Budd Boetticher's final film, MY KINGDOM FOR (1985), the last testament of a toreador (the reference to Cocteau is not a stretch), will have a rare public screening tonight, October 29th, 9:30pm (entrada livre) at Cineclube Gardunha in Fundão, Portugal.
The screening is the culmination of a 4-film series called "Rural American Films: For a Horse" –– films that dealt head-on with the mares, stallions, colts and fillies who've flooded the screen since cinema's birth. Films that made "the incredible fact of Horse" (Archibald MacLeish) their protagonists. Not exactly westerns but rural films, intended for rural audiences, made under the banner of the B-film or modest independent production:
BLACK GOLD (1947, Phil Karlson - Allied Artists/Monogram)
THUNDERHOOF (1948, Phil Karlson - Columbia Pictures)
BLACK MIDNIGHT (1949, Budd Boetticher - Monogram)
MY KINGDOM FOR (1985, Budd Boetticher - Lusitano LTD).
Programmed by Andy Rector / Kino Slang Presents for Cineclube Gardunha (care of José Oliveira and Marta Ramos), the series will now travel to Braga, with weekly screenings throughout November at Lucky Star Cineclube (thanks to director João Palhares, who wrote: "The series is full of nuances that I've picked up as the cycle progressed in Fundão. It seems to be as much about the production constraints of the "B movie" as it is about the great outdoor tradition of American cinema; as much about horses and their gracefulness as it is about adoptive children and their struggles.")
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MY KINGDOM FOR, ignored in Boetticher's filmography, was almost single-handedly chronicled and theorized by Bill Krohn in the years 1983 -1996, while he was the Los Angeles correspondent for the Cahiers du cinéma and Trafic, and, it should be added, a close friend of Budd and Mary Boetticher.
–– BUDD BOETTICHER SHOOTS ‘LUSITANO’ (1983): A short production report written during the making of MY KINGDOM FOR, at the time called LUSITANO, published in Cahiers as one of Krohn's "Letters from Hollywood".
–– THE RETURN OF BUDD BOETTICHER (1987): A long article situating MY KINGDOM FOR in the life and oeuvre of the filmmaker, with much information and many quotes from Krohn's talks with B.B. about the film and its history. Published in Cahiers.
–– “HERE IS A HORSE” (1996): A theoretical analysis (formal, psychoanalytical, semiotic, and within la politique des auteurs) of MY KINGDOM FOR, especially on the film’s unusual title, its relationship to painting and the word. Published in Trafic.
Within the huge block of context below on the role of MY KINGDOM FOR in Boetticher's life and work, and in the cinema itself, hand-in-hand with Boetticher's endeavor to "move away from Hollywood" and be "completely apart" (words declared in the opening narration of MY KINGDOM FOR), these three texts contain a key idea of Krohn's, a somewhat oppositional conclusion he arrived at during the writing of his essay "Phantoms of Liberty" (1991, 24 Images). In the early 80s, Serge Daney, editor of the Cahiers at the time, gave Krohn a simple assignment: "Find the margins of America cinema". Krohn visited Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton and, on close inspection, found them free only to the extent that limited, hermetic movements are possible inside of a straightjacket, i.e. he saw an institutionalized avant-garde that had "emerged from its underground ghetto to be absorbed by the system of university teaching, government grant financing and art museums". The filmmakers on the margins who were found not to be stagnant, or "D.O.A.", were the aged masters of this young art, who in their late films of the 70s and 80s were using images and sounds, biography and reality –– narratively, formally, politically –– in more complex ways, and also proving themselves more radical as masters of their own lives, their own production, and old age: Vidor (METAPHOR), Nicholas Ray (WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN), and Welles (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND). In the mid-80s, Krohn finds Boetticher strongly adding himself to this list of "M.I.A.'s", both by Boetticher's sudden use of video and freeze-frames in MY KINGDOM FOR ("functioning as a psychoanalysis of the oeuvre"), and by his totally independent production of cinema and even his own life as a rejoneador on his horse ranch in southern California. The lesson didn't die: in the decades since all of this, Godard and Straub (after Huillet's passing), in their seventies, eighties and nineties, found themselves practicing something similar in the 21st century, furthering the microsystems of production they'd already solidified late last century. They risked an embrace of the latest means of their age, for and against that age, shed all sentimentality about past formats without forgetting their craft, and made new works without compromise, in liberty, without capital, on video, in their homes, used like a set and workshop (ADIEU AU LANGAGE, SCHAKALE UND ARABER, etc.). Among the youth who did the same around the same moment, let's not forget, as many have (why?), the sisters Makhmalbaf –– Samira and Hana –– working in their own roving microstudio of the Makhmalbaf Film House ( وبسایت رسمی خانه فیلم مخملباف), making equally imposing, provocative 35mm and digital films about the reality of filmmaking, and the filming of reality (THE APPLE, BLACKBOARDS, THE JOY OF MADNESS, etc.).
–– A.R.
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BUDD BOETTICHER SHOOTS “LUSITANO”
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH A DIRECTOR OF THE THIRD KIND
by Bill Krohn
Cahiers du cinéma - no. 354, Dec. 1983
Budd Boetticher is currently putting the finishing touches on his new film, LUSITANO. The final sequence, a demonstration of rejoneo, or bullfighting on horseback, had to be re-shot when his wife Mary broke her arm, preventing the film from being shown as a workprint at the Seville Film Festival in November. LUSITANO was shot as a replacement for another film, CALIFA, the concluding film in an autobiographical trilogy about Boetticher's youth, his "lost years" in Mexico City during the making of the legendary ARRUZA (1971), and his life since ARRUZA. CALIFA, which was to be the first of the three films to be started, would have chronicled the third period, the time when Budd and Mary brought the first herd of Portuguese Lusitanos to the United States and established their ranch near San Diego. This was supposed to be a fictional film, with James Coburn and Yvette Mimieux playing the Boettichers, about their love affair with a show stallion, Califa, and about a young Mexican named Felipe, whom they were teaching the art of rejoneo.
LUSITANO tells the same story, but indirectly: Califa has become secondary, and Felipe is replaced by two young protégés, Gloria and Alison. Budd and Mary now play themselves, and the film, which includes material shot several years ago by Boetticher's favorite cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, has become what Boetticher calls a "documentary," like ARRUZA.
An accident unrelated to the film caused Mary to break her arm just before the rejoneo demonstration scheduled for October 1st, which would have been the last day of shooting. This scene would have to be postponed for two months, but Mary performed as planned, her arm in a cast, in a field made slippery by torrential rains, and this frightening scene will be added to the final version of the film, along with a fictional version of the accident.
Earlier in the shooting, when the 16mm cameras were not yet there, Boetticher switched to video and has used it ever since, making LUSITANO a kind of encyclopedia of the image, and incorporating paintings by the old Spanish masters, 16mm footage filmed by Lucien Ballard and the video footage, all mixed together. This is not the first time that Boetticher has worked in this way, adding "accidents" during the shooting to the finished film. A dispute with its star Carlos Arruza, which delayed the realization of the Plaza Mexico sequence that ends ARRUZA and, ten years later, Arruza’s death in a car accident, gave that film a tragic ending the director had not foreseen. Let's hope that this is the last real accident that will be added to LUSITANO and that we will soon be able to see the film in its definitive form. There are bad directors and good directors; those who sometimes surprise us with a personal work, and those who never cease to surprise us. Boetticher, since leaving Hollywood in 1960 to pursue his ideals, has become a director of the third kind.
–– B.K.
(Originally written in English; Translated to French by Vincent Ostria for Cahiers; with the original English manuscript now lost, this text was retranslated back to English from the French by Andy Rector)
LETTER FROM HOLLYWOOD:
THE RETURN OF BUDD BOETTICHER
by Bill Krohn
Cahiers du cinéma - no. 401, Nov. 1987
Oscar Boetticher Jr., better known as Budd Boetticher, is a filmmaker familiar to moviegoers who’ve learned to love cinema through genres: B.B. was one of the masters of the western, along with his fetish actor, Randolph Scott. Boetticher's eventful life and boundless love for horses and bullfighting have kept him away from Hollywood for many years. Preferring nature and animals, he has lived for many years on his ranch, not far from the Mexican border. Some may know one of his most beautiful films, BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1951), few have seen ARRUZA (1971), shot in 1967, on the life of the famous bullfighter, who was his friend. But no one in France has yet seen B.B.'s last film: MY KINGDOM FOR (1985), which closes his bullfighting trilogy. The Amiens Film Festival will pay tribute to Budd Boetticher from November 12 - 22, in the director’s presence. An ideal opportunity to reconnect with one of the most endearing filmmakers in American cinema.
With the completion of his last film, MY KINGDOM FOR, which took him nine years to make, and the restoration of his first major film, BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY –– cut down to 87 minutes by John Ford before its release in 1951, now reconstituted to is original duration of 2 hours and 20 minutes by David Shepard of The Directors Guild of America –– a circle has finally closed in Budd Boetticher's career.
A BULLFIGHTING TRILOGY
The MY KINGDOM FOR is the last in a trilogy of bullfighting films that punctuated Boetticher's career at a leisurely pace of one every seventeen years — BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1951), ARRUZA (1968), and MY KINGDOM FOR (1985). (Boetticher does not count THE MAGNIFICENT MATADOR [1955], which he says he made only to prove that Anthony Quinn could hold a major film together with his presence alone.) These films are the hidden side of a body of work that moviegoers have known first and foremost through a handful of masterpieces: six Randolph Scott westerns (Boetticher does not count WESTBOUND [1959]) and his farewell film to the studios, THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND (1960) —all made in an incredibly short span of four years, from 1957 to 1960; Many consider this period to be the twilight of what is now, in hindsight, called the "classical" cinema.
Let us briefly recall the history of these three films, and the quite varied circumstances in which they were produced.
1951: Oscar Boetticher Jr., gentleman bullfighter and director of low-budget films for companies such as Republic and Eagle Lion, undertakes an ambitious project. Under the aegis of his friend John Wayne, the film's producer, he makes a fictionalized version of his youthful adventures, his time learning bullfighting in Mexico. Robert Stack, in his first major role, and Gilbert Roland are the main actors in this film, the crew is essentially Mexican and some of Mexico's best-known matadors contribute themselves to the film. The film was barely finished when it was buried by the studio, until Boetticher sought the help of John Ford, a director he admired but had never met, who saw the film, liked it, and agreed to step in if he could cut out "40 minutes of sentimental shit". Edited by Ford, the film was released and nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Boetticher's directing career was launched.
1957: After a series of interesting films for Universal, some of which are noteworthy, Boetticher makes another film produced by Wayne, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, the first of the westerns with Scott, and even agrees to make a series of them, because, as each of the films must be shot in eighteen days, he is free, on the side, to make trips to Mexico, during which he begins with his cameraman, the great Lucien Ballard, to film the greatest matador in Mexico, Carlos Arruza, then on the cusp of a second triumphant career as a rejoneador. Finally, in 1960, disgusted by the rampant "lack of professionalism" he encountered while making THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND, Boetticher takes the 8 reels of film he has already edited, and his wife Debra Paget, gets into a white Rolls Royce, and leaves for Mexico to finish ARRUZA. This lasted ten years, during which he broke up with Paget, ran into a strike that paralyzed the Mexican film industry, lost all his money, was thrown into a federal prison, and even committed to an insane asylum by his own impresario who tried to force him to return to Hollywood to make THE COMANCHEROS. Completed in 1968 after Arruza's death in a car accident, ARRUZA was sold to Embassy Pictures, which sabotaged its distribution.
1976: Boetticher and his new wife Mary, comfortably settled on the ranch where they raise horses, not far from the Mexican border, are preparing a sequel of sorts to ARRUZA, filmed in 16mm by Lucien Ballard, starring the Boettichers and their protégée Gloria Ayling, a fourteen-year-old girl whom they are teaching the art of rejoneo. The project is buried when Gloria's family moves to Oregon, but is revived seven years later when they discover a new young protégée, Alison Campbell. Adapting the plot to the change of person, Boetticher also changes his medium: when his new cameraman, Gary Graver, delayed on another shoot with Orson Welles, fails to show up with his crew on the day of a performance that is to be shot for the film, Boetticher persuades a visitor to the ranch, equipped with a video camera, to cover the event, transfers to videotape what had already been shot on film, and edits it all with a VCR in his bedroom. Intended for television broadcast in the United States and theatrical release abroad, MY KINGDOM FOR is a hybrid work that, in addition, uses newspaper clippings and photographs to evoke different phases of Boetticher's life, as well as paintings photographed by the Boettichers in museums across Europe in order to show the role of their horses across history. Robert Stack and his wife Rosemary play themselves, visiting the Cortijo Lusitano and attending the important performance where Alison is introduced to the public for the first time, along with another representative of the new generation, Carlos Arruza Jr.. The film begins with clips from BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY and ARRUZA, and ends with a dream in which Alison sees herself making her debut as a rojoneador.
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Mary and Budd |
Many will continue to prefer his genre films, but it is in his bullfighting trilogy that Boetticher realized his true artistic ambitions. This was already visible in ARRUZA, whose affinities with Impressionist painting cannot fail to be noted, and, in its complete form, BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY turns out to be a work of very high caliber, through the sober, discreet tone of the dramatic scenes, the lyrical score by Victor Young, and the majestic rhythm, wonderfully controlled, which alternates the day and night sequences, playing on the rich palette of tones that characterized the last great period of black and white in Hollywood. (It is significant that Boetticher fought with Columbia for the right to use black and white again, nine years later, in THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND, which more than once echoes the sardonic side of BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY). As for MY KINGDOM FOR, with its mixture of techniques, its complex narrative strategies, its frank use of symbolism and the discreet use of modern techniques (notably the freeze frame, which here serves to replace dissolves), it is, of the bullfighting films, the one that least hesitates to follow an aesthetic bias –– perhaps because it unambiguously exposes the great unformulated theme of the trilogy: the aesthetic drive itself and its roots in aggression and the struggle for territory.
MY KINGDOM FOR
With the emergence of this theme, MY KINGDOM FOR brings considerable innovation compared to the previous films. What brings them together, however, are the two elements that unify the trilogy: a stated theme, the bullfight, and a way of filming it, essentially documentary –– for even BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY includes entire sequences of bullfights filmed in the documentary style, which Ford had chosen to eliminate. The key problem, the way of filming bullfights, seems to have been quickly solved. What is first striking when viewing the trilogy as a whole is the extent to which Boetticher remained true to himself by changing technique, era and production system, using literally every means at his disposal to pursue his project. One is somewhat stunned, for example, by the fact that in 1951 he was already using slow motion (32 frames per second, as in Mexican reports on bullfights) for didactic and aesthetic purposes, as he does throughout MY KINGDOM FOR with the help of modern video technology.
There is a passage in MY KINGDOM FOR where Boetticher’s fidelity to his style provides a delicious rhyming effect in this film full of nostalgic resonances: during the last performance, he shows us Carlos Arruza Jr. performing a dos manos against the tourino, a wheeled machine topped with horns, used in all rejoneo demonstrations at the Cortijo Lusitano ranch; then, as he mutters a remark about “memories,” he inserts a shot of Carlos Arruza Sr., performing the same maneuver against a live bull, filmed from exactly the same angle. “In Guadalajara,” Boetticher explains, “Carlos never planted his pair of banderillas so well, and I had the camera in the best position to film it: being a toreador and rejoneador myself, I knew when it would happen, because I had seen that the bull had a querencia. Automatically, I placed the camera in the same position when Carlitos planted his banderillas on the machine. Watching part of the film here in my room, I I thought, ‘Good God, I did this same shot 36 years ago!’ That's when I picked it up for this film. When you really know your subject, you always end up treating it in a certain way, which you can't perfect any more."
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 Arruza Jr. Arruza Sr. |
But none of these films are documentaries in the strict sense, even if they all aim to broaden the audience for a controversial sport, about which little is known, outside a circle of aficionados. Indeed, Boetticher also seems to have solved from the outset the problem of combining fiction and documentary, without alienating the audience, by openly giving them lessons: BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY was the first film in which the bullfighter was not Spanish –– he was an American. "You can't imagine Tyrone Power in BLOOD AND SAND turning to John Carradine, who grew up in Seville with him, both of them having fought bulls since they were old enough to walk, and saying, 'That's a fighting bull.' The other one would say, 'No shit, I know.' But when you have Robert Stack saying to Gilbert Roland, 'Manolo, how do you know if the bull will be brave?' Roland can explain it to him, and suddenly my audience begins to know something about bullfighting."
As if this method were not enough to exorcise the demon of didacticism, the transition from documentary to fiction is staged within the film itself. BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY begins with bullfighting scenes while a narrator (Ward Bond, absent from the credits) speaks of bullfighting as a game with death, and introduces Manolo Estrada (Roland) and his colleagues, expressing the omniscient point of view of an off-screen narrator, symbolized by the camera angle of the arena, from a very high angle. Suddenly a new voice intervenes, in which sarcasm breaks through: "Oh, you and your Spanish dictionary... the highest priced seats! Do you like it, 'muy alto', Liz?" The passage is a bit disconcerting, because we don't immediately realize that one commentator has replaced the other, and we have the impression that the sarcasm is directed at us, until a reverse shot reveals to us that the new voice and high camera angle are those of the film’s character Barney Flood (John Hubbard), an American theater producer visiting Mexico with his wife Liz (Virginia Grey) and his young associate John Regan (Robert Stack). We understand in retrospect what has happened: the narrator's voice has been substituted for that of a hapless tourist whose wife's lack of Spanish has led him to the worst seat in the arena –– a dizzying perch from which it is impossible to see the show, and offering a perspective that a few seconds before we had mistaken for that of a god. Superimposed on the images of the action unfolding below is the outline of binoculars. These are the binoculars through which Flood and Regan observe the magnificent craftsmanship that Estrada displays. During the next scene, Regan asks Estrada to teach him the bullfighter's trade.
In this sequence, Boetticher stages his aversion to the conventional and didactic use of a commentator's voice-over, preferring instead the point of view of the layman, the one who knows nothing (Flood, then Regan, his fiery sidekick), because he is a convenient substitute for the audience, and because his character serves as a starting point for the fiction. Knowing this, we are at first surprised to hear, in ARRUZA, Anthony Quinn's voiceover commenting, explaining, and even speaking in place of the real protagonists, whose voices we never hear, but in this film, Boetticher uses the convention of the voiceover commentary against itself, a bit like Godard "turning down the volume" in HERE AND ELSEWHERE: "The audience learns what the rejoneo is, Quinn explains it while Carlos learns to ride. But when we get to the last bullfight, there is half an hour without a single word: we see a bullfight."
In MY KINGDOM FOR, Boetticher uses Robert Stack exactly as he did in BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY. He outlines the story of Gloria and Alison, and through flashbacks, for Stack, who he thus prepares to understand the equestrian performance he will attend the next day (this one occupies a place equivalent to that of the bullfight at the end of ARRUZA): "I needed someone who didn't understand anything, who would ask me questions so that I could give him explanations. So I went back to the ancient Greek chorus—Robert Stack. So, I don't address the audience. The audience never wants to listen when you address them."
MY KINGDOM FOR also begins like a documentary: Stack's voice (unidentified) states the film's epigraph, taken from "Hipparchus" by Xenophon. But when the narrative voice becomes more concrete (speaking in the first person, recalling past encounters with Boetticher, also recalling Stack's first experience as a bullfighter, represented on screen by an excerpt from BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY. The scene he comments on is interspersed with images without commentary showing the descent of a private plane preparing to land at the San Diego airport. There, impassive, Carlos Arruza Jr. (unidentified) waits for the plane. The progressive identification of the voice-over and the descent of the plane that brings the commentator into the field of the film, removing him from the imaginary space from which he had until then made his comments, constitute two parallel movements. They end at the same time, at the moment when the plane stops, when Arruza Jr. opens the door and asks the couple inside: "Mr. and Mrs. Stack?" He suddenly reveals the name of the main passenger. From this point on, Stack ceases to be a narrator and becomes a character ripe for training.
Even if the difference between the actor and the character he plays seems extremely tenuous here since the actor plays himself, the first scene in which Stack appears, the one where he gets out of the plane, is purely fictional: not recognizing Carlos Arruza Jr., whom he’s not seen since childhood, Stack does not appreciate the fact that Boetticher has sent his driver to the airport instead of coming in person. It is only after he is driven to Boetticher's stables, where his mischievous host is writing a welcome text, that he is made aware of the gag.
This gag has allowed Arruza Jr. to be introduced but it is also a stone in the garden of Stack who has waited seven years before coming to the Cortijo. The photographs that we see in the next scene, fixed to the wall of the harness room, all represent friends who have visited Boetticher since he started a new life in Ramona. The gag also serves the same function as the binoculars in BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY: it introduces doubt as to the omniscience of the narrator played by Stack, suggesting that as a tourist, who has arrived a little late, he is not always able to see beyond appearances. What appearances? Let's go back in time (our medium lends itself to it): before the plane begins its descent, during the first sequence after the credits, we see Boetticher and his famous Spanish stallion, Sultan, on full exhibition in the "Airs Above the Ground", after which we see Boetticher riding his beloved stallion Califa. All this takes place in front of the spectators of the Cortijo Lusitano. At first alone, Boetticher is then accompanied by his wife Mary, an accomplished horsewoman, while Stack's voice tells us of the director's decision to leave Hollywood. In an admiring tone, his voice speaks of the director's "colorful" life and his taste for "danger" and "adventure." (These words recall the beginning of Anthony Quinn's commentary in ARRUZA.)
What we see, reinforced by Stack's voiceover, is exactly what we get from the man who made COMANCHE STATION: a man on horseback, made for danger, first alone and then in the company of a beautiful woman who, with her unforgettable gaze and her tight clothes, recalls the heroine of more than one western filmed with Scott. Stack's comments and a flashback showing the extremely powerful scene where Carlos Arruza fights in Plaza Mexico then remind us that Boetticher is also the man who directed ARRUZA. The parallelism is again obvious: like Boetticher, Arruza became a bull breeder and rejoneador after retiring. His wife was also called Mari and he even had a stallion called Califa. Today, one might have the impression that Boetticher became the man we see in his films, when he started to film the man he had been. During the following flashback, one of the highlights of BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY, also filmed in Plaza Mexico, Stack's voice informs us that the film is based on the director's youthful adventures. The man fits perfectly with his films. We have seen his films, now we see the man.
But this "supposedly biographical" aspect that Stack's romantic commentary helps us believe does not stand up to scrutiny. The similarities between Boetticher and his heroes are not as obvious as they seem at first. Moreover, the excerpts used for the flashbacks are themselves curiously contaminated by fiction.
The sequence taken from BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY shows Regan (Stack) entering Plaza Mexico and preparing to fight a bull to atone for the death of Estrada (Roland), which he caused. Meanwhile, Stack, the narrator, explains to us that the material of the film is really Boetticher's life. He tells us of the fear he personally had when, during the filming of this sequence, he found himself face to face with a bull for the first time in his life. Thus presented, the sequence is triply fictional. First, Stack found himself face to face with a bull during the filming of the tienta, which preceded the flashback sequence. Second, Boetticher never caused anyone to die in an arena. Third, he never fought in Plaza Mexico early in his career (the Plaza didn't yet exist). In fact, there's roughly one thing in this magnificent scene that's based on anyone's experience. It's Regan's reaction to his fellow matadors saying their prayers as they enter the arena: looking left and looking right, he sees them crossing themselves and looks up at the sky. ("I kept that sequence because it was the best close-up, but also because it fit with what I felt every time I fought –– I was always surrounded by Catholics!")
As for the sequence cut from ARRUZA, it is fourfold fictional, even though we see Carlos Arruza actually risking his life in one of the greatest matador displays ever filmed. First, Arruza was fighting for Boetticher's cameras, as Stack reminds us ("I was there... I heard the great matador say, 'Where do you want me to die for your damn cameras!' At the climactic moment, in the Plaza Mexico sequence we don't see here, Arruza actually glances at the camera before killing the bull to make sure it's in the right position.") Secondly, Arruza returned to Plaza Mexico to fight on horseback only at Boetticher's instigation and despite all his virulent objections –– in fact, he made Boetticher wait nine years. Thirdly, the sequence is in fact composed of performances that took place on two successive Sundays, because Boetticher, who was not satisfied with the ending of the sequence, brought Arruza back and made him do it again. Fourthly, these two exhibitions, which in fact corresponded to the high point of Arruza's career, had been, quite consciously, imagined by the director as an echo of the supreme scene of BULLFIGHER AND THE LADY, which itself had been, as we’ve seen, fabricated from scratch.
The myth that Boetticher embodies in what we might call "Stack's film" –– and, no doubt, in the eyes of Stack, who symbolizes Boetticher's friends in Hollywood and his admirers around the world –– is that of machismo, and MY KINGDOM FOR runs counter to that myth, by the very nature of the story it tells, which is closer to Disney than to what Hollywood or Boetticher's admirers would expect from him: "What I like about MY KINGDOM FOR is that it's a very kindly movie, and I was never allowed to make a kind film in Hollywood. It was all blood, balls, guts, because that's how they see me. You don't win a woman like Mary by just being tough." Even more surprising if we think about the limited role of women in the Scott Westerns, MY KINGDOM FOR is a film about the transmission of tradition, where the younger generation is essentially represented by two teenage girls. ("I'm sure someone will write a thesis explaining that this represents female empowerment, or something like that, but it's not. It's just that little girls are more passionate about horses than little boys.")
And all in all, the story told in the long flashbacks refines the image of mastery that Boetticher embodies at the beginning of the film, emphasizing his vulnerability: when Gloria, the first protégé, leaves, Budd and Mary are so touched that they swear to never do it again, until, finally, they weaken and agree to take Alison as their lad, at her request. It is only after the trio has weathered a crisis, when Mary's favorite gelding, Gitano, is seriously injured, that they risk taking Alison under their wing. Boetticher speaks of these things, as of everything else related to his film, in terms of mise en scène: "The new protégé is a good plot element. That's how you write good screenplays: boy meets girl, girl gets pneumonia, boy becomes a doctor, cures girl, they get married, have a baby, baby gets pneumonia... it goes up and down, and that's what keeps the interest alive." But the film bears the poignant mark of the pain and anger that Gloria's departure caused him: he has stripped away most of the footage of her –– it is hard to imagine another director doing that, considering that it was all filmed by Lucien Ballard.
The "Stack film" is in fact Boetticher's film, of course, and Stack, the actor, is only reading from a text written for him by Boetticher when he draws the romantic portrait of the man on horseback, but Boetticher explains this contradiction by referring again to his conception of directing: "Remember this: I am a showman, and people who see me in the performance will see me as I want to appear. On the other hand, it is not by being that kind of guy that I've had so much success, all my life, with pretty women. I cry, I am very sensitive, I am interested in people, I like good kids and hate others, and I love my friends. Nobody knows who I am deep down, except those who know me really well. I am a showman, and when I am in front of the camera, I am who I want to be –– but, Good Lord, I am not like that at all!"
None of this will surprise those who know Boetticher through his films and not through the stereotypes spread by critics. It is certainly not the first time that a Boetticher hero relives against his will the love whose loss traumatized him, but it is the first time that this repetition leads to an ambiguous happy ending.
Alison
ALISON'S DREAM
Machismo as pure spectacle: Boetticher implicitly develops this idea in the brief account he gives to Stack on the history of the rejoneo. Although he claims that he and Mary practice the only medieval art still in existence exactly as it was in the Middle Ages, the tradition has been completely revised in the performances at the Cortijo Lusitano, since the bull is replaced by the wheeled machine normally only used for exercises –– he was prompted to do so by a mixture of personal and professional motives: "It is the only way to show the people of this country what bullfighting horses do. It allows them to observe the horses and the art of orchestrating them, without a drop of blood. Personally, I would’ve preferred to fight live bulls, but my wife didn’t want to, and neither did the girls. I had a hell of a time getting Mary to stick the banderillas on the machine, because every time she hit that damn thing, she felt like she was hurting an animal!! You see, that's Mary, and that's why I love her."
The replacement of the bull by a machine represents such a radical change in the ritual of the bullfight that unprepared spectators may at first be struck by the imbecility of the idea, but Boetticher's innovation is only the most recent step in the evolution of the rejoneo, a war game devised by medieval Portuguese knights to keep their horses in shape, which evolved into an art form that predates the better-known Spanish bullfight by three centuries. The trilogy shows the three phases of this evolution, the last of which is rejoneo according to Boetticher –– though it is unlikely that the tradition Boetticher has revised will ever become law: "That can't be the next step, because they care about honor, death, and all that. That's their form of machismo."
All throughout the trilogy, bullfighting is portrayed as an art form, on a par with music and painting, and each film ends in the same way, with a performance where the aesthetic dimension of this art is fully revealed –– partly, at least, because Boetticher's other art form requires it: "That's how you make movies. These days, you can't make endings. Movies never have an ending. Take Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, with all their little friends, the movie always ended with a big show in the barn, you remember –– we've forgotten that now. They sit around a table and discuss the ending and end up messing it up. They've released a movie that has three different endings..." In MY KINGDOM FOR, the ending is pure spectacle: while the big bullfight scenes that serve as the climax of BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY and ARRUZA were preceded by dramatic sequences that emphasized the existential confrontation with the coming death, the finale of MY KINGDOM FOR comes after a sequence in which we see the whole cast, suddenly much more numerous, decorating the arena with flags and posters, grooming their horses, preparing their props and costumes, in an atmosphere close to that of a circus: "You have no idea what it takes to prepare a performance –– you need people everywhere. It's like being on the set of a big production."
But we should not overlook what remains of an existential drama, and which distinguishes Boetticher's performances from training runs, which the demonstrations at the Cortijo Lusitano also include. "We have put away the blood and death, and kept the ballet on horseback, but we have not put away the risk that the knight runs. Because, man, doing some of these things, you can crash and break your neck. What we do is very dangerous and that's what people like about this show. Go to a Lippizaner show, they do tagadatagada, and jump really high, they all look great, but nobody's going to get hurt. Mary and I can kill ourselves. In fact, for this movie, Mary got a broken arm and a broken toe. I had six broken ribs, a hernia, a double hernia, and a dislocated vertebra in my neck. If I told you everything, you wouldn't believe it!"
All the elements of the Boetticherian spectacle are condensed in the coda that follows the last performance. It’s Alison's dream: after everyone has left, Alison enters the deserted arena, holding her favorite stallion, Gladiator, by the halter. She hears music in the distance and all the trappings of the performance reappear before her eyes: the flags and posters, the banderillas swaying in a light wind, the machine. Suddenly, she is on Gladiator, dressed in the black 19th-century Portuguese coat that Boetticher had shown Stack earlier, a gift from Carlos Arruza. Just as suddenly, Boetticher appears behind the machine, dressed in black, looking savage; we see him in a close-up swinging his head like a bull preparing to attack. Alison grimaces and shakes her head "No"; Boetticher vanishes, replaced by Mary, wearing black leotards, smiling amiably. After a nod, Alison begins a demonstration of rejoneo, accompanied by music and applause. When she has finished, she hears the invisible crowd cheering her, and a reverse shot shows us Robert and Rosemarie Stack applauding, standing, among other admiring spectators. Alison thanks them with a little nod. The image freezes on her beaming smile.
The filmmaker is not unaware of the psychological implications of this sequence: "We were in black because we were her bull. The only bull she had ever faced was me, and she would not accept him in any way. All of a sudden Mary is there, she's a friendly, gentle bull, and Alison accepts the fight." But this idea of bull substitutes also illustrates Boetticher's bizarre and democratic notion of spectacle: "She looks at me and we insert the close-up on me. I'm a terrible son of a bitch who terrified her, who chased her around Califa until she almost lost her mind, and all of a sudden she's in her new dream costume, and it's her dream. And I'm there, but she won't accept anything in me. So she quickly gets rid of me, which I find very amusing." I got the same kind of response when I asked about a makeup detail. Question: "Why are Alison's lips so heavily made up in the scene where she's looking at the pictures in the tack room?" Answer: "Alison is fifteen. And rather than making her look like the fifteen-year-old we imagine her to be, she's a little crazy, she dresses however she wants. Kids these days look that way a lot more than we'd like them to. She wore those horrible earrings in the last scene of the movie. But we let her do it, because that's how kids dress." Everyone is their own director, free to create an image of themselves in the light of their own imagination: this could apply just as appropriately to the characters in Boetticher's purely imaginary works, and particularly to the villains, although here the idea produces a "documentary" effect. And if all the dream characters are in black, it’s not the first time that a Boetticher film, recognizing the limits of power to create myths –– which is the whole value of the spectacle –– has ended, cheerfully, with a look back at death (Craig Stevens to Peter Whitney at the end of BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE: "Don't just stand there Amos, get a shovel!").
––– B.K.
(Originally written in English; Translated to French by Francine Arakelian and Lydie Eschasseriaux for the Cahiers; with the original English manuscript now lost, this text was retranslated to English from the French by Andy Rector)
*
“HERE IS A HORSE” *
by Bill Krohn
(“Voici un cheval”,
Trafic No. 19, Eté 1996)
1976: Boetticher and his wife Mary, comfortably settled on their horse ranch in Ramona, California, are preparing a sequel of sorts to ARRUZA (1971), filmed on 16mm by Lucien Ballard and starring the Boettichers and their protégé Gloria Ayling, a fourteen-year-old girl whom they’re teaching the art of rejoneo: bullfighting on horseback.
The project is buried when Gloria's family moves to Oregon, but revived seven years later when the Boettichers discover a new young protégé, Alison Campbell. Adapting the plot to this change of person, Boetticher also changes his medium: when his new cameraman, Gary Graver, delayed on another shoot with Orson Welles, fails to show up with his crew on the day of a performance that is to be shot for the film, Boetticher persuades a ranch visitor with a video camera to cover the event, transfers to tape what had already been shot on film, and assembles it all with two VCRs in his bedroom, producing a cut that he will send to a video lab in San Diego for finishing touches.
MY KINGDOM FOR (1985) is a hybrid work that, moreover, uses photographs evoking different phases of the filmmaker's life, as well as paintings photographed by the Boettichers in museums across Europe, in order to show the role of their horses across history. Robert Stack and his wife Rosemarie play themselves, as visitors to the Cortijo Lusitano, and Boetticher tells the story to them, and to the spectators of the important performance during which Alison is introduced to the public for the first time. The film begins with excerpts from BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY and ARRUZA, narrated by Stack, who then leaves the role of narrator to Boetticher; it ends with a dream in which Alison sees herself making her debut as a rejoneador, wordlessly.
* This text is a postscript to my article, published in issue 401 of Cahiers du cinéma (November, 1987), on Budd Boetticher's most recent film, MY KINGDOM FOR, the last film in his trilogy on bullfighting after the fiction film BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY and the documentary ARRUZA. The description of MY KINGDOM FOR placed here in the introduction, extracted, with slight modifications, from the Cahiers, provides all the details necessary for the understanding of this text, which deals with the theoretical questions raised by the film and its title. But Boetticher fans are strongly advised to order a copy from Corinth Video, 34 Gavenport Street, New York, NY 10014, USA, by sending $59.95 per cassette)
MY KINGDOM FOR: a strange title. Like When, in Disgrace..., the title of Boetticher's book on the filming of ARRUZA, it’s taken from Shakespeare's Richard III. But the interruption of a quotation before the complement of a preposition is a "coupure plus brutale" (more abrupt cut), in the language of structural poetics, than the omission of the subject and verb in the sentence introduced by "When"; and unlike the title of the book, the title of the film does not contain an ellipsis to indicate its incompleteness – because it actually isn’t: it is part of the body of the film, which completes it. At the very beginning, the title appears, one word at a time, emerging from the blackness of the screen, accompanied by the stamping of hooves approaching then diminishing. Cut to a shot showing the head and neck of a horse –– the stallion Sultan, circling under the guidance of Boetticher, who is briefly seen behind him, while the camera, still closely following the horse, circles the track, accompanied by the sound of the approaching then fading hoofbeats we’ve already heard. The first shot of the film is the last word of its title; as Boetticher rightly points out: "I don't need to say 'a horse'!"
The idea that a film image is like a word is an old one and it has always presupposed a certain conception, not only of cinema but also of language, according to which words fulfill a purely denotative function, devoid of associations, etymologies, and other "parasitic" meanings. Along with this, MY KINGDOM FOR recalls another analogy, itself preceded by a venerable tradition: the analogy between film and painting, evoked here by the insertion of paintings from various European museums depicting Andalusian and Lusitano horses, and by moments where the image freezes – the most striking of which is the freeze-frame on the image of Mary performing a levade on Ciclon. (The levade was the favorite pose of equestrian portraitists of the 17th and 18th centuries, as the paintings inserted into the montage demonstrate: Boetticher freezes Mary and Ciclon in the same pose that Rubens painted the Duke of Buckingham, and Velásquez painted Don Baltazar Carlos.)
It turns out that these analogies are precisely the same ones that André Bazin implicitly invokes to praise Boetticher's style in his seminal article devoted to SEVEN MEN FROM NOW (1956) – "An Exemplary Western" (Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ? - t.1, Cerf) – where he contrasts the filmmaker's approach to the contemporary tendency of "psychological westerns, with a more or less philosophical thesis, the significant westerns":
"Emotion is born from the most abstract connections and from the most concrete kind of beauty. Realism, so imperative in the historical and psychological Westerns, has no more meaning here than in the Triangle films, or rather, a specific splendor arises from the fusion of extreme convention and extreme reality. Boetticher knew how to make prodigious use of the landscape, of the varied substance of the earth, of the grain and shape of the rocks. Nor do I think that the photogenic qualities of horses have been as well exploited for a very long time. For example, in Gail Russell's extraordinary bathing scene where the inherent modesty of the Western is humorously pushed so far that we see only the lapping of the water on the reeds while fifty yards away Randolph Scott is grooming the horses. It is difficult to imagine simultaneously more abstraction and more transference in the matter of eroticism."
After Bazin, it became commonplace for critics to praise Boetticher for making films where a rock is a rock, and a hero is a hero –– where the art of the filmmaker is more akin to that of a painter than to a man of letters: on the one hand, pure denotation, whether in the domain of nature or convention; on the other, the gaze of a painter who wisely limits himself to the surface of things.
The explicit inscription of these two analogies in MY KINGDOM FOR sums up this critical tradition well and corroborates it, but, one might add, just as rightly, reverses it, because establishing analogies with words and paintings incites us to reflect –– and allows the film itself to reflect, if I may say so –– on all the ways the filmic image differs from them.
Two essays by Pascal Bonitzer can help us think about this question alongside the film. In "Voici: la notion du plan et du sujet au cinéma" (Le Regard et la voix, 10/18), Bonitzer expands on the famous "paraphrase" of the filmic image according to Christian Metz's formula:
“It is because there is shooting, the production of a view, voyure, at the level of the shot, that it can never be reduced to a statement (or a fortiori to a word). At least to a statement whose enunciation would be indifferent, non-structuring. Christian Metz has pointed up, in passing, this question of enunciation (but without pausing over it), by "translating" a close-up of a revolver by a statement like "Here is a revolver." Here, he says, is an index of actualization, according to Martinet, and in fact the film image presents itself as actual, as actualized. But here is not just that, an index of actualization; or rather, as such, it constitutes a shifter, the point of connection for a subject of the enunciation who differs from the subject of the statement.”
Establishing a distinction between the spectator and the filmmaker as "the subject supposed to know" (or “the supposedly knowing subject” - A.R..), Bonitzer makes the shot the unstable, vacillating manifestation of the spectator's desire and the filmmaker's knowledge.
Confronted with the first shot of Sultan in MY KINGDOM FOR, the spectator is presented with two twinned statements, one embedded within the other: "I would give / I have given / my kingdom for a horse –– and here it is!" But who speaks these words, and what do they mean? The answer to the spectator's desire is first provided by Stack's offscreen commentary; then, when Stack becomes the surrogate spectator in the film, by the filmmaker himself who takes over the narration for Stack's and our edification; and, finally, by no one, when we are left to ourselves with the enigmatic images of Alison's dream. Far from simply denoting "a horse", the shot of Sultan establishes a crossbreed of desire and knowledge that constitutes the film's narration.
Bonitzer formulates even more precisely the paradoxical subjectivity contained in the film image in "L'objectif déconcerté" (‘The Disconcerted Lens’), one of the essays that makes up Décadrages. Peinture et cinéma (1987, Editions de l'Etoile) –– Deframings: Painting and Cinema –– by choosing an example that perfectly echoes this point:
"The horse in full flight in photography is very different from the horse of Géricault or Delacroix. Not only because the movement captured is no longer the synthesis of movement but rather the any-point, any-instant, any-section of movement... but also because this results, almost automatically, in a thematic modification. The Romantic horse was basically the formal expression of Romantic subjectivity; Géricault's destiny, Géricault's death, is entirely contained in his love of horses, in this figurative invention of the horse in painting. The photographic horse, on the contrary, is not inhabited, charged, or swollen with any breath, any storm of the soul. It’s as if, on the other side of the lens, there’s a void. It’s not that there is no consciousness in the camera, it’s that this consciousness appears empty, or even problematic, enigmatic. The camera operator does not have the possibility of "wanting", strictly speaking, what will appear, what the developer will make emerge on the photo paper. From now on it is the unconscious that operates, and it is also the unconscious that is represented..."
The analogy between cinema and photography is greater when it comes to still images, and it is precisely this analogy that is evoked by the first freeze-frame of MY KINGDOM FOR, showing us Budd, Mary, and Gloria together unknowingly for the last time, photographed by an anonymous cameraman. The most disturbing thing about this image is that it resembles a scene from a bullfight, with the three victims ignorant of their fate in the role of the bull – reminding us that in French, at least, as Bonitzer observes, "framing (cadrer) is a bullfighting term" (Décadrages, p. 62).
Just at the moment in MY KINGDOM FOR when Boetticher abandons film, used in the section concerning Gloria, for the video of Alison, the catalyst that introduces the analogy with photography is precisely the intervention of the video image, closer in its characteristics to photography than to the filmic image, whose qualities remain closer to the textures of painting. And this purely pragmatic substitution of mediums is not without thematic consequences. What the video captures is le lapsus, the lapse, the slip: precious instants for Boetticher (who associates them with the experience of filming a documentary), like the rapid replication of the movement that Alison mechanically makes while watching Budd teach the piaje to Triunfo – little touches that evoke the "empty subject" of psychoanalysis, and create a space in which Boetticher can explore a new dimension of his art: the field of the unconscious, of polysemy. ("You're going to like it..." he told me when he’d finished MY KINGDOM FOR. "It's very artistic.")
Not that this dimension was ever absent from Boetticher's films. In Bazin's example from SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, we can already sense the displacement and condensation at work, the essential mechanisms of the primary processes, of "dream work." But up until then, such meanings were, as Bazin says, unconsciously present, dissolved in the films "like salt in the sea." By bringing them to consciousness, MY KINGDOM FOR functions as a psychoanalysis of the oeuvre, condensed in the analytical power of the still image. (If ARRUZA is a contemporary of HERE AND ELSEWHERE, MY KINGDOM FOR relates to the Godard of the ‘80s, who began using slow motion and freeze-frames of children in FRANCE / TOUR / DÉTOUR / DEUX / ENFANTS.)
From the following three freeze-frames of MY KINGDOM FOR, two major figures emerge: the horse-woman (Mary riding Ciclon, Alison riding Gladiator: a substitution of a woman in the traditional pose of virile power, made strange by an "obtuse meaning" in Mary's posture—the relative proportions of the horse and rider, as well as the angle from which they are filmed, create the impression of a female centaur), and the bull-man (the surprising moment when Alison plants the training banderillas in Boetticher's back, as he leans forward to receive them). Major images (whose resonances curiously evoke Oshima) which are deployed and take on their full meaning in the final sequence of Alison's dream. (Another catalyst for the introduction of psychoanalytic motifs lies in the way the subject of horses is treated, discreetly present in Boetticher's westerns in the same way that handsome servant boys are in Visconti's films: see, in MY KINGDOM FOR, the astonishing panning shot ending on the close-up of Triunfo that concludes the first scene between Gloria and the Boettichers.)
MY KINGDOM FOR: a title whose meaning is just as personal as the film of which it is literally a part. For Boetticher is the man who gave up his kingdom (Hollywood) for a horse, but discovered a new kingdom, and new powers: the exchange of film for video, symbolized by the substitution of Bressonian Gloria for Alison, a Godardian heroine "endowed with three expressions" and a dazzling nascent sexuality that is one of the most radiant elements of this joyful and serene film. Boetticher is the only filmmaker of his generation to risk the new terrain of video, and MY KINGDOM FOR is a worthy addition to the small but precious group of films made by the most adventurous American filmmakers after leaving Hollywood –– WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN (Ray) and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (Welles), each of which aims to be an Encyclopedia of the Image: Welles by using all existing formats between 8mm and 35mm and by mixing color and black and white within sequences; Ray by doubling the heterogeneity of formats within the image itself, fragmenting it into multiple screens; and Boetticher by modestly, pragmatically mixing 35 and 16mm, video, photography and painting, and by pairing the history of bullfighting with the history of this other art which he said, in response to a questionnaire from Libération, is for him "a sacred duty".
–– B.K.
(Originally written in English; Published in French translation by Jean-Luc Mengus for Trafic; with the original English manuscript now lost, this text was re-translated to English from the French by Andy Rector, with many thanks to Adrian Martin)
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