Some Came Running

Martin Scorsese at the time of "GoodFellas"

My friend Brian Koppelman has a piece up at Grantland as part of its "Oscar Travesties" mini-series, called "The Boning of Goodfellas." It treats, of course, what a sham of a mockery of a sham it was that Kevin Costner's more do-gooderish Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars for 1990. While I feel Brian's pain, I can't share his indignation, for a number of reasons. But reading his feisty, funny, and for all that entirely evenhanded piece, I couldn't help recall the very first time I met Martin Scorsese, which was in late 1989, when he was in the very final stages of editing what was then called Good Fellas. 

At the time I was an editor at Video Review magazine, self-advertised on its covers as "The World Authority On Home Entertainment." The book was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and I, having worked my way up from editing the magazine's very tech-wonky equipment test reports (I swear I've forgotten more about this technology than most people have ever known), was one of several staffers deputized to fetch prognosticating soundbites and in some cases full essays from luminaries literary, cinematic, and otherwise. (J.G. Ballard: "I look forward to the day when specialty video producers—the equivalent of Sun Records and the like in the music business 20, 30 years ago, and the equivalent of small publishers in the book trade—really can begin to reach out to the public." Paula Abdul: "The big movie musical will return to prominence in this decade, as recording artists take the video music concept one step further.") I had already fielded essays by Paul Slansky and Dave Barry and of course the idea of approaching Martin Scorsese to do one was a no-brainer. I contacted his office and laid out our idea and terms (which were pretty good) and got a guardedly enthusiastic response from Scorsese's then-assistant. Two issues were of concern: Scorsese's schedule, which was tied up in finishing his latest film, and Scorsese's comfort level with respect to sitting down and writing something. Not a problem: I could come up to Scorsese's office with a legal pad and a tape recorder and go over the topics we wanted to cover, I'd draft an essay out of it, he'd dictate changes where necessary, then approve, and there we were. Deal, Scorsese's assistant said. 

It was right before the Christmas holiday when I went up to Scorsese's office, which was then in the Brill Building. The man immediately struck me as, sure, intense, but also warm, friendly, considerate. Not at all intimidating. We talked about the work in progress, and he invoked the old television series The Untouchables, in terms of both the pace and the brutality. The last thing on his mind was Oscars; there was a sense, almost palpable, of his delight that he was trying something really new for him, and also a slight sense of trepidation, as in "what are they gonna make of this?" And of course the work was consuming. "I ran into Paul Schrader in the hall the other day, he's finishing his movie. I said to him, 'It figures I see you here, we're the only two guys who are gonna work through Christmas'," Scorsese said, laughing the slightly nervous laugh he had back then.

We settled in to his private office and got started. He mostly stood and paced, and sometimes took a hit off of his inhaler—his asthma was acting up a little—and I'd just suggest a specific topic and off he would go. It did not take all that much more than an hour, and when we were through, I asked him to sign my copy of the then-new interview book Scorsese on Scorsese, published by Faber. I'm sitting here looking at it now; he inscribed it "To Glenn Kenny/Thanks & appreciation/Martin Scorsese/1989."

The piece came out well, I think. I was more interested in preserving Scorsese's voice than in making it work as an essay, and it shows, but I don't think that's necessarily bad. In subsequent years I would commission and edit other essays by him for Premiere, including his double obit for James Stewart and Robert Mitchum called "The Men Who Knew Too Much;" by this time, his comfort level with respect to prose writing had increased, so our interaction was a more simple matter of request and acknowledgement. 

In any case, the piece called "The Second Screen" has always held a special place for me, and even though it is now an extremely anachronistic look at the technology that has, indeed, transformed cinema and cinephilia, I think it still bears reading. So, without permission, I've inputted it into document form from my old and increasingly raggedy copy of the April 1990 edition of Video Review magazine, and am reproducing it here below the jump. Enjoy. 

"Shining" time

At the Vulture website for New York magazine this morning, there's an item linking to a post on The Overlook Hotel, a website devoted to "[e]phemera related to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of modern horror, 'The Shining'," concerning the deleted epilogue of the film. The post has stirred up a very slight flurry in my circle of Twitter, with one commentator expressing not entirely inapt amusement at a title card proposed in the epilogue in a draft of the screenplay, the relevant pages of which are reproduced in the post. "The Overlook would survive this tragedy, as it had so many others. It is still open every year from May 20th to September 20th. It is closed for the winter." The post at the site assures the reader, thought, that said title card probably didn't make it past the draft reproduced: "Clearly, the final text about the Overlook's history was an idea omitted in the writing process." Silly tone of the prose aside, it was probably obvious almost from the point that typewriter key hit paper that it would not do to go all Barry Lyndon in the context of a contemporary story. 

"Even the many people who saw the epilogue when The Shining was first released have varying recollections of the exact details," the post observes.  Indeed. I was one of those people. Well I recall the excitement building up to the May 23 1980 opening. My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, relatively fresh out of NYU Film School, had somehow or other acquired a one-sheet for the movie several months prior, and while we were not crazy about the pinscreen inspired Saul Bass graphic, it grew on us eventually. We knew we had to be there on opening day, and we Jerseyites were in luck, because one of the theaters in which it was opening was the Cinema One on Route 46 in Totowa, a pretty swank first-run then-single-screen theater constructed atop a short cliff of the side of the highway. We would be there for the first screening, one p.m. A bunch of us had been living in this dump in Orange from which we would soon be evicted for blasting Roxy Music records on Ron's Bose 901s at all hours (the landlord, who lived downstairs, was married to a nurse who worked odd hours and needed plenty of rest because "lives depend[ed] on her") but relations had recently been strained on account of Ron's girlfriend having been my girlfriend scant weeks earlier. While our shared  cinephilia tended to transcend such relatively petty personal concerns, the rift meant that we'd all be coming in from different points in north Jersey, I from some form of an ancestral home. I had talked my 16-year-old younger brother Michael into playing hooky from school (it didn't take much); he had read Stephen King's novel a while before and was keen to see whether Kubrick was gonna be able to pull off all the hedge maze stuff. Ron turned up with his-current/my-former girlfriend Debra and this stout, gruff, not-quite hippie chick named Tonka, who was the lover of one of the in-and-out Orange roommates. She was the first lesbian my little brother had ever met, and I was so proud. 

Anyway. The Overlook post quotes Diane Johnson as saying that "Kubrick felt  felt that we should see them in the hospital so we would know that they were all right. He had a soft spot for Wendy and Danny and thought that, at the end of a horror film, the audience should be reassured that everything was back to normal." The epilogue as I remember it did nothing, or at least very little, of the sort. As the Overlook says, people's recollections vary. I don't recollect any interaction between Ullman and a reception nurse, or Ullman  with Danny. (The above picture is a continuity Polaroid from the set, so obviously such an exchange was shot.) I can almost swear that the exchange in which Ullman tosses a ball to Danny was not in the sequence. I mainly remember the exchange between Ullman and a still-shaken Wendy in which he recounts to her, in terms more officious than comforting, that there was no physical evidence that any of the phenomena she claims to have witnessed at the Overlook, e.g., gallons of blood gushing from the elevators, ever actually occured. Barry Nelson's portrayal struck me more as manager trying to steer an ex-employee away from a lawsuit than a caring former boss. Of course that could just have been my anti-authoritarian streak, a common trait in twenty-year-olds. 

This was not really a "return to normal" kind of scene, in other words. It left more of a "what the hell happened" feeling in this viewer. We knew that Danny and Wendy had survived; Danny getting pulled into the Sno-Cat and that vehicle driving away had a very satisfying modern fairy-tale feel to it. The hospital scene threw us into a state of doubt again.

I also recall the placement of the scene differently than how it's described on the Overlook site. The post says it's "located between the shot of Jack frozen in the snow and the long dolly shot through the lobby that ends on the July 4, 1921 framed photo." Oddly enough, my own recollection is that the scene occurs after the shot of the Sno-Cat taking off. There was then a blackout, then the hospital scene, and then the shot of Jack frozen in the maze, then the lobby shot. Of course this makes no sense. Obviously if the Overlook people had been able to check out the hotel and insure that the elevators had not been flooded with blood and so on, they would also have discovered and disposed of Jack Torrance's mortal remains while on the job, and hence he would not be sitting frozen in the maze after Ullman had debriefed Wendy. On the other hand, the placement makes sense in terms of delivering a final shock to viewers, and also linking the mad dead Torrance to the droll champagne-glass-holder of 1921. We'll never know who's right, or who's "right," but again, that's how I remember it. (Roger Ebert's musings on the epilogue, cited in the Wikipedia entry on the movie, have Ullman saying that Jack's body was not found during the investigation, which would make the placement of Jack in the maze after that scene make a sort of sense/nonsense; my recollection of the scene does not have that dialogue and neither do the script pages reproduced in the Overlook post.)

The reason I had/have such a strong impression of the missing ending is because I ended up seeing The Shining again, with at least one of the same party, pretty shortly after seeing it the first time, and being flummoxed by the absence of the hospital scene. Ron did some investigating, and according to the story he told me, on the evening of the first day of screening, Warner Brothers had dispatched a batallion of in-house editors, armed with razor blades and Scotch tape and a memo from Kubrick himself, to every theater that had a print of the film, and sliced out the scene and taped the reel back together, and that was that. 

As I've said elsewhere, The Shining kind of became our social activity that summer. It was like a remake of Marty, only we were idiots: "Whaddya wanna do tonight?" "I dunno, whaddya wanna do tonight?" "Wanna go to The Shining?" "Sure." Think we saw it nine times before September. Ace picture!

UPDATE: I was so caught up in describing the more comic/picaresque aspects of my first Shining outing that I forgot to include one crucial member of our party, Joseph Failla, who as of 1980 had been my stalwart movie-going mate for over a decade. He too was there, and he e-mailed his thoughts last night: 

"It's funny how we can remember the same event so differently particularly since I was sitting right next to you at the time. As I recall, the deleted SHINING footage does indeed begin just after the shot of Jack Nicholson frozen in the snow and finishes on that long track down the hotel hallway into the black and white photo. It should be mentioned that the footage ends as a dissolve and not the quick cut that we see in the film today. The transitional shot originally started on a close up of Shelley Duvall and then slowly fades, revealing more of the corridor further back, so you could not yet tell where we were headed as the pictures on the wall were too small to make out. 

"As to whether the original ending is any more comforting, I'd say partially in that at least Danny has seemed to come through it OK. We see him enjoying a meal (ice cream I think), he looks as if he's forgotten all that has come before and there's no evidence of his imaginary friend Tony returning. Duvall's Wendy doesn't appear so much traumatized but rather emotionless and deeply confused. She's shown sitting up in her hospital bed nervously smoking a cigarette, as the hotel manager and his associate from the interview scene calmly and coldly explain there's no evidence of the mysterious occurrences she's told them. 

"So does the scene add any weight or clarity to the movie at all, or does it just puzzle the audience even more? I'm not sure if the ending as is, can tidy things up any better than what we first saw in 1980, but having seen the footage as part of the film, it's hard even today to ignore my memory of it. Keep in mind the European version of THE SHINING is further cut to under 2 hours, removing a substantial 25 minutes of more material we have always had access to. The cuts amount to numerous trims of existing sequences including the entirety of Anne Jackson's scene as a doctor examining Danny and questioning Wendy. The removal of that scene would take us directly from Danny's nightmare, to the family's drive up the winding highway to the Overlook. It's a possible smoother segue but it does rob the film of a memorable 'shining' moment when Wendy explains to the doctor how Jack nearly dislocated Danny's shoulder by pulling his arm too hard as, 'Just one of those things...'. "

Looks like we have a potential Shining Rashomon here. Maybe I'll ask MCPFRG™ and my brother how they remember the ending. I don't know about Debra though. As for Tonka, she's MIA. 

In comments, Partisan asks about DePalma's Dressed To Kill, released later on that summer. Indeed, it was another cinephile-Marty favorite, although not as monumental as The Shining. I have an anecdote about it, and its detractor Mr. Ron Jeremy, here. As for Parajanov's great film The Color Of Pomegranates, I missed out on its forst U.S. showings in '80; truth to tell my discovery of Parajanov, and Tarkovsky for that matter, would have to wait a few years.

UPDATE TWO (1/27/13): A third witness from the screening of May 23, 1980, the aforementioned Mr. Goldberg, weighs in in comments. 

The not-entirely-pure evil of "The Birth of a Nation"

"The Little Colonel" (Henry B. Walthall) performs a stupid and futile but nevertheless rousing gesture in Griffith's film.

In his December 2012 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Quentin Tarantino notes of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen, that it "really can only stand next to Mein Kampf when it comes to just its ugly imagery." To which Gates replies, "It's pure evil." As they continue to chat, Tarantino and Gates conflate The Clansmen with The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith's 1915 adaptation of Dixon's work, and Gates, after Tarantino avows that he doesn't use the word "evil" lightly, continues, apropos the film, "And a foundational moment in the history of cinema."

There indeed is the rub, and for as long as there is cinema, and cinephiles, and cinema historians, The Birth of a Nation will be maybe the greatest "problem picture" of all time, greater by far than The Triumph of the Will. While Riefenstahl's picture seems to us frozen in an unspeakable historical moment, its fascist aesthetics ever-ossifying into a species of malevolent kitsch, in the United States of America Griffith's vehemently racist vision is never not relevant, to use a word I'm not particularly fond of. A formulation I'm not particularly fond of either is the "what-we-talk-about-when" one; on the occasions it comes up, my reflexive response begins with "what do you mean 'we'?" Nevertheless, seeing how Gates and Tarantino talk about Nation reminds one that the movie's position as a film maudit is as singular as its position as a defining masterwork of epic American film. It is a film that literally cursed itself, by dint of the brutality of its racism; and the curse it put upon itself grows uglier year after year. 

Chatting with Gates, Tarantino extrapolates Griffith, the Kentucky-born-and-raised son of a Confederate colonel, as a man obsessed, and paints his obsession as an entirely malevolent one. "[I]t's one thing for the grandson [sic] of a bloody Confederate officer to bemoan how times have changed -- some old racist Southern old-timer bemoaning how life has changed, complaining that there was a day when you never saw a n--ger [sic] on Main Street, and now you do. Well, if he's just going to sit on his porch and sit in his rocking chair and pop off lies, who cares? That's not making The Birth of a Nation every day for a year, and financing it yourself." As if the entirety of the labor put into Nation was in the service of black subjugation. Tarantino has a vivid imagination, and a lot of general stuff going on in his head, but one might expect that, being a a filmmaker himself he could conceive that the day to day making of this film might not have been entirely a case of getting up every morning and saying "Time to get to subjugating the Negro!"

That said, I also don't expect Tarantino to be able to simulate a frame of mind in which The Birth of a Nation was actually NOT an effort driven wholly by malevolent intent, and I'm not sure it would be socially, spiritually, or intellectually useful for anybody to try to do same. Anyway, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, we have a historical record from which we can discover exactly what such a frame of mind was able to come up with in defense of Griffith's vision. As in: 

"Today, Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; not can I be sure that the film won’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years."

I was thinking of doing an "anyone in class care to guess, put your hands down [names of critics X, Y, and Z]" joke here, but that would be too coy. Anyway: yes, that was James Agee, writing in The Nation, no less, in a 1948 obituary for Griffith. Too which one may respond, particularly if one has watched Birth of a Nation recently (I just did, on the splendid Kino Lorber Blu-ray disc presentation), define "fair." Because, man, oh man. Between the self-pitying resentment, the schizzy miscegenation paranoia, and all the other racial neuroses-to-psychoses filtered through overheated post-Victorian melodrmatic tropes (the building blocks from which Griffith constructed his new model of cinematic narrative), the prominent racial observation of The Birth of a Nation is "the only tolerable Negro is a subservient Negro," which, you know, doesn't strike me as "fair." And yet James Agee thought it was? How can this be? Note the care with which he chooses his words, and the note of ambiguity in the placement of one of them: that Griffith went to lengths to be fair "to the Negroes as he understood them" AND that Griffith understood them "as a good type of Southerner does." The ambiguous word for me there is "good." But inasmuch as these words offer us a window into not just Agee's head in 1948, but a sentiment that it was not entirely disagreeable to articulate in The Nation in 1948, so too do Tarantino's words offer a window into what "we" think, or may think, Griffith's attitude and intentions were. We see them only as hateful. We are literally incapable of extending the sympathy to observe that Griffith saw/understood blacks "as a good Southerner would." By the same token, as amazingly constructed as the Klan-to-the-rescue climax of Birth of a Nation is, we are all in a sense socially prohibited (scratch the: not "in a sense" or even "socially" prohibited; more like, prohibited by the strictures of human decency itself) from permitting it to manipulate our sympathies as it intends/demands. In his 1915 account of the movie, the poet and writer Vachel Lindsay says of Nation that is "a crowd picture in a triple sense." Discussing the climax, he rhapsodizes: "So, in Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over a cliff. Finallt the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The lady is brought forward as a typically helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed. The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something that photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve."

Despite the eccentric undertones of his analysis, Lindsay, among other things, nailed why Nation was/is a "foundational moment in the history of cinema." "Real climax" is something greater than it sounds like, and it is not found even in the cinematic achievements one might be more comfortable with than Griffith's film. (As in, what if it was Feuillade's Fantomas? But it isn't/wasn't, and can't be.) Lindsay loves Griffith's storytelling, and his heart, so much that he seeks fo absolve him by trying to extract him from Dixon's vision: "Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wheeever the scenario shows traces of The Clansmen, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree; in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character."

It's very kind of Lindsay, but one need only look at the film, an uncomfortable thing to do, to realize that every frame of Nation carries the same level of conviction. It is very sad. And often very peculiar. From the prologue with the title card saying "The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion" to the odd formulation of Abraham Lincoln as the "great heart" who pardons future Klan founder Ben "The Little Colonel" Cameron when he's slated to be hanged for guerilla warfare and who, before heading to the theater to be shot by Raoul Walsh,  promises to treat the South as if it had never seceded, the movie's first section has these little rueful sentimental touches, not to mention reasonably powerful pacifist pleading moments, to give one the impression of Griffith as a relatively gentle-souled epic maker. Then, an hour and a half into a three-hour-plus movie, up pops the title card "This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstuction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” And then, if you'll pardon the phrase, it's off to the races, with a couple of ugly citations from future fan of the film Woodrow Wilson, about "men who knew nothing of the uses of authority, except it insolences" and of "a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South." (By the way, did you know that Larry the Cable Guy is actually from Nebraska?) 

Here is what I wrote in my notes while watching it the other night: "Hey, remember that tile card about five minutes ago? The immediacy of the images and the broadness of the performances pretty much wipes out THAT disclaimer. There’s really no getting round it: whatver the narrative necessity of setting these characters up as villains might have been, the execution of this can only be characterized as VEHEMENT." The film's quiet, sincere depictions of the privations the South suffered during the war, mentions of meals of "parched corn and sweet potato coffee," the description of raw cotton's use as "Southern ermine;" these now seem setups to rationalize the unrelentingly hateful portrayals of the likes of Thadeus-Stevens-pastiche Stoneman, smugly strutting Silas Lynch, "mulatto leader of the blacks[...]traitor to his white patron and a greater traitor to his own people," and whoever that black soldier is who chases poor Flora Cameron off that cliff. The dignified smiles of the blacks in the rafters of the House at the climax of Spielberg's Lincoln can, on some level, be understood as an answer scene to the repellent burlesque of the celebration of the racial intermarriage legislation in Griffith's film. But this, as we'll see, is maybe to genteel a reparation to the contemporary audience. The founding inspiration for the Klan is presaged by a lyrical picture practically out of Wordsworth, and followed by the proud intertitle statement "Over four hundred thousand Ku Klux costumes made by the women of the South and not one trust betrayed." Which may move an observant viewer to yell at the screen "Where the hell did you fucking crackers get the goddamn MATERIAL if you were so bad off?"

It's all terribly appalling, and yet you'd have to be an entire cinematic illiterate not to see and, yes, maybe feel the skill with which Griffith pulls off his to-the-rescue "real climax" with barely minutes to spare in the film's running time. A few years ago, the critic Terry Teachout wrote about Nation as a film that "has served its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently," and avowed, prior to making that pronouncment, that it was also pretty boring, which was one reason WHY it could be swept aside: "Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d’art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don’t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film—not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it—is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities."

This notion that the mean of "modern sensibility" as circumscribed by the critic is all that counts from said critical perspective is going to have to wait, and probably for a long time (see also Stephen Metcalf's immortal bit about The Searchers being "off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," oh dearie dear). But here's the thing: let's say that you are not Terry Teachout, and you do not process the film as bring "slow" but rather you apprehend both its pace and its overall cinematic language differently and as part of a continuum that continues to this day: in that case, whatever the fuck you think about early Renaissance music or what have you, the climax of The Birth of a Nation is going to "play" for you; that's the extent to which it is, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rightly put it, a "foundational moment." But what, now, is its proper place in "our" construction of cinematic history/heritage. And while the fashion has it that Birth of a Nation is some form of evil, what is the place of Django Unchained as an "answer film" to Griffith? (Tarantino has talked of his ur-Klan comedic fillip in the film as his "fuck you" to the earlier director, who died a near-penniless alcoholic forgotten by the industry he helped create, so even if he were able to receive Quentin's flip-off, it is not likely he'd be overly impressed.) And also, why isn't anyone talking about the Klan as it's represented in Gone With The Wind? So many questions.

In any event, a film in which the protagonist dryly exults "I get to kill white people and get paid for it?" is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office in these United States. Interesting payback for a nearly hundred-year-old insult, for sure. And a reminder that whoever "we" are talking about, "Give Peace A Chance" is not and never will be "our" new jam.

A few words with David Cronenberg about "Cosmopolis"

David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson on the set of Cosmopolis.

The other day I was allowed a few minutes on the phone with David Cronenberg, whose masterful adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis was one of the best movies of the year, in my estimation. The DVD and Blu-ray editions of the picture come out on January first from Entertainment One. 

    SCR: Watching the film, it kind of struck me as funny that it took you and Don DeLillo so long to come together because there seemed to be so many very distinct affinities, particularly with the way you both use language.  I wondered if you could talk about coming to this text and deciding that you were right to adapt it.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I had read quite a few things of Don's and I did know for example that his epic, Underworld, had been bought, I think, by Scott Rudin and then never made.  And that doesn't surprise me, because it's—you know, you can make about 10 movies from that book.  So I guess it's really a question of which project, you know.  And I hadn't actually read Cosmopolis, or even heard of it for some reason, when Paulo Branco the Portuguese producer, very experienced, he's done about 300 movies I think, came to Toronto and said, I have the rights to this book, I'm in touch with Don DeLillo and I think you should direct this.  And so really it was—when I read it, yeah, it was love at first sight.  I thought, I really need to—what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if—I'm going to do a sort of preliminary kind of rough screenplay from this book to see if I think it really is a movie.  Because there is a lot in the book and in all of Don's writing that is not directly, you know, translatable to cinema.  And that's the case with most novels.  People say to me, why do you end up doing these unfilmable novels?  And I say, oh, really, all novels are unfilmable in essence, because the two art forms are really quite different.  And there are so many things you can do in a novel that you simply can't do in movies and vice versa.  And that was true of Cosmopolis.  There's so much that's interior and metaphysical and metaphorical and all of that.  So I wanted to see if there was a movie in there and I wrote—it was the dialogue, exactly, that was the key to me.  And I transcribed all the dialogue, just on its own, and put it into script form.  And said to myself, OK, is this a movie?  And I thought, yeah, it is a movie and in fact it's a movie I really want to make.  And it really literally took me only 6 days to write the screenplay.

     SCR:  I think people make a similar misapprehension about your work as they do with DeLillo’s; is they don't see the comic aspect of the language, this baroque deadpan.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  It's true.  I mean a lot of the reviews of the movie even were very solemn.  And I thought, well, there are a lot of laughs in the book and the movie, and why aren't they seeing that?  Or responding to it at least.  And of course, if you don't do that, then your perception of the movie is going to be quite distorted, I think.

     SCR:  And it gets even more heightened at the end too, where the combination of your visuals and the dialogue really catapult you into Burroughs territory.  And I always thought in DeLillo's work such as Great Jones Street there's this streak of a Burroughs-type consciousness that is not his but that kind of enters from without and comments on what's going on.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, and of course Burroughs was incredibly accurate with his dialogue in a similar way to Don.  That is to say, it is stylized but it's also real.  It really nails some—the realities of American speech and the mentality that's behind that speech as well.  So it can be quite devastatingly funny in a satirical say as well.

     SCR:  You've often spoken about how much you rely on the production design and other aspects of the people you collaborate with during the film making process because you don't storyboard and you don't have an idea of how to shoot until you're actually on the set.  But there's something in Cosmopolis that makes some of the angles and some of the cuts—it's a really refined marriage of the verbal content and the visual content.  And I wondered the extent, if at all, your working method has evolved over the years, whether, as you write or as you conceive, where you see the cuts, if at all.  If that's changed at all.

     CRONENBERG:  It has changed.  I'm just more confident basically.  My director of photography, Peter Suschitzky, says that I shoot very differently now than I did in 1988 when we did our first movie together, Dead Ringers.  It's just—I don't—I just don't shoot as much.  I just know better what I want and what I need.  And that's just experience.  I don't think it's anything other than that.  But it's always been the case—the reason that I don't want to really think about something like story boards, unless it's a very complex physical action scene, let's say or special effects scene, I only—I've done a couple of story boards for let's say The Fly but not really since then, and that's just a special effects question—is because I want the visual aspects to come directly organically out of the scene itself as it's being played, by those particular actors, as they speak that particular dialogue.  To me, the dialogue in this movie really shapes the visuals.  Of course I've done design things with the interior of the limo and all of that, and you do a lot of stuff in prep that is the equivalent in a way of story boarding because you're setting yourself up for certain angles and lenses and so on by the way you design the set.  So there is that prep.  But ultimately, I want to hear the actors saying the dialogue.  I want to see what they look like and I want to see what there is about their face that pulls me to one side or the other or dead on or above and what lens I use.  It's very intuitive but to me it has to spring from the reality of that moment.  And so, in a strange way, despite the fact, you know, the control and as you call it, the refinement of the visuals in the movie, there's a documentary element involved, a kind of spontaneous documentary element.  My cameraman and I are really responding to what's right in front of us at that moment.

     SCR:  The extent to which this movie—it's set before 2001 and it's set before 9/11 and that's everybody's reference point.  But it's written in 2006 and it seems to very accurately predict 2008, among other things.  And it almost—it seems to go hand in hand with, say, the theorist Slavoj Zizek’s formulation of capitalism being the thing that is eating itself.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  Yeah.

     SCR:  A lot of people didn't see the irony or the satirical posture behind you and Pattinson ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, I know, some people thought that we were betraying the movie by doing that.  I thought, no, no, you're really not getting it at all.  That was so perfect.  I couldn't believe when they were asking us.  But that was the perfect expression of capitalism.  They were lovely there.  They were so excited, they love their Stock Exchange and, after all, we were selling a movie and selling is what they know.  So it was all perfect.  A capitalistic enterprise, and there we were.  Yeah, it's interesting, because Don and I on panels, in a way, that's when I kind of learn some things about his attitudes to things that I didn't really know or need to know but I'm curious about.  We both don't feel that being a prophet is part of our job description.  But if your antennae are sensitive enough to what's in the ether, you will inevitably anticipate some things that are just sort of accumulating but are not all that visible.  And I think that's really the case here.  As Don took pains to say, no, the book didn't begin with some grand, grandiose concept of coming to terms with financial responsibility globally and all of that kind of thing.  It had to do with limos.  It had to do with who would want one of those in the streets of Manhattan and why would you be in it, and who is it—and where do they go at night, and all of that kind of stuff.  It begins with details.  And it's the same with a film maker even more.  You cannot film an abstract concept.  We're in the concrete world, film makers. 

     SCR: I imagine—if you proceed from a point of view where you think you're going to sum it all up, that way lies madness. 

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.

     SCR:  But maybe there's some retrospective satisfaction in looking at this and saying, well, whoa, we got it.  Artists often don't even know that they're doing what they're doing; then it comes out and they've done something that is a summation. 

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I mean, and then you do get the delicious moments on the set, for example, when I got a text from Paul Giamatti who said, I can't believe Rupert Murdoch just got a pie in the face.  And we had not long before that shot the scene with the pie in the face in the movie.  So the resonances were kind of satisfying, even though it didn't really change what we were doing at all.  But it is satisfying, that aspect of it. 

     SCR:  As much invention as you have in the production design, and I wanted to ask about how you recreate the New York City streets in shooting, unless you are nitpicking, and as a New Yorker I'd be in a position to nitpick, but unless you're are very specifically nitpicking, it is convincing journey from 47th Street and 1st Avenue to 47th Street and 11th Avenue.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, well I'm glad you say that because I read some reviews that said they obviously, you know, Toronto shot.  And I thought, I don't think it's that obvious.  Because 47th Street now in particular is not what it was when Don wrote his book.  A lot of those places that he mentions aren't there.  Even if I did shoot on 47th Street, I would have to invent some things because they're just not there anymore.  And weirdly enough, the parking meters, the ones that deliver those little slips of paper, are exactly the same brand and color and shape and everything else in Toronto, as they are on 47th Street.  We took pains to try to not go crazy, because obviously this isn't Mean Streets or something like that, but given that you're seeing New York primarily through the window, through the screens of the limo, I thought it was not bad. We took pains to try and make it as much like New York as we could.

"Goodbye First Love" and Mia Hansen-Løve: an interview

Lola Créton in Hansen-Løve's film.

I was extremely taken with Mia Hansen-Løve's feature, Goodbye, First Love (original French title: Une amour de jeunesse) when I saw it at the 2011 New York Film Festival. At that time I interviewed its director, ostensibly for this start-up for which I was editing an online movie magazine. Then the online movie magazine folded, Hansen-Løve's film got a relatively unheralded U.S. theatrical release, and now it's on DVD. The interview kind of fell through the cracks, but as the film is part of my 2012 best-of list, I thought now might not be a terrible time to run the interview, in which I ask long-winded questions and Hansen-Løve provides patient, intelligent answers. It is probably best consumed after you see the film, which I highly recommend. 

    Some Came Running:  I wanted to ask you about the relationship the film has to the lead character.  You never, despite the fact that there's a suicide attempt and there's all sorts of problems, the film never looks at her through the perspective of pathology.  The film seems very much with her, both in the shooting style and just the way her character is portrayed.  And I was wondering the extent to which that was a really conscious idea of treating this theme or something that evolved, to the extent you even thought of differentiating the film in terms of its perspective from other films about young love, in other words.

     Mia Hansen-Løve: This film, like my other ones, are actually about things that could be very melodramatic. For me in a way it could be a tragedy.  I mean this girl, she's crazy about a boy who always goes away and leaves her.  She attempts—she tries to commit suicide and she overcomes it, but not really.  And then he comes back and then leaves her again.  It could be really big melodrama.  But I never tried to do a melodrama.  I always tried just, as in my previous films, I want my children to look at it in a way that so that the film doesn't belong to a genre but is simply a film about life.  To me the film cannot be about reality, about real life, if it's part of the genre.  It's a kind of paradox because as a viewer, as a spectator, I don't have any problem with that and I can be crazy about film, I can really love some films that are melodrama.  But it's not the same thing when you are a spectator and then when you make your own films.  You don't try to get the same things.  And as a spectator, I'm very open. But as a film maker I try to be as honest as I can about life and about my experience.  And I feel if I tell a story I want it to be as—I want to try to transmit a feeling of truth, and not—even if at the end people—I don't try to make people cry as much as possible or to make them laugh.  It's not that I don't care about that but to me it's not as much.  I prefer that they, when they go out of the film, maybe they're not so sad as they could be if I put the music at this point or if I make more dramatic scene.  But I prefer that they have a feeling of truth and of reality.  That's what I try to get.

Big Ed's used farms

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of Hitchcock, the kind-of quasi biopic concerning the late film director of the same name, starring Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins, written by John J. McLaughlin, and directed by Sacha Gervasi. I understand that in the dramatizing of real events that factual liberties are taken all the time, and have been since (I know, I know) the days of Shakespeare and before. So I understand then too that to complain about factual liberties taken here is to court accusations of,among other things, humorless literal-mindedness. But as I said in my review of the movie for MSN Movies, had the liberties taken with the facts resulted in a motion picture that was either illuminating or entertaining, or both (a lot to ask, I know) that would have gone a long way to forgiving those liberties. I got up early this morning to watch my friend Matt Singer of Criticwire talk Hitchcock, and Hitchcock, on the CBS This Morning program. The clip they showed from the new film features Hopkins and Mirren, as Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, going over footage of Psycho's shower scene in the editing room. Looking carefully at a single frame, Mirren's Reville coos "Ooh, you imp! You've got nudity in there!" to which Hopkins' Hitchcock replies with an exaggerated air of sang froid, "Well her breasts were rather large, it'd be a challenge not to show them." Most of the dialogue in the film is determined by the same juvenile notion of what constitutes breezy adult banter as that example. So, you know. 

Sometimes you will read a review of a motion picture and wonder if the person writing actually saw the same film you did. In the case of my friend Richard Brody, I have no doubt that we saw the same Hitchcock, as we sat next to each other at the press screening. But he came to some vastly different conclusions than I did, which he lays out in a typically detailed, incisive, provocative, and, for me, exasperating post at his New Yorker blog. He covers a lot of ground in this post, and seems most particularly pleased with the way Hitchcock demonstrates "the personal significance of the story of Psycho." Now, as I understand it, Brody's baseline idea isn't hugely different from Andrew Sarris' definition of Pantheon Directors, that is, those who "have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world." Brody sees an innovation in this biopic, born of his perception that "Gervasi rightly suggests that Hitchcock is no mere puppet master who seeks to provoke effects in his viewers." In discussing the technical aspects of his own films, Hitchcock took not-unjustifiable pride in the fact that with his effects he could, yes,  traumatically "play" the audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, Hitchcock himself DID acknowledge, and publicly at that, that within that component of his art there was a strong element of self-expression, so it's not really as if Gervasi has stumbled on to anything particularly new. (Then, of course, there are the reams—more like libraries—of detailed critical studies of Hitchcock's work.) Brody continues:  "[Hitchcock is] converting the world as he sees it, in its practical details and obsessively ugly corners, into his art, and he’s doing so precisely because those are the aspects of life that haunt his imagination." This is all unobjectionable. Where I think Richard goes a little off is in his praise for what he considers the "shaky but bold artistic limb" Gervasi goes out on by introducing the midwestern murderer Ed Gein into Hitchcock's consciousness, making him the stuff of daymares and imagined psychiatric consultations and even forays into marital jealousy that find Alfred crawling about the floor of his bathroom collecting grains of sand with which to confront Alma, who hasn't told him that her writing sessions of late have been taking place at a collaborator's beach house. 

"I have no idea whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein, but it doesn't matter," Brody writes. "[I]f it wasn't Gein that obsessed him, it was surely much that was Gein-like." Leaving aside that perhaps overly-confident "surely," I would argue that whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein certainly does matter, or at least it matters within the context of this film, because the portrayal of Gein therein is almost by necessity a kind of burlesque. At the time that Robert Bloch wrote the novel upon which Psycho was based, Gein was not the kind of household world that he has since become. As awful and appalling as his crimes were, the singularity of his atrocities underwent a certain diminishment as he was transposed over the years into a kind of pop-culture "brand." The wild-eyed, Midwestern, possibly cannibalistic serial killer, after roosting as a kind of Chiller Theatre Expo hipster icon since some time well before G.G. Allin shuffled off this mortal coil, has since become a sort of post-modern kitsch object. The only way for such a figure to inspire anything resembling real terror in a cinematic context anymore is to stretch him beyond, and then further beyond, reason, as Lynch did with "BOB" in Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me and certain episodes of the Twin Peaks television series. In any event, in Hitchcock, the way Gein, almost inescapably, comes off, Michael Wincott or no Michael Wincott, is as serial killer vaudeville. 

In a comment to a prior blog post, the great critic and biographer Joseph McBride, before recounting his own late '50s Gein-tourism experience, chides me a bit: "How can anyone not like a movie in which Alfred Hitchcock hangs out with Ed Gein?" I understand what he's getting at, and had Hitchcock been conceived and executed thoughout as a kind of burlesque, in the style of what McBride's old pals Allan Arkush and Joe Dante often had a go at in the Corman days and beyond, Hitchcock could have been good disreputable/affectionate fun. But that's not what Hitchcock is up to. Brody states that Gervasi recognizes Psycho as a great artistic acheivement, but he doesn't, or rather the movie doesn't, not really; art never enters into this movie's argument, or algebra. Rather, Hitchcock recasts the making of Psycho through a tired Hollywood template: the story of a dreamer with a vision that everybody around him thinks he is—you'll excuse the term—crazy for entertaining, and how that dreamer proves the naysayers wrong...here, not by making a great work of art, but by concocting a motion picture commodity that slays them at the box office. And in the process of grinding out this particular narratvie sausage, Hitchcock also manages to be astonishingly patronizing to its principal characters. In her own clearly ticked-off New York Times review of the movie, another friend, Manohla Dargis, writes, "Hitchcock, you are meant to believe, was himself a little psycho and could only work from a place of madness." She continues: "The real Hitchcock's great flaw, apparently, was that he was at once a genius and a private man, a combination that has allowed some filmmakers to have their insultingly imaginative way with him." She goes on to dismiss "dim fantasies" that to her smack of "spiteful jealousy." I'd say that's pretty spot on. Except I don't even think that Sacha Gervasi understands enough about Hitchcock to know that he maybe should be jealous of him. (There are several interviews with the director that bear this notion out, I'll leave it to readers curious enough to seek them out to do just that.)

As for Hitchcock himself...like DeMille, whom he admired, he was something of a self-made showman, and pronouncements such as "some films are slices of life, my films were slices of cake" were a part of his presentation. As Dargis said, he was a private person, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he worked exclusively and consciously in a vacuum of his own unexamined fancies. As much of a front as he put up, one often doesn't need to read too far between certain lines to understand his own understanding of where his themes came from. In other words: he knew that cinema was the stuff of obsession. There's a droll and poignant passage in Luis Buñuel's autobiography in which the Spanish director recounts a Hollywood lunch in his honor, at which Hitchcock rhapsodized, practically in a swoon, over a particularly salient detail in Buñuel's Tristana: " 'Ah, that leg...that leg,' he sighed, more than once." In the final revised edition of Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut, recalls watching Vertigo and seeing Jimmy Stewart's Scotty trying to remake Kim Novak's Judy Barton into "Madeline;" he writes of experiencing a certain sad frisson knowing that it was Vera Miles, not Novak, that Hitchcock had wanted for that crucial role, and Truffaut sees Hitchcock in Stewart with a kind of sad clarity. In other words, you don't need a bad cartoon—which, finally, I'm convinced Hitchcock is—in order to get it. 

A few citations. Here's a pretty salient passage from the above-mentioned Truffaut study of Hitchcock: 

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Mr. Hitchcock, this morning you mentioned that you had had a bad night and indicated that you were probably disturbed by all of the memories that our talks have been stirring up these past several days. In the course of our conversations we've gone into the dreamlike qualities of many of your films, among them Notorious, Vertigo, and Psycho. I'd like to ask whether you dream a lot.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Not to much...sometimes...and my dreams are very reasonable. 

In one of my dreams I was standing on Sunset Boulevard, where the trees are, and I was waiting for a Yellow Cab to take me to lunch. But no Yellow Cab came by; all the automobiles that drove by me were of a 1916 vintage. And I said to myself, "It's no good standing here waiting for a Yellow Cab because this is a 1916 dream!" So I walked to lunch instead.

F.T. Did you really dream this, or is it a joke?

A.H. No, it's not a gag; I really had a dream like that!

F.T. It's almost a period dream! But would you say that dreams have a bearing on your work?

A.H. Daydreams, probably. 

F.T. It may be the expression of the unconscious, and that takes us back once more to fairy tales. By depicting the isolated man who's surrounded by all sorts of hostile elements, and perhaps without even meaning to, you enter the realm of the dream world, which is also a world of solitude and danger. 

A.H. That's probably me, within myself. 

F.T. It must bem because the logic of your puctures, which is sometimes decried by the critics, is rather like the logic of dreams. Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest, for instance, are made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare. 

A.H. This may be due to the fact that I'm never satisfied with the ordinary. I'm ill at ease with it. 

F.T. That's very evident. A Hitchcock picture that doesn't involve death or the abnormal is practically inconceivable. I believe you film emotions you feel very deeply—fear, for instance. 

A.H. Absolutely. I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm. I don't want clouds overhead. I get a feeling of peace from a well-organized desk. When I take a bath, I put everything neatly back in place. You wouldn't even know I'd been in the bathroom. My passion for orderliness goes hand in hand with a strong revulsion toward complications. 

F.T. That accounts for the way you protect yourself. Any eventual problem of direction is resolved beforehand by your minute predesigned sketches that lessen the risks and prevent trouble later on. Jacques Becker used to say, "Alfred Hitchcock is undoubtedly the director who gets the least surprises when he looks at rushes."

And here is Hitchcock describing his childhood to Truffaut: "I was what is known as a well-behaved child. At family gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and I observed a good deal. I've always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can't remember ever having had a playmate. I played by myself, inventing my own games [...] I was put into school very young. At St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London. Ours was a Catholic family and in England, you see, this in itself is an eccentricity. It was probably during this period with the Jesuits that a strong sense of fear developed—moral fear—the fear of being involved in anything evil. I always tried to avoid it. Why? Perhaps out of physical fear. I was terrified of physical punishment. In those days they used a cane made of very hard rubber. I believe the Jesuits still use it. It wasn't done casually, you know; it was rather like the execution of a sentence. They would tell you to step in to see the father when classes were over. He would then solemnly inscribe your name in the register, together with the indication of the punishment to be inflicted, and you spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out."

And perhaps we should give the last word, for now, to Robin Wood, and this passage from 1989's Hitchcock's Films Revisited. The film to which Wood refers is, of course, Psycho (which I think I might watch this afternoon): "No film conveys—to those not afraid to expose themselves fully to it—a greater sense of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the ultimate horrors without hysteria, with a poised, almost serene detachment. This is probably not what Hitchcock meant when he said that one cannot appreciate Psycho without a sense of humor, but it is what he should have meant. He himself—if his interviews are to be trusted—has not really faced up to what he was doing when he made the film. This, needless to say, must not affect one's estimate of the film itself. For the maker of Psycho to regard it as a 'fun' picture can be taken as a means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) is a much greater artist than he knows." 

Ten images from "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse," Fritz Lang, 1933

Literary interlude

François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Helen Scott during the interviews that created the book.

F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the piece of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic are to acheive something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely acheived this. it wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. 

F.T. Yes, that's true.

A.H. That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can't get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we're using now. People will say, "It's a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it. " I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional. 

—Hitchcock/Truffaut, by François Truffaut, 1966. 

...he was an English guy...

If you're of the opinion that they don't make 'em like they used to, you are absolutely correct. If you're peeved that it's more and more difficult to see the ones they used to make on a big screen, that's absolutely correct too. So I would suggest you carve out some time and put your money where your complaints are this coming Thursday, October 4, when David Lean's still-remarkable, relentlessly thrilling 1962 picture Lawrence of Arabia plays in a 4K digital restoration for one showing only (at 7 p.m.) in theaters across the country, including one near you, I would expect. You can find out more at the Fathom Events website here. I can't imagine it'll be anything less than thrilling. I saw a prior restoration of the movie at the Ziegfeld some years back and it was one of my favorite moviegoing experiences ever. So don't wait for the upcoming Blu-ray; see it big, if you can. The presentation will also feature some nice extras, including introductions from Omar Sharif and Martin Scorsese. 

NYFF 2012: "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"

In 2007 I had the great privilege of doing a telephone interview with Alain Resnais. It was a very genial conversation that alighted ona variety of topics, one of which, no surprise, was his still-contentious 1961 collaboration with the late writer/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad. The movie still tends to be viewed by some through critic Pauline Kael's rather stubbornly dense reading of it—the gist of it being that it's one of the pictures that inspired her mot about "come dressed as the sick soul of Europe" costume parties—so I discussed it with Resnais with an emphasis on its more formally playful aspects, which include the appearance of a cardboard cutout of Alfred HItchcock and a pastiche of the Hollywood classic Gilda. He was not unreceptive to my perspective, but also gently cautioned against the notion of characterizing the whole thing as some kind of meta romp. As his interpreter put it, "Yes, there are some very funny jokes in Marienbad. But [...Resnais] hopes it doesn't take away from the tragedy."

And so. Resnais' latest picture, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, opens with some good jokes, beginning with its title, which heralds back to a different technological turning point in the history of film. The design of the title sequence, which does not but might as well incorporate the image of a flying unicorn, evokes a particular faux-grandiose Euro-cheesiness that's also quite amusing. Then there's the conceit of the movie itself. A flatbed-truck-load of great French actors, from Amalric to Wilson and with Arditi, Azema, Consigny, Girardot, and Piccoli and many others in between, are seen being summoned by phone to the chateau of a dear friend, a playwright named Antoine d'Anthac. Antoine's gone and died, and he wanted these friends to attend the reading of his will and testament. And so this amazing cast hies to an ornate CGI-rendered mountain retreat, where they are greeted by an unusually cheery Antoine via posthumous video. Turns out he wants to go over old times, particularly his play Eurydice, which various members of this cast, we learn, portrayed in various productions over the years. There's another theater company working up a version, Antoine tells the renowned thespians, and he wants their feedback on their version of the play. Which then begins on the big-screen display in Antoine's home theater. And the cast assembled for the reading of Antoine's will begins to interact with what's on screen, creating a mashup, if you will, wherein most of the entirety of Eurydice, a 20th-century gloss on the Orpheus myth, plays out for the viewer—that's you, and/or me. 

If you're somewhat familiar with 20th-century European drama, and/or have paid attention to the movie's opening credits, you'll comprehend that this Eurydice is a real thing—it's a play by Jean Anouilh that predated Jean Cocteau's cinematic gloss on the Orpheus myth by several years. The two have little in common, as it happens, aside from the ancient-to-modern transposition. The actors-called-to-a-playwright's-will-reading conceit is ALSO adopted from an Anouilh play: a later, and altogether more obscure work entitled Dear Antoine, or, Failed Love. So there's another set of mashup parentheses bracketing the opposition of the Resnais rep company and the lesser-known actors in the fictional theatrical company that they're running competing versions of Eurydice with.

All this sounds rather remarkably impenetrably knotty and maybe impossibly French, and there's a sense in which cultural specificity seems kind of crucial to "getting" what's going on here. (Because I'm a horrible person, I was highly amused to read a writeup by a VERY know-somethingish whippersnapper in which he cited Antoine D'Anthac as a real playwright, and Jean Anouilh as a fictional one. It's like you've never seen Waltz of the Toreadors or Becket or something!) However. Once the conceit is successfully realized and the Eurydice action moves forward while toggling in different modes, the movie's exploration of the art of acting and the fungible nature of what we call "tragedy" takes on a remarkable immediacy that's rendered more than slightly phantasmagorical by the 90-year-old Resnais' delight in the play of digital space. Most, if not all, of the setting inhabited by the actors transporting themselves (and the audience) in D'Anthac's lair are digital simulations, from great halls that look like video-game foyers to ratty pension bedrooms wherein various iterations of Orpheus and Eurydice enact their passion and domestic disputes. 

And while the viewer is taking in all of the various filters through which what is finally a very old and simple-as-Death story is being processed—and just to think, we ain't seen nothin' yet!—that story, its elemental themes of passion and mortality, comes through in a very direct way, via the performances and the way Resnais' camera views them. The formal innovations and sense of play aren't distractions from the emotion, rather, Resnais suggests, it is only through the rigorous exercise of the imagination that art is able to communicate anything even suggesting the Real. There'll be more to say when the picture gets a proper release and the rest of you are able to see it; I'm happy to report that Kino Lorber was not at all intimidated by its French-ness and will be releasing the film early next year.