Some Came Running

"The Fan"

There are any number of aspects to Madeleine Carroll's turn as Mrs. Erlynne in Preminger's 1949 The Fan that might be profitably commented on. But if you think I'm going to comment in such respects here, or at the Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report at The Auteurs', you are mistaken. Carry on. 

Dodge Challengers and Möbius Strips: Director Richard C. Sarafian on "Vanishing Point"

Next Tuesday Fox Home Entertainment releases a revamped DVD of the 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point in both standard definition and Blu-ray editions. Both look very fine indeed, but if you've got the equipment, the Blu-ray is the one to get. The film itself is an oddball piece that's very much of its time. Point is the story of an enigmatic driver, one "Kowalski" (played by Barry Newman, seen below with Lee Weaver), who, for reasons that remain known only to himself even after we get his back story via a series of flashbacks, is compelled to attempt a Denver-to-San Francisco jaunt...in 15 hours. Naturally his efforts attract the attention of law enforcement officials in a number of states, not to mention a blind radio DJ named "Super Soul" who becomes Kowalski's cheerleader and confessor. A combination crazy chase movie, Easy Rider-esque examination of "America," and a one-part-existentialism/one-part-mystic philosophical statement, Vanishing Point remains both compelling...and breathtakingly beautiful. Director Richard C. Sarafian followed the film with another picture chockablock with memorable imagery, Man In The Wilderness, and went on to direct and act in many other pictures, but Point remains a unique high for him. We recently spoke about it with the director, who turns 79 this year. Some spoilers are revealed in the interview, just so you know.

SCR: Vanishing Point is a movie that has fantastic imagery; you worked here with the  first rate cinematographer, John Alonzo.  The screenplay was written, under a pseudonym, “Guillermo Cain,” by the great Cuban writer Gabriel Cabrera Infante.  I wonder if you'd just give me a little bit of the background as how this very unusual film came into being, and then maybe let's talk about the process by which you created the visuals. 

SARAFIAN: I was in London and I was considering several other screenplays at the time.  One was Downhill Racer.  The other one was Serpico, and then Love Story.  At the moment I had just completed a movie that ultimately was called Run Wild, Run Free, about autism.  Anyhow, my wife, now my ex-wife, Robert Altman's sister, convinced me that I would have more fun with Vanishing Point, ‘cause it had a lot more to say and was more of a challenge for me as a director.  This was as I was considering Downhill Racer with Gene Hackman; I thought the challenge of that piece was to get into the molecule or the essence of speed and to transfer that—what Jean-Claude Killy might have seen, felt and experienced—into the audio-visual medium and the challenge of that, reaching for that. [Racer was eventually made by Michael Ritchie, starring Robert Redford—Ed.] But I didn't think that I would function well in that world.  I'd been overweight—I'm fat.  But here comes Vanishing Point, written by Guillermo, who was at one time Castro's Minister of Information, who apparently had read Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and was now writing this very graphic visual piece…and the essence of it was about freedom.  And so I saw it as about the road being an endless road and that the demise of our hero doesn't end at the bulldozer, that he goes on.  

The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg

Joe Swanberg as Tim in LOL, Swanberg, Bewersdorf, Wells, 2006

I: Apologia

Why Swanberg? Why now?

Blame it on my snark.

In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed “Mumblecore") are noted for their improvisational “realism” and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the “interest” in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: “I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.”

Now, those who know me even slightly, or read this blog with some regularity, probably understand that when it comes to cheap jokes I pretty much have no superego. And my Swanberg joke was pretty cheap. But it elicited some impassioned defenses of Swanberg’s work from, at first, Craig Keller, a cinephile of great passion and erudition and one of the more forceful and tenacious arguers I know. I hadn’t been aware that Craig was such a, as I put it, “Swanbergian.” I was aware that at least one other formidable film writer on the Internet, Dan Sallitt, held Swanberg’s work in pretty high esteem. With Keller on his side, a potential front was coalescing. My post also received some intelligent comments from Tom Russell, a young independent filmmaker who’s both a Swanberg fan and associate.

If I’m going to come out and say that I for the most part reject the work that Joe Swanberg has put his name on thus far, it occurs to me that individuals such as Keller and Russell are entitled to some fuller accounting. I also wanted to take up a kind of formal challenge: to construct a rejection of Swanberg that would avoid the sort of snark I used in the above-mentioned Sundance post, and steer clear of the too-easy ad hominem attacks that Swanberg (some would say rather bravely) leaves himself open to. Before doing so, it’s incumbent on me, with my old-school journalistic ethics and all, to lay some cards on the table.