Profit motive and the whispering wind

Communiqué from John Gianvito! this image from his latest film...

Luc Moullet part one...

In preparation for an upcoming, yet-to-be solidified, roundtable discussion on Luc Moullet, here are two of his early critical pieces for Cahiers du cinéma. I have not found any further information on La Punition, the first film under consideration, but no matter, Moullet's article still has many interesting ideas, and also serves to remind that, at it's inception Cahiers was officially called: Cahiers du cinéma, Revue mensuelle du cinéma et du télécinéma.

YOU COULD SEE LA PUNITION THREE OR FOUR TIMES

La Punition (Jean Rouch, 1962)

From French television viewers to specialists in cinema verite, nearly everyone has condemned La Punition as a kind of cinema lie. Their attitude is unjustified because it confuses three very different elements: film, truth, and cinema verite. For example, we have no right to say that La Punition is bad because it's untrue (Rossif's documentaries are true, but look at the result), or because it's not real cinema verite (neither is The Rules of the Game), or because its director or, more precisely, its producer (and who should we believe if they disagree?) might incorrectly claim it is. In such a case it would have been enough if they had said nothing, or were from a place (Afghanistan) or time (1909-1914) forgotten by interviewers, for the film to be considered good. The truth of La Punition isn't apparent without the active participation of the television viewer, who in talking or doing the dishes while trying to watch the film, fails to comply, fails to participate. This is not the kind of passivity that a nerve-wraking dramatic intrigue forces you into. The audience has to actively interpret the film to understand at which level of truth the film situates itself. If we relax our attention, we lose the sense of the film. It's possible to watch La Punition three or four times without it ever being the same film. Even if it were eight hours long, it would be equally compelling. In this light, it seems rather unnecessary to cut six or eight minutes out of La Punition, simply to broadcast the full version of Cuba Si! afterwards. Here we have an exciting film devoid of eroticism and accessible to everyone, which would shatter box office records if the French didn't prefer, in place of simple, direct cinema (La Punition, Adieu Philippine, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc), the preciocity of indirect cinema(Melodie en sous-sol, La Grande Evasion, La Guerre des boutons), whose useless digressions, dullness, and repetitiveness in the end reflect purely commercial values. Such values enable viewers to turn their attention from films in which a handful of powerful scenes leave lasting impressions on minds no longer required to confront the disturbing reality of unadorned facts.

Luc Moullet, Cahiers du cinema, May 1964

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A WESTERN WITHOUT INDIANS

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Luc Moullet

I hate westerns. That's why I adore Rio Bravo. The genre annoys me because, although the sentiments it portrays are admirable, they are almost always based on principle rather than fact. What little directing exists is concerned with something other than itself --personal problems, politics, technique. It denies the spirit of the true western and presents its opposite: emphasis, decorum, lyricism.Yet, Rio Bravo is pretty much the opposite of Johnny Guitar. There's nothing intrinsically poetic about the film although the end result is a kind of poetry. As always with Hawks the rules of the game are respected, at least until that moment when the director has hadenough. Rio Bravo is an extremely original film in that it's a western about confinement in which there are no Indians, landscapes, or chase scenes. It does something rare in rediscovering the essence of the genre, but it does so in this rather remarkable way (whereas Red River and Big Sky arrive at the same result without breaking with tradition). Rio Bravo brings to mind a thriller like To Have and Have Not or a meldrama, like Barbary Coast. So why did Hawks make this western? Because it enabled him to present actions that are not ordinarily seen in our everyday world, by beings outside of nature. I'm not a sheriff, or Angie Dickinson, or a pharaoh; neither are you.Yet Hawks shows us that the appeal of such individuals is unrelated to what we might expect ( the world of adventure, the extraordinary).Hawks the classicist has always rejected these values, satirized them, ridiculed them, even ignored them in The Thing. Yet he also accepts the everyday: a man is a sheriff the same way he's a laborer or a subway conductor. There are plenty of gunshots in Rio Bravo, but none of them real, none of them have any true dramatic value. The incessant gunfights end up only becoming monotonous, and they eliminate all suspense. Each repeated gesture cancels its predecessor. And Wayne's blase intelligence, far from contemplating the act, somehow immediately grasps the range of possible consequences. How Wayne does this is a question of telepathy, similar to the way Hawks' previous heroes had eyes in the back of their head.

Luc Moullet, Cahiers du cinema, July 1959

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Two very good short articles on Moullet, on occasion of the recent travelling Moullet retrospective, one by Chris Fujiwara, "Mineral Cinema", and one by Sam Adams, "Funny Strange-Ha: The Not-Quite-Right Comedy of Luc Moullet".

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If anyone has information about La Punition, please do tell. And if anyone is interested in the Moullet roundtable, please don't hesitate to email me.

This is the 100th post at Kino Slang. Russian proverb: "It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats." Thank you friends, for everything.

yours,

andy

"The contemporary world has lost the secret of the ancients. Recall the well-known serenity of antique statuary. Our smile is forced. We look for complictations."

(25 December 1963, J.-L. Godard)

LOVE REGULARLY (on Garrel's REGULAR LOVERS)

Les Amants de...

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New Babylon...They Live By Night

Commune...Depression

"We work for ourselves, not for the bosses..."

"Banks, that us."

"If you get loaded and act the clown, be the laughing stock of all the town, it's your red wagon..."

Les Amants réguliers

Regular Lovers

"Gunshot Dreams"

"You're with real people now"

...crime story...

"Riot cop, under your uniform you too are jobless."

(graffiti from the anti-CPE uprising in France, Feb.-April 2006)

"All films about crime are about capitalism, because capitalism is about crime." (Abraham Polonsky in Red Hollywood)

...love story...

Love and crime, two poles among revolution.

Love stories have to include crime stories in a certain society.

"This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in ."

(They Live By Night, Nicholas Ray, 1949)

We can see about love and crime in Mizoguchi too, especially in the 30's. Almost all of them have to do with the class struggle through love. Love is either reified -- love doused in the icy water of egotistical calculation, nothing but a process through which people are turned into things, a process Mizoguchi shows as clear as the Osaka day -- or it is the door to consciousness, resistance, revolt -- Tokai Kokyogaku (Mizoguchi, 1929): Osome, a waitress at a cafe has been in love with Harukichi, son of a company president, but is shocked to learn that he has become engaged to Reiko, the daughter of a bank president. Osome tries to confront Harukichi about the matter, but he will have nothing to do with her. She later meets Genzo, a childhood playmate. Genzo tells her that their hometown, a fishing village, has deteriorated on account of the company (Harukichi's). Genzo's life is complete poverty and he has come to the big city to avenge the rich.




Lovers in the revolution and of the revolution, why else would you make revolution, if you want to make revolution?

Above, 1792, Jean-Joseph Bomier (Edmund Ardisson) dies in the arms of Louison (Nadia Sibirskaïa) in La Marseillaise (Renoir, 1938).

Renoir said about Marie Antoinette: "quite simply (she was) very stupid, really an idiot. All her adventures were grotesque: her constant compromising, her pre-romanticism, her unbridled waste, and the story of the necklace and the Trianon and running the silk manufacturers of Lyons out of business, because she wanted her undergarments made only from fine linen and said so, proclaimed it, and waged war on silk. Not that I like silk, but many people lived off it, and needed royal publicity to sell it."

In La Marseillaise, Renoir has Antoinette always bitterly affected, harrassed and harassing, stung by her own insatiability, a frigid enforcer of royal code and appearances (she is brilliantly played by Lise Delamare). Her only love scene is with this man, of the Royal Guard, just before the Marseillais storm the palace:

Royal Guard: "It is best to allow them to force the gates. Once the rebels are inside, a volley from our guns must destroy the majority. Should some survive, or our gunners be won over,

our best men occupy windows overlooking the yard in a position to effect a crippling fire. We may expect, with luck, few assailants to escape our trap alive."

Marie Antoinette: "We must keep right on our side. By entering the yard they will avow their insubordination."

The Royal Guard at the gates are won over, not by the guns of the rebels, but by fraternity and common enemy. This is also the story of New Babylon (Trauberg/Kosintzev, 1929), people going to the other side; Jean, a Versailles soldier, deserts the army which is suppressing the Paris Commune. He is brought to consciousness by conditions ("no more milk!") and by his lover, Louis (Elena Kuzmina, pictured above). But Jean comes to consciousness too slowly, too late. He walks as slow as anyone ever has walked in the cinema, across the cobblestones, all his fellow deserters, horses even, pass him by. He'll be forced at gunpoint to bury his freshly executed lover in the mud: the massacre of the Communards. She is dead and the Commune goes with her, but the film ends in chalk: VIVE LA COMMUNE.

Did François (Louis Garrel), the young disaffected poet of Les Amants réguliers, go to the other side? The other side of his bourgeois origin towards revolutionary unity against capital (in the events of May '68)? Or did he desert, go to the other side, against the revolution, in opium smoke? In the final section of the film, indicated by a title card "The Sleep of the Just", he goes to an other side; his lover Lilie leaves him and he dies. A cop is the last one to touch François as he takes François's pulse, then steps back into the darkness.

Existence opens and closes with iris shots. An iris shot opens up to the riot police, readying themselves for a confrontation with the students on the barricades. Later, François, barely discernable at the barricades, just manages to escape the cops and, covered in ash from the fires, looks for a place to hide. He goes to the apartment of a family member and tells her, in her plain quiet apartment, what's been happening. It's the chief bit about the events of May '68 that François expresses in the film: "the police, they're real bastards...they hit women...". Chris Marker explained this in his documentary film Le Fond de l'air est rouge. This realization was repeated again and again, almost like theatre; students in the US and France, not accustomed to seeing the repressive State apparatus are given a naked display of it when they act up: suddenly, its not in books -- "this shit really exists!". François, still covered in ash, takes a bath and the iris slowly closes in, perhaps closing this chapter of his existence as a revolutionary actor (if we consider him one).

Earlier in the film, when he was being primed to join the barricades, evading military service and being put on trial for doing so, we see that even a certain playing by the rules of the game does nothing for François. During trial, François's lawyer evokes the importance of French poets in an attempt to garner sympathy for the boy and his role in society as a poet, to excuse him from service. This scene has been interpreted as pure comedy, absurd, but the lawyer is sincerely doing his job in an attempt to appeal to the judges, basically on nationalistic grounds (certainly not poetic ones). It's tragic. The judge's response to the appeal is startling: "Rimbaud and Baudelaire can go to prison". No cultural preservation here, things are a little different by 1968. This judge is no Lestingois.

Gabe Klinger has linked Garrel's film to Renoir's "everyone has their reasons" approach to point of view, and indeed Renoir's "regularness" in regards to grand events, and grandeur in regards to small events, has echo in Les amants réguliers . Neither filmmaker judges their characters. That said, I have to wonder aloud about the meaning of this scene that Gabe describes:

"Garrel and screenwriters Marc Cholodenko and Arlette Langmann are optimistic in their portrayal of the relationship between state and individual. In another late scene, a notary and a detective visit the house of François's rich friend Antoine to collect a bill. The two officials look around at the bohemian setting, and instead of acting suspicious or snobby, they engage the two youths in an affectionate dialogue about the future."

Affectionate is the perfect word for this scene, and it's a bit of relief from the threat of the authorities that looms over the rest of the film. Affection is essential, but people never quote the first part of Renoir's "...everyone has their reasons..." and that is: "the terrible thing is....everyone has their reasons." It is the notary and the detective who are affectionate: they know they're getting paid (unlike the judge at François's trial, just before May '68). They are bemused about their surroundings because the friend is rich, the bill will be paid.

Antagonisms are now gone but I would hesitate to call this optimistic; the flame is extinguished. Though, there is an open flame referred to constantly as François and his rich friend smoke opium. No telling how much time has passed. Defeat is in the air, as is poetry, and almost as heavily. Defeat is easy to come by today; poetry, not so easy.

Garrel: "You know, every cent in Les amants réguliers has come from the political left, even though it's a production funded by private and public money. (...) It had to be that way. There was no way you could tell this story that offers a radically left perspective with right-wing money."

If it's hard to tell how much time has passed in the film, it's because historic events are seldom referred to after the barricades are shown in the first 1/3rd of the film. Like in the other great film of 2006, Colossal Youth, historical events are buried beneath presence and light, passing far below the matter of the film, but always there. And, as in Colossal Youth, clothing plays a major role in Les amants réguliers. Post-barricades, François's clothing remains exactly the same, Lilie's too, though certainly, at least months are passing. In Colossal, Ventura's change of clothes is one thing we notice as an indication of an historical jump back, up to 25 years back. But these changes, or lack of changes, are the least simple thing about these movies. Colossal, which ends up being the more narrative of the two films, is also the more documentary of a film, with Ventura and the testaments he hears becoming historical events in and of themselves, as the stories of those excluded from history and the present, and visually, as presences burning themselves into the pixels (to paraphrase Michael Sicinski). In Les amants réguliers, the lack of change in clothes purifies the love story, which Garrel wishes to be classical (comparing it to The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal).

Love is difficult to speak about; which is why this post goes on like this... Les amants réguliers is a love story. The lovers in Regular Lovers don't meet like Keechie and Bowie in They Live by Night (Les Amants de la nuit), innocently among very guilty criminal conditions into which they were born (the Depression, a criminal catatrophe of capitalism which Gabriel Kolko says is upon us again). They don't meet like Mizoguchi's lovers, through bosses (or through workers for that matter). They don't meet like the revolutionary actors in Renoir's La Marseillaise, with historic tasks (though perhaps Marseillaise's way of loving is similar to Regular Lovers, if inverse: where Garrel's regular lovers barely cross history, in La Marseillaise, history barely crosses the lovers -- both are un-articulated loves). It's certainly not the ecstatic overthrow of an old kind of love for a new kind of love, as in New Babylon. Garrel's lovers meet at a mild get together like nameless people.

So what is it, aside from regular love and a bit of history, because surely this film is tremendously overwhelming? The music (piano accompaniment to invisible planes) and sound (intimist) are fantastic, the photography must be the finest black and white photography in 20 years (shot by Willy Lubtchansky). What else exactly? Hard to say.

There is something the cinema is capable of (Garrel said it: "Cinema is only mise en scene"), it is essentially made of it: the terror of sudden absences and appearances, dreams and bodies materialized, flesh, the weight of silence, gravity over time -- the things of lovers. A physics of love which all cinema is linked to, if it thinks, anyhow. Garrel shows existence and time, therefore politics, through regular lovers.

"Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon."
(May '68 graffiti)

Andi Engel on Straub/Huillet

I have been searching for a copy of the magazine ENTHUSIASM, No. 1, 1975, for about 5 years. I'm still searching. UCLA had it once, but in the digitalization of their library it has been temporarily lost. It's there somewhere but no one knows how it exists. It took me a year to figure out that this magazine only ran one issue, but I knew this one issue entirely focused on Straub/Huillet, including two very precious interviews with them in English.  (Update: 12 years on from this post, ENTHUSIASM No. 1, 1975 has been made available HERE.)

Wolf André Oleg 'Andi' Engel was the kind of man to invent a magazine (ENTHUSIASM) and a distribution company (POLITKINO) in order to spread the ideas and cinema of Straub/Huillet. He was also the kind of man to make issue Number 2 of ENTHUSIASM 30 years after the fact of Number 1. In those intervening 30 years Engel created the distribution company ARTIFICIAL EYE with his wife Pamela Balfry -- one of the most important distributors of world cinema anywhere. I can easily choose one film I may have never seen if ARTIFICIAL EYE didn't exist: THE APPLE by Samira Makhmalbaf (1997). DVD distributors in the US still haven't mustered the courage to release this dynamically realist film by the then 17 year-old Samira.

Andi Engel passed away on December 26th 2006. For a fittingly storied obituary, there's Colin MacCabe's in the Independent (dead link). Below I offer Engel on Straub/Huillet (from: SECOND WAVE: NEWER THAN NEW WAVE NAMES IN WORLD CINEMA, Andi Engel. Studio Vista, Movie Paperbacks 1970. )

-A.R.

Jean-Marie Straub by Andi Engel

To write about Jean-Marie Straub's (sic) four German films (Machorka Muff, 1962, Nicht Versöhnt , 1965, Chronik Der Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968, and Der Brautigam, die Kömödiantin und der Zuhalter, 1968) for someone who perhaps saw his films but could not understand, or only partly understand, the German dialogue is a bit embarrassing for me, because I feel I have to mention some basic things which if mentioned in an article for German readers would make me sound like a pompous schoolmaster.

Jean-Marie Straub's first four films are sound films and the dialobue is spoken in German. This does not seem to be an important statement, but it is, because most of the films made today are not sound films, but silent films with added dialogue and sound effects. They are only called sound films by general agreement. Not so Straub's films: in his films the sound effects, the dialogue, and the music are as important as the picture track. (Alberto Moravia about Nicht Versöhnt : 'We find ourselves confronted with a film, where the auditory element is as important as the visual.') Furthermore, the sound is no illustration of the picture and the picture is no illustration of the sound, but sound and picture form an entity. He has pushed his films to such an extreme, that if you take something away, for instance, the music, you no longer have a film; take the dialogue away and you have not a silent movie but nothing. And that applies not only to the sound, the cutting and the length of the sequences. I am sure too, that if you were to see his first colour film Othon (in 1970) in a black-and-white print, again it would not be a film.

So my problem is to write about films which most of my readers will not be able to see as an entity, though things are a bit easier with the Bach film, because here Straub was forced by a distributor to make an English version. But this naturally can only be a variation on the theme and not a proper transformation, even more so as in the original the German of Bach's time is used. The attempt to use old-fashioned English is not a satisfactory solution. Which brings us to translations in general . If you push the discussion to an extreme, you arrive at the conclusion that one should only read and listen to languages one can understand, because every translation is a betrayal, as much a betrayal as scientific articles in daily papers, which give the non-professional reader the impression that he too knows something about the latest research achievements in physics. No, translations are sedatives.

Important films are always multi-layered, meaning not only that different people see different films -- that is also the case with stupid or boring films -- but that the single person can see different levels of a film. Usually the easiest way to discover these is by seeing a film more than once. And surely it is one of the possible and desirable tasks of an introductory article, like this, to point out some of the different levels which a spectator might not see right way.

I think that Straub's films are very open to the viewer, and are really militant statements against what I would call the "Eeyore" attitude, towards films which is tremendously popular among "knowledgeable" film buffs: "The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, 'Why?', and sometimes he thought, 'Wherefore?', and sometimes he thought, 'Inasmuch as which?' -- and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.' I imagine that it would be helpful to mention three important though obvious things about his films. These are: their political impact, their simplicity, and their honesty.

a) Political Impact
Straub is a political man, which means that he knows he has to fight if he wants things to change. So, as he is a purposeful man, too, his films are political films, that is, they are his weapons in his (and our) struggle for change. Therefore his statement that the Bach film is his contribution towards the liberation fight of the Vietnamese people is not as idiotic or fashionable as most of the German press believed, or wanted their readers to believe, because like the guerilla fighter, Straub does what he thinks he has to do and, maybe more important , he does it the way he thinks he can do it best.

b) Simplicity 
Film needs still (in spite of all protests and attacks) immediate recognition by the audience. It has been often remarked how cool and how detached the public finally is about Straub's work, but this is to misunderstand him completely because he himself says: "I react like Rivette and believe that film still only -- let's say it -- depends on fascination and that it touches people. And it touches them deeply if it depends on fascination, which is the contrary of detachment." As film needs this spontaneous acknowledgement, it cannot be too complicated, too longwinded -- like literature for instance. (As I have pointed out, this doesn't mean that film cannot be complex or have several levels.) The subject, the moral or whatever a filmmaker wants to get over to his audience, has to be quite simple, because everything has to be understood by the viewer in a much shorter time than for instance the same person would have while reading an article. So the most important thing about the films of Jean-Marie Straub is that here a very deep and thinking man succeeds in presenting his view of things in the simplest possible way to the people. Here simplicity triumphs. If you look at his first two films, Machorka Muff and Nicht Versöhnt , you really think, if you stare very hard that you can see through to the screen, like a watercolour painting, where you see the paper. If you take anything, one minute detail away from any Straub film, you can see how the whole thing crumbles under your fingers. And there is no higher praise to be given to any work, than to say that everything that is not necessary has been cut out.

c) Honesty
All four films were recorded with direct sound, which was, at the time of his first film, 1961, more startling than it is today, when even a filmmaker like Roman Polanski, who used direct sound for the first time in Rosemary's Baby, says that now he is not sure whether one can any longer make films without direct sound. Anyhow, before Straub decided that he wanted -- come what may -- direct sound in his films, he had not heard of the Leacock/Pennebaker films. But he knew and loved the early sound films of Jean Renoir and Robert Flaherty. "The most beautiful films which exist are the first sound films of Renoir and not only because they all speak with this nice accent from the south of France, but because they are made with direct sound. For me one of the ten greatest films is La Nuit du Carrefour by Renoir, the thriller after the story by Simenon, whcih is also one of the greatest thrillers there is -- I agree with Godard completely...This sound of the first talkies is for me the best of all existing sound in films. A film like Man of Aran was something that impressed me most then. And Toni and La Chienne, and La Voix Humaine or Miracolo by Rossellini. In La Voix Humaine you can hear the dolly. That's beautiful! But you should not pursue that idea systematically, like some bloody intellectuals who would say: 'I'm going to let the audience hear the noise of the dolly, so that they realize that they are seeing a movie.' But if you have got it on the track, then you are not allowed to deceive. The idea to use direct sound above all came also out of the Bach project, because there it was clear to me that the whole film would only make sense if one recorded everything together with the images. And the other projects grew out of the Bach film." But this spleen, as most people thought -- "they thought I was mad" -- in wanting to use direct sound and not the usual, lazy and secure dubbing method didn't help him to find money for his projects. For instance,when he asked the producer Rob Houwer for money for Nicht Versöhnt , he got the answer: "No, not with direct sound, because then you will come afterwards and say you are unhappy about the sound and that you want to dub the whole ting. And that costs me double the amount." To which the proud and stubborn Straub answered: "If you want me to, I'll sign a statement here and now, that I'm not going to be unhappy." But However said no.

Besides the fact that Straub thinks it is boring to film people who just move around without at the same time recording the sound, it is a matter of honesty for him. Language is our most important means of communication. Therefore he treats speech very carefully, and it is not an obsession -- as some critics have said -- but a necessity. Necessity, because he does not show Bach -- how could he? -- but a young musician called Gustav Leonhardt who plays Johann Sebastian Bach in a feature film by Jean-Marie Straub. And we see the man Leonhardt in costumes and wig playing the organ music by Bach. Straub therefore is not only honest towards his public but -- even rarer in the film business -- honest towards the people who work with him in his films. That is also the reason why he does not use professional actors in his films, because actors are trained to stop being themselves and to try to slip into a fictional figure, which anyway they very seldom bring to life. The usual attitude of traditional filmmaking with perhaps the exception of the American musical is one of deceiving the public. "But nobody is going to see that! Nobody is going to detect that" were words Straub often heard from producers. Because average filmmaking is based on contempt for the audience, his honest startles and sometimes even confuses people.

What also could startle some people in the audience is the fact that Straub gets so near to them, because he treats them as equals and not as an unknown group of people who paid for their tickets and now have to be entertained. But in return he asks for their willingness to get involved, in the way demanded by Friedrich Schiller who said about beauty that it "addresses all the faculties of man, and can only be appreciated if a man employs fully all his strength. He must bring to it an open sense, a broad heart, a spirit full of freshness." But Schiller (and Straub, too) naturally knew the reality: "...the bitter anger of small minds against true energetic beauty? They reckon on finding therein a congenial recreation, and regret to discover that a display of strength is required to which they are unequal." And still there are people who have a very easy time enjoying Jean-Marie Straub's films. No, no, not the "workers and peasants", but the people who don't make their minds up before they go to see a film, whether they are going to like it or not. These are the "professional" cinema-goers, who have left the baroque cinema behind them and are able again to enjoy simplicity, and children, who are open and interested in anything new by definition. The Bach film is among other things a perfect and beautiful film for children.

In spite of his bitter struggle to make his films -- the script for the Bach film was finished in 1958 -- Straub was never dependent on a producer. This sounds paradox, but it is true. Straub and his wife, Daniele Huillet, kept their freedom by suffering almost inhuman working conditions. He was never paid for the work he did on his films, but he never accepted assignments, nor did he ever make any compromises towards a producer or the imaginary public. His films are not made to please. If they please, naturally he is delighted. The remarkable thing about Straub's films is that they are exactly the films he wanted to make. He would not have made the films differently if he had had more money. So Straub's anarchistic way of making films is the logical conclusion of a man who knows that "under capitalism...the means of production and the apparatus of distribution are controlled by private owners who run them at their discretion, driven by an urge for profit."

Henry Chapier described Nicht Versöhnt in Combat as "the only revolutionary film, which came out of Germany since the war." That's true. But one can go even further: Jean-Marie Straub is the only revolutionary filmmaker to have worked in Germany since the 'thirties.

The Flags of Our Fathers Mean Nothing to These Sons, the Playland Filmmakers

"After watching the footage (of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND), Oliver Stone told Kodar and Graver, 'It's too experimental.' George Lucas, who could bankroll the completion (of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND) by signing a check from petty cash, declined to do so. (...Graver recalls) 'After Orson died, I showed Lucas THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND in Steven Spielberg's projection room. Lucas just shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know what to do with it, that it wasn't commercial.'



"Clint Eastwood, whose work as a director Welles admired, asked to see the rough cut after Welles's death. But it turned out that he was only interested in studying Houston's performance so he could imitate him in WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART..."

from WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES? by Joseph McBride.

Downtown Los Angeles

"It's another war picture." Of course it is! And there will be another, and another, and another.

It is natural for this country to be flooded with war pictures, and continue to be for the next few years, as it is for a soldier to want to display his Croix de guerre. War is new to America. It is an heroic event. America entered, not because it was forced to but because it volunteered -- a demonstration of bravery, loyalty and martyrdom, each of these attributes a thread in the cloth called romance. Not so for Europe. Those countries are too full of it, too thoroughly immersed in the devastation of war any longer to see the romance of it. Don't you find that the man who has gone through the most horrible experiences is usually the one to say the least about them, and when asked whether he had suffered such and such a shock or witnessed such and such a catastrophe, will answer laconically: "Yes" or "No" and dimiss the subject.

Such is the posiition of the European countries, and that is the reason war is too real for them to idealize and romanticize over it in picutres and plays. It was an event to America, not a horror. Men enlisted bravely, hysterically; many returned in the same spirit, only more exalted for the thrills and frills that they could talk about after it was over.

I have become the most extreme pacifist because I have lived through the most lurid realitities of its destructive force. It is my aim to do a war picture soon, but not the kind that would treat of the glorification of gore and wholesale slaughter, but rather disclosing its perniciousness and convincing people of the utter futility of physical combat.

What can the effect of the picture be that for two or two and one-half hours shows two nations at war, working up to its dramatic climaxes by bombing, blasting, shooting or wiping out armies of men, the helpless puppets of quarreling nations? And then waving the victorious country's flag and playing all the brasses of the orchestra fortissimo? At every showing of the picture, in every theatre where it is featured, at its two, three or four performances a day, there are from 2,000 to 3,000 susceptible people being stimulated into a bellicose attitude.

And the women, incredible as it may sound, play the most important part in battle. Just so long as they dub as a coward the man who refuses or hesitates to "fight," regardless of his ideals, just so long as they are proud to cling to the arm of a uniform, and they glory in the sacrifice of their sons, sweethears, brothers and husbands for "the cause," just so long shall we continue to have war and continue to show pictures apotheosizing war. (...)

From "The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles: By Its Very Nature the Art of the Screen Should Tell a Complete Story Pictorially" (1928) 

by F. W. Murnau

The second half of Murnau's article deals with the plastics and drama of cinema and is oft quoted ("Real art is simple, but simplicity requires the greatest art."). The first half, above, is lesser known.

HORSE SOLDIERS (John Ford)

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY: PEACE AND WAR

Are of different substance.

But their peace and their war

Are like wind and storm.

War grows from their peace

Like son from his mother

He bears

Her frightful features.

Their war kills

Whatever their peace

Has left over.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE

It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.

But it has one defect:

It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.

It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.

But it has one defect:

It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He can fly and he can kill.

But he has one defect:

He can think.

From From a German War Primer (1937) 

by Bertolt Brecht

...In the land of capital
I see
the golden chain of capital
the foxtrot
the machines
and you
and you
I see you
and you
and you
and you
it is you I see
in service of capital
more machines
more
and more
but no less hard is it for the worker
no less
hard
I see
the colonies the capital
the colonies
the slaves
the capital
the slaves
from the negroes
for the fun of it
it makes "The Chocolate Kiddies"
capital
the toys
the guns
hatred
cramps
on the verge of its historical perishing
capital
is having fun...

-from the intertitles of A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD (Dziga Vertov)

ain't supposed to die a natural death

Salvador Allende (1971): "We are fully aware that the educated people brought up in this society have nothing in common with what we call 'the new man'. Bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society as it stands, but it is quite clear that what we call 'the new man' will emerge to become the citizen of the new society. Our task now is to make a major effort in the field of education in order to awake interest in forming a new society in the consciousness of the masses, and presenting the image of the members of this new society, 'the new men'. Now the vanguard contains revolutionaries who are determined to behave as such, and it is clear that they are laying the foundations from which 'the new man' will emerge. I do not, therefore, consider it Utopian to talk in these terms, although it would indeed be if we were to imagine that this man was going to live in our society as it is at the moment."
Pinochet, you were an old man and an "old man". An old man that only a decrepit old society could allow to die a natural death. May you rot in hell. And may the society that failed to rip these uniforms to shreds find its way to the door. It needs some help finding the door.

«Camera Lucida» by Nobuhiro Suwa
Pedro Costa Film Retrospective in Sendai
translated by Kumiko Yamamoto
Sendai Mediatheque, 2005

I was once asked to write about Pedro Costa, but I refused, saying, "First of all, Pedro is one of my few close friends, and it's difficult to talk about one's friend since friendship is a personal experience." As a matter of fact, the real reason I turned down the offer was that my words could hardly touch his work, and they still cannot. Even now I'm not able to discuss his work, but his films - I can see them hundred times over. In Vanda's Room is an experience that cannot be exhausted, regardless of how often I see it, and even then I would be incapable of describing just what that experience is. Our works are created using completely different methods: while I have chosen to work with professional actors, Pedro has chosen to point the camera at people living their lives. He spent two years with a small DV camera, filming In Vanda's Room, and a year editing I nearly 130 hours of footage. 1, on the other hand, have just finished filming my current film in only thirteen days. When we first became acquainted, I told Pedro that in making a film, I had to work hard to connect with my staff. He then said to me, "I spend time working on my films. I hate to work with a crew." The way he said the word "hate" impressed me. It made me imagine how hurt he had been by the traditional filmmaking system. I have heard that Bones was shot with a film crew. Vanda was most probably surrounded by a huge crowd: cinematographers, sound engineers, electricians with a lot of equipment, cars laden with machinery and drivers, and those catering for the entire crew. The members of such a crew must have been only interested in their own assignments. It takes a lot of planning to get such a large number of people to work together efficiently. The plans for today and for tomorrow are all fixed. Everyone's task is connected to someone else's and they all contribute to the completion of the film. Time and expenses are carefully calculated. A change in the schedule is immediately reflected in the budget. There is a powerful system of filmmaking in motion. When ordered to stand before a camera, any human being would shudder in awe of such a system. Vanda was not allowed to behave as she would have liked. Nor was the director, for that matter. Pedro has chosen to part with such a traditional way of filmmaking. He has chosen to take filmmaking back to the time of "humane life," a time that is not punctuated by the number of days available for production, the start of filming or the end.

Nevertheless, no matter how small a digital camera may be, there still is a camera. The camera divides the filmmaker from his subjects, placing the latter on the opposite side of the camera and the former on this side. It is a system that does not permit either side to cross over. Therefore, it cannot, by its nature, escape from a structure of one sided exploitation. The world is divided into two. When an image is inserted into this divided world, a window is created on this side of the wall that opens onto the other. The window functions like a magic mirror that lets our gaze pass from this side, without letting others gaze from the opposite side. When viewing a film, we are behind the camera, like the director. We are protected from the risk of being violated by the reality in front of the camera. I have chosen to work with actors because I see them as beings who need to stand before a camera in their life. When my subjects are non-professional actors living their own lives, the camera deprives them of their life without giving anything back to them. But I realize, from the images in In Vanda's Room, that in fact a crossing is permitted from this side to the other, and subsequently a relationship materializes, free from the camera's power structure. I have never thought that the camera could establish a non-exploitative relationship with its subject that seems unattainable. What in the world makes this possible in In Vanda's Room? Why only in In Vanda's Room? To answer these questions, I must continue writing...

I have previously mentioned the word "free". But the images of In Vanda's Room appear to be strictly controlled. The camera is always mounted on a tripod and never moves. Were this done according to the author's aesthetic judgment, the images could be controlled by the author and the character would then be inscribed in a controlled space. If that were the case, why wouldn't he just approach the subject with a handycam and say, "Now, you can move freely. I will follow you with my camera"? Wouldn't such a relationship be freer? In documentaries, in fact, the frame is always ready for the occurrence of unexpected events. The camera must always be ready to move as required. If a remarkable accident happens outside the frame, the camera will move without hesitation. The images captured in this way are somehow open to reality. As framing is transient and open in documentary films, we are conscious spatially that reality extends offscreen. By always reminding ourselves that documentary films can only capture a part of reality, we seek to suggest that reality extends out of the frame, i.e., outside the cinema. Documentary images depend on the reality that there is an object worth filming before the camera. In Vanda's Room was also made in a manner of a documentary film. There is a town that is being demolished, where the residents lead their humble lives. The existence of this town is a story that will be erased from history. There are objects at which the camera must be pointed. But the images of In Vanda's Room do not rely on these realities. They reject the thoughtless realism that something meaningful can be captured only once a camera is pointed at them. There is no sign that an accident or chance event barges into view, and the rigidly-constructed framing forms autonomous spaces. The sounds heard from behind the wall bring the expanse of the outside world into view, but the images do not readily indicate the world behind the wall. As extremely short exposures are used, the dimmer regions of the image sink into darkness, even depriving our gaze the freedom of movement, The images are never decentered in such a way as to allow the spectator to reconstruct them as freely as he can, as if saying, "Look just as you please!" Rather, they are so centered that they almost function, I might say, as if commanding our gaze. Moreover, they are frightfully beautiful. But then, if such filmmaking were only to create beauty, we would merely need to praise Pedro Costa for his creative talent. Costa would not have needed to break with the traditional crew system and go off by himself This beauty isn't simply for satisfying the filmmaker's aesthetics alone.

Pedro has set up the camera alone. When a camera is placed among people, it brings about many different relationships. Through the camera's violence, people on one side may hurt those on the other and make them unhappy. Some may feel ashamed to expose themselves before the camera, but may still think that they can compromise themselves in exchange for money- Others may run away from the camera to protect themselves. However, occasionally there are others, who may find themselves in a joyous relationship in which the people on both sides can work together. In any case, there still remains an asymmetric relationship between the one behind the camera and the one beyond: Pedro is a seeing being and Vanda a being seen. While actors are always beings seen, they are forbidden to stare back and are forced to ignore the camera, i.e. to gaze. To accept this and behave as if there were no camera at all is the acting. Would this definition on make Vanda also an acting being? There is a camera, but it is not just any camera. it's the camera held by Pedro. Vanda simply ignores its presence. Is it because she has become accustomed to it? Is it possible that she has spent so much time filming, that she has become used to the camera and forgotten its presence altogether? Though she's not acting, she must be aware of Pedro's presence, only that she ignores it. In this sense, she's acting, one might say, and that would be fiction. But Vanda's coughing, for instance, belongs to nobody else but her. It's hers. When she coughs, the image of her body undermines the division between filming and being Filmed. It crystallizes between being constrained and behaving freely, between acting and being the way she is. She has to cough. She's so free that she throws Lip on her bed as she coughs. She's not acting for anybody. She has no desire to show off her usual self before the camera. But she's also not what she is, forgetting the presence of the camera. I can perhaps say that she participates in the filmmaking, in conspiracy with Pedro's camera, or that she avows that she has nothing to hide from the camera. just as she would say to her neighbors, "if you want to come, come anytime. I am always here," she lets a man who wants to film intrude, offers him her own image and provides a place for him and his camera. Pedro isn't just there to bring the image back to his editing room; but lie rather continues to stay there with his camera, taking the attitude that he stays there because lie wants to, the attitude of an ordinary man. He also seems to be saying, "I have nothing to hide, either." He composes her image through his gaze and gives it back to her. Vanda exists with or without a camera, but her image does not require or need our imagining or questioning what she is like in reality. Pedro has not taken advantage of reality to fabricate a pseudo-real world; nor has he attempted to preserve some intact fragments of real life. Vanda signifies both Vanda and Pedro, images crystallized through the interaction with the spectator's gaze. She is the resistance against the division between the two gazes. She is a representation of new gazes that contemplate how people can live together... Vanda is now. She is here just now...

My dear Pedro, I wanted to write about the spirit of your cinema with all my compassion for you. Unfortunately, my review hasn't been entirely successful Hopefully, this text will not interfere with the imagination of those who have seen your films. I will reflect on this unsuccessful question in my cinema. I trust you are going to see my next film. I do hope you like it.

(obrigado: André Dias)

"Hide what the spectator most wants to see" (Ozu)

Not seeing, hearing a love letter by Ventura, recited to Lento. COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006).

I see useless beauties
Extinguished in the night of doubt

And the flowers are not real
And the earth becomes barron

Soon I must say nothing

Yet if I walk the earth
The reason is that others too are there
Who like me spoke haltingly
When we were not entirely silent. 

Excerpt from Ailleurs ici partout
(Here There Everywhere)
by Paul Eluard
trans. Gilbert Bowen

By no small miracle did a 35mm print of COLOSSAL YOUTH (JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA, 2006, Pedro Costa) make it to Los Angeles. And by no small miracle was I able to find out about the screening and attend on September 27th (thank you Andre D., Filipe, Curtis, and David N.). It came by the good graces of Thom Andersen, still one of the great torch bearers of modern cinema/history in Los Angeles, and under the most unassuming of headings: Film Today, Andersen's class at CalArts (30 miles from city). I must dwell on Andersen's vanguardism for a moment and point out that this CalArts screening of COLOSSAL YOUTH was the U.S. premiere. What's more, no sooner did that week's artist-in-residence Costa leave the campus, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul was on his way. If there were only a way to amplify from Andersen's cinema pickups 30 miles out to the the public of Los Angeles! If this were done regularly I'm convinced it would reduce traffic, if perhaps increase loitering, as any good film screenings should. Anyhow "all great civilizations are based on loitering."

I've seen COLOSSAL YOUTH only once (to Andersen's credit, it was actually screened twice). For an extraordinarily concentrated film like COLOSSAL YOUTH -- an object so deeply hewn on every plane and every register -- this is both a curse and a blessing. The need to verify (or overturn) certain things about COLOSSAL's narrative is immediately and intensely felt; one wants to see it again straight away. But as the film sustains in the mind (something that goes on for weeks) the inscrutability of it strengthens into stanzas and its poetry reemerges. I don't believe any amount of dvd extras could destroy its mystery. The film's relation to time (narrative and cinematic), it's images (which remain overwhelmingly strong), the many stories of it's individuals and their implications -- what of these things will "set" upon further viewings?

While wondering this, for better or worse, I have begun comparing COLOSSAL to other films. There are few films that stand on their own two feet as steadily as COLOSSAL YOUTH, and lest the many film references below give any other impression, let me admit that they are my own attempts to stand. Mystery, and yet...

And yet one question haunts me now: is the film's narrative actually unequivocal? Upon seeing COLOSSAL I immediately thought "this is what it must've been like to see LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD in 1961", but the possibility of unequivocality has lead me to NICHT VERSöHNT (Straub/Huillet, 1965). Were people seeing NICHT VERSöHNT just once then scrambling for the Böll novel on which the film is achronologically based? Were they seeing NICHT VERSöHNT several times and ignoring the Böll text? In any case, in 1969 Rivette said this about NICHT and it could well apply to COLOSSAL YOUTH:

"Straub imposes on the spectator (the virgin spectator viewing the film for the first time, at any rate, but also in part a subsequent viewings) an obscurity in the language, which seems wilfully indirect, apparently unaware of him as the addressee (even if he nevertheless, though tacitly, fulfils his task), and which prevents him from direct attainment of the 'knowledge' it seemed to be entrusted with bringing him; the film functions before him as a dream, one might say, as the product of an unconscious (but whose unconscious? Does it belong to the literary text? To fifty years of German history? The Straubs? The 'characters' in the film ? )..."

(from 'Montage' by Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, and Jacques Rivette - Cahiers du Cinema, No. 210, March 1969 - an heroic translation by Tom Milne)

Straub/Huillet's film is a complex operation on and materialization of a literary text (as always with them) and though prior knowledge of Böll's story far from dissolves all mystery of NICHT (it's not a puzzle, in fact it's articulations are inexhaustible), there is a known source in Böll to keep one's footing. They are realizing pre-existing material via excision and liasons (as Rivette calls them) and they are doing enormous work with a text laid out in front of them (see the Straub's heavily marked scripts), shuffling and emphasizing here, totally eliding there.

Costa's film may seem cryptic at first but there is something of necessity about the way it has been told, with it's soft indications of past and present, with it's particular ways of breathing and duration. If I can call this Costa's policy of presence (partly inherited from the Straubs but also Ozu and Ford) -- that is, the giving of time and weight to each person and place to work itself out "against" the montage and offscreen space -- it is another layer to take in which makes focusing on narrative chronology difficult. (And then there's a friend of mine in Taipei who found the chronology quite tractable).

COLOSSAL is comparable in density to NICHT, but there is another challenge; one of essence and consciousness, and that is of COLOSSAL YOUTH's source. The revelation of Costa's filmmaking, as film critic Quintin has elucidated it, boils down to the filmmaking process itself: "...the issue here is that the whole machinery of cinema is not exterior to its subject -- and by including cinema on the side of his subject, it no longer becomes an instrument of law and order." (Cinemascope 25, Winter 2006). COLOSSAL's subject is not a literary text but the actual stories and memories of the working class and unemployed of the Fountainhas ghetto and the new Casal Boba housing project in Lisbon. Costa has said his films are not creations but meetings. With each meeting we hear struggles orally recollected. Huillet/Straub's restoration of oral culture is taken to heart by Costa. He lives with the people he films, and he works hard everyday with them, with their stories and places. Costa's practice and the dignity and "non-inferiority" (Quintin) of Ventura, his children and comrades that results is nothing less than a restoration of the monumentality of humanity, and it is done precisely with every cinematic means a film is capable of. It's as if a year had been spent on each element of the film: lighting, composition, location, sound, voice, scansion, movement, duration, time, narrative, epic gesture, etc.. This dignity isn't created by Costa, it's been there all along; Costa's camera may often be low-angle but its thinking is the opposite of base. Contrary to professional belief, the cinema must concentrate the aforementioned cinematic elements, and perhaps use some unprecedented ones, to even approach these struggles.




So if the film is based on understanding, not decipherment, will this give any solace to those hostile or dismissive of it?

PRECEDENCE

What is COLOSSAL's surrealism? For me it is too early to say, there's work to be done. There are many factors, even down to its spatial organization that could bring one to call it surrealist. It's also a matter of decoupage. Certainly it is a "hallucination that is also a fact" (Bazin). In the films long recollections where the past and present seem to shift in mid-sentence or in the grand pauses that take up whole chunks of the encounters, there is a dream-like tone and each scene begins (and sometimes even ends) with an "out-of-order" chink for the penny-slot of meaning. But this quality is not the sole domain of Ventura's consciousness, as singular as he is. He and Costa and the cumulative effect of everyone encountered are much more generous. "In this world's structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth" (Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism" 1929).

There is something else underlying Ventura's encounters with the people of Fountainhas and it's something he carries with him wherever he goes. It's something white walls and new monstrosities can't erase.There may be some indication of what Ventura is carrying in John Ford's GRAPES OF WRATH, two films with many affinities.

THOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THEIRS

When Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) sets off at the end of GRAPES OF WRATH it's as if he contained the destiny of the human family to be a community, as if he were setting off as a witness and a realization of that dream at once. He aims to simply be present, not even to take action. To be "all around in the dark" as he says in his famous dialogue with Ma Joad. "To be in the way guys yell when they're mad. In the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready..."

Tom Joad learns from Casey (Carradine) why he gave up preaching: "a preacher's got to know. I don't know. I gotta ask." The gentleman Ventura, in Costa's true record of a tenament gentleman, often doesn't even ask - he is present, he listens and he says what he knows. Tom Joad recollects Casey's words: "Fela ain't got a soul of his own, but little pieces of a big soul. The big soul that belongs to everybody..."

By the time Tom Joad orally passes on these words above, the words of a friend literally beaten to death by a system, he has suffered the material loss of home, of work, of family, and he has suffered the material and spiritual tragedy of "people living like pigs and good rich land layin' foul". Ford's film shows the Joads doggedly tricked and exploited at every turn while trying to get work and find a home. The Joads find in every outskirts camp and every job the impossibility of "eatin' stuff they raise, livin' in houses they build." This constant laceration and the feeling that all humanity has been scarred is carried by Ventura as well and confirmed by the people who tell him their stories. This yearning for purposeful work in one's own interest as opposed to proletarianization is repeated several times by different people in COLOSSAL YOUTH. One of them is temporarily selling toys out of a large plastic bag. Later the same man (?) tells Ventura about his life and work from a hospital bed. A scene of prostrated confession, as in so many Ford films (an illness or wound nursed with feelings exposed in THE LONG GRAY LINE, HORSE SOLDIERS, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, DOCTOR BULL).

As Tag Gallagher points out in his very lucid (if less loving) chapter on GRAPES OF WRATH, in this film Ford focuses on the effects rather than the causes of the Joad's disenfranchisement. But the causes are at least within reach from the step by step presentation of the exploitation. This is only partly present in COLOSSAL YOUTH where the effects of the effects have already been long contemplated. It's closer to trauma, but also wisdom.

In GRAPES, when there is time (!), this traumatic wisdom comes across in vignettes between Tom Joad and the people he meets, people often ducking the cops; just kicked out of somewhere or about to be. These people relate what has happened to them in ricorsi (a term used by Gallagher to describe instances of "reliving" in Ford and Straub/Huillet). Though COLOSSAL's vignettes are vast and make up most of the film, the ricorsi of both films reverberate, one overlapping the other as they are approached or departed (like the vibrating bottle in Ventura's room as he paces). Just momentary stasis in GRAPES; prolonged stais in COLOSSAL: both squating down in some barely lit temporary place, both transitory.

"Twilight makes even very clear handwriting impossible to read" (Goethe)

In both films the camera is often below eye level, about waist high. The compositions are wide angle but planar rather than spatially deep. People and things rarely move toward or away from the lens -- they move in, from side to side. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões (I've yet to find details on Simões contribution) sustain an extremely low lighting scheme that Ford and Gregg Toland only occasionally hint at in GRAPES (extraordinarily enough however). According to one Portuguese review, COLOSSAL was lit entirely with natural light reflected off of nine different mirrors Costa came equipped with. The lighting of both films is natural and abstract at once. In Michael Sicisnski's extremely sensitive review of COLOSSAL he reminds that "Costa's hieratic lighting effects were possible [because] his subjects were living with holes in their ceilings").

DESTRUCTION

Daryl Zanuck tacked on the ending of GRAPES as it is, with Ma Joad's epilogue speech. Ford intended to end it with Tom Joad setting off...


In Gallagher's view Zanuck's ending "virtually destroys the films trajectory toward inevitable disintegration/revolution, in favor of perseverance/abidance."

The above still frame could be right out of one of the more Fordian scenes in COLOSSAL, where Ventura, his daughter and another man stand outside their home, nearly in salute, to watch a funeral procession off screen (THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT). But what is this image's context in GRAPES? It's the last shot of Muley's flashback recollection of the destruction of his home by the Shawnee Land & Cattle Company.

Destruction is seen in Ford's film whereas in Costa's it is mainly heard through a complex off-screen sound construction. In Ford's film the demolition is seen as enacted by a "Caterpillar" (not unlike those used by Israel to bulldoze the homes of Palestinians). Ford does a brief montage of Caterpillar tractors in the middle of Muley's flashback to show the volume of the destruction of homes ("for every one [tractor], there was 10, 15 families throwed right outta their homes"). The montage is of tractors -- not tractors destroying homes -- therefore in a different film this montage may have been a hymn to socialist construction or, to be more up to date, a cry against the construction of something horrible like a McDonald's or ill-conceived like a liberal-bureaucratic-reformist housing project. The potential of a thing to be constructive or destructive.




If the below still frame showing Henry Fonda walking through a skeletal doorway (with a tire hanging on it and the sky above) looks a bit like surrealist painting, those signs among him are more expressionist in context, considering that Joad (Fonda) has just been told that the outskirts camp they've been staying in is going to be burned down by contractors. Earlier the contractors came to the camp looking for workers but some of the workers were wise to the contracter's tricks. The only way the contractors can get the cheap labor is by the desperation of burned out refugees.






Above, the "agitator" (conscious worker) flees the cops through a doorway. The "agitator" flees because he beat a cop that tried to shoot him. The cop missed the "agitator" hitting a woman bystander instead.

Andre Breton called his novel NADJA "a book with a banging door". Costa seems to always mention doors and doorways. For him they are something fearful and something hallowed. It's where fiction/reality may be discovered or where the reality/fiction may bar itself from you. Ventura and Lento hang their hats next to a door banging with the wind and cold. In one of the first few shots of COLOSSAL Ventura approaches a dilapitated building, shakes the hand of a man standing by it's doorway, and they both wait outside. Loud banging and screeching are heard. One level of the noise drops and another man comes out of the building through the doorway -- a friend of Ventura's who will share lunch with him in the next scene.

V +/- V

The scenes between Ventura and Vanda in her room are the convergence of old and new. Vanda repeatedly mentions the brand-name of diaper and Ventura does not comprehend this; Ventura, (witness to past times of palpable solidarity and community) is attentive in silence while a TV yammers on for attention and domination; we watch Vanda's constant and mortal coughing and her million songs of experience next to her daughter's quiet youth and song of innocence.

As COLOSSAL proceeds and it is evident that Costa is mixing the naturalistic gait and words of Vanda with Ventura's more stoic exchanges, Vanda and her room begin look like a mixture of Walter Brennan/Monument Valley and one of Godard's TV documentaries. Ford often mixed acting styles and tones (MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, THE LONG GRAY LINE, 7 WOMEN), contrasting the colloquial and homespun with the grand responsibilites and fates of a new landscape. And Godard has been one of the only ones to convey and critique the din of domestic TV presence by means of the cinema, to discover the labyrith of social relations created by a blarring TV (NUMERO DEUX, FRANCE/TOUR/DETOUR/DEUX/ENFANTS).

As these articulations intermingle in Costa, it raises the issue of modernism and traditionalism (over and underdetermined in both Godard and Ford). I must leave this to those who are much better at distinguishing such things, where they need be distinguished. As both issues have bearing on the perceived "enterability" of Costa's work I must say that distinguishing is probably less important than engaging with the subject (which this post may show, is hard to do in it's absence). Costa has taken huge amounts of time to do this himself. Some critics are so cynical they consider Costa's practice a kind of MacGuffin (David Walsh). His films can be dismissed with a few words like "for a small fan-base". (The first half of that Goethe line is: "Whoever wants to accuse an author of obscurity ought first of all to have a good look at his own inward self and see whether it is really light in there.") . Meanwhile, whole countries are turned to dustbowls by global capitalism. Like the Straubs, Godard, and even Gehr before him, Costa is charged with elitism; but (as Gilberto Perez points out) what could be less elitist than making films with means that anyone could take up (16mm in OTHON [Straubs], a pocket 16mm camera in NOONTIME ACTIVITIES [Gehr], video in HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA [Godard], video again in IN VANDA'S ROOM and COLOSSAL)?

Trompe-l'œil

In GRAPES Ford repeatedly shows the Joads together or singly approaching or being approached by people ostensibly offering help. Often these are wolves in wolves clothing but speaking with the modesty of sheepherders. Their methods and tricks are exposed (the economy of effects). Even Ford's New Deal camp director seems suspiciously dispassionate, a simple bureaucrat (he emphatically shows no reaction to some of the Joad children's hijinx with a camp toilet).

In two succinct sections, Costa shows some skepticism toward a welfare agent offering an apartment to Ventura. There is a vacancy in this housing project and the agent has a clipboard telling him it is meant for Ventura. Ventura goes to see it; he stands in this completely empty room with white walls -- walls that seem to try to blot out the past that saturates every other encounter. Costa/Simões completely wash out the windows to the outside world.

When Variety called Ventura a "vacant guide", they not only missed everything made visible by Costa and Ventura as he stands in this abstract white room, everything Ventura carries with him, but they may have also succumbed to the State's notion of "occupancy" (the housing project). The white walls "have spiders" as Ventura points out. The apartment is not big enough for all of his children, Ventura tells the agent. The room looks like the end of 2001 (Kubrick). But will Ventura grow old and die here (in minutes, seconds, years?). It should be reiterated that the struggles of Ventura and the other inhabitants new to the Casal Boba housing project are ongoing.

In one amazing eye level shot in COLOSSAL (like GRAPES the camera sometimes changes to eye level when the authorities are around) Ventura is being led around in the new apartment by the welfare agent. The agent opens a door and they enter an empty bedroom. The door is slowly self-closing however, soundless and sterile, giving Ventura enough time to briefly take a look then slip out before it closes. Ventura goes off-screen, effectively closing the door to the agent who is still inside the empty room glorifying the beneficence of the housing project to himself. These scenes inside the new apartment are Costa's sharpest and most biting.

LAST SHOT

In these possibly overlong notes on COLOSSAL YOUTH in the absence of much dialogue or a chance to see it again, I have ignored much of the film to emphasize a few small bits. Another film, ZVENIGORA by Dovzhenko, also came to mind after the CalArts screening; it too uninhibitedly leaps from era to era, deals with time, roots, sons, fathers, whole peoples, stubborness, destruction, and the designs of the state versus the folk -- and it does it with urgency and unabashed texture, like COLOSSAL.

As Mark Peranson has said in Cinemascope (Number 27, Summer 2006) the youth of "youth on the march", the COLOSSAL YOUTH, are represented in the film by Vanda's young daughter; she's barely in the frame throughout the film and all the more stronger for it. It's a Renoirian idea that explodes in the final shot. Vanda asks Ventura to watch her young one while she goes out to do some housecleaning work. The next shot, on which the film will end, is of Ventura lying on his back in Vanda's bed, one leg crossed over the other in the air, Vanda's daughter in the extreme lower right hand corner of the frame creating a tension, standing dormant her small subtle movements. "You must give the feeling the frame is too narrow" (Renoir). The young one remains silent in Ventura's presence, as she did during her mother's long soliloquy. Considering Ventura's "function" in every other scene -- dutifully listening to others, orally passing on the poetry of his love letter, roaming on his feet, etc. -- this silent scene between Ventura on his back and the young one half out of frame raises the question of the fates of both without naming it, without designating it's future terms. It reminded me the last shot of WAGONMASTER by Ford, of sudden progeny: a pony climbs a hill, fade out.

My only concrete discovery in all of this is what most certainly must be an Ozu reference of Costa's in the final shot. Either that or an astonishing coincidence. Looking back at RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN by Ozu, I find in Ozu's final shot almost the exact same crossing of the legs in the air as Ventura's in COLOSSAL's final shot-- not to mention the same tension of youth and uncertain future: