In a stroke of fortune for Bay Area movie lovers, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) supplements its summertime fest with yet another extraordinary one-day line-up of classic silent cinema. SFSFF's Fifth Annual 2009 Winter Event takes place this Saturday, December 12 at the Castro Theater. For the uninitiated, SFSFF is the Western Hemisphere's premiere showcase for silent film exhibition, featuring the best available 35mm prints, live musical accompaniments, program notes, special guests and savvy film intros. The four films comprising this Saturday's line-up—all of which I'll be seeing for the first time—sound like a diverse and rewarding lot.
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), 11:30AM—Six years before they unleashed King Kong upon the world, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made this melodramatic docu-drama about a Siamese farming family and their struggle against the creatures of the jungle. Shot under rough conditions near the Thai border with Laos, Chang followed other successful silent ethnographic films such as Nanook of the North (1922) and the directors' own Grass (1925), which documented the migration of Bakhtiari herdsmen in present day Turkey and Iran. It's said that three crew members were bitten by pythons during the Chang shoot, and Schoedsack himself battled malaria and sunstroke in the 115 degree heat.
In contrast to the corniness of the film's staged drama (complete with cute inter-titles and a rascally pet monkey), there's the sobering sight of numerous wild animals being slaughtered on camera. The animal kingdom gets its revenge, however, in the film's climactic, village-flattening elephant stampede. At the first Academy Awards in 1927, Chang was one of three films nominated for the first-and-last Unique and Artistic Production Award (the others were King Vidor's The Crowd and winner F.W. Murnau's Sunrise). Introducing the film on Saturday will be Mark Vaz, author of Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper. Returning SFSFF virtuoso Donald Sosin will accompany Chang with an original piano score.
J'accuse (1928), 2:00PM—This 1919 anti-war film from Abel Gance is the movie most SFSFF-heads I know are itching to see. It's only been available in severely truncated editions, which is why this U.S. premiere of a new 162-minute version—painstakingly assembled and restored by the Netherlands Filmmuseum and France's Lobster Films—is such a big deal. Gance, who is sometimes referred to as Europe's D.W. Griffith, is best known for his 1927 epic Napoléon, which is the only Gance I've ever seen, back at a glorious 1981 (?) screening at Oakland's Paramount Theater, with Carmine Coppola conducting a symphony orchestra and the film's famous three-screen triptych battle scenes (an early stab at something akin to Cinemascope) fully restored.
J'accuse tells the story of a romantic triangle against the backdrop of WWI. Gance returned to active military duty in 1918 (as part of France's Section Cinématographique) to film parts of J'accuse, including the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. During a lull in fighting, he shot the celebrated "March of the Dead" sequence employing 2,000 soldiers—80 percent of whom would later die in battle. This eerie 20-minute sequence, along with Gance's expressionistic camerawork and rapid-cut editing, are reasons why J'accuse is remembered today. Although it was a commercial success in France, Pathé Films couldn't get U.S. distribution until Gance himself arranged a gala New York screening for D.W. Griffith in 1921. Griffith released the film through his recently formed United Artists, but it failed to find an American audience. Film preservationist Robert Byrne will introduce J'accuse, and Robert Israel will perform his original orchestral score adapted to play on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.
Sherlock Jr. (1924), 7:00PM—After a two-hour dinner break, during which time there'll be a special SFSFF party in the Castro mezzanine, the Winter Event continues with this 1924 Buster Keaton classic. Considered "one of the great movies of all time about the movies" and "a brilliant meditation on the nature of cinema," Sherlock Jr. follows Our Hospitality—which SFSFF just screened in February—within Keaton's filmography. Here he plays a movie projectionist who longs to be a celebrated detective. After being framed by a romantic rival for stealing his sweetheart's father's watch, he falls asleep in his projection booth and enters a cinematic dream world where his super-sleuthing skills are put to good use.
Expect plenty of Keaton genius—both in his hilarious sight gags and his primitive, but seamless special effects. This is also the film in which Keaton famously fractured his neck performing a stunt (the water tower scene). Because Sherlock Jr. runs only 45 minutes, it's being paired with his 1921 short The Goat, which some consider his best. This time he's pursued by cops who mistake him for an escaped killer. Look for the iconic scene of Keaton riding a train's cowcatcher. Keaton's granddaughter Melissa Cox will be a special guest at this program, where she'll be interviewed by SFSFF board member Frank Buxton (who once acted with Keaton in summer stock). Dennis James will accompany the films on the Mighty Wurlitzer, with the help of Mark Goldstein's special sound effects.
West of Zanzibar (1928), 9:15PM—The SFSFF days ends, as it has several times in the recent past, with a creepy collaboration between director Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks) and actor Lon Chaney. We've been shown Chaney as a larcenous ventriloquist in drag (The Unholy Three, SFSFF 2006) and an armless knife-thrower lusting to touch Joan Crawford (The Unknown, SFSFF 2008). Here he's Phrosos, a cuckolded, crippled magician who becomes an African ivory trader in order to extract truly twisted, simmering-for-18-years revenge. Boiling in the film's salacious pot are drug addiction, prostitution, voodoo, cannibalism and really un-PC dancing "natives." Unsurprisingly, the folks at Midnites For Maniacs are co-sponsoring the screening, and Dennis James will be back to thrill us on the Mighty Wurlitzer. Program notes for this one have been researched and written by Hell On Frisco Bay's Brian Darr.
Of related interest: Brian Darr has given us a glimpse of some of his research on West of Zanzibar in his HOFB November 18 entry (scroll down midway). Dennis Harvey writes the event up at SF360. Coverage from our friends at SIFFBLOG is also in full swing, kicking off with Anne M. Hockens' essay "A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", followed by David Jeffers on the Keaton double-bill, and West of Zanzibar. And, of course, there's SFSFF's own blog.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Ryan Bingham is not a man you want to meet. Not because he is unlikable, which he sometimes tries to be, but because Ryan fires people for a living. He flies from city to city, firing employees for companies too afraid to do it themselves. After so many years in the air, his sole personal ambition is to reach a million frequent flier miles, a feat only seven people have accomplished. Ryan lives a solitary life and wouldn't have it any other way.
But Ryan's life is turned upside-down with the arrival of Natalie, a young upstart at his company who pulls him off the road and threatens to outsource his job to a new video-chat system. His last chance to save his jet-setting lifestyle—and his miles—is to take Natalie on the road with him and show her that firing people needs to be done face-to-face. It's a breezy set-up, ripe for one of those industry manufactured summer rom-coms, but Up in the Air surprises by presenting a film that is thoroughly human-feeling.
Here, we have a movie that takes the time to create rich, multidimensional characters. These are people who make us laugh because they are funny, not players who appear always to be reaching for the next punch line. The character George Clooney has developed in Ryan Bingham is not an instantly agreeable one but he is believable. He's that guy you can laugh with even while you mostly feel sorry for him. Anna Kendrick, who the internet tells me is in the Twilight film series but I remember being effortlessly winsome in the little indie gem Rocket Science, takes the role of Natalie, which probably looked pretty one-dimensional on paper, and makes it feel 10-dimensional.
Without punch line comedy, the actors in Up in The Air rely on smart writing, and this is an intelligent, well-written script. There's a bit of the uncomfortable humor that has spread since the success of The Office, but much of the humor is more subtle, allowing the irony of Ryan's situation to play out to a logical—if somewhat unconvincing—conclusion. It's a shame that after developing such interesting, human characters and avoiding being cloying and sentimental, Up in the Air gently veers towards a predictable finale.
Even with a slight, third-act betrayal, the film showcases a great talent in Jason Reitman, who is a strikingly skilled writer/director when his talents are not overshadowed by the aura of Diablo Cody. With Thank You For Smoking, Juno and now Up in The Air, it is apparent that Reitman has a knack for reflecting our contemporary culture in a way that many mainstream films fail to understand. It's not how many pop-culture references you can throw in, it's whether or not we believe in the people saying them.
Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.
The Film on Film Foundation (FOFF)—partisans of movies screened on film and not digitally—is showing Otto Preminger's 1963 The Cardinal in the same month, and at the same venue, as Pacific Film Archive's Preminger mini-retrospective. Which Preminger idea came first? I haven't asked Steve Seid, PFA's video curator, or the FOFF principals yet—on the other hand, maybe I did and got no clear answer. (Many of the same films were shown at a January 2008 New York Film Forum series, and Cinémathèque Ontario in summer of this year.)
Whosever idea it was has put me in Preminger perplex mode for the past month. It's given me a chance to recontextualize the Preminger films I already love (Laura, Angel Face, Daisy Kenyon, Carmen Jones) and explore the ones I've never seen or especially liked. Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I was also able recently to catch large chunks of Anatomy of a Murder, Bunny Lake is Missing and Exodus in what I believe was a tribute to title designer Saul Bass. Several screeners from PFA and offers from that remarkable cineaste (and FOFF member) Larry Chadbourne to show me the near-entirety of Preminger's work had to be declined in the interests of time. Finally, Chris Fujiwara's excellent 2008 critical biography The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber & Faber, 2008) sustained me during two 10-hour plane flights. I look forward to reading Foster Hirsch's book Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (Knopf/Random House, 2007).
I also haven't asked FOFF why of all the films they chose The Cardinal, the first '60s widescreen Technicolor "superproduction" on their schedule. It's one of Preminger's long (nearly three hours), large-scale explorations of institutional compromise and decision-making, up there with the broad canvases and huge casts of Anatomy of a Murder, Advise & Consent and Exodus. Of these four, however, it's the least commercially and critically successful—despite uncredited contributions to the script by the likes of Gore Vidal and Ring Lardner, Jr.
Anyway, that's for interested parties to decide for themselves after they see The Cardinal this Sunday at PFA, among the other Preminger films playing before and after it. Weekends in December will be Preminger paradise.
Although I have enormous respect for his epics, I'm partial to Preminger's smaller-scale films, including the noirish works—and, by the way, Preminger disliked the term film noir being used to characterize them. I watched Whirlpool (1949) over a couple of days, a second time with Richard Shickel's casual commentary. One scene put me into a paralyzed stupor watching Gene Tierney as Ann, herself hypnotized, entering an unfamiliar house to hide evidence, seeing a portrait of the home's owner, and then coming upon a shocking sight without any discernible affect. Her zombie-like attitude in this particular scene is disturbing, yet we can still feel her mind working beneath the surface of Tierney's lovely complexion: Why am I here? What am I looking at? What am I doing? How am I supposed to react? I think it's that searching, wondering attitude that spellbinds me. Some of Preminger's most effective moments are of characters who, not hypnotized, sit alone and wonder.
In his book on Preminger, Fujiwara interprets the way the camera observes her: "The space around her, in the frame, figures the mental space of her own unconscious self-observation. The smoothness of the camera movements suggests this unconsciousness by emphasizing the mechanical quality of her actions, the regular, dance-like transitionality of all her movements."
Then Ann's tremulous, round-eyed reactions to the men around her, who whether benevolent or malevolent are still trying to control her, are the index of a woman caught in a hopeless situation: she's damned if she's innocent and damned if she's guilty. She can't be a "serene and devoted wife" nor a brazen adulteress seeking treatment from a sadistic swindler, and there are no choices in between. All she wants is a good night's sleep! It's hard to tell who gives her a harder time: her distrustful psychiatrist husband (Richard Conte, perhaps not as miscast as others claim, since his tough-guy impatience bursts out of his rational/scientific veneer as you might expect of a husband who thought he had his beautiful wife and illustrious career under control); the detective who's recently lost his own wife and won't let suspect Ann out of his sight (Charles Bickford, very subdued here); or the smug and cynical quack/hypnotist David Korvo (a snakelike José Ferrer, even as he lies in bed sweating from the aftereffects of a gallbladder operation).
Korvo knows all about women and expresses his cynicism freely. He rolls his eyes at Ann's attempts to keep their relationship aboveboard by not going to his hotel room: "Very well, I bow to your abysmal scruples." He's contemptuous of women and uses them to get what he wants, whether it's an inheritance or destroying the career of a more legitimate expert like Conte. His target before Ann, a woman who's trying to get her money back from Korvo, already looks destroyed before her ultimate fate—maybe it's the Bride of Frankenstein skein of white hair or the preternaturally pale makeup, but Barbara O'Neil looks almost as blood-drained as the greenish corpse of Scarlett O'Hara's mother.
It's hard to tell how much Preminger intended me to feel so vividly Ann's predicament of a comfortable wife in postwar America, in a film that instead, like Laura, seems to emphasize the enigmatic quality of another woman played by Gene Tierney. Or one that uses a B-movie gimmick like hypnosis-induced crime. "You made me play-act," she accuses her husband, who trusts her only as long as she plays the perfect wife. She's like the mermaid pin she shoplifts from the department store, the witness to which secret proclivity is Korvo, the man who hatefully "knows" all women. Men seek her, hook her and land her, but she's flopping around on land wishing she were at sea—or at least unable to explain her feelings of deep discontent.
Part of my perplexity with Preminger's films comes from wondering if I'm reading too much psychological depth into straight-faced entertainments, like I sometimes think Fujiwara does despite his often brilliant analyses. But I think his favorable opinion of The Cardinal, and especially Tom Tryon's often-criticized performance, is right on. Preminger, in his bullying and manipulation of his actors, usually got what he wanted out of them. Notoriously he terrorized Tryon, even firing him on the first day of shooting in front of his visiting parents and rehiring him an hour later. Tryon's performance has usually been condemned for its woodenness, but I love it for the same reason and think it's true to the character.
Stephen Fermoyle, son of a Boston motorman, has ambitions to be cardinal and must fulfill several tests on his way up the ladder. He impresses the monsignor with his ability to comfort immigrant parishioners in their native Italian during a "miracle," and he secures a relationship with the influential and pragmatic Cardinal Glennon (John Huston in a marvelous performance). He is tested for humility by being sent to the Siberia of parishes. But his severest test comes from his sister Mona (Carol Lynley), whose Jewish boyfriend (John Saxon) has refused to convert to Catholicism to marry her and who in her own attempt to "convert" him has gotten herself pregnant, alone and in labor in a sleazy brothel. Stephen refuses to agree to a late-term abortion to save her life, and she dies while the child survives. This test makes him lose his religion, and he becomes an English teacher in Vienna. Resisting the love of a beautiful Viennese student (a radiant Romy Schneider), he realizes that he has passed another test and returns to the priesthood.
From here he continues Fujiwara's characterization of him as a "superpriest who travels around the world," now going to Georgia to defend a poor black parish against the Ku Klux Klan and getting kidnapped and whipped for his trouble. Preminger apparently added the nonfictional character of Austrian Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (played phonetically by Josef Meinrad), whose belief in Adolf Hitler's promises to the Catholics is his undoing. Those still looking for scenes parodied in Inglourious Basterds will find a strudel scene as well as a Hitler snitfit (here offscreen).
Why is Tom Tryon effective? Because the actor's attitude of pained self-consciousness, his woodenness, is an accurate manifestation of the compromises the character has had to make along the way to attain cardinal. Fujiwara quotes Preminger in an interview saying that the character (whom he calls "Tom Tryon") is weak, that "he never does what I would think is right." In two powerful scenes, the confessional and the prison, Stephen fails the two women he loves. His ascension to cardinal marks his ultimate compromise with the world of power.
More reasons to watch The Cardinal:
Murray Hamilton, whom I didn't fully appreciate having seen him in relatively one-dimensional roles in The Graduate and Jaws. In The Cardinal he plays a conscience-stricken white supremacist and in Anatomy of a Murder a bartender trial witness.
Burgess Meredith in performances of abjection before he played cartoons like Batman's nemesis the Penguin or Rocky Balboa's trainer. In The Cardinal, he plays an unambitious parish priest dying of shame and multiple sclerosis. In a brief but unforgettably awkward scene in Advise & Consent, he appears before the Senate confirmation committee as a damaging witness to a period in cabinet hopeful Henry Fonda's past.
More information here.
12/06/09 UPDATE: Of related interest, Brian Darr confesses his admiration for The Cardinal at Hell on Fricso Bay.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Currently screening at the Pacific Film Archive through December 20, 2009 is a 14-film tribute "Otto Preminger: Anatomy of a Movie", curated by Steve Seid. The first three entries in the series—Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945) and Daisy Kenyon (1947)—constitute the heft of Otto Preminger's collaboration with actor Dana Andrews, with the exception of Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), which has not been included in the series (though—incidentally enough—it reunited the Laura duo: Andrews and Gene Tierney).
So much has been written about Otto Preminger that it seems foolish to reiterate what's already been stated many times over. Within immediate parameters, however, Steve Seid has synopsized: "As legend would have it, Otto Preminger was a bald-headed baddy scolding helpless actors about flaws in their performance—the tyrant on the set. But Preminger's films, some thirty-seven in all, bear no sign of this heated temperament, instead sharing a muted detachment that ironically excites our own engagement with his complex characters. …Preminger promoted a cool take on human nature that simultaneously savored cinema's expansive visual spaces; over time his eloquent way with the camera grew complex and sensuous. The willful director's insistence on artistic autonomy compelled him to become one of the first champions of independent film."
There are, of course, the career overviews offered by James Quandt, Thomas Gale, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Tag Gallagher and Chris Fujiwara. James Quandt cleverly finesses the alphabet to review Preminger's career from autocrat to Zanuck at the Cinémathèque Ontario website; Thomas Gale's entry on Preminger for The Encyclopedia of World Biography can be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay "The Preminger Enigma" is at The Chicago Reader website; Tag Gallagher's Film International essay on Preminger's "heroic" films can also be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; and Chris Fujiwara's nuanced profile for the Great Directors database can be found at Senses of Cinema.
Fujiwara, in fact, has provided the most recent biography on Preminger: The World and Its Double (Faber & Faber, 2008), published close on the heels of Foster Hirsch's own notable study Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (Knopf/Random House, 2007). Earlier, in his Film International DVD review "4 x Otto Preminger" (May 2004, Vol. 2, Issue 3), Fujiwara convincingly contested the oft-stated ascription of "film noir" to the suite of Preminger films that include Laura, Fallen Angel, Where The Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool (1950), The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952). Fujiwara argued against this received wisdom: "It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as 'films noirs' is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954) as a musical; or In Harms Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger's films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms."
Fujiwara further pointed out that films like Laura, Fallen Angel, and Whirlpool "depart radically from the 'film noir' pattern … characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings."
Laura (1944)
Dana Andrews—a popular leading man in the 1940s—has never been one of my favorite actors, though his brooding performance as the smitten detective Mark McPherson is unquestionably one of his best. In her profile of Andrews at Bright Lights Film Journal, Imogen Sarah Smith has written: "Dana Andrews, with his naturally tamped-down style and his gift for ambivalence, was an ideal leading man for Preminger. Apart from The Best Years of Our Lives, Andrews' four films with Preminger … were the peak of his career, and they gave him his most complex and compelling roles."
In "Acting Like Children", his 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews admitted: "People very often say to me that Laura was my first picture. Well, it's the first one they saw, which is why they think that." His recollections of the behind-the-scenes intrigues that shaped Laura—specifically his characterization of Detective McPherson—details how then-producer Preminger deviously wrested directorial control away from Rouben Mamoulian (the film's original director) by strategically aligning himself with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Andrews opines: "I think Mr. Preminger wanted to be a producer-director." Andrews also recounts how he and Preminger disagreed on a point of direction and stared each other down in stony silence for hours, "acting like children."
Allegedly, Zanuck's dissatisfaction with Rouben Mamoulian's interpretation of Detective McPherson as an Ivy-league criminologist clashed with Zanuck's preference for a tough "right-down-the-alley type of detective" more familiar to audiences. Preminger's willingness to cater to Zanuck's vision on such a major issue distracted the studio head from his noted objection to the casting of Clifton Webb in the role of Waldo Lydecker. Andrews recollected that Laura was Webb's first motion picture. "He'd been under contract to MGM for 18 months and never done a foot of film—never had seen himself on the screen." According to David Boxwell at Bright Lights Film Journal, the homophobic Zanuck was initially displeased with Webb's portrayal of Lydecker as an effete and waspish socialite; however, Preminger convinced Zanuck that such effeminacy suited the character and provided comic contrast to the traditionally masculine Andrews.
Originally, as Eddie Muller intimated in his Noir City introduction of Hangover Square (1945), Mamoulian had wanted Laird Cregar for the role of Lydecker; but, Preminger worried that Cregar—who had gained notoriety playing the sinister role of Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1944)—would lead the audience to become suspicious of Lydecker earlier than necessary. When Cregar died of a heart attack after a drastic attempt to lose weight for the role, Preminger brought in Clifton Webb. It's now nearly inconceivable that anyone else could deliver Lydecker's vicious bon mots more stingingly, which to this day delight audiences with their unfettered bitchiness. "The voice alone would have carried the performance: the tone of a courtly buzz saw, the razor diction dining on consonants as if they were truffled squab," Richard Barrios has written in Screened Out: Playing Gay In Hollywood From Edison to Stonewall (Routledge, 2003:202).
Despite Lydecker's homosexuality having been removed from the script early on (though, as Barrios continues, "the rewritten character's bouts of hetero-jealousy [sit] oddly upon Webb's epicene deportment"), Clifton Webb's performance of Waldo Lydecker has gone down in cinema history as one of the great gay characters on film; the epitome of the "mannered, high-gloss style" that David Thomson pointedly identifies in his recent book The Moment of Psycho (Perseus Books 2009, p. 43) as a "code for homosexuality" in American films of the '30s, '40s and '50s.
In retrospect, Preminger's direction of both Andrews and Webb—and the characterizations they finally settled upon—served to manifest a tension essential to Laura's suspense. As Imogen Sarah Smith has correctly perceived in her Bright Lights Film Journal profile: "Preminger was right about McPherson. Not playing him as hard-boiled not only destroys the comedy in his interactions with Laura's friends, it eliminates the tension within Mark's character as he begins to feel and behave in ways no one would expect of a standard-issue tough cop. Laura introduces the essential Dana Andrews character: the Average Joe with unexpected complications. It also demonstrates the Preminger Paradox: the director was a notorious tyrant, prone to tantrums and sadism often directed at the most vulnerable of his actors, yet the keynote of his films was tolerance for ambiguity. Ensembles in shades of gray, full of subtle, tamped-down performances, his films never turn on a simple axis of good and evil but listen to many voices and allow each some degree of persuasiveness."
Smith evokes the "long, wordless sequence, followed by Preminger's fluidly tracking camera" wherein "McPherson prowls around Laura's apartment, ostensibly looking for clues but really indulging his insatiable desire for communion with the dead woman. Reading her letters and her private journal isn't enough; he opens her closets, fingers her silky handkerchiefs (obvious Hays Code stand-ins for her unmentionables), and sniffs her perfume. He doesn't linger over things sensually; he fidgets brusquely, irritated by his own romantic yearning. He heads for the liquor cabinet and gulps Scotch while gazing at Laura's portrait. He snarls at Waldo Lydecker, who hits the nail on the head when he sneers, 'I wonder you don't come here like a suitor with flowers and a box of candy.' Mark couldn't, or wouldn't, openly admit his own feelings: cops just don't find themselves in the grip of morbid, perfumed obsession with dames who have been bumped off. But he knows that Waldo is right, hence his seething, brooding restlessness. Alone again, he plants himself in front of the portrait and nurses a drink until he falls into a stupor."
This pivotal scene—underscored by David Raskin's haunting theme (with belated lyrics by Johnny Mercer)—is seductive in its gravitational allure. It's one of my favorite scenes in Laura and one of my favorite scenes in film altogether. Rarely has desire for what is absent been so sensuously embodied in an imagined presence, save perhaps Portrait of Jennie (1948). It reminds me of what poet Mark Doty once wrote in his equally haunting study Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (Beacon Press 2001:3-4): "I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really—[rather, it's] that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, having allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and the life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness towards experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world."
Cross-published on Twitch.
I've been sampling the Pacific Film Archive series "A Woman's Face: Ingrid Bergman In Europe", curated by Susan Oxtoby focusing on the work of the actress before her Hollywood heyday. Though nearly complete, the series extends with two more entries: Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953)—which has been enfolded into Pedro Almodóvar's most recent film Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces, 2009)—and Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978), Ingrid's last performance tinged by Ingmar's "Nordic blues."
Admittedly, I was out of town for the first half of the series, which featured Ingrid Bergman in Swedish films from the '30s. But this was a minor regret as my interest was primarily in the three Bergman/Rossellini entries in the PFA series: Stromboli (1949), Europa '51 (1952) and Voyage to Italy (1953). I'll be writing about that triad in more depth in coming weeks; but, wanted to respond immediately with a visual flush of desire to Rossellini's Stromboli.
I watched Stromboli with Brian Darr and Ryland Walker Knight. Both of them rushed to Twitter to tweet their reactions. Darr: "Like Howard Hughes suggested, it's a documentary on Ingrid Bergman's isolation in a community she's too deep for." And Knight extolled Bergman's beauty (he called her a "hottie"). That's to be expected, of course. As Judith Clark has described in the program notes: "Bergman's radiant looks and her distinctive combination of sensual directness and exquisite sensitivity" are, indeed, "evident."
But if the launch of the 21st Century is to mean anything, it must acknowledge the gendered parity of seeing, and film's complicity with desire, especially to readings of cinema. "There is no difference in desire," queer songwriter Steven Grossman sang, "I used to wander with my father's violin."
And so I turn to the men in Stromboli, whose beauty I found counterpart to Bergman's: Mario Vitale and Mario Sponzo, both former fishermen discovered by Rossellini in 1949 who he later featured in Stromboli. Mario Vitale played Bergman's well-meaning but provincial husband Antonio, and Mario Sponzo the flirtatious lighthouse keeper. Vitale went on to play roles through the late '90s. Mario Sponzo's face graced the silver screen only this once. I offer a gallery.
Mario Sponzo
Mario Vitale
Seattle-based journalist Jay Kuehner introduced the screening of Liverpool. "I was told to keep it to five words," he quipped, "so: distant, remote, vodka….?" Kuehner opined that Liverpool consolidates one of the most thematically strong trilogies seen from the cinema in quite some time, especially from such a fairly young director. Many claims have been made both for and against Alonso's cinema: that his are exercises in style and that his films reflect more on him than on his subjects and that—to his credit—he is pioneering a new film language (which, Kuehner suggested, might very well be true).
Earlier in the afternoon at the Masters Workshop, Kuehner wrote down Alonso's statement that he pays attention and thinks about everything: the way that a man eats, goes to the bathroom, and—in the case of Liverpool—the way that he drinks. By paying attention to small moments, Alonso has created a drama in the ongoing moment and, with that, the possibility that a lifetime of regrets can be uncovered in a single moment, or in a tiny object, as Liverpool bears out in its ending.
With Liverpool, Alonso shifted his attention away from uneducated rural laborers to an educated and well-traveled sailor who, nonetheless, is unable to communicate with his family and others. Farrel (Juan Fernández) cannot change the way he is. Even though he is experienced, he cannot change his tendency to observe others at a distance or the way he feels towards his family. After reconnecting with them, he leaves them behind ("I'm off") even though they want him to stay, hoping he can help out. This basic drama was enough for Alonso to shape his film.
Admittedly inspired by Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, Liverpool is purposely sad and isolated. Alonso wanted to balance aesthetic pleasures with the feelings of his characters. It was filmed in the southernmost part of Argentina in the snowy port town of Ushuaia (nicknamed "the southernmost city in the world"). The film is purposely short on dialogue, adhering to Alonso's mistrust of words. His goal was to tell his story through the images.
In many ways films are like paintings for Alonso, in the sense that there's no way to explain why an artist chooses to use the color blue here and the color red there. He tries to make films for everybody but not everybody wants his films. It's not that he creates films just for film festivals, but it's the film festivals who show his films, not the local cinemas. What should he do? Compromise and make a film that will be played in the local cinema? Or what he wants to do?
By contrast to the way that Alonso found Misael and Vargas and transformed them into the characters of his first two films, Alonso had already imagined the character of Liverpool's mariner Farrel before casting Juan Fernández in the role. True to technique, Alonso knew he wanted to make a film in this part of the world and that he wanted to film within a cargo ship. He had seen a magazine published by United Colors of Benetton that included some photographs of Ushuaia and the people who lived there and it intrigued his curiosity. The only place in Argentina where he could find a harbor that accommodated cargo ships in the snow—and he really wanted to shoot in snow—was Ushuaia. So the magazine sold him on the people and convinced him he could find a film in that place.
The following week he drove 3,500 kilometers over a few days until he arrived in Ushuaia. He stayed there three to four days to organize his ideas, watching the people and how they lived. One of them—the cook who owns the restaurant and operates the short wave radio who appears in Liverpool—was staring out the window (just as he does in the film) and Alonso asked him what he was looking at? He had already walked around enough to know there was not much to look at. The cook answered that he was waiting to see if any brown rabbits would appear. Alonso didn't know how long the cook had entertained this habit of looking out the window for rabbits, but it awakened him to the possibility of creating a film that would show this community and how they lived. He didn't know if Ushuaia's inhabitants were running away from something or why they were a people who preferred not to have much contact with outsiders.
As Alonso detailed in my interview with him in Toronto, Alonso found Juan Fernández in Ushuaia. Fernández operated a snow plow caterpillar that kept the roads clear. In fact, the scene where Farrel waits with card-playing locals for a lift from a truck driving into the interior is the place where Fernández actually works.
Kuehner asked Alonso to explore the theme of how location forms character and character forms location. Alonso specified that he works at the same level with space and character. In Liverpool he tried to use frozen nature to explain the character of Farrel. Others would ask what he was doing filming in such an empty place; but, for Alonso such empty places talk about many things that are happening inside Farrel. This intuitive trust in the articulative potential of empty spaces conforms to Alonso's penchant to leave his camera lingering in empty rooms after characters have left the scene, as if more is said by their absence than their presence. Alonso's camera is infatuated with the white shadow.
Before he started the film, Alonso created a history for the character of Farrel. Though he didn't know what it was that Farrel did in the first place to make him run away for so many years, Alonso suspected it must have been something wrong—maybe it had something to do with Analia?—but, whatever it was, Farrel took off on the cargo ship and didn't return. When the ship eventually returned to Ushuaia, after however many years, Farrel felt guilty about the fact that he had stayed away from "home" for so long. So he asked for shore leave to see if his mother was still alive. He finds her fragile with an addled memory. And though his remaining family members don't ask it outright, they want his help and hope he'll stay; but, he refuses and leaves. That's what Alonso felt from his film anyway, though he acknowledges others may not have the same reaction. The information has been organized in the film and it's up to the audience to decide how they want to take it, what they think it means, and create a narrative or non-narrative history for the character.
Alonso likes to query his audiences about where they think Farrel is going when he walks off towards the woods in the film's longest shot. One person responded that Farrel was going to get the black bag he stashed away when he first got off the cargo ship. But Alonso is not so sure. If his intention was to return to the cargo ship, why did Farrel remove all his belongings from the cabin? Then why did he take only what he could carry in his red bag, leaving the rest in the black bag? Perhaps he never intended to return? Perhaps he intended to disappear? That's Alonso's interpretation; but, if the audience has a different interpretation and wants to believe that Farrel catches a truck that takes him back to his cargo ship in time to sail off, that's fine; but Alonso is not so sure.
What will be the future of those Farrel has left behind? What will happen to the girl Analia? All she has to remind her of her father is a keychain that reads "Liverpool." Can she even read? Alonso doesn't know. Can she imagine what Liverpool means? To her it might just be a key chain that's red and blue. Developmentally disabled as she is, Alonso's not even sure she can distinguish between red and blue. Ironically, this keychain that has so much meaning for Farrel—that represents his life as a sailor traveling around the world, abstracted into a single memento—possibly means nothing to Analia, his daughter.
Alonso believes cinema needs smart critics to help keep his kind of independent filmmaking alive. In Argentina he recommends Quintin who he finds argumentative. Quintin is far from diplomatic in his writing, prefers to fight over films, something Alonso respects. As Alonso puts it, cinema needs "main critics who separate water from oil" and "publish in a main forum, not just one website."
Alonso refuses to shoot digitally because of the medium's destruction of 35mm culture. Part of digital filmmaking is the practice of shooting alone. By contrast, Alonso believes a true film requires a group of collaborators to help shape the film. It's an entirely different process than shooting alone, even though he knows it can be done. James Benning does it. Pedro Costa. But they are exceptional.
Filming anywhere other than Argentina is problematic for Alonso. He is familiar with his Argentine subjects; he understands them fully—"what they eat, how they walk, their sex, etc."—but he wouldn't have the same familiarity with non-Argentine actors, nor the same connection with the land.
Alonso saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and thought it was just fine; but, the real cinematic experience for him was watching the audience's reactions: how they talked, where they laughed, what excited them. Alonso realized the audience for Inglorious Basterds was simply not his audience and never would be. That's just the way it is.
As for what's coming up, every morning Alonso wakes up thinking about an idea he has for his next film but it is not strong enough to support a film and he's not ready to start the process again of writing, securing funding, shooting, editing, promoting. He feels lucky to have made the four films he's made. Alonso has decided to take a break from filmmaking for the next few years. Now that he's been out of the family business for the last 10 years, he wants to return to the ranch and see what his brothers are doing.
His decision has something to do as well with the fact that as a filmmaker he is trying to find new questions for his cinema language so that he doesn't keep repeating himself. He wants to do more than just make films about one man on a horse in the desert, "riding lonesome" as James Quandt puts it in his recently-republished Artforum essay.
In all frankness, Alonso admits that he is not very positive about the future of filmmaking in general and his own in particular, though he will keep trying to make films. He enjoys the entertainment of genre films but it troubles him that their popularity is diminishing the diversity of cinema language. He wants to see new faces, films from Africa for example, because there is so much he does not know about Africans.
Cross-published on Twitch.
In a stroke of fortune for Bay Area movie lovers, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) supplements its summertime fest with yet another extraordinary one-day line-up of classic silent cinema. SFSFF's Fifth Annual 2009 Winter Event takes place this Saturday, December 12 at the Castro Theater. For the uninitiated, SFSFF is the Western Hemisphere's premiere showcase for silent film exhibition, featuring the best available 35mm prints, live musical accompaniments, program notes, special guests and savvy film intros. The four films comprising this Saturday's line-up—all of which I'll be seeing for the first time—sound like a diverse and rewarding lot.
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), 11:30AM—Six years before they unleashed King Kong upon the world, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made this melodramatic docu-drama about a Siamese farming family and their struggle against the creatures of the jungle. Shot under rough conditions near the Thai border with Laos, Chang followed other successful silent ethnographic films such as Nanook of the North (1922) and the directors' own Grass (1925), which documented the migration of Bakhtiari herdsmen in present day Turkey and Iran. It's said that three crew members were bitten by pythons during the Chang shoot, and Schoedsack himself battled malaria and sunstroke in the 115 degree heat.
In contrast to the corniness of the film's staged drama (complete with cute inter-titles and a rascally pet monkey), there's the sobering sight of numerous wild animals being slaughtered on camera. The animal kingdom gets its revenge, however, in the film's climactic, village-flattening elephant stampede. At the first Academy Awards in 1927, Chang was one of three films nominated for the first-and-last Unique and Artistic Production Award (the others were King Vidor's The Crowd and winner F.W. Murnau's Sunrise). Introducing the film on Saturday will be Mark Vaz, author of Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper. Returning SFSFF virtuoso Donald Sosin will accompany Chang with an original piano score.
J'accuse (1928), 2:00PM—This 1919 anti-war film from Abel Gance is the movie most SFSFF-heads I know are itching to see. It's only been available in severely truncated editions, which is why this U.S. premiere of a new 162-minute version—painstakingly assembled and restored by the Netherlands Filmmuseum and France's Lobster Films—is such a big deal. Gance, who is sometimes referred to as Europe's D.W. Griffith, is best known for his 1927 epic Napoléon, which is the only Gance I've ever seen, back at a glorious 1981 (?) screening at Oakland's Paramount Theater, with Carmine Coppola conducting a symphony orchestra and the film's famous three-screen triptych battle scenes (an early stab at something akin to Cinemascope) fully restored.
J'accuse tells the story of a romantic triangle against the backdrop of WWI. Gance returned to active military duty in 1918 (as part of France's Section Cinématographique) to film parts of J'accuse, including the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. During a lull in fighting, he shot the celebrated "March of the Dead" sequence employing 2,000 soldiers—80 percent of whom would later die in battle. This eerie 20-minute sequence, along with Gance's expressionistic camerawork and rapid-cut editing, are reasons why J'accuse is remembered today. Although it was a commercial success in France, Pathé Films couldn't get U.S. distribution until Gance himself arranged a gala New York screening for D.W. Griffith in 1921. Griffith released the film through his recently formed United Artists, but it failed to find an American audience. Film preservationist Robert Byrne will introduce J'accuse, and Robert Israel will perform his original orchestral score adapted to play on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.
Sherlock Jr. (1924), 7:00PM—After a two-hour dinner break, during which time there'll be a special SFSFF party in the Castro mezzanine, the Winter Event continues with this 1924 Buster Keaton classic. Considered "one of the great movies of all time about the movies" and "a brilliant meditation on the nature of cinema," Sherlock Jr. follows Our Hospitality—which SFSFF just screened in February—within Keaton's filmography. Here he plays a movie projectionist who longs to be a celebrated detective. After being framed by a romantic rival for stealing his sweetheart's father's watch, he falls asleep in his projection booth and enters a cinematic dream world where his super-sleuthing skills are put to good use.
Expect plenty of Keaton genius—both in his hilarious sight gags and his primitive, but seamless special effects. This is also the film in which Keaton famously fractured his neck performing a stunt (the water tower scene). Because Sherlock Jr. runs only 45 minutes, it's being paired with his 1921 short The Goat, which some consider his best. This time he's pursued by cops who mistake him for an escaped killer. Look for the iconic scene of Keaton riding a train's cowcatcher. Keaton's granddaughter Melissa Cox will be a special guest at this program, where she'll be interviewed by SFSFF board member Frank Buxton (who once acted with Keaton in summer stock). Dennis James will accompany the films on the Mighty Wurlitzer, with the help of Mark Goldstein's special sound effects.
West of Zanzibar (1928), 9:15PM—The SFSFF days ends, as it has several times in the recent past, with a creepy collaboration between director Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks) and actor Lon Chaney. We've been shown Chaney as a larcenous ventriloquist in drag (The Unholy Three, SFSFF 2006) and an armless knife-thrower lusting to touch Joan Crawford (The Unknown, SFSFF 2008). Here he's Phrosos, a cuckolded, crippled magician who becomes an African ivory trader in order to extract truly twisted, simmering-for-18-years revenge. Boiling in the film's salacious pot are drug addiction, prostitution, voodoo, cannibalism and really un-PC dancing "natives." Unsurprisingly, the folks at Midnites For Maniacs are co-sponsoring the screening, and Dennis James will be back to thrill us on the Mighty Wurlitzer. Program notes for this one have been researched and written by Hell On Frisco Bay's Brian Darr.
