Sins of the fathers

Watching The White Ribbon (2009) feels like taking a bath in disinfectant. You are better off when you're finished, but it's pretty tough while you're going through it. The pleasures of the film are more ascetic than aesthetic.

One cannot deny the purely cinematic artistry of a film like this. Whereas I found his previous film, Cache a confused jumble of jabber about a number of conflicting ideas, The White Ribbon is purely visual, clear, specific and precise. It speaks through simple objects: a pen, a dead bird, a burning barn, mangled cabbages, and the white ribbons of the title. In the pre-Christian world, white ribbons offered protection from evil and harm; here, a father ties the white ribbon on his children to protect them from being harmed by the evil in their own minds.

The viewer most wonder if the use of black and white is a reflection of the community's Manichean view of the world, or of fallible memory, for the narrator confesses at the opening of the film: “I don’t know if the story I’m about to tell is entirely true.” (This has the added advantage of excusing Haneke if his interpretation of the German character is incorrect -- it's just that the schoolmaster remembered it that way. )

Moreover, black and white makes it easier to conceal the tripwire that brings down horse and man in the first sequence and starts the cascade of horrors visited on this village. The source of that evil remains as invisible as the tripwire itself, even though it is out in the open and plain to
see, if one has the will to do so.

Most of the discussion of this film has been about morality, sociology, psychology or history. This is merely a film blog, so let me reserve my opinion along these lines. What is striking about this film is that it is possible to make a good film without a scrap of beauty. There is no music but for some diagetic dance music at a harvest festival. There is not one blue sky, not one lovely tree, not a human face depicted with tenderness. All is cruel and cold and terrible. The implication is that cruelty like this is passed on unless one makes a conscious effort to break the chain. And the film simulates the cruelty by communicating the chill.

In an analogous fashion, the documentary Tell Them Who You Are (2005) gets invited into our cinematic parlor by purporting to be a portrait of cinematographer, documentarian and sometime director Haskell Wexler (photographer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In The Heat of the Night, American Graffiti and director of Medium Cool). But it quickly develops into a portrait of an overbearing, unfaithful, jealous and sometimes controlling father who, over the course of the film, learns to accept his son as an independent and worthy artist of his own.

On the way, the younger Wexler gets advice from a surrogate father, Conrad Hall, Paul Newman, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda (who both had toxic fathers) and Michael Douglas, who must have fought similar battles for artistic and personal identity with his father, Kirk Douglas. The challenge is to stop the cycle of attempting to control that which will follow us, always a feckless task.

If you come to Tell Them Who You Are merely as a film buff, you will be disappointed. The clips are few and limited, and the only good "making of" stories are about the films Wexler was fired from, usually for trying to control the direction (most notably One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest). That need for control, for recognition, for acknowledgment seems to make so many men into Willie Lomans who push their children away the harder they try and pull them in. (The answer to the film's title is: You are my son. The implication is: ...and nothing else.)

Tellingly, although father is famous as a shooter and father and son are both seen handling cameras throughout the film, it has to be acknowledged that Mark Wexler's triumph in Tell Them Who You Are is as a cutter. The cinematography is unremarkable -- why would it be in a videotape documentary, the writing and direction nonexistent. (A good deal of footage is taken up with Wexler pere attempting to tell fils how to stage a scene.) A documentary is directed in the cutting room, and Mark Wexler's success is testified to by his father's tears at seeing the finished product.

I'm not saying you'll be in tears, although if you have a judgmental parent you have struggled to get out from under, you might be. The White Ribbon shows how this parental poison may be left to fester and infect another generation; Tell Them Who You Are demonstrates how it may be purged.

Horror = expressionism

Cat People (1942), is a seminal horror film for three reasons; it is the first produced by Val Lewton, and because it was produced by Lewton, a sensitive soul who eschewed Universal-style monsters, Cat People emphasized (a) scare sequences using the power of suggestion and (b) horror based on everyday fears, insecurities and neuroses.

Horror stories are always ridiculous, which does not make them less compelling. Nowadays, when we know longer believe in fairy godmothers, frog princes or walking mermaids, we happily exchange stories of vampires, zombies and malevolent space aliens, all of which are equally impossible and fantastical as the fairy story characters we've discarded. I suppose in the first half of the twentieth century, monsters were like wicked foreign countries declaring war from somewhere afar, and we need only kill them as soon as they get close enough. Today our worst enemies spring from our own families, or worse still, from the inside of our own heads, and we must not go outside, or up the stairs or fall asleep, lest we be overtaken.

And while Cat People is not the first psychologically based horror film (we know of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) at least, it brought the trend into the mainstream in the 1940s, interrupted briefly in the 50s for space aliens who represented communist invaders, only to roar back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the monsters were our friends and neighbors, lovers and spouses. Whatever, the theme, horror is the genre that takes the invisible, the unspoken, the suppressed, the unseen, the inner state and renders it into a visible, audible tangible form. Where the Lewton films broke away is by providing the least amount of visual and audio information possible and requiring the audience to supply more of the connection between the real horror inside and the melodrama outside.

Cat People is the great grandma of the modern style of horror. Put aside the fantasy element about turning into a cat--this is a story about a woman raised to believe that sex will destroy her and the man she makes love to. Seems contemporary, that "sex is bad" thing. It's the basis of almost every teen horror movie since the 1970s. The old horror films may not be frightening anymore, but they are disturbing and sometimes even shocking. (Certainly the lesbian undertones of Cat People are unmistakeable and unsettling even today.)

In the clip posted above, starting at about 4:55 or so is the beginning of the most famous sequence in the film, referred to in 1952's The Band and the Beautiful, excerpted in Martin Scorsese's Journey Through American Film and weakly imitated in the 1982 remake. A woman is terrified by her own fear that her sexual rival has the power to transform into a large killer cat. Note how benign each separate shot in the montage is, especially the shots of walls and corners. Also how ominous the echoing dripping water. Sadly, the person who chopped the film up for YouTube did not let this sequence run to its payoff, when the swimmer discovers that her terry robe has been torn to shreds, as if by the claws of an immense cat. This sequence made audiences scream aloud in 1942 and 1943. Maybe it won't have that effect on you, but viewed with the proper respect in the right circumstances, it should at least creep you out.

Real mean streets

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) is a wonderful, jazzy title for a fairly pale rip-off of Panic In The Streets, a thrilling noir about the hunt for a killer with plague shot in the streets of New Orleans. Killer That Stalked is based on a real case of a smallpox scare in New York in 1947, which resulted in a mass wave of vaccination. Some smart producer and/or writer had the notion to graft the central premise of Panic in the Streets onto this true story--namely, that the source of the infection would be just the type of person unlikely to cooperate with the officials, being a criminal--and even better, a criminal in mid-crime, that is, waiting for the heat to blow over in order to get rid of stolen goods (in this case, jewelry).

Neither Panic nor Killer qualify as hard-core noir, since there is little element of doom, fate or evil. Panic has a couple of deaths and shootings early on which thicken the atmosphere, but its claim to noir cred mostly rests on the moody photography of Joe McDonald (a favorite of Frank Capra's) and the high-tension lead performance by Richard Widmark. Killer has none of that, being shot in a fairly flat, almost television style, with little point of view. The illustration above demonstrates some of the attitude of the film. All the cops are benevolent Irishmen, and the nurses are gentle and knowing. It is ankle-deep in early 50's Hollywood pap.

Killer has only two possible claims to noir status, one being the presence of Evelyn Keyes, who while not a significant noir figure, is a fairly consistent "bad girl" (perhaps mostly because she's a no-longer-young blonde and because of her long string of famous romances off-screen). She entered the pantheon as Scarlett O'Hara's pouty younger sister, but in Killer she's not especially pouty or especially bad. Just sort of flu-y and sweaty. The other, better claim is the use of New York location photography. Unfortunately, it doesn't amount to much more than some second-unit material, and some plates for Ms. Keyes to walk in front of on a rear-projection stage. Still, it's always fun to see New York 60 years ago, and those little slices here and there provide most of the entertainment value of The Killer That Stalked New York.

Much more extensive and enjoyable use of New York as a setting is found in The Glass Wall (1953). Like Killer, Glass Wall is not a noir, but a chase film and a suspense piece, but the person running is far more resourceful and determined than in the earlier film. He's a refugee from Communist Hungary without an immigration quota number, desperate to find the American, a jazz musician, who can tell the authorities that he aided the Allied cause during the war, and is entitled to entry. The film boasts excellent location photography by Joseph Biroc, who fought his way through the low-budget swamp of the 1950s, and became something of a specialist in comedy beginning in the 1960s.

Co-writer and producer Ivan Tors had to be a huge influence on the film, also being Hungarian (there is a striking encounter with a Hungarian family late in the film, who argue about their responsibility for the refugee), but also as the future creator of Sea Hunt and Flipper, a fellow who liked to take the camera out of the studio and into the outdoors. Much is shot with available light, and, I suspect, with hidden cameras, since most of the close-ups of star Vittorio Gassman are shot before rear-projection plates, which suggests that they did not want passing New Yorkers to see the cameras, and so kept them far away and under cover. How appropriate to have brought over an Italian actor (albeit playing a Hungarian) to recreate the feeling of Italian neorealism in the streets of New York.

But the element that truly brings Glass Wall closest to noir is the incandescent Gloria Grahame, who breathed guilty sexuality. Most filmgoers remember her as Violet, the girl who is no better than she should be in It's A Wonderful Life, to whom Jimmy Stewart lends money to get out of town away from the gossips, and whose flirty walk makes Ward Bond wonder what his wife is doing.

I don't suspect Gloria Grahame made many moviegoers think of their wives, but the irony is that her characters rarely project sense intentionally, nor even in the fake-innocent manner of a Marilyn Monroe. In Glass Wall, as in most of her films, she plays a lonely, damaged woman who has trusted some wrong men and suffered for it, and yet keeps hope alive, confident she will find a good one. In the illustration above, she is describing her life on the shoelace tip assembly line, part of her rough struggle for survival. The speech and scene is American screenwriting at its best, terse, heartfelt and hardboiled. Incidentally, the set decorators and director had the courage to make Grahame's slum apartment really look like a slum apartment. It may be the shabbiest living space seen in any film in the 1950's.

There's an exciting sequence which could only have been shot on a real New York subway platform (how little they've changed), and even more remarkable from a historical aspect is a brief chase through the still-new and apparently still uncompleted UN building, most strikingly when Gassman's character addresses an empty hearing room demanding justice--and this from a character who has spent ten years in concentration camps before stowing away to America. Perhaps not noir, but unafraid of harsh facts (and McCarthyites) and the reality of being an outsider in America, clawing for a way in.

Loneliness of the long distance killer

When did consciousness of the idea of film noir begin to affect filmmakers? There is a photo of Robert Aldrich in 1955 clutching a copy of Panorama du Film Noir, the first book-length work to address the subject. Certainly, Touch of Evil, made in 1958, seems self-consciously about its own style, but that may have more to do with Orson Welles than it does with noir.

The question comes somewhere in the 1960's--what is part of the original creative thrust of noir, and what is a self-conscious revival. And then one must separate the threads of which films are noir because that is the prevailing style of black-and-white crime films, and which films show evidence of having drunk the noir Kool-Aid. And I suppose if it's in color, such as Point Blank, it's neo-noir.

Clearly actor-director Allen Baron, knew what kind of film he was making with Blast of Silence (1961): A cheap but competently professional crime film suitable to be a calling card in the feature film business. An independent film scene was developing in New York at the time, most famously culminating in the films of John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke. The resulting films are mostly theatrical in origin (not based on plays, but using the personnel and techniques of theater, especially improvisation), self-conscious and relating to the edgier aspects of downtown New York life--jazz, interracial love, gangs, drug addiction.

Blast of Silence is not having any. In fact, Frank Bono (pronounced "bon-no") might like to be part of the downtown scene. He might like to be part of any scene. But he's from out-of-town, he's alone for the Christmas season, just here to execute a hit and split. Forget all those depressed hippies, Bono is the definition of alienated.

I haven't actually been hired to kill someone (yet), but I have been alone in a city for a number of days at a time, and the film captures the boredom and isolation of that situation. And when Bono does have the opportunity to reach out to someone else he fumbles it. Which makes his own death logically right. Zero minus zero, nothing lost, the universe is still in balance. Barron's non-acting suits this perfectly. (Peter Falk, originally cast, would have been terrible, too ingratiating, too needy. Barron is a cipher, albeit an unhappy one.) The overwritten second-person narration (reportedly by a blacklisted Waldo Salt) is irritating at first, but you learn to tune it out--I almost wish Criterion could issue a version of the film without it.

A great deal of the contemporary pleasure of this film is seeing the New York locations, the Village, 125th Street, Rockefeller Center as they looked in the very early 1960s--some recognizable, some not. Shooting quick and dirty on the streets of the city means you don't have to actually have a cinematographic style. Those brightly lit yet dingy streets give you a production design and a shooting style by themselves--foreground objects and low key lighting not necessary (as Sweet Smell of Success demonstrated). Although there is an awe-inspiring shot as Barron approaches us from a long perspective, tiny at first, then filling the frame (my guess is it's East 34th Street near that large diagonally-placed building that sits on the corner of 34th and Park.)

Barron doesn't seem to have a great psychological or sociological point. It's a simple tale, crisply told. The best-laid plans and all that. The points make themselves via the pictures. And this Blast of Silence might be the last pure blast of noir before self-consciousness sets in.

Shadow play

If, in the endless debate as to whether film noir is a genre or a style, you take the position that it is a genre, with a coherent world view and set of audience expectations, you are going to have to account for He Walked By Night (1948), which, for my money, is still viewable today only for the cinematography of the great John Alton.

The story is a grubby little police procedural about hunting down a thief who has become a psycho killer. We don't know who he is, where he came from and why we kills and we don't care. We are siding with the police in this one. Many have noted that a very young Jack Webb plays a police technician and the word "dragnet" is used in the script, and have speculated that his is a source for Webb's TV series Dragnet. Dragnet has none of the style, visually or textually of film noir. It is the essence of flat, flat, flat. No irony no humor, just plodding police catching boring criminals. This film partakes of this a bit, but then is redeemed by brilliant sequences, such as the one you find about 0:30 minutes in, or the final chase through the storm sewers, which I would like to point out, antedates The Third Man's sewer chase by a year.

Like T-Men and Raw Deal, also made at Eagle-Lion, there are so many scenes with low-key single source lighting, often directed across the picture or toward the lens. There is a lot of wonderful fog, and of course the extreme light and dark of the aforementioned sewers. If the movie has a theme is that life, like this unexplained villain, comes up out of the shadows and returns to the shadows, and if you've been able to perceive anything during that brief moment in the light, well, good for you.

Another point in favor on this one--no music score, which means no overdone, cliched score, unlike many that mar otherwise perfectly good late 40s films. And if you're serious about studying the look of this film, which is quite dazzling, don't rely on public domain copies, like the one embedded above, but seek out the MGM/UA DVD, which, while not restored, comes from a cleaner clearer print than this.

I lost it at The Last Picture Show

I remember it still. It was my 16th birthday, May 30, 1972. Although The Last Picture Show had opened the previous October, it had won some Academy Awards in April and went back into release, at least in little neighborhood houses like where I lived. And I was now old enough to attend an "R" film without a parental unit, so my steady girlfriend and I went to see what the hollering was about.

Up until then, my concept of "important" films was a literary one. A Man For All Seasons, To Sir With Love, Beckett--these were the important-type artistic films. They were about big things like Justice and Freedom and usually somewhere near the end, the hero had a long speech in which he explained his choices and defended his ideas as the camera slowly dollied in and we all knew that this was a Very Profound Movie.

This type of work is an aesthetic booby trap. Because, despite its pretensions otherwise, it is not challenging the beliefs and assumptions of its target audience: it is confirming them. It confirms to the audience that they are good and decent people and that they would Do The Right Thing if confronted with such an important moral dilemma.

But those are not the choices we have to make. We don't have to decide if our country is going to adhere to the pope's dictates, or if a generation will be saved or lost. We decide where to buy our houses, where to work, if we will stay true to our spouses, if we will raise our children well or abandon--physically or emotionally--when they need us. Real true, everyday life choices.

And as far as I can remember, The Last Picture Show was the first American film I could remember that seriously dealt with these issues, especially from my point of view as a teenager. (I probably hadn't seen Rebel Without A Cause and if I had, I would have seen it as a melodramatic hyperventilation of an earlier generation.) The film addresses that time in your life when you need to leave your hometown--if you can. (It would make an interesting companion piece to the lighthearted American Graffiti.) And what it says is quite ambiguous--which was new to me. And nobody made a speech to clarify the matter.

The people in The Last Picture Show were not given to speeches; when they spoke at length it was of memories. Most of the time, they said less than they thought, less than they felt. They spoke indirectly, obliquely. They communicated by looks, by looks away, by pauses and silences. Case in point: the final line in the film. Sonny has betrayed and hurt Ruth and she explodes with anger. Then she sees the hurt in his own eyes (he has undergone his own losses), weaves her hand in his and says, "Never you mind." Somehow, those three inarticulate words sum up the humanity of this film.

Another example, which illustrates both the use of subtext and the extraordinary quality of the acting. Ellen Burstyn's character is bored at home. She hears an engine, which has been established as the distinctive-sounding engine of her husband's right-hand man, with whom she has been having an affair. We see on her face--"Oh, good, he's coming to see me." She heads toward the door and sees her daughter, looking angry and disheveled. Clearly her daughter (Cybil Shepherd) has been with her boyfriend, they have had sex and the daughter is upset. Burstyn swallows her disappointment, passes quickly through anger (for the boyfriend standing her up, for him preferring her own daughter and for him treating her daughter like a two-dollar whore), realizing that the daughter needs to be talked through this. Burstyn begins prattling, suppressing all the emotions she is feeling, trying to soothe the daughter and dismiss the importance of what's happened. And under the chatter you see her forming the plan to get the girl out of town. Get her out because she doesn't want the girl near her boyfriend, get her out because there is nothing for her in this crummy little town and get her out because her daughter is both an innocent and a manipulative bitch and will have more scope for her talents in a larger town, where she can capture a rich man and make him miserable. None of this is in the dialogue--it's all in Burstyn's acting. It's another reason why one trip through this film will not be enough to see what's there.

While the subject matter was almost soap opera or turn-of-the-century Realism--the secret stories, rivalries, dreams and disappointments of a small town-- the pace and handling were like the French New Wave. Filmmaking of the classical era had never been as frank about sex, language and other private matters. Yet the visual style is quite classical. The film is famously black and white, which today makes it seem as true to 1951 as 1971, much the way Keaton's The General looks like a Matthew Brady photo. It was the first serious contemporary black-and-white film I had ever seen. (I was too young to have seen In Cold Blood--the last previous major B&W film.) The result was a story that seemed to come from a distance and yet have an immediacy, given the language and subject matter.

And the film follows the John Ford rule of camera placement and movement. First, the camera only moves if it moves with the characters and keeps them in a constant relationship with the frame. Otherwise, the camera is fixed and records events happening within the frame. Second, two-shots are preferred in dialogue scenes, because the physical and temporal space between the characters is important. Deep focus is used to make both foreground and background action visible and important. In addition to the beauty of this formality, it makes the film even more timeless. There are few things as dated-looking as the "up to date" camera styles of the 1970s--overuse of the zoom lens, super-shaky handheld work, washed-out color and endless camera flares. Many of the most highly regarded works of Picture Show's era looks like museum pieces. Picture Show still looks fresh as a daisy.

Of course, it's impossible to talk about the film without its extraordinary cast, few of whom were familiar to the film audience: Tim Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid as the kids, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan and Cloris Leachman, whose ability to move from plain to beautiful is brilliantly exploited here. Interestingly, the major male actors bring some film history: Clu Galager and the incomparable Ben Johnson of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master and so many other Ford films, who you can see earning an Academy Award at the top of this post. (Leachman also won, probably for that brilliant final scene. Oh, what the heck, let me put it in here:)



I watched the film again the other night, and then watched it yet again to hear Bogdanovich's commentary, which is very straightforward and honest. I cannot be objective or analytic about this movie. It is too beautiful, heartbreaking and true. It is all about the sweet pain of growing up, of hurting people you love and learning to ask their forgiveness, of the fusion of past and present, how everything you love will leave sooner or later--unless you leave them, and unfortunately, that very fact will not kill you. If you can watch this film dry-eyed, I wonder if you really remember being young.

When is a dream really like a dream?

It is the hoariest old cliche that films are dreams. I don't know about you, but my dreams don't have neat three-act structures, perfectly scripted dialogue and elegant production design, like your typical Hollywood product. They're usually a chaotic collage of the flotsam found in my brain. Cowards Bend The Knee (2003) is the first movie I've ever seen that actually looks the way I think I dream (sometimes).

Let's be straight with this, though. It's not clear that Cowards (by cult filmmaker Guy Maddin) is even a movie. It began as an art installation, in ten peepshows, now manifested as chapters. The films are primarily monochrome, shot in out-of-focus silent, 8-millimeter, with a vague continuity and jump cuts and repetitions galore. You can search the internet to read about the plot, which was not comprehensible to me until I listened to the comment track, and which ultimately did not affect my opinion of the movie.

I used to like the fever dreams I had when I was a kid. They are some of the few dreams I can recall. I think I could even control or direct them. I remember that many parts were in grainy black-and-white (perhaps influenced by the cheap prints of Charlie Chaplin films that were shown incessantly on TV in my childhood), that the motion was jumpy and choppy and that many parts repeated and others were complete non sequiturs. Could Guy Maddin have gotten into my head? Not sure I want to see any of this other films, but I'm glad I saw this one. It was short, too (61 minutes).