Steven Spielberg, film historian

Echoing "Night of the Hunter"?

Written reactions to Steven Spielberg's film version of War Horse (2011) is virtually a litmus test of each writer's film history knowledge.  Youngsters who think Titanic is a classic old-timey movie dismiss the film as sentimental slop, riddled with cliche and overstatement.  A few recognized some quotes from Gone With The Wind, usually misattributing the palette and compositions of the film to Victor Fleming, the named director.  But Fleming essentially directed the actors.  The look of the film was designed from top to bottom by William Cameron Menzies with the collaboration of cinematographers Ernst Haller and Fleming's favorite, Lee Garmes.  These would be the source of the oversaturated colors behind near-silhouetted figures as in, for instance the final shot of War Horse.

But Gone With The Wind is just the beginning.  War Horse draws from the work of David Lean (who Spielberg evoked brilliantly in Empire of the Sun) but also other epic filmmakers of the 1950s George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann.  But it also goes straight back to Lewis Milestone (specifically All Quiet On The Western Front), and silent filmmakers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and especially King Vidor, director of The Big Parade and The Crowd as well as the 1956 War and Peace.  Spielberg does not do DVD commentaries (a sensible position), but I would love a commentary by really knowledgeable film scholar who could annotate the sources, whether overt or sub rosa.

Which is not to say that the film is pasted together from film references like a Brian DePalma movie.  Spielberg has thoroughly absorbed this vocabulary, like an author deliberately writing in an archaic style.  With all the fuss about last year's The Artist, I would love to see Spielberg make a substantially silent film--I think he is the director most qualified in the world to express himself in that challenging and classical form.  The exquisite no-man's-land sequence, designed by Rick Carter, would not be out of place in an epic of the mid-1920s, and the dialogue (with a German fluent in English) might have played even better on title cards than being heard.

Which is not to say that Mr. Spielberg doesn't know how to use a soundtrack.  For one thing, John Williams has written his best score in many years, although, he, like Spielberg, is creating in a borrowed idiom.  In this case it is the work of early 20th century British composers such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Walton, Britten and Grainger.  Again, there is no actual plagiarism, but the full immersion in a particular language.

Non-musical sound plays a part in one of the three-shots in this film that I would nominate for all-time greats in film history.  That is the moment when two young German deserters have been discovered and are being shot on the spot at late dusk or early evening.  The camera suddenly jumps from the base of the windmill in which the boys have been ensconced to high in the air, just the other side of the windmill's sails.  The boys are lined up with their backs to us.  The officer calls "Fire" and at that very instant a windmill sail obscures our view.  We hear the gunshot and the sail has passed revealing the bodies strewn on the ground.

Earlier in the movie there is a shot that would have made Eisenstein weep in recognition of a brother filmmaker.  The British are making an insane, under-manned, under-weaponed charge on a German encampment.  (The sequence begins with a brilliant shot of the officers mounting amid tall grass that obscures  the horses.)  At first, the Brits seem to be triumphant until they reach the end of the open field and the edge of the adjacent wood.  There the Germans have hidden their automatic guns, with which they proceed to demolish the British cavalry.  But we never see the falls.  We see the moment of recognition on the cavalry officers' faces that they have made a devastating miscalculation.  Then we see riderless horses leaping over and past the German guns.  Back to the mounted charge.  Back to the empty horses.  The audience puts those two shots together with that beautiful mathematics of film editing:  (Shot of mounted officers charging PLUS shot of riderless horses leaping past machine guns EQUALS officers falling dead from their horses.)

My next is a throwaway, but it simply demonstrates that Spielberg breathes the syntax of film.  It is an establishing shot of a person entering the stable in which the title character, Joey has been hidden.  We see the person first as a large, dark, convex reflection.  Then we realize it is a reflection in Joey's eye.  It is not only an inventive way to open a sequence, but it reminds us that the film is really about Joey and that we are always viewing the world through Joey's eyes.  All of this work, I have to presume, is executed with the superb collaboration of Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer since Schindler's List.

We knew that Spielberg is great with young actors and he has done his usual sterling work with Jeremy Irvine as Joey's faithful friend Albert and most especially with Celine Buckman as Emilie, the beautiful and tragic young protector of Joey.  But one must add to this the evocative "acting" of the horses playing Joey and Topthorn.  Be it the work of handlers and experts, Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn have put the shots together so as to simulate acting that is more convincing than many a so-called human actor.

The climactic reunion between Albert and Joey is most frequently acted as ridiculous, sentimental, implausible.  Again, this demonstrates an ignorance of this classical mode of storytelling.  It is not meant to be journalism, nor is it meant to be startling or surprising.  The mechanics of the scene were carefully put in place in the first act (my wife and I remarked to each other that the particular device would doubtless return in Act III).  The genre is closer to fable or legend than to film realism.  That is not an accident -- it is a choice.

Not only is War Horse one of the best World War I films I have ever seen, making it clear what a price nearly every person in Europe paid for that bit of insanity: I would list it as one of Spielberg's five best films, with Empire of the Sun, Jaws, Munich and Duel.  Yes, it's a perverse list, but hey, this is my blog.  Make your own list on your own blog.

"Somebody get Aristotle in here for a rewrite"

As it happens, I am teaching bits of Aristotle's Poetics to my AP Literature class. A lot of it seems so elementary and self-evident, and yet apparently it isn't. For instance, Aristotle writes that a play is an imitation of an action. Not a person, not an idea, an action. Yet major expensive films omit that on a regular basis.

Take The Conspirator (2011), about the sham military trial and summary hanging of Mary Surratt, accused of being part of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy by virtue of being Southern, being related to one of the conspirators and of living among angry wounded people (Americans) desperately in need of scapegoats. Ignoring the prologue, which shows the various parts of the conspiracy in motion, at the outset of the story, Mary Surratt is going to be tried before a kangaroo court and be hanged. Not only do those facts never change, but the purported protagonist, Surratt's appointed lawyer never manages to change them. The second hour of the film runs out of narrative gas so badly that it repeats the same scene three or four times. Stanton tells Aiken nothing can be done. Seward tells Aiken nothing can be done. The other lawyers tell Aiken nothing can be done. Round and round the wheels spin, throwing up mud and going nowhere.

And then there is Dean Spanley (2008), which I will, exercising the utmost self-restraint, not describe as a shaggy-dog story, but which also would earn Aristotle's scorn. It also happens that I am teaching a creative writing course (yes, my teaching life is quite wonderful at the moment), and I am trying to hammer into the students the importance of making a timely promise to the reader (or audience) as to where the story is going to go. The classic rule in film is that by ten minutes in, you have to clue the audience in as to what the film is going to be about, what the objective is, what the conflict will be.

Dean Spanley lets an hour go by before it settles down and decides what story it wants to tell. It does have quite a touching and remarkable payoff, but not one worth that arid first hour. At least 45 minutes of the movie are engaged in pure misdirection, whether or not intentional it is hard to say. But it makes it hard to invest in the emotional stakes the film is really interested in. Once again, filmmakers have attempted to cram one hour's worth of story into two slam-bang hours of middle-aged men sipping liqueurs.

People, these are not just rules for their own sakes. Breaking the rules of screenplay structure has consequences! You're playing with fire! Or in the case of Dean Spanley, some rather tepid and dingy bathwater.
On more purely cinematic territory, why was everything in the past blurry, grainy and distorted in color? Was the air that different back when? This penchant, as displayed in The Conspirator for arty visual treatment to suggest earlier eras (it's even worse with future noir films) started, to my recollection, with The Godfather, which stood for the proposition that everything in the past used to be more yellow. That was bad, but it at least had to be planned in advance so that filters could be put on lenses. Now directors can decide in post-production that the whole world is topsy-turvy colorwise, which raises the question as to whether future cinematographers will need any competence at all, given that images can be reframed, objects added or removed and color timing completely reconfigured at will.

And are there no American actors other than Paul Giamatti (who seems particularly contemporary to me) who can portray people who lived long ago? Look at the picture at the top of this blog, and there is an Englishman facing off with a Scot, pretending to be 1865 Americans. I think SAG needs to step in here. (At least they got John Cullum, as authentic a Virginian as you can find anywhere, to play a Southerner.)

I think the English can share their objection, given that in Dean Spanley, English people are portrayed by Ozzies and Kiwis in a quite indiscriminate way. What next? Carmen sung by a soprano? Or a bass?

Throwbacks

Water for Elephants (2011) and The Way Back (2010) are not only about earlier historical eras, they seem to have been made at some earlier time and sent through a wormhole to our time. What is it about these films, other than the obvious physical trappings that make them seem like cinematic throwbacks?

Theorist David Bordwell has posited that the entire manner of storytelling on film has entirely altered in the last 30 years or so, in a syndrome he calls "intensified continuity." We have seen so many stories, have absorbed so many images that we can and do take in visual narrative in a more rapid and complex way than previous generations. But classical continuity still has its attractions, and not only can we still enjoy old films, we can enjoy new films made in the old way. What is that way?

1. Straightforward chronology - Something happens, and then something else happens because of that, and that leads to the next thing and so on and so on. This stems from a deep cultural bias toward the concept of cause and effect in life, that choices have consequences, that life moves toward purposes and ends. Post-modernism looks at life as random, irrational, even accidental. Garp's plane crashes into a house the very moment he is considering buying it. No foreshadowing, no "planting" of that plane -- just - wham! - plane! - hole in house! Nothing like that ever happens in a Spencer Tracy movie.

Yes, classic films have flashbacks, even flashbacks within flashbacks. But they are always announced and punctuated with rippling dissolves or some other device. The actual chronology is never disturbed and never unclear. We have no such certainty in the cinema today.

Water for Elephants starts at A, goes to B, then on to C. There are a few moments when so information between scenes is omitted briefly, but that is so it can be revealed strategically a few moments later. We're never in doubt that is 1931 and that a cause will be followed by an effect.

The Way Back is even simpler, because once the preliminaries (which take too long) are out of the way, we are in a road movie, going from Point A to Point B. (Russia to India in 1945, to be specific.) The film is picaresque, so the events do not necessarily have the strong causal links of a three-act story, but there is no question that chronology is proceeding in a straight line.

2. Long shots and long takes - Both films eschew the modern "cutty" style of editing which is intended to immerse the viewer in the "sense" of the event, but actually just distances and alienates the audience because the information cannot be decoded or placed into a narrative frame. Both films use fairly conventional styles, prefer to frame two or three characters together at a minimum (to emphasize their relationships), and a relative minimum of camera movement, used only to set scenes, follow characters or show the relationship between things, as opposed to the camera movement which is used to show that the producer let you have a Louma crane and a Steadicam operator.

3. Theatrical acting - Christoph Waltz and Ed Harris, the respective "leaders" of each film operate in a text-based style, using voice and full body gesture to execute their ideas. Christoph Waltz is explicitly theatrical, with a grand and rolling style of voice and hyperbolic physical expression. But if Marlon Brando developed his technique in the theater (and he did), then Ed Harris's performance, in classical American realistic style, pared down in the manner of Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood to a burnished simplicity, is theatrical. It is, at the very least, simple in an epic way which indicates great forethought and craft, a world away from Mumblecore.

4. Relaxed and minimal use of effects - Digital effects come in two broad categories today -- those which are showpieces in and of themselves, as in the Transformers series, in which the principal actors are machines which have themselves been created by machines; and films which are only possible because of "seamless" effects, such as historical backgrounds, vast panoramas and location and automobile shots which are made practicable and efficient by use of the digital domain. Both of the films under discussion fall under the latter category. Water for Elephants creates a fairly convincing 1931 world, and is able to offer some long shots of that vanished universe that would be otherwise impossible. I'm not positive when and where effects were used in The Way Back, but I suspect they were used to simplify and burnish the image, which for a good deal of the running time consists of a burned-out landscape. In any case, whatever was done is fairly invisible to the average audience, which is the Classical approach to using any new expressive tool.

Plus Water for Elephants has wonderful scenes of people walking around and sitting on moving train cars. Don't you love people walking around on top of moving trains? Isn't that just the essence of a certain type of Classical-era movie? Maybe it's not elemental, but it's sure evocative.

Just Cause or "jus' cuz"

2010 saw two new entries in what I might call the "pre-gunpowder conflict" genre. Centurion (2010) is one of those all-CGI-all-the-time epics that allows one to gouge and maim characters with mad abandon and without angering the actors' unions. The real problem is that if you like this sort of thing, you can get it right in the comfort of your own home torture chamber and abbatoir, courtesy of the Spartacus series on Starz (also on DVD and Netflix streaming).

But aside from its lack of uniqueness (coupled with lack of originality or quality performance, either in technical or non-technical categories), the truly fatal aspect of Centurion is that it tries to make Roman centurions into heroes.

William Goldman says nobody knows anything and there may not be any rules in art, but still I say: UNWANTED INVADERS ARE NEVER THE HEROES. Not even if all their friends are killed, not even if they're helpless and unarmed and turned into quarry for an implacable killing machine, who is part of the native troops. Natives = good; invaders = bad. Maybe this wasn't true back in the 1930s and 1940s when we thought the British Empire was cool, but those days are long gone. I don't care if the invaders are played by the offspring of George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- Invaders Are Bad. So when the Picts pronounce a death sentence on the Romans, we don't say, "Oh goodness, how will those poor Romans get out of there?" We say, "Good, die you miserable arrogant Romans." And don't forget, Romans were played by snooty English actors all through the 50s and 60s while Americans played the denizens of Palestine or whatever the local area was, so we were conditioned -- Romans are cruel, greedy and jerks. And when they're invading -- Hey, remember when the British tried to invade in 1775-6? Remember how much we liked that? And nowadays Brits don't even like Brits.

Centurion was doomed before the first camera turned. A terrible idea terribly executed.

Robin Hood (2010) was dead on arrival, but for slightly different reasons. It's not a bad movie, but it's Not A Robin Hood Movie. What's a Robin Hood movie? Oh, you know -- trickery, derring-do, thumbing the nose and cocking a snoot at entrenched power. Robin Hood is the proto-American Tax Rebel. He is clever, he is crafty. He tricks the Sheriff and his foolish henchmen, woos the Maid Marian, uses disguises, subterfuges and generally outwits power. What's more, he uses what he gets to help people who really need it -- honest, hard-working folk who have been sucked dry by the powers that be and need a little leg-up to keep their heads above water. What red-blooded Murkin doesn't love that story? I think this is an area where most of us can agree -- the guy who Sticks It To The Man and Does Justice is Awesome.

But somebody let a bunch of Brits and Ozzies make a Robin Hood movie and They Don't Get It. This is particularly appalling in the case of the Ozzie in Question, as he is Mr. Rebel, the Gladiator Who Will Not Take Crap From Anybody, Russell Crowe. I assume he did this picture because he owed somebody money. Maybe it was a tax problem. (That would be appropriate. But NOT ironic, OK?)

Because 3/4s of this movie is an attempt at an origin story, and an establishment-oriented one at that. First, our hero is an archer for the king, then things go wrong, he assumes the identity of some nobleman, pretends to be married to Cate Blanchett and all the time everyone is running around with big crossbows and swords and maces and nobody is hiding in a tree, ambushing a nobleman, pulling off some big switcheroo. It's all big battle scenes and something about some traitor who's working for France, so the big climactic battle is all about defending England against France, and like I say, where are the people rebelling against the nobility? That's Robin Hood!

Look, you make all the medieval strategy and battle movies you want, but DON'T CALL THEM "ROBIN HOOD." Honestly, I find it impossible to critique this movie -- it's the usual Ridley Scott, the CGI has gotten a lot better since Gladiator and if you like movies where guys wear armor, have greasy beards and say "Aye" a lot, this is the picture for you.

But me, I'm sticking with Douglas Fairbanks and Erroll Flynn. Heck, they know how to have fun, which Russell Crowe NEVER does.

Power couple

There is plenty of comment available online as to the historical accuracy of The Young Victoria (2009) or its qualities as a romance. I just want to briefly note that when it comes to trying to depict the intoxication of infatuation, so many filmmakers turn to the vocabulary of Max Ophuls.

Ophuls is, if nothing else, the master of the moving camera, mixing theatrical trickery with camera choreography. Young Victoria uses two marvelous Ophuls-like devices in a single sequence, the pivotal meeting of Victoria and her true love, Albert. First, you have to forget Victoria as the squatting humorless priggish widow one connects with the word "Victorian." Young Victoria (and this is according to my readings in history, and not just this admittedly romantic film) was a lovely young woman ready to be in love.

Victoria enters the sumptuous ballroom in a ball gown suitable for a Cinderella and is literally transported across the room toward her love. That is, without moving her feet, she sweeps toward us and toward her love, floating into a close-up--all before we even see the beloved, Albert. They join hands and dance, and as their faces and bodies grow close, the sound begins to echo and repeat into a chamber, like the dizziness you feel when you know your life is changing in that very instant. It is utterly enchanting, and carries the film through a certain amount of 19th century political positioning chatter. (There is even discussion of tariffs, which has to raise a giggle with anyone who has seen The Deal.)

The film is one of the finest demonstration of the creative use of shallow focus and the rack-focus shot. Film critics love deep focus, possibly because it was generally the exception in 35mm cinematography and mise-en-scene, and it does permit the actor to control the pace and energy of a scene, rather than the director and the editor. As the use of HD Video increases, the use of deep focus is increasing, as it is much easier to execute in digital. But shallow focus has its uses and is a uniquely cinematic tool to direct the audience's attention with precision. Thus cinematographers shooting in HD often emulate 35mm and adapt the lens so as to shorten the depth of field.

I recently saw a good example of how depth of field can be misused in the film Local Color, which I will be writing about soon. A very young man walks into frame standing behind a woman he is attracted to, but who is a bit older and who is recalling the tragic loss of her child. Although the young man is attracted to this woman, given the difference in their life experience and the emotions she is feeling at that moment, a romantic overture would be completely inappropriate and probably out of character for this sensitive young man. But a faulty choice of a long lens makes it look as though he is inches behind her or perhaps even less. Only when the scene cuts to an alternate angle one can see they are actually separated by several feet. It is possible that the director made that choice of a long lens deliberately to create an ambiguity, but if that's true it was a tonal error rather than a technical one, but an error nonetheless.

The result of director Jean-Marc Vallee's photographic choices is to convert the usual stuffy politics and hand-kissing that goes on in these movies into a story of the joining of two souls that is, if you understand the nature of true romance--not the soupy Hollywood version--a rather sexy story.

Based on a true story

The historical epic is an established film genre, although scarcely a popular one in its own right. (I'm not talking about things like Dr. Zhivago or Gone With The Wind which use historic events merely as a backdrop for cheesy romantic melodrama. I mean films which attempt to actually explain and interpret history, like the million-megaton bomb Reds.) Film is not built to do history very well. Significant historical events incorporate so many diverse elements, politics, economics, social conditions, cultures, geography, etc., etc., that film, with its natural drive for narrative, and especially visual narrative, rarely helps anyone understand the causes and meanings of history.

(Similarly, epic biographies rarely work on film, because truly significant lives are not stories or novels, but anthologies of stories. Too many films, like Chaplin or The Aviator, are too eager to get too many stories in, rather than deciding on a simple, telling story. It's the difference between the compelling Motorcycle Diaries, an adventure of Ernesto Guavera before he became the famous "Che" and the overblown Che by Steven Soderbergh, a 5-hour epic that tries to tell Everything You Need To Know About Che.)

I must have seen at least a dozen films about armed conflict in Ireland, including Michael Collins, The Crying Game, The Rising of the Moon, The Informer, The Plough and the Stars, Hidden Agenda, Shake Hands With The Devil...the list goes on. So I began watching The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) with a little trepidation about sitting through some more historical medicine that would be good for me, but not taste very good.

It was a pleasure to be so wrong. Not only was the film clear (a huge accomplishment in any film about Irish politics) and even-handed (no straight-up heroes or villains, just people caught on different sides of a regrettable conflict), but beautiful to look at. The visuals seem to be more "caught" than composed, yet they are balanced and telling. Evidently director Ken Loach does not storyboard or use focus marks, but eschews faux-documentary shaky-cam. His operators just have a knack for identifying where the heart of the scene is taking place.

You can read attacks on the film's historical accuracy. But that would be like complaining about the historical details in Henry IV, Part 2. Because Loach and screenwriter Laverty have done just what Shakespeare did, and personified an historical divide into believable individual characters. At the beginning, when the Irish are involved in a revolution against England, activist brother pulls doctor brother into the conflict. Then, when the English craftily transform the war from a revolution against them into a civil war among the Irish, the activist brother becomes defender of the new status quo, while the doctor maintains his revolutionary stance. In the end, one must kill the other. Shakespearean, like I said. And like Shakespeare, there is a marvelous foretaste as one of the brothers must execute a traitor within their midst whom he has known since childhood. No propaganda, no mounds of background historical exposition and explanation--just a tale of brothers caught in history's jaws.

So, in a lighthearted vain, does the principal character in Taking Woodstock (2009) find himself amid history, albeit pop culture history, and albeit an event he helped set in motion. And again, the real story is not Woodstock, to which destination the principal character never actually arrives, although he invited the festival to his town. It is a story of a young man separating from his parents and being accepted by them for his individual abilities and accomplishment. Being a gentle character, unable to abandon his difficult and unhappy parents, as his siblings have apparently done, the film shares his gentle character and humor; it goes most off course when it engages in the kind of vaudeville that found a home in the nearby Catskills.

Without the family story, there really is not much else other than a loving recreation of the spirit and ethos of the event, at least as it has been reported by the participants. There is no other conflict or drama, although in actuality, the production of the Woodstock Festival with riddled with dramatic and difficult events. Again, the filmmakers recognized that the subject was too large for any film, much less a low-budget film to get its arms around, and focused on a simple coming-of-age tale. This is the Woodstock movie you can show your grandma if she doesn't mind a bare bosom or schpeckel or two.

And you haven't lived until you see Liev Schreiber in drag.