Without question, the online event of the week has been the "For the Love of Film Blogathon" co-hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films and Farran Smith Nehme at Self-Styled Siren. Greg Farrara has crafted the above introductory Cinema Styles "commercial" (which made me consider how far blogathons have come to now have commercials, let alone Facebook pages). The heart behind this blogathon has, of course, been to advance not only an awareness of film preservation but to solicit contributions as well to the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. NFPF works directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.
As "Ferdy" has commented on the blogathon's Facebook page: "We've raised enough to preserve a 1,200-foot black-and-white nitrate silent film in fair condition, starting with lab inspection, cleaning, minor repair, and then moving on to make a new negative and print." So congratulations are in order.
My contribution to the blogathon is a transcription of a January 2008 lecture by Stefan Drössler, the Director of the Munich Film Museum, co-presented by the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco on the restoration of the German premiere version of Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955); a print acquired by PFA from a private collection with help from Drössler and the Munich Film Museum. Among the scope of Drössler's many specialties in film history are German cinema, Hollywood cinema (including his leading expertise on Orson Welles) and the history of 3-D, to name just a few. Lola Montès has recently been released on Criterion Blu-Ray with a wealth of extras, including press notes and an essay "Loving Lola" by Gary Giddins so I thought now would be a choice opportunity to share Drössler's PFA commentary. Of related interest are David Hudson's aggregates for both The Greencine Daily (from the 2008 NYFF) and The Auteurs Notebook (on the Criterion release).
Admitting it is always a pleasure to lecture at PFA, Drössler likewise apologized for his modest English. He outlined that he would first discuss the production circumstances behind Lola Montès, followed by 10 minutes worth of production stills from the film, including a survey of the 1950s artwork used for the film's promotion, which might more fully provide insight as to why there was a near riot when the film was first released. Following that would be a separate 12-minute clip reel comparing the different versions of the film, including rarely-seen takes from the American version, the full version of which is now believed to be lost.
The French version of Lola Montès disastrously premiered in Paris on September 22, 1955. Billed as a "super-production", a huge crowd gathered for the premiere, both inside and outside of the cinema. After the film had run no more than a few minutes the audience began to laugh, jeer and shout boos. François Truffaut described that the exiting audience warned those waiting for the next screening not to bother because the film was a disaster. On the night of the first showing the producers, responding to public disdain, immediately began editing the film, which had been produced in Cinemascope with a magnetic sound track. They worked on the sound track to erase certain words, especially one word in a scene early on in the film where Lola (Martine Carol) as a young girl is entering the sleeping cabin of a ship. In the scene she is asked her age and—though in the existing print you can see her lips moving in response—you hear nothing. Originally, her response had been that she was 16 and this is what started the disbelieving laughter in an audience familiar with Martine Carol—long considered the French sex star of the '50s, and far from 16. Carol, in fact, was reputably one of the first French actresses to bare her breasts for the camera, scenes with her were always provocative, and the audiences at Lola Montès were unquestionably there to satisfy their salaciousness.
The German version of the film premiered three months later on January 12, 1956 and, once again, it proved disastrous, though this time the producers explained to the audience that they would be watching a preview print that would be cut and redubbed for general release three weeks later in Germany.
Thus began the unfortunate tale of the long butchering of Ophüls' last film Lola Montès. By the time the film was finally released in America in 1959 under the title The Sins of Lola Montès, its original two-hour length was cut down to 75 minutes, redubbed three times, with the sequential ordering of scenes changed. Unfortunately, all of these edits were done on the original negatives, which has made it extremely difficult to reconstruct the film; but, Drössler felt it important to recapitulate the sad production history of what was the most expensive European film after the second World War. It cost roughly 8 million deutschmarks (roughly $2,000,000), which meant that everyone in France and Germany would have had to go to the theatre and pay an entrance fee just to recover the film's costs. From its inception, it was an ill-fated project engineered by two producers who had no experience in film production; one of them an Italian-French producer Albert Caraco who had made his fortune in Swiss real estate. The other producer was a Nazi who had worked in Paris during the occupation but was unable to continue working in film production in France after the war. He returned to Germany to work in film distribution and made a fortune in bad, cheaply-produced German films. The two men met in Lausanne and began entertaining fantasies of creating a historical drama to rival Hollywood epics. They had no true idea of what they were doing but they began hunting for a property of a known character and came upon the passionate story of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, better known as her stage name Lola Montez, an infamous cabaret dancer whose numerous affairs included such notable personalities as composer Franz Liszt and Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.
It was clear to them that their film needed to be an international co-production so that it could sell in all the countries. To that effect, they sought out a multilingual European film director. Jacques Tourneur was their first consideration, though Drössler is not sure if they actually contacted him. Michael Powell was their second choice and they contacted him at the Cannes Film Festival. While Powell was pondering the opportunity, the producers decided upon Max Ophüls, who was experienced in shooting films in Germany and then later—during his emigration—in the Netherlands, France, and eventually Hollywood. Ophüls was successful—especially in Germany with his 1950 film La Ronde—not so much for the film's artistic value but its adult themes of illicit love affairs, which passed the German censors only because Ophüls cleverly kept the raciest scenes in French. The producers felt that Ophüls skilled manipulation of censors would be invaluable in their production of Lola Montès.
Despite Ophüls's specific contractual demands that he have complete control over the screenplay, the producers next set their sights on lending their project a spurious air of prestige by finding a literary source upon which the film could be based. To accomplish this, they hired the French bestselling novelist Cecil Saint-Laurent to write a novel about Lola Montez. This is one of the first mysteries of the film. You read in the film's credits that it was based on the novel of Cecil Saint-Laurent but Saint-Laurent didn't write the novel until after the completion of the film. Ophüls wrote his screenplay independently from any novel.
In an interview, Ophüls stated that he had no original interest in directing Lola Montès; but, then he had an idea about a first draft, a treatment, wherein the story would be told as a big circus show so that—in effect—the film would be about show business. The film presents Lola at the end of her career as a performer in a circus with her life rendered in flashbacks. Throughout all the scenes money and business predominate and the film is full of caricatures of producers, by which Ophüls satirized the entertainment industry.
The producers insisted upon making an even bigger film and frequently came up with ideas that Max Ophüls didn't like. He would only agree to their ideas on the conditions that he would be given more money, more extras, and that no limits would be placed on his budget and artistic creativity. The producers wanted the film to be shot in Cinemascope and—though Ophüls didn't like the wide screen—he agreed to the condition but created a cinematographic design that frequently cut the wide screen through the use of side curtains and iris-like effects that reduced the horizontal image. The producers also wanted to shoot the film in color. At that time there were very few film productions in color. Again, Ophüls was in disagreement with the usage of color but circumvented the condition by creatively resisting a realistic usage of color and designing a concept of using special colors for each flashback sequence to indicate seasonal episodes. This necessitated the painting of houses and streets, separate costumes, to conform to his color concepts. The producers wanted to use a magnetic sound track, which Ophüls hated. He used only the front channels instead of the wide channels and decided to use overlapping soundtracks so that people in the foreground were talking as well as people in the background. Often you cannot understand everything everyone is saying. You can only understand the words Ophüls deemed especially important. Though this became a technique used by later filmmakers, at the time it proved confusing to audiences. Finally, the producers wanted to use Martine Carol, the sex star, which he agreed to but you can see what he did with her. There was a sequence where Carol rips open her dress, which the audience was anxiously awaiting, and Ophüls cuts away in a manner that proves comic. In retrospect one can see how brilliantly Ophüls was playfully frustrating audience expectations. Even the flashback structure has no logical sense. It's never made clear why they are not in chronological order; but, this was important for Ophüls and he insisted upon it. Ophüls' stormy relationship with his producers informed his creativity in such a way that—as Rodney Hill states it in his Senses of Cinema essay—"one of the core principles of auteur criticism is that a great director will turn such practical hardships to artistic advantage."
The final piece to this production history, which is less well known, is that the film was shot in three different languages. In the 1930s, before magnetic tapes were invented, sound was recorded on disks. It was difficult to dub a film so separate Italian, German and French versions of a film were made. Even though in the 1950s magnetic tape had come into use, it remained exceedingly difficult to match color negatives and so the practice of filming multiple versions of a film in separate languages persisted. Ophüls elected to shoot Lola Montès three times; once in English, once in French, once in German. This fact determined the selection of the actors. Fortunately Peter Ustinov was multilingual but Martine Carol was not as accomplished and so Ophüls had a lot of problems with her. She was completely dubbed in the English version and partially in the German.
The shooting of Lola Montès took place in the summer of 1955 over five months, beginning in France, with the last four weeks in Munich where the circus sequences were filmed. The film was set in a circus arena and—though there existed a circus arena in Munich—Ophüls insisted on building his own, which was so immense that it had space for 2,000 people. It was built at the Bavaria studios and cost a fortune, especially because Ophüls did not want to hire extras for the circus. He hired an actual circus that had a hundred animals, many of which you never see in the film. If you're lucky you see a few horses and the edge of a polar bear. For his circus audience he photographed extras that he positioned in the bleachers, some of them with moveable arms, and with some live actors inbetween. This process ended up being much more expensive than if he had hired extras.
Max Ophüls is well-known for his long tracking shots, a strategy he devised partially to keep producers from cutting his films. He used the same strategy in the circus sequences of Lola Montès and what is of interest is that you can actually see the tracks in some of the scenes only partially covered by carpeting.
There were many complications during the shoot. At one point Martine Carol went on strike because the producers had trouble securing the money to pay her. During one of Ophüls' color schematics, an owner of a house refused to allow the production company to paint his house red, so they had to make do by draping it in red fabric. For one sequence set in the Munich gardens, 1000 extras were employed for a scene that lasted no more than 30 seconds in the finished film. Since production was frequently postponed, Ophüls could not transfer the company to the high Alps to film the winter sequences so they re-created winter in Hamburg by using salt for snow, causing much architectural damage.
For much of the press photos used to publicize the film to generate interest for its premiere, Martine Carol's breasts were exposed. These are all scenes, some with very daring costumes, which do not appear in the finished film.
In the original film, the credits came first, then the circus, then the flashbacks of Lola's life; but, in the American version, the story was re-sequenced in chronological order so that the circus came last. Ophüls was outraged knowing the producers intended to do this and did everything he could to prevent them from editing his film, but to no avail. His death by heart attack in March 1957 saved him the disgrace of seeing the American version.
The remainder of Drössler's presentation was a fascinating and detailed comparison of various existing versions of the film that underscored the obstacles encountered in reconstructing the film: jumpcuts that were made to shorten the film that interfered with both visual and aural continuity; lefthand cropping of the original cinemascope ratio effected to enchance sound; aesthetic decisions on the part of Ophüls to grade the film darker in the positive print than its original negative, requiring reconstructionists to debate whether or not to use a negative or positive print and the ethical concerns of whether reconstructionists have the right to make a film look better than the author's intent. The reconstruction of Max Ophüls Lola Montès is the first to be completely done in high definition with a Dolby soundtrack. Drössler lobbied against a Dolby digital soundtrack to retain the sound of the film's original magnetic soundtrack, again believing reconstructionists do not have the right to make something sound clearer than Ophüls intended. I'm not sure how much of the reconstruction is detailed in Criterion's Blu-Ray release. I strongly recommend Dinko Tucakovic's FIPRESCI write-up from the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
Time to mix it up, ladies and gentlemen. In conjunction with the Jewish Community Center, 3rd i presents a multi-media panel discussion with documentarian Eric Molinsky, Professor Deborah Stein and 3rd i's own Anuj Vaidya, who will bring us back to the era of Indian silent cinema when many of its leading ladies were Jewish, Parsi, Anglo-Indian and Australian (Remember Fearless Nadia!). Gain insight into a little known chapter of Bollywood and find out how these women became the "go-to girls" for leading female roles in the 1920s, 30s, and beyond.
When: Friday, February 19, 2009, 7:30PM Where: Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF), 3200 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94118 Cost: $10 (Tickets for dinner + talk: $30; use the following code for discounted price: 3rdI; Tickets are also available at the door.)
Not since Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) has an animal eye witnessed the pitiful plight of human beings with such patient compassion, as in Antonio Nuić's sophomore feature Donkey (Kenjac, 2009), which saw its US premiere at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF10). As synopsized in the festival program, this gentle comic fable shows how one family of mulish, macho men in the Herzogovina countryside ultimately gain some much-needed self-awareness—with the help of a real donkey. Director Antonio Nuić accompanied his film to PSIFF10.
Born in Sarajevo in 1977, Nuić graduated in film and TV directing from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. He is a member of the Croatian Film Directors Society. In 1998, his first short film On the Spot won awards at the Croatian student film festival FRKA for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Audience Choice Award. His television drama Give Them Dinamo Back fared similarly at FRKA, winning the Audience Award. From 1999-2004, Nuić directed television shows, music videos and his third short film Sex, Booze and Short Fuse. In 2005–2006, All For Free—his first feature length film—won multiple awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress at Croatia's Pula Film Festival. At the Sarajevo Film Festival, All For Free won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Male Performance. It likewise garnered a Special jury award at the New Author Festival in Belgrade and the Bronze Rosa Camuna in Bergamo.
Nuić's second feature Donkey has followed suit, winning three Golden Arena awards at the Pula Film Festival: Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography; and Best Music. It also received the Croatian Film Critics Society Award and, consequently, was chosen as Croatia's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards®. Although Donkey did not make the Academy short list, it remains one of my favorites seen at this year's festival. My sincere thanks to Jonah Blechman of inclusive pr for setting me up to interview Nuić over drinks at Miro's Restaurant. Nuić is a ruggedly handsome, affable fellow with a rumbling voice deepened by chain smoking.
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Michael Guillén: Donkey is a beautiful, elegant narrative about the grief shared between fathers and sons. Straight off, I was impressed with its bleached cinematography. Can you speak about how you worked with your cinematographer to develop the look of the film?
Antonio Nuić: The cinematographer Mirko Pivčević is a great friend of mine and obviously a very talented person. When we were location scouting, we discussed the script and the way the film should look. What we came up with—because he lives near those parts of the country where the film takes place—was his remembrance of how sometimes at the beginning of August everything goes yellow because there's no water, as if it's Autumn, not Summer. The land is already dry and rocky and the intense heat creates a bleached look. There is no green. That was my idea of how the film should look—strong highlights and no green—because green represents life, whereas when something is yellow, it represents the time of the year when everything dies back down. I believe that look was important for this story.
Also, one of my personal motivations for that look came from a famous Croatian poet who came from the village where the film takes place and in his poetry, the color that he used to describe sadness was yellow. It made sense to me to go this way.
Guillén: Could you identify that poet?
Nuić: His name is Antun Branko Šimić. He was a great poet at the beginning of the 20th Century. He wrote expressionist poetry that was current with European literature of the time. He died very young, actually, when he was 27 years old; but, he managed to become part of Croatian poetic history with only a few collected books of poems.
Guillén: Donkey is bolstered by its poetic influences. It's amazingly simple on the surface; but, underneath there's much inherited grief and a tragic sense of generational repetition. It intrigued me to watch Boro (Nebojša Glogovac) come hazardously close to repeating the mistakes of his father. Are you a father yourself?
Nuić: That's what made me think about the father/son relationship. As I grow older, obviously I see myself making the same mistakes my father made, especially with regard to his relationship with my mother. They're still married and live a good life; but, I see his character flaws. We like to call them "character flaws" but really it's just bad behavior based upon not thinking about the other person—whoever you live with or whoever your friends are—you rationalize, "That's just the way I am." Whereas, a man should think about, "Why do I tell people this is the way I am when I can change?" That's what most men don't do and, basically, in Croatia there is a traditional way of raising male children. Boys are allowed to do things their own way. It's considered a good thing and it makes families proud—that way of thinking—but as a consequence sons don't get a good upbringing. It's an unrealistic way of looking at things. Men expect things to go the way they imagine things should go. As time goes along and things change, my generation of Croatian men are very much in conflict with their surroundings and their female partners, male partners, whatever, because they can't accept that there are other people and other ways of thinking. We've been basically brought up that way.
I was raised by my grandmother and—as she was feeding me—she used to say, "Son, it's best never to have one wife. Always two, possibly three." Brought up that way, a man thinks he can get anything he wants. Now, I love my grandmother, I love my grandfather, and obviously they love me; but, this is the way men are raised in Croatia and throughout the Balkans. That's what I was thinking about when I drafted the script for Donkey.
Guillén: You were wanting to critique the existing practice of how men are raised?
Nuić: Yes. The basic idea is that we usually repeat the mistakes of our fathers whereas we should learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. My film critiques that behavior because such behavior leads to larger conflicts and damages future generations.
Guillén: Are you saying that this is still pretty much how Croatian men are raised today?
Nuić: Yes. It's changing a little bit now with my generation and their children; but, in some parts—those communities close to the Dalmatian Coast, for example—this still happens, though on a much smaller scale than before.
Guillén: Though I'm aware that your film is critiquing masculinities in the region, I admire that Donkey likewise explores the conflicted emotionality of these men. The story that spoke most to me was that of Ante (Ljubo Kapor), Boro's uncle. His realization at film's end of what it has truthfully cost he and his wife not to have children—collecting money instead—carried such sad weight.
Donkey won three awards at Croatia's Pula Film Festival: you won Best Screenplay; Mirko Pivčević won Best Cinematography; and Srdjan Gulic Gul won Best Music. Then the film was chosen as Croatia's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards®. Despite this critical success, how have your local audiences accepted the critique in your film?
Nuić: Very well. I'm always afraid, obviously, as a filmmaker. Whenever I make something, I ask myself, "Who will watch this? Who will be interested in some small family drama set in some rural part of the country? Does it communicate?" You might know that there are many different dialects in the Croatian language. The people in the South—who were influenced by Italy—speak totally different than the people in the North, who were influenced by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. If you pair an older guy from the Northern part of Croatia with an older guy from the Southern part, they won't understand a word each other is saying. I kept a lot of those dialects in the film and I worried, "What have I done? Who will this talk to? What am I talking about?" But, basically, people have loved the film, especially the people from the South who have told me, "This is it. This is us." That was very flattering to me because my father comes from that part of the country, I know those people, and I wanted them to see themselves in my film. It's not very common to make a film about these Southerners. There aren't many films in Croatia that have been made in that part of the country about the people in that part of the country.
Everywhere else people loved the basic relationship between the father and his son. Just before my trip here to Palm Springs, a guy I know came to me and told me, "I've just seen your film and it helped me. After seeing your film, I went and had a conversation with my father that I have put off for such a long time because we were in conflict." I think people got the point and they love the point that men should simply communicate.
Guillén: Equally fascinating for me was the role of the donkey in furthering that communication. I'm aware that kenjac—the Croatian word for donkey—is pejorative slang for a man who is mule-headed; i.e., an ass. But you've distinguished in your press notes that you wouldn't call a donkey an ass. I've noticed where these masculine issues come into play that—if a woman does not help a man come to terms with himself—an animal will. [Nuić chuckles.] I have to commend the different ways you showed your male characters relating through the donkey to themselves and to others. The donkey became—how do I put this?—a witness to these various self-examinations, if you will. He actually became the agent who brought these estranged men together.
Nuić: It's almost as if he's their silent priest. These are religious people who—when they go to confession—communicate with their priest. But here they choose to confess to an animal because, obviously, they don't want to hear an answer. They already know and are aware of the answer. They're just so stubborn and into themselves that they can't communicate with another human being with whom they have any issues. They would rather just get it out of themselves, vent, by communicating with a donkey. The donkey becomes someone who takes all their problems unto himself and he can bear it because donkeys are famous for carrying heavy loads on their backs.
Guillén: How much has or hasn't changed with regard to men's perception and respect of women?
Nuić: You mean in Croatia?
Guillén: Yes, in Croatia, but also between the city and the countryside in Croatia.
Nuić: I can assure you that women in those parts of Croatia are pretty powerful in their own way. They know how to handle things—let's say—quietly. They willingly take this role of being humble and being servile to their husband; but, basically they rule everything. Croatia is a maternal country. But I'm not a woman so I cannot say how women feel in Croatia. I don't see anything different from any other European country.
Guillén: As the writer/director, can you say where this story came from?
Nuić: I had already written something about a father and son relationship when I heard about the trading of donkeys, which was told to me by my cousin Boro who lives in Drinovci. He told me that this uncle Ante—who is based on a real person—sold donkeys to people from across the border who then sold them to Italians to make sausages; some mortadella is made from donkeys. That anecdote helped me decide to set my father-son relationship in Drinovci. That village is the birthplace of my father. I knew the people. I knew their characters. I knew what I was being told when I heard that anecdote. That's how I came up with the story.
Guillén: Along with the trafficking of donkeys, your film mentions a lucrative cigarette trade, yet no one smokes in this film. I've been to the former Yugoslavia and I don't remember anyplace where people weren't smoking.
Nuić: [Laughs.] Yes, we do smoke a lot. I don't know quite how to explain to you why I decided not to show smoking in the film. I'm a chain smoker myself. Perhaps I could say that it was very hot when we shot the film and—when some of the older actors wanted to smoke—I suggested they not do so because I was afraid for their health. Also, I found no reason for the characters to smoke. Besides, it's a common thing in Croatian films—or in European films generally—that everybody smokes so I simply decided not to do it.
Guillén: Can you speak to why you situated your narrative against the political context of 1995? You've suggested in your press notes that this timing was chosen for two reasons: first, to juxtapose family conflicts against historical events and, second, to respect a certain authenticity; i.e., it was in the summer of 1995 that donkey trafficking actually took place.
Nuić: That's right. Also, 1995—the year when the film takes place; the year of Operation Storm—is the year when the war ended in Croatia. It lasted for a few months more in Bosnia; but, basically 1995 is considered the end of our civil war, which took place in Bosnia-Herzogovina. The village Drinovci is in Herzogovina, which borders Croatia. It's so stupid and difficult to explain because the majority of the population living in Herzogovina are Croats.
At the beginning of the film when Boro and his family cross the border you see two identical flags on both sides. That could be confusing to someone who doesn't know the situation; but, that was supposed to be funny. During those war years Herzogovina and Croatia were technically two separate countries; but, they weren't really.
That border was used to make enormous sums of money through custom fees. Speaking of the cigarette trade, Croatia passed a law that set taxes on cigarettes—let's say 10%—whereas Herzogovina set the taxes at 5%. So, Croatia would export cigarettes to Herzogovina and then the law would be killed for a few days during which time cigarettes would be brought back into Croatia, thus making millions of dollars for one or two men. That was the situation we had. It resembles something your country did back when the west was won; but, unfortunately for us, it was at the end of the 20th century.
Guillén: Srdjan Gulic Gul won Best Music at Croatia's Pula Film Festival. He used a mix of both pop and classical. Why?
Nuić: The pop song was kind of an inside joke. It's a song that's been popular in Croatia for over 20 years and which—if translated—means "Long Hot Summer". Classical music was in the mix because—as you could see—Boro's aunt loved classical music. And I love classical music, to be honest with you. I love classical music in film. I think film and classical music have a lot in common and they complement each other.
Guillén: Which American directors do you like?
Nuić: American directors? I could go on for about an hour, right? But I'm a great admirer of classic Hollywood. I like Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra. For recent directors, P.T. Anderson I like. Scorsese, obviously, I like. Wes Anderson I like. Clint Eastwood I like. I'm a great admirer of American culture and I was brought up especially on westerns. My mother took me to see them at the cinematheque twice a week. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is one of my favorite films.
Guillén: How did you feel having your film chosen as Croatia's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards®?
Nuić: I was really flattered by their decision. And it's been great getting to come here to Palm Springs. I love seeing my film in a US theater because—as I just mentioned—I was brought up on classic Hollywood cinematography. My mother loved classic American films so she took me to see them at the cinema, twice a week at least, whenever the film changed at our Cineplex. So I was brought up watching American films. I'm very much influenced by them. The fact that my film is being shown in a US cinema is very exciting for me.
Guillén: Can you tell me a little bit about your actors and their backgrounds?
Nuić: My actors are well-known actors who all come from the country formerly known as Yugoslavia. We have trained at similar—if not the same—acting schools. The main actor Nebojša Glogovac (Boro) comes from Belgrade. The main actress Nataša Janjić (Jasna, Boro's wife) and some of the other actors are from Zagreb. The guy in the wheelchair Emir Hadžihafizbegović (Petar, Boro's brother) is from Sarajevo. I like working with actors from different acting schools because I think something good happens. Actors are intuitive and they pick up all the good things from their colleagues. I like working with actors from all over. It may sound funny to you because it's such a small region but it's not conventional. You don't ordinarily see Bosnian actors in Croatian films; but, I tend to mix them all together, which is rather unconventional, at least in the last 20 years in our country.
Guillén: To wrap things up here, let's discuss Krenica, the lake in Drinovci, which you've indicated represents a kind of doom for the villagers. I was struck by the image of Boro's wife nearly drowning herself in the lake much like his mother had earlier "let herself go." Then there was also that scene where Ante throws his money into the lake. What does this lake Krenica represent for you in your film?
Nuić: Okay, there is a story about that lake, which is a very strange lake. When I was a kid, every Summer we went to Drinovci and we all swam in that lake several times even though it was considered somewhat dangerous. The story about the drowned boy is, unfortunately, a true story. It seemed like every other Summer somebody drowned in that lake. It has unpredictable currents with very cold water. Though most of the water in the lake is perfectly warm and perfect for swimming when it's hot, an unexpected current of cold water can hit you and you can have a heart attack. So, more accurately, people don't die by drowning in that lake; they die of heart attacks and many of them have never been found. The divers that you saw in the film diving for the boy in the lake in real life dove for three days and never found him. They dove 80 meters below the surface and never found the bottom of the lake. Since it's rocky terrain and the sea is nearby, a week later Krenica spit up the drowned boy and he had salt water in his lungs.
Krenica is associated with local mythology. The legend goes that a very powerful man was riding drunk on his horse. He was dissatisfied with his life. He rounded up all of his horses and they jumped into a pit, creating the lake. This lake is haunted by fate. It represents life because the water is pure, people can drink from the lake, and it provides the watering system for that village; but, also, it represents death because it can take away everything you love. It's the pure symbolism of the water that represents life in such a rocky terrain. It gives life. It takes life. That's what I had in mind.
Guillén: You've added in the press notes that the disregard of Krenica's actual danger renders "a deeply irrational, dark side of the people from Herzegovina, otherwise extremely religious and cautious people." Final question: Are you working on anything new?
Nuić: Yes, I am writing a new script based on a theater play. It's a Christmas tale that was turned into a theater piece. I saw it and I was lucky because the guy who wrote it was asked by a few other directors for permission to turn it into a film but he rejected their offers. I met him on the street one day in Zagreb and I asked him what was happening with the script and why hadn't it been made into a film? He said, "Would you like to do it?" I said, "Yes!" That's how I got the rights. We know each other from the Academy. We studied together. So basically, right now I'm in the process of writing the script from his play. It's beautiful. My films are always about family and this is about the relationship between two brothers. It's pretty much a chamber piece that happens in an old barber shop on Christmas Eve.
The US premiere of Vortex (2009)—Lithuania's official submission to the Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards® and winner of three Sidabrinė gervė ("Silver Crane") awards for the outstanding performances of its talented trio of actors: Oksana Borbat (Best Actress); Vladimiras Jefremovas (Best Supporting Actor); and Jūratė Onaitytė (Best Supporting Actress)—was introduced by director Gytis Luksas, who wanted his Palm Springs audience to understand that Vortex was a film about his generation. He recounted that—despite his youth, falling in love, marrying, and raising a family—life in Lithuania at that time was "difficult and black." This played into his decision to film the narrative in black and white because he "didn't need the color" for his story.
"Between the black and white," he offered, "there are numberless nuances of grey." He found it interesting to craft his film with his DP Viktoras Radzevicius using rules of vintage photography, such as its stern turn-of-the-century portraiture. The characters of his film speak both Lithuanian and Russian, which was normal for the time, and Luksas employed this bilingual practice as a temporal marker to situate the narrative in its historical context. At heart, however, the film can be easily understood as a love story free from the tethers of historical circumstance and a timeless study of the relationship between men and women; a theme important to Luksas, and one which he hoped would be of importance to his audience. It's not enough for him to make an interesting movie, he stated, it must reflect genuine emotions, whether love or hate.
An adaptation of the 2003 novel Duburys by Romualdas Granauskas—winner of the Lithuanian National Cultural and Art Prize—Vortex recounts the history of the generation that lived through Lithuania's gloomy Soviet period as inflected through the life story of its main character: good-hearted country boy Juzik (Giedrius Kiela). As synopsized by Dennis Harvey at Variety, though Juzik's father is killed returning from WWI, and his teenage best friend drowned in another accident, Juzik "nonetheless reaches adulthood with his country innocence and good faith intact. After military service, he works in a corrupt quarry where he becomes involved with two self-destructive women: boozing, promiscuous Klara (Jevgenija Varencia); and insecure, much-victimized Maska (Oksana Borbat). Periodically, Juzik returns home to visit his lonely, aging mother (Jūratė Onaitytė). Structured in chapters, the tale eventually plods a bit, but sports a gentle gravity that's winning, not least in Viktoras Radzevicius' luminous lensing."
Harvey likewise suggests that—as much of a compliment as it is to say that Vortex "might be mistaken for a Soviet-bloc feature of 40-50 years ago—its austere black-and-white beauty, deliberate pace and tender solemnity are of a piece with works from a great period in world cinema"—the "difference is that during the 1960s, such exercises stood some chance of offshore theatrical exposure, while now they're strictly fest fare—and not even fashionably so." That demarcates a sad fate for an otherwise lustrous film.
After the PSIFF10 screening, Gytis Luksas and I talked briefly in the lobby of the Camelot Theatre.
* * *
Michael Guillén: Let's start with the film's title Vortex, which brought to my mind the whorling whirlpool in which Juzik's friend is drowned. Did you mean that deathly whirlpool to be equated with the idea of the vortex? [I later learned that Duburys means "waterhole".]
Gytis Luksas: It's similar, yes. The whirlpool, yes, of course. The vortex, like the whirlpool, is something very dangerous; but, not only in the water—in life too.
Guillén: You're saying there's a vortex in life—a way of looking at life?—that a person can get sucked into?
Luksas: Yes, it's a metaphor.
Guillén: I was intrigued by the film's false ending. You think that Juzik is going to die and that the film will end on that somber note; but, he doesn't die, and—as a consequence—the film expands out into hopefulness.
Luksas: You know, the novel by Romualdas Granauskas—on which my film is based—ends with Juzik drowning. I changed that especially because I felt that—to live for somebody, to do something for someone else—was thematically more important, even if more difficult. I didn't want the ending to be so simplistic. Suicide is the shortest way to end all problems; but, I felt it would be better to end the film with an image of hope: Maska, the two children, and the dog. For me they were a picture of happiness within a future life, something that could be.
Guillén: I read it that—rather than succumb to the vortex of despair—Juzik for the first time became aware of the potential for happiness in life.
Luksas: Yes, it's an image that's about the fullness of life, the wholeness of life. Maybe, after all, Juzik will decide to adopt Klara's children from the orphanage? Maybe he'll return to Maska and begin life again?
Guillén: Tell me about the novelist Romualdas Granauskas.
Luksas: He's a famous Lithuanian writer and this novel was written five years ago.
Guillén: Is he still alive?
Luksas: Yes.
Guillén: What did he think of your changing his ending?
Luksas: I was afraid when he came to see the movie; but, afterwards, we had a conversation and he told me, "You know, maybe you did better, because the film has more depth; it's more serious." I structured the film as a circle. At the beginning Juzik loses his friend to the whirlpool and—as the film's hero—he lives with a sense of sin; a sin that he has made in his own mind.
Guillén: Is that the vortex that threatens to pull him under?
Luksas: Yes, it's like a vortex, and then he becomes involved with the two women, which leads to further problems, such that he decides to end his problems by committing suicide; but, he finally understands that perhaps it's more important to live. The writer Granauskas decided this was a better ending than his novel.
Guillén: What can we expect from this film? Does it have a distributor in the US?
Luksas: As you know, it was considered the best film in Lithuania and submitted to the Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Language film; but, it remains difficult to know what will happen with the film. But the fact that Lithuania is represented at this festival with this film is good for Lithuania. We're such a small country.
You can rest assured that—if it's a genre film—it's most likely been covered by the Twitch team from the moment a glimmer of malice appeared in the filmmaker's eye. Such is certainly the case with Joko Anwar's The Forbidden Door (2009)[site], the midnight screening offered in the International Showcase of this year's edition of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF).
After exchanging email, Todd Brown finally met Joko Anwar (Kala, Janji Joni) at the 2008 Udine Far East Film Festival and hailed him as "the very best of the current crop of directors in Indonesia." He cited the film's official synopsis: "A successful sculptor whose life [is] run by [a] domineering wife and mother discovers a secret organization in which members can watch the lives of [the] most dysfunctional, depraved families in the town which are fed from hidden cameras. When he stumbles upon a channel showing a little boy who's being viciously abused by a crazy couple, he tries to find the kid to save him. But his quest leads him back to a secret door in his own house that could be the answer to many puzzles."
After that meeting, Todd pretty much kept up with every new production still, poster or available trailer for The Forbidden Door and offered them up to the Twitch readership (though, unfortunately, as is often the case with time and other thieves, some of those links are now broken).
Equally an Anwar fan, Ard Vijn picked up the baton when The Forbidden Door had its international premiere at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival, where he reviewed same. However qualified—Ard had difficulty feeling sympathy for the film's protagonist and mean-spirited narrative—he nonetheless found the film's shocking ending a satisfying achievement. Further praise went to the film's stylishness: "Deeming the real Jakarta to be too dirty looking, Joko Anwar ordered a fake, cleaner version to be built using several big sets. Like with Kala this makes it seem as if the story takes place in some alternate universe where everything is slightly more stylish, colorful or menacing. The sheer amount of gloss and polish totally defies the small budget: the film cost less than 600.000 USD to make but easily looks ten times as expensive." In fact, Ard considers the film's "sultry atmosphere" to be "the real star of the movie."
The Forbidden Door went on to make appearances at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) where it was described as "a 19th century gothic novel adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and directed by David Lynch" and "one of the sickest, kinkiest movies" NYAFF had ever screened: "Graceful, gliding and with a Bernard Herrmann-esque score we feel confident when we say you've never seen evil look quite so beguiling."
Canfield reviewed the film at NYAFF and cautioned: "This blood-soaked unpacking of what it means to sell-out should haunt anyone who has ever called themselves artist and asked to be paid for it." He concludes: "Incorporating elements of the Hostel series, film noir and psychological horror this begs to be seen on the big screen where the arterial spray can underline the Shakespearean sensibilities. Part tragedy, part drama, and hard to watch this is dangerous filmmaking made all the more dangerous by the line it walks between exploitation and truth telling."
Guest reviewer Joshua Chaplinsky offered a second perspective, acknowledging The Forbidden Door's "tasty amalgamation of Lynch, Hitchcock, Hostel, Videodrome, Takashi Miike, The Usual Suspects and Shakespeare." Though considerably less impressed than Canfield, Joshua concludes that The Forbidden Door "digs below the surface in an attempt to raise larger questions. Is it an allegory about artistic integrity? A treatise on marital fidelity? A commentary on violence and the media?" Though mystery might be what gives the film its momentum, Joshua cautions: "Unfortunately, as is often the case, the answers cannot live up to the questions asked, and this is where the film falters."
Guest reviewer Teresa Nieman offered a third take for Twitch when the film appeared in Vancouver: "In a nutshell, we get Dumplings meets Videodrome meets Hostel, by way of an Indonesian Tarantino." She summarizes: "The good news about Joko Anwar's follow up to the brilliant Dead Time (a.k.a. Kala, or The Secret) is that it's bigger, more ambitious, and seems to have had a much more lenient editing process. The bad news is that ... it's bigger, more ambitious, and seems to have had a much more lenient editing process. Yep, it's one of those."
Coming full circle, The Forbidden Door was announced on the line-up for the 2009 Udine Film Festival, screened at Toronto After Dark 2009, and won "Best Film" at the 2009 edition of PiFan.
There's not much more to say other than that, clearly, The Forbidden Door continues to reveal Joko Anwar's promise checkered among his faults and it's certainly his promise that excites reviewers (who tend to be willing to overlook his faults). I felt the film couldn't decide what it wanted to be and—though certainly stylish in its look and tone—some of its cinematic waystations worked better than the film as a journey. For example, its resemblances to Videodrome were what impressed me the most—prurience and perversity are always a welcome cocktail—and I have to admit that I was genuinely creeped out by the story of the abused child, which seemed so real and exploitive that I was left no room to feel comfortable. I could probably say the same about protagonist Gambir's stringy haircut. Yeesh. And every time the red forbidden door loomed into view, I thought of that faux trailer Don't from Grindhouse. Don't open that red forbidden door. DON'T!
Aside from Twitch, The Forbidden Door has received favorable critical praise. Richard Corliss at TIME—who caught the film at NYAFF—wrote: "As slick as it is sick, the movie could be Anwar's calling card for international employment, if only Hollywood moguls wanted something out of their own narrow range". Corliss appreciated the film's effort to be something that others "rarely dare to try." At The Hollywood Reporter—as quoted by Misa Oyama in her SFIAAFF program capsule—Maggie Lee opined: "A stylish and teasing chiller that unlocks a chamber of Freudian horrors, The Forbidden Door would make Hitchcock and Almodovar proud" and mentioned that "Joko Anwar accessorizes his creepy suspense-horror with a dazzling array of auteur-homage."
Without question, the online event of the week has been the "For the Love of Film Blogathon" co-hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films and Farran Smith Nehme at Self-Styled Siren. Greg Farrara has crafted the above introductory Cinema Styles "commercial" (which made me consider how far blogathons have come to now have commercials, let alone Facebook pages). The heart behind this blogathon has, of course, been to advance not only an awareness of film preservation but to solicit contributions as well to the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. NFPF works directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.
My contribution to the blogathon is a transcription of a January 2008 lecture by Stefan Drössler, the Director of the Munich Film Museum, co-presented by the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco on the restoration of the German premiere version of Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955); a print acquired by PFA from a private collection with help from Drössler and the Munich Film Museum. Among the scope of Drössler's many specialties in film history are German cinema, Hollywood cinema (including his leading expertise on Orson Welles) and the history of 3-D, to name just a few. Lola Montès has recently been released on Criterion Blu-Ray with a wealth of extras, including press notes and an essay "Loving Lola" by Gary Giddins so I thought now would be a choice opportunity to share Drössler's PFA commentary. Of related interest are David Hudson's aggregates for both The Greencine Daily (from the 2008 NYFF) and The Auteurs Notebook (on the Criterion release).
The French version of Lola Montès disastrously premiered in Paris on September 22, 1955. Billed as a "super-production", a huge crowd gathered for the premiere, both inside and outside of the cinema. After the film had run no more than a few minutes the audience began to laugh, jeer and shout boos. François Truffaut described that the exiting audience warned those waiting for the next screening not to bother because the film was a disaster. On the night of the first showing the producers, responding to public disdain, immediately began editing the film, which had been produced in Cinemascope with a magnetic sound track. They worked on the sound track to erase certain words, especially one word in a scene early on in the film where Lola (Martine Carol) as a young girl is entering the sleeping cabin of a ship. In the scene she is asked her age and—though in the existing print you can see her lips moving in response—you hear nothing. Originally, her response had been that she was 16 and this is what started the disbelieving laughter in an audience familiar with Martine Carol—long considered the French sex star of the '50s, and far from 16. Carol, in fact, was reputably one of the first French actresses to bare her breasts for the camera, scenes with her were always provocative, and the audiences at Lola Montès were unquestionably there to satisfy their salaciousness.
Thus began the unfortunate tale of the long butchering of Ophüls' last film Lola Montès. By the time the film was finally released in America in 1959 under the title The Sins of Lola Montès, its original two-hour length was cut down to 75 minutes, redubbed three times, with the sequential ordering of scenes changed. Unfortunately, all of these edits were done on the original negatives, which has made it extremely difficult to reconstruct the film; but, Drössler felt it important to recapitulate the sad production history of what was the most expensive European film after the second World War. It cost roughly 8 million deutschmarks (roughly $2,000,000), which meant that everyone in France and Germany would have had to go to the theatre and pay an entrance fee just to recover the film's costs. From its inception, it was an ill-fated project engineered by two producers who had no experience in film production; one of them an Italian-French producer Albert Caraco who had made his fortune in Swiss real estate. The other producer was a Nazi who had worked in Paris during the occupation but was unable to continue working in film production in France after the war. He returned to Germany to work in film distribution and made a fortune in bad, cheaply-produced German films. The two men met in Lausanne and began entertaining fantasies of creating a historical drama to rival Hollywood epics. They had no true idea of what they were doing but they began hunting for a property of a known character and came upon the passionate story of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, better known as her stage name Lola Montez, an infamous cabaret dancer whose numerous affairs included such notable personalities as composer Franz Liszt and Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.
It was clear to them that their film needed to be an international co-production so that it could sell in all the countries. To that effect, they sought out a multilingual European film director. Jacques Tourneur was their first consideration, though Drössler is not sure if they actually contacted him. Michael Powell was their second choice and they contacted him at the Cannes Film Festival. While Powell was pondering the opportunity, the producers decided upon Max Ophüls, who was experienced in shooting films in Germany and then later—during his emigration—in the Netherlands, France, and eventually Hollywood. Ophüls was successful—especially in Germany with his 1950 film La Ronde—not so much for the film's artistic value but its adult themes of illicit love affairs, which passed the German censors only because Ophüls cleverly kept the raciest scenes in French. The producers felt that Ophüls skilled manipulation of censors would be invaluable in their production of Lola Montès.
Despite Ophüls's specific contractual demands that he have complete control over the screenplay, the producers next set their sights on lending their project a spurious air of prestige by finding a literary source upon which the film could be based. To accomplish this, they hired the French bestselling novelist Cecil Saint-Laurent to write a novel about Lola Montez. This is one of the first mysteries of the film. You read in the film's credits that it was based on the novel of Cecil Saint-Laurent but Saint-Laurent didn't write the novel until after the completion of the film. Ophüls wrote his screenplay independently from any novel.
In an interview, Ophüls stated that he had no original interest in directing Lola Montès; but, then he had an idea about a first draft, a treatment, wherein the story would be told as a big circus show so that—in effect—the film would be about show business. The film presents Lola at the end of her career as a performer in a circus with her life rendered in flashbacks. Throughout all the scenes money and business predominate and the film is full of caricatures of producers, by which Ophüls satirized the entertainment industry.
The producers insisted upon making an even bigger film and frequently came up with ideas that Max Ophüls didn't like. He would only agree to their ideas on the conditions that he would be given more money, more extras, and that no limits would be placed on his budget and artistic creativity. The producers wanted the film to be shot in Cinemascope and—though Ophüls didn't like the wide screen—he agreed to the condition but created a cinematographic design that frequently cut the wide screen through the use of side curtains and iris-like effects that reduced the horizontal image. The producers also wanted to shoot the film in color. At that time there were very few film productions in color. Again, Ophüls was in disagreement with the usage of color but circumvented the condition by creatively resisting a realistic usage of color and designing a concept of using special colors for each flashback sequence to indicate seasonal episodes. This necessitated the painting of houses and streets, separate costumes, to conform to his color concepts. The producers wanted to use a magnetic sound track, which Ophüls hated. He used only the front channels instead of the wide channels and decided to use overlapping soundtracks so that people in the foreground were talking as well as people in the background. Often you cannot understand everything everyone is saying. You can only understand the words Ophüls deemed especially important. Though this became a technique used by later filmmakers, at the time it proved confusing to audiences. Finally, the producers wanted to use Martine Carol, the sex star, which he agreed to but you can see what he did with her. There was a sequence where Carol rips open her dress, which the audience was anxiously awaiting, and Ophüls cuts away in a manner that proves comic. In retrospect one can see how brilliantly Ophüls was playfully frustrating audience expectations. Even the flashback structure has no logical sense. It's never made clear why they are not in chronological order; but, this was important for Ophüls and he insisted upon it. Ophüls' stormy relationship with his producers informed his creativity in such a way that—as Rodney Hill states it in his Senses of Cinema essay—"one of the core principles of auteur criticism is that a great director will turn such practical hardships to artistic advantage."
The final piece to this production history, which is less well known, is that the film was shot in three different languages. In the 1930s, before magnetic tapes were invented, sound was recorded on disks. It was difficult to dub a film so separate Italian, German and French versions of a film were made. Even though in the 1950s magnetic tape had come into use, it remained exceedingly difficult to match color negatives and so the practice of filming multiple versions of a film in separate languages persisted. Ophüls elected to shoot Lola Montès three times; once in English, once in French, once in German. This fact determined the selection of the actors. Fortunately Peter Ustinov was multilingual but Martine Carol was not as accomplished and so Ophüls had a lot of problems with her. She was completely dubbed in the English version and partially in the German.
The shooting of Lola Montès took place in the summer of 1955 over five months, beginning in France, with the last four weeks in Munich where the circus sequences were filmed. The film was set in a circus arena and—though there existed a circus arena in Munich—Ophüls insisted on building his own, which was so immense that it had space for 2,000 people. It was built at the Bavaria studios and cost a fortune, especially because Ophüls did not want to hire extras for the circus. He hired an actual circus that had a hundred animals, many of which you never see in the film. If you're lucky you see a few horses and the edge of a polar bear. For his circus audience he photographed extras that he positioned in the bleachers, some of them with moveable arms, and with some live actors inbetween. This process ended up being much more expensive than if he had hired extras.
Max Ophüls is well-known for his long tracking shots, a strategy he devised partially to keep producers from cutting his films. He used the same strategy in the circus sequences of Lola Montès and what is of interest is that you can actually see the tracks in some of the scenes only partially covered by carpeting.
For much of the press photos used to publicize the film to generate interest for its premiere, Martine Carol's breasts were exposed. These are all scenes, some with very daring costumes, which do not appear in the finished film.
The remainder of Drössler's presentation was a fascinating and detailed comparison of various existing versions of the film that underscored the obstacles encountered in reconstructing the film: jumpcuts that were made to shorten the film that interfered with both visual and aural continuity; lefthand cropping of the original cinemascope ratio effected to enchance sound; aesthetic decisions on the part of Ophüls to grade the film darker in the positive print than its original negative, requiring reconstructionists to debate whether or not to use a negative or positive print and the ethical concerns of whether reconstructionists have the right to make a film look better than the author's intent. The reconstruction of Max Ophüls Lola Montès is the first to be completely done in high definition with a Dolby soundtrack. Drössler lobbied against a Dolby digital soundtrack to retain the sound of the film's original magnetic soundtrack, again believing reconstructionists do not have the right to make something sound clearer than Ophüls intended. I'm not sure how much of the reconstruction is detailed in Criterion's Blu-Ray release. I strongly recommend Dinko Tucakovic's FIPRESCI write-up from the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
