ConFluence Film Blog

Songs of Innocence and Experience

2012-01-14T20:35:00.001-08:00

William Blake hit on something very true to me about the art of filmmaking, and he did so with the title of one of his works: Songs of Innocence and Experience. I feel that, for films and their filmmakers, there are songs of innocence and songs of experience. Songs of innocence are the films, most often by young filmmakers, that are infused with a volatile enthusiasm for the limitlessness of the film form. A song of innocence is the work of a filmmaker with such inimitably youthful and wondrously impetuous vitality, so much so that the creator has somehow managed to convince him/herself that the film is going to accomplish something -- anything -- with a rookie film that has never been done before in the history of the medium, no matter the modesty or limited ambitions of the given project. This is a welcome objective that, if executed right, emerges in the best of ways in the work itself, and should ultimately transcend one's ego. Conversely, a song of experience is the work of a filmmaker who, with years of work and evolution, has attained a pronounced degree of confidence and polish -- and feels that, to some degree, he/she has mastered most of the tools of filmmaking from film to film, using the equipage and personnage with a definite level of comfort and voice. While this latter state of being is rather enviable, the filmmaker who has achieved making a song of experience typically is subject to losing or dulling that original youthful vitality that marked a song of innocence, exchanging the zesty lifeforce inherent to a song of innocence for the acquisition of confidence, polish and comfort inherent to a song of experience. A film that is a masterpiece is a rhapsody of the two songs -- simultaneously a song of innocence and a song of experience, with both melodies in total harmony with each other, with the collective effort creating the most driving rhythm one could ever imagine.

Part 4 - The Bridge Between Two Nights: Ambivalence in Canadian Cinematic Identity, and the Silence of the North

2011-08-08T12:07:00.001-07:00

The Pulp on Maple Leafs: The CFDC, American Tax-Shelter Films, Southern Comfort and Canuxploitation

"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."

-Margaret Atwood (1939-present), Canadian author

Throughout my friendship with actress Karen Black, I have had a few conversations with her about Hungarian-born Canadian director George Kaczender, with whom she has worked twice and speaks quite highly. The original question I posed to her was not about Kaczender as a director, but rather what prompted her to work more than once with a given director, other than out of financial necessity or convenience's sake. We also have had similar and multiple conversation about her numerous collaborations with Czech director Ivan Passer. Strangely enough, I caught more than a few of Kaczender's now obscure work when I was just a movie-crazy teenage kid, including In Praise of Older Women (1978), Agency (1980), Chanel Solitaire (1981) and Your Ticket is No Longer Valid (1982). All of these films, with the possible exception of the highly unusual latter, seemed more American than anything else, even though it never occurred to me to question and explicitly consider their national origin at the time of my initial viewings. In my later research and in my consideration of Canadian cinema history, however, these films seem rather logically placed in the timeline, considering the point at which they were produced.

Looking at the cast lists of these four Kaczender films alone, one starts to get the picture. Collectively, these four films feature the likes of Robert Mitchum, Lee Majors, Richard Harris, Susan Strasberg, Tom Berenger, Karen Black, Valerie Perrine, Helen Shaver, Timothy Dalton and Rutger Hauer. Needless to say, these are all performers who were no strangers to the American film industry and spent most of their careers spinning the wheels of its machine, with no other discernible Canuck connection. Each of these four Kaczender films can be conveniently relegated to popular genre slots. Chanel Solitaire, for instance, is a pristinely costumed, sexy, vacuously stylish epic biopic of Coco Chanel. Agency is a nifty, but ultimately flaccid and campy little conspiracy thriller about a nefarious advertising agency and an insidious plot involving subliminal messages. Martin Knelman, in his 1977 book, describes the dilemma that was just then emerging at the time he was writing:

"The Canadian Film Development Corporation is not an agency like the Canadian Council, with the objectives of supporting artists and subsidizing culture. No, the CFDC is an investment outfit, operating like a bank to stimulate production. Of course the CFDC does not invest exclusively in trash, but its rules for investment tend to favour precisely those people who least need backing. In order to qualify for CFDC money, you have to have other investors and a distributor. In other words, you have to be obviously commercial. In practical terms, this often means that producers line up investors and distribution through Hollywood studios. Almost inevitably, it turns out that while these films might be technically Canadian, they feature American stars, are geared to the American commercial market and are often controlled American businessmen."

There are moments in films like Agency and Your Ticket is No Longer Valid that speak more to a Canadian sensibility. Ironically, Agency almost unwittingly becomes an allegory for the Americanization dilemma, insofar as taking into account how the clearly American advertising corporation CEO Robert Mitchum edges his way into a company (in what could loosely be described as a hostile takeover) and exercises an all-powerful influence over his Canadian staff to produce ads with subliminal messages to enable him to position himself for realizing political ambitions. The implications should be obvious here: an American business model's influence on a fledgling industry and its desperately eager impressarios north of the border. If the other Kaczender films had not been admitted as evidence, I might assert that the director was perhaps working in a subliminal sense himself in relation to this possible message.

Film scholar Jim Leach accounts how part of the fear with a picture like Jutra's Kamouraska, as originally voiced by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, was that large and "more American" productions would contribute to a "climate of inflation" and that, by trying to appeal more to international audiences, there would result an overall loss of control of film production and the imposition of a conventionality of film language that suppressed not only a tradition rich in direct cinema but the distinctive personal voice of the Canadian auteur. Lefebvre, being of Québéc, was also concerned with the exploitation of Québéc folklore. The concern should not have rested in a decidedly arthouse saga like Kamouraska, however. That would be like crediting the ambitious, epic-length French "arthouse" masterpiece Les enfants du paradis (1945) for the wretched discredit of French cinema by sheer virtue of its scope.

Filmmaker John Trent's goals were similar to that of Kaczender. Trent was similarly nurtured by the Canadian Film Development Corporation for dutifully following what was becoming their standard operating procedure: import foreign talent to amplify marketing value outside of Canada and streamline stories into more genre-oriented products, thus the films become camouflaged and less distinguished as Canadian product. Ultimately, when it boils down to representation and national cinema, the films with the imported names would edge out the others and receive press by sheer virtue of the names themselves, thus obscuring works with true Canadian earmarks. This is all after a perhaps gravely naive hope that Canada could mostly maintain a personal cinema as a simultaneously popular mode of output. Trent films such as the Straw Dogs-clone Sunday in the Country (1973), the pale slapstick farce It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1975), the sex romp Middle Age Crazy (1980) feature Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Newley, Isaac Hayes, Yvonne De Carlo, Stefanie Powers, Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret. I call the CFDC's "wannabe American films" of Canadian cinema the "southern comfort flicks". Alvin Rakoff, the director of such mega-budget Canadian films as disaster flick City on Fire, starring Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda, is yet another perpetrator of this southern comfort model.

In considering films like Jutra's early 80's pictures Surfacing and By Design, which are certainly films that aspired towards a status beyond that of a business deal, one notices an encroaching "southern influence" even in works by the great Canadian artists who had generally avoided the perceived excesses of such things as star-power in the past. Granted, the talent Jutra ultimately hired for both these films (e.g. Joseph Bottoms, Kathleen Beller, Patty Duke Astin) were not exactly hot American property at the time, and rather low on the totem-pole compared to the Mitchum or Lee Majors that Kaczender and Trent seemed successful in casting. However, for two films that called for specifically Canadian talent (particularly Surfacing), producers and financiers did the films no favors by demanding an overall American presence. Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing is still considered a great Canadian novel, about a Canadian woman in search of her father in Canada's northern wilderness. Even respected directors like Paul Almond took to directing films like Final Assignment (1980), an embarrassingly bad and very American action vehicle I had the displeasure of seeing half of on VHS at one point, starring Genevieve Bujold (Almond's muse in one of her worst roles).

However, it must be said that none of Kaczender's or Trent's "southern comfort" Canadian enterprises scored any surefire success and most of them disappeared in both the Canada and United States film markets with little or no fanfare. Frankly, they just were just too mediocre to withstand even the slightest audience scrutiny, let alone scrutiny from the critical establishment. There were, however, a couple "southern comfort films" of value and I am not trying to lump them all into the trash bin. Harvey Hart's The Pyx (1973), shot in Montreal and starring Karen Black and Christopher Plummer, is a wonderfully taut and quite excellent detective thriller with horror elements. "Shot entirely in Montreal" proudly emblazons The Pyx's opening credits sequence, and the film's Catholic symbiology informs the perennial Christian influence in Quebec. Hart also does a capable if slightly perfunctory job of directing MGM's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971). Besides Canadian imitation, though, actual American films were coming to shoot up north of the border because, during the 1970's, Canada's newly legislated tax policies allotted for tax credits for U.S. films shot in Canada. Examples include the Canadian-lensed, American-funded Meatballs (1979, directed by the Canadian emigre Ivan Reitman) and Prom Night (1980), and the Florida-lensed, Canadian-crewed Porky's (1981, still the largest grossing Canadian film to date, factoring in inflation) and the San Francisco-lensed, Canadian-crewed Ticket to Heaven (1981). Both of these films live on in some way, mostly as enduring cult items. Jim Leach notes that, unlike radio and television, which both have strict Canadian content regulations, there is no protection for Canadian content in film. The distribution networks for Canadian movie theatres are largely controlled by the American studio system.

What the "southern comfort" and "Canuxploitation" films did was to establish a paradigm which took a good many years to finally die off, and it is arguable that it ever even did really die off, as CFDC soon was re-christened Telefilm Canada and still exists today. Its presence, while still perceptible, has waned somewhat from its late 70's heyday when CFDC was foregrounded and seemed almost omnipotent. Perhaps the film with the strongest sense of Canadian identity to emerge in the above-described period is 1982's The Grey Fox starring Richard Farnsworth, an enchanting "post-Western" film about an over-the-hill stagecoach-robbing desperado who is released from thirty years in prison in 1901. The film was ultimately picked up by Francis Ford Coppola and distributed by United Artists Classics in the U.S.

In 1894, Australian critic and social commentator A.A. Phillips coined the term "cultural cringe" to define a condition characterized by an inferiority complex causing people to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of others. If southern comfort and the tax-shelter period did anything other than produce mostly substandard product, it was to illicit the perilous condition of filmic Americanization into the consciousness of the Canadian national cinema, as I have defined it to exist in the 60's and early 70's.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART FIVE

Part 3 - The Bridge Between Two Nights: Ambivalence in Canadian Cinematic Identity, and the Silence of the North

2011-06-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

The Simulated Shtetl: Losing the Charm of Jewish Distance in Canadian Cinema, and a Walk Down the Old St. Urbain's Street

"All day long, St. Lawrence Boulevard, or Main Street, is a frenzy of poor Jews, who gather there to buy groceries, furniture, clothing and meat. Most walls are plastered with fraying election bills, in Yiddish, French and English. The street reeks of garlic, and quarrels, and bill collectors: orange crates, stuffed full with garbage and decaying fruit, are piled slipshod in most alleys. Swift children gobble pilfered plums; slower cats prowl the fish market."

-Mordecai Richler, (1931-2001), Canadian author, Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)

Being a Lubavitcher Chassid, albeit a decidedly odd one whose life hinges on a fusion of intensive Torah study and an undying hunger for independent and international cinema, I felt a strong desire to include this little detour in the heart of my Canadian study. However, this is no lark. This chapter is integral to a deeper discussion of the points engaged in the article as a whole, as I will examine how the Jewish Canadian microcosm directly informs the Canadian macrocosm, and vice versa. I have taken notice of how antithetical the Jewish-themed films of Canada are to the Jewish-themed films from most every other country, particularly the U.S. Perhaps among the most famous Jewish Canadian figures is venerated Montreal author Mordecai Richler, who is often regarded (perhaps recklessly) as the Canadian Philip Roth. Richler, whose writing bears only some resemblance to Roth, certainly possesses a style and a narrative drive all his own, completely disparate from Roth; nevertheless, the comparison is there to be made. The most famous of Richler's work, in both literature and subsequent film adaptations, is, of course, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the novel of which was published in 1959 and the film of which was released in 1974. Richler also has enjoyed adaptations of his other novels, including The Street (1977), Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1978), The Wordsmith (1979, directed by Claude Jutra for television), Joshua Then and Now (1986), St. Urbain's Horseman (2007) and most recently Barney's Version (2010), all of which feature some form of Jewish subtext. Two of the films, including Duddy Kravitz, were directed by Richler's longtime best friend and fellow Canadian Ted Kotcheff.

However, other non Richler-based films such as Lies My Father Told Me (1975), The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick (1988) and an adaptation of Chaim Grade's well-regarded play The Quarrel (1991), the latter two featuring actor Saul Rubinek, suggest and outright demonstrate a sturdy and resonant Jewish voice existing in a most forthcoming sense within Canada's film industry, more so than in most other national cinemas. There are even oddly conspicuous moments in films like Robin Spry's NFB-funded Prologue (1970), a film about a group of 60's political radicals which opens on the close shot of two Jewish headstones that the two lead actors eventually walk past before the opening titles roll. There is never another nod in Spry's film to this peculiar, anomalous opening image. Granted, the United States has seen its share of Jewish-themed works but, with the possible exception of works like Fox's adaptation of Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1981), Jewish culture is exoticized and driven home with a big prettified sledgehammer rather than the sensitive, deft touch of Canada's filmmakers, who discard the forced, terminal quaintness that American films seems intent on perpetrating in similar works. One can even catch moments in more mainstream Canadian films like George Kaczender's Montreal-set Agency (1980) when ubiquitous Jewish-Canadian actor Saul Rubinek, playing an outwardly Jewish copywriter, jokingly places a yarmulke on his head before entering a funeral service in a Catholic church.

Much of the landscape and sets in films like Duddy Kravitz and Maximilian Glick seem almost shtetl-like in the most becoming sense. An early scene from the latter, for example, shows Saul Rubinek, playing a Lubavitcher rabbi, standing in the middle of a snow-covered field davening while donning the customary tallis and tefillin for his morning prayers -- the old-world Jew in an old-world landscape, but one which is actually twentieth-century Canada. For all we know, it could be somewhere in czarist Russia or Poland. To someone acquainted with shtetl literature, paintings and photographs of Jewish villages in eastern Europe, novels like Malamud's The Fixer or any artistic works that commemorate and preserve shtetl life well after their existence crumbled, Canada would seem a most sensible destination for the displacement of Jews. One can imagine, with very little effort, Duddy Kravitz's jaunts through the picaresque Montreal's so-called St. Urbain Street "Jewish ghetto" being transposed to a European Jewish ghetto. The St. Urbain's Street milieu is one that Richler knew all too well. He grew up there and many of his novels and stories are set there. Jan Kadar's Lies My Father Told Me (1975) is set in the same Montreal Jewish ghetto, in the 1920's. For the most part, things look very much the same in the filmic Jewish ghetto of the 20's as they do in Duddy Kravitz's 1950's. Then again, the old country is ever the old country, even if it's the new country.

Later, in 2005, Allan King's documentary portrait Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company would chronicle a core group of senior citizens living out their days at the Apotex Centre's Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto. The sounds of classic Yiddish tunes like "Oyf'n Pripetchik," "Bay Mir Bistu Shein," "Tzena Tzena" and "Tumbalalaika" are often heard echoing the corridors. These residents have had a great stake in Canada's past. For example, Ida, one of our main characters, is the widow of the Toronto City Hall Controller, and Ida makes a point of clarifying that he was prominent in the "goy world" in Toronto. At another point, two of the women, Ida and Claire, gossip about a fellow resident who was married to a goy. Film writer and critic Michael Koresky writes, "These characters. with their varying levels of degeneration, form a valuable testament to a dying group of first and second generation immigrant Jews in Canada." The camera, for one, follows Ida in a quest to single-handedly eradicate the misplacement and displacement of Jews within Canada's cultural and social records, wheeling her chair through a lobby in search of photos of her prominent husband on an expansive hall-of-fame wall.

As a Lubavitcher myself, I am aware of a thriving cluster of Chabadniks and Chassidim living prosperously in Montreal and I myself would love to one day live in Montreal myself (also because I love the city and not just its Jewish cluster). Looking at the history of Jews in Canada, one gets a true sense of logic about the big picture. After repealing its law requiring the oath "on my faith as a Christian" in 1832, largely thanks to the Jewish Ezekiel Hart who made history by taking public office to a storm of controversy and outrage in 1807, Canada passed laws that were passed into the books guaranteeing Jews the same political rights and freedoms as Christians. A Jewish population began to accumulate around Montreal and, by 1850, there were approximately 450 Jews living in Canada. At the outset of pogroms in the Russia of the late nineteenth century, United States received the overwhelming majority of the immigrant victims of these anti-Semitic acts, but Canada was a destination of choice due in large part to the Canadian Pacific Railway's role in developing Canada after its confederation. As the twentieth century dawned, the Jewish population of Canada grew to nearly 160,000.

With each generation, there were the expected waves of anti-Semitism, perhaps the most grievous of which was the appointment of Frederick Charles Blair to the post of Director of the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources in 1935. Blair publicly counciled Jews to "divest themselves of certain habits" in order to attain the status of popularity held by "Canada's Scandanavian friends" and limited the number of Jewish immigrants admitted into Canada, thus limiting options for European Jews looking to escape the persecution and ultimate extermination during the years of World War II and the Holocaust. Blair further bemoaned the Jewish problem, rhetorically asking the reason for the unpopularity of Jews throughout the world, perhaps finding solace in the fact that he was not the only one with an open Jewish prejudice.

Overall, the Jews, the ones who had safely maintained Canadian citizenship before the embargo, prospered, particularly in Québéc City and, especially, Montreal. It would not be until the late 50's when Mordecai Richler would begin emerging as the Jewish voice in Canadian literature. A large majority of Montreal's Jewish population were originally quite resistant to Richler's work, considering it "bad for the Jews" (this was the main criticism leveled at The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz when it was first published in 1959). Residents of St. Urbain's "Jewish ghetto" in Montreal remembered Richler growing up as something of a hooligan who spurned his Jewish heritage and Jewish education, opting to skip out and play pool instead. Looking into his work, many realized that the mythic symptoms of "undesirable Jewishness" that resulted in the derision leveled at the Jewish people by the likes of Frederick Charles Blair in the 1930's were, all things considered, personified in the very existence of Duddy Kravitz as a character. One undoubtedly heard Canadian Jews kvetching, "He writes of us like we're gonnifs (swindlers)!" Kravitz is an almost sociopathic, opportunist little monster always with an eye towards the almighty dollar. The ironic part is that he is actually rather likable -- a classic quixotic Canadian in the tradition, one might say, of Shebib's heroes in Goin' Down the Road. It also did not reflect well upon Richler within Canada's Jewish communities that he married a shiksa (non-Jewish woman) and exhibited what many deemed the attitude of a flagrant self-hating Jew on a literary smear campaign. Now, however, Richler's reputation among Canadian Jews is mostly intact and even rather warm. His most apparent similarity to his American facsimile Philip Roth (who debuted in the literary world in 1959 with his first book, Goodbye Columbus, four years after Richler's first, The Acrobats) is that he shares a compatible, like-minded sensibility in depicting the prototypical modern Jew and his path in the pointedly modern world -- and after all, the equally irrepressible Duddy Kravitz and Alexander Portnoy would make a priceless cruising tag-team. The question is, which one gets the blond?

"Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials. I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game."

-Mordecai Richler

One source that came to Richler's defense around the time of the controversial premiere of the film was the Canadian Jewish News, with its front page emblazoned "Duddy Kravitz Not Anti-Semitic." Rabbi Eliezer, one of the rishonim of the Talmud (i.e. the leading 11th-15th century rabbis of the oral Torah who were the deciders of Jewish law) said, "A serious Jew is one who actively struggles with his Jewishness." To reiterate the Roberson Jeffers line from the last chapter, "Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice." These two quotes are key to realizing that the Canadian Jewish News' assertion about Duddy Kravitz's anti-Semitic status is correct.

Duddy is indeed a definitive example of the anti-hero figure and certainly the quintessential Jewish anti-hero -- a shameless, embarrassingly self-centered opportunist. But one of the things that allows Duddy to safely "go about his way" without the socio-cultural critics of his fictional persona digging in too deeply is the fact that he is victim of a commonly Canadian condition with which Donald Shebib's marginalized Maritimers, Pete and Joey, were afflicted in Goin' Down the Road: they have big city aspirations and big dreams of success, no matter how steeply the odds are stacked against them in Canada. Duddy is not the "victim" of Jewishness; however, the Jewishness is a secondary aspect. Pete and Joey's dreams in Goin' Down the Road are quickly dashed when they reach Toronto, and they wind up settling for Robinson Jeffers' carrot. What makes Duddy different is that he will not settle for Robinson Jeffers' carrot -- he, as a Jew from an economically challenged lineage and with the 1950's socio-cultural odds against him, is lunging right for the precipice and will accept no compromise. When Duddy finally confronts his uncle, who is on his deathbed, as to the reasons why he neglected him and quietly scorned him growing up, Duddy, for the first time in his life, is able to angrily open up to his uncle and reveal an equally hostile resentment and, ipso facto, reveals himself uniquely as a Jewish Canadian. A hyper-complex predicament, that.

He tells his uncle, "You don't think I read? I've read books, big deal! They always make fun of guys like me...pushers, guys who want to get somewhere. You know, I’m going to have place of my own one day. And when I do, there aren't going to be any superior shits like you to laugh at me or run me off." In this case, Duddy Kravitz defines an overarching Canadian spirit at large (the need to bust loose of one's imposed limits and achieve existential somethingness) and, when his own extra "baggage" is added, he becomes Rabbi Eliezer's "serious Jew" even more so as a direct result of his national identity. Thus, it no longer becomes the troubling Jewish stereotype about which many cried wolf. Duddy often appears somewhat proud of his Jewishness, a case in point being when he quietly but clearly judges his brother Lenny when he tells him that he much prefers the company of goyim to yiddin.

The Jewish Canadian predicament is also present in Richler's other novels as well, particularly St. Urbain's Horseman, which many of his devotees and scholars feel is his most important, most personal work. Mordecai Richler, the man who carried his youth on St. Urbain Street under his arm throughout his life's adventures and the Richler who still, in his own way, attempts to speak the truth of his rabbi grandfather, holds a mirror up to the Jew in the shtetl landscape of Montreal, and a larger Canada. Duddy Kravitz's grandfather is not a rabbi, but instead a poor immigrant, but everything Duddy does, every bad deed, is a misguided attempt to please his zeyde (grandfather), who tells him, "A man without land is nothing."

Martin Knelman notes that there was a boom on Richler property shortly after the film of Duddy Kravitz was released. It was Alan J. Pakula who originally bought the rights to St. Urbain's Horseman (which was produced as a two-part television film in 2007), followed by Norman Jewison making a bid for The Incomparable Atuk. Mike Nichols also pursued adapting Richler's Cocksure in 1976. The overarching point of this chapter of the article ultimately boils down to one thing. Hollywood product routinely chooses to "de-Jewcify" its films, unless the Jewishness can be overwhelmingly pronounced as cute, quaint or particularly other-worldly -- or if the film is about the Holocaust. Decades ago, a friend of mine who presented a script to a producer (co-written with Elliott Gould, who was still popular at the box-office) was immediately met with that standard Hollywood question, this from a Jewish producer no less: "Do the guys in this story have to be Jewish?," only to come right out and proclaim the whole affair was "too Jewish."

What is refreshing and fascinating about Canadian Jewish films, particularly the Richler adaptations, is that they unabashedly confront hard truths about Jewish identity and its conundrums, which exist fully within an unmistakably Canadian canvas. I am again flashing to an image of a wide-shot of Saul Rubinek as the Lubavitcher rabbi davening in the middle of a snow-covered field of Ontario in The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick, which I first saw right around the time of my own bar mitzvah. I also flash to our hero's breeze through St. Urbain's Street at the end of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Clasically Jewish environs in the United States, like the Lower East Side for instance, predominantly died out much too early in U.S. history, and the magic itself vanished into thin air. Orthodox Jewish clusters exist in most every American city, granted, but what is fascinating here is that Jewish Canada appears so communal as to suggest the ethos of shtetl life, regardless of the populations' range of belief constructs, well after the U.S. incarnation faded away. Perhaps this explains why Sergio Leone used Montreal for a few of the locations featured in Once Upon a Time in America, which is set partly in New York's Jewish East Side of the 1900's. Paul Mazursky also shot extensively in Montreal for his Isaac Bashevis Singer adaptation Enemies, a Love Story, set in 1940's New York. It could be said that this observation might be the result of "Richlerisms" and/or machinations on the part of the creators of the works to perpetrate such an idyllic illusion, but one gets a strong sense of its complementary existence in reality either when reading someone like Richler or seeing a Canadian Jewish film. The St. Urbain's Street of the twenty-first century is highly gentrified, it would seem, however.

The character of Canadian Jewish cinema and literature, while appreciably and thankfully lacking most the meretricious contrivances and precious ornament that pervade other Jewish cinemas, also suggests a proportion to the actuality. Refreshing it is, for once, to not be trounced with overwrought and preciously distancing klezmer music at the appearance of a conspicuously Jewish character. The Canadian approach affects a "haimish" quaintness that is not cloying and, ultimately, it is an indication of Canada's early and enduringly deep-seated proclivity towards the personal in its arts and culture, enabling unencumbered, uncompromised portraits of this phenomenon. I said it before and I'll say it again: the old country is ever the old country, even if it's the new country.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART FOUR with The Pulp on Maple Leafs: The CFDC, American Tax-Shelter Films, Southern Comfort and Canuxploitation

Part 2 - The Bridge Between Two Nights: Ambivalence in Canadian Cinematic Identity, and the Silence of the North

2011-04-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Northern Authorship: The Canadian Master Class of the 70's and 80's

Patrie intime de ma foi, (Intimate homeland of my faith,)
Dans une immuable assurance, (In an enduring assurance,)
Je veux vivre encore avec toi, (I still live with you)
Jusqu'au soir de mon espérance. (Until the evening of my hope.)

-Charles-Nérée Beauchemin (1850-1929), Québécois poet, "Patrie intime"

Claude Jutra: Québéc's Archaeologist Poet

It could be said that Claude Jutra is Canada's Orson Welles. I do not lightly make this claim nor do I make such a bold comparison to merely raise eyebrows. The analogy is not only apt because Jutra directed what is officially regarded as the best film ever produced in Canada, 1971's Mon Oncle Antoine, or because his follow-up film, 1973's Kamouraska, was an ambitious epic that wound up emasculated by its producers, much like Welles' follow-up film The Magnificent Ambersons had been, but also because Jutra struggled greatly towards the end of his life in producing work that he could call his own, striving to exist within the rapidly evolving world of filmmaking in both English and French Canada -- and as we all know, Welles' final decades were spent hustling for money to realize his sundry projects throughout decades when American cinema was often shaken to its core. Jutra's heart was buried so deeply in Québéc and his finest works were made for Québécois. He resigned himself to making television films for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the late 70's (1976's Ada and 1977's Dreamspeaker to name the two most widely known) during a self-imposed exile in English Canada. He immediately followed his brief television tenure by directing two compromised English-language features, particularly 1980's Surfacing, an ill-fated but nonetheless fascinating adaptation of Margaret Atwood's popular novel. The other was 1982's By Design, a now somewhat reappraised comedy about two lesbian fashion designers. He ended his career with one last francophone masterpiece in Québéc, 1985's La dame en coleurs, but is quoted to have said, "Sometimes I wonder: why are things easier for me in English Canada and so difficult in Québéc? Then I remember the answer: everything is more difficult for everybody in Québéc."

Jutra launched his career in cinema with a series of NFB-funded short films and documentaries (including the award-winning A Chairy Tale, co-directed with Norm McLaren) and completed his first feature film, the groundbreaking A tout prendre, in 1963. A tout prendre, seen now, fits more into the French Nouvelle Vague movement than most bona fide French New Wave films, and Jutra obviously owes much to those works, even though the film stands on its own two Canadian feet. By the time Jutra made his second feature, Wow (1970), which remains his most overtly political work, he was already something of a legend in Québéc. However, he was attacked throughout his career for what was perceived as a neglecting of a national cinema sensibility -- a cinema that would have more directly jostled Québécois out of its complacency. This brand of complacency is fascinating when you consider how the people of Québéc seemed to be getting impatient with their own complacency and were waiting for something to pry them loose from stagnation. Hence, there were bold cries for immediacy in cinematic intention.

Both Jutra's masterpieces, Mon Oncle Antoine and Kamouraska, were heavily criticized for situating their narratives deeply within an enclosed time period, rather than in the turbulent then-present, and as a result, the deep-seated politics of both films often failed to register in the cold light of day. What Jutra ventures to do is contextualize the current by depositing his stories in the safety of history. In the early 1970's, audiences seemed to prefer more didactically political and topical films by the likes of Denys Arcand, Gilles Carle and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, whose was identified by one critic in 1962 as "the Canadian incarnation of Godard". Mon Oncle Antoine is often designated as a "coming-of-age" film, but it is decidedly more of a tableau and a snapshot of a time and place than most coming-of-age films, which are more focused and resigned towards a single character, thus I find the designation facile and only somewhat accurate. As I will examine, many both now and at the time of its original release felt that the film did not fully exert or assert itself politically, and that its so-called "nostalgia" was ill-wrought. Of course, I beg to differ, strongly. Its nostalgia makes you want to actively participate in the film (i.e. climb into the screen), but this element is never made to be too precious nor does it obstruct our understanding of Jutra's political views concerning the past and popular memory.

Mon Oncle Antoine follows twenty-four hours in the life of a teenage boy named Benoit living in Black Lake, an asbestos mining town circa 1940. Kamouraska, at least in its 1983 director's cut, is a gorgeous-lensed three-hour period melodrama based on a bestselling 1970 Canadian novel by Anne Hébert, set in a frozen Québéc town of the 1830's and starring Genevieve Bujold, who plays a woman who has plotted with her lover to murder her husband. What is of note is that both films were based in some element of true incident and dug up remnants of a dark but halcyon past. Mon Oncle Antoine's primary location Black Lake was a key locale during the Quiet Revolution, and seemed to stand as a microcosm for the mistreatment of the working class under the Duplessis reign. Kamouraska is based on the real-life 1839 murder of Louis-Pascal-Achille Taché, and the story of the fictionalized events surrounding this crime can be taken as an allegory for the then-current tumult in Québéc, and a piercing assessment of a nation in denial of its past, in disgrace over its present and in doubt over its future.

Jutra could hardly be called apolitical. He was an ardent separatist who refused the Order of Canada, supported the Québéc sovereignty movement (which supported Québéc's right to exist as independent of Canada) and demonstrated against Duplessis during the revolution, and was also adamant in asserting two cultures and a French Canada's autonomy from English Canada. He hails from a liberal upper-class Montreal family who also vehemently opposed Duplessis' backwards-trained policies. However, Jutra tackles politics at a controlled distance in his films.

Martin Knelman, in his book This is Where We Came In: The Career and Character of Canadian Film, writes that "when Jutra tries to be overtly political, whether onscreen or off, you feel its a violation of something deep within his nature." In the same breath, Knelman continues, "Jutra's work isn't political in the same narrow, didactic terms as, say, Arcand's Rejeanne Padovanni or Michel Brault's Les ordres; yet maybe Jutra is political in a deeper way." This is exactly the case, and it could not be any more true. Jim Leach, in his book Claude Jutra: Filmmaker, notices that "Realizing that no form is ideologically pure, [Jutra] chose to work within existing forms, with the result that his films were rarely perceived as formally or politically innovative." I therefore will choose the path of political analysis of his works, even though this reading is only a single level.

What one must consider is, at this time in Québéc, to be political in one's cinema was the equivalent of being national and possessing the national branding of Québéc. I find Mon Oncle Antoine to not only be one of the best films, Canadian or otherwise, I have ever seen, but also one of the most intensely political films, even though its political statements are artfully camouflaged within an all-encompassing tableau of life in Black Lake, with a narrative intent on revealing larger and more revealing truths rather than limiting itself to the then-pressing topicalities; its ending is the young lead character's realization that things cannot continue in the muted manner to which the town has become accustomed. Benoit, for the first time, has learned to judge what he sees within his insulated, sleepy and dissipated world, and he is awakened to a harsh reality about the warped rhythm of routine of life in Black Lake. His now unforgiving eyes look upon his drunken sot of an uncle with a fierce sense of shame, and the film takes its title from the subject (the prosecuted) of Benoit's first-ever judgment. We are effectively set up for this revelation. Earlier in the film, the townspeople quietly but grimly accept the meager Christmas gifts thrown by the oppressive English-speaking mine-owner in a manner that suggests throwing swill to hogs. This all happens without so much as any measure of an expression of discontent from the miners and their families, who watch silently and guardedly as the boss passes through town in a sleigh haughtily puffing his pipe. They are clearly torn, simultaneously aware that any Christmas offering, even a pathetic trifle, is acceptable to the children who depend on it. It is our young hero Benoit who indulges in the only act of dissent.

As a presiding spirit over the film, we get not just Jutra the director but Jutra the actor, playing the role of Fernand, the taskmaster and bookkeeper of the general store owned by Benoit's aunt and uncle. Pauline Kael compared his presence in the film to that of Jean Renoir's presence in his La régle du jeu, writing, "While you are watching the movie, you realize that the spirit behind the movie is also present in the movie, in the performance of the director." The comparison is apt because Jutra the actor is certainly a presiding spirit but, beyond that, though, is the fact that, in the scene when Benoit catches Fernand and his aunt red-handed following an illicit tryst, Jutra allows his character to be the target of the boy's newly discovered judgmental eye, as well as allowing himself to be at least partly complicit in its first-ever unmasking. The allegedly non-professional actor Jacques Gagnon, who plays Benoit, has the film's finest bit of acting in this single scene, all with his eyes and almost totally without dialogue. On Jutra's part as the director, I see it as an exquisite personal admission of guilt and complicity on the part of the director; here, after all, we have the film's director willing himself into a just prosecution in precarious courtroom of a bedroom hallway -- i.e. "everyone in Québéc at this time in some way contributes to the tensions and problems like those depicted in the film, either by direct action or by complacency." There is a boldness in this staging and the arrangement of the film's action that is thrilling. This is a call to action.

The stage is being set throughout the film for a shattering final image, in which Benoit looks through the window and into what I like to call a "twisted Nativity" scene of a family gathered all around a casket on Christmas morning, mourning the death of its eldest son. Much like the end of Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (it should be noted that Jutra and Truffaut were friends), the film freeze-frames on Benoit peering through the window as he observes and digests a bitter pill of truth about the faulty world in which he lives, awakening from the dream now with an eye towards questioning what comes his way. At one point in the film, Duplessis is explicitly mentioned, albeit in graffiti on the wall of a public john.

This ending proves that the political can be poetic, and that bold political statements can emerge from the roots of a delicate story without total and immediate manifestation of its political objective. This is what the lauded "overtly political" Québécois films of the time seemed to lack profoundly. This is not to blithely be pejorative of a film like Arcand's Rejeanne Padovani, which is excellent on its own terms, although the pointedness of its political discourse is nothing that could reasonably be called novel. "Political cinema" is very much like mental rape to me (with filmmakers like documentarian Emile di Antonio excepted), and I often find it to be a kind of intellectual pollution, as your thought processes are compromised by a crafted manipulation of the status quo in an effort to call a viewer's attention towards truths that have been negotiated through shallow artifice. It's also an opportunity for an artist to perpetrate him/herself as chic, on which grounds, for instance, Jean-Luc Godard's most fervent critics assailed him, especially when entering his Maoist period. Here, at last, is a piece of political cinema that transcends and, in a sense, becomes not just transcendent, but transcendentalist.

"Le pauvre québécois, (The poor Québécois,)
Découragé, saigné à froid, (Discouraged, bled cold,)
Gagna son toit par le châssis (Its roof by the frame gained)
Et s'y pendit. (And hung itself there.)"

-Felix LeClerc (1914-1988), Québécois songwriter, "La québécois"

Around the time Jutra was shooting Mon Oncle Antoine in Black Lake, Québéc found itself in the throes of the 1970 October Crisis, a series of events triggered by the twin kidnappings of government officials by members of the Front de liberation du Québéc, which had detonated a total of 95 bombs between the years of 1963 and 1970. The October Crisis was one of the few times in Canadian history when martial law seemed to rule, and civil liberties violations became the most prevalent. Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, spurred the chain of events by compelling the first peacetime enacting of the War Measures Act, and the widespread deployment of Canadian troops resulted. The Canadian military arrested and detained 497 individuals without bail. Every one of these individuals, except 62, were later released without charges.

There was little Jutra could do to inject impassioned polemics about Québéc's tremulous status quo into the material in Mon Oncle Antoine, although that did not stop certain francophone audiences and critics from censuring the film for an alleged lack of political conscience. Many seemed to hold by the opinion that the film was simply too immersed in a deluded nostalgia dream to be fully cognizant of what was happening around the time of its creation. The film's success in English Canada did not bode well either, for (as Martin Knelman noted) Jutra was in the embarrassing position of being English Canada's favorite French-Canadian filmmaker. However, if Mon Oncle Antoine elicited the original suspicion of a wayward political aversion in Jutra's work, then his follow-up Kamouraska did nothing but outright confirm it for them. What they got was an opulent literary adaptation, the likes of which were not at all a commonality in the cinema of Canada. Although critic John Hofsess made the claim that Kamouraska is apolitical, he added that the film "couldn't have been made anywhere in Canada except Québéc" and that its "psychic roots" are deeply embedded there.

I should note that I saw Kamouraska on VHS in its full 174-minute director's cut, prepared later for a television broadcast in 1983, a full decade after the film's aborted Canadian and French premiere. The original theatrical version ran a truncated 124 minutes. The full unexpurgated cut is sometimes shown on a 35mm print in Québéc but, to my knowledge, has never been screened in the United States. Kamouraska, which was co-produced (with Québéc's Carle-Lamy Productions) by Parc Film in France, functions in very much the same way as Mon Oncle Antoine with its delicate, poetical political implications and, from my perspective, an obvious reading of the film is an allegorical one. Elisabeth Tassy, played by Genevieve Bujold in what is widely regarded as her best-ever onscreen performance, enlists the help of her American-born lover, whose first language is of course English, to murder her husband, the Lord Squire of Kamouraska. When, after a few weeks of marital bliss, Antoine reveals his true self, a "live-in rapist" slob of overwhelming ill manner, Elisabeth becomes the lover of a rugged American-born nobleman named George Nelson.

Genevieve Bujold gives what is, without a doubt, the performance of her career in this film, and she has never been better in any single film before or since. Martin Knelman also holds this position as he has remained one of the film's key defenders, and even was so at a time when that allegiance was a rather unpopular one. Bujold won the Best Actress award at the Canadian Film Awards that year, but the film managed to just slip away in a manner that was almost unprecedented, despite its high profile and the inexorable status it held as a truly major production (the most expensive Canadian production in history up to that time). I can only think of the later American film Heaven's Gate to compare. That similarly epic film's own history of aborted release, its pull from theaters, its recut, its disappearing act and its re-emergence in full glory is extremely analogous to Kamouraska, which predated Heaven's Gate by a full seven years. Both films were eventually restored to their original director's-cut lengths.

Kamouraska marked the end of an era for Jutra, who discontinued his longtime working relationship with cinematographer Michel Brault (a filmmaker in his own right, responsible for the landmark documentaries Pour la suite du monde and Les ordres) after shooting wrapped. Reasons for the termination are unknown even to Brault, but his work on Kamouraska is textbook beautiful camerawork and lighting. Also important to note is that, in a political move, Bujold declined accepting her award for Best Actress at the Canadian Film Awards, claiming that she was standing by Jutra and his crew when they opposed the unification of Quebec.

Jutra's previously mentioned 1980 feature Surfacing is a film could have been absolutely brilliant, considering Surfacing author Margaret Atwood's similarly delicate "poetically political" touch and her feminist perspective on Canadian national identity; considering Atwood's stance, one must also keep in mind that Kamouraska revealed Jutra's gifts for entering a female psyche on film. The mind boggles to think what it could have been had Jutra been allowed to revise the script to his liking before it was locked for shooting. Jutra was brought in to replace another director and most of the elements of pre-production were already well in play.

Unfortunately, at the time, the Canadian film industry was beginning to show signs of buckling and bowing to trends which pandered shamelessly to U.S. film marketing demands (as I will discuss later in depth), so the film became a victim of a tampering blitzkrieg that limited the scope of its identity as a Canadian film, with all the fascinating, rich "baggage" that carries. Considering the source material, the adaptation's inherently Canadian identity must have proven difficult to mask for the producers. Jutra's creative hand was thus limited because of that and other reasons, and compromises unfortunately exist throughout. As it is, the film is average with flashes of brilliance that are all too intermittent.

At the first level, what makes Surfacing more exceptional above the other cases of this "Americanization backlash" occurring in Canadian productions is its deft approach to its setting: Jutra enters the Northern wilderness world unassumingly, without looking to recklessly define it, even though more certainly could have been done in fully realizing the land's potential in the story. Knowing Jutra's and Atwood's aptitude for being poetically political, the film's political stance is nowhere to be truly discerned, except through especially deep and exacting analysis. Jutra is known to have said in the wake of Kamouraska's original failure, "For us, a hundred years ago is prehistory. It is before everything." Surfacing's characters are partly in search of the prehistoric petroglyphs for which the main character's missing father had been searching, and, at the denouement, this father's ultimate revealed death in his search for Canada's "prehistory" is at the film's soft and distracted political center.

However, all this said, the "spirit of Claude" still presides over the whole affair and an artistic presence is felt even amidst the tragic compromises of its production. At a time of American tax-shelter films, it was a definitive example of a thumb-itching need to appeal to American marketing sensibilities (including the casting of American actors in the leads) and a drive towards a brandedly American financial excess that led to Surfacing's streamlined final product. The film failed to appeal to pretty much anyone, including Americans and especially Canadians. His final two films, By Design and La dame en coleurs (shot in French in Québéc, an appropriate swan song), ushered in a slight but ultimately feeble redemption for the frustrated master. Jutra, ultimately, was a man whose mind might as well have been sliced in half by the English/French Canada borderline.

"Une autre vie est là pour nous, (Another life is there for us,)
Ouverte à toute âme fidèle: (Open to any faithful soul:)
Bien tard, hélas! à deux genoux, (Although late, alas! on two knees,)
Je rêve d'elle!" (I dream of it!)"

-Louis-Honore Fréchette (1839-1908), Québécois poet, songwriter, "Le rêve de la vie"

Jutra's life did not end happily. The victim of early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, Jutra committed suicide by jumping into the St. Lawrence River in late 1986, only to be found five months later when the river thawed, with a sign around his neck reading, "Je suis Claude Jutra" ("I am Claude Jutra"). It was with that chilling, tragic farewell that Canada and Québéc lost one of its most distinguished artists (and one of its most frustrated), a little more than a year after his American avatar, Orson Welles, succumbed to an unknown illness. His impact on the national cinema, or what there was and is of one, cannot be underestimated. What is key to consider and ponder, however, is Jutra's role in lassoing and valiantly maintaining a Canadian identity in his cinema. For those who argue in favor of his considerable influence, it was perhaps the first time a Canadian national identity in its cinema could be acknowledged. His best work is unmistakably Canadian, and even his more dubious work bears a Canadian stamp. Few if any can undermine the value and enduring impact of his masterpiece Mon Oncle Antoine. Jim Leach, in his 1999 book Claude Jutra: Filmmaker, the first comprehensive study of Jutra's work, writes, "Jutra's problems were hardly unique in the history of Canadian cinema, but this only made it easier to think that his 'sad fade-out' was less a personal response to a medical condition than a symptom of a cultural condition."

"There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless."

-Neil Young (1945-present), Canadian songwriter, "Helpless"

Donald Shebib: The Margins Aren't Nowhere

Donald Shebib scored a critical and commercial knockout in 1970 with his micro-budget independent film Goin' Down the Road, and it is a work that still remains canonical in the annals of Canuck cinema. It is difficult to think of other Canadian works that are quite as high on the canon as this landmark drama shot with never more than four people on crew on 16mm on a $19,000 CFDC grant and the director's personal savings. Its reputation is comparable even to that of Mon Oncle Antoine, which is apt because it embodies the Ontario/Maritimer identity in Canada the way Antoine embodies the Québéc identity. Shebib, however, never scored another success to even nearly equal that of this, his first feature. What sets this a notch above the rest is its place in the national cinema as its been delineated here, and the certainty of its Canadian identity. If we are making pale comparisons to American films, various critics made a point of branding it the Canadian Midnight Cowboy. This parallel is grossly obvious, imprudent and uncomfortable. The film has a dedicated reality that could only be the result of non-professional actors like the ones in the film being directed into miraculously near-flawless performances. In the leads, unknowns Paul Bradley and Doug McGrath (who has the voice of Robert Blake and the face of a failed Steve McQueen impersonator) star as Maritimer buddies Joey and Pete, two buddies from Nova Scotia who pack up and wheel into Toronto on the 1960 Chevy version of a wing and a prayer, in search of a better life. On the doors of the dilapidated Chevy are the hand-painted words "My Nova Scotia Home". The story, of course, sounds perfectly familiar -- but observations of how customized and tailor-made the story is, all in an effort to examine the sad state of affairs revolving around the lifetime relegation of the marginalized (specifically Maritimers) to anonymous humiliation and thankless positions in society.

There is a 1972 television interview with Shebib from The Pierre Burton Show included on my DVD of Goin' Down the Road, in which the filmmaker unabashedly admits to being "turned off" by the act of reading and claims to have been largely television-educated, as he deems reading mostly a source of fatigue, even though his knowledge of pre-1940's classic films is encyclopedic and his appreciation of history seems exceedingly impressive. Even though the screenplay of Goin' Down the Road is credited to William Fruet (who would pen Shebib's follow-up film Rip-Off, then make his directorial debut with the excellent Wedding in White), one senses that the earthiness and salt-of-the-earth qualities of Pete and Joey are a direct result of Shebib's natural directing ability to color brightly within the fine edges of Fruet's outline drawing. I think of Texan-American independent filmmaker Eagle Pennell's approach in films like the extremely similar The Whole Shootin' Match (1977) and Last Night at the Alamo (1983). Shebib's film and The Whole Shootin' Match are quite similar because they are both ultra low-rent buddy films, but never pander to expectations of what buddy film are and/or should be.

The performances in Shebib's grand debut possess a snappy level of folksy, gloriously unpretentious, down-to-earth repartee that is difficult if not impossible to write to this degree. Knelman writes, "[the characters] are forced to exist as freaks in a [Toronto] ghetto culture for displaced Maritimers" where they "cannot blend into the background." The personal, and uniquely Canadian, implications of the story thus become poetically political. It is almost a poetic justice, then, that this anglophone film that does for the Maritime what the poetically political Mon Oncle Antoine does for northern Québéc is ranked together with the latter francophone work as one of the great Canadian films of all time.

"Everybody knows this is nowhere."

-Neil Young

The most point-blank way to say it: This film is a Canadian Film tried and true, and Shebib's NFB documentary experience shows. Our remarkably real protagonists suffer great indignities at the proverbial hands of the dehumanizing Toronto, which is forwardly intolerant of "their type of animal," and we empathize so much so with them that, amazingly enough, we can almost condone the two going on the run from a petty crime that ends in violence with Joey leaving his pregnant wife behind at the end of the picture...well, to any extent by which that choice can be condoned. The film itself is about indignity in its very nature, suffered at the hands of "backwater folks" on the fringes of dehumanized, rapidly Americanizing cities. We watch how the boys, with only $26 to their name, are reduced to working in a bottling factory upon their decidedly untriumphant arrival. Plans have fallen through and dreams are drying up fast. Whereas Joey observes that they made more money in the bottle factor than they ever did in their Nova Scotia home, that is not enough to reassure Pete's hardening cynicism. They find their only true solace in the French-Canadian secretary of the factory-owner, who provocatively struts her way past the "charmingly primitive" working stiffs.

To use a favorite quote, from Robinson Jeffers, "Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice." Pete and Joey start off hungering for the precipice and end up gracelessly settling for the carrot. And then that carrot gets taken away.

Interestingly, Shebib's follow-up film Rip-Off looks at the flipside -- as Knelman puts it, that film is about people who have "the social advantages that Pete and Joey were victimized for their lack of," who "can't live up to what the media says their lives should be." I admittedly have not seen this particular film, but I know that responses to it were somewhat hushed. Shebib, however, seems to know that their are discontents on both sides of the coin, and duly highlights this point in what I have seen of his later work (including 1973's Between Friends, 1976's Second Wind and 1981's Heartaches).

I hold by the theory that it was thanks to Goin' Down the Road that later films like The Rowdyman (1972, the first film ever to be shot in Newfoundland), Paperback Hero (1973, shot in Saskatchewan) and The Hard Part Begins (1974, shot in southern Ontario) emerged as portraits of quixotic figures in small, hidden-away Canadian hamlets -- all with dreams of mobility in all that word's connotations. For Jim Leach, this group of films explored "the tension between American dreams and Canadian reality," though I disagree with him when he claims that these films are simply "distinctive inflections of Hollywood models." None of these three really measure up to the success and lasting shelf-life of their paragon of a predecessor, but Goin' Down the Road is a tough act to follow and all are worthy follow-ups and filmmaker responses to the literal overnight smash-success of Shebib's film. It is perhaps fair to say that Shebib's film awakened the flame in Canadian filmmakers hailing from remote parts of all the provinces. Below you can view the visually rich opening sequence of Goin' Down the Road, which was shot partly by acclaimed Black Stallion filmmaker Carroll Ballard, with legendary Ontario cinematographer Richard Leiterman (the brother-in-law of Allan King) credited solely as cameraman.

Shebib, by the looks of things, is preparing a sequel to Goin' Down the Road forty years after the original, entitled Down the Road Again, which is scheduled for release in 2011. He never again hit the triumph of his glorious debut and, in 1981, directed what could accurately be described as the female version of his hit, entitled Heartaches, starring Canadian-born Margot Kidder and Annie Potts. This film has moments of greatness, but fails to reach the heights previously achieved. One of the more intriguing works in his filmography is a film that he wrote, the World War II-set Wedding in White (1972), directed by Goin' Down the Road's screenwriter William Fruet, and starring Carol Kane, Donald Pleasence and Road alumnus Doug McGrath. Again, with this film we have another compelling story of marginalization and cruel relegation, this time not to a pair of disenfranchised country boys or working stiffs, but to the teenage daughter of a working stiff who finds herself raped, pregnant and about to be married off to a dirty old man in an emergency wedding to save and preserve her family's reputation.

Whereas Claude Jutra operates within the scope of history with great freedom, a filmmaker like Donald Shebib operates within the cages of a cold modernity with the same freedom, and both are equally valid. What is astounding to realize is that there is certainly reciprocity between the two artists' output.

"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love."

-Leonard Cohen (1934-present), Québécois songwriter

Frank Vitale: Valence Readings

The comprehensive nature of my exploration of Canadian cinema really started with the film Montreal Main (1974) back in August 2010. I was just starting to embark on my own feature-length film at the time and Montreal Main, directed by Frank Vitale, provided a boon and a true source of inspiration for me. A true work of self-reliance in filmmaking which looks and feels impressive by sheer virtue of its collaborative verve, Montreal Main opens with a byline which credits the entire cast with its creation. Right away, it starts with an impressively honest and thrilling admission to the entire cast's complicity in its brilliance. Shot on 16mm on a miraculous original budget of $17,000 (with $45,000 awarded later by CFDC for the film's completion), the film later premiered at the Whitney Museum in New York and is now considered something of (at least) a mini-masterpiece of Canadian cinema. The film follows photographer Frank (director Frank Vitale) and his motley crew of mostly gay male artist friends who live in the lower-rent part of Montreal's Main, as well as their acquaintances, the hip Sutherland clan, who live in the more residential, middle-class suburban part of the Main. Photographer Frank, who along with his friend Bozo (future director Allan Moyle) considers himself straight, becomes obsessed with the Sutherlands' 13-year-old son Johnny. The relationship is innocuous, mostly innocent and something of a paper tiger, which is proportionate to the film's understated approach to all of its material. Nothing really much happens in the central relationship in terms of direct action, but this relationship simply provides a catalyst. What is so brilliant, though, is that, in similar works about a man's adoration of a beautiful, innocent young one, like Death in Venice and Lolita, the author rarely if ever navigates the audience in an attempt to understand the other side of the equation, that is, the object of the lead character's desire, at least in any real psychological depth. Whereas it was more immaterial to those works, in Montreal Main, we are driven towards an attempt to understand the sexual confusion and ambivalence of the 13-year-old Johnny, and sometimes it even becomes more central than the sexual confusion of Frank. It is a film of attempts, often failed attempts as it bravely bows to the inherent complexity of the circumstances, but that does not make it any less penetrating. We know that, in some sense, the two fall in love with each other, but the substance of the relationship is beguilingly never clarified. There is a beautiful delicate balance and a kind of equilibrium achieved in this deceptively subtle tipping of the scales.

Montreal Main's sexual ambivalence continues a "grand history" of films in Canada with delicately handled homosexual subtext, and the delicate handling is salient and quite striking, and this feature is perhaps the only overt aspect of the film. Claude Jutra's A tout prendre (1963) and David Secter's Winter Kept Us Warm (1964) took great risks in confronting the subject of homosexuality on film at a time when it was even more taboo -- and also during the Canadian-cinema-as-we-know-it's infancy. The delicacy of the path and approach in those two early films, however, is more than a circuitous attempt to remain tasteful. There is a Canadian identity to be discerned when looking at Montreal Main, which was produced a decade after A tout prendre and Winter Kept Us Warm; it is not just that the dichotomy of Montreal's Main is as much of a character in the film as the people on display, but it is also, in a way, about Canada's ambivalence to its own persona, generally and in terms of its cinema. It often appears that Canadian cinema does not know what it wants to be. Montreal Main's characters do not truly know the inner workings of their own desires and, if they do, they are afraid of them and cower themselves away in some way, thus it is a "film of attempts" and ambivalence, ultimately emerging as a definitive Canadian film, and certainly one of the most artful the country has ever seen.

Also of note is the fact that Vitale, in his editing, masterfully mingles the rawness and immediacy of its stretches of verité-style performance with other exquisite, well-observed sequences that are almost Hitchcockian in terms of framing and montage-rooted tension-building (e.g. the scene involving Frank snooping his way through the Sutherlands' upstairs rooms). At every point, the audience is asking the questions it should be asking, not just about the film but about the frightening realms of the intensely personal we often dare not traverse, and about the people we hold close to us. I immediately watched the film again after my first viewing because I wanted to be taken back there and made to ask myself those questions again. There is also the clear admiration that Vitale has for his characters, who are all played by his friends. You feel Vitale's love for them to the extent that it fuels a desire to discover them more fully, even though they can be occasionally vexing, scary and often petty.

Montreal Main was resurrected just two years ago, restored (by Concordia University's School of Cinema and the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada) and given a series of screenings at various venues in various parts of Canada and the U.S. Even though the film scored with most critics, Vitale admitted to me that he did not know from where the suddenly renewed interest in the film was being generated. "I've asked academics about the film's new reputation, but I never quite get what they are telling me," he laughs. When I asked Vitale on the phone about his feelings about the film's relationship and strong bond to other earlier, similar Canadian works like Winter Kept Us Warm, he admitted, much to my fascination, to never having seen it.

Vitale followed Montreal Main with 1976's East End Hustle, a pulpy but somehow intelligently campy exploitation-type thriller also shot in Montreal, which seems a radical departure from the quiet, deliberate quality of his debut, but it is certainly a fascinating choice and I personally applaud going in new directions. Vitale, in our conversation, admitted to being embarrassed by that film now, stating, "I just wanted to make a film that would return its cost so that I could make another film after that. But the drive to make it was really practice. I wanted to learn how to make a regular film with a script and actors and all that. I realized after Montreal Main's critical success that I had not developed any standard dramatic filmmaking skills. East End Hustle's small following must be a result of the film's current distributor, Troma. That's the only thing I can think of to explain it."

Montreal Main also stars Allan "Bozo" Moyle, who went on to become a director in his own right, and who also appeared in Outrageous! (1977), another milestone in Canadian queer cinema. Moyle directed his first film, The Rubber Gun, which featured many alumni from Montreal Main. Moyle went on to direct films like the underrated Times Square (1980) and the fine Christian Slater-fueled youth movie Pump Up the Volume (1990), both in the United States.

Allan King: Canada's Reality Trip

Allan King was among a class of documentarians who exploited the elasticity of the form in ways that few other filmmakers dared at the time, coining the term "actuality drama" to denote the type of documentary film he patented. Known most for the trio of early "actuality drama" films Warrendale (1967), A Married Couple (1969) and Come On Children (1972), King would soon after bundle his direct-cinema documentary experience temporarily under his arm to helm a series of theatrical features, like the Depression-set saga Who Has Seen the Wind? (1977), the well-budgeted Universal picture Silence of the North (1981), shot in Canada's Northwest Territory and starring Ellen Burstyn, and Termini Station (1989), starring Colleen Dewhurst, before recently returning to his "actuality drama" roots with the digital-video works Dying at Grace (2003) and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005).

On the surface, the original three actuality dramas are direct cinema documentaries ostensibly in the tradition of Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles. What distinguishes King's work from those, however, is that King's films are even more about levels of performance. When I say performance, I am not merely suggesting the illusion that documentary subjects place in front of the camera as either filtered or juicier projections of themselves, nor am I explicitly speaking anything concerning the oxymoronic term "documentary reality," even though elements like this get peripherally explored in King's work. Like Frederick Wiseman's films, King's explore the inner workings of institutions, and an obvious analogy one might perceive is Warrendale to Wiseman's Titticut Follies, simply on the basis of subject matter. Critics of the time observed delightedly how Billy and Antoinette Edwards, the married couple of A Married Couple, were "wonderful performers." What is fascinating is that we get a portrait of King's given institution as theater and, with that in mind, there is reason why the term "actuality drama" is used in lieu of "cinema-verite documentary," and King's term is not the straining shibboleth some seem to feel it is. But King's films do belie the documentary classification.

The films are often structured to accommodate a narrative arc that fosters and heightens the classic drama inherent in their documentary platform; it is not an ordinary kind of arc. This was even more unusual and innovative then, when King customized and patented the technique, than it is today, as most of the verite documentaries of the time relied largely on a looser, more instinctual essayist brand of observational style in which it was the particular building of a message or a tonal perpetuation that most dictated the direction of the ultimate piece during the editing stage.

As Canadian film scholar and critic Robin Wood claims, "Through his unfiltered view and the way he pushes the boundaries of confined temporality and space, King allows life to progress unhindered by sentiment." Considering the claim I made just prior, Wood would suggest that the freeing of the material from a fiction filmmaker's customary imposed subjective investment opens the film up at both ends and allows it to breathe more than either an actual dramatic work of fiction or a documentary about the same subject would. And, at the same time, the works are not objective either. Ultimately, the suggestion I make about the plasticity of its narrative formalism renders, for me, King's form an entirely new one, neither true documentary nor constructed fiction.

Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company, for one, almost plays like a multi-character ensemble drama. King never shanghais the novelty of watching constructed actuality on the screen by staging interviews or inserting voice-overs (omniscient or otherwise) of any kind. Warrendale, A Married Couple and Come On Children also nix the formal interview format, respectively examining a home for troubled youth, the marriage nest and a communal house of free-spirited teenagers, with the latter of the three being the only created environment/institution. Frederick Wiseman examined similar institutions in another way entirely. To quote Wiseman about his own work, "I’m interested in how institutions reflect the larger cultural hues, so that, in a sense, is like tracking the abominable snowman; in the sense that you’re looking for cultural spoors wherever you go. You find traces of them in the institutions." Adam Nayman, in his recent essay about Allan King, writes:

"Like his contemporary Frederick Wiseman, King spoke about doing the majority of his work before the cameras rolled, inveigling his way into his subjects’ environment and getting a sense of its rhythms, and then handing things over to his crew. 'It’s like casing the joint,' he told me. King’s films are indeed rife with stolen moments, and yet one never feels (as one sometimes does with Wiseman) that anything is being taken away from the people on screen."

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE with The Simulated Shtetl: The Canadian-Jewish Identity Microcosm Informing the Canadian Cinema Macrocosm

Part 1 - The Bridge Between Two Nights: Ambivalence in Canadian Cinematic Identity, and the Silence of the North

2011-03-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

I want to extend my special thanks to the following people for their assistance in the research of this five-part article: Saul Rubinek, Frank Vitale, Karen Black, Stephen Eckelberry, George Kaczender, Jack Angstreich. I also want to thank my brother, who gave me the title of the Prologue, which is...

Prologue: A 49th Parallel of the Mind

C'est ce pont que je construis (It is that I build this bridge)
De ma nuit jusqu'à ta nuit (From my night to your night)
Pour traverser la rivière (To cross the river)
Froide obscure de l'ennui (The cold, dark stillness)
Voilà dans le pays à faire. (Here in the country to be realized.)

-Gilles Vigneault, (1928-present), Québécois poet, "Il me reste un pays"

As someone born and raised in the United States, and as one who enjoys a hearty intake of books and films, a great deal is heard about the "great American novel" and the "great American movie". One ultimately begins to question the litmus test by which an exalted status like either of these honors gets determined. Needless to say though, it is forever most every American writer or filmmaker's goal -- to hit that zenith, at which you truly characterize and represent the American national identity. But to what extent does the word "American" really play into the great work's identity? What does a work's national identity even mean, and does the same standard hold if one goes, say, north or south of the vast forty-eight state expanse? And more to the point, does the weight of that standard intensify in any specific case, and what are the ramifications of that?

Keeping that in mind, the concept of a national cinema is a curious one, and one might say a troubling abstraction. For natives of any given flag, “national cinema” remains shrouded in a veritable crazy-quilt of convolutions and conflicting agendas, all of which claim ties to nationalism. Also often stitched into this crazy-quilt are loaded distortions and subversions. Nonetheless, many tend to hold the position that a film should not just merely serve in representing a land, its society and its general sensibilities, but should instead fully embody and be them. Of course, shifting political climates, power structures and perspectives on history and popular memory enter into the equation when national cinema is discussed openly. Fascinating cases also enter the picture when things like Balkan cinema and what is breezily defined in rather generic and limiting terms as “third world cinema” are considered. This paradigm also applies for regional cinema. The key question that is often asked vis a vis the national cinema criterion is, “It’s good, but is it really a (fill-in-the-homeland) film?” Undue pressures are thus placed on filmmakers to deliver Cinema for Motherland. Members of the cinema cognoscenti have even gone as far as to claim that the existence of a national cinema is totally apocryphal.

"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."

-Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

In large part due to the works of documentarian, National Film Board founder and wartime Film Commissioner John Grierson and, slightly later, animator Norman McLaren, the Canadian film industry was truly born, although there were certainly lesser known progenitors of the country’s cinema working prior to them (these men are documented in the 1974 documentary Dreamland: A History of Early Canadian Movies 1895-1939 directed by Donald Brittain). However, it was never a nation with a solid foundation in terms of its film industry until the 1960’s; it should be noted that it was also around this time that Michael Snow's landmark, structuralist experimental and avant-garde epics began to emerge. By this time, the film-board’s base had moved from Ottawa to Montreal at a time of political unrest within the “two solitudes of Québéc.”

Although Canada had a fine background in documentary cinema, it was without a doubt overwhelmingly gratifying for Canada's non-entity of a film industry when ultra low-rent independent fiction films such as Claude Jutra's A tout prendre (1963), Larry Kent's The Bitter Ash (1963), David Secter's Winter Kept Us Warm (1964) and Don Owen's Nobody Waved Good-bye (1964) surfaced with little or no financial assistance from official production sources in Canada, and when most everything else of substance (and of lengthier run-time) carried a signature National Film Board of Canada impramatur. Even before these, feature films like Sidney J. Furie's double-bill of A Dangerous Age (1957) and A Cool Sound from Hell (1959), and René Bonniere's Amanita Pestilens (1963, produced by famous Ottawa film personality Budge Crawley and featuring a young Genevieve Bujold) seemed to vanish from sight, remaining unseen even today.

When the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) was established in 1967 to initiate and stimulate a fully functional, financially sound film industry in Canada with the help of millions of dollars of government funding, and it was under its auspices that directors like David Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman rose to later prominence. The already existing production company Cinépix often worked in cooperation with the CFDC. Attentions tended to shift, however, largely toward works intent on establishing a late-to-arrive Canadian identity in the cinema, and this yielded rather compelling results. This, it is important to note, was all under the aegis of the government. Heads of production were answerable to the Canadian Parliament.

The last six months or so, I have been heavily involved in exploring Canadian cinema in depth, and most of my film and literature intake have revolved around this subject, although there is not a great volume of works formally written on the subject. However, I continue to observe how the Canadian films I digest are all so profoundly and intensely personal, and in an altogether different way than most other works of international cinema when considering country of origin. One can easily assess the reasons for Canada's astounding brand of personal cinema. For one, the late-to-arrive Canadian film industry sowed its identity with the help of novice, passionate directors at a time when equipage was becoming more portable and when the American film industry was itself entering a bold period of personal filmmaking due to shifting audience interest.

One of the things I find fascinating is that each province of Canada has exactitudes in terms of cinematic stamp and sensibility, as one can distinguish, for example, a Québéc film from a British Columbian or an Ontario film with little to no effort. In the case of Québéc, unrest was in full bloom amongst Québécois at the outset of Canada's film revolution, during which time the long-ruling Québéc leader Maurice Duplessis (whose ultra conservative reign was known by many as La Grande Noirceur, or “The Great Blackness”) died in office, setting the stage for the struggle towards a new rule centered more around a balanced, pluralist socio-political climate. This era, which covers a turbulent span of six years in Québéc, is known as the Quiet Revolution.

On a personal note, the regional low-budget independent cinema that I love and admire so much is so often embodied in Canadian films of this time, but this time did not come without its quagmires. I intend to further examine this fascinating history with examples of films, excerpts from publications I’ve been reading and conversations with actors Saul Rubinek and Karen Black, and filmmakers George Kaczender and Frank Vitale, all of whom were working in the Canadian film industry at this key moment in its history. I also intend to examine the considerable, lasting impact of American funded tax-shelter films shot in Canada, as well as how they affected Canadian films that were devoted to a Canadian national identity of the time.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO with Northern Authorship: The Canadian Master Class Directors

Peaking My Head Out of the Cave

2011-03-11T04:26:00.000-08:00

Hello again, dear readers! It has been many months since I have written anything of substance, let alone anything on this blog. My life, however, has been filled with duties, exciting adventures and labors of love, including my feature film The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour, which is due for release this summer.

I have decided to inaugurate this new era of the ConFluence-Film Blog with a typically lengthy article about my growing passion for Canadian cinema, and the observations I have made and questions that have arisen for me about national cinema. I have been researching this for awhile now. Also coming up is that long-promised Joseph Losey survey article by guest-writer Aaron Hollander, which will be premiering on the blog in the next couple weeks.

Soundtrack Spotlight #6: Nunzio (Lalo Schifrin)

2010-11-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

Nunzio is a rather special Soundtrack Spotlight case to me because I am very close friends with David Proval, the actor who played Nunzio in the 1978 Universal production (filmed, by all the accounts I have heard, during one of the hottest New York summers on record, with both the 1977 black-out and the Son of Sam playing a role, albeit minor, in the film's production). Every time I have seen even short clips of the film, it gives me a profoundly privileged feeling in knowing that the Nunzio character speaks to aspects of David Proval's persona that I have seen emerge endlessly from him in reality, and I am grateful to have known him and to have been one of the beneficiaries of his warmth and trust. David is one of the biggest mensches I have encountered; he truly went out of his way to help give me a start in film world and has encouraged me every step of the way since I have known him. It was through him that I also have met the film's writer, Jimmy Andronica, who also plays Nunzio's brother in the film and is a native to the part of Brooklyn in which the film is shot, and I have spoken with the film's director, Paul Williams, on the phone. It actually doesn't end there, either. I just finished shooting a fundraising trailer for the little boy (now grown man) who played Nunzio's 5-year-old nephew. So, I am not exactly going into this with an air of impartiality. I think highly of the film because, in it, someone I have grown to love and admire as a friend plays a character you grow to love and admire as the creation of a gifted actor whose greatest part this is...and that is including his performance in Scorsese's Mean Streets (third billed after De Niro and Keitel). He plays Nunzio with bold humor, fascinating nuance and gravitas--three ingredients that rarely function so well in confluence. Watching this performance made David one of my favorite actors and I sometimes have gotten a little emotional just watching choices he is making as an actor in this film. So, okay, this is not a review of the film or the actor in the film, or at least it shouldn't be. My prejudices are out in the open about the score, but I nonetheless think an average listener would get a great deal out of Schifrin's usual mastery.

Lalo Schifrin's music complements the film in spades. Funny story: I was simultaneously disturbed and delighted at one point to pass a stand on West 34th Street in New York City playing a badly dubbed kung-fu flick featuring Nunzio's theme on the soundtrack. I was flabbergasted, considering that Nunzio is not exactly a movie known by many. Schifrin scores the film with tracks and cues of great bravado and piano-based strains heavy on pathos (yes, versus bathos). One often cannot help but think that Bill Conti's score from Rocky had at least some influence in Schifrin's approach to scoring Nunzio, but I think it stands perfectly well on its own and is certainly one of my favorite scores of the composer's long, prolific and distinguished career (along with his unreleased score from The Christian Licorice Store, which could very well be the next Soundtrack Spotlight). The film tells the story of a "mentally slow" Brooklyn grocery delivery boy/man who thinks he is Superman, who enjoys a puppy-love attraction to a bakery cashier, played by Tovah Feldshuh. My favorite lines in the film: "Superman don't take tips" and "You break those eggs and I'm gonna break your head, Nunzio!" I am not going to break down technicalities of the score for this, like I usually do. This score is pure whimsy and emotion, nothing much else to really say. Just enjoy it, really. And for the retrophile, you've got the occasional disco elements which are especially present in "Theme from Nunzio" and "Candy Store Frenzy".

Download the score here. Thanks to the boys at Isbum's Place and Vintage Vinyl for the upload. My favorite track is perhaps "Nunzio in Love," with "Main Title" coming in a close second.

Keeping Company: A Survey of Now Defunct Production and Distributon Companies

2010-11-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

People have often used the term "retrophile" in describing my tastes and creative proclivities. After all, I was one who was tickled with a nerdishly giddy (or giddily nerdish) delight when seeing that Tarantino used the old Universal Pictures logo of 1967-1974 to open Inglourious Basterds, and when noticing that Fincher used my favorite old Paramount logo of 1968-1975 to open Zodiac. Both of these instances were cause for me to exclaim, "If I made a major studio picture, I'd always use one of their old logos to open it!" For a Warner film, I would have most likely used Saul Bass' logo of 1975-1984 (or, even better, the one from their "A Kinney Company" era in the early 70's), and for a Columbia film, the one used in the late 60's. And then there are the great United Artists logos: the "Transamerica whale's tail" or the one with the spooky Jerry Fielding music.

Another instance of my deep-seated desire to exploit opportunities to be esoterically retro occurred when a friend of mine completed a 3-hour film. I was ecstatic that he would be premiering it with an Intermission and envisioned in my mind a 60's Roadshow-style presentation, with Overture, Intermission, Entr'acte and Exit Music. I even suggested at one point that we hand out programs the way they used to at epic movie roadshows. The idea was not met with even nearly equal enthusiasm. I understood why this was impractical. No one would have gotten the reference or even the fact that it was a reference at all.

Since I am not making films nearly on the scale of a major Hollywood production, I recently settled for opening my upcoming film The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour, a sort of elegy to "journey films" of the early 1970's, with a 5-second MPAA certificate claiming my film as having been rated GP, a short-lived rating signifying "General Public" which was used only from 1970 through 1972. Alright, so a little self-indulgent, I admit it. It's a quick five seconds at the header of my film (once upon a time, all films in the U.S. opened the first reel with an MPAA-rating header). I figure audiences can hang in with me for that long at the very outset, even if they don't get the reference. At one point, I seriously considered opening the film with the logo of a defunct production company, but stopped short, considering the possible legal ramifications of this idea, and considering that existing companies owned the defunct companies' catalogues. It was fun, however, deliberating which one I would have used. Some of the options I considered are below. That said, whenever I see a film headed up by these logos, I feel automatically privileged to be viewing works specifically of (and often for) their times.

Cinema Center Films (1967-1972) (Assets currently held by Paramount/CBS) As far as I am concerned, Cinema Center has one of the coolest animated logos I can remember. You can view it on YouTube above. Spearheaded by CBS for the release of the Doris Day vehicle With Six You Get Eggroll in 1967-68, Cinema Center would soon become a formidable production house, turning towards the risky and/or controversial (e.g. 1970's The Boys in the Band, Something for Everyone) as well as commercially viable genre pictures (e.g. Little Big Man, The Reivers) not to mention the tame and family friendly fare (e.g. Snoopy Go Home, Scrooge). CCF was eclectic. Something for Everyone, directed by New York stage sensation Harold Prince, actually happens to be one of my favorite films, but Cinema Center's contribution to American filmdom of the late 60's and early 70's does not stop there. Other Cinema Center films of note include: Adam at 6 A.M. (1970), an unfairly dismissed and most curious Steve McQueen-produced entry into the "journey film" cycle featuring a very young Michael Douglas in a Five Easy Pieces-type role; Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), an underrated Herb Gardner-penned character study featuring Dustin Hoffman as a disillusioned rock music composer; The Christian Licorice Store (1971), an unusual, simultaneously emotionally distant and involving exploration of a professional tennis player's decline into shallow living featuring cameos by Jean Renoir, Monte Hellman, James B. Harris and others; This company was the numero uno front-runner when I was still considering using a defunct company's logo to open my new film. Other films of note: The April Fools (1969), Prime Cut (1972), Blue Water White Death (1971), Figures in a Landscape (1970).

National General Pictures (1967-1973) (Assets currently held by Warner Bros.) It is very appropriate that National General Pictures follows Cinema Center Films because NGP was the official distribution company for CCF's films. National General did helm nine in-house productions, including one of my favorite films, Daniel Mann's A Dream of Kings (1969) starring Anthony Quinn. In 1973, the company attempted to merge with Warner Brothers, in hopes to acquire and take over. When this plan of action failed, National General closed its doors. Ironically, it is Warner that now owns their in-house productions. Films of note: Executive Action (1973), Up the Sandbox (1972), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Todd Killings (1971), The Grasshopper (1970), Poor Cow (1967), The Baby Maker (1970).

Cinerama Releasing Corporation/ABC Circle Films (1966-1974) (Assets currently held by Walt Disney with video rights to MGM, with select titles under license to miscellaneous other video distributors) When someone says Cinerama in mixed company, it clearly does not illicit the memory of an actual production company, but rather an ambitious "stretch" 70mm process made popular throughout the 60's with films like How the West Was Won and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (both 1963), Battle of the Bulge (1965), Grand Prix (1966) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Cinerama Releasing is to ABC exactly what Cinema Center Films is to CBS. Cinerama Releasing even released a number of certified 70mm Cinerama productions during its tenure, including Song of Norway (1970), Krakatoa East of Java (1969) and Custer of the West (1967). Cinerama also released such films as the Oscar heavyweight They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), Kotch (1971) and a great many others, making it by far one of the most prolific of the defunct companies I am surveying, and also one of the most eclectic.

Avco-Embassy Films (1949-1994) (Assets currently held by Studio Canal through Lion's Gate Films, as well as select titles under video license to Anchor Bay and Image) You know Joseph E. Levine, don't you? Come on, you've gotta remember this guy! After all, he's the "great artist-producer" who "presented" films like 8 1/2, Contempt and the Hercules films to American and British audiences. Yes, the first thing you saw in a Fellini film was not "Un film de Federico Fellini," but instead "Joseph E. Levine Presents". A great deal has been said and written about Avco-Embassy CEO Levine and it is far from flattering. For one, a close friend of mine, production designer Paul Sylbert, wrote an entire book called Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Motion Picture about his titanic battles with Levine over the production and final cut of his film The Steagle (1971). Other accounts say likewise inflammatory things about Levine as a businessman and as an individual of low moral fiber. However, many of the films that his company Avco-Embassy released throughout its five-decade tenure are nothing to sneeze at. The Graduate, The Producers, The Lion in Winter, Carnal Knowledge and The Ruling Class were just five of the myriad of films produced and distributed by Avco Embassy Pictures, which went belly-up in the mid 90's due to bankruptcy.

American International Pictures (AIP) (1956-1980) Do the names Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff ring any bells? Arkoff was the man whose well-known business model was ARKOFF: Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy and Fornication. Later, the "Peter Pan Policy" was adopted at AIP. These were the precepts of that policy: (1) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch; (2) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch; (3) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch; (4) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch. The conclusion? Zero in on the 19-year old male! Thus, American International was responsible for all those fun little Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies, grade-C horror and sci-fi pictures like The She-Creature and The Terror, pale Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, motorcycle gang pictures like Hell's Angels on Wheels, counterculture freak-outs like The Trip and Psych-Out, and youth exploitation pictures like Wild in the Streets, Gas-s-s-s and Riot on Sunset Strip. AIP products, however, were the training ground for many of the filmmakers that would storm the Hollywood Bastille following the success of Easy Rider, including Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, John Sayles and a great many others. Their later years were spent producing slightly more mainstream efforts like The Amityville Horror, Shout at the Devil and The Island of Dr. Moreau, before biting the bullet finally in 1980, selling out to Filmways which later became Orion.

Cannon Releasing Corporation (1968-1993) (Assets from 1969-1979 currently held by MGM, and assets from 1980-1993 currently held by Warner Bros.) The names Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus ring in infamy within the halls of moviedom. The term "schlockmeisters" was often synonymous with the Israeli entrepreneurs who turned a once-profitable independent filmmaking company founded in 1969 by Christopher C. Dewey and Dennis Friedland to foster films like Joe (1970) and Sam's Song (1969) into the "den of high class" responsible for Death Wish 3, 4 and 5, Missing in Action 1 and 2, the unbelievably schlocky camp musical The Apple (1980), the Indiana Jones knock-off Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986) and other "super prestige" titles. Under Golan and Globus' reign, the aforementioned ethereal art film Sam's Song was re-edited into a trashy action-suspense yarn called The Swap (over which the film's star Robert De Niro rightly sued). As an aside, it is ironic that the recut version of that film so designed to make the film more commercial features less of De Niro (he's only in the new version for about 14 minutes versus the old version's entire 83 minutes) and more of the acting chops of "dynamic thespian" Anthony Charnota (never heard of him? there's a good reason for that). Golan and Globus did try their hand in the world of the arthouse film and mainstream drama with releases like John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984), Andrei Konchalovsky's three-film cycle Runaway Train (1985), Duet for One (1986) and Shy People (1987), Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) and Godard's embarrassing King Lear (1987). Cannon's legacy in schlock is known before any of the titles representative of that schlock. By the late 80's, Cannon was showing considerable signs of great financial strain, exemplified by a key event: the budget for their A-list production for 1987, Superman IV, had been cut literally in half from $36 million to $17 million just days before the film was to begin shooting. In the midst of a slew of lawsuits, a Golanless Globus closed Cannon's doors in 1993.

Orion Pictures (1978-1992) (Assets currently held by MGM) In the wake of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate in 1980 and the fracas thereafter, disgruntled ex-United Artists employees, some leaving willfully and others defrocked and sacked in the wake of changes of the corporate guard and a no-frills merger (read: takeover) with MGM, headed over to the auspices of the newly founded Orion Pictures, originally partnered with Warner (until 1982) essentially to continue the work they started at UA. It was a profitable and often artistically fruitful venture, spawning a great many formidable Oscar contenders, including a few that actually brought home the bacon, including Amadeus, Platoon, Dances With Wolves and Silence of the Lambs. Orion was also the home of Woody Allen's 1980's output, including Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. The company, due in large part to creative accounting which caught up to the ailing studio, as well as a string of ambitious flops that went over-budget, Orion folded and closed, even in the wake of two consecutive big Best Picture Oscar scores and hits.

RKO Radio Pictures (1928-1957, 1981-1987) (Assets currently held by Warner Bros. in the U.S. and Universal in the U.K.) RKO's logo is indelible in the minds of American history, let alone American film history. This was most heartily demonstrated by its prominent display as a backdrop during the last act of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In all honesty, what can you say about the production company that released Citizen Kane, Top Hat, King Kong, Bringing Up Baby and Murder My Sweet? It's already been said. I am going to focus on the company's later incarnations, however, because not much is known widely about the later rebirths of the company. I remember watching D.C. Cab (1983) with Mr. T when I was a youngster and, already a cinephile (albeit a different breed of one), I was puzzled by text in the opening credits of that film which stated that it was an RKO Production. Research well over a decade later (thanks to the then-developing powers of the Internet), I discovered that the later RKO worked in cooperation with Universal Pictures and released five pictures, including the Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton picture The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). An attempted hostile takeover led to it ultimately being acquired by a capital firm, thus it went defunct once again. It was reborn yet again, notably to release the landmark 1992 independent film Sundance festival hit Laws of Gravity directed by Nick Gomez. More nasty treading of corporate pirate waters led once again to its demise.

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A possible spin-off of this article could be companies that started small and grew Popeye-style with a little corporate spinach. Examples of this? Lion's Gate is a production house started up by Robert Altman in 1970. The company would release Alan Rudolph's Welcome to L.A. (1976) and Remember My Name (1978) as well as Robert Young's Rich Kids (1979), all of which Altman produced. Look at the company as it exists now. It's a titan which has grown in size exponentially! Part of me wonders what Altman thought of this. Being Altman, he probably did not care one way or the other. New Line Cinema is another example. It started as a small production house on Manhattan's 14th Street and Second Avenue, importing foreign and art films for American release. It also branched out into releasing American indie productions like Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982). Enter Ted Turner...the rest is, as they say, history.

But I have always avoided news featuring stories about full-body-contact games of corporate roller hockey. I need an interest in that like I need a hole in my head. What does interest me is the risky material these often short-lived companies chose to champion and, in some way, shove into the popular consciousness. I am one curiously afflicted by a deep-seated premature nostalgia, and seeing these logos at the head of films is like full-cerebral massage. I nestle into another time completely. I would have gladly placed the Cinema Center Films logo at the start of my film The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour...but I fear a game of full-body-contact corporate roller hockey. And so it goes...

The Accidental Feature: A Director’s Statement on The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour

2010-11-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to William Cully Allen, a true rescuer, to whom I am grateful.

For the first year I lived in New York, a recurring dream seemed to taunt me and haunt me at least one night per week. In it, I had completed shooting a feature-length film almost entirely on my own – and the great thing was that there it was, just waiting to be put together and edited, there in this dream world, and the greatest source of comfort was just in knowing that the pieces were just ready to be given a working-over. That alone was enough because the possibilities about its outcome were limitless. It was exciting. The world was so immaculately open. Various other dream scenarios would fashion themselves around this feature-film that existed only in these dreams, and the project often stood as the incentive, the oasis, from the worries and the weight that had cumulatively built up around my life and manifested themselves in these dream narratives.

I would soon awaken and, in that place between asleep and awake, I would ruminate about how very lucky I was to have a film on the proverbial “editing table,” just waiting to be put together. In this in-between place, I romanticized it and likened it to a browbeaten aspiring writer, returning from a day “in the trenches” at a dead-end job and plugging away on an Underwood or Remington Portable – the novel (or, in this case, the film) acting as a possible tunnel from hardship and obscurity, ultimately to all manner of security, even if it failed. When I became fully conscious, I realized that I had no feature film ready to be edited. It did not exist. It was only a dream. I had nothing, zippo, bupkus, kadoches. I didn’t even know what this “dream film” had been about. It could have been about anything for all I knew. The point was that it wasn’t there anymore as it had been when I was asleep. For all I cared, it could have been shot on a $100 used consumer Handicam purchased at Best Buy or Wal-Mart. It didn’t matter. I just wanted it to exist so badly.

I would then go about my day in vague disappointment, wishing that somehow it existed or that it would exist soon. I suffered from a general whopping creative block around this time, and really had nothing I found worthwhile doing. The dreams just compounded my frustrations. I was rather demoralized and felt I had dried up. Not to be melodramatic, but I thought it was a permanent condition. I thought then that maybe my recent Jewish religiosity had softened my drive to make films. No, I then thought. I knew I had the fire, and the drive to make an ambitious project like this hypothetical film happen. It just wasn’t there yet, but the worst part was that it looked like it was not going to arrive for awhile, if at all. It wasn’t like me. I was, at one time, so prolific and churned out things like it was nothing. A lot of stuff I made was bad, but I was constantly working, and had an intense need to keep working. Those days seemed no more. I hit the panic button. Just go out and shoot something, I told myself, and keep shooting and shooting and shooting until, for better or for worse, the feature at last would exist. “Foolishness,” I would say to myself, “That’s just silly. It wouldn’t be a film at all, just a desperate stunt that no one would watch.” The dream continued to play out over and over, the in-between place between asleep and awake continued deluding me and months passed me by. With the loss of a creative drive, I felt the sadness of losing a best friend.

By early summer 2010, I was ready to chuck the filmmaking thing and resign myself to rabbinic studies forever. It seemed I was more passionate about that than my desire to make films. I can’t do it anymore, I told myself, and went around justifying what people perceived as a startling decision…with an internal numbness. Kremer is quitting film! If a project I found worthwhile turned up later in time, I told myself, I might try to pursue it, but that was that. A then-recent unpleasant experience in Los Angeles had also served in disillusioning me and rattling my cage. I decided definitively that the very world of filmmaking was not for me. I thought, one might say pretentiously, of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" once again in relation to my life, “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life." These words had a habit of returning at various points throughout my quarter of a century to haunt me again and again.

That’s that, then. Goodbye, filmmaker Daniel Kremer. Hello, Rabbi Daniel Kremer. And off I went, throwing myself headfirst into the new pursuit, got myself into a good yeshiva and tried not to look back. A profound part of me remained profoundly depressed, though. It was not easy realizing or believing that I had dried up. I never thought it would happen, let alone to such a degree. I found myself becoming alienated around friends who were still creatively active, even though I tried to hide this feeling from them and make it seem that, with the exception of the news of my new career path, all was the same. It wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still pursuing becoming a rabbi and that fulfills me equally as much as film. But I still felt like a widower. My long-time wife, cinema, had died and left me as half and alone. I sat shiva for it in a manner of speaking, but tried to take my mind off it. I cried for its loss. It was perhaps one of the hardest periods of my life thus far. I had never before wanted to cash in the chips with film. I had never given up on much of anything. No one has known the degree I felt this until now. I didn’t tell a soul. I alluded to it to a single friend. It was damn hard hiding the fact that I felt an emptiness and it was the first time I lost total belief in myself. I loved film and it had flown the coop on me. My muses jilted and cuckolded me into a cruel timidity.

In July 2010, I received a call from William Cully Allen, my ex-professor, close friend and a loyal member of a repertory acting company I kind of helped form. His spirit always managed to make me feel better, no matter what mood I was in. Bill always seemed positive and full of energy. I envied him for it. He told me that the time had finally come to make the documentary that was his lifelong dream project: a bio of his doctoral advisor Bibhuti Singh Yadav, the controversial philosopher of Indian religions. Bill told me, “You’re coming to India with me on a trip. We’re going to do this thing.” The prospect of a trip to India made me burst with a new excitement. I didn’t know about the filmmaking aspect of it. I doubted myself so much, and my capabilities. I’d certainly shoot, but then doubted I would have the energy to put it all together when push came to shove. I was also traversing a new path now and felt trepidation at any aversion or detour on that path.

I thought about it. The idea of a second film was brought up. Hey, we would be in India together, an amazing location. I would be there with an actor I had worked with a total of four times. Picture yourself (and Bill) on a boat on a river. The River Ganga. Danny in the sky with cameras.

For the life of me, I couldn’t thing of a single blasted thing to do the second film about. Just go over and shoot something. You never know what will happen until you’re on-site the camera starts shooting. I started writing scenarios in script form for this second project. As far as I’m concerned, it was all total nonsense. I sent these to a couple people. I didn’t like what was happening. I got blasé about it. “If I shoot something, I shoot something. If I don’t, that’s okay too. I have another life to return to.” I started packing for the trip on a shabbos, and still I had not a clue about what this second film would be, or for that matter if it would be.

I boarded the plane to Zurich. I listened to music nonstop, my old “writing music,” and started thinking long and hard about the other movie. I really wanted something to happen and I really wanted to make it happen. I felt crippled. The non-Chassidic part of my head kept saying, “Fuck it! You’re finished! What you’re doing right now is a farce! You’re not going to come up with anything! Quit now!” I fell off into a troubled sleep. Upon waking, the first thing I thought was, “I just have to do this. I’ve gotta come up with something. This is make or break. Bill’s ready to do something and I’ve gotta just do it.” In my head, I got to quoting The Music Man…at a pivotal moment, Robert Preston, about to be tarred and feathered if he doesn’t prove himself to the people of River City says, ”Now think, man. Think!” Do or die. Again, this is not wanton melodrama. This is really what I was going through.

Then, the clouds parted, and suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The memory of unfinished business blazed a glorious trail of light through my brain. The memory that I had long wanted to do a film that paid tribute to and echoed the “journey films” of the early 70’s American New Wave, the films that had so left a mark on me even as a pre-teenager building the encyclopedic knowledge people have come to know me for. Five Easy Pieces, Scarecrow, Two-Lane Blacktop, O Lucky Man!, Zabriskie Point, countless others. I remembered something Bill had told me about his own life, i.e. having hitch-hiked across country at the age of sixteen in the late 60’s. Lightning had struck! I had my answer, I had my film. Furiously, I began writing. When I got off the plane in Zurich, I immediately e-mailed my best friend about the film story. He had heard tons of bad ideas come out of me the weeks preceding the flight to India. At last, there was one that stuck.

I arrived in Delhi and had a night to stay there before flying to Varanasi the next day to meet Bill. There he was, waiting there outside the airport door, standing amongst a solid congregation of Indians awaiting the arrival of a dignitary, ready to lock me in a friendly embrace, next to Pappu Rai, an assistant and longtime friend of his who would ultimately play a part in acting and producing the India leg of the film. Pappu did more for both films than anyone has yet given him credit for. I told Bill my idea. Originally, it seemed there was some trepidation, but he seemed open to the concept. I was whisked off right away to remote rural India, to the village of Tulasipur, where the Yadav family resided. The next morning, the sacred, enduring (and banned) karaha ritual would be performed for the benefit of my camera. I would be one of the few Westerners to have ever seen this performed live. I felt like Marty McFly to Bill’s Doc Brown. On the roof of a half-finished school in remote rural India, on two wooden hammocks by nightfall, Bill went off quoting Dylan tunes and reciting a variety of other things that found their way into the film. This was the beginning of something good, as the old song says.

The karaha ritual I will never forget witnessing, until my dying day. What’s more, though, is that something unexpected and frightening happened during it. The ritual involves, partly, immersing bodies in sacred flames and immersing one’s limbs in boiling hot cauldrons of milk. In the middle of the ritual, Bill was called up to have it done to him. He had no idea this was going to happen. Afterwards, a little shaken up, he said to me, “You’re not using that footage of me in the documentary.” I was crestfallen, because it looked so spectacular. Then, he said, “You’re using it in the other movie!” Flattered that he entrusted me with such amazing footage for my own work, and rather stunned, I excitedly started planning everything around this central sequence.

We returned to the city of Varanasi and started shooting more and more, sometimes even with the benefit of extras. One night, Bill and I stayed up until the wee wee hours of the morning. He confided in me that night about his experiences on the road in the 60’s and the things he had seen, and entrusted me with his story, openly and (it seemed) willingly. I told him why the film was so important to me and how it was make or break. He understood because he had felt the same way about the documentary for years. He felt an equal stagnancy. It felt like a real connection and bond was made between director and actor. We became co-conspirators. I was riveted by what he told me that night. I was reawakened. I was rebirthed into filmmaking. I was reinvigorated. That was, until what I thought was the arrival of disaster.

I had shot a great amount of footage for both projects. All I needed to complete the second was a single shot in a field of tall grass in the Yadav village – the climactic emotional moment for my lead character. The patriarch of the village was not keen on this idea. Initially, he forbade it. Then, he softened but said we could only do it under his watchful eye. It was the pivotal moment of the film, the character’s finally emotional realization. I shot what I could of it, but a mushroom cloud went off in my brain. All that shooting and now I don’t have my ending! I would be leaving to return to the U.S. in a day’s time. I had no time left. I didn’t have a film. I was angry…angry at the Yadavs, angry at being reinvigorated only to be cut short so close to the finish line. I tried to keep my cool, but I think I was visibly upset and Bill knew it. I was so close and so very far away. It was never like me to quit, but in my mind I couldn’t think of anything to do to cover up the lack of an ending. Keep in mind, now, that at this point in time, the second film is still, in my mind, a short film and not yet a feature.

The next day I was put on the plane with assurances from Bill saying, “You’ll think of something, Dan. You always do. It’s going to be a masterpiece” and all that. I didn’t believe him. I felt patronized. I was angry at the world really. The movie’s finished, I decided. Screw it. I threw in the towel. I had no ending. Nothing could change that. All the work of the Indians who had assisted so generously in the making of the film, all my efforts, all Bill’s efforts, all for naught. I admit now that that was a fatalist, defeatist attitude. But the project was so important to me now, and a door had been closed right in my face.

Then, another magic airplane moment occurred. I came up with a way of using the footage that had been shot in the field by using an alinear chronology in the film. By shooting a frame back in the U.S., the film could be saved. I was relieved and a smile was able to return to my face.

We started shooting the U.S. scenes, which I had written in script form. Everything in India had either been improvised or “written” on the spot (I’m not putting those parts down because they do work). Glenn Walsh, whom I had directed in three previous films, only one of which has been ever screened, was conscripted to star as Bill’s character’s old friend and the film would be framed partly by their discussion at various parts, with the use of Glenn’s fantastic, rustic family house – the house his grandfather had built. Truly magical moments transpired on that set to me. I called upon friends of mine to crew. Aaron Hollander returned as my DP from A Trip to Swadades and shot most of the American sequences. Andrei Litvinov, the first person I befriended in my freshman year of college, recorded sound. John Gross, my roommate of three years in college, was an all-purpose man. Various people stepped in and out of roles, but it was good to be back in the saddle with people I loved and trusted. The set was pure fun and everyone was in good spirits. Once I again, I felt the same invigoration.

Now the funny thing was that this project just grew, and grew and grew and grew. It was without a doubt an accidental feature-film which just kind of happened. I originally didn’t envision this as a feature-length film at all. But even after shooting with Glenn Walsh in the U.S., the ideas just came fast and furious and I wore Bill down with additional shoots -- in Manhattan, on Long Beach, reschedules because of rain-outs, trips up to Montreal. He occasionally had doubts, I know, about how it was all going to come together. In his words, “I just do what you tell me to do. I never know how it’s all going to come together until I see the finished product and you always make it great.” This is the man credited as co-writer, harty har har. Upon first preview viewing, his faith and enthusiasm were restored and the validation of my confidence about the film was exactly what I needed at that point. We filmed a Castaneda-esque dream sequence on the amazing acreage of actor K.J. Linhein’s heavily wooded property. I was able to integrate into the film another piece of unfinished business -- the fact that I had long wanted to do a film in some way about Castaneda. Everyone was just a joy to work with and I am grateful to everyone who helped make it happen with me. They helped me prove myself to myself. That’s the best gift anyone could have given me.

I grew apart from my yeshiva studies as a result of the project. I was rushing to get it done in time for a rough cut test screening of the film in California. It was an extreme crunch and I barely got it finished in time. The rabbanim at the yeshiva were perplexed by what seemed like a sudden shift in allegiance, but gave me the benefit of the doubt. The first California screening of the assembly cut was phenomenal. It went through the roof and was met was a standing ovation. I stood before a crowd of the film’s admirers with a new humbleness. This was funny because my "other life" was taking hold. As a result of my “mussar” (the Jewish practice of self-improvement), I heard one the rabbis telling me, in my head, to keep old practices in check. I had the tendency of being a ham at Q&As, answering questions that people weren’t even asking, basking in the fact that I access to a captive audience. This time around, it felt extremely strange to me. It was truly a case of a double life vying for equal chances at the spotlight. I talked to them about how important the film was to me, and how it couldn’t have come at a more critical time for me. It also begat other ideas for films I want to make. My anthem for this film, a song that I played over and over again while actively working on the film was, in fact, “Before the Parade Passes By”.

Before the parade passes by
Before it goes on, and only I'm left
Before the parade passes by
I've gotta get in step while there's still time left
I'm ready to move out in front
Life without life has no reason or rhyme left
With the rest of them
With the best of them
I wanna hold my head up high
I need a goal again
I need a drive again
I wanna feel my heart coming alive again
Before the parade passes by...

I am still editing the film as of November 1, 2010. I am making the final adjustments to the rough cut. It’s almost there. It needs some massaging as they say. But I will say that this film was a big, bold adventure in its making. My eternal gratefulness is extended to William Cully Allen. Without his faith and belief in my abilities at a critical time, I might have resigned myself permanently to a life asking those saddest words of tongue and pen, “It might have been.” He assisted in helping me find the “derech” (path) that I spoke of in my previous blog entry about Chassidism on film. Thanks also to the Eldridges, the film's producers, for everything they have contributed. The film would not exist without them either. To me, the film speaks about the status of the perpetual dissenter who kicks defiantly against the universe and longs heart and soul for the past that can no longer be, much like it seems most of my characters do. More so, it speaks to that figure’s branding in society. The film will ultimately be transferred to a 16mm print then transferred back to nonlinear for its final cut. It’s a film that, itself, longs for the past that can no longer be, shot on video, transferred to film, only to see its inevitable return. The film itself undergoes the struggle its character undergoes.

So what else is there to say? I finally got that feature I had literally been dreaming about…the one that had tormented and taunted me for a year's worth of dreams. Full consciousness now is greeted with the reality that I do have a film on my “editing table” and the possibilities are limitless and the world feels immaculately open to me. And thanks to the realization that no one says I can’t be both rabbi and filmmaker, we’ll add a “Baruch Hashem” for good measure. For the non-Jews who don’t know it, look it up, ‘cause that’s how I feel. The Rabbi Filmmaker is truly born!

Soundtrack Spotlight #5: La Course du Lievre a Travers les Champs (Francis Lai)

2010-11-01T11:54:00.001-07:00

Bar none, never again will you hear another composer's score sound so extraordinarily reminiscent of the most idiosyncratic work of Morricone...and wind up doing it so right, with originality to spare! The vastly underrated René Clément's La course du lievre a travers les champs (1972) is one of my favorite crime films, and Lai's dolefully dulcet strains throughout his scoring of the film demonstrate that, on occasion, he could eclectically reach well far beyond the soporific constraints of the scores he composed for Claude Lelouch and popular American box-office soapers and romancers like Love Story and Mayerling. The chords that end most of Lai's phrases almost literally scream "Morricone!" and most everything at the very least echoes the prolific Italian scoremaster, but there is something about this score that transcends and defies accusations of empty-headed mimicry.

The film was released in the U.S. in late 1972 under the new title ...And Hope to Die, dubbed into English and cut from 140 minutes to 99 minutes. The original French title translates as The Chase of the Hare Across the Fields. If you ever get the opportunity, go out of your way to see it, especially if you are a crime film enthusiast. The film is available on DVD in its full version in France (I own the Russian disc). It features Robert Ryan in one of his last great roles before his death the following year, along with Jean-Louis Trintignant (just fresh after the critical and commercial success of The Conformist), Tisa Farrow (yes, Mia's sister), the stalwart Aldo Ray and the gorgeous Lea Massari as Sugar. Based on a novel Black Friday by crime fiction luminary David Goodis (upon whose "Shoot the Piano Player" the Truffaut film is based and upon whose "Dark Passage" the Bogart film is based), La course du lievre a travers les champs is by far among the most unusual works of its kind. Filmed in Montreal and rural Quebec, the film tells the story of a hoodlum who seems a misfit fink even among his own kind. On the run from his former gang, who he has somehow double-crossed, he falls in with a motley group of hoods, shepherded by a gravel-voiced ringleader Charlie (Robert Ryan), who are all hiding out in a country-house and shoulder-deep in a grand (read: grandly fouled-up) plot to kidnap a dead girl and holding her for ransom under the pretense that she is alive. I openly recommend this film as well as Clément's Le passager de la pluie in the same breath as any of the Melville crime-genre masterworks like La cercle rouge.

The film consciously opens the way Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opens, establishing early on that much of Clément's film and not just its score is, in part, a pastiche (or perhaps just simply a meditation) on a director he clearly admired. It would be more than a decade until Leone honed his aesthetic on something other than the Western genre, so an acknowledged use of Leonian influence on a crime film seemed at the time, undoubtedly apropos and intriguing. The film and the score, however, are more than just works that hinge tremulously on the viability of other works. Lai's interlarded use of the pan-flute and a man's melodic whistle to season moments and construct character within musical modalities is novel and admirable, even if one wrongly chooses to reduce it to a case of monkey-hear-monkey-do. Clément places Trintignant's Tony/Froggie character to consciously exist within filmic genre constructs, and within a world invaded by reminders of childhood and the act of play. The score reflects this curious stylistic and directorial pursuit -- and it becomes revolutionary because a score of this time, far before a score like Goldsmith's 1990 Gremlins II soundtrack, has the ability of commenting on a film's sense of self-awareness as well as the handling of the other themes therein that, at first glance, have nothing to do with such reflexivity.

Download the score here. This, again, is not my link. Thanks to the now sadly defunct Isbum's Place and its archives. I recommend the following tracks especially: "Generique Fin" (which innovatively stews the Morricone strains with elements of Jarre), "Main Theme," "Finale/End Title" and "La Course du Lievre".

Vilifying a Rebbe: On Subculture vs. Underworld and the Orientalization of Chassidic Jewry in American Cinema

2010-10-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

Day in and day out, each sunset and each dawn, I find myself one in a sea of oscillating black hats; a single wave, contributing to the rhythmic ebb and flow of black and white in heavy motion, and the mellifluous collective murmur of engaged voices swelling around shtenders (podium-like study posts), shteiging feverishly. I am a Chassidic Jew. Technically you're not supposed to call yourself a Chassid, but for the sake of specifying my so-called "insider's perspective" on the matter at hand, it is probably requisite that I affix this label to myself early on. Mostly contrary to my general upbringing, I have taken it upon myself to openly and full-heartedly accept a Chassidic lifestyle as a baal teshuva Lubavitcher Chassid. A baal teshuva is a Jew who has returned to a life of observance. I am a full-time yeshiva bokher (Jewish seminary student) and have begun pursuing a rabbinical ordination (semicha as it is formally called). I pour over Talmud and Tanakh day and night and, contrary to what many might have you believe, I live a happy and fulfilled existence met with mostly little resistance. To some degree, I knew that I had been headed to this point of Jewish observance all throughout my life, and Judaism has always been central to my identity.

I am especially unusual because I am a Chassidic filmmaker. Oh yes, there are others of us (most notably another Chabadnik, Marc Erlbaum of Philadelphia). I do not portend to know precisely what my kindred spirits have weathered or will weather in terms of quasi-clever quips leveled at them by others, but I have been called both a "Chassipster" (yes, that is a friend-patented term meaning "Chassidic hipster"), "Chassidic hippie" and "the soon-to-be Matisyahu of independent cinema". Filmmaking to me is my parnassah (a means of survival) but also a form of avodah (in this context, a service that serves some higher purpose). Up to now, I have made only a single film about Jewish issues, all the rest tackling secular topics, albeit often with a keenly Jewish perspective. I am currently at work on a script, ironically entitled Parnassah, which will mark my first feature-length foray into Jewish-themed filmmaking, namely a look into the world of a Chassid which defies earlier permutations of the Chassidic film.

It upsets and disillusions me that not just seldom but in fact never has a truly accurate portrait of Chassidic Jewry been offered up maturely in American cinema -- at least none that I know of. The autopilot button that American filmmakers, outsiders all, seem to push when depicting what is to them almost an underworld renders a highly unfavorable and insensitive view of Chassidism -- an oppressive subculture populated by all manner of stereotypes, from uptight and often grossly unhappy religious zealots to servile women without persona which make the filmmakers go to absurd lengths to make it clear to the viewer that, "Hey, it looks like they obviously missed out on the whole women's lib thing, heh, nudge nudge?". Aim is taken at the flagrantly obvious and the surface-level with any attempt at complexity left discarded to amp the box-office receipts. There is a reason that neatly wrapped packages are attractive to the eyes. An often-used plot device is that one or many of these stock characters are bent on restricting the freedoms of a "free" protagonist who is made to appear free in the most banal of ways. People have often come to accept the illusion that there is a single type of Chassid...the kind that Annie Hall's granny envisions Woody Allen as, at the dinner table scene in Annie Hall. One size fits one and all. That's one of the reasons why that scene, to me, is extraordinary and, in its own way, profound about the image the world has of practicing Jews.

Even in films that take on an overall more "sensitive" approach like 1981's The Chosen, directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, the son of a conservative rabbi, films often end with a character leaving, at least in some degree, the cloistered environs of the Chassidic world. 2002's The Believer observes Talmudic discourse in a yeshiva as close-minded and closed off to anything that could even remotely ask the bigger questions that emerge in such a dialectical event, and serves in the film to explain partly why our Jewish lead character becomes a skinhead neo-Nazi. The fairly recent film Holy Rollers does not even seem to know, even in any simplistic terms, the hashkafot (sects) that comprise the entirety of the Chassidic world. Behaviors of one hashkafoh will differ in the minhagim (customs) from another hashkafoh. The 2003 low-budget, shoddily produced indie film Mendy is just another tired drama on the tired subject of a restless Chassidic youth looking to free himself from the constraints of the Chassidic world. I am not saying that such stories do not exist. I admit that I am privileged to have lived a wholly other life before resigning myself to my current one, but these truly are the only types of Chassidic stories that are told in American film. Fleeting references in films like this year's It's Kind of a Funny Story are placed carelessly for audiences to gawk and laugh at people, like Chassidim doing things they would not likely do (e.g. taking acid and roller-blading over the Brooklyn Bridge). There is reason why those photos of farm animals smoking cigarettes were never funny. Cinematographers are also keen on photographing yeshivas as dark, bat-cave-like, candelit rathskellers lit only by lush amber hues every other here-and-there. If I studied in a place as dark as that, I'd be like Mr. Magoo by age 35. I am reminded of the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, a documentary history of homosexuality in cinema. Everyone interviewed observed how it was once the key trend in mainstream cinema for gays and lesbians to die by a given film's final fade-out, either by murder or suicide. And so it is the trend that Chassidim will leave the fold by the final fade-out in films about Chassidism.

Even when films are not explicitly about Chassidism and merely possess a definitively Jewish voice, a strictly borscht-belt sensibility is the presiding state of normalcy. Well, either that or the films become pale Woody Allen clones. Jewish humor is vital to our culture, without a doubt, but in American cinema, it assumes such a front-and-center status almost as a means of safety. I am reminded of an actor friend who wrote a script with explicitly Jewish characters, set around the world of horse racing. When pitching the project to Hollywood types, he was told by producer Jennings Lang to "cut the Jewish bit and you got a deal". To most producers, Jewishness is just often too strange and foreign to warrant the posting of funds for a "Jewish film". It's the Orient, the unknown, that spells danger in a world that gambles with investments the way the film business does. A non-Jewish friend of mine is keen on the term "Jewish magic" because of the very insularity with which we, to him, seem to conduct our spiritual affairs. This is to say nothing of the ultimate level, which of course is Chassidism.

Keep in mind that I am not stating that the yeshivishe world and the Chassidishe world is free of stringency. That is an equally absurd illusion and I am not in any way looking to maintain it. It is a challenge and one that, for good reason, most Jews choose not to withstand or ever even attempt. Chassidism is clearly not for everyone and it is no wonder why my new direction has turned a lot of heads and incited panic in many people I know. Implicitly, there is this barrier. What can't be said, done, etc.? What would offend him? Better be careful. How do I act? Questions like this seem to quietly consume those I have chosen to keep close in my life. Valid points all, granted, but a lot of this nervousness is informed by the distorted way media portrays my shady "underworld". At the same time, there is a fascination the world has for the way my brethren and I live. We're among the collective proverbial car crash? No one wants to look, but they cannot look away.

I specifically remember watching Sidney Lumet's 1992 film A Stranger Among Us (or, as many critics dubbed it, "Vitness"), I became actively angered and offended at the depiction of Borough Park Chassidim. I might add that it is not easy to offend me. Melanie Griffith's female cop cruises through Brooklyn in a car and Lumet prefers the tiresome old "babe in Jewland" approach, streets teeming with Hebrew signage, young boys with swinging tzitzis and/or payis, parades of women with strollers, and beards beards everywhere. This is of course accompanied by klezmer music so over-the-top in its placement that it, with very little effort, becomes a heightened parody of itself. This is all coming from Sidney Lumet, a Jew himself, the son of a popular Yiddish theater actor. The film is known as a particular low-point in the director's career, but it speaks to often how Jewish directors picture their own concealed identity when they tackle Jewish subjects, and how alienated they have become from the shtetl that reared their ancestors on a mamishe machmeer (extremely stringent) yeshiva experience. Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street explores Jewish assimilationism in America at its most critical juncture, in the America of the 1900's. A dream project of mine would be to adapt one of the most scathing and complex Jewish assimilation stories ever told, Abraham Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky, to the screen one day.

I do not wish to reveal very much about my next project Parnassah. It just suffices to say that Chassidism will just simply be in this proposed film, and twists and turns will present themselves, but never in a way that impugns the entire way of life as every single film with a Chassidic subject seems to have done blithely. Sure, I live a life far removed from the lives most are used to observing or even noticing. History, among other things, has taught Jews, not just Chassidim, to be cautious and more insular than most ethnic or religious groups. Another kind of history informs popular conception, i.e. that which is presented in media. As a Chassid then, I have something ahead of me to accomplish. This also engenders something else. On a pay-job shooting a fundraising trailer for a film to be shot in Borough Park, Chassid after Chassid would pass by, catch a glimpse of me on the camera dolly with payis ("sidelocks") untucked and tzitzis out and look at me with wonderment and pointed confusion. Like I said, there are other Chassidic filmmakers, but no one has truly emerged as a voice for our startling minority. Sure, the fact that in many hashkafot (sects), filmmaking may very well be asur (forbidden) might have been a factor. A great deal of weight is placed on "hamavdil beyn kodesh l'chol" (separating the holy from the secular). I happen to belong to a sect that thankfully encourages it more, as Lubavitchers believe that much of everything can be used for tachlit hakadosh (a holier purpose). I think the reason for its asur status is that no filmmaker has delivered an honest portrayal of their lifestyle, therefore no worth can be seen for the greater good, and for it being an avodah. Cinema can aspire towards higher purposes, and I (along with others of my kind), are out to achieve that. We are in search of emes...in search of truth and honesty to the extent that film can capture it.

There is friction between the dubitably termed "civilization" and one of its under-realms. I am not going to say that there has not been the occasional difficulty of existing fully in the real world. I have never been able to fully return to my old way of living one-hundred percent and this has deeply affected me on an emotional level, especially as one afflicted by the most intense premature nostalgia. My old self is now just a shadow. As Rabbi David Aaron eloquently says, "We are not human beings but human becomings." It is the friction that is truly interesting. I am resigned, currently with no question in my mind, to live the rest of my years this way. I have seen my fellow bokherim (students) undergo the quandaries of occasional rebirth. Rebirth is always depicted in culture and the natural world as a joyous event, a celebration, a bacchanal. What of rebirth as trauma? What of the story of someone of deep faith and piety who does not wish to escape with any permanence into a new world, but to simply take a brief jaunt into it, bearing in mind his conduct and duty as a Chassid...and the ultimate trauma this Chassid undergoes. I have a stirring story in mind. The political ramifications of this, to me, emerge without them fully meaning to.

This is all to say that subcultures, not just Chassidism, have been branded too often in both Hollywood and independent American cinema as underworlds -- mysterious underbellies of society from which types can easily be manufactured, even by those who should know better.

POST SCRIPTUM: For an interesting and compellingly complex non-filmic portrait of the lives of ex-Chassidim which runs thankfully counter to that of film's one-dimensional portraits, visit unpious.com. One of my brother's students at Stony Brook writes for this blog.

Calling Morocco at 2 A.M.: The Fundamental Reasons Why I Hate Jean-Luc Godard

2010-10-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

My apologies for another long absence from the blogging world. I am in post-production on my upcoming feature film and a deadline is looming. However, I figured that since most of this article had been written in another form completely (mostly on Facebook), all I'd have to do was organize the points a bit and post it on here.

To quote Mark Borchardt in the popular 1999 documentary American Movie, "Is that what you wanna do with your life? Suck down peppermint schnapps and try to call Morocco at two in the morning? That's senseless! But that's what happens, man..." Or likewise, to quote from another favorite documentary Crumb, "How perfectly G-ddamned delightful it all is to be sure."

So what does all that have to do with Jean-Luc Godard and my hatred of him? In my recent Facebooking, I posted a status update in response to certain things I had been reading in the articles reviewing this year's New York Film Festival. The status update was an impulsive, impassioned and sincerely felt sentiment that erupted in a heated debate and a flurry of responses. I wrote, "Daniel Kremer thinks Godard needs to quit already. No one ticks me off in cinema (for all the wrong reasons) more than that pretentious sack of hot air who is idolized just because he has a few so-called 'classics' to his name. If you want French New Wave, check out some Rivette, Truffaut or Rohmer instead." Okay, so I was kind of looking for trouble in a sense. I was inviting conflict and scrutiny, and playing the provocateur a bit. So what? I liked the irony. The act of posting that update in and of itself was rather Godardian. I responded at one point, stating that "no filmmaker has enjoyed such flagrant display of titanic ego and misanthropy."

Among the criticisms levelled at my statements: "What about James Cameron?," "Godard is self-conscious, but Rivette isn't? Resnais? Godard's pretentiousness is worse than Truffaut's sentimentality, Chabrol's pandering, Rohmer's arch-Catholicism? Please...," "Film, like rock music, is so much a populist art form that oftentimes films and filmmakers are reduced to a vulgar reactionary quip in a Facebook comments box," "It's the idiotic critique that every film student from here to Tokyo feels empowered to offer up on your average legendary octogenarian cineaste. Spare us all."

Then, out of a comment I made that I have often been tempted to don a pair of shades, an unlit cig and a strip of film, take a photo of myself to mimic the famous one of Godard and caption it with 'I too can be look like an egomaniacal, arrogant reprobate who thinks he's Cool' came my favorite response: "Why do you make movies, Dan? To be thought of as cool? To be praised for your vision, your genius? To get laid? Only you know the answer to that. Just like only Godard knows for certain why he made Vivre sa vie, 2 ou 3 choses..., Le Mepris, Masculin feminin , Pierrot le fou, les Carabiniers, A bout de souffle." This was followed by theorizing that I hated Godard because he was politically Marxist in his work.

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The Guardian critic Xan Brooks wrote an article entitled "No Joy in Godard" about Godard's newest film Film Socialisme and its premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival. He writes, "Jean-Luc Godard continues to haunt the wings of the Cannes Palais. There is little hope of arriving at a consensus over his latest (and reputedly last) film. Some say Film Socialisme is an eccentric masterpiece; others that it's an eccentric mess. File me in the latter camp. My sense is that old age has soured Godard: he has grown so disdainful of his audience, and society in general, that he can barely be bothered to invite us in anymore. Again, I fear I was duped by the title. Isn't "socialism" about inclusivity, about pulling together and meeting as equals? Film Socialisme has no interest in that. It is Godard's arrogant repudiation of the world around him; a burst of lofty non-communication. Crucially, the subtitles are rendered in what he has described as 'Navajo English', a kind of semiotic sloganeering that strips out the verbs and teeters on the verge of nonsense."

This is the type of thing that is said most about Godard's latter day work, including his previous film In Praise of Love. So okay, here's a for-instance. Writer Thomas Hardy at the end of his career felt much the same way as Godard now seems to, but at least Hardy welcomed his readers to share in his disillusionment and to lament it with him. He still told compelling stories that refused to alienate his readers in bold strokes. Godard pushes us away. So Mr. Godard is much older than I, and has experienced so many more years, but one who subjects an audience to what is described above in the Guardian should have his or her ego checked by an egotrician. And yes, egotrician is a made-up word on my part.

What was startling and fascinating for me to discover was that Truffaut and Godard had a major falling-out in 1973, which precipitated in Truffaut writing Godard a 20-page letter lambasting his behavior. Truffaut writes, "Jean-Luc, So as not to oblige you to read this disagreeable letter to the end, I begin with the essential: I will not enter co-production in your film. Second, I am returning your letter to Jean-Pierre Leaud: I have read it and find it disgusting. It is because of this that I feel that the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my view you behave like shit." In this letter, Truffaut went continued calling Godard out in degrees of “shit” for, among other things, trying to seduce his female actresses and calling French producer Pierre Braunberger a “dirty Jew.” Truffaut continued:

“Anyone who has a different opinion from yours is a creep, even if the opinion you hold in June is not the same one you held in April. In 1973, your prestige is intact, which is to say, when you walk into an office, everyone studies your face to see if you are in a good mood. You have never succeeded in loving anyone or in helping anyone. Other than by shoving a few banknotes at them."

Truffaut then added in the letter of all the times he went to bat for Godard, helped him financially especially in Le mepris when Truffaut was asked to replace Godard and refused. He also told Godard that he was jealous of him, and included passages from a letter in which Godard demanded money from him for the production of 2 or 3 Choses.... The letter ended with “In any case, we no longer agree about anything.”

In 1977, he did a talk with students and reviewed his career and said that he was relieved that his films after A bout de souffle were failures. In his mind, he felt it kept him from becoming what he thought Truffaut had become: someone who “Talks to nobody, except to Polanski”. Godard felt that Polanski and Altman films “pretend to be intellectual when it’s pure merchandise”. He felt their style was dishonest. He felt that Truffaut was part of that group.

I am one who steadfastly believes that personal and artistic life should be separated. What do you do about Wagner or Ezra Pound, who were raging anti-Semites, or any legion of others whose personal views do not accord with one's own? I freely admit however that, as a Jew, I find value in both Wagner and Pound. But it is when personal life shrilly eclipses the artistic life yielding masturbatory work that the product(s) and the individual behind it cannot avoid intense scrutiny. What is identified as "joie de vivre" in his early work, to me, looks like a lot of back-patting, the success of which hinged on people's latent need in the 60's for that type of freedom. Pierrot le fou is the closest he has come to my liking him. Even Jean Eustache, whose La maman et le putain (1973) took us through a similar milieu, speaks to more of a humanity and an artist's commune with his audience than any of Godard's work.

I have no issue with Marxism or Marxists really at all. Many of my favorite artists have been far left of center, and I am rare among my kind as an intensely religious liberal, a left-wing Chabad Lubavitch Chassid, and a Zionist all at the same time. It's kind of complicated. Wouldn't it be? I take no issue with the fact that Godard is a Marxist and that he's made "political cinema" and beloved as a polemic. What bothers me, however, and what really "cheeses me off" about his work is that he makes films like he expects automatic commendation from intellectuals, complacent and comically indifferent anger from the "capitalist pigs," the middle class and its sell-outs, and impassioned cries of hurrah hurrah from fellow artists and cineastes...for what are really and ultimately stunts. It's like filmmaking on auto-pilot. You cannot make Marxist films and be a flagrant narcissist the way he is. It's not Marxism anymore. I cannot wrap my head around those mincing, pompous, cutesy stunts he uses in his films, even ones as fleeting as the opening "film from the cosmos" title-card in Week End. And that's really what they are...stunts. As much as people try to glean gold from them, they are like most everything else from Godard, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. His almost sociopathic personality, which everyone blithely characterizes as temperamental artist syndrome, is just the cherry on the cake for me. It just compounds my hatred of him.

But my hatred really does begin with the work (although I believe that his work and personality go hand in hand), which if we are talking about why I dislike his canon, the hatred should begin there, but one should always seeing from where that type of work stems. For instance, Vivre sa vie is beautifully shot and keep in mind that I am not underselling Godard's technicians. I love most all of cinematographer Raoul Coutard's work. But as for the actual film, I have seen similar stories told better elsewhere, with more heart and honesty than that film. There is no doubt Truffaut saw Godard as a genius in his work, but I really do think he saw his friend's reprehensible behavior in life undermining his artistry. Nowadays, it is like Godard's favorite toast, when he can bring himself to be around people, is "Here's to art in vacuums...and the people who toast it!"

His omnibus episodes in Paris vu par and Amore e Rabbia are laughable compared to his compatriots, and these are the only times his work can be explicitly compared. Chabrol, who one of my Facebook debaters identified as "pandering," really showed up his overpraised contemporary in the former. Godard's episode in that film about a love letter sent to the wrong male suitor, or whatever it was (it was so forgettable to me), was the very epitome of tired and tiresome.

Yeah, I really dislike no one in film as much as I do Godard. Alright, maybe M. Night Shyamalan, but that guy is just a universal joke in general anymore, so it almost kind of goes without saying. People think I'm just being contrarian and vainglorious or whatnot when I communicate my vehement dislike of the man and his work. Someone I know threatened to disown me as a friend if I didn't take back my "Godard is a hack" comment. I generally think that Truffaut, more accessible as he is and more commercial as he is (and, yes, perhaps cloying), is a much more successful type of filmmaker. His films are not always great and yes, I dislike quite a few of them as well, but even the ones I dislike still feel like they probe the depths of what fascinates, moves and inspires him as a filmmaker and as a human being (which, even before the duties of being a filmmaker, is first and foremost in its own duties, because the quality of life you lead ultimately, even if you're hermetic, speaks to the kinds of films you make and I don't think anyone can deny that). Rivette's films, good or bad (but most often good in my opinion), often speak to something so intensely personal and deep rooted, and become politically profound as a result, almost inadvertently. I couldn't believe how quickly the 13-hour Out 1 (and most of his long movies) just kind of flew right by. To quote another indie filmmaker, "If you make a film to be liked, it’s not your film anymore that’s being liked. It’s what you did to get liked. I don’t know how you can have worth as an artist if you are full of it as a person. I don't know how." My mantra: Be a mensch first and a filmmaker later, even if you're angry and embittered at the world and the people in it.

I don't take issue with Marxism. I feel like getting out of this country because, yes, as a political animal (surprise surprise, peoples' assumption about my aversion to politics is incorrect), I cannot stand living in this country anymore, in the current climate of Obama-bashing, middle-class racism and intolerance of progressivism for the sole reason that it comes from an alleged "radical black man" (I've seen people lambast him with very little education on the state of things to back it up) and the fever-pitch moral corruption by pop culture and corporations of people my generation and younger. I had to listen to an hour and a half of party-orgy talk from a group of teenage girls on the subway the way back from JFK after my India trip, while they sat directly in front of American Apparel ads of a scandalously young girl in bra and panties. This is not to mention the counter to all this, which is the Bible-beating of America's Breadbasket to smear the lives and livelihoods of those with whom they disagree. Everyone and everything in this country is just ridiculous to me now. This is coming from a Chassidic Jew. Amazing, no? I am devout, but not at the expense of my fellow man. Okay, all that I just said was said with great ferocity. However, I just don't make films about overtly political things, because I don't want to give my work expiration dates. If a political statement is made, it is mired thick in the heart of a story. Rivette would have inspired and exhilarated me enough that way had he just done this alone. Would you rather see Godard's brain-bleedingly pretentious, laughed-off-the-screen-in-1987 King Lear rather than something like Rivette's L'amour par terre (1984) or Truffaut's The Green Room (1978) which, even though they are recognized as respective failures, are ten times more fascinating than any of Godard's 80's drivel?

Making inaccessible films is on the shoulders of its maker. Rivette gets accusations of inaccessibility and that is something I have never understood when you compare him to the likes of JLG. So if Godard wants to suck on his stogy or a cig and "call Morocco at two a.m." (when most people are asleep and not able to pick up the call) because it fullfils him in some way, count me out of being open to picking up that call even if I'm awake. That's senseless! But that's what happens, man. How perfectly G-ddamned delightful it all is to be sure.

India Projects Posted on IndieGoGo! Please Support My Upcoming Films!

2010-08-26T09:59:00.001-07:00

By clicking here, you can help me so very much by contributing funds and leaving comments on the funding site for my exciting upcoming India film projects. Even by leaving comments and showing interest in the site by responding to my updates, you will be helping me get the project featured on the IndieGoGo homepage, which can lead to others contributing funds if you are personally unable. Even one comment helps more than you know. It's up to you. These are great films just waiting to be born. This is a real grass roots effort and I need your help in planning the films' releases and film festival lives just right. And for independent filmmakers, I highly recommend IndieGoGo.com. It is an excellent resource!

My upcoming article, entitled "The Schnook, the Schlub and the Schmendrick: The Anti-Antics of Stiller, Sandler and Carrey" will be posted within the next couple days and Soundtrack Spotlights will continue this week as well!

AGAIN, PLEASE HELP ME IN ANY WAY YOU CAN! I APPRECIATE IT MORE THAN YOU KNOW!

Trailer for The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour

2010-08-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

Hello from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India!

I am making two films here, dear readers, a documentary tentatively titled Paduka: The Footprint of the Guru and a fiction piece that will be titled The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour (which is supposed to be a tribute title to psychedelic literature of the 60's because this is a tribute to the 60's "journey films" about a man going to remote rural India to find the unknown, unmarked gravesite of an American "guru" named Teschlock who took the main character under his wing as a teenage cross-country-hitch-hike runaway). The lead is being played by William Cully Allen (A Collection of Chemicals and A Trip to Swadades) who is over here with me. It is going to be a Castaneda-esque film, exploring the remains of the 60's idealist in search of his master. The film is very much based on the actor's real life story! The documentary, about the fascinating, extremely controversial life of low-caste philosopher of religion Bibhuti Singh Yadav is some of the most exciting material with which I have ever worked. Stay tuned for more details! These two projects are the first things I have worked on in over eighteen months!

Soundtrack Spotlight #4: Viaggio Con Anita (Ennio Morricone)

2010-07-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Viaggio Con Anita (Travels With Anita, also known under its American title Lovers and Liars) is yet another strange and unlikely film that I saw when I was very young, maybe too young. Even at a young age, I was mystified by the fact that Goldie Hawn, at the very height of her popularity in the United States, following a string of soaring late 70's hits, would agree to star lead opposite Giancarlo Giannini in a highly unusual dubbed Italian sex comedy. It donned on me years later with an obvious answer: a paycheck and a free trip to Italy. Why not, right? The film did not score well at all with critics, at least in the American and British press, and the movie soon vanished into obscurity.

I still today find the film to be something of a pleasure to view, perhaps a guilty pleasure, with more than a few great moments. Its dazed, desperate tonal confusion is endearing and, amazingly, works in the film's favor. And look at the names in the credits! Claudine Auger and Laura Betti co-star, Mario Monicelli directs (Big Deal on Madonna Street and Casanova 70 were both respected films, folks), Tonino Delli Colli shoots and Ennio Morricone scores. The latter is one of the most fascinating aspects of the film. You can often tell very easily that it's a Morricone score (it has the earmarks), but it often feels antithetical to much of his work around the time he scored this film. I mean, hey, Ennio must have been scoring like 400 other films the weekend he scored this one, but this particular score, even though it may seem dated to most these days, is one of his most intriguing and original, not to mention underrated. When I sent the film's main theme via e-mail for a friend to listen to, he told me that he hated it because it sounded like the theme song from a warped, failed children's TV show from the 70's. I wouldn't say that, personally. I then sent him another piece from the soundtrack, entitled "Sull'amaca," which uses a cello like one strums a guitar, which he loved. I might add that I believe "Sull'amaca" to be one of the sexiest love themes from that period of cinema, punctuating a passionate hammock love scene between the two leads.

Other aspects of the score are intriguing as well. Morricone uses a spry harpsichord in many of his cues and he also takes the score into surprisingly mournful directions. The film's last act deals with Giannini covering up the death of his father to Hawn, stowing her away unknowing to rot in a hotel while he deals with the repercussions of his father's sudden passing. Morricone accents these sequences with a treatment of one of the main themes except with melancholic trumpet offset by strings in responsa (and, in "La Ragazza del Padre," a slightly distorted guitar sound). The album as a whole makes excellent travel music, if you ask me. I mean, the movie it scores is a road movie.

As a bonus, Morricone's score from La Cugina, which I have not seen, is included as well. The scores have connecting tissues, but La Cugina, to me, isn't nearly as intriguing as Viaggio con Anita. Also, savor the so-bad-they're-good funk songs "Move," "Good News" and "Sorridimi, Sorridimi". Close your eyes and make your believe you're in some disco in Idaho. Yep, it's that good.

Download the score here. This, again, is not my link. Thanks to Brainiac's Sleazy Listening blog for this upload!

Soundtrack Spotlight #3: Busting (Billy Goldenberg)

2010-07-15T11:17:00.001-07:00

Okay, for this Soundtrack Spotlight, I'm givin' you even more Goldenberg. I feel, for at least these two posts, it is my duty to institute a Goldenberg revival because I really feel he is one of the finest film composers ever, and one of his finest scores is from the 1973 police buddy action/comedy/drama Busting, starring Elliott Gould and Robert Blake, and directed by Peter Hyams (in his directorial debut).

Last month, the Busting soundtrack was released for the first time on an official, legitimate disc. This soundtrack is extraordinary. I saw the film last year at Anthology Film Archives on an edited-for-TV print that had seen its better days (the film actually broke midway through). Hearing Goldenberg's score in a theater, no matter the quality of the print, was exhilarating in and of itself. There has never been a score for a film like this that is quite like this. It is, with every bit of honesty I can muster, totally and utterly original, but still manages to integrate the staples of 70's action-film musical composition. In my previous Night Gallery soundtrack post, I said that, with this particular score, Goldenberg achieves something that Elmer Bernstein tried to achieve throughout the entire decade of the 70's but never managed to really pull off (the closest he ever came was his Report to the Commissioner score). The liner notes make note of the fact that Goldenberg's orchestrations were extremely unorthodox, particularly for the time. Like how soundtrack-heads know there is the Mancini Sound and the Goldsmith Sound and the Williams Sound and the Barry Sound and on and on and on, there is most certainly a Goldenberg sound, and, for me, it's irresistible, and no better evidence could be given than his score for Busting.

Tracks I want to particularly call your attention to: "The Chase" and "Nailing Rizzo" open the same way, but go in different directions with a pulsating action-scene theme. I can't recall better chase music in a film from the time. Savor the jarring bongo sound and miscellaneous "noises" in tracks like "The Search" and "Home Alone". Alternate compositions of "The Chase" theme can be heard in "Busting the Club" and "The Electra". Enjoy!

Download here. Note: This is not my link, but another score-head's link. Thanks to Vagos.FM.

Soundtrack Spotlight #2: Night Gallery (Billy Goldenberg)

2010-07-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

I have recently decided not to limit my soundtrack reviews to a weekly feature. There are just too many great soundtracks out there, and so little listening time to limit this to just one per week. I am thus renaming this feature to The Soundtrack Spotlight. Today's spotlight score is another old favorite: Billy Goldenberg's score to the 1969 Night Gallery pilot film. When I say old favorite, I mean that I remember telling the three stories of this film around a fire when I went off to camp as a kid.

Billy Goldenberg is easily on the list of my Top 5 favorite soundtrack composers, and he is also easily the most obscure on that Top 5. Working primarily in the 60's and 70's as a Universal contract composer, composing initially for television (most famously for Columbo, Kojak and Spielberg's debut feature TV film Duel), he was soon elevated to scoring feature films in a variety of genres and styles. Even in his malleable nature, there is a definite style that, to me, is irresistible and stirs something deep within me. His score for Peter Hyams' Busting (1973), for example, which is seeing a CD release via Kritzerland this month (hooray!), achieves something that an artist like Elmer Bernstein tried to achieve in the 70's but sadly never really did, i.e. a fusion of funk, jazz and rock sensibilities to score a thriller in a successful, effective and amazingly unaffected way.

Goldenberg combines the best elements of Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Nora Orlandi and Krzystof Penderecki while still managing to create a wholly new musical idiom, experimenting with instrumentation in a way entirely apropos to what he is scoring. I find, often times, that many composers force this kind of musical conceit onto films that cannot properly frame or digest it. There is no better example of this than his score for the 1969 Night Gallery film.

The downloadable soundtrack file is self-compiled from the actual movie because unfortunately no soundtrack was ever released. This is one to savor. It is comprised of a Main Title and Closing Title, along with suites from the three omnibus-style segments. Savor the surreal, antithetical-seeming but brilliant computerized keyboard sounds in "Suite from The Cemetery". In that piece, there is also a bone shivering "ghost noise" (there is no way else for me to describe it because there is no way I can really identify the instruments) that creeps up twice. Look out for more difficult-to-identify but effective experimental instrumentation in "Suite from Eyes," which is the score from Spielberg's first ever studio gig (directed Joan Crawford at 21). And...the piece de resistance: "Suite from Escape Route". My iTunes play-count for this piece totals 18 on just one of the two computers I use. There are so many things about this score that I hold in such high regard. This is all without mentioning the oh-so-original Main Theme heard in the Opening and Closing Title.

Download the score here.

BONUS: For Billy Goldenberg's Duel score, go here.

Soundtrack Spotlight #1: Sometimes a Great Notion (Henry Mancini)

2010-06-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

The first Soundtrack of the Week. I've thought long and hard about this. I have been conflicted in choosing between an old favorite and a current listening pleasure of mine. I decided to go with an old favorite.

I've loved this score since I was a kid, when I saw the film at age twelve. There is something really extraordinary about the music of this soundtrack. Scoreheads know the Mancini sound. How could you distill it? Playful, optimistic, whimsical, arpeggiated comedic scores that take adventures with major harmonies; droning, strangely mournful suspense scores often with experimental instrumentation and diminished chords offset by 7s (sure, that's very technical, but I can spot a Mancini score from miles away using this key). So how is this score from Sometimes a Great Notion so antithetical and interesting?

First of all, it doesn't explicitly feature the Mancini sound, although the score is nevertheless his and his alone. It can be likened to a hybrid of Quincy Jones in the early 70's and Lalo Schifrin late 60's so-called "Gone Southern" scores. The use of harmonica, pipe organ and a kind of honky-tonk piano is truly beautiful. And, of course, there is the Charlie Pride opening title tune "All His Children" thrown in for good measure. Tracks I recommend (in order of preference): "A Lonely Man's Song," "Lee," "Tiny Tug Boat," "Rollin' On".

Download the score here.

The Box-Art Underground: A Tribute to Video Cover Art Snobs and Snobbery

2010-01-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

One might say that I have a special affinity towards movie artwork. Because I take that affinity to heights I have heretofore neither expressed nor “confessed,” I have instead often called it yet another strangely obsessive peccadillo of my movie-crazy persona. Movie posters and video cover-art have always captivated me since childhood. Early on, I even took to designing my own hand-drawn covers for VHS movies I taped off TV at a very young age. It often got the point where, if I really liked a movie and it that movie had a video cover design that I considered poor or substandard, it would cast a pall over everything—my enjoyment of the movie, the thankfulness that I could watch whenever I wanted, everything. I know, that’s pretty crazy and taking the whole thing too far. Owning movies with video cover-art that is graphically pleasing was always a must for me, though. If I really had been questing in my search for a harder-to-find title that I wanted to see badly and if I had found the movie for sale only to discover that it lacked the desired cover-art, I would opt not to buy it at that time. Lazy cover-art for certain releases of titles superceded my intense desire to see the titles behind the art. It was a compulsion and, yes, a neurosis that I never have spoken about openly until now. Even as a filmmaker, I’ve been rather particular about the art and design for promoting my own films. If such a self-help group called Movie-Art Snobs Anonymous existed, I would undoubtedly be recommended to join. However, in the past couple years, I have discovered that there are many others out there just like me. How lovely to know that I’m not alone! Now, deep breath and say “I’m okay.”

My compulsive snobbery eventually did, however, become the impetus behind what still remains one of my favorite hobbies: graphic designing of video covers. Click on the Video Cover Art link at the top of this page to see some of my DVD cover designs. I soon found that there are worse cover-art snobs than myself, and they live on the Criterion Forum pages. For instance, I remember an “epic struggle” on the site that resulted in a petition being written to urge Janus Films and the Criterion Collection to completely overhaul the planned hot-pink cover-art planned for a release of Buñuel’s Viridiana before it officially hit the shelves. There were many, many signatures. In case you are interested in the outcome, Criterion did wind up redesigning the cover for that title. Power to the people! Um, yeah.

For an entire transcript of the impassioned Viridiana cover "uprising," visit Criterion Forum.

Recently, as I was browsing through Barnes and Noble, I encountered a very curious book called Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box by Jacques Boyreau (pictured above next to the first paragraph) — a picture-book consisting entirely of VHS cover-designs for grindhouse titles. I was beginning to feel a lot more sane. And the saner and saner I started to feel, the more I also began to realize that there were obviously other “cover-heads” out there who felt the same way I did about good video-cover designs. Brothers! Sisters! ‘Tis I, a fellow cover-head! With this realization (and confirmation that friends of mine have much the same appreciation for a well-designed cover), I have decided to pay tribute to unsung video companies with the best cover designs, mostly in VHS but also in DVD.

A Tribute to the VHS Cover Art of United American Video

Where did I really pick up my movie-art snobbery? It’s not an easy answer because it’s something that cemented itself over the years. However, I can attribute a great deal to the work of one particular company and their designs. When I was about seventeen, I took to buying only VHSs from United American Video. I loved their cover designs so much that I was resolved to find all of them. My love of this company is deep-seated because I remember, as a nine and ten-year-old in the early-to-mid 1990’s, accompanying my shopaholic mother to thrift stores and spending the entire time looking at a special rack of brand new and shrinkwrapped videos, all of them manufactured by United American Video. At that age, all the titles on this rack were so mysterious. I had never heard of any of them. I still connect a lot of those titles with the smell of Citronella. Why? Because this rack of videos always bordered a bin of Citronella candles that were on sale. The actual movie titles I remember seeing ranged from things like obscure spaghetti Westerns, badly dubbed Euro-thrillers, mid-range 70’s action thrillers, Italian romantic comedies featuring some adventurous American star, little indies that fell between the cracks, unknown made-for-TV pictures, TV series episodes like Lou Grant with Ed Asner (I had only known about that through watching “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on Nick-at-Nite), and the like. The thing that struck me the most then, though, was how aptly designed and smart-looking the covers looked.

Some time later, I discovered that United American Video put out a series of arbitrary collections, like The Samuel Goldwyn Collection, the Rank Film Classics Collection, the World Premiere Movie Collection, etc. Obviously, the company had licensed films from other companies (often defunct ones) at a given time and had chosen to distribute them under collection banners. For one, the Samuel Goldwyn Collection titles had bright-colored strips running across the top of the boxes garishly exclaiming their inclusion in the Samuel Goldwyn Collection, and the man with the gong (the J. Arthur Rank Films trademark) logo lay below a band reading “Rank Film Classics” on those titles. UAV was (and still is, for that matter) a budget-release company, but what set them apart from others of their like was how cool their designs looked, as well as the wider range of interesting obscure titles. I also attribute my love of markedly obscure films to my days of collecting UAV videos. Their designs (at least the ones from 1989 through around 1996) were never slapdash and always seemed fresh, original, well-arranged and rightly colored. I became a video collector at a very early age and, by the time I reached the age of seventeen, I had made a vow to myself to get my hands on every UAV title worth owning, and to complete my Samuel Goldwyn and Rank Film Classics collections. The word “weirdo” is probably running through most of your heads right now. Okay, then, I’m not going to read your passionate blog entry about your impressive collection of rare belly-button lint! Or the one about your celebrity shot-glasses and how you’re still missing Scott Baio’s! How ‘bout that?! I jest, of course. It took me a long time to find images for these, but here are just a few images of Samuel Goldwyn Collection titles:

I first had to do a great deal of research about what titles were actually in these collections. Information on the Internet was not forthcoming in any way because, even if the same titles had then been available from other distributors at that time, they had long gone out-of-print from UAV. I even called the company at their North Carolina headquarters at several points, to inquire about titles connected to specific product spine-numbers (which, in retrospect, must have been a weird call from the people on the other end—if I recall, when I told one of the UAV employees I was collecting these titles, a long condescending silence followed). Through sheer determination, I was able to piece a lot of the information together. On many an occasion, I even got lucky and happened onto purchasing desired titles at flea markets and such. I was most often more lucky than not at picking up a lot of them unexpectedly. All of a sudden, as I would be scouring vast tables of VHS tapes at flea markets, one or two would be staring me right in the face. I would excitedly squeal, daresay almost like a little girl, as I found one and picked one up. As for the others, I can only thank a little site called eBay. At one point, I chanced to meet a video-dealer on eBay who had an “in” with a warehouse stocked full of UAV titles. I was his favorite customer for a long time and he was perhaps my biggest help in tracking a lot of titles down, aware of my goal to complete the given “abritrary collections”. You might even say that this seller and I developed a real friendship. eBay-user “mebisping” (if that even still is your user name), if you’re out there and, perchance, find yourself reading this so many years later, a profound thank you.

I hope I haven’t lost you by this point. If you are still reading this by now at this point, I have another story to tell—a recent one. I was browsing through Mondo Kim’s Video and Music in the East Village the other night and happened upon one of just a few VHSs for sale, and it the VHS was a UAV release from the Samuel Goldwyn Collection, and one of the ones I had originally failed to acquire. The old feeling came back, just like the days of my great hunt…that old feeling of profound satisfaction and pride that I had located yet another one. The quest to find these things was momentous and, after all, took a great deal of exertion for me. I am sure that, all these years later, it would be even more of an exertion than it was then, as VHS are getting scarcer and scarcer.

Below are the only photos I could find online (and I looked everywhere, believe me) of covers from the Rank Film Classics Collection, of which many videos were a part. The pixel quality in these photos vary, but you will of course pardon that. Concessions must be made because of their rarity.

Whenever I think of UAV Video, though, I also think of the lost, magic days of the VHS boom, when home theater was a new and exciting commodity that was just on the heels of becoming popular. I romanticize nights at our local video store, a now long-defunct place called Braverman’s Video in my hometown Pittsburgh, which I remember as being well-stocked in selection but not big at all in square-footage. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, the store would be very literally filled to the brim with people renting videos on a given weeknight. Those memories are still very real to me, so many years later. The DVD boom just isn’t even nearly the same as the VHS boom. They are just two different animals, you might say. The VHS boom was right when people were getting acquainted with the revolutionary concept of home theater, the idea of being able to play any movie when you wanted and where you wanted. DVD releases might be more plentiful and comprehensive in terms of the number of titles never released on VHS that have thankfully become available for the first time, but the age of the birth of the DVD market is hard (if impossible) to really romanticize in the same way. And then there is the joy of watching an old VHS that hard-core cineastes can attest to. It is the act of watching the films we know in a different way, and it is something in which most everyone has become totally disinterested.

As a person whose need to make films and study films is deep-rooted, those memories of going to the jam-packed Braverman’s Video in Pittsburgh on a given night mean more to me and are more immediate to me than anyone knows. Ultimately, the need that developed within me to be comprehensive and “encyclopedic” with film knowledge I attribute to three things: a severe stutter that alloted the time for advanced film study, UAV Video Corporation’s ecclectic VHS releases complete with their attractive cover-art designs, and the amazing 1990-91 TLA Video Guide that I studied cover-to-cover and nearly memorized as a kid (there has never been another movie guide like that one before or since, even from the TLA themselves, trust me; as an aside, the main TLA video store in Philly even uses the amazing pages of that book as wallpaper). Whenever the opportunity to browse VHSs for sale presents itself, which is sadly seldom these days, I still find myself looking to complete those arbitrary UAV collections…and I still keep those particular accumulated titles all grouped together in the place where I have my vast video collection stored in Pittsburgh. UAV also introduced me to a few of my still-favorite films (e.g. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Dear Mr. Wonderful).

Navigation by Design

Many companies’ designs just fade into the blitz at video stores. Regardless, though, think about this. If you walk into the action section, the colors on the spines conform very neatly and you know that you are in the action section by sheer virtue of the colors and fonts you are seeing together. Action covers, after all, seem to be heavy on blacks, dark greens, heavy browns and the like, and the fonts are very blocky and feel very authoritative. If you are in the comedy section, you know it by spines that are heavy in whites, pinks and light blues, and by fonts which are funner and more spirited, hence less official-looking. One might say that comedy designs have a “tentative” look. Even the drama section, which is an exceedingly general genre name and covers an extremely wide range of subject matter, certainly has its “look,” so much so that you know you are in a drama section. The rest of the genres have their colors and font-styles as well – sci-fi (deep blues, purples, lime greens, skinny and pointed outer-spacey fonts), Western (heavy on browns, beiges, earthtones), thriller (black, baby, black). Yep, you always know where you are in a video store.

When you are in a video store, you can likewise also tell very easily you are in the Criterion section. In many video stores, there is a section for just titles from the Criterion Collection, as they stand for always and ever as the standard of excellence in U.S. video companies. If a film has a Criterion spine number, it speaks to the very excellence of the film. It is fair to say that video junkies expect a great deal from the cover-design artists at the Criterion Collection. Their designers, after all, are real artists and not just your average schmo with a bachelor’s in graphic design. The covers have a definite aesthetic, as their designs are known for their discernible cleanliness (often noticeably resembling the covers of modern fiction books), their meticulous spatial relationships, their conservative but nonetheless still pleasing and intiguing use of colors, their tasteful font selections. The designs are all-around class. The Criterion Forum has a boards-section about the Criterion cover designs. Fans even go so far as to design their own Criterion-style covers. There is even a board devoted entirely to mock Criterion art. What is most important, though, is that the designs speak to the needs and qualities of each individual film. The artists designing them have seem to have thought long and hard about bringing the tonal qualities of each film to life in a graphic sense. In the Region 2 lands, Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema Collection (what some refer to as the British Criterion Collection) have a similar high-standard when it comes to cover art. Some of my favorite Criterion designs appear below.

I will say it upfront and without any flowery build-up: Alpha Video does great cover-art work. Their DVD designs are astonishingly good; they also sell full-size posters of their original video cover-designs. Ironically, they are also a budget-release (read: cheap or bargain-bin) company. Quite frankly, they are the UAV of the DVD market. You might make the case that their catalogue is just as diverse as UAV’s, ranging from old serials to bonafide classics like Meet John Doe and One of Our Aircraft is Missing to 30’s-40’s B pictures (often by directors like Edgar Ulmer) to bonafide obscurities from the 70’s. There would seem to be a regard for a vintage-poster-like sensibility in both the work of UAV and Alpha, but particularly with Alpha.

Of the majors, I cannot say much. Warner Home Video preserves the original poster-art of each individual film for the most part, but other than that, every cover-design aesthetic for companies like MGM, Sony, Fox, Universal and Disney are indistinguishable from the other. However, back in the day, I loved the then-MGM/UA’s pre-1995 VHS cover designs for older catalogue movies. Again, you had exciting graphic arrangements, fine use of color, apt choice of font and a classy presentation. I still have a fine collection of old MGM/UA VHSs, including their gold-topped “Epic Classics” collection (two-tape sets of epic films with a metallic gold legend of an MGM lion logo at the top, see below). There were also single-tape covers with a silver MGM logo legend at the top. Shout-outs must be given to other old and now-defunct VHS companies, like New Yorker Video’s VHSs, Charter, Media, Embassy, Vestron…others that I am sadly forgetting.

Everything Shrinkwrapped

Originally, I just wanted to do a tribute and a salute to UAV. I gradually realized this was too narrow a focus and decided to fit it into an article about cover-art snobbery. Even today, I am still prone to putting titles back in the stores if I am convinced I can get a better cover-design of the same film elsewhere. Ultimately and regardless, the films are still more important, but the need for perfection in collecting is one that requires good movies and good art.

As I examined months ago now in a blog article, movie art is getting lazier and lazier, and there is more of a draw towards bland and “boxy” designs. This is indicative of the fact that Hollywood and mainstream movies seem to be getting lazier and lazier, so it’s logical and apropos that the art would reflect that. Movie-art is a smarter barometer of such things than most people would give it credit for. Besides my personal adoration of and interest in film graphic-design, it may reflect dry-spells, particularly in mainstream cinema. After all, when is the last time you saw a movie-poster or DVD cover design that truly grabbed you? You don't have to be a movie-art snob to have noticed this. I can say, though, that good video cover-art takes me back to that, to me, magical time when home video was the hot new commodity and the movie lover's world seem full of possibility. It may not have been the first time the world opened it itself up, but you cannot deny that it was a milestone.

Culture Must Deal With Us: An Interview with Revolutionary Independent Filmmaker Amos Poe

2010-01-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

This will be the last fully transcribed interview-article for at least some time. Most interviews from here on out will be podcast format, unless of course they are e-mail interviews.

As I await my interview subject’s arrival at the Noho Star Restaurant at Bleecker and Lafayette on the first official day of winter, I scoop spoonfuls of thick, lukewarm soup into my mouth and gaze out the window to meditate on the snow and slush-covered New York of now, glittering with trendy shops, “hip” restaurants, chain stores and the like, all of which, as per standard procedure, have been spruced up with ornamental tokens of holiday season cheer. Specifically, though, in observing these things, I consider the innumerable ways New York has changed in the years since my subject made his groundbreaking do-it-yourself features in the late seventies and the early eighties. I am speaking of The Blank Generation (1976), Unmade Beds (1976), The Foreigner (1977) and Subway Riders (1981), and the director of those films, the titan of the “No Wave Cinema Movement,” Amos Poe.

As I continue just sitting there with my soup and my saudades, what comes to mind readily are the opening shots from The American Friend (1977) and Lightning Over Water (1980), both Wim Wenders films. The opening shots of both films use the same exact location, and that location is in the general vicinity of the Noho Star. The Spring Street of then was a cobblestone thoroughfare of lofts and loading docks; a tourist or out-of-towner who found himself there was most likely lost or a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed completist. That Spring Street is no more. For one thing, there’s a Gap around there now, and a Nike store. I could go on.

I know, I know…I’m making it all sound like some numinous fairy-tale kingdom when maybe it doesn’t quite fully warrant that. In the spirit of my classic m.o., I am naturally pining for something that no longer exists, like a young old man. After nearly a year of living here, though, I still cannot bring myself to stop thinking about the films shot in this town when I walk the streets or sit down to look out the window of a restaurant in any of the five boroughs. It’s a visual addiction. My eyes dart everywhere on a simple little weekend constitutional. If I’m in the presence of others, I will point out my theories (e.g. “I think a scene from Death Wish was shot here,” “I think this is where Sylvia Miles picked up Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy,” “James Garner wakes up around here in the opening scene of Mister Buddwing,” “This is where they fly the kite in You’re a Big Boy Now.”). As one who was not alive and around to take in the New York of then, I have always harbored a deep-seated, overwhelming desire to take a magical walk through the Manhattan of those lost days.

After a few moments more of waiting, Poe arrives. We begin by our meeting by making a trade-off: a DVD of his most recent film Empire II for a DVD of my film A Trip to Swadades. He orders himself a coffee, and I mentally ready myself while he fixes the coffee to his liking. My day has already worn me out, and it isn’t even half over. Nonetheless, there are many things I still wish to ask him. As something of a self-proclaimed scholar emeritus of New York on film, in both the mainstream and obscure/underground realms of cinema, I wonder what he will have to say about the city’s evolution, specifically throughout the last thirty or so years. In the post-Giuliani era alone, the old Needle Park which is now Verdi Square, the old 42nd Street of yore has given way to becoming Disneyland, many of the types of haunts that Holden Caulfield would have frequented have vanished or have gone corporatized. You could say that this is a topic with which I am obsessed. It was the subject of its own article many months ago…the one about “Lost New York on film”.

The Israel-born Poe, as a singularly New York filmmaker, has had a most fascinating career and his legacy (even though his career isn’t really even close to being over) is truly something of great value. He was basically the founder of the movement that nurtured the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Vivienne Dick, James Nares and others. After a long run of making personal, often self-financed works (the end credits of his The Foreigner announces proudly the source of its financing for the film being a $5,000 personal loan from the Merchants Bank of New York as the film ends), he helmed his first 35mm film Alphabet City in 1984. Ultimately, he wound up writing the screenplay for the 1988 film Rocket Gibraltar, from which he was fired. In the wake of this brush with Hollywood politics, he was, and remains, unfazed, and has continued crafting small but well-regarded independent films. His most recent film, Empire II, is a three-hour self-described “sequel” to Andy Warhol’s Empire, which is known to most as the classic cinematic sleep-fest. It is fair to note, however, that Poe’s film is most certainly not that. For additional information about him, visit his website.

DK: I recently read an interview you gave for BOMB Magazine in January of 1981. In that interview, you talk about telling a linear story and how, if you are not doing that, you’re essentially not really making a film.

AP: I actually just read that interview again recently. That interview’s a funny one because, at the time, I was being interviewed by someone who was my girlfriend and someone who would eventually become my wife. In it, I was talking a lot about things I wasn’t really doing. That was written right as Subway Riders was about to be released. I had been working on editing that for a long time. What I said in that interview, a lot of it I really meant but most of it I wasn’t really doing in my own work, even though I talked about it like I was. When I made films like The Foreigner and Subway Riders and Unmade Beds, I was dealing with a really experimental approach to traditional narrative. Nowadays, I’m really working in this new form that I call “documental,” which I guess you could categorize as a kind of experimental documentary form. Empire II, to me, looking at my own work, is the purest thing I’ve made. And my next project is a treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In that, I’m really working on peoples’ perception of motion. I am doing things like animating the still image, for instance, largely inspired by the photographer Eadward Muybridge, who captured movement with multiple still cameras. Also, the concept of Markov chains.

You know, cinema can always do so much. I remember I went to Madrid right around the time of the March 11 bombings in 2004. The trip would result in the strangest screening experience of my life. I actually went there to screen The Foreigner, which is of course a film I made all the way back in 1977. The film is about a terrorist hiding out in New York and it’s all framed like a potboiler espionage movie, except that it’s not. Really, it's a subversive pseudo-espionage film. At the time of this screening, the world looked pretty grim and unpredictable and I almost felt like calling off the screening. Everyone was nervous and really upset about the bombings and it just seemed like the thing to do. But I went and they screened the film and, if you’ll recall, there is a scene shot directly underneath the World Trade Center, right smack underneath the two towers. It’s a really eerie shot, and it was especially eerie seeing it that night. And this amazing thing happened. So you’ve got an audience that’s fucked up by these very real events, what they’re seeing up on the screen is fucked up, the world is very clearly fucked up with no end in sight, and what you get out of this “fucked-upness” is this amazing synergy of all this stuff.

So, the movie ended, the lights went up and the Q&A started…and it became basically like some town-hall meeting. And I thought, “Perfect!” It was perfect! What happened was this: what was happening in the audience’s head and what was happening on the screen kind of meshed to form this extraordinary, electric town-hall discussion with people expressing themselves openly about their concerns of living their life in the world today and their worries about the future and such. They weren’t even really so much talking about the actual film. It was beyond the film. They were talking about things that were very immediate and real to them. That, to me, is the magic of cinema! It was this extraordinary head-to-screen action. That is the magic of cinema, and to a certain extent that is what I am still very much trying to do in my work…to recreate that synergy. That’s still the strangest and the greatest screening experience I’ve ever had.

DK: That’s a great story! The Foreigner is actually one of my favorites of your films. It’s like a genre tone poem.

AP: That is an interesting way of putting it. They may have been what that audience was responding to. The tone, the themes, the images resulting from that…those combined with everything else happening around them at that time. Even though the film wasn’t discussed, it was perceptible to me that the movie became realer to them and more immediate than it ever was for any audience.

DK: Talking about legacy, you were identified in a film publication as being “the progenitor of punk cinema”. How does that moniker make you feel and do you think that, to any extent, is true?

AP: Yeah, I think it’s true, but it really doesn’t matter all that much. I mean, people like myself and Vivienne Dick and James Nares…we were New York filmmakers, we liked to think of ourselves as members of the New York avant-garde, and we were openly looking to reinvent cinema, to reinvent the form. If you look at our collective films, you could really call them neo-narratives, insofar as that they told stories but didn’t tell them in a way that was at all traditional. This idea of reinvention was central to what we were all collectively trying to do. And this do-it-yourself quality to these works that, I think, made my films as popular as they were among their kind, really played into my unschooling. I didn’t go to film school before I made those films. They had that purity about them. So, as opposed to just making one film, we conspired to forge a movement, one that became known as the No Wave Movement, and make far more than just one but many that functioned the same way. Speaking for myself, I was already on fire…I was unstoppably compelled to make movies. It was ingrained in me. But through the making of this movement, we were able to look at culture so we didn’t have to deal with it…so that the culture would instead effectively have to deal with us.

DK: New York has certainly changed a great deal since the time you made films like Subway Riders and The Foreigner. How does today’s New York make you feel as a filmmaker?

AP: Essentially, what you’ve had happen is Death Row turning into the Hilton. I personally love it. It is a different place, but I really do feel that it is a better place. I mean, I remember coming down to the East Village in the 70’s to do things like score drugs and it was a much darker place than it is now. Now, you have restaurants and shops and people everywhere. It’s richer and more alive.

DK: Interesting, because I was expecting you to think the total opposite of that.

AP: I guess it’s something that is easy to romanticize. I was there and I can tell you that I like the New York of now more than then. That said, I really cannot imagine myself living and working anywhere else. I tried the Hollywood thing and it just wasn’t for me. I can really go both ways. I love Hollywood movies just as much as I love arthouse and foreign films. In my mind, when I am in New York, I am in a place in-between Hollywood and Europe, in-between popular filmmaking and the arthouse world. I feel most comfortable in that state of in-between. If you sell yourself out to either side, I feel almost as if you’re selling yourself short and losing your individuality. New York is the perfect place for a filmmaker to be a true individual. I had my shot at Hollywood, with Rocket Gibraltar. I wrote that film, they wind up making a film out of it with Burt Lancaster and Macauley Culkin. I got taken off of it before they went into production. So I took a shot at Hollywood. I’m happier doing what I am doing here and now.

DK: I wish I could have seen that New York. It’s actually not enough for me just to see it in movies. I’m obsessed with it. So, okay, another thing that has changed is the accessibility of the technnology. When I interviewed Henry Jaglom about his change-over from flatbed editing to non-linear computer editing, he was excited by the speed, efficiency and easiness of it, but lamented that he no longer feels like the artisan and misses the feel of the actual film between his fingers. How do you feel about it?

AP: Technology is really an Oedipal thing. We’re constantly killing off the past when it comes to technology, and there will always and forever be new ways and new methods of doing things. There are some things I miss, sure. I wouldn’t do anything differently looking back, even if I could. Regret is a silly thing when you’re talking about filmmaking. I can tell you right now that I don’t miss things like a roll of film unspooling accidentally all over the floor, and I don’t miss editing issues that are unblievably tedious to fix, and I don’t miss the countless other struggles and nuisances that come with shooting with film, but there is still nothing like light passing through celluloid. There is a price to that though. I mean that literally and figuratively.

DK: I am going to get potentially controversial here, because there is a lot of contention about what I am about to mention.

AP: Okay, go ahead.

DK: Hipsters and hipsterism. When I was in film school, it was the height of what I like to call the hipster craze of the aughts, which many people feel is either nonexistent or imperceptible. To me, it’s very perceptible. Hipsters will deny being hipsters. Articles have been written about it and the word “hipster” is often dropped in conversation nowadays. Along with that, you basically have the birth of hipster trends in popular youth films. I remember these nerdy suburban kids injecting punk music and general punk references into their thesis films, while at least ostensibly defying totally what it means to be “punk” themselves. It’s done in an effort to make them look cooler. What do you think about the whole hipster thing, if you indeed thing such a craze exists, and what do you think about “punk” being bastardized, misused and glamorized in perhaps the wrong way?

AP: I actually don’t see that so much, even as someone who teaches film [at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts]. One thing I believe, though, is that you have to write for eternity. That is vital. I mean, if you look at “Paradiso” in The Divine Comedy…that thing reads like a film script, and look how long ago that was written! James Cameron should be making a movie of that. The tremendous impact it must have been to read it then remains tremendous even reading it today. To make lasting works should be everyone’s objective, and it should be everyone’s goal. Jim [Jarmusch] and his films, they were made for a particular time, but they have a lasting power and they are timeless. Jim was a funny guy…one of the funniest, and his films have that humor and it clearly appealed to people. Those films are cool. No one else could have made Stranger Than Paradise. You know, if we’re talking about this whole idea of “cool,” you know, a hip guy makes a hip film, and that film is cool. But a total square can make a total square film, and that square film can be equally as cool. You need to be true to yourself in order for your work to be lasting and for it to mean something, let alone for it to be cool.

[At this point, Amos orders a desert for himself. The desert is called “Garden of the Gods” on the menu.]

DK: Well said. So, okay…money.

AP: Money. Yes?

DK: The whole DIY thing still suits you pretty well?

AP: I was reading recently something having to do with Fellini. It was the early 60’s, the very height of his career. He had won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, he won at Cannes, he was internationally acclaimed and loved the whole world over. I mean, when you make a film like La Strada, I mean come on! So he makes La Dolce Vita and it’s this great masterpiece. You would think the whole world would be at his feet and that he could name his next project, whatever it was, and people would be literally throwing money at him. He goes to producers to try to get 8½ funded, and he can’t…nobody’s interested. One producer tells him it’s too racy. [getting excited] Now that’s Fellini we’re talking about! If Fellini has to put up with it at the point in his career when you think he’d be at the height of his power, where do we stand? Where do anyone of us stand? You’ve just got to get off your ass and get it done, no matter what. If you care enough about a project and you want to see it through, you have to work for it and believe in it. Money should really be no obstacle. Most things of value come out of some degree of DIY.

[The waitress brings Amos’ Garden of the Gods desert. On top, there are two fortune cookies. I take one, he takes one. Amos looks at his fortune.]

AP: This fortune, I did a double-take at first. I thought it said, “It’s up to you to make the next movie.” It says, “It’s up to you to make the next move.” He’s my dime-store philosophy of the day. The only thing standing between move and movie is I.

DK: [laughing] Author! Author!

[My fortune reads, “Nothing in this world is difficult if one sets one’s mind to it.” Both fortunes, we agree, make for good filmmaking mantras. We finish our lunch by discussing my current work.]

Amos and I end our lunch/interview together by discussing the films we feel have been the best of 2009. He mentions two films I have not heard of, both of which he saw at the Cannes Film Festival this year. We also briefly discuss Jacques Rivette, about whom I had recently written an article, then part ways at the corner of Houston and Lafayette. I couldn’t deny to myself that it had been one of my favorite interviews.

I decide to walk the area a little more before returning to the Upper East Side. I carry with me the new copy of Empire II which Poe had given to me, wondering how Poe’s New York of then differs with Poe’s New York of now, considering the feelings he had expressed to me about the evolution. After a good bit of walking, I start playing the game again, and this time it’s more immediate. “Isn’t this where Robbie Coltrane makes his first appearance in Subway Riders?” “Is this where one of the first scenes of The Driller Killer was shot?” The thing of it is…I can’t seem to tell anymore. The past is getting scrubbed away more and more strenuously. Part of me feels like Marty McFly walking through the befuddling future world of 2015. I feel like a stranger in a strange land, and I have no logical reason to feel so. One thing I agree with Amos on when it comes to New York…as a filmmaker, I still couldn’t live anywhere else. It is an in-between place in more ways than one: between Hollywood and Europe, but also between sleep and awake.

The Coming Attractions, and the Latest About My Newest Feature Documentary Raise Your Kids on Seltzer

2010-01-13T11:14:00.000-08:00

Coming up on the ConFluence-Film Blog, we have an interview with New York filmmaker Amos Poe. That article will be the last text interview featured on the blog for at least a little while as ConFluence is giving way to a new podcast format. Following this, there will be a podcast interview with filmmaker Peter Nicks, award-winning director of the upcoming Sundance Film Festival feature The Waiting Room, a muckracking documentary about healthcare in America. Peter Nicks is an old friend of mine (we're talking more than ten years) and a distinguished maker of documentaries. His newest film is certainly receiving a great deal of attention.

Also, creative collaborator Aaron Hollander will be posting his Best of the Decade list, either to counter or corroborate the one already posted. Counter or corroborate...whatever the case may be, it'll be a good discussion.

Also coming soon: news about my latest film project (the DIY one). I have been wanting to post something for awhile about my upcoming feature-length documentary essay film Raise Your Kids on Seltzer which effectively parallels the lives of three segments of the Jewish population currently in New York: a Holocaust survivor nearing the end of his life, a German-Jewish woman who came to America during one of the heights of Jewish immigration in 1920 and an Israeli immigrant song-spinner. I currently have about forty minutes of it cut together and working very well. There is a long road to go for it and, for once, I need funding for one of these little projects. I'll write more about the film tomorrow, but it is one that I feel very close to and one that I feel could be an important film.

The Best and Worst Films of 2009 (and What I Missed in 2008)

2010-01-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

For a guy who claims to find the practice of best-of/favorite listmaking a senseless, futile and mind-numbing exercise, I certainly do make a whole lot of ‘em. Look no further than the right column of this blog to take notice of that, and the two articles below this entry, for that matter. However, to reiterate, I do feel that, despite the drawbacks inherent to such lists, mostly the fact that quantifying the quality of one’s intake of movie-watching through lists is not what movies are about, they are still dialogue-starting stimulants, as well as gauges of one’s taste and judgment despite their inherent fallibility. I find that readers appreciate reading them as well. So, here we have it: the obligatory 2009 Best-of lists.

I was not at all proud of my 2008 list (I mean, come on, it has to be a pretty rough year when I name Vicky Cristina Barcelona as my best, even though John Waters did the same). Keep in mind I also missed more 2008 films than I care to mention because I was making and promoting two of my own films at that time. Therefore, I have added an extra section at the bottom (i.e. the “Best of What I Missed in 2008 and Saw in 2009 List”) to make up for that. Unless you are a working full-time critic, it is nearly impossible to see all the notable films of a single year in a compressed amount of time. All in all, however, 2009 was a much better year for cinema than 2008, in my opinion (neither year can hold a candle to the amazing 2007, however).

Also, it is necessary that I affirmatively lay down some ground rules. I got into some trouble last year when a few people pointed out a few films of foreign origin they felt I missed or unjustly ignored, which I had counted as 2007 films. The rule I am setting down is as follows: If the movie has an official 2008 release year and made it to the United States in 2009, I will henceforth count it as a 2009 release. Basically, whatever year the films would be up for American awards consideration is what I am counting. So here we go…

THE 10 BEST OF THE YEAR LIST

1. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) Truth be told, I never thought I would see the day when I would name any Tarantino film as the best of the year. However, I could not seem to shake the feeling that the film was somehow important, particularly at this moment in time. Inglourious Basterds is a film that accepts itself as reflection and not as recreation or representation. I am going to begin making my case for this film’s importance by asking a stupefyingly and inanely naïve question: How many films have been made about history, or how many have depicted historical events? “Oh, come on!” I know, I know, a stupid question, but just bear with me. Easy answer? Lots and lots and lots. What this film does is build a war movie around other war movies at a time when the traditional film about historical incident has knowingly lost any sense of enterprise and originality, despite a machine in the habit of churning out the old models in snazzy little packages, and despite the dazed and deluded machinists who respond to this loss by just shrugging and saying “C’est la vie” in an ineffectual murmur. As we have entered an increasingly tongue-in-cheek post-post-modern era in which it has become harder to jar audiences loose from viewer complacency, Inglourious Basterds stands alone as a film that tests our sense for what a historical film should be and how it should function (for one, it challenges a viewer’s implicit need for rigid adherence to truth and historical “fact,” cognizant that aspirations to such things are misguided and foolish, regardless of any degree of earnestness and good intention). Some have called this film “revenge pornography” and “grossly irresponsible populist fantasy” without recognizing that these are both used as platforms to address the meanings we glean from the idea of popular memory depicted in a popular medium. It functions on so many levels that, even after a few subsequent additional viewings, I still find it mind-boggling.

Some claim it is mired in a devil-may-care sense of social responsibility, but Tarantino is perhaps the first to recognize, at least within the confines of the Hollywood machine, that the only way to be truly socially responsible at this stage in American movie history is to test our perceptions of what it really means to make so-called “socially responsible works”. He does that by pushing these unspoken standards, and that in and of itself is extraordinary. However obvious the following statement is, people still go to a theater and have no trouble accepting “true stories” as truth and cannot see that the real truth has been filtered through a medium that worships technique, mechanism, maneuver, aesthetic elbow grease, and takes liberties to do so. Inglourious Basterds has enough technique, mechanism, maneuver, aesthetic elbow grease and taken liberties to jam into three movies, and the fact that it possesses all that speaks to its intention, i.e. the intention I mention above. To reitereate, Inglourious Basterds is a film that accepts itself as reflection and not as recreation or representation. The film is extraordinary and is, in my opinion, thus far Tarantino’s masterpiece, which is funny considering that the final line of dialogue in the film is “I think this could be my masterpiece”. For every bit of "bang-bang," there is just as much (if not more) "talk-talk," and his nonstop referencing of pop-culture for once works like clockwork in this movie, and it doesn't strain the film's progression at any point. In fact, this element is integral to it. All this, of course, comes from someone who has never been a fan, and someone who has even been a flagrant, vocal disliker of Tarantino’s much-praised work. This one is different and it is certainly his most mature film. Never have a seen such a specimen: a “historical” film pointedly about historical films, and at the same time I was enormously and gratefully entertained without the need to be “in on the joke(s)” overshadowing my being unconditionally absorbed (even though as a cinephile I most certainly was in on the jokes). Also, every single performance is par excellence, particularly Christoph Waltz as the sly, conspicuously poised, multi-lingual German commandant. If this performance doesn’t earn Waltz an Oscar, I’ll eat my head with my hat on it. And I have never enjoyed the stone-jawed Brad Pitt more, even counting his hilarious comic turn in last year’s Burn After Reading.

And who puts veteran Rod Taylor in a scene together with Mike Myers? Even the most surly critic of the film has to acknowledge this as astonishing. This gutsy, thinking-out-of-the-box type of “stunt” is part and parcel of an artistic voice that I am finding, in some ways, more and more irresistible.

2. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) Haneke’s latest is a masterpiece by any measure of the word. Visually, narratively and otherwise, I just cannot say enough about it. Before I went to see it at Film Forum this past week, I saw it described as "a ghost story without a ghost". This is very apt. Haneke's output in the past ten years has always been, by and large, quite substantial. From The Piano Teacher to Cache to this film, which I think might very well be his masterpiece, he has stood as one of the most solid and consistently successful directors working in the international cinema scene. The only thing that prevented this from occupying the number one spot currently occupied by the Tarantino's film is what I perceive as Inglourious Basterds doing double duty as both popular entertainment and timeless commentary on the nature of a genre that has spawned thousands upon thousands of films that have, heretofore, failed to truly recognize what that film recognizes. In terms of achievements in cinema aesthetics the year, however, I hand the mega-gold prize to The White Ribbon. It confidently captures and evokes the spirit of Bergman without imitation and being affectedly Bermanesque, thus managing to be a creature all its own, entirely fresh and visionary. The black-and-white photography is gorgeous, the performances (particularly those of the children) are simultaneously restrained and direct, and as a result, tremendously touching. This one is as good as they come.

3. A Serious Man (The Coen Brothers) For awhile, I thought this would be the number one film of the year on the list. Much of this is due to personal proclivity because the movie’s focus and its subject hit very close to my heart and head. However, the film met with curious reactions from the ethno-religious group it depicted. I would hear many-a conflicting report about it being passed from ear to ear when I would attend synagogue on shabbos from week to week. I saw it the first week it played at a multiplex on 86th Street and I immediately fell in love with it. When you discuss the voluminous content of the film with someone, one thing that is extraordinary is that the conversation is never quick nor can it be rushed. Identity, the nature of faith and belief, the uncertainty principle, what it means to ascribe meaning to things we cannot explain, the collapse of the Midwestern suburban American family, unwitting victims, what it means to be a "serious man," a father, a good man, a Jew. One can have a lengthy conversation about the shtetl prologue of the film alone. This is perhaps my personal favorite of the Coen Brothers' output this decade. It seems the closest work to them...as people as well as filmmakers. And, despite a circulating and epidemic opinion, the film is really no way anti-Semitic. I remember reading a hysterical (and nonsensical) account in The Village Voice by a writer who claimed that it was the work of vehemently self-hating Jews. That would be as short-sighted and facile as calling Do the Right Thing racist, or calling Meet John Doe communist.

4. 36 Views from the Pic San Loup (Around a Small Mountain) (Jacques Rivette) I, for one, hope that Time Out magazine’s claim about the possibility of this being Jacques Rivette’s final film is just rumor. Maybe they do have a case, however, because this is the notoriously lengthy director’s shortest film to date at 84 minutes. Was a regular three-hour outing too much for the reportedly ailing 81-year-old French master? That is immaterial and maybe an ill-founded basis for my believing the rumor because these 84 minutes are certainly among some of the best in his distinguished career. The themes are familiar (i.e. illusion, the struggles of artists, the nature of theater, the mysteries of interpersonal relationships) but, as always, he continues to stretch these themes, economize them and render them in ways that are new and exciting. The story revolves around an Italian drifter who decides to tail a circus company passing through a string of small villages in the northern France. An awkward romance develops between him and a female member of the company (Rivette alumnus Jane Birkin), but struggles to understand why she remains so distant towards him. The film's jarring finale is pure Rivette. That is not to say that the rest of the film isn't. In fact, the classic Rivette themes are more present than ever. If it is my favorite filmmaker's farewell film, it's a good one (and a fitting one, if I may say) to go out on. You could almost make the claim that the film is very consciously a farewell. I could go on and on about this, but you would have to see the film and then get a sense of Rivette's public image.

5. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch) This one isn’t going to make many peoples’ best-of-2009 list. I know that many filmgoers found it a troubling, enigmatic and self-indulgent exercise in smarmy arthouse alienation tactics. Jarmusch has reached a point in his career, however, where he feels absolutely comfortable in continuing to deliver openly and welcomely idiosyncratic films that remain integral to the style he pioneered back in the 80's with the groundbreaking Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, still keeping it fresh as opposed to tired and knee-jerk. I originally saw this in a theater on the Soho area where you would expect that Jarmusch's films would draw the biggest crowds. When I went there, however, it clearly wasn't. I have since purchased the film on video and have seen it again since. It is rare that an American film has a sensibility that feels as European as this. Shot and set throughout Spain, The Limits of Control in the spirit of existential theater and literature features characters lacking names (they are instead called things like Lone Man, Creole, French, Blonde, etc.), and only two of whom are played by "Jarmusch Repertory Company" members, namely Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton. It is the kind of story concept a filmmaker like Antonioni would have loved. In spite of its perhaps justified lack of popularity, I still think it has a voice that most other films this year lacked...and I, for one, think it is an exceptional film.

6. Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola) I was truly surprised to see how soon everyone forgot about this one in their year-end round-ups. "O, so soon we forget!" Coppola’s digital follow-up to his 2006 digitally-shot critical and financial failure Youth Without Youth faired amazingly well in critical circles this past spring, countering his previous film's failure. Featuring the notoriously irascible Vincent Gallo in the lead, the film is one that reminds us that Francis Ford Coppola can still make substantive contributions to film art as it stands today. I personally think it is very fitting that Coppola has returned to this comparably smaller and more personal production model. Youth Without Youth and Tetro are the types of the films that his company American Zoetrope was originally built to produce and distribute. He is doing exciting things now with the digital form that American Zoetrope aspired to do back at its first inception, but never really succeeded in doing (short of Lucas' THX 1138). It is exciting that he seems to be finally realizing his long-held, deep-seated ambition to helm these more personal works, and this one is the first recent effort to truly succeed in really every department. I also identify with the film's story for personal reasons, and that only heightened my appreciation of it.

7. Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe) This, along with Von Trier’s Anti-Christ, was the most scandalous film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It has not been released stateside yet, but I was able to see it through let's just say "other means". Noe is the director who gave us the equally controversial Irreversible (2002) and he was heard to have called Enter the Void a "psychedelic melodrama" in that the film is just as much of a sensory experience as it is a story (although there is most certainly a story). I have chosen it for this list because this is a film that defies convention in nearly every conceivable way. Its ventures into unpleasantry are occasionally hard to sit through but, throughout it all, you get the sense of a director testing the constraints, the boundaries and the limits of the form and the medium itself without over-indulging himself too heavily. This is something for which I immediately look when I am analyzing degrees to which films are cutting edge these days, as it is obviously becoming more challenging to challenge a form that is constantly being challenged in new ways every day, especially as digital media become more accessible. Enter the Void makes bold strides in forging new paths for telling stories, even if the journey isn't always a pleasant one. This should be a film that lives on, not just for its provocative, sure-to-be-censored content, but for its guts.

8. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) This one would seem to be this year's prime Oscar bait. Even as a summer release with little fanfare, it drew a great deal of attention at a very early stage in the awards race, but that is neither here nor there really. The United States has not given us a truly compelling or gripping war film in quite some time. Bigelow's The Hurt Locker functions as many things. It goes without saying that the film is a gripping commentary on America's involvement in the current Iraq War, telling a story of which one could easily allegorize: the story of a bomb defuser part of a bomb-squad operating like frantic surgeons in a city where everyone could go up in smoke at a single frozen moment. Yeah yeah, right. Allegories are passe these days. What Bigelow does well is dip the movie in large vats of adrenaline, directing it so effectively that you will swear suspense has rarely, if ever, been this agonizingly suspenseful. This is one of those movies where I felt myself almost tremoring as I was leaving the theater. What the film allowed us to recognize is the U.S. film market's burgeoning aversion to uber-topicality. Think Vietnam movies, for instance. Besides John Wayne's inept The Green Berets (1968), Hollywood steadfastly refused to bankroll war-genre films about the war in southeast Asia until well after the fact. The Hurt Locker would seems to exist thoroughly as the first successful non-documentary film about American military involvement in Iraq, and it does not make it a fleeting, wasted or self-important experience. To use Full Metal Jacket terminology, with this movie "Hollywood's grown a pair," thanks ironically to the help of a trail-blazing female director.

9. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam) Poor Terry Gilliam. Lady Luck just doesn't like hanging out in his corner for some reason. It seems that every film he makes is fraught with production trouble. What happened during this production is old news (if you don't know, somebody died...an actor, someone you should probably know really) and how Gilliam proceeded to complete the film shows that, despite the hardships that seem to effortlessly trot his way, the man has some get-up-and-go that hasn't gotten up and left (even when maybe it easily would have). This year, he delivers another piece-de-resistance in the fantasy genre. From the man who brought us The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits comes a film that sports that signature style and depicts the fantastical in similar ways, but one which continues to trudge the path in furthering where the previous films left off, specifically in the visuals department. Gilliam has not lost one iota of his command of delivering some spectacular visuals (we all know that this has always been his strong-suit). Following his dreary Tideland, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a most welcome bit of redemption, as he makes us aware that he continues carrying his own torch...and, boy oh boy, does it blaze!

10. Born in 68 (Olivier Ducastel) This film met with virtually no fanfare when it arrived in the States. It played at a few domestic festivals, won a couple awards and then saw a no-frills video release. As one who has studied and continues to study May 1968 in films as well as history books and literature, this epic drama, while failing to capture the time and its aftermath as artfully as Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers (2005) did, still packed a punch of great emotional and intellectual resonance. The story is epically ambitious. We follow various couples during the May 68. The film covers the span of twenty plus years, examining the aftermath of that time of demonstrations, street guerrilla warfare and youthful idealism, staying with the characters well after the fact to observe the impact that the era has had on their children, all the way up until the early 90's when it appears that two of these children born in 68 are HIV-positive. The film is a very curious epic that was originally conceived as a French miniseries, then eventually released as an actual film. It stands as a lucid historical examination on the dovetailing of history, the evolution of civil unrest and the path towards transcendence from oppression.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Funny People (Judd Apatow), Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze), The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda), The Maid (Sebastian Silva), Hunger (Steve McQueen)

STILL NEED TO SEE: TOO MUCH

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE YEAR

1. New York, I Love You (Various) I was invited to a preview screening of this film many months before its actual release. I have a soft spot for omnibus movies and had enjoyed Paris je t’aime, so the bar had been set high. Instead, I was treated to one kitschy, irritating short after another. This is all without mentioning…a-hem…Brett Ratner’s installment. Pound for pound, short for short, this is a whopping disappointment beyond any scope of belief. It is frustrating partly because it seems as though every filmmaker felt drawn to the “young-and-hip-strangers-meet-funny-banter-follows” formula. And if it wasn’t that, we were treated to (if I may quote Wayne from Wayne’s World) “alienating and pristine” episodes like Shekhar Kapur's (penned by Anthony Minghella, to whom the film is dedicated) featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBeouf…or Shunji Awai's episode, which features a cloyingly "cute" Christina Ricci and Orlando Bloom. After the preview screening, I was handed a survey, on which the question “What was your favorite episode?” was posed. Reading down the list, I started to laugh heartily and shake my head in disillusionment, because I’ll be damned if I could even remember most of them, even five minutes after the final fade-out, and I have an extremely good memory. When the welcome presence of Eli Wallach cannot redeem a single thing about the film, you know you’re in trouble. I think I’ll skip the upcoming Shanghai omnibus, thank you very much. That’s okay because I’m not a big China fan anyway. I'll live if I miss it.

2. The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson) One could argue that the critics were just waiting to jump on this adaptation of Alice Sebold's pop-literature neo-gothic novel. After all, I remember hearing a story about how Pauline Kael warned Spielberg that he was riding for a fall following two major successes, and that she would be unsparing of cruelty in her review of his next film. She was (but then again, so was everyone, because we are talking about 1941). I did agree with something I read, however, which said that Jackson did not direct the film the way it needed to be directed: quietly, delicately. Any sense of nuance and subtlety is absent, perhaps because Jackson has been painting in outlandishly broad strokes for so long, in works like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. However, I cannot fault Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, even if I tried.

3. Irene in Time (Henry Jaglom) I am going out on a limb here because I know most of the people involved in the making of this film. For one, its director was interviewed for this website a few months back. I also had the unique opportunity of sitting in on some of the editing of the film, and I had seen three rough cuts of it at various points of its post-production before attending its premiere at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles this past June. I feel, however, despite any allegiances or biases, that it is still my duty to be honest and upfront about reviewing this year’s successes and disappointments and, to me, Irene in Time stands as one of the year’s major disappointments. Jaglom’s film is ostensibly an examination of the complex relationships between fathers and daughters, which is actually a novel concept. The means by which that concept is explored, however, is what is ultimately suspect and faulty. What we are treated to is a parade of shallow and/or vehemently irritating characters prone to lounging poolside and spending many a workless day kvetching, moping and chatterboxing about their “daddies” at endless impromptu roundtable discussions. Shallowness really pervades this film. Why do I really care about this particular rich woman character whose only problem is that she cannot find an ideal boyfriend/husband to replace her father? What does that mean to me? Okay, sure, I'm a man. That said, I doubt that, excepting a few moments in the film, even women would connect to it in the way Jaglom wants them to. The real crime is that little effort is made to make one care. The character is just not compelling and is, instead, inordinately taxing of one's patience. The pseudo-documentary/fiction hybrid form which once seemed, at the very least, fresh and emotionally raw and compelling in films like Eating and Someone to Love feels forced, seemingly over-solicited, strained from every angle in this film. When people even take to talking about their fathers to strangers at parties, you know the director needs to cool it and take a few steps back with his theme for it to be rendered to its fullest potential.

The actors seem game, but the director seems less concerned with reality, emotional or otherwise — this film resembles no reality that I or anyone in my wide circle of friends knows — than making some kind of point that, despite the specificity of his focus, is still inconclusive and muddled. Its inconclusiveness is just the cherry on the cake really. Tanna Frederick has a terrific screen presence, a scrupulous and awesome ability to step into any emotion and a truly amazing instrument, but in this film she lacks a director who can mold that natural passion and performance intuition into something focused, articulate and truly impactful. Instead, her director allows an unwieldly performance that goes all over the place, testing the audience’s tolerance of Jaglom's and Frederick's self-indulgence in gapingly bold strokes. Also, motivations given to other actors seem to be frustratingly and overtly one-note (e.g. “Act this way,” “Act that way”). Other supporting players, like Karen Black and David Proval, feel underutilized and also misdirected, and screen-time that should have been more theirs is given to actors like newcomer Lanre Indewu who, to be frank, really grated on me. Jaglom has a singular voice that is unique in cinema, but this is far and away his worst film. Although this undisputed “chick flick” adds up to very little (New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis, in a review that basically panned the film, called it a "letter bomb to men"), it still stands out among other films, however, due to the virtues of that singular directorial voice. By the way, Jaglom makes the claim that he appreciates both the good and bad reviews he receives, so in theory he should love this write-up. No one could have made this film except for Jaglom…and that might be enough. But, to be totally honest, this film isn’t even close to being good...not at all. Andrea Marcovicci’s excellent performance, though, is one of the film’s saving graces. But again, underutilized.

4. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh) This is one of those films that is not easy to talk about, and that fact, despite my disappointment in it, is one of the film’s virtues. Nonetheless, I feel that this film’s biggest offense is that, in less time than anyone is willing to truly acknowledge, this film will acquire the “quaint time capsule” moniker and, to supplement the limiting nature of its topicality, it seems much too pleased with itself to really appeal loud and clear to much of anyone. It will not live on because it was made expressly for the time it was made in. Soderbergh’s thesis on the economic crisis may very well be articulate and sophisticated, but he has failed to make a film without an expiration date. The Girlfriend Experience will turn into a "curio" in less time than I think anyone is giving it credit for. Time capsules can be fascinating, but I think films should stand on their own and implicitly comment on the state of things, lest they become too topical and lose their impact watching them in retrospect. As Milos Forman said at a Q&A at Film Forum recently, “All you have to do is really mean what you say and feel it way down deep and, no matter what the film is about, it will immediately become political."

Soderbergh is a hero of mine because of his prodigious nature, the frequency with which he makes stuff and his methods of making it. And he hasn’t sold himself out to either "side" (i.e. the mainstream vs. arthouse markets, which has been a slippery slope for every other filmmaker to juggle, even those who consciously strive to balance both methods and audiences). He’s the guy who says, “I’m going to make this little movie in between these two big ones.” I exploded with delight when I discovered just recently that he had directed another “small indie” totally on the fly and on the spur of the moment whilst directing the play Tot Mom on stage overseas (using the same cast of the play for the film). He has a passion for filmmaking and for the form that is unparalleled and especially rare among well-known working filmmakers today. While porn-star-gone-legit Sasha Gray needed to portray her call-girl character with the air of entitlement and cold privilege that envelops her performance, she is a downright lousy actress and it was difficult to stomach her performance most of the time. The actors playing her clients were also much too self-conscious and felt like amateurs. In essence, it is not just the lead actress but the whole film (and its director) that seem to have a feeling of irritating entitlement and self-importance, which I cannot wrap my head around. The recession is prime target for a filmic treatment (I would stop short of thinking that Wall Street 2 will have something important to say), but this one fell way short of the mark for me.

5. Whatever Works (Woody Allen) Woody has certainly made worse in this decade. Remember Melinda and Melinda (which occupies the top spot in my “Worst of Woody Allen” list) and Scoop? However, I expected more from a collaboration between him and Larry David, even beyond what seemed to be predicted as a raucous schlemeil-athon. Although a good many of the jokes fell flat and the characters were one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, I cannot call this a total disappointment. Woody’s worsts, to me, fullfill my entertainment needs more than others’ best. However, I was neither able to be seriously analytical nor was I able to laugh freely without feeling duty-bound. And I find myself constantly amused by Woody’s curiously guarded and conservative depiction of gay and lesbian characters. You feel he wants to break out and do it right, but he still remains cautious and perhaps prudish, which itself is something rather funny to think about. He remains one of America’s premier film artists and he has taken great strides towards growth in this past decade, opening himself up to experimentation.

THE WORST FILM OF THE YEAR:

Anti-Christ (Lars Von Trier) Much too much has already been written about this film, which is certainly the most controversial offering of the year, and the grand majority of what has been written is not flattering. Even the word “unflattering” is a euphemism, so I am not going to join my fellow movie scribblers in debunking it at length because that would be just yet another highly unoriginal case of been-there-done-that. I wish I could say that the film’s bad press is just critical short-sightedness, but I most certainly cannot. The film, although a few of its elements are of intrigue (although they are never properly fleshed out or even understood by the artist conceiving it), is almost irredeemable. The main problem with it is perhaps the most simple, fundamental issue and the one that is actually directly under my nose as a viewer: Why was the thing even made? Even Lars Von Trier doesn’t seem to know why. If it simply, and only, functions as an outlet, a vent, for its director’s deep suicidal depression and his misogyny…well, that is no reason for the existence of anything, lest it be made for the artist and the artist alone with no intention of it being seen by anyone else. Von Trier’s well-known reputation as a shameless self-promoter, press-hound and provocateur is at hand here. What I can affirmatively tell you is that unmotivated sexual violence is insufferable and nearly impossible to sit through.

BEST OF WHAT I MISSED IN 2008 AND SAW IN 2009

Note: I have composed a new Best of 2008 list in light of new films seen. The ones that were on the list last year have been re-ordered to accommodate the new 2008 titles I recently saw. The titles on last year's list appear in bold.

1. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Forman)
2. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
3. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen)
3. Man on Wire (James Marsh)
4. Frozen River (Courtney Hunt)
5. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins)
6. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
7. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
8. Milk (Gus Van Sant)
9. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
10. Che (Steven Soderbergh)

RUNNERS-UP: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu), The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky), The Wackness (Jonathan Levine), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller), Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)

LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING THESE IN 2010:

And Everything is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh): There are personal reasons I feel so eager to see this, Steven Soderbergh's long awaited documentary about Spalding Gray. I made a documentary essay film a couple years back called Yarns to Be Spun on the Way to the Happy Home that examined the life and career of Spalding Gray in a way that was very personal to me. I am curious to see how a filmmaker like Soderbergh frames the man's story.

Tree of Life (Terence Malick): Honestly, what movie nerd isn't looking forward to this one? I would venture to say that even Malick the Opus Filmmaker's detractors look forward to his upcoming new work.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen): I always anticipate the next Woody. It's like a default button. Like the old tune goes, "I'm with ya rain or shine." And, as usual, he has assembled a truly interesting cast (Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderes, Josh Brolin, Lucy Punch).

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese): After seeing a rather underwhelming trailer, I am a little less anxious to see this than I was. But I still want to see it. Trailers can be deceiving in the extreme.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach): I'm curious to see where Baumbach goes after his fascinating film Margot at the Wedding which showed me he was growing, maturing and evolving as a filmmaker.

Queen of the Lot (Henry Jaglom): I may have given Henry Jaglom a bad review for Irene in Time this year, but I am looking forward to this sequel to his 2006 film Hollywood Dreams which, even though I also had a great deal of problems with, I still enjoyed (at least more than Irene in Time).

The Social Network (David Fincher): David Fincher is making a Facebook movie? What the Sam Hill? It just goes to show you that wonders never cease!

An Audio Interview with Legendary Actress Karen Black

2010-01-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Karen Black has enjoyed the successes of an extremely distinguished acting career. As one of the highest paid, most highly acclaimed actresses of the 1970's, Karen's roles in films like Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975), Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976) and Jack Nicholson's Drive He Said (1971), among others, have made her legendary.

I am good friends with the great Ms. Black (we are working on a project together called Call Me Spoons to co-star David Proval, known a great deal for his work on The Sopranos), and the photograph you see above is me (in the wool cap) with her on a movie-shoot. So, to inaugurate this new podcast format with a bang, I sat down to talk with her and recorded our conversation. The interview begins with the two of us discussing music and the evolution of the popular song beginning in the 1950's (it's immaterial and totally irrelevant to the interview proper, but still fun...and you get to hear Karen sing). We then begin discussing the projects she has in the works currently. For the many Tim and Eric Show fans I know, she has recently become involved in one of their shows. We also take a look back at her lengthy career. It was truly an honor to have her as the first guest on the "show".

Unfortunately, I am extremely frustrated that I am very much an idiot when it comes to the podcast format, hosting audio online and getting it up onto iTunes and such. I visited a few hosting sites today, but all of them make you pay and the free ones are impossible to understand. It's so bad that I might actually need someone to sit down with me (want to volunteer?). Until I get all this stuff figured out, you can access the interview here.

Now for a catchy name for these things. I hand it off to you. I was thinking something like "ConfluCast" or something akin to that. Any ideas?

The 10 Best Film Performance Moments Involving Recognition

2010-01-08T10:28:00.001-08:00

I was conflicted about what to call this post because this is not the easiest thing to describe. Recently, I have come to realize that some of my favorite performance moments in the films I have seen and admired involve some moment of recognition by a character at a pivotal point in the narrative. For me, the ten moments described below are some of the finest screen acting moments I have yet witnessed, and all of them are profound moments of recognition for a given character. These moments of recognition propel the stories forward in truly marvelous ways and resonate so profoundly in terms of our emotional intake of the given movie. Keep in mind that all the moments I intend to examine are nonverbal and be forewarned that spoilers lie below. Whenever possible, I have included a video clip of the actual moment to which I am referring.

City Lights: At the end, when the blind flower-girl lays her now-working eyes on the Tramp for the first time. ‘Nuff said. Very little else, if nothing, can top this moment of recognition. In the video below, drag the YouTube timeline cursor to around 2:50.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: The ending of this classic Powell and Pressburger film is one of the most moving I can think of. We have followed the life of career-soldier General Clive Wynn Candy through three major wars. He has just been rebuked and insulted by a young, impetuous, firebrand officer and is adrift in a world gone mad, lost somewhere in between a long life and a looming death. He is an old man with methods that seem to be growing more and more antiquated in a war that requires enterprise and new ways of thinking about how to achieve victory. Amidst all these quandaries, he observes a single leaf adrift in the pond where his house once stood. He flashes back to an exchange between himself and his late wife. He utters to himself, “Now here is the lake, and I still haven’t changed.” This isn’t going to mean much until you have seen the film, but this moment, where Candy recognizes himself and the years that have passed him by (and years that, at the same time, have made him the great man he has become), gets me every time. It is hard to talk about this sequence. You need to see it to feel the depth of its emotion. In the video below, drag the YouTube timeline cursor to around 7:20.

Rushmore: In this film, I am referring to the moment when the lead character Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a compulsively lying teenage diletante, confesses to his friend Herman Bloom (Bill Murray), a friend more than thirty years his senior, that his father (Seymour Cassel) is not the world-class brain surgeon he has claimed him to be but is instead a simple, old-fashioned, Thermos-wielding barber. Throughout the movie, Max has gone to great lengths to describe his father as a doctor (“The old man’s on call”) in order to impress the Rushmore Academy population and to elevate his status — one might say to successfully blend in. The moment really marks the second plot-point of the film, the beginning of the third act and the beginning of Max’s moral awakening. But, it is the look on Bill Murray’s face upon hearing this confession and absorbing its truth that is simultaneously heartbreaking, exhilarating and, most of all, hopeful. He recognizes Max’s attempt to right the trail of wrongs he has strewn throughout the story’s duration, and he thus grows to really and truly understand the friend he simply thought he understood. He, for one thing, recognizes that he never truly did and that he is just beginning to. His verbal response, “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Fischer,” is, simply put, a perfect reading following a moment of viseral but gentle nonverbal acting. Look at Bill Murray’s reaction to the confession. “Dat’s ecting!”

Being There: There is a scene well towards the end of this film when Chance the Gardener, after a long run of being called Chauncey Gardiner by the chorus line of dignitaries, talk-show hosts, politicians and journalists he meets, is called once again by his real-name Chance. The doctor (Richard Dysart), who is perhaps the first and last to refer to Chance by his real name again, is the only one who knows that Chance is a simpleton. This moment comes directly after the death of Melvyn Douglas’ character Ben. Chance is very clearly mourning the death of his friend at the same time he . I have seen this film many, many times (it is something of a family favorite) and every time this scene plays, my emotions are titanic and they so easily overtake me. Peter Sellers’ excited nod as the tears well up in his eyes nearly brings me to tears. The moment is exquisitely simple and, at the same time, highly charged. By the same token, the moment very early in the film when Chance bids a laconic but nonetheless emotionally fraught farewell to the maid who has taken care of him throughout his life is another excellent moment of recognition well worth mentioning. For the first time, and very early in the film mind you, he recognizes (at long last) the gravity of a moment that will entail change, thus shattering much of the vision he has of his world. In the video below, drag the YouTube timeline cursor to around 7:30.

There Will Be Blood: I am referring to the scene in the middle of the film when Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) first realizes that the man who claims to be his brother is not his brother at all. Daniel and “Henry” Plainview have just finished chatting together at a beachfront. “Henry” has, in some way, given himself away and Daniel suspects something. Daniel leaves “Henry” on the shore and decides to take a dip in the ocean. The look that Daniel gives toward the shore as a wave arrives to ride him back to shore is among the most frightening I can recall in cinema. At the moment, Daniel recognizes that “Henry” is not his brother and we, in turn, recognize that what we the audience had originally perceived as a gifted thimblerigger with his eye on greed and Machiavellian ambition is instead a perversely deep-seated ruthlessness. It is at this moment that we begin to perceive our lead character, an anti-hero, for who he really is. The clip below immediately follows the moment I speak of. Unfortunately, I could not find the precise clip on YouTube.

Cruel But Necessary: This film might perhaps be slightly lesser known than the others on this list. Take my word for it and see it (it’s on Netflix, folks) because it is among the most original and fascinating films of the decade that I can recall seeing (I recently included it on my Best of the Decade list), and I am not just saying that because a friend of mine wrote and starred in it. The moment I am going to discuss is no less stirring than any of the other "well-known works" examined on this list. The scene in the film I wish to discuss captures the first ever moment of understanding between a mother and son, and comes at the film's denouement. The film is unique in that it is fictional but the family it portrays is played by a real family. Wendel Meldrum plays Betty Munson, her son Luke Humphrey plays her son Darwin and her ex-husband Mark Humphrey plays her ex-husband Doug in the film. Ostensibly, the film is about a recently divorced woman who takes to videotaping every moment of her waking life, sometimes in a David Holzman's Diary style (Betty's direct-to-camera musings about a wide range of topics are as provocative and intellectually compelling as they are humanly funny) and other times as an eavesdropping device. What is central to the story, it seems, is the extremely strained but still somewhat civil relationship she shares with her son Darwin. The film's final moment, an exchange of looks between mother and son, carries a great deal of emotional resonance because these are characters about which we have learned to care a great deal. To many, reflexive filmmaking is a conceit that is growing more and more tired with each passing year. This film transcends and defies that in innumerable ways. Do your best to see it...it's not hard to find!

Dear Mr. Wonderful: Yes, this film gets yet another mention on the blog. There is a moment towards the end of the film when the now wiser Ruby Dennis (Joe Pesci) is leaving his sister’s and nephew’s apartment. As he approaches the door to leave, about to forge an entirely new life, the look on his face is perfect, well-timed and beautifully acted in that his character, at long last, recognizes the beauty of his limitations in this world, as opposed to the drawbacks of those same limitations. There is also the look of appreciation of something he had always been numb to truly appreciating. As a yearning, disheartened man with big dreams who has long been immune to the inherent charms of his daily life as one of life's "little people", he awakens for the first time to experience life's smaller pleasures, recognizing them and reaching a self-acceptance.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “You fooled ‘em, Chief! You fooled ‘em! You fooled ‘em all!” By now, you probably know I am referring to the moment when R.P. McMurphy hands Chief (Will Sampson) a stick of gum as they both await electroshock treatment. The Chief, an alleged catatonic, replies “Thank you” when he accepts McMurphy’s offer of Juicy-Fruit. Nicholson’s confused and downright amazed wild-eyed initial reaction to the Chief’s unexpected verbal gratitude is classic. His double-take followed by a second accepted offer which confirms what he just heard is a priceless moment. He recognizes that he, after much ado, has a true “partner in crime” in the institution…someone else in there with him who isn’t really “crazy” but is a slickster very much like himself, and one who has fooled virtually everyone in the hospital, even the supposedly brilliant doctors. In the video below, drag the YouTube timeline cursor to around 3:15.

Soldier of Orange: I am referring in this film to the “tango scene”. Rutger Hauer has escaped Nazi-occupied Holland to the safety of England and has returned to Holland in the film's last third for a bit of cloak-and-dagger work. In a crowded dance hall, he spies upon an old, dear college friend and Nazi sympathizer (Derek De Lint) tangoing with another man as onlookers watch. As his friend's face tango-turns, he sees Hauer in front of him. This moment of recognition is played entirely without dialogue, but you can see the look that comes over De Lint's face. Oh, the wonders of YouTube! There is a clip of just the isolated "tango scene" below. The scene must be better known than I had originally deduced.

Midnight Cowboy: Joe Buck's moment of recognition comes towards the end of the film when he pitches his cowboy get-up in the trash while en route to Florida. He has shed the pretense of assuming this other persona and is now to free to shed the illusion.

The Best Films of the Decade

2010-01-08T09:12:00.001-08:00

For the longest time, I was resolved not to do this. A decade best list? Ugh! Too many movies have been made, most of which I haven't seen, for me to act brazenly enough to put together such an ambitious best-of list on so little. However, upon recently viewing Paul Harrill's Self-Reliant Film blog, I found a format I like for composing such a list. Below are the films that I found to be the most outstanding efforts of the aughts, listed in order of release (and then alphabetically) and not in any order that quantifies quality. I am not going to provide write-ups and explanations of my choices because I'd be sitting at this computer forever doing so. This is just a list. If you want rationales for why specific movies were included, e-mail me or write a comment. Like I said, these kind of lists are dialogue-starters if they function as nothing else. There was no set number or quota for the list. If the movie was exceptional to me in any way, I included it. Also, some of the movies you can't really "like" but can nonetheless acknowledge their importance to the development of the filmmaking art in this decade, and/or for bravely testing the boundaries of the form.

Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)
Mysterious Object at Noon (Arpichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)
Platform (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2000)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
Gambling, Gods and LSD (Peter Mettler, 2001)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette, 2001)
Ataranjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Zunuk, 2002)
24-Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottum, 2002)
Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2002)
The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003)
Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
Laissez-Passer (Bertrand Tavernier, 2003)
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2004)
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005)
Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Cruel But Necessary (Saul Rubinek, 2005)
Live and Become (Radu Mihaileanu, 2005)
Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrell, 2005)
The Yacoubian Building (Marwan Hamed, 2005)
The Free Will (Matthias Glasner, 2006)
Syndromes and a Century (Arpichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Volver (Pedro Almodovar, 2006)
Into Great Silence (Phillip Groning, 2007)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007)
No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen, 2007)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
12 (Nikita Mikhalkov, 2007)
Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
A Serious Man (Joel Coen, 2009)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

THE BEST MOVIE YEAR OF THE DECADE: 2007

First of the 2009 Best Lists

2009-12-20T16:29:00.001-08:00

List-making is a tiresome exercise for me. I dislike the act of quantifying my enjoyment and/or appreciation of films, music, literature, et al. However, if lists do nothing else or function as nothing else, they are at the very least dialogue-starters. I look at lists I've composed from years back and gawk at how much they run counter to my current tastes, but it is often an accurate gauge of a person's tastes and a person's radar at a particular time. So, without further ado, I am inaugurating the best-of 2009 lists with the DVD and Repertory Screenings reviews. I am still in deliberation over the best films of 2009, but until then, you can nosh on these.

BEST DVD RELEASES OF 2009

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Region 1) Pound for pound, Criterion’s release of Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece is the best DVD package of the year. The transfer looks crisp and vibrant, and the extras, which include interviews with the cinematographer (Babette Mangolte as of late has become my favorite cinematographer) and the director’s mother, which is an extraordinary interview with an extraordinary woman and justifies being a film in and of itself. I will be among the first to line up for Criterion’s release of the Chantal Akerman in the 70’s Eclipse set. If the transfers are anywhere near as good as the one for Jeanne Dielman, I am in for a very big treat. I can’t wait!

2. The Whole Shootin’ Match (Region 1) Watchmaker Films’ release of Eagle Pennell's recently resurrected independent classic of regional filmmaking is compulsory viewing for anyone who has made or wishes to make a movie on the cheap, to make it good and to live to tell about it. The release of this film on DVD inspired its own article on the blog many months ago. To read it, click here. The 2-disc special edition also features Pennell's first short film, A Hell of a Note, along with a rare interview with the director and a soundtrack for the film. Rumor has it that a Watchmaker Films DVD release of Pennell's Last Night at the Alamo (1983) is in the works. One can only hope that they do as fine a job with that one as they've done with this one.

3. The Human Condition (Region 1) Long available only in three separate heavily compressed barebones Image Entertainment releases with poor transfers, the Criterion Collection saves the day once again and delivers not just an excellent transfer of this nine-hour-plus Japanese masterpiece but also rare interviews with its filmmaker Kobayashi and the actor Tatsuya Nakadai. This is epic filmmaking to say the very, very least.

4. A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Region 2) Douglas Sirk has long been a contentious director for me, causing many a heated debate between me and his staunch defenders who say I’m either crazy or am missing something, or both (I was and am still outnumbered). This film, however, one of the few of his not currently available in the United States, held up due to American rights issues, is not just my favorite Sirk film, but also one of my favorite films period, and certainly the best melodrama to come out of the Hollywood machine at that time. It comes to DVD from Eureka!’s “Masters of Cinema” Collection, known to video-monsters stateside as the British Criterion Collection. It also may be one of the most ambitious war films on record.

5. Yentl: The Director’s Cut (Region 1) Some call it a vanity project (honestly, what Streisand-directed film has not been a vanity project?), and the DVD comes complete with wall-to-wall Babs, not just in the film itself. She introduces every single featurette, every single making-of doc and every single deleted scene as if the very fate of the world hinged on their inclusion on the DVD. Despite Streisand’s unmistakable hubris (for example, she is insistent about and constantly reminds us of the alleged “fact” that Spielberg called her film “the best since Citizen Kane”), that does not take away from the fact that Yentl is a strong, visually impressive, emotionally impactful film. I still cannot buy the movie’s central conceit that anyone, much less an entire community of the most mentally agile Talmud scholars and yeshiva buchers, would believe Streisand to be a boy. However, there’s this thing called suspension of disbelief, I guess. Test how deep yours is by seeing this film. The second disc is jam-packed with extra materials, including the original test film-rolls that were shot in order to convince the backers that the film was a viable project.

6. Inglourious Basterds: The 2-Disc Special Edition (Region 1) One of the most popular films of 2009 gets an excellent DVD treatment in both the one-disc and two-disc releases. My advice is to go for the two-disc because you can get a full sense of how fun it must be to be on a Tarantino set. Just from interviews of the likes of Rod Taylor, Enzo Castellari, Bo Svenson and other veterans, this is worth the little extra you pay over the price of the one-disc version. "Oooh, that's a bingo!"

7. L’Important c’est d’Aimer (The Important Thing is To Love) (Region 1) It would seem that Polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski’s work is a rare delicacy in both America and England. This 1975 film, which some say is his masterpiece, was one of the almost deified works profiled in the documentary Z Channel: Magnificent Obsession. I had been kicking myself for years after I had missed taping a few showings on the film on the IFC Channel years ago. That feeling has subsided now that I have this gorgeous DVD from MondoVision, featuring a commentary track and video interview with Zulawski, as well as a 24-page booklet and a whole featurette on the remastering of the film alone. It does my heart good to know that people care about movies like this, and providing extra materials for such obscure works. The cover package for the disc looks pretty deluxe. It’s a beautiful and toweringly difficult film (I mean that in a good way), and the DVD of it is something truly awesome.

8. Lookin’ to Get Out (Region 1) Hal Ashby biographist Nick Dawson resurrected Hal Ashby’s never-before-seen director’s cut of this originally panned 1982 box-office disaster from the UCLA vaults from a print that Ashby willed to UCLA Film School just before his death in 1988. The film can now finally be seen the way Ashby originally intended it to be seen. Warner Home Video gets faulted only slightly for not releasing the original theatrical cut in the same package. Just because I can access it (on my aging VHS) doesn’t mean that others will be able to do the same in an effort to see how the director’s cut differs from the version exhibited in 1982. It would have been a most valuable lesson for people on the power and importance of movie editing, and how just a little cutting makes for a completely different motion picture.

9. The Other Side of the Underneath (Region 2) The British Film Institute has, in the past year, taken to engineering the re-release and resurrection of the films of Jane Arden (who sometimes co-directed her films with filmmaker Jack Bond). Whereas I am not the biggest fan of their Anti-Clock (despite the BFI’s DVD of that being up to this same standard), The Other Side of the Underneath is a truly fascinating film, and an extremely disturbing one as well. You cannot shake this film off very easily. It lingers with you, almost as if you yourself had the mental collapse the movie depicts.

10. Comrades (Region 2) Here is yet another great BFI DVD release. It’s been a great year for them, what can I say? Bill Douglas’ bold, rugged and beautiful epic about the exile of the Tulpuddle Martyrs to the Australian Outback in the 1830’s. This is one of the hard-to-describe films. It is three hours in length, it is toweringly ambitious and yet it also seems very little known and discussed. I will say that a special badge of valor is awarded to BFI this year for resurrecting films like this and many others.

BONUS DVD:
11. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: The Criterion Collection (Region 1) I am by no means an admirer of the film and, in fact, have a great many problems with it. Criterion’s two-disc DVD set of the film, however, is perhaps one of the best video releases I can think of which offers a comprehensive look at the making of a given film. The making-of featurettes and behind-the-scenes material, the interviews with all those involved, accounts of the epic history of the project (its evolution throughout a more than twenty-year timespan, throughout which time it was in turn-around) is alone worth the price of purchasing this.

HONORABLE MENTIONS (A.K.A. THE “I’M-HAPPY-THEY’RE-FINALLY-RELEASED” LIST): Generale Della Rovere, My Dinner With Andre, Wise Blood, Palermo or Wolfsburg (R2), Sometimes a Great Notion (R2), Herostratus (R2), Zabriskie Point, Nous Ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble (R2), The Adventures of Werner Holt, Anti-Clock (R2), Grin Without a Cat, the other Chris Marker films that are now reasonably priced for the first time, every title released on the Warner Archive label, all releases from Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema Collection

CONFLUENCE’S BEST DISCOVERIES/REDISCOVERIES

1. The Free Will (Matthias Glasner, 2006)
2. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007)
3. The Arrival of Joachim Stiller (Harry Kumel, 1976)
4. Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969)
5. Goin’ Down the Road (Donald Shebib, 1970)
6. 12 (Nikita Mikhalkov, 2007)
7. Events (Fred Baker, 1970)
8. New York Story/Hotel New York (Jackie Reynal, 1981/1984)
9. Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, 1968)
10. Billy Two Hats (Ted Kotcheff, 1973)

BEST 2009 REPERTORY SCREENINGS IN NEW YORK

1. Elia Kazan’s America America (1963) at Film Forum, Hosted by Foster Hirsch, who facilitated a Q&A with two of the films stars, Stathis Giallelis and Linda Marsh, following the screening of an extremely rare, beautiful print loaned to Film Forum by Martin Scorsese (a piece of privileged information I received after the film was shown). There is a funny story involving this particular screening experience. I arrived at the theater to discover that the show had been sold out. Somewhat dejected and only somewhat consoled that I owned the rare Warner VHS from the 90’s, I decided that I would use the theater’s bathroom and go home. On the way out, almost as if it were fated, I bumped into Foster Hirsch, whom I had met some time ago at a Preminger retrospective at MoMA. He remembered me by name, and asked if I was there to see the Kazan. I told him the situation. “No, no, you can’t give up,” he told me excitedly, after which he enthusiastically informed me that he believed America America to be one of the most important American films ever made. A few minutes later, he single-handedly managed to get me into the filled-beyond-capacity screening, so here is a special thanks to Foster Hirsch for an amazing night, and for the wonderful Q&A that followed the film. Film Forum gets additional kudos for an excellent Elia Kazan retrospective of which this was part.
2. Ivan Passer’s Born to Win (1971) at Museum of Modern Art A packed theater for an obscure, gritty black comedy about a heroin addict and his scraping-bottom $100-a-day drug habit? Yep, we’re must be in New York City! This is one of those nights upon which I said aloud to myself, as a cineaste, “I love living in New York!” What shocked me more, though, was just how jaw-droppingly gorgeous and pristine the print of the film shown was. It was almost as if the film had been made yesterday. No scratches, hardly any specks, sterling sound, super smooth reel-changes. At a few moments during the screening, audible “wow”s escaped my lips. I informed my friend, actress Karen Black, one of the film’s stars, about the screening of the film. She connected me with the film’s director Ivan Passer, who was tickled to learn about the conditions of MoMA’s print, the size of the audience of the recent reception of a film he made almost forty years ago. If MoMA were to screen it again in an hour’s time, I’d pick and leave for it right now. Ivan Passer’s Law and Disorder (1974, also featuring Karen Black) and Intimate Lighting (1965) were screened before this film. This screening was also the impetus for a blog-article I wrote in April, and its presence is felt in the first big article I wrote for the blog, on the topic of New York on film.
3. Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989) at Anthology Film Archive, which featured a Q&A with Ulrike Ottinger herself following the screening of another beautiful print. The film itself is an underappreciated and little-screened mix of social satire, Noel Coward comedy of manners, feminist drama, magical mystery tour, ethnographic documentary and sweeping epic a la Lawrence of Arabia (you got that…can you picture it?). The audience for this screening was meager compared to the audience sizes for the top two listed above,
4. Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) at Film Forum. Film Forum screened one of my favorite films in mid-2009 and I was there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to see it with a good friend of mine. I’m not so sure there is another film quite like it, although in my e-mail correspondence with a well-known filmmaker the following day, I was met with derision when I informed him that I found Odd Man Out to be a better film than The Third Man. To each his own, I guess. That opinion still stands.
5. Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971) at Film Forum. Officially part of Film Forum's "Madcap Manhattan" series, this screening of Taking Off was introduced by Milos Forman himself, who stayed for Q&A after the film ended. The film's producer Michael Hausman was also in the audience. The print was in pristine condition and, although I had little doubt that the film still played well, the enthusiastic audience reaction proved its status as a real "audience picture".
6. Robert Kramer's Milestones (1975) at Anthology Film Archives. It seems that there is at least one Kramer retrospective a year in New York. I had already seen his Ice (1970), which was the first film ever funded by the American Film Institute. I had heard a great deal about Milestones and Anthology's July 2009 Kramer Retrospective was my first real opportunity. It blew me away, but then again, movie examinations of 60's radicalism are most certainly my cup of tea.

The Curious Case of Hugo Stiglitz: Points of Reference in Inglourious Basterds

2009-12-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

Here we have Round 1 in our Guest Writers Series at the ConFluence-Film Blog. Our first guest writer, Sunrise Tippeconnie, is a filmmaker and writer currently living in Oklahoma City who dabbles in film criticism and history. You can read more of his work in Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies and on The Candler Blog. To view Sunrise's original response to Inglourious Basterds, click here.

With the release of Inglourious Basterds for home viewing, I’ve culminated some suggested cinematic links to aid any Basterds study, and allow the film’s conversation to continue, and allow for a means of navigating some of the referenced materials.

While discussion about Basterds often results in it’s definition as a “war movie,” we must be specific, and just as Tarantino observers are quick to correct with definition of the film’s concept as propaganda analysis as well as a lover letter to “grindhouse” grade war-fare, we should be specific about what issues of these types of cinema are being discussed. While most war films about a squadron have a tendency to place the concept of manhood during war beneath the microscope, Basterds does not.

Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) is very clearly referenced through the initial framings in which we begin to learn about the assumed title roles, the men under watch by Lt. Aldo Reine. While this implies a connection to Aldrich’s film, what normally follows reference is thematic homage. This is where Tarantino severs the tie and we do not come to understand how these men develop a camaraderie, a code of honor among themselves, nor do we see them grow beyond their social status as “bottom of the barrel” expendables like The Dirty Dozen. While the initial response to these omissions is runtime and viewer completion, these elements are quite important in understanding the film’s satiric nature and would introduce problematic identification with these men, one that could destroy the film’s ending effect and film’s final messages.

As important as the development is of these themes, their removal allows for a better understanding of propaganda’s ability to instill pride and inspiration. Without such identification, these men appear ruthless and slightly unjustified. The introduction of “The Bear Jew” opens an opportunity for violence to be inflicted upon a Nazi soldier. This sequence also omits, and in this case it omits any context for the violence. There is no back-story given about the Nazi party, the war in Europe, nor the background histories of Raine and his collected rag-tag group of misfit soldiers. Just as audience completion requires the accessing of Aldrich’s film to understand these men might have learned to work as a group, learned the necessary war-survival skills and can be successful in their collected attempts, the film also assumes the audience will access their knowledge of history to complete the context of this violence. This is where the strength of the film’s narrative allows for the satire to plant its seed. While the violence in this section of the film feels justified, because of the Nazi agenda and tactics during the war, the mistake in assumption is what allows the satire to grow without notice until the final reel of the film. The justification for the violence comes from a specific assumption that these men have learned to develop camaraderie and honor instead of blind patriotism, which is perhaps something that we have missed between the scenes –and in omitting such moments allows for the film to play out a hidden narrative, one in which the men do not learn a value of life, nor question the meaning of war, thus becoming merciless vigilantes bent on winning in the name of patriotism. This ultimately becomes what feels like maniacal terrorism, the frightening reality of the film’s final moments of violent outburst. This is what makes Tarantino’s film diverge from most films in the war genre: without the compassion towards life on either side of the war zone there is no hope in cinema and thus such works are Tarantino-ized as propaganda.

It is important to look at the final moments of Aldrich’s film, which allows for this moment to come quite successfully when Jim Brown falls from Nazi bullets. At this moment the disheartened survivors see the fall of a man, who at the start of the film would have been seen as a less than a man because of his color. What is most incredible about this moment is twofold in the compassion for the death a fellow man as well as their ability to see beyond the limits of their racism. While this moment does not erase the possibility for future racist tendencies for these characters, and thus not suggestive of a solution to such tensions, what is important is the ability for these characters to put aside prejudices to mourn for the fatality and mortality of humanity.

What seems like a conscious response to this moment results in the fascinating introduction of “Hugo Stiglitz”. Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz serves as a means to understand the vigilante wrath of a propagandized hero; he is the only Jewish solider to look like an action hero, while others in the squadron look scrawny, disheveled, and un-muscled. Sgt. Stiglitz is further presented as an extreme assassin who’s Nazi SS officer death count is unrivaled, and Tarantino ignites an adrenaline rush through a flashback sequence that depicts intense infliction of violence upon Nazi officers while we hear the theme from Jack Starrett’s Slaughter (1972). The audience is again asked to access their own knowledge of both history and cinema via the Brechtian device of a Samuel L. Jackson voice over. While accessed history implies associations of World War II, it is most important to acknowledge contemporary associations of the recent Iraqi War and the violence of Iraqi ground forces and prisoners held within Guantanamo Bay. Cinema associations recall Jim Brown, and thus a connection is made between an action hero and the real horrors of violence in the name of patriotism. This connection suggests the actions of characters portrayed by Jim Brown are just as heroic, and perhaps justified at this point within the context of Basterd’s narrative since the satiric nature of the film has yet to completely unspool. Looking at this point closer, Jim Brown’s cinematic nature is not just implied by Slaughter and The Dirty Dozen, but through another musical reference of Dark of the Sun (1969), and further implicit connections to Pacific Inferno (1979).

All of these films contain Jim Brown as heroic protagonist that utilizes violence to overwhelm an oppressive force, justified by the sides of war. While these films reinforce the issue of humanity as the true victim of war, and those that find a bond beyond the confines of political allies are those that truly learn from the atrocities depicted on screen. Clyde Peterson, in Pacific Inferno, throws the final switch that explodes the Japanese prison camp, yet the film attempts to humanize his actions through the relationship he develops with one of the camp leaders who is indebted to Clyde for saving his life. The honor of code and a reverence for life allow Clyde (and thus, the audience) to define the elements that are in opposition of these humanistic concepts allowing justification for the violent end of the Japanese soldiers as part of the prison camp. While these seems acceptable, it is only so because of the propagandistic nature of the narrative elements, as Tarantino ultimately delivers. While experiencing such heroic tales with Jim Brown, the ultimate question is whether these violent responses are appropriate.

As Basterds comes to its close, non-historical events take precedent and allows for the accessing of history to halt with a sudden error, meanwhile the accessing of cinema remains un-severed. This disconnect springs a sudden question of legitimacy. While cinema history serves the moment as possible, world history states the moment is fictive, unbelievable, and absurd. These audience threads don’t simply separate, they open the door wide for a sudden reassessment of one’s allegiance to American cinema history in its entirety: have we been lied to? Why would the actions of Jim Brown’s characters be dishonorable since his position against such oppressive forces is justified. While Slaughter’s anger (as well as Clyde Peterson’s) is justified by racism, oppression, and exploitation, the means of his violent reparations and retaliations are what is questioned.

What makes this moment of Hugo Stiglitz more complex is the nature of this character’s name, which is a direct association with a caucasian, Mexican actor of the same name. While Stiglitz is associated with the “grindhouse” aesthetic with which Tarantino has made his name, the context of his cannot be overlooked in comparison to the referenced Jim Brown roles.

Within the range of Stiglitz’s work, a good consistency of roles portray a confident, imposing character that takes charge and gets things done, often resulting in the kind of antagonist strong enough for a climactic battle. The work that Basterds seems to reference most strongly is Counterforce (1988), in which Stiglitz portrays a world-class assassin that races an American counter-terrorist squadron to a targeted Middle Eastern leader. Stiglitz is constantly out maneuvering the team with disguises, weaponry, and most notably through a surprise attack upon a theater audience during the leader’s address.

With such an antagonistic character actor serving as reference through the name for a Jewish war hero, the resulting conflict between Jim Jones and Hugo Stiglitz implies more than just race or audience identification. What results is a complicated identity that implies the real nature of a war hero: one side is an honorable man that fights against the injustice of oppressive forces and ideals, while the other side in a dishonorable man that will do whatever is necessary to stay atop of his game, and eliminate all others in the way. While Basterds eliminates the Stiglitz character after a game of deception, the violent tactics of Counterforce’s surprise attack remains. Humanity becomes a casualty that cannot survive such moments of deception within the games of war, and any character that holds the possibility of the human integrity of Jim Brown’s Clyde Peterson will not see the sight of the third act, which would imply that all those alive at the end of the film are in fact the Basterds of the film’s title. What remains is a request for audience identification removal from cinematic material that requests joyous participation in violence as an acceptable means for accomplishment. Even if American Aldo Raine obtains the upper hand in the end, the reality of this situation completes the absurdity of the actual political nature of America’s contemporary international relationships, allowing Tarantino to strongly suggest a change in allegiance to vengeance over patriotism.

A final thought, before anyone comes to the conclusion that Jim Brown is a good guy, Hugo Stiglitz is a bad guy, and therefore a racial divide occurs between “good” and “evil,” this critical analysis of the “suppressed” taking vengeance upon their “oppressors” is further paralleled by Aldo Raine’s brief comment about his moonshine exploits that mirror the plot of Burt Reynold’s Gator in White Lighting (which is also musically referenced). Although Raine’s back-story implies an empathy with Jim Brown’s Slaughter, he is not capable of completely understanding the racial tensions because of his privilege as a Caucasian male during the fifties. Raine’s own name is similar to character Aldo Ray, who played a rough mixture of Brown and Stiglitz character descriptions. The reference that serves best here is Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead (1958). In this film, Aldo Ray plays tough Sgt. Sam Croft who heads a Pacific reconnaissance squadron behind enemy lines when his tactics of leadership are questioned by his men. The film deconstructs the morality and integrity of war’s catch-22 nature, where successful leadership takes no prisoners, disregards individual humanity, and often appears murderous as a means to save lives. Failure to comply with Sgt. Croft’s hard edged and crazy rules results in what feels like negligence with life. The Naked and the Dead treads a really thin line between moral decency and reckless murder when conveying that war sometimes necessitates a clear line of division between sides for survival. When placed within the context of Tarantino’s Raine, the development of the character excludes such dichotomies that are more likely developed within the parallel character in The Dirty Dozen. This exclusion implies that Raine lacks the internal moral responsibility of Croft while maintaining the murderous exterior, which allows for the most two-dimensional character of the major cast. This vapid character further perpetuates the myth of the American hero so that there is a point for comparative analysis with Jewish war hero Hugo Stiglitz. Without such a comparison point there is no way to understand the complicated satire implied through character actions and intentions when the film’s violence comes to full climax, otherwise belief within the actions of these heroes would be misrepresented as appropriate.

Epilogue

Two more films that serve as subtle reference points for comparison films for further dialog on the themes of race, violence, and the war genre: Lee Frost’s The Scavengers (1969) and Umberto Lenzi’s Desert Commandos (1967). Also a strong satire, Frost’s film follows a troop of Confederate soldiers that continue the war against the North after the Civil War has ended, and their maniacal leader holds nothing back when he retaliates against supposedly freed slaves. Lenzi, whose film Bridge to Hell (1986) also serves as a visual reference for Basterd’s violence, helms Desert Commandos’s similar plot with a clever approach towards breaking down audience identification without satire nor irony, and yet remains just as strong as Basterd’s analysis and critique.

Those Satisfactions Are Permanent: Finally Addressing Why I Love Jacques Rivette So Dearly

2009-12-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

There has been a flurry of question-asking directed towards me recently, and this flurry has all been a single question. “Kremer, why do you love Jacques Rivette so much? Why is he your favorite filmmaker? Just what the Sam Hill is the attraction?” Whether it be people I have known personally for years or ConFluence-Film Blog readers who have written in to me about it in the past year, there is an interest in discovering the true nature of my unbounded admiration of the beloved French auteur, whose work is little seen Stateside. I believe it is the fact that his work is so hard to track down that accounts for much of the fascination from people. Just how is it that I have even seen a lot of these films? So finally, I am, at long last willing, interested and ready to answer the question and to articulate my love and overwhelming respect for the iconoclastic French director, who has recently turned 81. It is fair to say that, as my personal hero, I might mourn his eventual death like a member of my own family. That’s a pretty big statement, but read on and I will tell you why he means so much to me as an artist and as a personality.

I am going to begin my answer by mentioning my favorite audience reaction to a film of my own. Shortly after my final cut of A Trip to Swadades was completed, I sent a copy of the film to an old friend of mine on the west coast, a documentary filmmaker. When I asked him if he liked my movie, he replied unabashedly and point-blank, “I hated it!” A little stunned and honestly rather crestfallen and hurt by the candor of his response, I nonetheless went about my business of promoting and trying to distribute and screen the film as if no such response to it had been received. Let us just say it was a quiet shellshock. But while I was hurt, I was not angry with this friend at all. I appreciated his honesty because…well, it is just so rare for someone to be so forthcoming and frank with such a terse and straightforward negative opinion. About a month later, the friend called me up at what was almost midnight east-coast time. He told me that, although he had been initially resistant and irately puzzled by my film, he had since viewed it two additional times and he grew to admire and even love it. He accounted how the film had gotten under his skin and how he couldn’t shake it off, even if he tried. He then proceeded to dissect my film, which is a work of an extremely personal nature, for me over the phone, providing for me his own interpretation, and a unique one at that.

When this conversation ended, I was immediately flooded with a deep well of emotion and a sense of profound accomplishment. Why, you ask? And what does this have to do with Rivette? Well, I had the occasion of seeing Jacques Rivette’s L’amour par terre (1984). On my first viewing, I really disliked the film. I thought it was muddled and I failed to see much of a point for it being made. Time passed and I realized that the film had lingered, and it had lingered so steadfastly and unerringly that it had similarly gotten under my skin, to the extent that I could not shake it off. I could not stop thinking about it. And so I watched the film again, and again. The fact that something I made functioned in the same way, that I was able to fashion it, direct it and edit it in a way that lingered in someone’s mind — that I was able to do what Rivette did for me, which I find to be one of the greatest gifts a filmmaker can give — was, and still is, to me, my greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker thus far. The very fact that any film can do this excites me as both audience and filmmaker. That is not the only gift Rivette has given me. He also respects his audience enough to believe in their intellectual curiosity towards further discovery.

In a sense, I guess you could say I am talking about a modern audience's desire for “immediate results” and the “instant thrill”. These audiences might watch a film and want to say, “Damn! That was good!” directly after the final fade-out. While, for instance, Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse is the best film about the artistic process ever made in my opinion, it is certainly deliberately paced throughout a four-hour running time. Although the film is greatly praised, audiences have had general difficulty wading through what they perceive as fat in desperate need of -ectomy. But in the time allotted, we are made to perceive the canvas as a battlefield, and we feel so intensely and intimately all the agony and the ecstasy to which Chuck Heston’s Michelangelo couldn’t hold a candle. Rivette is also the first person I have known to observe how an artist cannot bargain with the source of inspiration, and that a source of inspiration just is. Rivette’s films provide neither immediate results nor instant thrills. The kinds of results and thrills that are provided by Rivette, however, are most substantial and lasting than anything “instant.” To quote Warren Oates in Two-Lane Blacktop, "those satisfactions are permanent." But, you know, that’s not even it really. It’s other things too, like his restrained, economical but nonetheless dynamic use of music, which rivals only Robert Bresson in Western cinema. He is a treasure as an artist because, simply put, all of his films are somehow and in some way magical. There is not a single one that is not magical to me. It is becoming, then, that many of his films are explicitly about magic (e.g. Noroit, Duelle, Histoire de Marie et Julien). My favorite film of all time, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), is about the magic of storytelling, and the heroines return to a “film-within-the-film” through sucking on a magic candy-rock which places them back within the strange house where the meta-drama unfolds. I encountered this, my favorite film, at a flea-market when I was still in high-school. It was two dollars for a two-VHS set. No film, then and now, has perplexed, baffled and exhilarated me as much. This is all without mentioning that the man has respect for effective and intriguing titles. I always say that if a filmmaker or novelist isn’t interested in naming his work effectively, I am not really interested in seeing or reading it effectively.

I cherish and I am blown away by every one of his films. Each of them is infallibly honest and could have been made by no one else except him. My fascination with the inherent power within the act of telling a story has been the subject of some of my recent reading. I have been looking at Martin Buber’s books on Chasidism (both his collection of Chasidic tales as well as his book On Chasidism) and absorbing his accounts of how integral the act of storytelling is to the Chasidic world. Storytelling is a form of prayer, an act of devotion that signifies our overpowering need to connect with eternity, to paraphrase Buber in my own words. Spirits chained in things, in both animate and inanimate objects, are unlocked through prayer, so thinking of storytelling as a form of prayer, you can just imagine the implications. Considered this way, it is more than mere escapism.

Storytelling, to me, is to be cognizant of cycles — cycles with all the shifts, the gauntlets and the cosmic tumblers we may not be immediately cognizant of, but which lead full-circle to some truth, and a braiding of elements. Human beings make sense of themselves through this sacred act. It is through my favorite filmmaker that I have come to realize my own true feelings and philosophies about the act of storytelling, and it is because of him that I am able to articulate them in such a way. Rivette, more than any filmmaker with whom I have yet been acquainted, recognizes this magic and much of his work has been successfully characterizing and analyzing the importance of theater and storytelling's grand illusion and the cathartic process(es) of creating it. It is intrinsic to humans, and this need not be illustrated further than simply watching children being let loose in a room with or without toys, and observing how they will immediately find a way to make-believe, and this is most certainly the purest form of theater. From our earliest years, we relish the idea of “going boating” (i.e. French vernacular meaning “to get wrapped up in a story you are being told”). In this sense, the films Rivette makes about theater and theatrical companies staging productions of plays (he uses this device in six separate films, including his beloved L’amour fou and Out 1) is more than just a series of tired examinations of theater and its relationship with reality, and vice versa (because that is just plain boring and grossly unoriginal, lacking imagination). It is our intrinsic need to create illusions, and the implications and ramifications of that, which fascinates him.

I often liken Rivette’s films to the music of the Sun Ra Arkestra. You hand yourself over to the wonders of dissonance, letting go of any preconceived notions of being in control and getting joyfully lost. His films have often been improvisatory with a full-on, unbridled feeling of jazz. His film Merry-Go-Round (1981) even uses the often cacophonous “Greek chorus” of a saxophonist and a bass player in a strange jam session to pace his hallucinatory story. One could almost call many of his works “jazz filmmaking”. Yet they rarely meander and, if they do, there is very just cause for them to do so (e.g. the seemingly interminable opening chase in Celine and Julie Go Boating). One of my favorite quotes about Rivette is from critic and film scholar Richard Roud who, upon seeing one of Rivette’s films, exclaimed, “Cinema will never be the same, and neither will I.” I, as a viewer, particularly in Rivette’s earlier works, am transformed with each viewing of one of his films.

His genre experiments of the 90’s are fascinating in and of themselves, and one might argue that his work starts getting more “accessible” when he enters this phase of his career. For example, his musical Up Down Fragile is an homage to the 1953 Stanley Donen musical Give a Girl a Break (a Hollywood production with economical musical numbers which, according to Rivette himself, “was shot in next to no time”). The first musical number in Rivette’s three-hour musical does not appear until almost a whole hour into the film! When it does appear, though, your brain is so happily busy and you have so much of a sense of what is at stake in the film’s story that the first musical genre element means something much more than if it were arbitrarily placed and just an excuse for a big production number. My endorphins are buzzing just talking about this! The philosophy of placing music sequences in a musical is, after all, often a disaffected “It’s about time for another song” mentality. Rivette subverts this and makes elements of the genre mean something to the audience on the levels of both emotion as well as logic. In addition, there is a single long take in the film I must have watched and rewound about twenty times, on a dance-floor as Enzo Enzo sings “Les Naufrages Volontaires”. In his thriller Secret Defense, we have the character of an ordinary woman (played extraordinarily by Sandrine Bonnaire, who it would seem was his 90’s muse) driven to the extreme task of murdering another human being who killed her father. In a marvelous long take, we observe her transformation and the maelstrom of emotion she undergoes as she prepares to commit the act, taking many trains and transferring many times on her trip up to the country to do so. He stages the Electra drama as Hitchcock, and explicitly furthers the psychological depth in the process through the use of one fraught long-take. If you only knew how wonderfully full I feel as I am writing about this. This is all without mentioning frequent Rivette collaborator William Lubtchansky’s sublime camerawork.

When I make new films, I find that I am often thinking, “What would Jacques do? Would he like it? Would he approve?” He is, after all, the filmmaker I most want to emulate, a filmmaker whose sensibility, I feel, is closest to my own. I am heading into my next feature film, Permanent Arrangements, and find that I am constantly asking myself these three questions. I remember being at a Hollywood party a couple years ago and being asked by my host, “What artist makes you feel so full of life that he or she almost makes you cry just by how much you are inspired by their work?”. I do not, in this circumstance, have to answer that for you. What I have said about my so-called hero should speak for itself. It is not just in the work, of which there is no real equal, but it is also the way Rivette comports himself in public and in interviews. How he comports himself also speaks to the fact that while he may be concerned with illusion in his work, he is not consumed by any of it in the reality. He feels a great deal of comfort, it seems, in being slightly lesser known than his French New Wave contemporaries, almost as if he has consciously willed it to be. He seems happiest with a smaller cluster of fans who are devoted in a most hardcore sense. Another interesting aspect of his work: He has been known to recut his films into completely different other films. For example, La Belle Noiseuse becomes Divertimento and Out 1 becomes Out 1 Spectre. I've never known any other filmmaker to do that in this manner.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is without a doubt the foremost American champion and scholar of his work, and contributors to the Criterion Forum have long been in an uproar over Criterion’s overdue release prospects of any of his films through the Criterion Collection. It speaks to his appeal, however, that many screenings during a comprehensive 2006 Rivette retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image sold out. I have most of his films on DVD, many of them foreign discs and bootlegs, but would buy them yet again if they were officially released here. Truffaut said in 1977, “French New Wave and cinema itself would not be what it is today without Jacques Rivette.” Highly esteemed film scholar David Thomson called Celine and Julie Go Boating “the most important narrative film since Citizen Kane.” All I know is that Daniel Kremer of New York, New York thinks he is one of the very few living genius still working in cinema, and in the order of poets.

I want to end this article with Jonathan Romney’s review of Celine and Julie Go Boating in Time Out London, because I think it’s a beautiful review which encapsulates at least part of Rivette’s mission as an artist: “Favorite films are always the hardest to describe. There are the two pairs of actresses, Berto/Labourier and Ogier/Pisier. The first play a magician and a librarian who meet in Montmartre and wind up sharing the same flat, fiance, clothes, identity and imagination; the other are the Phantom Ladies Over Paris, whom Celine and Julie either invent or stumble upon (or both) in a haunted house, along with a man and his child. There is also Rivette’s love cinema—the movies he cherishes—and the childishness of his and our and Celine and Julie’s rapt attention as we embark on the adventure together, experience a collective form of narrative rape, all spinning a tale that is spinning us. It’s scary, evocative, exhilarating and essential.”

Coming Soon!

2009-12-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

Next up at bat is New York City filmmaker and "No Wave Movement" luminary Amos Poe, who will be discussing his recent work as well as the evolution of so-called "punk cinema" since his pioneering of it in the late 70's. Elliott Gould is still also forthcoming. We're just awaiting a window of time. Karen Black is on the roster to be interviewed as well. Plus, we still have the Guest Writers series to look forward to as well. Stay tuned!

Old Friends and Teachers: An Interview With Randal Kleiser on the Upcoming DVD Release “Nina Foch: Directing the Actor”

2009-12-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

I met director Randal Kleiser at a premiere screening at the Director’s Guild of America Theater on Sunset Boulevard. Our meeting at this premiere was brief and none-too-memorable. As a matter of fact, I simply told him, “I grew up on Big Top Pee-Wee,” which he of course had directed. He met this with a polite thank you and went about the business of schmoozing. Now, what I had told him was an honest statement but, in all honesty, how are you going to begin any substantive conversation with that? In any case, as Pee-Wee himself would sardonically exclaim, “I love that story!”.

A few months later, however, we better acquainted ourselves at a Midwestern film festival where I was premiering my film A Collection of Chemicals and where he was being honored for a lifetime of work. This, after all, is the man who gave us beloved mainstream American films like Grease, Flight of the Navigator, The Blue Lagoon and many others. An appearance in George Lucas’ student short film Freiheit is also noteworthy (he and Lucas were college roommates and remain friends to this day). Offhandedly one day, he mentioned that he was working on promoting a directing workshop somehow centered around the teachings of actress Nina Foch. When I told him that I was an admirer of the classic Hollywood actress’ work and rattled off a few of my favorite performances of hers, including her role as Dyan Cannon’s cartoonishly vain pseudo-beauty-queen mother in Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends, he informed me that he had been on the set of that film as an observer in 1970. I got all misty-eyed.

The festival ended as all things do, and we found ourselves together at the airport, catching the same connecting flight home, on separate coasts mind you. When we parted, I gave him a copy of my film and asked him to stay in touch. His mention of the Nina Foch project lingered on my mind and, for many months, I wondered about the specifics of it.

Some months later, I called Randal up to ask about something technical (i.e. pertinent to the pre-production of my upcoming movie project). At this time, I then asked him if he would be willing to sit down for a phone interview to talk about the Nina Foch project, of which I had just superficial knowledge. Little did I know that the project had its roots as far back as 1965 during Kleiser’s tenure as a film student at University of Southern California, at which time he himself was a student of Foch’s.

He informed me that 200 hours of footage had been recorded of Nina Foch teaching her “Directing the Actor” class at USC. shot over the span of fifteen weeks. Foch passed away in December of 2008 and, in her wake, Kleiser and others have been aiming to package Foch’s videotaped classes to new and upcoming generations of writers, directors and actors, intending to market them to a DVD audience. The DVD package will be entitled “Nina Foch: Directing the Actor” and will be available in early 2010 (with no exact date set at this time).

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DK: Can you discuss your relationship to Nina Foch and this project?

RK: When I took Nina’s class way back in 1965, it was the most amazing class I had ever taken and, in retrospect, I’d say it still is the most valuable film-school course I have taken. I had long considered it an ambition to somehow record her teachings and to keep them for posterity because I was convinced that it would be a really great tool for teaching directors how to direct actors. In 2002, George Lucas financed the taping of a whole semester. The project then grew and morphed into an interactive DVD, with the theory being that the viewer can either play everything and take the whole course, or view specific lessons. What was recorded of her…there are details in directing the actor in all areas. You learn how to breakdown a script for one, and there is no way the worth of that can be overestimated. Nina had been at this for forty years and had made a lasting impression on such directors as John McTiernan, Amy Heckerling, Ron Underwood, many others. It wasn’t even just actors and directors she touched and influenced. Singers like Barry Manilow, Natalie Cole, Melissa Manchester, Julie Andrews, Neil Diamond. Nina taught them how to comport themselves on stage in the presence of an audience, how to command the space, how to make a performance more compelling and intriguing—this was all stuff that Nina taught like no one else taught it. Barry Manilow said, for one, that his whole career changed and that everything became fresh. He said that everytime he is on stage, he feels as if she is up there on the stage with him.

She also gives tips on how to treat the crew. She teaches you to never rely solely on your AD [assistant director] and how a director needs to be proactive and alert to the tasks of every department. She teaches you how to properly prepare for shooting a scene the night before you shoot it, how to be as organized as possible…for actors how there is a separate physical action for every line. There are so many things of value that actors and directors can learn, and so much knowledge to be accrued from her classes and her teachings.

DK: Do you have any of them talking about her influence on their careers on the DVD?

RK: Yes, we have gotten many of them commenting on how important and vital Nina had been to their careers, and they share anecdotes about her as well. Their interviews will be included in the final product.

DK: How are you going about distribution?

RK: We are initially going through USC. I just got a call from Sony, so there is a possibility of it being distributed over there. We’ve also gotten advice from George Lucas. Peter Broderick, who runs the site peterbroderick.com, has also been a help in terms of our distribution plans.

Below is a clip from Executive Suite (1954), for which Nina Foch was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

DK: You’ve worked with Nina Foch as her director?

RK: [laughing] I directed her twice, if you could really call it that. How can you direct the greatest directing teacher you’ve ever had? How can you direct someone as intelligent and naturally intuitive as Nina? Maybe you can imagine. I worked with her on It’s My Party (1996), which is my favorite of my own work. I worked with her on Shadow of Doubt (1998) with Melanie Griffith. I remember I was directing a scene with 500 extras in black tie. Nina was at a podium on one side of them, I was on the other on a crane. It got to the point where we were talking back and forth to each other over PA systems, saying things like, “Isn’t it great to still be working after all these years?!” That was one of my fondest on-set memories. She was one of my greatest friends as well as my greatest teacher. She just teachers you how to get in there in do your thing and do it right. I consider it something of a Bible for actors and directors, without question. It’s just going to be a great resource for people. Even for animators, it will be something of tremendous worth. She also teaches you how to light actors. For a woman who was sixty or seventy years in the business, she knew more than a great deal about that. She actually physically lit the set a couple times on my films.

DK: I now want to touch on something that is in a way related but is kind of a diegression.

RK: Okay.

DK: Back in 1965—I don’t know because I was not around then—but I can’t imagine anyone really and truly knowing about how accessible the film medium would become in the future. Nowadays, films can be made so easily and so cheaply within the digital form. A class that you take back in 1965 with Nina Foch would one day be available to not just USC students but everyone via a home-viewing format. With the development of the medium, with more stuff being produced, are you concerned with a loss of quality and the process of having to wade through the junk to get through the stuff of value and worth?

RK: One thing I’ve learned is that the cream always rises to the top. I know that the Sundance Film Festival has four times as many submissions for festival consideration as they once did so, as you were saying, there is more being produced and a lot of it isn’t good. But, again, I will say that the cream always rises to the top and if something is good, it will get seen. I went to a financial distribution seminar at the DGA a couple of nights ago. There were a lot of people present saying how everything in film distribution has changed completely, and how a great deal of personnel have moved over to television. They were also saying that there is little to no room for small films these days because they are competing with these other forums, and television is getting steadily more ambitious. Films get seen more and more online and work gets disseminated more easily. When I was learning to make films, that obviously didn’t exist. You had to physically schlep a film-print of your movie from venue to venue. There were no easy distribution avenues like there are today. Now, you can just log on to the Net and you can watch these shorts that people make on there. It’s completely different and everything has changed so absolutely. I am grateful and enormously thrilled that not just USC students can learn from Nina, but everyone with a DVD player can learn from her. There are many things to be grateful for in the digital age. I guess you could say Nina is one of them.

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To view a tribute article written shortly after Nina Foch's passing, visit the ALT Film Blog.

ConFluence-Film Blog is Nearing Its First Anniversary!

2009-11-23T08:42:00.001-08:00

The ConFluence-Film Blog is nearing its first anniversary. It has been an eventful year for the blog. I started it the month before I moved to Manhattan. This is just the beginning! Thank you for your readership and for being a loyal audience to my epic rantings about the subjects I have examined.

Next up at bat is director Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon and Flight of the Navigator) who was interviewed last week about the Nina Foch Acting and Directing Workshop. The full article is now being written. Keep checking back! An interview with Elliott Gould will feature audio from a podcast to be co-hosted by myself and Jon Poritsky of The Candler Blog.