Immersion

I saw two films recently -- neither film was released recently, but I experienced them that way, within a proximity of weeks, and although their intentions were utterly apposite, one to entertain, the other to inform, they seemed to me to both be attempting to create an immersive experience on film.  That one failed and the other succeeded and the means by which they did that seem worth examining.

The first was Cinerama Holiday (1955) one of the original feature-length films designed to demonstrate the three-camera, three-projector Cinerama format, develop and audience and a a demand and possibly suggest to filmmakers that what might be seen as a gimmick might have narrative possibilities.  The film has been restored for Blu-ray and evidently does the best it can to simulate that overwhelming experience in the home setting.  Actually, the photography and sound are still impressive.  What prevents it from becoming overwhelming is the overall mundanity and lack of imagination in the design of the film.

The content is simply two intercut travelogues, representing a young American's trip through Europe, and a young Swiss couple's trip across America.  Thankfully, there is no phony story cooked up, no chase, no lost passports or jewelry, no getting caught up in foreign intrigue.  There is a certain goofy naive integrity to the whole Cinerama project, which probably inspired the hiring of one of the squarest of the square filmmakers, Louis DeRochemont, creator of The March of Time to execute CH.  After all, the financiers didn't want anything "extra."  They just wanted to show the world how awesome Cinerama was, with no other frills or furbelows.

Cinerama projects at about a 2.75 ratio, but on an enormous screen that was often 40 feet high and about 110 feet wide.  If you sat inside the curve, the projected picture could occupy your entire peripheral vision.  You were literally inside the picture.  This was augmented by super-duper-multi-stereo recording, which must have been pretty startling to mid-50s filmgoers (remember home stereo records didn't arrive until 1958) and still sounds pretty good, especially in the field recordings of actual sounds, such as the bobsled run and the hiss of skis on snow.  The approach is to envelop, surround and dominate the viewer, reduce him or her to a state of helpless surrender to the sheer scale of this form of filmmaking.

(In home video, the picture is deliberately distorted in a "Smile Box" as show in this video, to simulate in two dimensions the look of a huge curved screen.)

It's really not too bad -- the sheer novelty holds the interest for most of the two hours, although some of the scenes of the country fair in Vermont hardly justify this kind of spectacular approach, and their are interludes that lag.  Still, to blow up what is ordinarily a 10-minute feature before the film, the travelogue, and make it a feature attraction has its own sort of audaciousness.

But you can't call this a moving or an emotional experience.  And strangely, it's not really that immersive, at least not in home video.

On the other hand, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015, Son of Saul, takes what might be called the reductive approach to immersion.  Released in Academy ratio, that is commonly known as 4:3 or 1:37, the camera doggedly follows a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz carrying out his hellish duties in a hellish environment.  When I say follow, I mean follow.  Probably two-thirds of the film is a shot of his upper back and shoulders.  The camera uses a very short focal length, which means that nearly everything except that which is very close is out of focus.  It is hard to make out what is going on, which at times is a mercy, especially in the most ghoulish and horrific parts of the story.

Conversely, the soundtrack is rich and complex, if just as incomprehensible.  I am told eight languages are heard, or rather barked, languages of captors and the captured carrying out their literally insane duties.  In the clip I've embedded here, you can see just what a confusing and relentless existence this is.

And yet, better than any documentary I've seen, any dramatic film from Schindler's List to Europa Europa to Fateless to The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, etc., etc., Son of Saul conveys the feeling of being inside this bizarre and historically unparalleled phenomenon.  There is no solemn music, no extended speeches (barely any complete sentences in the entire film), no musing on the meaning, no plea for help or understanding or anything except a request that a boy's body not be burned, so that Saul, who believes the boy to be his son (the film never resolves that question) may have the Kaddish said over him and buried with proper respect.  There is a parallel story about the attempted uprising of the Sonderkommandos -- I'm not sure if it was necessary, and it certainly never becomes central or even very well explained.

But that's the point.  Nothing is explained.  No one makes sense of anything, because this is a world without sense.  Instead of pre-empting your peripheral vision, like the Cinerama screen, director Lazslo Nemes has chopped off your peripheral vision with the use of the square format picture.  In its place he has given you super hearing, but what you can hear is chaotic and untranslated, and is mostly of little help, being its own source of confusion and terror.

And so, by cutting off your senses and forcing you to try and piece together what is happening, Nemes has provided much greater immersion than Louis DeRochemont's gigantic Cinerama experience.  Which is just the kind of paradox that a filmgoer has to love.

See Son of Saul even if you're fed up with Holocaust films.  I promise you, you will not be bored for one single solitary second.

Rabbit hole of madness

Seeing Downfall (2004) just a few weeks after seeing Five Minutes of Heaven, and a few months after The Experiment, I am tempted to conclude that director Oliver Hirschbiegel is the master of small, confined spaces. And here is Hitler, who dared to try and conquer half the world, confined to a rabbit warren under Berlin. Yet he shows no surprise or bitterness, just the tired demeanor of an old sick man who knowingly gambled and lost. Doesn't make him any less mad, just not as delusional as one would be tempted to think.

These madmen and women are trying to reassert their perverse versions of everyday human values. Hitler marries as foreplay to the ecstasy of shared suicide. Goebbels' wife kills her magazine-cover lederhosen-clad super-Aryan-children, telling them that poison is medicine, then waiting calmly for her husband to shoot her before shooting himself. Thus are decent people kept decent before the dirty alien hordes arrive. The point is, everyone feels boxed in--despite the fact that they have brought this all down on themselves--and the film reflects that physical and mental claustrophobia superbly. Production information reveals that sets were built without "wild" walls--those are walls which can be removed to accommodate better or wider camera angles. Instead, the bunker was reconstructed exactly and the cameras had to cope with whatever they could.

Tellingly, no other perspective is presented, other than a few soldiers left defending the city who are eventually brought into the world of the bunker. There is no parallel Allied story, or that of ordinary citizens of Berlin. It is all myopia and literally a mile wide. But there is little ranting, other than the impatient squawk of a tired old man. The madness is quiet, and clear-eyed enough to recognize that the reckoning has come. And perhaps that's the most frightening thing. These people were not visibly any madder than people we meet all the time. The young secretary who provides the point of view was an ordinarily decent person, looking for a good government job.

Incidentally, Downfall has become the subject of a YouTube phenomenon, in which footage of Bruno Ganz as Hitler is re-titled to react to some new pop-culture phenomenon. Most of these contain (subtitled) language not appropriate to this website, but the idea is undeniably funny. More suitable for a film blog, here is a StarTrek II/Downfall mashup I enjoyed:



This sort of thing, along with Mel Brooks's The Producers represents our final triumph over Hitler. We no longer tremble at him, monster though he was. Now he is small and ridiculous and silly--the type of thing that would hurt him the most. Would that we had the perspective to the same to Al Queda and similar threats--see them for the pipsqueaks they are.

Burden of truth

Costa-Gavras's films have to be approached as socio-political documents before considering them as aesthetic objects. Amen.* (2002) seems sets out to confound the truism that the truth will make you free. Newly minted SS Officer Kurt Gerstein is a first-hand witness at a dry run for the Final Solution and is determined as a Christian to make it public knowledge, confident that the German people will put a stop to it, as they stopped execution of the mentally disabled. Unable to get an audience with Germans, he stumbles over a connection to the highest powers in the Vatican, who also turn a deaf ear.

As an aesthetic object the film is a perfect demonstration of how filmmakers discard the strength of the material they have acquired and fail to substitute anything as powerful. The material first appeared in Germany in the early 1960's as a play called The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth. It was a long documentary indictment of the Catholic Church and was vehemently denounced by the church, thus enhancing its fame and probably increasing the number of productions it received. (Would-be censors never learn this lesson.)

Though it was long and much of it was disputed, it was theatrical lightning, and was produced across the continent, and the Royal Shakespeare Company production came to New York to great acclaim and fanfare.

Costa-Gavras and his collaborators modified the story so that instead of the straight-on attack on the church, the film bounces between Gerstein's agony and the attempt of a young priest to get the attention of the Pontiff. This is exactly what happened to the play Amadeus by Anthony Shaffer. Where the play focused with laser beam intensity on the hatred and frustration of Salieri against Mozart, Forman's film brought in Mozart's father, Schickaneder, an elaborate physical production (in which Mozart is seen conducting an orchestra in a completely inauthentic manner), all of which diluted the film and made it utterly unclear what it was about except the fact that Tom Hulce can giggle like a fool.

Since the publication of The Deputy, Costa-Gavras claims that information has surfaced that tends to exonerate the Vatican and make its silence understandable if not excusable. I don't have the time or inclination to delve into the charges and counter-charges. All I know is that this is among the mildest and politest of Holocaust films. Admittedly it was a wise decision to play the initial gassing scene off-screen, with its horror reflected in Gerstein's eyes. But the rest of the film feels like earnest young officers and priests stomping around and telling their superiors, "I beg you to listen to me," while the elders blandly wave them away. The point is made quickly, and no new points or insights follow in the second hour.

Costa-Gavras is an exciting filmmaker when he's angry. Clearly, he's aging when the Holocaust doesn't seem to get him worked up anymore.
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* The period is part of the title. I don't know why.

Broken

I have been interested in live theater almost as long as film and have more hands-on experience in the former when one includes non-professional and semi-professional activity. And because of my interest in both media, and because it is often impossible to see plays live in the theater for years at a time, I have always had a special curiosity about film adaptations of theater pieces.

One of the principal differences between the media is the use of dialogue. For film, dialogue is one of the possible modes of expression, but it is only one and it is always subservient to image, and often in an inferior position to other elements of the soundtrack, such as music and effects. Great movie dialogue is often elliptical, enigmatic, riddled with subtext. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." "If you build it, he will come." "Go ahead, make my day." "We rob banks." No poetry here, except the poetry of understatement, fused with story and character.

Whereas in the theater, dialogue is the principal means of expression. Characters tell us what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what they're going to do, what they just did, what happened offstage. None of this is necessary or even desirable in film. And in theater, they often make beautiful music with their speech--I don't need to quotes, open Shakespeare to any page.

This makes translation from stage to screen so tricky, because the dialogue may be the very seat of the play's value, but could prevent it from being effective onscreen. There are successful talky movies--Network, The Maltese Falcon, My Dinner With Andre, gabfests all. But that talk has been designed for film, designed to work in concert with all the other elements, and it knows that dialogue in film has two audiences--onscreen character and film viewer. And somehow, it takes less time to grasp the ideas when the camera can show us those eyes, those lips, those brows that are issuing that speech. It's almost like that thing where you can't understand what someone is saying until you put your glasses on.

I missed Bent (1997) on stage, and to be honest, the subject has little fascination for me. I'm sure one can argue that homosexuals were treated worse than Jews, but death does not seem to me to be a matter of relativity. The film has some interest because it represents Clive Owen in an early leading role, two years before his breakout film, Croupier. The first half hour of the film eschews the play's politics and seems determined to upset or offend the non-gay audience with a great deal of simulated gay porn (in that definition I include a performance by Mick Jagger in drag). Finally, the film settles down to what it's going to be about, and 45 minutes in, commences the relationship which is the centerpiece of the film.

So after a long patch of trying to be "cinematic" Bent settles down to be a straightforward dialogue-driven theater adaptation. In this mode it presents its one and only point of interest. The two principal characters are gay men imprisoned by the Nazis (one pretending to be Jewish). They are under constant surveillance and are not permitted to touch. Using words only, standing stock still, side by side, they have an extreme erotic encounter. This has several functions. It establishes the bond between them. It establishes the power of words. It makes for some discomfort among much of the non-gay audience; at the same time, most must recognize the common elements between homosexual and heterosexual encounters-- which both relieves and increases the discomfort. And despite the fact that the driving aspect of the encounter is verbal, the film medium reinforces it by maintaining a steady, still gaze, fixing the characters in the center of the frame and reinforcing the stillness around them.

After all, stillness in the theater is the default mode. A fixed frame, fixed set, often the words the only animating factor. But such a circumstance is special, heightened, in film. Stillness demands special attention on screen. So for a moment, theater and film themselves touch hands and work together.

Then it falls apart. Because, presumably following the lead of the play, in a subsequent scene the verbal sexual encounter is repeated. And where it might have had a cumulative effect in the theater, because we are in the world of words and more words is more meaning, it is simply redundant in film. Because the action, not the word, is the key in film, and we have seen and registered this action. It means nothing to repeat it, even if the actual words are different this time than last. And from there on, the film grinds to its stagy conclusion in highly formal, artificial compositions which only heighten the writer's and director's failure to bridge, or even acknowledge the gap between stage and screen.

Cured ham (I know, it's trafe!)

I don't know if I realized consciously that Jeff Goldblum has been a largely wasted natural resource this last 30 years, but Adam Resurrected (2008) is surely proof of the fact. Much of the film is off-putting, either in bad taste, degrading to its characters or solipsistic (if a film can be said to be self-absorbed). But Goldblum's realization of Adam Stein, the guilty Holocaust victim magician clown is both miraculous, warm and somehow natural.

For good or ill, the clown has found himself in a film by Paul Schrader, a director (and sometime writer) who evidently always wants to tell the audience to go **** itself. If Taxi Driver didn't make that clear to you, Hardcore should have. Happily, he has dropped his neo-classical stylistic trappings and caught up with 21st century filmmaking: hand-held camera, digital media, jump cuts, mismatches, CGI, etc. Given his usual challenging subject matter, in this case, madness and the Holocaust, the style seems appropriate.

The film meanders around, Adam saves a little boy from madness which seems to balance the scale for his own humiliation (and his loss of his family) and he recovers. Well, that sucks. Because a madman-clown who gets better is no fun at all.

I hope more sane people than Paul Schrader have seen this film and will cast Goldblum again as an entertainer. I think he out-Penns Penn Jillette.