugged into it when it was already in decline but we didn’t know it yet. Cahiers and Cinethique were the only ones to have taken seriously, albeit later, what had moved politically during those years. It was something going around Paris. It had affected reviews like Tel Quel and at the university there were some very politicized students, this all precipitated our move.

Toubiana: A very concrete example. In February 1972 there was the demonstration at the burial of Pierre Auvernay.** It was the sum of Leftist activity and the beginning of the end, the largest Leftist demonstration in France (200,000 people). The Cahiers people went to it and from then on, the review was a place where Marxism-Leninism was discussed, while the Auvernay demonstration was the end of the Maoist movement. The entertainment people also showed up. It was also an opportunity to see the PC under its ugliest mask. It put the murderer and the victim on the same level. There was a sensibility with the “petits bourgeois” who wanted to politicize themselves while the people interested in Marxism-Leninism were in a period of decline.

Daney: After that, there was a traditional period when Cahiers was thinking of its political activity in regards to a Party (to be built) although it was evident that the small groups would never build this party. There was a polemical and hysterical position in regards to the PCF which was ten years too late on everything concerning Cultural Front activity (theory, cinema), something it has somewhat made up today. There was a second period in which certain words can help us. The word “power” came at one moment, synchronically with Foucault... We can say that our cinephilia helped us to go forward. For a cinephile, the power of the cineaste, even if it’s really imaginary, is ours of proportion socially and real in regards to what he manipulates as material. Therefore, we see a moral preoccupation which comes back to Bazin, which is to evaluate films not really on their aesthetic quality but in ethical terms. It’s a period when we speak of “direct.” Then there’s a third period when, from the idea of power, we moved to the realization of the power of media. Power today is the new management of media which is a problem on which the Leftists have been nil, pre-historic, with the exception of someone like Baudrillard. But let’s say that, in general, Marxist reflection on media is nil. This is a little bit the Mattelart period.*** From then on we saw how we could re-interest ourselves in cinema, in films that were coming out, to become once more a film review while being a little bit ahead which consists in recognizing that film is one piece in the more general game of the media and that we can’t disassociate them. To approach these media, everything we learned before 1968, in psychoanalysis for example, is helpful.

Toubiana: I think you’re going a little too fast because there have been other words too. My thesis is that may exist from dogmatism is done on the empirical and populist mode. When you come out from a strong discourse, a little bit paranoid, you only do so through a return on your base where you try to see what is being done on a popular level in the area you’re working in. The fetish words at the time are “popular culture” and “ideological struggle.” In the table of contents of #250 you see the Editorial, “Popular Culture” and “Militant Work,”“Collective Film” and “Critical Function” where Cahiers fights an ideological struggle against films with reactionary political content: Lacombe Lucien and Night Porter. We only leave the period where we lost the cinematic referent by returning to it in a more populist fashion. We invented some words like “popular culture” which doesn’t exist, isn’t definable. From there you come to today when we’ve rectified a lot of things. A deviation always supposes a counter-deviation.

FZ: A deviation which was rather abrupt to begin with.

Toubiana: It’s a violent return which doesn’t go far enough or goes too far. It was also done at the price of sacking one person in particular. It wasn’t done without a crisis.

Daney: This pendulum movement also follows a logic. The subjective drama of the intellectual is that he is in the service of ... he thinks himself as responsible, either in the service of a party or in the service of the masses. Cahiers lived both phases rather quickly before finding an anchoring place where are found certain cineastes who work this situation from a filmmaker’s point of view. This lets us re-question the cinema. But more and more from the standpoint of individuality. It’s a kind of very selective “politique des auteurs” which capsulates a period with Straub and Godard. Today, since we’ve got a little critical distance from them, we see they asked themselves these questions from an individual, not individualistic point of view. Pudovkin at the end of his life, Godard when he deals with television and Straub behave like little states, little powers, and if they think out the great debates in their times, they do so from a position which is theirs and only theirs. It's always the same debate but more collective in large units and crystalized in one film practice. Since it was already the cinema which, in our capacity of simple cinephiles, we lived before '68, we came back on our feet: Godard, Straub, Robert Kramer, Moullet, etc. Today we can say that a guy like Syberberg, who’s a more ambiguous filmmaker, also functions in a totally paranoid way, which isn’t negligible, like a small power in relationship to producers, the Party and cinema.

Toubiana: We also forget the word we used at the time: Cultural Front, i.e., an alliance with other artistic practices. We saw at the end of a year that a film critic couldn’t ally himself with a painter.

Daney: It’s from this position of greater power, social, aesthetic and artistic that an intellectual can speak. The last time we saw Bertolucci after The Conformist, we were very rigid and he was already very opportunistic, he said that he had done The Conformist as well as militant films for the PCI on textile workers. It was very evident that he was putting 0.5% of his power into the militant films. It was Godard who put everything into it, that is the level of a great cineaste and enough power to do experiments, he's still going today.

FZ: People who've always taken risks?

Toubiana: I don't think Godard sees it as a risk. He lives it as a normal evolution.

Daney: He sees it as a rivalry between himself and the rest of them. When he said "France mise en scene by Pompidou and Marcellin," it's evident he sees these political men as other filmmmakers. Like Syberberg with Hitler. It's a mad rivalry. It's a settling of accounts with the same weapons: money, and power.

From these we can see other ties from before the political period. A dogmatic cinephilia which extends its hand to dogmatic politics. Cahiers with Godard, Rivette, Bazin, had an arbitrary, cut and dry vision, -- ethical, unjust, polemical. There was always the question of liking one film over another, of liking one film against another. That hasn’t changed.

Toubiana: The worst period of the Cahiers is that after this dogmatism when we thought militant cinema was going to work. In this cinema there is no question of judging the quality of a film, we can only say, “It’s good for the public to which it’s addressed.” Never cutting to say whether it’s a good film or not, one where there is work or not. That was a pretty short period from which we came out with an issue on Straub. Milestones (Robert Kramer) was for us the positive example of militant cinema. We mystified it into the message from America.

FZ: It’s interesting there to see the gap between France and te U.S., Milestones being a film little seen in the U.S.

Toubiana: That’s another thing that’s always gone on.

Daney: It’s something to do with our relationship to American cinema, militant or not. We like Milestones, in regards to the kind of cinema it is. “Progressive” ideas in an Arthur Penn film, for example, were of no interest to us. There’s a great deaf dialogue between the U.S. and France concerning what’s good in American films. Cahiers has always defended the products which Hollywood wasn’t too proud of. I think there’s a re-appropriation of this today since film is being taught increasingly in U.S. universities. It still goes on like Hitchcock and Hawks today with people like Monte Hellman or Cassavetes. Let’s say American film after Arthur Penn and Altman made a cinema which has reacted against the spirit of American cinema (Hollywood films, a reactionary spirit), but which hasn’t touched the letter very much. They film a little less precisely than before. If we’re interested in (Robert) Kramer, it's because he can take up, to the letter, the same shots as Ford, for example. Cassavetes because he's a part of Hollywood fighting Hollywood. The critical viewpoint Americans can have today in regard to their own mythology is not interesting to us, because we did it before them. It's more interesting to see what's done with the letter, on ecriture. It's evident that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a thousand times stronger than Penn because of what stays on the level of the letter.

FZ: What kind of tools have you been using to analyze film? I see the influences of psychoanalysis in writing like Bonitzer’s or Pascal Kane’s. There’s been an interest in photography, in video, etc.

Daney: The most Lacanian texts of Bonitzer’s are before the Maoist period. We’ve always had a reaction against the idea of “purity” of cinema. Bazin was interested in TV at a time when it wasn’t seen very much. What we’ve always seen as the best part of French cinema is the most literary and theatrical part, it’s a literary cinema. From Abel Gance to Duras, that’s been the case. This refusal of a “cage” marked Cinema is still going on. We’ve always thought that cinema is defined by what it wasn’t but positively not negatively. It’s always by the meeting of film with something else, like politics, that there’s movement. There’s also the “crisis” of cinema. It’s evident that its place in the other media is going to be redefined. It’s a crisis of the “machine” of French production, not of talent.

FZ: You haven’t gone through the Maoist period to return to the same kind of cinephilia as before?

Daney: No, but everything I said about the letter, about literality, stays the same. Maybe we can better theorize it today.

Toubiana: The old cinephilia supposes the concept of the series. If Ford did one or ten good films, it’s because he did so many films to begin with. All the great filmmakers worked in conditions that allowed them to build an “oeuvre,” a series of films, a kind of factory system (studio) with rebels and other workers who accepted the situation with the bosses. This condition isn’t around anymore. Today’s cinephilia supposes an average (medium) production (France is certainly the place where the average production is worst). Individual works stand out very well, on the other hand. These auteurs we defend are not in a position to work in series, although they're nostalgic about it. The only one who still uses these methods is Godard who says, "You must give me 10 hours of TV time to make 10 films." There's a sort of madness there, to consciously impose on yourself a studio production pace, as if a producer was pushing him. He's got his own studio, factory, he hires technicians, etc. Straub, on the other hand, can't work that way, because he's attracted to literature, the concept of the work. He has to redefine his position each time.

FZ: Straub brings in the question of avant-garde. Can we keep the distinction of Peter Wollen who writes of two avant-gardes and what is your interest for these filmmakers?

Daney: It’s a question of words. If we take the word “avant-garde’ it means those who are ahead of the others, implying that the others will one day go through there.

FZ: Is it a problem of taxonomy then?

Daney: Either it’s a military (spatial) definition or it goes back to something which has existed since the beginning of cinema. When today we see the films of L’Herbier, Cocteau, Man Ray, they’re still avant-garde, they’re still far from the rest. They’re people who defined themselves generally in relation to painting, outside of the industrial machine of film. “Avant-garde” in the Cahiers sense would be people who have cut a path for others: Cocteau, Bresson, Antonioni. People who did work in an industrial system. The role of a film review is to understand at any one time what is done that is new. In our view, to see this in close contact with the “enemy,” where things are the most dangerous, the most risky. Bresson doing Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne in the production system is more important to us than some guy experimenting alone in a corner, although it’s not “one or the other.”

Godard has always made films that questioned cinema. When I saw Les Carabiniers, it seemed obvious to me that you could never make a war film like before anymore, like Walsh's Objective Burma!. It's not the feeling you got when you saw a film by Marcel Hanoun or Malcolm LeGrice. There's another tradition, one which keeps the concept of craftsmanship from the industrial system but which dismisses the rest. The avant-garde is also a phenomenon which is tied to the art market not like it is tied to the rest of cinema. We're interested in the meeting of the two.

Toubiana: The filmmakers that interest us are those who submit themselves to the same verdict as commercial cinema. Straub said Othon was made for workers and peasants, for example.

Daney: If he didn’t say that, he wouldn’t have the strength to do it.

FZ: Is therefore the place where the writing is read more important than the writing itself?

Daney: There’ll certainly come a day when Straub won’t be able to make films outside of Beaubourg.**** It’s a tendency that goes back to the origin, in America, of the avant-garde to painting. The people who used to do Cahiers, and still do them today, learned to love cinema under very precise conditions and it’s not evident that we will learn to look at films like at paintings.

FZ: Do you think Cahiers will begin to explore this different kind of cinema?

Daney: Something that’s always irritated me about the avant-garde is the discourse it holds about itself. Peter Wollen says that there are two avant-gardes, one from the “realism” in cinema and the other which also holds a discourse on “purity” as the first one does (with Bazin, Eisenstein, etc.). There’s always a bad Other, in the case of Eisenstein and Bazin it’s naturalism, and in the case of the other avant-garde it’s narration. The thing I heard most in the U.S. was “non-narrative” cinema which to me doesn’t mean anything. It’s understandable, because if they want to distance themselves from narrative it's simply because they've been the best storytellers in the world. Nobody will ever do better than Hitchcock and Ford to tell a story.

*JumpCut #17 — “The Cahiers du Cinema 1969-1977.”

**Pierre Auvernay, worker killed by a factory guard. The guard was recently shot and Auvernay revenged.

***Mattelart is also known for his HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK.

****Beaubourg: Le Centre National d'Art et de Culture George Pompidou

Originally published in ON FILM, No. 9, Winter 1978-79 (ISSN - 0161-1585)

Feed the squirrels to the nuts

2011-03-25T00:12:00.000-07:00

2011-03-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

2011-03-16T16:02:00.001-07:00

"Such tricks ('showing the effect before the cause' -Bresson) are nearly always impoverishing except when used with deliberate terrorist intentions, as they are by Lang."

2011-03-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

and when they confiscated her goods, when everything was taken away, she let them kiss her back for money.

2011-03-04T00:18:00.000-08:00

"Cinema could be an avenger."

2011-02-20T19:03:00.000-08:00

Thankful for Jacob Wren of Radical Cut who has transcribed his notes from "the round-table between Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa which was part of the conference Image in Science and Art." Take a read, HERE.

"I need cheap machines."

"I want to push the machines into the past."

"I can only think about yesterday, today, and I cannot think about tomorrow."

continue..............

2011-02-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

New movie by Jean-Marie Straub as part of the Jeonju Digital Film Project 2011

2011-02-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

***

Un Héritier (An Heir)

2011 / 22 min / Color / HD

◎ Synopsis

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet made a film, Lothringen!, adapting from a novel Colette Bodauche of Maurice Barrès. In 2010, Straub goes to Alsace in France to complete the second film of the Barrès series. At this time, the film is based on the novel, Au service de l'Allemagne, about Mont Saint Odile written in 1903. Like Joseph, the protagonist, Jean-Marie Straub from the Colmar region will be wandering around Mont Saint Odile following the route of a young country doctor. And Straub will be visiting paths leading to the private house of foresters and near the famous wall of the heathen existing in the region, which were also familiar to Barrès.

◎ Director's Statement

1872 - 1918 !

These images of my childhood cause me pain. We others, young Alsatian bourgeois, we grew up in an atmosphere of conspiracy, fear and hatred.

◎ Production date

- Nov. 2010 : In production (shooting)

- Dec. 2010: Post-production

Q&A

1. How do you feel about joining the project, Jeonju Digital Project 2010 and what kind of work you want to deliver through this project?

A narrative film

2. How do you want you as a director and your works to be introduced to Korean audience?

Shamelessly: both as "the survivor of Warsaw" - and as the last of the Mohicans.

4. How would you explain your own style and philosophy when making films?

Challenging the philosophy!

5. Please let us know if there is an on-going project you are currently working on, and your future plan.

Who knows, you never know.

--excerpted from the PDF Source Book of the Jeonju Digital Project 2011 web page, see here.

Thanks to Ben Greenblatt for the ¡centinela, alerta!

2011-02-04T12:23:00.001-08:00

2011-02-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

percentage of survival (3)

2011-01-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

***

SEI AO CHEGAR A CASA

Sei
ao chegar a casa
qual de nós
voltou primeiro do emprego

Tu
se o ar é fresco

eu
se deixo de respirar
subitamente

António Reis

I KNOW WHEN I GET HOME

I know
when I get home
which of us first arrived from work

You
if the air is cool

me
if I stop breathing
suddenly

***

percentage of survival (1)

percentage of survival (2)

2011-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Abraham Polonsky on Mercury Theatre On the Air's 1938 radio broadcast of Wells/Welles' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Q: Were you surprised at the reaction to THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, how the public reacted?

POLONSKY: Of course I was surprised. After all I'm a materialist and I know there are no other worlds with people flying around. But they were really frightened.

Q: Absolutely.

POLONSKY: Imagine what an idea they have of the nature of reality!

Q: Through the power of the medium...

POLONSKY: It's the power of the lack of power in the people!

***

One Sunday Afternoon (Dec 22, 1946)

2010-12-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

(St. Petersburg Times)

2010-12-09T23:57:00.000-08:00

December 7th

2010-12-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

from Tag Gallagher's Ford till '47:

Field Photo productions won best-documentary Oscars two years in a row, Midway and December 7th (1943). The latter, mostly directed by Gregg Toland, initially followed White House directives and made a case for interning the 160,000 Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii, as was being done with the 110,000 Japanese-Americans living on the west coast.

Instead it was decided to leave the Hawaiians alone, after the military governor, General Delos Emmons, supported by the community, resisted Washington's orders. Accordingly, some 50 minutes of December 7th were deleted, now Japanese-American loyalty is stressed, and the portion that remained was exhibited not in theatres but in factories. Virtually all the footage of the Pearl Harbor attack was staged at Fox. (All prior accounts of December 7th's history, including my own, have missed this story completely. Hawaii's successful defiance of Roosevelt is a deeply forgotten event in American history – not surprisingly.)

The long Gregg Toland version of the film

Cinema Nearer to the Earth by Jean-Claude Biette (1982. Translation by Ted Fendt)

2010-11-17T21:15:00.001-08:00

There is, I believe, in all of Jean-Marie Straub’s films, an active mixture of two passions: one for politics and one for aesthetics. The first is based on hate, the second on love. In these films, hate is the driving force behind the political passion, love that of the aesthetic. Passions are very much at stake, and this appears as much when the films are violently refused as when they are adored: those who reject them are not confused about what they are rejecting. Two kinds of characters or figures exist between these two poles. The positive ones, who are either resistance fighters – characters that are so strong as to not be entirely lucid (the grandmother in Not Reconciled) or that have a lucidity that exceeds reality (Moses) – artists (with a great capacity to resist) – Bach, Schönberg – or resistance writers – Brecht, Pavese, Fortini (with, in this last example, the chance of being able to put the writer face to face with his writing), and the other, negative ones – bankers, lawyers, soldiers, men of power, agents of repression and democratic opportunists. I’m setting out here a separation and a notion that determines even the contents of Straub’s films, as I interpret them. But love and hate are not pure and one-sided with the first matching the positive characters and the second matching the negative ones. On the other hand, hate isn’t the only complexion that the political passion takes (Straub loves the oppressed), nor is love the only complexion the aesthetic passion takes (he hates clichés, shots that don’t rhyme with anything, superfluous shot durations, and pornography). Love and hate are directly linked and they trade back and forth, but this mixture of two passions – whose exact composition is unknown – is precisely what guides the more or less great success of Straub’s films. Because they both belong to reality and they both express themselves, they are what create this new reality that is the film. Politics and aesthetics are also directly linked in these films even though in public Straub always places politics before aesthetics, which doesn’t exactly describe the reality of his films or the more and more sensual character that is becoming noticeable. More and more, the most beautiful sequences move away from the political passion and get closer to the aesthetic one, and thus we have Too Early, Too Late which comes out today and can be summarized as the combination of two documentaries, one on the French countryside, one on the Egyptian countryside.

If we look at the entirety of J.-M. Straub and D. Huillet’s work, it seems that the most significant film is Moses and Aaron. It contains all the figures from the other films and dares in its excessiveness a fusion of politics and religion (a possible metaphor for the aesthetic), and it shows the struggle between a rather positive character (Straub seems to favor the intransigent spiritual guide, Moses, politically) and a rather negative character (Straub doesn’t like those who make compromises in order to be understood) while entrusting to the aesthetic the work of regulating this duel and attacking directly the political impulses locked within Schönberg’s libretto. As a rule, the aesthetic has to count only on its own forces in order to tackle “politics.” Thus, there exists in Straub’s films (with what one can guess is Danièle Huillet’s vigilance) a capacity for engagement (and, thus, of withdrawal as well), sometimes by way of a political decision, sometimes by way of an aesthetic decision. If I have separated the positive and the negative characters in a very basic manner, it is under the pretense of considering the fact that in practice such characters find, by passing through Straub’s cinematographic device, a more complex existence which they had the potential for in the source texts, and then these are, first of all, in the present in which the spectators live, filmed actors. Once incarnated by the actors, even the negative characters resist (against the ideological traps identified by Straub in the texts and offered by the characters that bring the texts to life) and in the aesthetic process executed by Straub. He takes off his toga of hate (politics) in order to put on his toga of love (aesthetics).

At a certain point, the term “politics” proves to be insufficient. Let’s replace it with “history.” Traces and inscriptions have been talked about a lot in regards to these films. Everything that bears witness to and guards the memory of human actions is the made the subject and the very substance of these films. Can one film history? Straub tries hard, in any case. But isn’t the cinema the art of the present? If we rely on the examples provided by major films, it would appear that before being a matter of essences or nature, it is an aesthetic process. I believe that this conception of cinema as the art of the present dates back to the translation – or the critical realization – by Jean Renoir of Chaplin’s cinema and, maybe above all, of Griffith’s. Charleston (Charleston Parade), La Fille de l’eau (Whirlpool of Fate), and La petite marchande d’allumettes (The Little Match Girl) are films that return to Griffith and develop, in French culture (while suppressing the fictional), what is most profoundly linked to the present: the living truth of the actor. And the art of the present is, in this process of recording via the image (and then via image and sound), that which, within the actor, reaches for or claws at something, that which puts up a fight. Straub’s cinema comes from this Griffith-Renoir movement. The same aesthetic is involved, with the difference beginning at the moment when history provokes in Straub a mixture of love and hate such that all the rigor of an aesthetic is not too much to overcome and resolve it. This resistance of the actors – and we know what traps are placed under their feet, above their heads, etc. in this cinema – is what allows this element of fragility, this degree of mortality to appear in these “negative” characters. They share this with the “positive” characters in the form of bared arms, exposed necks, voices pushed to the point of fatigue, faces drained from the effort made to speak and haggard from lived experiences (what professional actors can rarely give in the ‘cinema-as-art-of-the-present’ aesthetic). That the positive and the negative characters are treated in the same, quasi-documentary manner in their cinematographic inscription allows the love-hate tension on the political side to be resolved in the love-hate tension – strictly aesthetic – between history and the present, between traces (on stones, on paper, that one can read – Fortini – or decipher – Bach, Schönberg) and obstacles: the actors placed in between the text and the anti-naturalist memorization, between the energy that they would like to freely employ and the obligation to submit to the mysterious and implacable orders of each shot.

In the French countryside, Too Early, Too Late shows us roads, fences, pastures, fields, cows, villages and market towns, as well as the sky and clouds, and we hear, captured by the direct sound, all sorts of noises and bird songs. In the Egyptian countryside the film shows us the land grown wild or covered in planted vegetation, paved and unpaved roads, waterways, walls, a railroad track, fortifications, a factory and lots of workers coming out, women, men, and children who come and go, peasants who are going to work or coming home, bikes that pass, mopeds, cars, trucks, and carts, and we hear with all this, in direct sound, in addition to events than we can’t see (an extraordinary far-off rumble, like a continuous bass hum). Too Early, Too Late is composed of panoramic shots in which the rotating movements capture the elements of the “scenery,” stopping and re-starting, including and excluding, by some kind of cryptic decision, the individuals in the shot, admiring them as they pass by. The grass, the clouds, the sky, the light, and the movement of the human beings establishes the present, the only element of the show. And this time, no one is speaking in front of us. Where then is the history? It is, first of all, in the first shot of the film, outside of the country: something of a reminder of the worst, the Place de la Bastille, filmed as we have never seen it, overrun by the perpetual movement of cars. And it is in two commentaries spoken, if I may say so, off screen. For the French countryside, a text by Engels that is an account of the beggars in certain French villages before 1789 and, for the Egyptian countryside, a text extracted from a book (by Mahmoud Hussein) published by Maspero relating the history of Egypt and its efforts to escape from colonialism. History is also in the extracts of Egypt’s official archival footage, the images and sounds of which are integrated into the continual flow of the film.

What is history’s role in this film? It consists in employing not a tension that would be able to confront the aesthetic violence of the Straubian project, but a pressure that only sets in motion a quantifiable movement of signifieds. The Marxist discourse (even if it is partly Engels’) menaces these landscapes; it determines a path to the people that we see, just as much as capitalist exploitation in the case of the French peasants (made present by graffiti on a wall) and colonialism (and neo-colonialisms) in the case of the common people and the members of the underclass in Egypt is supposed to, in this film, menace them and determine their path. It even goes so far as producing a sort of very unpleasing shock when we hear the signifier “repression” at the moment that we see a police officer stopping some children from going near the camera. This means that the desire to give meaning (here, during the length of a second, and in a more constant manner by the commentary) does not manage to find any grounds for communication with the aesthetic project and, thus, the political-aesthetic tension is not constructed, but imposed. The shot of the Bastille and the archival footage, however, participate in a genuine construction of this tension. So much the worse for us! Nobody will be able to explain why John Ford insisted on reverence and solemnity.

Let’s consider what is splendid about this film. It is a pure documentary the way that Playtime is a purely comedic film. Too Early, Too Late exists through its own secret rhythms, formed by this series of panoramic shots. The lesson, today, is no longer about history, but about shots – how does one film these landscapes? A strange mixture this time. Love is inseparable from the awareness of beauty, and hate remains (almost constantly) off-screen in order to watch over what this, possibly guilty, beauty doesn’t invade. The Griffithian feeling about nature is no longer what surrounds a Renoirian inscription of bodies. Here, it goes further. It is possible that the next Straub and Huillet film will be taken from a real novel.

Jean-Claude Biette, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1982

2010-11-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

2010-11-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

August 25, 1943

Miss Mildred Martin

Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Miss Martin:

I feel extremely sorry that my picture Heaven Can Wait has caused you two such uncomfortable hours.

I am not writing this letter with the intention to make you reconsider your criticism - nothing is farther from my mind. I am merely writing this letter to point out to you that several times in your criticism you resort to what one calls in sports circles a "foul."

In order to support your argument against me you feel it necessary to refer to the "Berlin born director." Not that I am trying to conceal my place of birth, but I feel at this point in your review the reference to my birth place is a little dragged in by the heels.

The purpose becomes very clear when in the next sentence in regard to To Be or Not to Be you call attention to my "callous, tasteless effort to find fun in the bombing of Warsaw."

Being an experienced newspaper woman you are surely aware of the effect such an allegation must have on the reading public, particularly at a time like this. Such propaganda is not very gracious, but when it is based on false facts it becomes outrageous.

Naturally, your statement that I "find fun in the bombing of Warsaw" is completely untrue. When in To Be or Not to Be I have referred to the destruction of Warsaw I have shown it in all seriousness; the commentation under the shots of the devastated Warsaw speaks for itself and cannot leave any doubt in the spectator's mind what my point of view and attitude is towards those acts of horror. What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and thier ridiculous ideology. I have also satirized the attitude of actors who always remain actors regardless how dangerous the situation might be, which I believe is a true observation.

Never have I said in a picture anything derogative about Poland or the Poles. On the contrary I have portrayed them as a gallant people who do not cry on other people's shoulders in their misery but even in the darkest day never lost courage and ingenuity or their sense of humor.

It can be argued if the tragedy of Poland realistically portrayed as in To Be or Not to Be can be merged with satire. I believe it can be and so do the audience which I observed during a screening of To Be or Not to Be; but this is a matter of debate and everyone is entitled to his point of view, but it is certainly a far cry from "the Berlin born director who finds fun in the bombing of Warsaw."

I repeat again, I have no quarrel with your opinion of Heaven Can Wait or my ability as a director in general, but I feel I have a right to protest against such insinuations which are so completely contrary to my real beliefs.

Sincerely yours,

Ernst Lubitsch

2010-11-02T13:03:00.001-07:00

("5. Let's also report that several mentioned Night and Fog as 'beyond competition'; this work, according to them, cannot, by its nature and its object, enter into competition with other films.")

--quoted from Jdcopp's

Dominique Laborer

2010-11-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Work, Leisure

Dominique Laborer

2010-10-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Manufacturing and Service.

2010-09-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

Kino Slang always hopes for dialogue. Our gracious thanks to Cicat Cailhronnat for his recent letter of great insight, in text and image...

Hi Andy,

Your exposition of Irving Lerner as an adherent to the Worker's Film and Photo League was important to a better understanding of his work. I find it ironic that the same studio that shamefully crushed distribution of Losey's M eight years before would support Lerner's work - maybe it was the death of Harry Cohn in early 1958 that made it possible for the studio to make pictures with Lerner. Lerner's pictures for Columbia - City of Fear and Murder by Contract are both obsessed with imagery from vehicles and with the specificity of the built landscape.

There are so many striking and intelligently photographed images of the automotive landscape in City of Fear, and it seems that Lerner knew the city, or worked with someone who knew the city well. I thought I would contribute three images (out of many) that produce the optical unconscious of the film.

In 1959, California mandated that the Department of Public Health set standards for emission and control of air pollution, so the appearance of air cops would have been a perfect dodge for the Feds. Here we have the scientific police at work, casually sampling the Los Angeles atmosphere for radionucleotides. The insignia and identification of the side of the vehicle: "Air Pollution Control - Enforcement Patrol."

Here is a quasi-pov shot of Vince Ryker, already exposed to a lethal dose of cobalt, cruising through south Hollywood, top down, wind in his hair, and through the windshield, we see a truck ad for Spike Jones Musical Insanities of 1958.

Finally, what may be the slyest of shots, another cruising image, another pov. Despite the exceptional quality of the photography, the pov trope gives some of the film a kind of home movie quality, the quality of being in and examining public space - the same sense we often get from Thom Andersen's films. There is a power to the liberty of this kind of seeing, which is at the other end of the spectrum from surveillance video. The shot is looking downhill at the intersection of Wonderland Avenue and Lookout Mountain Avenue. This is Laurel Canyon, before Morrison, Joni, before John Holmes. And what is fascinating in retrospect is that this location is less than a mile from Lookout Mountain Laboratory, the military's "secret" facility for preparing and processing photography of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. This facility was busy developing images of the Hardtack series of 'plein-air' nuclear detonations (which, in a series of 72 explosions, tested the response of over 18,000 G.I.s to various levels of radiation exposure - more ominous and undisclosed than the testing of prisoners in City of Fear) even as Lucien Ballard was perched in the backseat of this Ford in the hills above the Strip. Just another register of the "vast State secret that rumbles beneath ... the narrative..."

Cicat Cailhronnat

CITY OF FEAR: GET OUT OF THE CAR!

2010-09-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

--The 1959 film by Irving Lerner written about in a recently revised piece here

--Thom Andersen's tremendous new film; He writes a commentary for it here; reads as a lively stand-alone essay on rhythm and blues and Los Angeles history, Chicano culture, 16mm filmmaking...

O SOMMA LUCE di Jean-Marie Straub

2010-08-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

2010-07-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

2010-06-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

FILM IS ONLY A REFLECTION OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE
by Luc Moullet

Many people take the habit of current cinema as laws imposed by the profound nature of the cinematographic spectacle: thus the breaking up of the film into tiny fragments, the consistency f the dramatic situation and the developments of the camera, the musical filler, shimmering images, the abundance of sets, the audibility of the dialogue, the notions of a beginning and an ending, the credits, the willful scam (even in excellent films like LA GUERRE EST FINIE the principle of the scam is respected, a principle which consists of insuring that actors and fiction be taken for real characters and action) are only the expression of the civilization of petty bourgeois who arrange beautiful paintings on their walls. It is a cinema of masks: the filmmaker avoids difficulties by means of artifice; he hides reality – their reality – from himself and from the spectator through decoration and apparent order. Current cinema artificially reintroduces beautiful elements in a universe which is unaware of this beauty. When I go from the Gare du Nord (Euston Station) to the Gare de l'Est (King's Cross), I don't pass through the Bois de Boulogne (Hyde Park). Still it's pretty. Well, most filmmakers pass through the Bois de Boulogne. In this way they offer a false conception of life. They make the exploited person believe that beautiful external elements can be integrated into his sad actual life. Insofar as the discovery of beauty creates happiness, it is important to discover true, rather than false, beauty within normal life.

That is why repetition – the same gestures without obvious interest, daily washing, shaving, dressing, walking – variety – the lack of dramatic ordering of the human day – the absence of poetry – modern decor and rhythm of life, invasion of the Civil Code – all must be sources of emotion, interest, and beauty. Modern music (Antoine, Dutronc, Gall, Sheila 62 and 66, Vartan) offers an example by basing its beauty on anti-poetical words and sounds and on repetition. I would even say that the value of a film is connected to the degree to which it creates beauty through repetition, and that the aim of cinema is to allow the spectator to pee every day in the literal sense without getting pissed off in the figurative sense.*

Analysis, opposition, reflection, all methods are good. I prefer exaggeration: the careful accumulation of uninteresting elements provokes a certain dizziness, a source of beauty and humor, which allows us to beat the modern world and its henchmen at their own game, to anticipate their absurdity, to disconcert and thus to defeat them. That is why in shot 163 (c) of BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE, Colette Descombes says that it's logical for man to "prefer human absurdity, to which he must contribute in order to adopt it."

The predominance of bourgeois values in films originates in the success of the cinema of the past: the first filmmakers all became big businessmen. Then, in order to enter the milieu of cinema it was necessary to belong to an equivalent milieu. That's why 41 % of Frenchmen, but 0% of filmmakers, have a father who is a worker or an agricultural wage-earner; 71 % of filmmakers but 7.8% of Frenchmen have fathers belonging to the upper classes of society. Today [1967], the minimum salary of a director is around $9000.00. He shoots a film every two years, on the average. Nevertheless, only 6% of the French earn more than he does. Wherefore the crisis of the cinema: as long as the salary of the director is not identical to the earnings of the average Frenchman, he will be cut off from the average spectator and from reality.

Add to that the betrayal of the other sectors of the C.G.T. and F.O. (organized labor) by the actors' and technicians' unions: The industry bringing in so much, they require gigantic salaries (an average of $160 a week) and personnel which the State tends to render obligatory, even for small-budget artistic films. Thus directors, having to spend more, are forced to respect commercial demands, derived from tastes which the bourgeoisie impose on the exploited class, with the help of advertising, demands which they wouldn't have to respect if films only cost what they were supposed to. They are forced to avoid taking political or artistic risks.

Currently, leftist labor unions glorify right-wing films which alienate the exploited class, like LA GRANDE VADROUILLE or IS PARIS BURNING?, films which cost millions of dollars and bring in plenty. They sabotage incisive films which only cost $10,000 or $20,000 and don't bring in much. An actor who resents being offered $240 a month as a travelling salesman wouldn't even suspect that this contact with reality would make him a better actor. As with the novel and painting, 70% of the time film must be a moonlighting job, in which a person condenses what he's acquired in the course of his main work. Pecas or me, Patelliere or Godard, we're too professional, too marked by the cinema to give it new blood: Everyone, agricultural worker, baker, coal-merchant, dock-worker, elevator-operator, fireman, garage- mechanic, hospital-attendant, ice cream vendor, journalist: there aren't any. knife-and-scissors grinder, locksmith, miner, nickel-plater, office-worker, postman, quiz show host, railroad worker, secret agent, ticket-puncher, urbanologist, veterinarian, watchmaker (there aren't any), must make his own film. Each person can realize a good film at least once in his life. Therefore, access to film-directing for 50 million Frenchmen must be facilitated, especially since there is room, each year in France, for thirty films costing one million dollars, but also for at least five hundred feature length films costing $6000.

Today, if a studio film like BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE costs much more, a French feature film made under normal conditions, without useless expenses (remember that insurance, the office, and the staff are the founding fathers of bankruptcy) costs $9,800, $6000 with real ingenuity (but I think by 1970, with a little bit of organization we'll be able to arrive at this figure normally), $3000 for 8mm (a format sufficient for 200-seat theaters). We must democratize the cinema. Here we have a prodigious possibility of growth for culture, for industry, which can’t help but develop through the multiplication of clients, and also for employment: 500 films, that’s 4000 new jobs.

The more the stooges of diverse bourgeoisies and trusts – Messieurs Goebbels and Fourre-Cormeray – struggled against the free access of the individual (Jew or amateur) to film production, the more the individual rebelled, wanting to take up the challenge and do the forbidden thing. That is why we mustn’t protest the absurdity of the current cinematic policy, which will one day produce a hilarious comedy, and which has already given us a good laugh. If a National Center of the Novel were created, many more people would all of a sudden want to write. There are disadvantages, but many more advantages to the fact that the current status of filmmakers is identical to that of smugglers.

– Cahiers du cinéma, No. 187. Translated by Sandy Flitterman. From the FILM AT THE PUBLIC program, "The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet", November 2-14 1982.

*This is an untranslatable pun on “se raser,” which is slang for “being bored.” (Trans.)

2010-05-22T21:28:00.001-07:00

Yesterday...

2010-05-06T01:26:00.000-07:00

...we suffered a severe loss to the cinema today: William Lubtchansky died.

Reflections to come. Craig Keller has written a preliminary remembrance which, for him, needn't stretch back further than the morning before the great cinematographer's passing. And for me too, not a day goes by that I am not thinking of one or more of the films or videos that Lubtchansky shot: Ici et ailleurs, France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, Le Pont du Nord, Too Early, Too Late, Sicilia!, Les Amants réguliers, Itinéraire de Bricard. And there are 2, 3, 4 titles between each of these towering works that are, and will remain, part of daily operations.

Photo: Lubtchansky, Huillet and Straub shooting Klassenverhältnisse (CLASS RELATIONS) in Hamburg -- 1983 -- by Caroline Champetier. Below, Une visite au Louvre (2004, Huillet and Straub and Lubtchansky).

May Day

2010-05-01T04:09:00.000-07:00

Commemorating the birthday of Danièle Huillet, who would've been 74 today, a photograph by Caroline Champetier of a dog (unknown!), JM Straub, Willy Lubtchansky and Huillet during the shooting of the French part of TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (1981); and another by Sebastian Schadhauser of Renato Berta, Straub and Huillet shooting GESCHICHTSUNTERRICHT (HISTORY LESSONS, 1972).

MAY DAY

2010-05-01T03:21:00.001-07:00

A VERY YOUNG FILM (SOCIALISM)

2010-04-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

Article: "Explication Through the Trailer"
(of FILM SOCIALISME - JLG, et al.)
by Arthur Mas and Martial Pisani
English Version thanks to Craig Keller.

Godard, Kael,
Spanish Republicans, Stalin,
Dziga Vertov Group, Bezhin Meadow
Mr. Arkadin, Mr. Hulot,
Gold, Gold,
Children, Animals

YOUNG PEOPLE

2010-04-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

YOUNG PEOPLE, 1940, by Allan Dwan

The film in full here

Written on the wind...

2010-04-17T11:13:00.001-07:00

"I travel through countries awash with blood..."

FILM SOCIALISME

MADE IN USA

2010-04-13T03:13:00.000-07:00

"Appreciates the physical-mental exercise of seeing of movies like these..."
said the amateur boxer Pedro Rufino.

ANTIGONE (1991)- Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub

2010-04-13T01:45:00.000-07:00

Charles Burnett: "Well, I think it’s being aware of (children), and also respecting them. There was an incident I remember where I was trying to tell this little girl how to drink this water and come over to her father. So I’m telling her, I sort of bent down to her level, took the water, 'walk like this,' sort of crouching down at her level. Then when I said action she did exactly what I did, she crouched down and walked over to her father. I said 'no no no', and I get down on her level again, did the same thing, and she did the same thing. I didn’t realize she was imitating me crouching down. I was just trying to get down to her level. So I realized it was my mistake and I stood up and said 'this is what you do.' So from that moment on I learned you can talk to kids like they’re adults and they understand perfectly what you’re talking about."

2010-04-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Innocence and Malice

2010-04-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

"When from behind the board-fence he unties the shoe-strings of the policeman who is seeking him, one knows, of course, that he is doing it on purpose, but one is less sure of his intention when he steps on the gouty foot of the man who is persecuting his sweetheart. His innocence and his malice go hand in hand, and by means of his malice he reveals his innocence. When he arrives late at his master's house and submits his poor body to the kick that does not come; when, from his bed, he rattles his wash-basin and drags his shoes about the floor to make his master think that he is getting up, a divine joy fills us, for he is avenging us all, those who have passed and those who are yet to come. Through his resignation and through his vitality he is the conqueror of fate and of despotism. What does death matter, or trouble? He brings laughter through his suffering. The gods flee in all directions."

-Elie Faure, "The Art of Charlie Chaplin", Art of Cineplastics, 1923.

*Double bill tonight of BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and LE TESTAMENT DU DR. CORDELIER at LACMA (thank you Ian Birnie and Mathieu Fournet).*

popular front

2010-04-09T17:15:00.000-07:00