Some Came Running

Did Julien Temple invent Baz Luhrmann?

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic,  entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous. 

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann. 

Riefenstahl/Sontag/Nabokov/Monty Python

Adolf Hitler in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Leni Riefenstahl, 1934.

"Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly superb films (they may be the two greatest documentaries ever made) but they are not really important in the history of cinema as an art form. Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstachl, while many filmmakers (including myself) regard Dziga Vertov as an inexhaustible provocation and source of ideas about film language. Yet it is arguable that Vertov—the most important figure in documentary films—never made a film as purely effective and thrilling as Triumph of the Will or Olympia. (Of course, Vertov never had the means at his disposal that Riefenstahl had. The Soviet government’s budget for propaganda films in the 1920s and early 1930s was less than lavish."—Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 1974

"To exaggerate the worthlessness of a country at the awkward moment when one is at war with it—and would like to see it destroyed to the last beer-mug and last forget-me-not—means walking dangerously close to that abyss of poshlust which yawns so universally at times of revolution or war. But if what one demurely murmurs is but a mild pre-war truth, even with something old-fashioned about it, the abyss is perhaps avoidable. Thus, a hundred years ago, while civic-minded publiscists in St. Petersburg were mixing heady cocktails of Hegel and Schlegel (with a dash of Feurbach), Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshulst pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius.

"The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said: 'Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome...One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means  whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothers, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what these swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married.'

"Here you have poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled."—Vladimir Nabokov, from Nikolai Gogol, 1944. 

"Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popular now, and for most people it is probably no more than a variant of camp. Fascism  may be merely fashionable, and perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste will save us. But the judgments of taste themselves seem less innocent. Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed."—Sontag, 1974 

Three frames from the sketch sometimes called "Killer Joke," from the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Its first airing occured October 5, 1969, on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Channel One. 

Hell/Carax/Tosches

There's nothing to win by
this sort of an outcry
Oh yeah we all know why

Cuz the world a person lives in
is his brain. Well mine just gives in...

—Richard Hell, "Who Says? (It's Good To Be Alive?)," from Blank Generation, Richard Hell And The Voidoids, SIre Records, 1977

Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Mauvais sang, Leos Carax, 1986.

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2012.

In a recent comment the reader calling himself "That Fuzzy Bastard" expressed surprise/curiosity that Holy Motors was ranked so highly on my best-of-the-year list given the skepticism I expressed about it on first seeing it. As I mentioned in my first writeup, some of that skepticism was fueled in a reactive mode relative to Carax's Cannes 2012 status as the Approved-Creative-Fireworks-Wackadoodle of the Know-Somethingish American contingent of the festival attendees. Also there was some subsequent annoyance at self-satisfied predictions concerning a shift in the film's reception. 

A second viewing was, for me, more demonstrative of the movie's not just melancholy but its anger, its futile regret over a life badly lived because, in the immortal words of Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, "I got no choice!" As the ultimately nameless (I believe) actor played by Denis Lavant, once more I think acting for/as both himself and his director, goes through a day of demands and insults and winds up having to spend the evening with (spoiler alert) a family of chimps, if I'm not mistaken, the movie drives any number of sad and pissed-off stakes through The Imaginative Life As It Is Lived In These Times, but avoids (to use David Thomas' phrase) "I'm a miserable artiste, pity me!" special pleading, in part via a genuine empathy expressed through certain of the roles Lavant enacts. The imaginative life is not so far removed from what's referred to a the life of the mind after all. Unlike That Fuzzy Bastard, I came out not seeing "light, context-less emotion-tweaking" so much as a melange of modes and of alienated reactions to those modes, those reactions not making much of a dent in "reality" along the way. Yes, the green-suited "Merde" monster does succeed in disrupting a fashion photo shoot, but aside from a hard-on and a cigarette, what does it get him? 

Nick Tosches' latest novel, Me And The Devil, is a pretty problematic piece of work, but in the aggregate I have to say it left a mark, one that's not entirely segregated from the local anger that Tosches often expresses therein in a fashion many will take not unreasonable exception to. It's that kind of book, one where the acheivement seems in too-uncomfortable proximity to the things that make it objectionable. Where Holy Motors stumbles, it's in the realm of sentimentality (forgivable with respect to the movie's treatment of Edith Scob, less so in the It's A Wonderful Life-inspired talking-limos coda); Me And The Devil errs, as regular Tosches readers should not be surprised to learn, in the area of sort-of nihilist-tough-guy posturing. But it's not entirely purposeless. For instance:

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts. 

Writing was not an act of imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word 'creative" in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe "artists," living the "creative" life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

While Carax's film is a fantasy depiction of the working life of the artist, it is relatively unsparing in its depiction not just of toil but of emotional deprivation and loss. If it is a work of "creative" "exuberance" that exuberance is in a certain sense a gob of spit from the bowels of hell. 

Tosches again:

When I was young, I thought it would get easier. But as it turned out, each novel got harder. Maybe this was because, with each one, I was flaying a further layer from inside me, exposing yet another, deeper layer. Maybe this was what made it harder. When I was young and thought it woudl get easier—the days when I was thrilled to see my name or my picture on a book—I hid. I did not even dare to write in the first person. Then all that changed, and when it did, it reminded me of that sixteenth-century anatomical engraving by Amusco something-or-other, or something-or-other Amusco, the one of a guy stripped to his inner anatomy holding a knife in one hand and the drooping entirety of his body's own freshly removed skin in the other. 

The special knife, I thought as I recalled this: the special knife. Maybe I needed to write. Maybe, even with all the illness it brought, it was the least destructive, least dangerous alternative that I had. And I should be thankful that I had it. 

Every gift a curse, every curse a gift.

It was 50 years ago today

 

In England, the Beatles make their debut television appearance, on the Sid-Bernstein-founded Granada TV, a northwest-servicing commercial television franchise. They perform the songs "Some Other Guy" and "Love Me Do."

 

 

In Osaka, Japan, American modernist composer John Cage gives a concert at Mido-Kaikan, for which he is joined by artist Yoko Ono for the piece 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists & a String Player. Ono served as Cage's interpreter for much of the artist's 1962 tour of Japan, and participated in several other performances, including the one pictured above, featuring Cage, David Tudor and Toshiro Mayuzumi. 

Eternal returns #11

Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki, 1997

Snow White and the Huntsman, Rupert Sanders, 2012

Haven't done one of these in a while. And there are many who would argue that this example doesn't represent so much an affinity or an example of nothing new under the sun than it does a complete and blatant lift or rip-off, right down to the forest fairies in both films. I wouldn't blame anime fans for getting their panties in a bunch, but I learned about the futility about pursuing such matters in an indignant fashion almost around the time that Jeff Beck invented feedback. But do carry on. 

The men in the white suits

Alec Guinness as The Man In The White Suit, Alexander MacKendrick, 1951

Tony Curtis with Sharon Tate in Don't Make Waves, Alexander MacKendrick, 1967

Surely I can't be the first person to have picked this up. The only thing that messes up the symmetry is that while Waves is MacKendrick's final film as director, Suit is not his first but his second film as director (the first was Whisky Galore!/Tight Little Island).

UPDATE: Several commenters have indirectly solicited my assessment of the latter film, which was recently made available via the indespensible albeit slightly irritating (because they're indespensible—it's a loop, you see) Warner Archive. I dig it. It doesn't have the verbal assets of such prime MacKendrick fare as White Suit, Sweet Smell of Success, and others, and there's a good deal of technical roughness around its edges, but it's pretty fascinatingly acerbic, Tate is wonderful in it, and the climactic scene should have been watched by Michael Bay before he tackled the folding-skyscraper sequence in Transformers: Bark At The Moon, or whatever the hell it was called. My old friend Joseph Failla has some notes on the film that are not inapt, complete with illustrations:

"It took awhile but when I caught up with DON'T MAKE WAVES, I wasn't disappointed in the least. While I have a liking for some of the sillier beach movies, WAVES as directed by Mackendrick seemed to have more on it's mind, basically skewering many American values of excess. This would make a good double feature with the incredibly acidic THE LOVED ONE,also helmed by an English director taking an even angrier aim at the same subject (in fact both films feature a sequence with valuable beach front property precariously teetering on the edge of destruction). 

"I realize to call DON'T MAKE WAVES the LA DOLCE VITA of beach films is a stretch, although the these pics from both movies underscore an interesting affinity, I think. I may not have picked up on the white suits, but I find Tony Curtis makes for a decent Marcello Mastroianni, American style (think of Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS as a more smarmy counterpart to Mastroianni's famous paparazzi, Marcello Rubini from VITA). While the inclusion of  Claudia Cardinale reminds me of the presence of a European's eye view of the sweet life in '60s southern California. You may not feel both films should be mentioned in the same conversation but is there not a similar glint in Curtis' eye for Cardinale that Mastroianni has for Ekberg?"

Grand Funk Railroad/Michael Bay

Survival [Capitol, 1971] For about a year I've been saying that people aren't stupid, that there has to be something new about this music, and of course there is—it Americanizes Led Zeppelin with a fervent ingenuousness that does justice to the broad gestures of mass art. But now I read where various men of taste, having reached similar conclusions, claim in addition actually to like the stuff. That's going too far. C —Robert Christgau, 1971

 

"Transformers 3" is the same Michael Bay, a bit more expensive. There is nothing "new" or "different" about it. Let's not pretend otherwise.—Matt Zoller Seitz, Twitter, today

Modes of representation

Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau, 1921

Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927

The Thing From Another World, Christian Nyby, 1951

Team America: World Police, Trey Parker, 2004

Contemporaneity

"Aside from a couple of insignificant items [...], the photograph could have been taken yesterday for Esquire or Vanity Fair. And if [the director's] critical stock has fallen of late, the truth is that, as one of the century's supreme inventors of forms, his genius has been usurped by its own posterity."—Gilbert Adair, writing in Flickers, 1995, on Breathless, 1959, Jean-Luc Godard.

The image above, on the other hand, is from La signora senza camelie, 1953, Michelangelo Antonioni. The actors are Gino Cervi and Lucia Bosé. 

The subsequent sentence by Adair is: "Moreover, the evidence that not merely the cinema but the world itself has become Godardian is staring us in the face."

Let's see if it works when we make the switch: "Moreover, the evidence that not merely the cinema but the world itself has become Antonionian is staring us in the face."

Yup.

DeMille/Hitchcock

In his recent biography of Cecil B. DeMille, Empire of Dreams, Scott Eyman points out: "[...] DeMille's images became part of cinema's DNA, and, as already noted, many of his plots had a strange way of turning up in later years as well. As the film historian Robert Birchard pointed out, The Little American is clearly a forerunner to aspects of Rex Ingrams The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse; characterizing a relationship at a dinner table is most famously done by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, but DeMille did it first in Something To Think About; in The Ten Commandments, a dying Nita Naldi pulls a curtain off its rings, which Hitchcock—a great DeMille admirer—lifted for Janet Leigh's death throes in Psycho."

During the Q&A at an event at the Museum of the Moving Image, the critic Dave Kehr (whose new book When Movies Mattered is a complete must-own), riffing on what I call the Ecclesiastes theory of the arts (e.g., the notion that there really IS nothing new under the sun), described the galvanic effect of watching the Blu-ray of the 1923 DeMille Ten Commandments (available, at the moment, only, alas, in the super-duper deluxe gift edition that Kehr considers in his DVD review column in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section today, which I'd link to except I think that pay firewall's gone up already) and seeing the curtain-ring effect executed nearly four decades before Hitchcock recalled it, lifted it, and, let's face it, immortalized it in a way that its original did not. Dave admiringly enthused that Hitchcock was a real "magpie" with a near-photographic memory. Here is the sequence of shots from the '23 film; the murderer is Rod La Rocque.

And Psycho, 1960:

Hitchcock, writing in 1965 for the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Given the skill that permits a man to direct, skills shared in varying degrees, perhaps the most significant and individually important thing about a director is his style. This style is evidenced by both his choice of subject and his manner of directing it. Important directors are known for their style. The record speaks of Ernst Lubitsch as having a style characterized by cinematic wit, of the pictorial quip. Charlie Chaplin is spoken of as having a style, and it is interesting to notice that it was his incursion into dramatic direction in A Woman of Paris that seemed to crystallize this style. [...] On the whole, style was slower to manifest itself in U.S. pictures, always excepting the extravaganzas of C.B. DeMille and the works of Griffith and Ince."