"The human race I prefer to think of as an underworld of gods. When the gods go slumming they visit the earth. You see, my respect for the human race is not one hundred percent."
May 22, 2009
percentage of survival (2)
"With every film the director should make it felt that man is a magnificent thing, and in the same moment that he is the curse of the planet."
"The human race I prefer to think of as an underworld of gods. When the gods go slumming they visit the earth. You see, my respect for the human race is not one hundred percent."
"The human race I prefer to think of as an underworld of gods. When the gods go slumming they visit the earth. You see, my respect for the human race is not one hundred percent."
May 21, 2009
R.I.P.
João Bénard Da Costa
"(...) buzina. Descobrindo o efeito sonoro do seu movimento, a criança repete-o um sem número de vezes, sempre de costas voltadas para a rua e sempre a olhar para a velha. Esta não esboça a mais pequena reacção ao jogo da miúda, mas, embora não lhe vejamos o olhar, sabemos que está com toda a atenção a ela. Atenção que, de certo modo, é devolvida, pois que a brincadeira da criança, sendo também uma brincadeira solitária, é uma brincadeira para a velha, ou uma brincadeira com a velha. (...)"
"Sobre NO QUARTO DA VANDA"
João Bénard Da Costa
If sensitivity to a single shot or a film's title are worth a damn to the English speaking world, then film critic and historian João Bénard Da Costa's work will one day be recognized and translated. He died today (1935-2009). I only became aware of João Bénard Da Costa through my work on Pedro Costa, and what Pedro and other Portuguese friends have told me of João Bénard's importance. One of the few (the only?) ways you can see João Bénard Da Costa with English translation is in a penetrating interview about OSSOS (Pedro Costa) included on this dvd of the film. He wrote an entire text, a beautiful one, about the above shot, a single shot!, in IN VANDA'S ROOM (Pedro Costa). He wrote monographs on Hitchcock, Buñuel, Lang, Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, Hawks and Ford. He also did the kind of work you cannot completely transcribe or translate since it resides in the minds of hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, that of being a great director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa since 1980. My impression is that there are many people who could say about the films and the light shed on them by João Bénard Da Costa "I would have died if you hadn't come back." Mr. João Bénard Da Costa is gone. The films will wait "all these years." Is it a lie Johnny Guitar?
- a.r.
May 17, 2009
Separation
Danièle Huillet : There is something else in cinema besides directors, on which all the cinema rests: its craftsmen, its technicians, and that's also a social history. People who entered the cinema of the generation of Louis Hochet, our sound engineer, were generally people who came out of the working class and for whom the cinema was a possibility of upward mobility. But they brought their classes with them, their intelligence and experience. Now, this has also disappeared from cinema: the cinema became a Mafia, the son of a technician becomes a technician, the daughter of an actor becomes an actress... And that represents a loss of fantastic energy.
Louis Hochet - Class Relations (1984)Jacques Aumont : It's true from this point of view, the lists of students at IDHEC or FEMIS are interesting, there is a high proportion of surnames of film people or known intellectuals.
D.H : We see it in concrete terms. The young technicians are often very nice, relatively less pretentious than directors. Nevertheless, there is a loss in terms of intelligence and experience, which is also frightening.
Jean-Marie Straub : And then, there’s too much vanity. There’s almost only vanity, there’s no ambition now.
D.H. : But ambition is also a social fact: someone that comes from below and wants to climb has ambition.
(...)
J.-M. S. : A musician condenses time with time. That’s the affinity between music and cinema. The work to be done is of not getting bogged down in the space that we show; it’s terribly annoying to see tracking shots, never ending pans. When I hear talk about sequence shots (plan-sequence) I want to vomit; that consists of being bogged down, and besides people now don’t even know what it means concretely. One must know how to, with space, condense time, and how to condense space to get time; also, if the actors speak there can be a relationship to vocal music (or not, if we don’t want it). After all, when someone says hello, it can be notated, no? [To Danièle Huillet:] Why are you staring at me like that?
D.H. : I was thinking about the time when all that wasn't separated...
J.-M.S. : It was well before cinema!
D.H. : Yes... But cinema could find something, and that's what has been lost. It's frightening when you look at old films, to see what was lost en route, all that was possible and that has been ransacked, looted, repressed. This is especially frightening because it's a model for what happens in general.
J.-M.S. : That money is profit. Barbarism is not just in society, it's also produced at the individual level.
J.A. : How then to continue to make films?
D.H. : By saying every time that this will be the last -- not like (Ingmar) Bergman, but concretely, in the knowledge that one has no future.
-- 1987
May 15, 2009
---------------CINEMASCOPE
only good for funerals and snakes,and bread lines around the block,
for food vouchers, ending in riots,
which are also mainly good
which are also mainly good
for funerals and snakes.
-in Milwaukee '08-
-in Milwaukee '08-
May 14, 2009
....with Gloria in Laughton's garden -
GARDEN IN PROGRESS
High above the Pacific coast, below it
The waves' gentle thunder and the rumble of oil tankers
Lies the actor's garden.
Giant eucalyptus trees shade the white house
Dust relics of the former mission.
Nothing else recalls it, save perhaps the Indian
Granite snake's head that lies by the fountain
As if patiently waiting for
A number of civilizations to collapse.
And there was a Mexican sculpture of porous tufa
Set on a block of wood,portraying a child with malicious eyes
Which stood by the brick wall of the toolshed.
Lovely grey seat of Chinese design, facing
The toolshed. As you sit on it talking
You glance over your shoulder at the lemon hedge
With no effort.
The different parts repose or are suspended
In a secret equilibrium, yet never
Withdraw from the entranced gaze, nor does the masterly
_____hand
Of the ever-present gardener allow complete uniformity
To any of the units: thus among the fuchsias
There may be a cactus. The seasons too
Continually order the view: first in one place then in another
The clumps flower and fade. A lifetime
Was too little to think all this up in. But
As the garden grew with the plan
So does the plan with the garden.
The powerful oak trees on the lordly lawn
Are plainly creatures of the imagination. Each year
The lord of the garden takes a sharp saw and
Shapes the branches anew.
Untended beyond the hedge, however, the grass runs riot
Around the vast tangle of wild roses. Zinnias and bright
_____anemones
Hang over the slope. Ferns and scented broom
Shoot up around the chopped firewood.
In the corner under the fir trees
Against the wall you come on the fuchsias. Like immigrants
The lovely bushes stand unmindful of their origin
Amazing themselves with many a daring red
Their fuller blooms surrounding the small indigenous
Strong and delicate undergrowth of dwarf calycanthus.
There was also garden within the garden
Under a Scotch fir, hence in the shade
Ten feet wide and twelve feet long
Which was as big as a park
With some moss and cyclamens
And two camelia bushes.
Nor did the lord of the garden take in only
His own plants and trees but also
The pants and trees of his neighbors; when told this
Smiling he admitted: I steal from all sides.
(But the bad things he hid
With his own plants and trees.)
Scattered around
Stood small bushes, one-night thoughts
Wherever one went, if one looked
One found living projects hidden.
Leading up to the house is a cloister-like alley of hibiscus
Planted so close that the walker
Has to bend them back, thus releasing
The full scent of their blooms.
In the cloister-like alley by the house, close to the lamp
Is planted the Arizona cactus, height of a man, which each
_____year
Blooms for a single night, this year
To the thunder of guns from warships exercising
With white flowers as big as your fist and as delicate
As a Chinese actor.
Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast
Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides
Drag parts of it into the depths without warning. Seemingly
There is not much time left in which to complete it.
b.b. c. 1945
GARDEN IN PROGRESS
High above the Pacific coast, below it
The waves' gentle thunder and the rumble of oil tankers
Lies the actor's garden.
Giant eucalyptus trees shade the white house
Dust relics of the former mission.
Nothing else recalls it, save perhaps the Indian
Granite snake's head that lies by the fountain
As if patiently waiting for
A number of civilizations to collapse.
And there was a Mexican sculpture of porous tufa
Set on a block of wood,portraying a child with malicious eyes
Which stood by the brick wall of the toolshed.
Lovely grey seat of Chinese design, facing
The toolshed. As you sit on it talking
You glance over your shoulder at the lemon hedge
With no effort.
The different parts repose or are suspended
In a secret equilibrium, yet never
Withdraw from the entranced gaze, nor does the masterly
_____hand
Of the ever-present gardener allow complete uniformity
To any of the units: thus among the fuchsias
There may be a cactus. The seasons too
Continually order the view: first in one place then in another
The clumps flower and fade. A lifetime
Was too little to think all this up in. But
As the garden grew with the plan
So does the plan with the garden.
The powerful oak trees on the lordly lawn
Are plainly creatures of the imagination. Each year
The lord of the garden takes a sharp saw and
Shapes the branches anew.
Untended beyond the hedge, however, the grass runs riot
Around the vast tangle of wild roses. Zinnias and bright
_____anemones
Hang over the slope. Ferns and scented broom
Shoot up around the chopped firewood.
In the corner under the fir trees
Against the wall you come on the fuchsias. Like immigrants
The lovely bushes stand unmindful of their origin
Amazing themselves with many a daring red
Their fuller blooms surrounding the small indigenous
Strong and delicate undergrowth of dwarf calycanthus.
There was also garden within the garden
Under a Scotch fir, hence in the shade
Ten feet wide and twelve feet long
Which was as big as a park
With some moss and cyclamens
And two camelia bushes.
Nor did the lord of the garden take in only
His own plants and trees but also
The pants and trees of his neighbors; when told this
Smiling he admitted: I steal from all sides.
(But the bad things he hid
With his own plants and trees.)
Scattered around
Stood small bushes, one-night thoughts
Wherever one went, if one looked
One found living projects hidden.
Leading up to the house is a cloister-like alley of hibiscus
Planted so close that the walker
Has to bend them back, thus releasing
The full scent of their blooms.
In the cloister-like alley by the house, close to the lamp
Is planted the Arizona cactus, height of a man, which each
_____year
Blooms for a single night, this year
To the thunder of guns from warships exercising
With white flowers as big as your fist and as delicate
As a Chinese actor.
Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast
Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides
Drag parts of it into the depths without warning. Seemingly
There is not much time left in which to complete it.
b.b. c. 1945
May 12, 2009
NE CHANGE RIEN (Pedro Costa, 2009)
"Although people sometimes act like they think so, a singer is not like a saxophone. If you don't sound right, you can't go out and get some new reeds, split them just right. A singer is only a voice, and a voice is completely dependent on the body God gave you. When you walk out there and open your mouth, you never know what's going to happen."
Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues.
There is now an entry for Pedro Costa's latest film Ne change rien at pedro-costa.net . The entry includes a synopsis, photos, biographies/ filmographies, and notes on singing and cinema by Jeanne Balibar. Ne change rien is to premiere at The Director's Fortnight, Cannes, this Friday the 15th of May.
*from C-
" — 'Pourquoi les juifs?'
Olho para uma mesa redonda e digo que ela é redonda porque assim me parece, mas depois começo a duvidar. (Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, regarder? C'est garder deux fois.) No fundo não acredito na objectividade, ou então só acredito numa objectividade silenciosa, imponderável — as palavras são demasiado vivas, demasiado frenéticas, passam-nos a perna num instante.
De um filme de Godard, por exemplo, não se pode dizer quase nada, é literalmente feito de material inflamável. — 'Uma mulher casada' são fragmentos de um filme rodado em 1964 a preto e branco, dura 95 minutos. — Pois bem e o que é que isso significa? — Ah, Bérénice, o amor é um mistério."
Olho para uma mesa redonda e digo que ela é redonda porque assim me parece, mas depois começo a duvidar. (Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, regarder? C'est garder deux fois.) No fundo não acredito na objectividade, ou então só acredito numa objectividade silenciosa, imponderável — as palavras são demasiado vivas, demasiado frenéticas, passam-nos a perna num instante.
De um filme de Godard, por exemplo, não se pode dizer quase nada, é literalmente feito de material inflamável. — 'Uma mulher casada' são fragmentos de um filme rodado em 1964 a preto e branco, dura 95 minutos. — Pois bem e o que é que isso significa? — Ah, Bérénice, o amor é um mistério."
May 6, 2009
Several notes on Brody's Godard biography...
...after reading Adrian Martin's "Contempt" :
1) When I first read Adrian Martin's review, I found his comparison of Brody's Everything is Cinema to Fuegi's biography of Brecht, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (at least Fuegi wears his thesis on his sleeve) very apt. There's the mutilation of the artist's works into a series of exposé-fueled interpretations pivoting on spurious biographical speculation and crude biographical judgments; hysterical ideological reductivism and wild revisionism; a completely knowing disregard and/or distortion of the artist's strivings and working methods, especially with regard to political being (in the case of the Fuegi, Brecht's collective adaptation methods are interpreted as life-long plagarism!); the well-crafted intent to do grave harm to the understanding of certain works (perhaps even to the man) -- all this is evident in both biographies.
But the comparison is not completely apt. Fuegi contributed to Brecht studies for at least 10 years (the BRECHT YEARBOOK, for example) before he (for ideological reasons) turned on the artist and the work. Brody, however, has produced little if any of what can be called solid scholarship on Godard before, during, or since his biography.
I was just using the term "artist" to describe the subjects of Brody and Fuegi's biographies. It can be a very limited term, especially in relation to the work of Brecht and Godard. I wouldn't want to be in league with the term "artist" when it's used to to say that Godard sacraficed being one by becoming militant, by speaking about the Palestinians, as if those concerns were "self-denial" of an "obstinate artistic quest" (pg. 625-6, Brody). To be in thrall to, or worse propagate, such a stodgy and couth definition of "art" as Brody's is as backward as it has ever been -- and over a body of work like Godard's, it's quite a reactionary feat. This definition of art has certainly been forced on us before. (Andrew Sarris for example, also speaking of Godard: "the death of an artist is too high a price to pay for the birth of a revolutionary, even when the revolution seems to make more sense than ever before.") To that definition I say thank goodness Brecht and Godard haven't always proceeded as "artists" alone, or else we wouldn't have TO THOSE BORN LATER, DER MESSINGKAUF, GALILEO or ICI ET AILLEURS, SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE), HISTOIRE(S) DU CINéMA.
An astute reviewer of the Fuegi biography (click here to read the review) reminds that Brecht and his work fought and survived much, including every kind of force for reaction -- no reason to think Godard's work won't do the same.
2) The last group of stills in my post of Adrian's review
are dedicated to Adrian's recent comment at Girish's blog:
Yet another deepening of that exchange. I don't think I would be alone in calling GRANDEUR ET DECADENCE... one of Godard's greatest films of the 80's, perhaps of his entire career. Brody gives it a one-and-a-half page plot synopsis (funny since this is one of Godard's most self-sufficiently plotted films and an admirable self-criticism) and nothing else.
3) and of that exchange -- the letters between Truffaut and Godard, and the anecdote about the slurring of Pierre Braunberger: for those who've only read Adrian's review and not Bill Krohn's KINBRODY AND THE CEEJAYS, the latter really must be referred to for a deepening of the issues and events at hand in those letters and that slur. At Dave Kehr's always interesting blog, Glenn Kenny finds:
But Kenny does not need to stretch because this is not what Bill Krohn is suggesting at all. Bill's review would not be 8000 research-based words (in a book review!) if he were asking us to actively "reduce" and think the "sale juif" remark "nothing more" than anything. In short, there's more -- to consider, to argue, to think about, to remember, etc.. Brody's book, and the reactionary attitudes it has empowered (cf. Kenny's blog post on Godard and Brasillach, recent New York Times articles, etc) give the opposite impression. By doing the research on that letter that Brody did not do (or withheld), I think Bill is suggesting that it's impossible to accept Brody's long-armed judgements which, in this case, hinge upon the spoken word with no witnesses. This does not make the slur against Gorin by Godard (reported in the Brody) any less unfortunate. Nor does it make NOTRE MUSIQUE or any of Godard's films anti-Semitic. Brody is craftily counting on these slurs as they appear in his book to pass into and strengthen his perspective against Godard's anti-Zionist films -- and only in this vile book could it pass.
Rolle, witness
New York, witness
West Bank, witness
4) For a similarly complicated affair accusing Jean Renoir of anti-Semitism, including the rebuttals to that charge, see the wonderful Jdcopp's definitive post here.
1) When I first read Adrian Martin's review, I found his comparison of Brody's Everything is Cinema to Fuegi's biography of Brecht, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (at least Fuegi wears his thesis on his sleeve) very apt. There's the mutilation of the artist's works into a series of exposé-fueled interpretations pivoting on spurious biographical speculation and crude biographical judgments; hysterical ideological reductivism and wild revisionism; a completely knowing disregard and/or distortion of the artist's strivings and working methods, especially with regard to political being (in the case of the Fuegi, Brecht's collective adaptation methods are interpreted as life-long plagarism!); the well-crafted intent to do grave harm to the understanding of certain works (perhaps even to the man) -- all this is evident in both biographies.
But the comparison is not completely apt. Fuegi contributed to Brecht studies for at least 10 years (the BRECHT YEARBOOK, for example) before he (for ideological reasons) turned on the artist and the work. Brody, however, has produced little if any of what can be called solid scholarship on Godard before, during, or since his biography.
I was just using the term "artist" to describe the subjects of Brody and Fuegi's biographies. It can be a very limited term, especially in relation to the work of Brecht and Godard. I wouldn't want to be in league with the term "artist" when it's used to to say that Godard sacraficed being one by becoming militant, by speaking about the Palestinians, as if those concerns were "self-denial" of an "obstinate artistic quest" (pg. 625-6, Brody). To be in thrall to, or worse propagate, such a stodgy and couth definition of "art" as Brody's is as backward as it has ever been -- and over a body of work like Godard's, it's quite a reactionary feat. This definition of art has certainly been forced on us before. (Andrew Sarris for example, also speaking of Godard: "the death of an artist is too high a price to pay for the birth of a revolutionary, even when the revolution seems to make more sense than ever before.") To that definition I say thank goodness Brecht and Godard haven't always proceeded as "artists" alone, or else we wouldn't have TO THOSE BORN LATER, DER MESSINGKAUF, GALILEO or ICI ET AILLEURS, SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE), HISTOIRE(S) DU CINéMA.
An astute reviewer of the Fuegi biography (click here to read the review) reminds that Brecht and his work fought and survived much, including every kind of force for reaction -- no reason to think Godard's work won't do the same.
2) The last group of stills in my post of Adrian's review
- one of Godard, Suzanne Schiffman, and Truffaut on the set of FAHRENHEIT 451
- one from Godard's HISTOIRE(S) with Truffaut and Léaud ["YOU/YOU"]
- and two from GRANDEUR ET DéCADENCE D'UN PETIT COMMERCE DE CINéMA, Godard's film with Léaud from 1986
are dedicated to Adrian's recent comment at Girish's blog:
"(...) I don't think I have ever seen it mentioned that, for example, the film project that Godard 'menaced' Truffaut with in their bitter 1973 letter exchange (called A FILM at that stage, if I remember correctly), is substantially the film he made 13 years later as GRANDEUR ET DECADENCE ..."
Yet another deepening of that exchange. I don't think I would be alone in calling GRANDEUR ET DECADENCE... one of Godard's greatest films of the 80's, perhaps of his entire career. Brody gives it a one-and-a-half page plot synopsis (funny since this is one of Godard's most self-sufficiently plotted films and an admirable self-criticism) and nothing else.
3) and of that exchange -- the letters between Truffaut and Godard, and the anecdote about the slurring of Pierre Braunberger: for those who've only read Adrian's review and not Bill Krohn's KINBRODY AND THE CEEJAYS, the latter really must be referred to for a deepening of the issues and events at hand in those letters and that slur. At Dave Kehr's always interesting blog, Glenn Kenny finds:
"Krohn’s attempt to reduce the Godard/Braunberger 'Sale juif' incident to nothing more than Godard attempting an allusion to Renoir and Braunberger not 'getting' it is a real stretch."
But Kenny does not need to stretch because this is not what Bill Krohn is suggesting at all. Bill's review would not be 8000 research-based words (in a book review!) if he were asking us to actively "reduce" and think the "sale juif" remark "nothing more" than anything. In short, there's more -- to consider, to argue, to think about, to remember, etc.. Brody's book, and the reactionary attitudes it has empowered (cf. Kenny's blog post on Godard and Brasillach, recent New York Times articles, etc) give the opposite impression. By doing the research on that letter that Brody did not do (or withheld), I think Bill is suggesting that it's impossible to accept Brody's long-armed judgements which, in this case, hinge upon the spoken word with no witnesses. This does not make the slur against Gorin by Godard (reported in the Brody) any less unfortunate. Nor does it make NOTRE MUSIQUE or any of Godard's films anti-Semitic. Brody is craftily counting on these slurs as they appear in his book to pass into and strengthen his perspective against Godard's anti-Zionist films -- and only in this vile book could it pass.
Rolle, witness
New York, witness
West Bank, witness
4) For a similarly complicated affair accusing Jean Renoir of anti-Semitism, including the rebuttals to that charge, see the wonderful Jdcopp's definitive post here.
May 5, 2009
Contre-Brody
Since many of Richard Brody's gross distortions of Godard in Everything is Cinema continue to proliferate and go unquestioned, there's truly no risk of lapsing into a game of ping pong here by making available another clear as day pan review. This is the review by Adrian Martin (many thanks to him) that Bill Krohn pointed out in his article Kinbrody and the Ceejays as "particularly good on that brand of malarkey," i.e. Godard, actresses and the "gossip made tedious by morality" in the Brody. Right off Adrian brings up a huge deficiency of the book not yet mentioned elsewhere: that Brody does not take account of Godard's impact on world cinema. With Godard's constant concern for the state of cinema and active reaching out to others in its name (Duras, Straub/Huillet, Wenders, Garrel, Truffaut, W. Allen, Akerman, Artavazd Peleshian, the list goes on, far out of Godard's reach -- all influenced by him; not to mention whole countries: Mozambique, Palestine), is there any other filmmaker to whom (precisely, in a biography) this deficiency could be more of an affront?
___________________________________________
Contempt:
A Review of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008
by Adrian Martin
In 2003, Melbourne’s veteran independent filmmaker Nigel Buesst made a long video documentary called Carlton + Godard = Cinema. It was about a small band of filmmakers clustered around Melbourne University Film Society in the mid 1960s. Brave figures including Brian Davies and Bert Deling scraped together just enough money and resources to make a bunch of short films; their inspiration came primarily from the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) that had surged since 1960, and especially the work of Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt, Alphaville). Buesst’s memoir shows how this buzz of local film activity intersected with trends in theatre (La Mama), how it laid the ground for some striking feature films of the 1970s (Deling’s Pure Shit), and how it clashed with certain institutions of the time – in particular, the Melbourne Film Festival which, under the illustrious stewardship of Erwin Rado, sometimes studiously ignored the flagship example of Godard’s ever-changing work.
Godard's Alphaville.
For Australians, this is a fascinating, long-buried piece of cultural history – one of those stories which shows our artists and thinkers in dialogue with trends from abroad, rather than gazing inwards at their nationalistic navels. But you will not read a word about it in Richard Brody’s 700-page biography of Godard, Everything is Cinema. Nor will you find much information about Godard’s vast influence over the development of independent filmmaking and cinema theory in Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain, UK, Taiwan …
Brody is a film critic for The New Yorker – and Everything is Cinema is definitely a New Yorker’s view of Godard. On the one hand, the book springs from a peculiarly American projection of French society and culture: the France of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy (heavyweight intellectual celebrities), Brigitte Bardot, May ‘68, François Truffaut, and the wartime Resistance. On the other hand, it is at pains to document Godard’s impact on the US, particularly on those revered critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.
This dual focus is odd, and leads to many distortions. Godard is no longer a citizen of the world, no longer someone who interacted with fellow filmmakers such as Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Georgia’s Sergei Paradjanov. He mainly seems, in Brody’s account, to be on planes between France and the US – at least until he relocated to Switzerland, where he is based today. But the Switzerland of this book is just a picture postcard of lakes and restaurants, not a living, breathing, troubling society which Godard depicts in films including the magisterial Nouvelle Vague of 1990.
This is the second biography of Godard to appear in English, after Colin MacCabe’s rather staid Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 in 2003. It is, in certain respects, an improvement: virtually everything Godard – or JLG, as he likes to style himself – has made since the ‘50s (long or short, film or video) is documented, and the often rocky course of his personal life is more or less detailed. The most praiseworthy aspect of the book is undoubtedly its even-handed evaluation of Godard’s contribution to the Seventh Art: flying in the face of so many superficial accounts that cruelly cut off Godard’s career at 1967 (the spectacular auto-da-fé of Weekend), Brody follows it all the way. He seeks to enshrine late works such as 1987’s King Lear (a true film maudit, starring Norman Mailer and Molly Ringwald!), and the extraordinary Histoire(s) du cinéma series made between 1988 and 1998, a collage of treated clips best savoured on DVD.
The problem with the book is elsewhere. It is a commonplace wisdom to assert these days that ‘biography is fiction’ – but Brody’s effort comes off as more fictional than most biographies. The book has a frightful coherence: it is as if, very early on in the process, Brody decided on his neat interpretation of Godard, and then set about researching only those facts which would prove it. Brody has interviewed a significant number of Godard’s associates – many more than MacCabe did, but still only a fraction of the hundreds who have passed through the director’s prolific career. One sometimes suspects that a different ledger of interviewees might have produced a quite different portrait – as indeed Alain Bergala’s far superior Godard au travail (even though it only deals with the 1960s) proves.
But Brody, alas, has an axe to grind. Like John Fuegi in his seething The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, Brody has at some point switched from adoring fan to investigative reporter, not to mention moral judge. The book tries to ‘nail’ Godard, sensationally, on two counts.
The first count is anti-Semitism. The evidence for this charge is, in my view, particular only to a certain period of Godard’s life, and the book’s wholesale expansion of it into an almost magic biographical ‘key’ is highly dubious. No public statement by Godard, and nothing explicit in any of his films, incontrovertibly backs up Brody’s claim. What do exist are several reported, anecdotal accounts of verbal racial slurs by Godard: in his Correspondence 1945-1984, Truffaut (in the midst of a historic 1973 angry exchange of letters between the two filmmakers) recalls that Godard once called producer Pierre Braunberger a “dirty Jew” when a deal between them fell through; and when Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator during the Maoist period of 1968-1972, asked for money due to him from their joint production company, Godard (according to Gorin) replied, “Ah, it’s always the same thing, the Jews come calling when they hear the cash register” – prompting a rift between the two friends that lasted several years.
Those are dreadful, damning details. But when Brody reaches for a handy quote from Lévy – who has had relatively little direct contact with Godard – that the filmmaker is, in his view, “an anti-Semite who is trying to be cured”, prone to the periodic “seizure of anti-Semitism”, reportage begins to shade into a rather suspect form of pop socio-psychoanalysis. Brody proceeds to weave a life-long web that ranges from the alleged Vichy sympathies of Godard’s family members during the Occupation, to references and allusions in his most recent productions such as In Praise of Love (2001).
How to defend JLG against this barrage? In the latter half of the ‘80s, Godard in his work begins to meditate deeply on issues arising from the Holocaust – and, on this matter, he is no revisionist historian who denies the existence of the event. His empathy for murdered Jews is palpable, and leads to the kind of fervent identification with Jewish traditions to which many non-Jewish artists have arrived. One aspect of this is the reverent way that Godard, over the past 15 years, has mined the writings of Jewish poets, mystics and theorists including Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch. At the same time and by the same token, Godard poses a critique of the politics of the Israeli state, and offers sympathy for the Palestinian cause, in films ranging from Here and Elsewhere (1976, initially made in collaboration with Gorin) to the sublime Notre musique (2005) – both of which also richly feature a great poet, the recently deceased Mahmoud Darwich.
Here and Elsewhere
Can the balance of that ledger be toted up as anti-Semitism? There is a clear difference – and a laudable progression – between Godard’s racist jibes of the ‘60s and ‘70s and his actual work since the ‘80s. Brody shows himself to be a dab hand at a certain style of forced misreading when he considers a scene from the autobiographical JLG/JLG (1995): Godard draws a zany diagram on a piece of paper, two triangles superimposed to form a Star of David, thus demonstrating the filmmaker’s view that nations ‘project’ an image or idea of other nations, “Germany which projected Israel, Israel which reflected that projection”. From this oddly conveyed but certainly even-handed schema, Brody draws the message that, for Godard, the Jews “inflict suffering” and perpetrate a pernicious ideology through their control of the media!
Likewise, Brody tracks a set of references – sometimes merely vague, allusive or contestable – to the right-wing, flagrantly anti-Semitic collaborator Robert Brasillach in Godard’s life and work. His family, it is asserted, mourned the writer’s death by execution in 1946; the phrase “our pre-war” included in JLG/JLG echoes a 1939 memoir by the writer; and the ‘testament’ letter Brasillach wrote in prison shortly before his execution is, in part, recited by a non-actor in In Praise of Love – a young man named Philippe Loyrette, whose personal tape of this recitation, mailed to Godard some years previously, compelled the filmmaker (according to Brody) to recompose his own ‘version’ of it in the little-seen short video Farewell to TNS (1996). But Brody is confusing and mangling a lot here, conjuring a species of guilt-by-association: firstly, he displays little comprehension of Godard’s ‘dialectical’ collage method (consistent throughout his career) of quoting deliberately clashing, contradictory texts from right across the political spectrum (as he once made perfectly clear, “I just quote them, I don’t own them”); secondly, Farewell to TNS, which contains not a single word of Brasillach, is a tribute to the form, not the content of Loyrette’s performance. In fact, if this cryptic (and very moving) record of a recitation by Godard refers to anything specific, it is simultaneously the closure of a theatre school in Strasbourg, and the painful ending of an unrequited love.
A man in full: Farewell to TNS (1996)
Which brings us to Brody’s second, even more bizarre charge against Godard. The director has never been shy about admitting that he has fallen hard for a number of the women that appear in his films – that is, apart from the several he married – and that these relationships have sometimes been pretty one-sided. Brody hunts down a number of these women – for instance, Bérangère Allaux, whose persistent rejection of Godard leaves him, at a histrionic highpoint of the book, “wandering desperately through the streets” in search of her. It is hardly a new situation in world cinema: the director’s passion (satisfied or otherwise) for his or her much younger, newly discovered ‘star’. But Brody is sniffing for something nastier, more perverse. And he finds it – to his satisfaction, at any rate – in the case of Camille Virolleaud, 9 years old when Godard cast her in the experimental TV series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977). Virolleaud feels she was bullied and mistreated by Godard during the filming (she retrospectively describes its effect on her young self as “hyperviolent”), and disliked, when she saw the result on TV, how Godard showed her in a state of undress – although this was a fully professional, consensual production situation, endorsed and encouraged by Camille’s mother. (Australian readers will be cross-referencing at this point of the book to recent media beat-ups about the photo-art of Bill Henson and Polixeni Papapetrou.)
What is the point of all this intimate muckracking in Everything is Cinema? Brody insinuates that, from the mid ‘70s on, when Godard hit his mid-forties, he was increasingly consumed by perverse desires towards young (even pre-pubescent) women, and that his behaviour toward them tended to the abusive. Again, there is scant evidence on the public record for this claim; and again, Brody casts every which way for clues, and engages in crazy misreadings of the films. No feminist analysis of cinema has ever been as fanatically politically-correct as Brody is here: he takes virtually every scene in Godard that depicts men’s sexual exploitation of women – and there are plenty of them, from Vivre sa vie (1961) onwards – as proof not only of Godard’s darkest private intent, but also that the women before the camera were actually being “degraded”, rather than simulating it. Yet the vast majority of women featured in Godard’s films (often on multiple occasions) have never voiced any such complaint – Isabelle Huppert, for instance, who gets to play some of the most apparently degrading situations in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Passion (1982), testifies to Brody himself that she found acting for Godard “artistically gratifying”.
In general, the book is, on all matters of sexuality beyond marital, hetero-normative monogamy, almost comically prudish: Brody rages from on high against the libertarian sexual politics of French intellectuals (such as Michel Foucault) in the ‘70s and the supposed destruction of decent, humanist values such carry-on entailed, to the point of wondering melodramatically whether the “shock effect” of Godard’s project on young Camille is “emblematic of what was left of 1968”! This is one strand in which Brody’s forced Sartre-Godard parallel might have helped him, especially when he reaches the latter period of Godard’s life, and his fluid, long-term union with filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville: Sartre’s personal life likewise demands a less moralistic biographer.
Brody’s excesses on these points are reflected in the entire argumentative structure of the book. Brody bites off more than he can chew in attempting a ‘critical biography’, that is, an analysis and evaluation of the films in lock-step with the life story. The alarm bells went off for me by page 30, when an early piece of film criticism by Godard is interpreted as staking the future director’s commitment to “a traditional nineteenth-century-novelistic and naturalistic approach to character” – which makes it tough to grasp how he became, quite quickly, cinema’s arch-Modernist. More damagingly and pervasively, Brody takes the interpenetration of art and life in Godard’s career as the sole way to understand and grade the work: if the film is a cryptic love (or hate) letter to his leading lady, it’s great; if it’s only about something as unromantic as global politics (as in the films co-directed with Gorin), it’s dead, inert, uninteresting. No wonder the Godard that emerges from these pages seems hermetic and solipsistic – when his actual films are anything but.
A richness Brody refuses to deal with: Struggle in Italy (1971, Dziga Vertov Group)
Here, as with the anti-Semitic and ‘dirty/abusive old man’ broadsides, Brody’s cinematic interpretations usually rest on a numbingly literal parsing of the films’ bare plot situations: just as select bits of what Godard quotes and collages in his work are mistaken as transparent declarations of authorial intent, the incredibly dynamic fragmentation of images from sounds, bodies from words and stories from events in every Godard work is damagingly re-set back into novelistic/naturalistic conventions.
___________________________________________
Contempt:A Review of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008
by Adrian Martin
In 2003, Melbourne’s veteran independent filmmaker Nigel Buesst made a long video documentary called Carlton + Godard = Cinema. It was about a small band of filmmakers clustered around Melbourne University Film Society in the mid 1960s. Brave figures including Brian Davies and Bert Deling scraped together just enough money and resources to make a bunch of short films; their inspiration came primarily from the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) that had surged since 1960, and especially the work of Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt, Alphaville). Buesst’s memoir shows how this buzz of local film activity intersected with trends in theatre (La Mama), how it laid the ground for some striking feature films of the 1970s (Deling’s Pure Shit), and how it clashed with certain institutions of the time – in particular, the Melbourne Film Festival which, under the illustrious stewardship of Erwin Rado, sometimes studiously ignored the flagship example of Godard’s ever-changing work.
Godard's Alphaville.
Deling's Pure Shit.
For Australians, this is a fascinating, long-buried piece of cultural history – one of those stories which shows our artists and thinkers in dialogue with trends from abroad, rather than gazing inwards at their nationalistic navels. But you will not read a word about it in Richard Brody’s 700-page biography of Godard, Everything is Cinema. Nor will you find much information about Godard’s vast influence over the development of independent filmmaking and cinema theory in Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain, UK, Taiwan …
Brody is a film critic for The New Yorker – and Everything is Cinema is definitely a New Yorker’s view of Godard. On the one hand, the book springs from a peculiarly American projection of French society and culture: the France of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy (heavyweight intellectual celebrities), Brigitte Bardot, May ‘68, François Truffaut, and the wartime Resistance. On the other hand, it is at pains to document Godard’s impact on the US, particularly on those revered critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.
This dual focus is odd, and leads to many distortions. Godard is no longer a citizen of the world, no longer someone who interacted with fellow filmmakers such as Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Georgia’s Sergei Paradjanov. He mainly seems, in Brody’s account, to be on planes between France and the US – at least until he relocated to Switzerland, where he is based today. But the Switzerland of this book is just a picture postcard of lakes and restaurants, not a living, breathing, troubling society which Godard depicts in films including the magisterial Nouvelle Vague of 1990.
This is the second biography of Godard to appear in English, after Colin MacCabe’s rather staid Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 in 2003. It is, in certain respects, an improvement: virtually everything Godard – or JLG, as he likes to style himself – has made since the ‘50s (long or short, film or video) is documented, and the often rocky course of his personal life is more or less detailed. The most praiseworthy aspect of the book is undoubtedly its even-handed evaluation of Godard’s contribution to the Seventh Art: flying in the face of so many superficial accounts that cruelly cut off Godard’s career at 1967 (the spectacular auto-da-fé of Weekend), Brody follows it all the way. He seeks to enshrine late works such as 1987’s King Lear (a true film maudit, starring Norman Mailer and Molly Ringwald!), and the extraordinary Histoire(s) du cinéma series made between 1988 and 1998, a collage of treated clips best savoured on DVD.
The problem with the book is elsewhere. It is a commonplace wisdom to assert these days that ‘biography is fiction’ – but Brody’s effort comes off as more fictional than most biographies. The book has a frightful coherence: it is as if, very early on in the process, Brody decided on his neat interpretation of Godard, and then set about researching only those facts which would prove it. Brody has interviewed a significant number of Godard’s associates – many more than MacCabe did, but still only a fraction of the hundreds who have passed through the director’s prolific career. One sometimes suspects that a different ledger of interviewees might have produced a quite different portrait – as indeed Alain Bergala’s far superior Godard au travail (even though it only deals with the 1960s) proves.
But Brody, alas, has an axe to grind. Like John Fuegi in his seething The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, Brody has at some point switched from adoring fan to investigative reporter, not to mention moral judge. The book tries to ‘nail’ Godard, sensationally, on two counts.
Watch your back: Godard and Karina on location of Vivre sa vie.
The first count is anti-Semitism. The evidence for this charge is, in my view, particular only to a certain period of Godard’s life, and the book’s wholesale expansion of it into an almost magic biographical ‘key’ is highly dubious. No public statement by Godard, and nothing explicit in any of his films, incontrovertibly backs up Brody’s claim. What do exist are several reported, anecdotal accounts of verbal racial slurs by Godard: in his Correspondence 1945-1984, Truffaut (in the midst of a historic 1973 angry exchange of letters between the two filmmakers) recalls that Godard once called producer Pierre Braunberger a “dirty Jew” when a deal between them fell through; and when Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator during the Maoist period of 1968-1972, asked for money due to him from their joint production company, Godard (according to Gorin) replied, “Ah, it’s always the same thing, the Jews come calling when they hear the cash register” – prompting a rift between the two friends that lasted several years.
Those are dreadful, damning details. But when Brody reaches for a handy quote from Lévy – who has had relatively little direct contact with Godard – that the filmmaker is, in his view, “an anti-Semite who is trying to be cured”, prone to the periodic “seizure of anti-Semitism”, reportage begins to shade into a rather suspect form of pop socio-psychoanalysis. Brody proceeds to weave a life-long web that ranges from the alleged Vichy sympathies of Godard’s family members during the Occupation, to references and allusions in his most recent productions such as In Praise of Love (2001).
How to defend JLG against this barrage? In the latter half of the ‘80s, Godard in his work begins to meditate deeply on issues arising from the Holocaust – and, on this matter, he is no revisionist historian who denies the existence of the event. His empathy for murdered Jews is palpable, and leads to the kind of fervent identification with Jewish traditions to which many non-Jewish artists have arrived. One aspect of this is the reverent way that Godard, over the past 15 years, has mined the writings of Jewish poets, mystics and theorists including Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch. At the same time and by the same token, Godard poses a critique of the politics of the Israeli state, and offers sympathy for the Palestinian cause, in films ranging from Here and Elsewhere (1976, initially made in collaboration with Gorin) to the sublime Notre musique (2005) – both of which also richly feature a great poet, the recently deceased Mahmoud Darwich.
Can the balance of that ledger be toted up as anti-Semitism? There is a clear difference – and a laudable progression – between Godard’s racist jibes of the ‘60s and ‘70s and his actual work since the ‘80s. Brody shows himself to be a dab hand at a certain style of forced misreading when he considers a scene from the autobiographical JLG/JLG (1995): Godard draws a zany diagram on a piece of paper, two triangles superimposed to form a Star of David, thus demonstrating the filmmaker’s view that nations ‘project’ an image or idea of other nations, “Germany which projected Israel, Israel which reflected that projection”. From this oddly conveyed but certainly even-handed schema, Brody draws the message that, for Godard, the Jews “inflict suffering” and perpetrate a pernicious ideology through their control of the media!
Likewise, Brody tracks a set of references – sometimes merely vague, allusive or contestable – to the right-wing, flagrantly anti-Semitic collaborator Robert Brasillach in Godard’s life and work. His family, it is asserted, mourned the writer’s death by execution in 1946; the phrase “our pre-war” included in JLG/JLG echoes a 1939 memoir by the writer; and the ‘testament’ letter Brasillach wrote in prison shortly before his execution is, in part, recited by a non-actor in In Praise of Love – a young man named Philippe Loyrette, whose personal tape of this recitation, mailed to Godard some years previously, compelled the filmmaker (according to Brody) to recompose his own ‘version’ of it in the little-seen short video Farewell to TNS (1996). But Brody is confusing and mangling a lot here, conjuring a species of guilt-by-association: firstly, he displays little comprehension of Godard’s ‘dialectical’ collage method (consistent throughout his career) of quoting deliberately clashing, contradictory texts from right across the political spectrum (as he once made perfectly clear, “I just quote them, I don’t own them”); secondly, Farewell to TNS, which contains not a single word of Brasillach, is a tribute to the form, not the content of Loyrette’s performance. In fact, if this cryptic (and very moving) record of a recitation by Godard refers to anything specific, it is simultaneously the closure of a theatre school in Strasbourg, and the painful ending of an unrequited love.A man in full: Farewell to TNS (1996)
Which brings us to Brody’s second, even more bizarre charge against Godard. The director has never been shy about admitting that he has fallen hard for a number of the women that appear in his films – that is, apart from the several he married – and that these relationships have sometimes been pretty one-sided. Brody hunts down a number of these women – for instance, Bérangère Allaux, whose persistent rejection of Godard leaves him, at a histrionic highpoint of the book, “wandering desperately through the streets” in search of her. It is hardly a new situation in world cinema: the director’s passion (satisfied or otherwise) for his or her much younger, newly discovered ‘star’. But Brody is sniffing for something nastier, more perverse. And he finds it – to his satisfaction, at any rate – in the case of Camille Virolleaud, 9 years old when Godard cast her in the experimental TV series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977). Virolleaud feels she was bullied and mistreated by Godard during the filming (she retrospectively describes its effect on her young self as “hyperviolent”), and disliked, when she saw the result on TV, how Godard showed her in a state of undress – although this was a fully professional, consensual production situation, endorsed and encouraged by Camille’s mother. (Australian readers will be cross-referencing at this point of the book to recent media beat-ups about the photo-art of Bill Henson and Polixeni Papapetrou.)
Camille Virolleaud in France/tour/détour/deux/enfants
What is the point of all this intimate muckracking in Everything is Cinema? Brody insinuates that, from the mid ‘70s on, when Godard hit his mid-forties, he was increasingly consumed by perverse desires towards young (even pre-pubescent) women, and that his behaviour toward them tended to the abusive. Again, there is scant evidence on the public record for this claim; and again, Brody casts every which way for clues, and engages in crazy misreadings of the films. No feminist analysis of cinema has ever been as fanatically politically-correct as Brody is here: he takes virtually every scene in Godard that depicts men’s sexual exploitation of women – and there are plenty of them, from Vivre sa vie (1961) onwards – as proof not only of Godard’s darkest private intent, but also that the women before the camera were actually being “degraded”, rather than simulating it. Yet the vast majority of women featured in Godard’s films (often on multiple occasions) have never voiced any such complaint – Isabelle Huppert, for instance, who gets to play some of the most apparently degrading situations in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Passion (1982), testifies to Brody himself that she found acting for Godard “artistically gratifying”.
In general, the book is, on all matters of sexuality beyond marital, hetero-normative monogamy, almost comically prudish: Brody rages from on high against the libertarian sexual politics of French intellectuals (such as Michel Foucault) in the ‘70s and the supposed destruction of decent, humanist values such carry-on entailed, to the point of wondering melodramatically whether the “shock effect” of Godard’s project on young Camille is “emblematic of what was left of 1968”! This is one strand in which Brody’s forced Sartre-Godard parallel might have helped him, especially when he reaches the latter period of Godard’s life, and his fluid, long-term union with filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville: Sartre’s personal life likewise demands a less moralistic biographer.
Brody’s excesses on these points are reflected in the entire argumentative structure of the book. Brody bites off more than he can chew in attempting a ‘critical biography’, that is, an analysis and evaluation of the films in lock-step with the life story. The alarm bells went off for me by page 30, when an early piece of film criticism by Godard is interpreted as staking the future director’s commitment to “a traditional nineteenth-century-novelistic and naturalistic approach to character” – which makes it tough to grasp how he became, quite quickly, cinema’s arch-Modernist. More damagingly and pervasively, Brody takes the interpenetration of art and life in Godard’s career as the sole way to understand and grade the work: if the film is a cryptic love (or hate) letter to his leading lady, it’s great; if it’s only about something as unromantic as global politics (as in the films co-directed with Gorin), it’s dead, inert, uninteresting. No wonder the Godard that emerges from these pages seems hermetic and solipsistic – when his actual films are anything but.
A richness Brody refuses to deal with: Struggle in Italy (1971, Dziga Vertov Group) Here, as with the anti-Semitic and ‘dirty/abusive old man’ broadsides, Brody’s cinematic interpretations usually rest on a numbingly literal parsing of the films’ bare plot situations: just as select bits of what Godard quotes and collages in his work are mistaken as transparent declarations of authorial intent, the incredibly dynamic fragmentation of images from sounds, bodies from words and stories from events in every Godard work is damagingly re-set back into novelistic/naturalistic conventions.
The ‘artist biography’ has become a well-worn genre in recent years. It has frequently descended to gutter level, but the obligations of the form have also come into sharp relief. We have come to expect not only the ‘life and times’ and a comprehensive account of the artist’s works, but also an exploration of that artist’s reputation or legacy. This is where Everything is Cinema falls down on the job. Brody likes to lament, especially in the latter stretches of his tome, that JLG is today a rather forgotten, misunderstood, under-appreciated artist. JLG forgotten? It is true that none of his films have received arthouse cinema distribution in Australia since the mid ‘80s – but that is part of a wider, disturbing trend that has also seen most progressive cinema from Europe and Asia similarly shut out by the local brokers of film culture.
Nonetheless, Godard is today an ubiquitous culture hero, thanks to DVD, the Internet, and an unending stream of books, articles and reviews in every language. Is there any student, in any arts academy or filmmaking course in the world, who has not been initiated, to some degree, into the JLG cult? Brody overlooks the educational circuit, ignores all in-depth critical writing on his subject beyond the initial (and frequently vapid) first-release newspaper opinions, and seems not to realise how frequently Godard’s audio-visual work is screened, discussed, analysed and worshipped in places beyond the offices of The New Yorker. Fortunately, despite the efforts of this latest biographical straitjacket, Godard still belongs to us all.
© Adrian Martin August 2008
Nonetheless, Godard is today an ubiquitous culture hero, thanks to DVD, the Internet, and an unending stream of books, articles and reviews in every language. Is there any student, in any arts academy or filmmaking course in the world, who has not been initiated, to some degree, into the JLG cult? Brody overlooks the educational circuit, ignores all in-depth critical writing on his subject beyond the initial (and frequently vapid) first-release newspaper opinions, and seems not to realise how frequently Godard’s audio-visual work is screened, discussed, analysed and worshipped in places beyond the offices of The New Yorker. Fortunately, despite the efforts of this latest biographical straitjacket, Godard still belongs to us all.
© Adrian Martin August 2008
***
May 1, 2009
MAY DAY
MAY DAY
MAY DAY
*
~ Commemorating Danièle Huillet's birthday today, a still from THIS LAND IS MINE (Renoir, '43), Charles Laughton as Lory, burning then saving a pamphlet of the Resistance.
~ mural detail, History of the Needlecraft Industry (1938), by Ernest Fiene, depicting the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, on the auditorium walls of The High School of Fashion Industries, New York (the 1600-seat auditorium in Manhattan's old garment district was for years the venue of the Vogels' CINEMA 16). A mural commissioned by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGW). 400,000 mourners. ~
MAY DAY
April 23, 2009
The Smash of Rage
The Smash of Rage
By Serge Daney
Where television, watching tennis, has ended up whispering to the players the art of overacting the violence that they may not feel.
Everybody remembers the moment where tennis lost its manners and no one ignores that television was partly responsible. What was banned from the courts returned via the small screen and slowly became a part of the total show that tennis had become. In the early eighties, Borg's indifference to what wasn't his tennis, Connors' grunts and MacEnroe's trotting flip drew the new face of the top-level tennis player. A champion maybe, but never again a gentleman. Because it was total, the show of the great tournaments included what it was no longer possible to hide: that tennis is not the opposite of violence, except that this violence is often directed more towards oneself than towards the Other.
Since then, the evolution of tennis and the evolution of television have hobbled along, from injuries to cohabitation, from new ATP rules to programming grids, from big money to big money. And the top players of world tennis have had all the time needed to live with the idea that they were filmed and if, at first, they might have dreamt an image of friendly and elegant players, they eventually understood that this image which was stolen from them with impunity during matches, they could use it themselves to improve their game or study their opponent's.
Elegance has therefore disappeared as the TV spectator's eye expected something else from tennis. The diabolical Connors and the amazing MacEnroe became loved for their bad manners, because these manners were more interesting than the starchy class of the last stylists (from Clerc to Gomez). All this, a very human phenomenon by the way, deepened the scenography of tennis with a new dimension: that of the close up after the rally, of the disarticulated replay, of the stroboscopic ordinariness of the slow motion, of the microphone at court level. The number of events per second inflated with all the affects, tics, drives and silent rages that a body is capable of.
Since it was no longer a question to suppress the aggressiveness in tennis, and since it was no longer enough to simply observe it on the image, it was about defining the vocabulary of its gestures, a visual vocabulary. Where Connors was naturally mixing bad temper and humour, and where MacEnroe effortlessly combined madness and lucidity, the young ones of the eighties who, despite their gifts, did not all have the famous killer instinct, felt "obliged" to manufacture gestures that everybody could see, inelegant but "human" gestures, where one could read their sadness of never being enough of a killer. This is the moment when the incest happened between television and tennis.
Yesterday, the final at Flushing Meadow was moving, "finally" moving. Not so much because of the players or the beauty of the game (the semi-final between Wilander and Edberg had offered a more beautiful, a more complete tennis) than because of this "duty of aggressiveness" which took over the finalists. The code of this aggressiveness is now known: closed fists, bended necks, curved bodies and evil gazes. As if it was necessary to maintain oneself as long as possible in a state of hate, without assigning any particular object to that hate. For this frenetic body language is not directed at the opponent, but at one's self-image, at the image the public is creating and the image the cameras are coldly recording. Image, in last analysis, goes to the image.
The recent history of tennis is the acquisition of these few gestures and of this choreography of aggressiveness - neither "contained" (Connors) nor "played out" (MacEnroe") but "on the skin". For a long time, Lendl forgot to win decisive matches because, too proud, he didn't want to appear relieved to have saved a point or happy to have totally defeated the other. He was so stiff, unable to bend, that he had to learn, while becoming the best, to express the fear of losing, even and "especially" after a winning shot. He had to learn to exorcise. His body took longer to bend, to invent this neck movement resembling a disappointed vulture, than the camera took to record this burlesque gesturing. The tennisman also had to become an actor and play motivation to be sure not to lose it. In that sense, Lendl comes from the Actors Studio.
Some say that Lendl likes no-one and that no-one likes Lendl. We could add that nothing is sadder (and "finally" moving) than the face of this man whose only remaining option is to be the man to beat, until he is beaten. But who would have said, a few years ago, that Wilander, the subtle Wilander, the seventeen year old who won Rollang Garros laughing, would be also forced to play aggressiveness? It's nevertheless what he does since his marriage, thus becoming an interesting player and a man (twenty-two years old) capable, him too, to stylise the emotions he's going through. And Wilander invents a strange movement, the two fists tightly closed and parallel, his back swayed, as if each point was a match point, as if each ball was the deciding one. This metamorphosis isn’t elegant; it’s probably the condition for Wilander to – already! – start a second career.
And the simplistic myth of the Swedish impassiveness starts to crack. One of the most inspired players on a court is maybe Stefan Edberg. Arrived at the top of the rankings, he is facing Lendl the ogre, and is forced to join in. Natural gifts are no longer enough, the theatre of aggressiveness is required. And here's the tall, placid boy (who's also a tad lethargic as everyone says) starting to close his fists, to express an indecisive "take that!" or a puerile "serves you right!" which shows as much the joy of having done well as the idea that the other is "right" as well.
Acting aggressiveness allows aggression and grants a chance to win. What television has given to tennis (a magnifying glass lens), tennis returns to television. What it has taken from tennis (elegance, seduction, serenity), it doesn't take for itself. In the small wars of French television, there's a style of bragging and boastfulness which is not far from the courts. No need to seduce to carry the day. But in the end, the day is no longer attractive.
Originally published in Libération, 16 September 1987, and reprinted in Le salaire du zappeur, POL, 1993, pp. 18-21. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar
Godard: Nowadays you see the champions raising their fists, showing their teeth as soon as they win (Godard imitates what he means). It's awful. Even women are getting into the act now.
--The frenzy of winning...
Godard: Poor Pasteur.* Excitement, sure, but the frenzy of winning -- that's for (General Jacques) Massu in Algeria, that's for war. It's a far cry from sports.
*In the original Godard plays off the interviewer's initial remark, "La rage de la victoire..." (the frenzy, madness, "rage" of the victory). "Rage" also means rabies in French; hence Godard's reference to Louis Pasteur.
------from Jérome Bureau and Benoît Heimermann interview with Godard, early May 2001. First published in L'Équipe , 9 May 2001. Reprinted and translated in Future(s) of Film; 3 Interviews, John O'Toole, Verlag Gachnang & Springer AG Publisher.
------film clip: THE BIG MOUTH (1967, Jerry Lewis)
April 18, 2009
April 17, 2009
"We had everything then, I thought: the nightmare mood, the helpless victims, the feeling that all the solid things could at any moment dissolve into thin air, that only the unseen, lurking evil was real. But it was really not until I was in the empty Tobis studio in Berlin, in the middle of the night, putting on the sound with the very gifted, inventive Werner Obitz—he was the one that had constructed spaceships and that kind of thing for Fritz Lang—it was not till the moment we were there with Zeller’s monotonous musical theme and the somnambulistic, incoherent words… Blut… Hunde… Kind… and the sounds that had no visible source but were there to increase the angst mood—it was there and then, in the empty, echoing studio, where the only sounds reaching us from outside were echoes of street brawls, the SA out with their clubs and knuckledusters, that it struck me that I had also made a film about that, about the living nightmare of violence and war and suffering that we were all drifting into, without will or knowledge. The film was premiered, to boos and catcalls on the Kurfürstendamm in May 1932, some six months before Hitler’s takeover. But his minions were already at it, and persecutions of the Jews had long been the order of the day, though the worst, of course, was still to come. Yes, VAMPYR was also a period piece…"
-- Carl Th. Dreyer, quoted by Elsa Gress, “The White Nightmare,” Scandinavian Review, 1989. P. 54-56.
As quoted in 'Montage for Carl Th. Dreyer, P.4' by David Phelps
Image: the staking of the vampire from VAMPYR, a shot censored by the Berlin Censorship Board before release of the film.
March 21, 2009
"The world is divided into hawks and sparrows -
let's be hawks."
(Sylvia Scarlet [K. Hepburn]
in SYLVIA SCARLET [George Cukor, '35])
***
"Not individualism but real individuals."
(Brecht on the Soviet cinema)
***
***
Luc Moullet (12/22/2007):
"The Thing From Another World is an exemplary movie. Theoretically, this is an anti-communist movie made during the cold war -an anti-communism which is not but can be guessed, as it was shot in 1950-1951. Curiously though, as in many other of his films, the film constantly shows many people acting simultaneously. In each sequence, Hawks shows us the behavior of a small group -five or ten people. The action takes place in a station in Alaska or in the Great North, isolated from the world -- it’s a huis-clos film. Each character has a professional and personalized function and the film shows how they react as if each actor was at the same time directed and his own director. This a real orchestration: not only a personal itinerary but one of an entire group, which leads me to say that The Thing From Another World is a communist film -- which rejoins the true nature of communism. It’s an example for all directors: most of the time, they don’t want to direct their secondary actors and let them do what they want. Instead, everyone here has his own individuality. It’s fascinating to see all those secondary actors -- none of them are really famous- who act as parts of a group would in life. Hawks’ film is a model for every director and a typical example, maybe the most typical, of cinema history." (From dissidenz)
***
***
Horus, son of Isis, who occurs in many different forms, invariably represents the upper world or region of light, and also regeneration, resurrection, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of life over death, of light over darkness, and of truth over falsehood.
He is constantly called the ‘avenger of his father’. Under the name of Hor-hut (Horus, the wing-expander) he overthrows Seth and his associates on behalf of Ra Harmachis, who, as a god of light, is considered equal to Osiris. Ra is equivalent to the Helios of the Greeks, and the young Horus and Hor-hut to Apollo. The hawk, with whose head he is represented, is the animal sacred to him , and the bird itself with a scourge on its back sometimes stands for him.
*
March 20, 2009
Hawks at Work: The Making of LAND OF THE PHARAOHS — by Bill Krohn
Land of the Pharaohs, Howard Hawks’ only attempt at an epic of ancient civilizations, figures in its author’s filmography as a film maudit. Defended at the time of its release by Cahiers du cinema (Rivette, Chabrol), it continues to intrigue Hawks’ admirers, who have always suspected that this bizarre deviation from our hero’s habitual concerns (a story extending over thirty years, instead of the usual fastidious "unities"; focus on a single powerful figure at the expense of the professional group, even more than in the anomalous Red River; flatly colloquial dialogue free of the pomposities of Hollywood epic speech-making, but also of any trace of humor; a tragic ending) must paradoxically contain the key to the art of this mysterious filmmaker. (Cf. Jean-Claude Biette in his eulogy for Hawks: "The greatness he achieved in filming the Relative kept him from occassionally running the risk of confronting the absolute. Nevertheless, he ran that risk once, in Land of the Pharaohs, an extraordinary film where the Relative admits its limits: the work leads, this time, to a gigantic apparatus of tombs." - reprinted in Poetique des auteurs). Or what amounts to the same thing, to his unconscious mind (Cf. Serge Daney’s psychoanalytic overview of the oeuvre, "Viellesse du meme" ["The One Grows Old", CdC 230, reprinted in La rampe], where pharaonic imagery abounds. So the existence of a book on the making of Land of the Pharaohs by Hawks’ second-unit director (Hollywood-sur-Nil, Publisher Ramsay Poche) raises hopes too high not to be dashed on a breathless first reading.
First of all because Noel Howard’s book is written in the style of an old campaigner’s memoirs, by a craftsman for whom Land of the Pharaohs was a lark and an adventure (a view that happens to echo Hawks’ own recorded sentiments about filmmaking), in a style that emphasizes the well-told anecdote over the telling detail, so that lots of time is spent on the spectacular physical problems of making a film about the building of a pyramid on location in Egypt, most of which seem to have fallen on the shoulders of Howard and the film’s production designer, Alexandre Trauner.
Another reason for my initial disappointment is a limitation inherent in the genre: not only are such accounts usually a little boring – few things are less interesting than the making of a film – but they are also never very revealing. Certainly Howard has interesting things to tell us: We learn that he and Trauner excavated and dressed the foundations of an actual unfinished pyramid near Zaouiet al Atryanm and that for the pan encompassing a huge quarry filled with thousands of extras, they stitched two shots together by sticking a plastic boulder in front of the camera to conceal the cut, thus magnifying the number of extras as Hawks had magnified with a similar hidden cut the number of cattle in the long pan that prefaces the start of the cattle drive in Red River.
But no book like this will ever tell us much about the director’s creative processes, although Howard, a director in his own right, is in a better position than most chroniclers to understand, because directors on film sets are usually too busy to reflect on what they’re doing. Add to that the enigmatic personality of Hawks, seen here at the height of the last great era of unselfconscious filmmaking in Hollywood, and the paucity of psychological material in Hollywood-sur-Nil is hardly surprising. Hawks appears in Howard’s narrative as an ironic phantom, glimpsed in brief, laconic conferences with trusted lieutenants who have staggered back from the front to find their general playing golf (in Switzerland!), or tinkering with a new car, or thumbing through a copy of Popular Mechanics. We only see him "direct" a couple of scenes, which he seems to have had little to do with, and there isn’t a word in the book about his direction of actors. (Not that there is anything implausible about this portrait. In fact, it corresponds trait for trait to what we see of Hawks in "Shootout at Rio Lobo," George Plimpton’s television documentary about the making of Hawks’ last film.)
To know what Hawks was trying to do in Land of the Pharaohs, we need to hear him conversing at his leisure with Rivette, Truffaut and Jacques Becker in an interview done for Cahiers du cinema at the time of the film’s release (reprinted in Howard Hawks: Interviews, U. of Mississippi Press), where he talks about his intentions and the problems he encountered in realizing them. Conceived to take advantage of the recently perfected Cinemascope process (Hawks’ only experiment with the format, which he never liked), Land of the Pharaohs began as a film about the construction of an aerodrome in China during World War II, which turned out to be unfeasible for political reasons. He gives considerable credit to William Faulkner, one of the film’s three screenwriters, for his part in the elaboration of the story. He also pays tribute to Trauner, and says essentially the same thing as Howard about the question of historical authenticity: A great deal of research was done, but it was not allowed to stand in the way of the filmmakers’ imaginations. ("We’re not making a documentary," Hawks gently reminds Howard at one point, when the latter proposes an interesting solution to the problem of illuminating the stonecutters’ tunnels during the quarry scene.) "I very much like this kind of work," he says in the Cahiers interview. "Enterprises like building an aerodrome or a pyramid show man's power, what it's possible to do with stone, sand and one's hands."
Little trace of these ideas appears in Hollywood-sur-Nil. Yet there is much in the book that repays a second reading, confirming once again that there is nothing harder for a critical eye to see than "l’evidence" (Rivette’s term for the quality that pleased him most in Hawks’ work.)
The first point, so obvious that I hesitate to mention it, is that Land of the Pharaohs is a film about the making of a film. As such it would not necessarily have any special claim on our attention – all of Hawks’ studies of mostly-male professional groups in action can be seen as metaphors for the daily life of a film crew. But in Land of the Pharaohs for the first time the activities of Hawks’ heroes directly mirror what used to be called "the process of production" of the film itself.
With respect to the dramatis personae, first of all: In this film about the building of a pyramid, the three main heroes are Khu-fu, the Pharaoh (Jack Hawkins), who orders and oversees the building of his own tomb (Hawks the powerful producer-director); Vastar, the foreign architect who builds it for him (Trauner, the French production designer, charged with the construction of the pyramid for the film); and the high priest Hamar, the Pharaoh’s indispensable right hand (Noel Howard himself, whose own right hand we see in the film’s second shot, tracing in hieroglyphics an account of the Pharaoh’s deeds: the previous shot has shown the hand to be that of Hamar).
Second of all with respect to the story: "We based our script on a single idea: the building of a pyramid," Hawks told the Cahiers, and more than for any other Hawks film, it was through the activities of Trauner, Howard and their associates that the director’s vision expressed itself in Land of the Pharaohs. Trauner actually designed the sets before he ever saw a page of script, commenting to Howard when he showed him the plans, "With all this, they can write what they like. We’re ready."
As for the script that eventually did get written, all its main points grew out of the construction of the pyramid, the design for housing the Pharaoh’s treasure, and the device used to seal the pyramid once the body and the treasure are inside – it was not until Hawks and Trauner hit on a way of accomplishing this last task, after most of the scenes of the pyramid’s construction had been filmed, that Harry Kurnitz was able to write the final act. (According to what Kurnitz told Howard, Faulkner only wrote one line of the script, part of a scene where the Pharaoh, after work has been going on for several years, pays a visit to his chief architect – PHARAOH: "So…how is the job getting along?"
_(photo_by_Carl_van_Vechten).jpg)
Considering the source, I’m skeptical about this piece of information, but it is emblematic of the subordination of writing to architecture in the making of Land of the Pharaohs – a subordinate role that Kurnitz freely admitted: "He thinks in images," he told Howard when asked about Hawks’ contribution to script conferences. "I bet you no matter what I write, he already knows what he wants to shoot.") A whole drama of palace intrigue unfolds around the scenes of construction, but it is those scenes – the only ones Howard writes about in his book – that are the real film. The film is the pyramid, and it ends logically with the image of the pyramid’s completed form.
If we concern ourselves is only with what I have called "the real film," Land of the Pharaohs is something very modern: What we see on the screen mirrors the process of production, which immediately generates what we see. For example, at the start of filming, Howard hits on the device of having a singer chant through a microphone to set the rhythm for the scene of the Pharaoh’s workers dragging blocks of stone from the quarry, but as the crowds grow bigger and more unruly, the singer is replaced with a drum and a cymbal. This shift becomes thematic in the film: At first the builders of the pyramid sing, rejoicing in their task, but as they grow bitter and rebellious they fall silent, and a drum is used to direct their movements. The Pharaoh’s goal is to build the biggest pyramid in history; Hawks’, according to Howard, is to film crowd scenes with more extras than had ever appeared in any film by De Mille – a quasi-obsession that finally provokes a mutiny by three members of the Egyptian Army who have been dragooned into playing slaves, which Hawks and his lieutenants have to beat back by physical force.
Howard never underlines these parallels, but he is certainly aware of them. After the revolt was quelled, he tells us, he experienced "a mixture of frustration and guilt" at the part he had played in the episode. One evening in the hotel bar Faulkner makes a speech to Howard and Kurnitz about how a film company is "a state within the state," and the three men fall to imagining a coup d’etat to topple Nasser with an army of extras, flying flags emblazoned with hawks’ heads. A few days later Kurnitz comments to Howard that if Hitler’s father had given him a movie camera for his eighteenth birthday, World War II might never have happened. And in the film, when the inhabitants of Egypt hear Pharaoh’s challenge to build the pyramid, which fantastically takes the form of a voiceover proclamation that can be heard in every corner of the kingdom, like a voice on the radio, they respond with a version of the fascist salute. Like Ulmer in L’Atlantide and Tourneur in War Gods of the Deep, Hawks in Land of the Pharaohs hold up a mirror to his own creation. What the mirror shows him is the image of a tyrant – complex, all to human, courageous and even sympathetic, but a tyrant nonetheless – who rules over a universe of death.
Two remarks before concluding: 1) Howard is not totally incurious about the effect of Hawks’ psychological quirks on the film. For example, he records only two story ideas proposed by the director during the production, and the first of these – "That our Pharaoh will have the greatest gold treasure ever assembled" – Howard portrays as being rooted in a personal obsession. (It is certainly not a given in stories about pyramids. Hawks builds his film around the Pharaoh’s fear of grave robbers and his stratagems for defeating them, but never even alludes to the most famous aspect of Egyptian burial practices: mummification.) "Hawks certainly had an eye for handsome women," Howard remarks later in the book, "but what he loved more than anything was wealth, riches, gold, money". He was always ill at ease when, during a casual conversation, someone would mention the very rich men on Earth: Paul Getty, Howard Hughes, etc." And he follows this surprising observation with an anecdote that is to say the least illuminating.
One day Hawks disappears. After a long search Howard finds him on the set of the Pharaoh’s treasure chamber, lost in contemplation of the dazzling array of fake gold ornaments created by Trauner and his collaborators:
I sat down silently, stopped a few steps above him and waited. Hawks didn't turn around. His head moved slowly from side to side like a camera panning on its tripod. He seemed to be in a trance. We stood there for quite a while, as I didn’t dare interrupt his deep contemplation. How many times had he gone down alone, switching on the lights to illuminate this "temple" where he came to worship his treasure? Suddenly a great noise broke the silence behind us: Clicking his sandals, singing a preposterous song with his booming voice, Sydney Chaplin was coming down the steps, dressed in his treasure guardian’s costume. Hawks spun around. His mouth open, he threw him such an outraged look that Syd stopped dead in his tracks. Hawks quickly regained his habitual poise. With a grand gesture, sweeping the décor, he said with deep conviction, "Sydney, look at all this…isn’t it…BEAUTIFUL?" Sydney gave the wondrous sight a quick glance. "Not bad," he said, walking up the steps. "You should see my old man’s cellars!"
This anecdote also serves to point up the naked honesty of Hawks’ self-portrait in the character played by Jack Hawkins, who has a similar moment when he shows his young son the treasure room. After the boy’s mother has taken him away to eat is supper, the Pharaoh lingers to caress one of the ornaments, first wiping his hand on his tunic with a little convulsive movement – a gesture that Hawkins acts with the finesse of Fernando Rey revealing an unsuspected perversion in a film by Buñuel.
2) Sometimes the connections to be made are too abstruse to be evident to an eyewitness, and it is the critic’s turn to help the historian. Hawks’ second recorded contribution to the story is made when Trauner and Howard show him a sarcophagus dating from 800 BC that was sealed with a great rock dropped into place by a hydraulic system that ran on sand – a device that immediately suggests to Hawks a method of killing off the Pharaoh’s scheming second wife, Nellifer (Joan Collins), who has murdered both the Pharaoh and his faithful first wife in order to seize the throne, and the treasure, for herself:
When Trauner, pencil in hand, explained the idea to Hawks, he listened intensely. Then he got up and looked at [the sarcophagus] for a long time. Finally he turned around. He was smiling. "The whole inside of the pyramid will function on this principle," he began. "One single gesture would start the whole
thing going. Large stones sliding down galleries will break hundreds of potteries, releasing tons of sand, setting huge blocks of granite in motion, locking Joan Collins in forever next to the man she wanted to rob!" He shook our hands and went to see the writers.
In the climactic scene Nellifer stands in the burial chamber next to the Pharaoh’s sarcophagus, and Hamar instructs her to pull the cord setting the infernal machine in motion, while 24 faithful monks whose tongues have been cut out – can a grimmer reduction be imagined of the "little Hawksian group"? – impassively watch her seal her fate.
A beautiful scene, which Hawks had already used before at the end of Twentieth Century, when Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore), a tyrannical theatre producer down on his luck, feigns death to trick the star he "created," Lily Garland (Carole Lombard), into signing a contract that will save her career, and bind her to him for eternity. The mise-en-scene is identical: Jaffe, stretched out like the Pharaoh in his sarcophagus, seems to be breathing his last as he extends the contract with a trembling hand to his sobbing protégé, begging her to put her name on it "so that it can be buried with my body." His two faithful stooges watch impassively, one of them indicating to the victim the place where she should sign…
Was it just a typical piece of "Hawksian humor" (the only one in the film) to end his only tragedy with a scene from his most raucous comedy? I think the connection is a more meaningful one: Oscar Jaffe is Hawks’ first artist-hero and Khu-Fu the Pharaoh is his second. For that reason the economic and psychological reading of Land of the Pharaohs suggested by Howard’s account is not the only one possible. Hawks made Land of the Pharaohs to produce a blockbuster and thereby augment his personal fortune. But Land of the Pharaohs begins when the Pharaoh has already amassed the greatest treasure in history, just as Red River begins when Matt Dunson (John Wayne) has already built up the biggest herd of cattle ever owned by one man. Dunson needs a son to leave his empire to, and at one point he offers Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) half his fortune if she will bear one for him, before finally accepting Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) as his heir; the Pharaoh, returning from his last campaign with all his goals of plunder satisfied, demands the same of his wife, who gratifies him by producing the desired heir, but even that is not enough – he must be assured of possessing the treasure in his second life, and that is why he undertakes the building of the pyramid.
Immortality – a subject that crops up more than once in Hawks’ films – is the concern of artists, and in the Pharaoh’s speech to his son he equates the gold he has amassed with power, another concern that artists share with tyrants. (At the end of the first day’s shooting, Howard tells us, Hawks pointed to the can of undeveloped negative that was to be shipped back to Warner Bros, and said, "It’s worth its weight in gold.") I think that Hawks, who always denied that he was an artist (that would have meant admitting his kinship with Oscar Jaffe), made Land of the Pharaohs for the most obvious of reasons: He was trying to create a masterpiece that would live forever. "The pyramid will keep his name alive," says Vastar to his son. "In that, he built better than he knew."
I also happen to think that Hawks succeeded, but it is no secret that in the process he created the biggest flop of his career. Coming after a series of films that carried his form of classicism to its apogee (Red River, I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sky, Monkey Business), but which Hawks himself, he told Peter Bogdanovich, considered failures, the disaster of Land of the Pharaohs was the last straw. There followed four years of reflection before he returned to filmmaking in 1959 with Rio Bravo. The profound transformation that occurred in his work at this point comes down to one decision: Get rid of the story (they’ve all been told countless times on television anyway) and make the film out of the interaction of the characters. Insofar as Land of the Pharaohs does have a complicated melodramatic plot - one of the most beautiful of any film epic – it represents the past, but what I have called "the real film," the self-reflecting narrative of the pyramid, already sets up a system that will culminate in Hatari!: a plotless film about a hunting season in Africa, in which Hawks filmed the actors actually capturing a series of wild animals and devised a story to fit as he went along. What we see, then, in Land of the Pharaohs is both the final form of a certain classicism – that was the business of Faulkner and his collaborators – and the birth of a certain modernism, one whose progeny extends from Jancsó to Straub, and that is the story that Noel Howard tells in his invaluable book.
But Hollywood-sur-Nil would not be the document it is were it not also a personal narrative, one which at its best often concerns Noel Howard himself – his reaction to his friend Robert Capa’s death in Indochina, or his many reactions to the landscape of the real Egypt surrounding this tale of tombs and palace intrigue: the terrible poverty of the inhabitants, which continually preys on his mind; a moonlit ride on the Nile with a drunken boatman; the spectacle of a burial chamber suddenly illuminated by hundreds of ancient lamps; or the unexpected discovery, which Howard was the first westerner to share, of a solar boat buried in the wall of Kheops’ pyramid. Howard wanted to make a documentary about that boat, and Hawks supported him in his project. Warner Bros., however, preferred to have a documentary about a newly discovered tomb that promised to be "as big as King Tut," so they dropped the boat project and went to film the ceremony of the unsealing, in the presence of Nasser and the American ambassador. The tomb, of course, was empty.
---Bill Krohn
__________________________________________
Orignally published in the now defunct Los Angeles 'newspaper on film' Modern Times (Issue no. 4; April, 1990). More recently published in French as 'Hawks à l'ouvrage: La genèse de LAND OF THE PHARAOHS" in TRAFIC No. 63, Automne 2007.
I am extremely grateful to Bill Krohn for his generosity in allowing me to reprint this here. More on Hawks to follow as we're having a 'Late Hawks' retrospective in Los Angeles, via LACMA.__________________________________________
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