André Dias was kind enough to translate the Cinema Cinemas clip of Godard on Full Metal Jacket/79 Primaveras. Much obliged André.

« There it is! This is the slow motion we find in Peckinpah, if you will... It addresses the crowd of spectators only by exploiting something that it lacks. It seems like what Welles talked about: a gimmick, a trick, a gadget. Something that's now usual in all these American directors, even in Kubrick, who disappoints me because he has more talent than them. And this is just Peckinpah, if you will... with the exploitation of Vietnam. To his film I wouldn't go because I wouldn't see the Vietnamese, or God knows in which form. They were there. You just needed to go there... He doesn't see them. Something's missing. Kubrick's film misses what America also missed. They keep showing... In war films about Germany, there's not one big Hollywood actor that hasn't, sooner or later, played a German general. Here no one has played a [Vietnamese] general, cause they didn't know how to do it. That's their shame. To cover up this shame with a slow motion, whatever talent one has, it doesn't work... Let see the Alvarez slow motion. We see a crowd that cries. And we see each one cry without privilege, despite being privileged. The spectator can make his choice. This is what never occurred...Here is a war movie made by a Cuban. It's sufficient to see this to, when we show Kubrick's images see that they do not hold... To say good or bad things... I, (...), it wouldn’t come to my mind to make war; I've deserted in two countries. But it's necessary to watch. We see something in which we believe and there he [Kubrick] doesn't believe in films anymore. He forces himself to believe. And at a certain point it doesn't stand. There's a minimum of honesty... We see that the other [Alvarez’s], which is made of documentary, is so worked by a stylised fiction like this, that it gives back something. And there [Kubrick's] lacks the documentary approach. »

La Guerre des mondes / Les guerres d'un monde

The War of the Worlds /

The Wars of the World

This piece was written for the French magazine Panic, No. 3, Mar./April '06, as part of an ongoing series "Chronique cinéphile" conceived and collected by Nicole Brenez.

Amidst the wars of the world (just one world) I see CITY OF FEAR (Irving Lerner, 1959). This is going back a bit in what's called film history, but I've just seen the film for the first time. It rages on. The city and the fear.

It's a film that shows secrets, large and small. The secret lies and exaggerations of a police report about a dangerous criminal's prison break, critiqued by the escaped convict himself as the report streams from the car's radio. An image of two different sides of the story: official and sanctioned (radio/media), and the suffered and experienced (critique/action).

A vast State secret rumbles beneath the rest of the narrative: the canister the convict has stolen from prison just before escaping is not the $1 million worth of heroin that he thinks it is, that he needs to sell in order to live the good life. It's radioactive Cobalt that was in the prison, it's banally explained by the cops, for experimental use on the prisoners. Hoods for sale. This Mengele treatment of the incarcerated continues in US prisons to this day.

Thus we have Threatening Danger, Fear, then...Catastrophe. The ultimate goal of the State's radioactive experiment is efficient and contained annihilation. But of elsewhere! not here! in Los Angeles!

The final cinematographic scene of the film predicts 'zero': a shot of a radiation ridden corpse, draped with a black sheet, framed like a landscape, a "Caution: Radiation Area" sign placed against the static hilly form of his body. Dissolve to a panorama of the Los Angeles basin, flat and twinkling.

Why mention this film today? Apart from its surprising narrative and formal similarities to Godard's Breathless (made the same year, 1959, and as in that film you see: passenger-seat jump-cuts; jive digressions for their own sake; sweaty, drawn-out sequences in location-shot cafes; gas stations and rooms where women wait, and may rat; general anguish); apart from profound contrasts between Los Angeles location shots (usually alongside the crimey) and the stale air of the studio shot-sequences (usually with the police); apart from reminding oneself of the existence of CITY OF FEAR's director Irving Lerner and therefore of the Worker's Film and Photo League of which Lerner was an active member, and therefore of the existence and possibility, once upon a time in America, of an openly Communist Cinema Collective, whose founder said:

"the news-film is the important thing; that the capitalist class knows that there are certain things that it cannot afford to have shown. It is afraid of some pictures....we will equip our own cameramen and make our own films." (Samuel Brody)

...yes, apart from all that, I also mention this film today because it shows something people in the US do everyday but that's seldom shown in American films: citizens talking back to their radios and televisions. Refutations yelled at the machines by those who know the truth because they live in the consequences of it.

One has to marvel at one horrifying bond between cinema and radiation sickness posited by the poster advertising the film: Chills for millions. 

Like cinema itself, cinephilia is nothing unless it fabricates a bond with life. Across films, across continents, across thoughts, justices and injustices -- that's all.

The Greatest Cinema Blog I Can't Read

I stumbled upon an extremely interesting cinema blog while searching for references to Jean-Claude Rousseau. It is in Portuguese and seems to be a "discovery" type of blog, taking frequent note and quotation of Cinemateca Portuguesa screenings (though it's much more than that, for instance theoretical as hell, as a babelfish translation of a piece on video vs. film has just indicated to me). It is called Ainda não começámos a pensar and it looks to be run by someone called Andre Dias.

It is where I found the Cinema cinemas clip of Godard comparing Kubrick and Alvarez, Full Metal Jacket with 79 Primaveras (pictured above as it appears in dual-screen sequence on the blog).

Andre has also posted several beautiful videoclips on youtube (most of which have been put to use on his blog):

La cicatrice intérieure (Garrel)
Les enfants jouent à la Russie (Godard)
Le pays de la terre sans arbre (Perrault)
... and what I assume is just an excerpt from Andre Dias's own film
Destruição de uma casa de banho . Very disquieting film.

LA Pigs brutalize Anti-Minutemen, or, When They Crossed the Street, the State Came to Meet Them. (July 8th)

click here for youtube video of LAPD brutality against Anti-Minutemen

Two weeks ago, while walking home on Hollywood Boulevard I heard distant drums. As I passed Vine Street I found a demonstration and counter-demonstration in my path. The Minutemen were staging a rally for their racist anti-immigrant crusade. An organization like the KKK, but much more active, the Minutemen are a jingoist vigilante group tolerated if not encouraged by the State, as unaccountable civilian border police.

The Minutemen were on the east corner, on top of Jerry Lewis's star, while the counter-demonstrators were on the west corner, on top of Frank Borzage's star. The Minutemen were organized and about 150 strong, and were met with an equal number in opposition, impromtu though, chanting "down, down, down with the Minutemen!!" Both parties were pressed to edge of their respective curbs. The police were doing formations in the middle of the street between the two groups, however they always faced the opposition, the counter-demonstrators, batons drawn. Every 10 minutes or so the police would shift positions in maneuver-like fashion, lending the scene a theatrical air.

Someone from the counter-demonstration stepped down off of the curb accidentally and the pigs started clubbing us with all their strength. The victims were mainly women. Afterwards, as everyone on our side cursed the police and threw plastic bottles at them, I saw the physical consequences of the police clubbing on those at the very front: knees swollen the size of baseballs. In the now indignant atmosphere several young counter-demonstrators tried to cross the street in dispersion and were immediately sacked by multiple cop, with typical pig historionics: 2 or 3 corn-fed flat-foots pinned and ground one female counter-demonstrator into the asphalt. Several minutes later the police began beating a protester who had successfully crossed the street (see video by clicking above photo). They caught him by his shirt, dragged him around by it, and several different brutal pigs took turns with their batons. A young couple tried to shield the sacked protester from the baton blows, only to receive their own. The pigs cuffed the street-crosser, picked him up high and slammed his chest into the ramp of a truck unloading stage apparatus for the theatrical musical 'RENT'. In all this the pigs made a point to shout "resisting arrest" (for the crossing of the street).

I took the above picture from across the street with a disposable film camera. Note the title on the theatre marquee; the duty of the police in a capitalist state is to protect private property -- the duty of art in a capitalist state is to be private property! Proof: this theatre will certainly pay no mind to the theatre in the street or its casualties; it exclusively puts on Broadway superproductions about "getting better all the time."

Zach Campbell recently noted Pasolini's siding with the police during May '68 in France because the police are necessarily of the working class, batons and all. Here is a response to that troubling point of view:

"We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people. (...) The free Athenian considered police duty so degrading that he would rather be arrested by an armed slave than himself have any hand in such despicable work."

-Chapter V. of Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State by F. Engels.

In turn, the police must differentiate themselves from the State to gain any respect in these struggles.

Demonstrators might make the cop think twice about his/her job with formations and maneuvers of their own. At least a presentational aspect could be tried...?

True/False Passports

"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. "

-Herman Melville

Israel has displaced, as we have seen, those who flee by foot, by hoof, by bus, by Mercedes, by BMW, by Jeep, by French or American Helicopters, etc., They have not diplaced them equally and the US media is not afraid to risk capsizing the weight of their reports by doggedly focusing on the airlfting of those with the proper passports, all the while unilaterally labeling Israeli strikes as against Hezbollah targets. The vast majority of Israel's savage strikes have been against civilians and civilian infastructure.

As usual it will be the poor who will suffer the most for not being able to leave, it will be the poor who will also refuse to give up their homes to the Zionists, and as usual it will be (and has been thus far) the poor who will resist epically.

I needn't identify the nationality of this corpse; were she the "correct" nationality this would be one of the most famous pictures in the world.

The passports of bombs and rockets, however, are given a mistier treatment. For instance, a missle fired by Hezbollah is unfailingly referred to as "Iranian" whereas an Israeli shell is almost never identified as "American". Perhaps the massive number of Israeli bombs justifies their shrouded identity; well over 9,000 US made shells have been fired into Lebanon by the Israeli aggressors in just one week -- not to mention US missles, the US jets that carry them, and as yet unidentified American weapons of mass destruction being used on the civilian population in Gaza.

Robert Fisk (the British journalist who lives in Beirut and always provides valuable on-the- ground reports from the Middle East) has even stooped, in this degraded time, to begging for some sort of class/culturally based outrage over Israel's arrogance and boundless barbarism:

"It amazes me -- I mean, living here in Beirut, as I have for 30 years. Here are the Lebanese people, sophisticated, educated, cosmopolitan, people who don't look like the Arab world, they look like us; I mean, people who could be quite at home on the streets of Paris or New York and London, and some of them are; people who read, who are very well educated; people who speak English fluently, French beautifully, and fluent Arabic."

Indeed it is shocking, especially insofar as Europe has given up the ghost on its own visage in Lebanon, but no more so than the concurrent occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, and most critically, Gaza and the West Bank.

The left needs to unify its outrage in the face of the spurious 'clash of civilizations' mantra of the capitalists. If one has the suspicion that Chavez is right, that the capitalist/imperalist US (as it exists today, and has long before Bush) will NOT last another 100 years...then the left must focus on facilitating that fall...This requires mass solidarity with ALL who are oppressed and exploited by the US and its facilitators, across all supposed cultural lines. Class IS tied up with culture, we can't deny that: mass culture is inseperable from mass production and signification, but everyone on the planet is subject to the FACT that almost nothing is purely signification, that material conditions provide existence. Why be afraid of this knot (in the same stomach that must be filled from day to day)? I say we use it as a basis for renewed human solidarity and revolution. This requires signification; signification is not sinful; and this is where cinema comes back in...

                                                                                         

                                                                                              - a.r.

Jean-Claude Rousseau by Akasaka Daisuke (excerpt)

2005... From "Visual" to "Audio"

A fixed shot. In a hotel room there is a bed and sunlight enters from a right window. A middle aged man enters the room and takes off his coat and hat. When he opens the window, the atmosphere and noisy sounds of the outside invade the inside. The man triggers sounds from the off-screen. He switches on TV, the voice of an RAI announcer is heard, and the noisy siren of a patrol car fills in the room. At that moment we feel as if the space is exploding within, the shot and the sounds are cut... a black screen with silence, and connecting to a vivid long shot of the city which liberates the sounds of the outside atmosphere.

Jean-Claude Rousseau, who himself plays the man, is an amazing cineaste in that he can show what cinema is, as such, in only one shot. In Japan, his four video works were shown for the first time in the "Panorama of New French Documentaries", at the Institute Franco-Japonaise de Tokyo, in November 2004.

He was born in 1948, and was influenced by the American underground cinema during the time he spent in New York, as was Phillipe Garrel. After coming to Paris Rousseau made 8mm film works, taking years for each one. In 1999, La Vallée close (1995) won prizes at the Belfort International Film Festival. Jean-Marie Straub says Rousseau is one of the greatest filmmakers in Europe, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler. Recently Rousseau has made video works at a greater pace. The first video I described above is a short film called Lettre a Roberto (2002)-- it's a masterpiece. I was fascinated with the movement of light and sound, lead by Rousseau's gestures in the space. The movement captured by this fixed shot is very fresh, fun and even entertaining; the director's look is gloomy to the contrary. But, why?

Some viewers must have the same question about Juste avant L'orage (2003), which was shot while Rousseau was in South-Korea for the Jeon-ju International Film Festival.Why is such a low-angle fixed shot of a street market stall so fascinating? Immediately after men at rest leave, a shop-woman is cleaning, and there are families in  the distance, in addition to a motorcycle and a car, appearing and leaving, roaring like choreographed extras in a Jacques Tati film. But it's not a comedy. Was it directed or not? I don't know, but this simple shot is incredibly funny. Then the space is filled with noises suddenly turns into a black screen with silence, and an inside shot of a taxi captures wipers moving on wet windshield, with a conversation between driver and guest.

Faibles Amusements (2004) fragmentally tells a love story that the director himself tempts out of a young man who wants to be a filmmaker. They stay at a hotel near Lake Como and the young man leaves the director, but viewers can see the deck of a ship on which passengers board (Ozu!), a young man posing in bed with the director's voice, the young man who reads outside through a window like a Bonnard painting, and a street with the conversation of the two men about Robert Bresson... The relation between image and sound is loose (for example a shot of the young man's face with conversations from an other scene), and the time goes back and forth. And in the 5 short minutes of  Contretemps (2004) we hear the voice message of a young man from telephone "I can't come see you " with black screen, and see the next wonderful shot whose composition consists of books and antiques of an oriental taste on a desk. A book turned over shut by itself. That's all. But in such a short film which consists of extreme simplicity, we feel Rousseau gives his absolute confidence to space and sounds -- as if each shot answers "yes" when asked " Is such an image valuable?"

In Rousseau's films he trusts the audio-visual sense of viewers who will recognize the movements which create this world. And through his cinema he lets us notice the existence of the space and sounds which we can't recognize in daily life. How the collision of sounds, their deletion and invasion into space can expand our audition and amuse us! Rousseau developed Bresson's ways of "off sound", and he implies that the manipulation of the author himself who organizes the movement of the sound that goes in and out of a fixed shot is an amazing subject, too. His films are documentaries of manipulation in that sense. Rousseau is an ultimate filmmaker because he reforms cinema buoyantly, as if keeping a diary.

(...)

But why do most viewers turn away from the trust of these cineastes and leave themselves out of the audio-visual operation? Every year it becomes more and more difficult to see the films that awaken our senses on-screen in Japan. Most distributors and bureaucrats believe that they can leave the sleeping beauty as she is, without knowing it drives us into dangerous places. Our life is enclosed within images now and in the future, and the person who doesn't think about this is nevertheless profoundly influenced by it, as if it's easier for the person who doesn't have immunity to get disease. We need the cineastes who give us an opportunity to think along with the enjoyment of listening.

-- Akasaka Daisuke

(2005.04.01)

This is a revised translation of Daisuke's longer essay "2005...from 'Visual' to 'Audio': Jean-Claude Rousseau, Monteiro's Branca de neve, Nestler, Straub-Huillet" which can be found in a questionable translation, but still better than nothing, as information and incisive thought on these filmmakers is hard to find, HERE.

Click here for video -- JLG showing the evidence that lies between how two filmmakers see Vietnam: Santiago Alvarez and Stanley Kubrick. (From Cinema Cinemas)

English translation by A. Dias in the comments field below...

LOS MUERTOS played last night as part of the "Films That Got Away" series during the LA Film "Fest". Robert Koehler gave an inspired introduction, mentioning Bielinsky's death, Lisandro's new film FANTASMA (which I knew nothing about), and heralding a new generation of filmmakers who haven't forgotten cinema, even "pre-storytelling" cinema, linking LOS MUERTOS and this new generation (in Argentina, but beyond) to silent cinema, pointing out that they have not forgotten 35mm...

"Shot in long, stationary takes, the film is a minute-by-minute account of regeneration, as the returning prisoner renews his acquaintance with nature, negotiating the shallow rivers that lead to his home, feeding on honey stolen from buzzing hives."             -- Dave Kehr

There are very few "stationary takes" in LOS MUERTOS. The ebb and flow of the film, its very form, depends on preemptive, autonomous, or structural camera work (not to limit the moves to those three descriptions alone) -- most of which are worthy of Murnau. In my piece on the film for FIPRESCI I mentioned seeing the curvature of the earth over a green river in one of the shots. I thought I had seen this directly, a curved horizon where the river meets the sky. Seeing it a second time I realize this is a result of the camera's path in accord, and then in opposition to, Vargas's boat, a kind of drift that spatially creates a curve, i.e. he starts the shot looking to the left diagonally, pans and stays with Vargas in profile, then lets Vargas go diagonally panning to the right, with the camera following wind and stream. An incredibly simple "follow" shot made rich by the resistance/guidance of the circumstances/world.

LOS MUERTOS has the advantage of making all other films seem false, another inspiration to start anew. This has been said of films before, genre films to genre films mostly. It is to the whole of cinema that Alonso speaks. Alonso is the only filmmaker of his generation I'm currently aware of, plus granted 15 years older or younger, who cares about the green of the earth. Positif called Alonso's way of filmmaking "haughty". While watching LOS MUERTOS I suddenly thought "hardly any filmmakers give a shit about people."

Lisandro's masterpiece and his way of working, truely unique today, along with Koehler's introduction, have stirred a lot of expolsive yearnings in me, to fight further and harder for the solidarity required if any more free films like LOS MUERTOS are to be made and seen. And by freedom I don't mean the freedom of those other green rivers only producing the freedom to buy and sell. We ought to put an end to independent film, for the only thing independent about it is the dealing. LOS MUERTOS is something else.

- a.r.

BK/LB

Bill Krohn speaking about Bunuel's lifelong Jovian thuderbolts... hurled at the fascists...

Gaston Modot looks on (thanks to Modigliani, Bunuel, Renoir, Becker, Gance...)

Thank you Scott Foundas
(his defense of Colossal Youth):

"There were few if any boos at the end of the press screening of Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, but that was because anyone likely to jeer (including the entirety of the three rows seated in front of me) had long ago fled the theater — many of them during the scene in which a methadone addict named Vanda pours forth a long, rambling monologue about childbirth, while a man called Ventura, who may or may not be Vanda’s father, listens inexpressively. Like all of the characters in Colossal Youth, Vanda and Ventura are “played” by real Cape Verdean immigrants enacting thinly fictionalized versions of their own lives, and to the extent that the film has a plot, it’s about how Ventura’s already tenuous existence descends into chaos when the demolition of the Lisbon housing project where he has lived for more than 30 years coincides with his wife’s decision to leave him. From there, Ventura sets out on an itinerant odyssey, dazedly wandering between his gutted-out former residence and a couple of prospective new ones, crossing paths with a succession of similarly displaced and/or dispossessed persons whom he refers to as his 'children.'

"Developed by Costa in close collaboration with his nonprofessional cast, many of whom contributed their own storylines and dialogue, Colossal Youth was whittled down by the director from more than 300 hours of footage shot over a 15-month period. The result is a harsh, nightmarish and often terribly beautiful film set against a world of peeling paint and crudely nailed planks, through which moves this solitary man grasping at the flickering embers of some real or imagined past. It is a movie in which marginal people living on the edges of society are treated with dignity and allowed to tell their own stories in their own unmistakable voices. And it is quite unlike anything that you or I have ever seen before.

"It’s no exaggeration to say that Colossal Youth was the single most divisive film at Cannes in 2006. Even before anyone had seen it, some Costa detractors were badmouthing the film up and down the Croisette, accusing the director of being a fraud championed by a few highbrow critics said to get off on his films’ impenetrability. It was a sentiment summarized succinctly by the Variety review, which opined that the film would “hold the Portuguese director’s coterie of fans in rapt attention while proving a colossal bore to everyone else.” But does the fact that a movie is destined to reach only a limited audience prevent it from being great? I grant that Colossal Youth isn’t for everyone: The pacing is slow (there are maybe 30 or 40 shots over the course of two and a half hours of screen time), and sometimes we are looking, for minutes on end, at two people lying on a bed watching TV, or sitting in a cramped, dimly lit room playing cards. Yet in the week since I saw the film, it has haunted my dreams and is still with me upon waking. If there were many good movies in Cannes this year, and perhaps even a couple of great ones, Colossal Youth is the only one I would venture to call heroic.

"The decision of the Cannes programmers to include Colossal Youth in the official competition struck even some of the film’s admirers as perverse, but to my mind it is the very sort of radical gesture by which Cannes continues to define itself. Like several other filmmakers who premiered new films at the festival this year — including the Argentine Lisandro Alonso and the Paris-based American expat Eugène Green — Costa is a director whose work is scarcely known within the borders of his own country (let alone elsewhere) and who needs a stage like Cannes upon which to present it, lest he follow in the footsteps of so many great artists not duly recognized in their own lifetimes. "

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/let-them-eat-film/13650/#Continuation

COLOSSAL YOUTH
and
KINO
KILLING
KRITIKS















Tuesday, May 30, 2006 
9:05 PM
From GK(...)
To : Andy Rector
Subject : could ebert sound like more of a dumbass?

From Ebert's last Cannes report:
"Sunday morning in the Hotel Splendid breakfast room, my favorite Cannes expert Pierre Rissient predicted that the big prize would shock everyone by going to “Colossal Youth,” by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Pierre is such a legend they are naming a theater after him at Telluride this year, but he was, to put it delicately, wrong. “Colossal Youth,” unseen by me, tells the story of a Lisbon worker whose wife leaves him, and he moves from a slum to a housing complex. Why didn’t I see it? Because Mary Corliss did. She is the wife of Time film critic Richard Corliss, who told me: 'Mary walked out after an hour because the movie made her feel like rats were fighting in her skull.'”

Tuesday, May 30, 2006,
9:06 PM, 
From : Andy Rector: 
Subject : Re: could ebert sound like more of a dumbass?:

real rigorous, not seeing a film based on the opinion of a bad critic's wife. What a horrifying image...rats fighting in her head... if thats what happens when a filmmaker respects you, you have other problems! Such reactions are deranged, not the films. One only has to ponder the rabidity of the sort of films that ease the minds of critics like Corliss or his wife to know what's healthy and what's not.

Now that's the second reference to "heads" and Pedro Costa films that I've heard. The difference being that Mary Corliss spoke of her own head and Manny (Farber) spoke of the film's head!
________________________________

PEDRO COSTA: It's not a creation its a meeting. I make films because I meet certain people in certain places. (...) And I think that's important to show certain things like that, it's innocent enough...

We don't want to stop, we have things to do, things to work on. I think cinema's tools require us to make efforts; not everything is lost.

Nevertheless I think that I would do everything for cinema to be like it was in the past. It was an art which educated me, which trained me morally, politically, artistically, aesthetically. I learn so much from films and the way I put into practice my production.
When I say production I mean how to treat people. (...)

QUESTION: Do you expect the cinema viewer to make an effort watching your film?

PEDRO COSTA: Yes. But it's sort of an awareness. I'm not asking the cinema goer to suffer, I just want them to be sensitive and that's what worries me about being here (in Cannes). Perhaps people are not really paying suffient attention. And there should be some nervous tension.

from: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/films/fiche_film.php?langue=6002&partie=video&id_film=4360212&cmedia=18368840\

From the Archive of the Youth Brigade For the Import of the Films of Pedro Costa

pour WaeL
what's happening man?!

" .......................................................your style never lasts long
because the harder you flash
the harder you get flashed on."

Franj-yeux

"I'm even the opposite of an anarchist, because from the moment where what's needed is collective action, I detest everything that's individual...when all's said and done, loving your neighbor is all very sweet, but we have to destroy before we can rebuild. And I think we might begin, as Saint-Just recommended, by depriving the enemies of liberty of their liberty. And then we'll go towards liberty automatically, whether liberty of action or liberty of art."

"Obviously, you have to be pessimistic.....Once I've eliminated all the undesirable potentialities I can be sure of winning, but I have to believe in all those potentialities before I can eliminate them...I think that pessimism is very profitable, and that it leads...first to fighting....then to a happy outcome."

-Georges Franju

Poor, Old, Hollywood

Coming across a particular film and two texts recently moves me transcribe and juxtapose them here in the hope that they say a little something about the price of nostalgia and glamour, those qualities enshrined by an increasingly apolitical generation of cinephiles, and the way these idealizations can distort or favor certain artists and the conditions they worked in, ignore the politics of the films themselves, and willingly forget the courage and degradation that went on in old Hollywood. I also submit these thoughts as a check on my own post of a series of stills from several weeks ago, of women in films.

The film: THE LAWLESS (1950), a dialectical political film if there ever was one, directed by Joseph Losey. I won't go into the film here beyond the following, which I've just posted to the film group Film + Politics:

http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/film_and_politics/message/

Quote of the day (this "american century"?) -- Maurice Jara, playing a WWII vet and struggling laborer, saying "they (Uncle Sam) used to pay me to kill guys like you!" while swinging a wrench at a foaming white american mob. This film is really something...

- The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.
- The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.
- The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)
- The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.
- The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.
- The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.
- Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into.

Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down and that it won't be easy...

Text 1: Losey's own account of the career of actress Gail Russell (pictured turning above), the female lead in THE LAWLESS. With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Wisconsin, early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product. "Variable exploitation". If it is a product, it remains a great one. Below is Losey's account:

"Gail Russell, who didn't want to be an actress, was picked up by a talent scout when she was a clerk in a department store in Beverly Hills, came from a lower middle-class family. She died of alcoholism because she was so deathly frightened of acting, but she had in her the makings of a great star. I had a tragic time with her. I think she had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen, the most moving eyes. And she was immensely sensitive. She didn't know anything. Paramount had her under contract -- like a horse. She got a big salary then, and I had absolute instructions from them not to let her have a drink. The very first time I shot with her I had a long night-tracking shot. It was half the night, we finished at twelve.

"She couldn't remember a single line and it was three or four pages of important dialogue. I wasn't trained enough then to say 'Well, we'll shoot it another way', and I kept trying to get it by coaching her in her lines, and finally I said 'What's the matter?' And she grabbed me, her hands were icy cold, she was absolutely rigid, and she said 'Look. I don't want to be an actress. I'm not an actress. I can't act. I never had a director who gave me a scene this long before. I can't do it.' And I said 'Oh yes you can. I'm sure you can, and you are an actress.' 'No, I'm not, I've never kidded myself. I'm not an actress. I hate it, I'm frightened of it. Get me a drink and I'll be alright.' So I said 'You know, I've been told not to get you a drink?' She said 'Get me a drink!' I got her a drink and she did the scene. (...) 

"This started her drinking and she was drunk throughout the rest of the picture. That isn't to say that she was bad. I think she was very good often, but sometimes I had to shoot scenes in ways to disguise the fact that she was drunk and sometimes I had to shoot scenes with a stand-in because she was too drunk to stand up."

Text 2: Not entirely unrelated, at least not in my mind, is the below text by the great film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz. It appears in FRANK TASHLIN (Festival Internazionale del fim Locarno, Editions Yellow Now) edited by Roger Garcia. A book of very fine essays on this nearly forgotten director ranging from personal appraisals to scholarly research on Tashlin's extra-filmic work. Eisenschitz's essay PARDON MY FRENCH breaks any lightness in the other essays and starts in with an acute analysis of how this comedy director has been critically understood in France. Towards the end of the essay he launches into an attack on those who neglect Tashlin's modernist aspects and those who neglect Tashlin entirely, even linking this to opportunism:

"Subsequently (after the May '68) the discovery of the American cinema went hand in hand with praise for the "transparency" of a linear narrative, a non-reflexiveness, a lack of self-distantation, non-autobiography, and preferably contemplation. Since he was at the opposite of these concepts, Tashlin was soon declared as nothing more than a foil for Jerry Lewis, the only avant-garde filmmaker championed with some unanimity by French critics*. This stance has reappeared in a diffuse cinephilia which feeds on mythic - and Americanized - knowledge of genre and studio movies. Everything that was iconoclastic and anti-nostalgic in Tashlin in relation to this cinema and this outlook could only be rejected. The corollary of 'Nothing much remains of Tashlin's works today,' is: It's time to discover Norman Z. McLeod or Norman Taurog. The deeper meaning of such a rejection is a settling of scores with the New Wave (whether the enemy is embodied in Truffaut or Godard) and in what it stood for, and stood up for.
"In a world where second hand visions and video have become shortcuts to a career, and where - on the other hand - films have become the abstract objects of cultural analysis, it is understandable that Tashlin, with his awareness of the rupture that was to come, would not be among the most shared of pleasures. It is not a successful career move to remind the audience they are marketed and devalued by a cinema obsessed with success. The fact that satirical comedy, like epic theatre - and no less deliberately so - puts the audience in an uncomfortable situation by making it laugh, is no more of a way to success either. For me Tashlin is the link between the new cinema of the 1960's and another great satirist, himself a victim of general amnesia, Bertolt Brecht. There is no better commentary on the image of the movie theater in THE POSSUM THAT DIDN'T than paragraph 26 of Brecht's THE LITTLE ORGANUM FOR THE THEATRE, Rock Hunter and the Bear are incarnations of Galy Gay, and we should watch THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT in the light of the commentaries on MAHAGONNY."

*Lewis on Tashlin: "I owe him everything I know."

+ thanks to Deborah Mainwaring for the correction.

A whole type of sound has died

J Dilla, James Yancey 1974-2006