Some Came Running

A few words on "The Arrangement"

Kirk and Kirk

On May 25th I had the honor of presenting, at the great NY moviehouse The Metrograph, Elia Kazan's 1969 The Arrangement. These are the program notes for the show: 

“Plastic people! Oh baby now you’re such a drag!” So bellowed The Mothers of Invention in 1967. That same year Elia Kazan issued a not dissimilar cri de coeur in his doorstop-size novel “The Arrangement,” which he adapted into a film two years later. In Kazan’s complaint,  Kirk Douglas’ compulsively adulterous ad exec mounts his own rebellion against a values system that has made him affluent but empty. Is this a frantic, truculent indulgence? A film maudit of monumental proportions? Kazan’s own Skidoo? You have see this rarely-screened curio to find out.

A few of you out there have been kind enough to inquire if I could make my pre-screening remarks available in prose form. I worked from what I regard as loose notes, but I cleaned them up into something resembling what I said and/or an actual text. See below. 

In my program notes I quoted Frank Zappa’s “Plastic People.” Here’s another Zappa quote: “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

Why The Arrangement? Why now?

This screening came about as a result of some casual conversations I had with Jake Perlin, one of the programmers here. I had a book idea I’d been toying with, about the Great Hollywood Directors— Hitchcock, Preminger, Wyler, Kazan, and more — and the ways that they, and their work, reacted beginning in the early ‘60s when (and Preminger’s efforts had a lot to do with this in the first place) the Production Code imploded and these filmmakers had the freedom to do things that they’d never been allowed to do. In Hitchcock’s case, for instance, you have the morbidly explicit rape scene of Frenzy. With Preminger you have the explorations of Skidoo and the Burgess Meredith nude scene in Such Good Friends. With Kazan, you have The Arrangement.

Now this movie didn’t start with a compulsion to break boundaries in filmmaking. Kazan, in the mid ‘60s, had what he considered a profound sense of dissatisfaction in his life which he channeled into a novel, which happened to coincide with a shifting zeitgeist. His marriage to Molly Kazan had ended with her death in 1963; he subsequently married Barbara Loden in 1967. He had a lot of tortured feelings concerning both relationships, which he details in his fascinating autobiography. In The Arrangement he wrestles with not just those feelings but a larger disgust with the phoniness of American life. Status symbols, affluence, their stifling influence on interpersonal relationships, particularly those of love. Which were coming into collision with the counterculture, which believed love should be free.

Now you’re wondering if Jake and I were discussing these issues. No.

This program was supposed to have been a double feature. The second feature was to have been 1960’s Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine and starring Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, Ernie Kovacs and Walter Matthau. Written by Evan Hunter, whose estate, we have discovered, now retains the rights to the film.

Quine is what a friend of mine has called a  “major minor” Hollywood director and Strangers is one of his best, a work of great sensitivity and prescience. While The Arrangement knocks over its metaphors like a drunk entering a darkened living room and stumbling over the furniture, Strangers brings a real deftness to the whole work/love/integrity theme. And its treatment of insidious sexism —Kim Novak’s character is all but persecuted for looking like, well, Kim Novak — is also very sharp.

So that was supposed to be the idea — the sexual revolution, 1960 and 1969, with Kirk Douglas the iconic bracketing. But we could not find a 35 print of Strangers, so here we are.

One of the rather nastier features of The Arrangement is its treatment of Deborah Kerr. If you thought her having to almost yodel “Doodle me James” in the 1966  Casino Royale was undignified, get a load of what she goes through here.  Kazan’s novel put across a certain amount of complexity on top of its baseline sexism, but in the film this too often translates into an attitude of  “Why must I, a new man with new ideas, be saddled with an OLD WIFE?”

The movie’s pre-echoes of Network are not limited to a particular manifestation of misogyny, but with Faye Dunaway as the object of desire that quality is hard to ignore. Neither film bothers to recognize that it’s the male-constructed power structures that help make the bitches that so bewitch the hapless middle-aged male. At least Strangers tries to bust its characters out of circumscribed gender roles, recognizes the oppression.

Michael Higgins, later  of Wanda, plays the Douglas character’s brother Michael; look for an uncredited Barry Sullivan…Richard Boone, six months younger than Douglas, plays Douglas’ dad, and look, there’s practically teenage Michael Murphy as a priest!

Just when you think it’s peaked, the movie  gets weirder. When Dunaway is setting a table for Douglas and Boone you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Joni Mitchell was commissioned to write a song for the movie, and she did. It wasn’t used in the film, but the song “The Arrangement” appears on Court and Spark and bemoans the “credit card and the swimming pool in the backyard.”

REACTIONS

From the NYPL Perf Arts clippings file…

Judith Crist: “126 minutes of sturm, drang and banality and about as turgid a job of soap-suds cinema to be found outside of Peyton Place reruns”

“The sight of a 44-year-old wallowing in self-searchings that would embarrass today’s 14-year-old by its simple-mindedness is simply boring”

“As a neophyte novelist, Kazan was entitled to a trash wallow, but his spreading The Arrangement over the big screen is inexcusable”  — New York mag Nov 24, 1969

John Simon: “ a senseless and banal story that reels from platitude to platitude”

My old friend Joseph Failla wrote to me:  “You sure don't pick the easy ones to present, I've seen THE ARRANGEMENT and thought it was great. I know late Kazan becomes difficult but I've never understood Maltin's bomb rating either.Compelling from the opening moments till it's dreamy, hallucinatory conclusion. My favorite touch, Kirk's Batman style punch up in a bar.”

Not in a bar, as it happens, but imagined by Kurt as he looks into Dunaway’s NYC apartment window and sees a man (future Lars von Trier day player John Randolph Jones) in there.  

"Madame:" An Evening With Catherine Robbe-Grillet

Left, Beverly Charpentier; with pen, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Wednesday, October 7; photograph by Michael George.

By the way, when we visited Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had dressed herself a la gamine in my honor, pretending to be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when we met again at a publisher’s luncheon in a restaurant. After pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked, “Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle?” It was very funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in photographs, roared with laughter.

—Vladimir Nabokov; in an interview with Alfred Appel, Jr., conducted August 1970, collected in Strong Opinions, 1973, McGraw-Hill

Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov places this meeting in 1959. By this time, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, née Rastakian, has already published her first novel, The Image, published by Editions du Minuet under the pen name Jean De Berg in 1956, when she is 26. She married Robbe-Grillet in 1957. The Image is a detailed account of a sado-masochistic relationship; it was made into a film, shot on location in Paris, by Radley Metzger in 1975. Robbe-Grillet appeared in two of her husband’s films, both among his best, 1963’s L’Immortelle and 1966’s Trans-Europe Express. In the years since her husband’s death (he passed away in 2008) she has gained a second reputation; for a very rare speaking appearance in New York, held by the  French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) on Tuesday evening, she was referred to more than once as “France’s most famous dominatrix.” The evening, which was prefaced by an edited version of La ceremonie, Lina Mannheimer’s documentary about Madame Robbe-Grillet, which also features extensive interviews with Robbe-Grillet’s companion and, …well,… it’s hard to put a name to it, and “slave” will not do…in any event, a good deal of the post-film discussion focused on how Beverly Charpentier, who spoke quite a bit herself while serving as Madame’s translator, could, as an extremely accomplished heterosexual woman with two grown children, have given her whole life over to the care and obedience of Catherine.

The panel was moderated by Toni Bentley, the one-time ballet dancer whose writings have come to chronicle her own explorations of sado-masochism. Wearing a near-crimson dress, Bentley, who authored the recent Vanity Fair article which introduced Madame Robbe-Grillet and her life work/style to an American audience, asked a series of questions, told the audience that she expected their own questions to be “bold,” and related a tale of her own participation in a bondage ritual with Robbe-Grillet and Charpentier.

So, you know, it was not an entirely literary evening. (It’s part of the French Alliance’s “Art of Sex And Seduction” series.) I myself am not terribly interested in S&M as a practice (despite my having penned, pseudonymously, an account of an evening at The Vault for a Guccione publication back in the ‘80s; like they say, once a philosopher, twice a…never mind…), but like all closed or semi-closed social systems, it is certainly interesting, and Madame Robbe-Grillet, a woman of fierce and formidable intelligence, brings her perceptual acuity to bear on the phenomenon in a dispassionate way when necessary. Looking very proper in her black dress suit and white headband, Madame, now 85 years of age, reflected on the fact that, from what statistics she could glean, 90 percent of all the individuals with an interest in sadomasochism are males, and that the disproportion creates, among other things, a certain kind of complicity among women who participate in the lifestyle. Also discussed were the differences between professional dominatrices and those who practice discipline as a lifestyle; Madame Robbe-Grillet, who does the latter, does not disdain sex workers—indeed, she has heartfelt praise for them—but does not take money herself; it redefines the nature of the whole exchange, she says, and of course she is correct. As for Charpentier, answering why a woman as accomplished as herself should be in the position she’s chosen, wondered aloud why it would be considered so unusual, and cited the motto of the American college fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, “joy in service.” A not dissimilar concept animates some practices within twelve step programs, but I wasn’t gonna bring that up necessarily.

There was much laughter in the talk. “Obviously, if you’ve read or seen 50 Shades of Gray, you know that a predilection for sadomasochism is the result of something terrible that happened to you as a child,” Madame Robbe-Grillet said, luxuriating in mild, rancor-free irony. “It’s reassuring for people to tie it in to some childhood trauma, but I can’t say that there’s any that I myself remember.” She went on to say that sexuality was still a place of mystery, and while “çe me derange pas” that psychoanalysts, both amateur and professional, have tried to figure out “why” she spent decades as a submissive before turning dominant, or any of the other features of her erotic life, she herself had/has “no need to find out where my desires come from.” I was delighted when, at the question of how long she intended to keep up her practice of rituals now that she’s in her ninth decade of life, Madame cited the example of Portuguese filmmaker Manoel De Oliviera, who continued making films even past the age of 100.

It is a tricky business, sado-masochism, and particularly in these times. At one point, Madame made mention of the fact that a genuine sadist derives no pleasure from inflicting pain on a person who enjoys receiving pain, as that goes against the whole ethos of sadism; the implications of this statement were left to hang as Madame continued by speaking of ideas of consent. Consent, I infer, is one of the rationales that inform the ritualistic practices in Robbe-Grillet’s mode of living. But these practices are not all she lives for. Again without irritation, she noted, “I know I’m billed as France’s most famous dominatrix, and I am, but I’m also a nice little old lady who’s interested in the theatre, music, and literature, and who makes jam!”

There was not much time for audience questions. The house, Florence Gould Hall, was packed, and the male-to-female ratio was something like 60:40, and of course I thought more than once of old Woody Allen jokes about the personal ads in the New York Review Of Books. The questions were not terribly “bold,” and I didn’t get to ask either of mine, the first of which was to solicit her own recollection of the meeting with Nabokov so very long ago (in the year of my own birth, as it happens), the second would have been about the extent to which she’d been involved in the making of the film version of The Image, and her impression of the picture. There was a book-signing afterwards, though, and I got to be third on line.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s final published fiction, A Sentimental Novel, is so replete with elaborate erotic fantasies of such atrocities as child murder and such that it’s easy to ignore its ingenious structure, a variant of that of Raymond Roussel’s long poem “La Vue”—a structure that in some way inoculates the work from genuine moral condemnation, or should, or, oh, I don’t know. Although Robbe-Grillet doesn’t get into it in his wonderful memoir, published in English translation in 1988 as Ghosts In The Mirror, his marriage to Catherine was, among other things, a long-held S&M relationship. (His depiction of the marriage in the book is in fact, especially for this author, downright romantic. The book contains an account of how the couple survived the first crash of an Air France Boeing 707 in 1961, and how his main regret from that event was that in his incinerated luggage was a bracelet he had brought for Catherine in commemoration of their meeting exactly ten years before, while he was stuck on his novel Les Gommes and took a trip to Istanbul on impulse—the couple met on the Orient Express!) The cover of the paperback edition of Madame’s memoir of her husband, Alain, is a picture of the two locked in an impossibly tender embrace that has an emotional echo of Annie Leibovitz’s famed 1980 Lennon/Ono shot. The book is a series of alphabetically arranged vignettes/observations, some several pages, others only a paragraph or two. I certainly hope an English translation is in the offing; here is my own probably very not-good and certainly completely unauthorized translation of the entry called “Fax.”

FAX

My man has a happy relationship with tools, but with technology…?

Apart from the fax, he never puts aside his obstinate refusal of technical innovations (digital photo, computer, mobile phone). Only the fax finds grace with Alain; he has it in constant use after I buy him a simple model. He will not even hear of a credit card, even after being tricked up in a Canadian hotel, or it becomes a requirement for accessing an international phone line. He will never change; he’d rather suffer than bend.

Fortunately, without being infatuated with them, I have no issue with electronics, domestic or otherwise, and everything works out.

Tools, that’s him; electronics, me.

 It was Alain that I chose for Madame to sign. Charpentier was by her side to translate, and I mentioned right off that I was an admirer of hers and a longtime admirer of her husband’s. Madame said something to Charpentier, and Charpentier said to me “You are a good person;” by way of amplifying this, Madame—who despite her tiny frame gives the impression of being a formidably strong person, and is unfailingly alert, with vivacious eyes—continued, “Tous les amateurs de Robbe-Grillet sont bonnes.”

A new film by Gina Telaroli: "Here's To The Future!"

Water and script pages, Here's To The Future, Gina Telaroli, 2014

The young filmmaker Gina Telaroli has a new picture premiering this upcoming Saturday, December  13, at the Migrating Forms festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Here's To The Future! is both an immediately engaging and consistently (playfully) challenging piece of work; I characterize it below as an essay film disguised as a process film. The premise of the movie is simple: Telaroli assembles a small crew and variable cast to enact a scene from an obscure Michael Curtiz-directed melodrama from the early '30s, The Cabin In The Cotton  (which costarred soon-to-be-casualty-of-the-talkies Richard Barthelmess and not-yet-ascended star Bette Davis), and gives herself a single afternoon to get it done. (It occurs to me now that there's also something slightly OULIPean about the enterprise.) All of the folks assembled have their own devices which are shooting the shooting and the finished feature intercuts footage off devices ranging from a Blackberry Curve to a Canon 60D. Where Telaroli's prior feature, 2012's Traveling Light (which I wrote about here) made a kind of abstract narrative out of an abandoned attempt at a different narrative film, Here's To The Future! adopts an interrogative mode from the get-go. But because it gets so close to the people who are part of it, the movie never feels hermetic or theoretical. It's both as unconventional and accessible as filmmaking gets, in a funny way. Go see it. 

I engaged Gina, who's a friend, in an e-mail interview, and here's how it went.

GK:  Your first feature, A Little Death is, from all appearances, a pretty conventionally conceived and produced narrative film in that it seems to be the work of actors and a crew working from a script, etcetera. Traveling Light is a movie that aspired to be one thing, and ended up as something else due to circumstances of shooting and then again with respect to editing. Here’s To The Future! is something else yet again: a kind of essay film in the disguise of a process film. Was that what your conception was from beginning to end or, as with Traveling Light, was that something that changed along the timeline of the production?

GT: Like Traveling Light, HTTF! isn’t conventional in terms of its conception and is very much a product of circumstances, some in my control and some not. The scene we are shooting was actually supposed to be part of a short film I was making for an omnibus project that was centered on the theme of ‘proof.’ I was going to make a film comprised of documentary footage I shot in Ohio and have that transition to the narrative scene we shot on that Sunday in September.  The omnibus project fell through, so that film never got made, but even before that project turned to dust, I knew I was more interested in the document of the shoot itself and the repetition in the performances of the scene, that that was the real “movie.”

GK:  It looks as if, in the films where you work from footage you generate yourself and/or with the collaboration of your colleagues, your role as director is less that of a traditional auteur and more as a conductor or prompter. You’re creating a set of circumstances for creative people to enact and recording and digesting—via editing—the results. Is that an accurate characterization?

GT: I don’t disagree with what you wrote, though something about your question feels like it discredits my voice as the author a bit?  My films are 100% the result of circumstance and they are definitely dependent on collaboration and the people I work with, which I love, but I still put all the elements in the room, if that makes sense. For HTTF!  I chose the scene, the people, the day, and I did direct a lot of the footage, even if it’s used in a different context.  Also, while it isn’t directing exactly, I have to imagine the mood, the general feeling of the day and thus the progression of events was due in part to the environment I created and sustained. 

Also, in Classic Hollywood (and even in the current iteration of the studio system) directors didn’t necessarily have a lot of choice about content or collaborators but of course the entire idea of the auteur was developed around them.  The main difference here is that instead of directing a traditional story with the creative elements given to me (script, actors, crew), I’m basically directing the story in the edit with the creative elements given to me (footage).

I do like the idea of comparing myself to a conductor although I think a more accurate metaphoric description might be that what I do is like being a contestant on MasterChef during one of the Mystery Box Challenges. Ultimately I have to use the ingredients given to me (footage) but at the end of the day I’m still the author, the recipe prepared is mine. 

GK: Why did you want to reenact this particular scene from The Cabin In The Cotton?

GT: The simple and practical answer, which always factors into my no-budget filmmaking, is that I needed something that looked and felt like a movie scene and I needed that scene to be a simple one with minimal characters that could be shot in an apartment in one afternoon.  After those practical considerations came the fact that in the months leading up to that shoot, Film Forum was having one of their pre-code series and I was going nightly and rabidly emailing with friends about the films we were seeing, which were proving very inspirational and also timely, with August 8th’s Black Monday. Of all the movies at Film Forum, The Cabin In The Cotton really hit home in terms of its strange and complex ideas about economics and solidarity politics. I was also drawn to the baffling combination of a fresh-faced Bette Davis and a soundly confused and tired Richard Barthelmess.  So, as per usual, the choice was a product of circumstance and practical concerns, as well as thematic appropriateness and my own bizarre interests and fixations.

I will say that I am getting a lot of joy from the fact that everyone who talks to me about the movie is asking about why I chose this scene. That is, I really really like the idea of people being curious and placing all this importance on a pretty random, mostly forgotten, and by all accounts insignificant movie from 1932. That doesn’t happen very often anymore. It’s actually going to be on TCM on January 21st at 8:45, so interested parties should set their DVRs.

GK: “I just think it needs to look really real,” an offscreen voice is heard saying at the beginning of the film. The multiple frames contained within the movie—the credits list seven discrete recording devices—in themselves suggest different standards of realism, but even so, other considerations come into play. The personalities of the players kind of mutate as the movie moves along; a viewer might find cinematographer Eric Phillips-Horst a little uptight and wonky at the outset, and his sheer joy at the end is kind of unexpected and infectious. Was illuminating the conundrum about cinema—that it both shows and withholds, and can be very cagey about giving what one might call "the whole picture"—part of your scheme?

GT: I’ll start with the specifics here and then get a little more general.  With Eric, who actually is the person who speaks the line you reference, I think this is partially due to process. For the first two acts of the movie, more than anyone else, he’s working and has a very specific task that requires a very specific focus and energy, especially when there’s a time crunch because your talent has to finish at specific times to get to their day jobs.  The third act is the first point in the movie where he is actually able to relax and just be himself, and in the case of Eric, himself is very much something I would associate with joy.  In any case, I really like that his “character” worked that way for you—in terms of character development but mostly in terms of a document of labor.

Something I often thought about while editing was how the movie would change or work for people that knew the people in movie personally and those that didn’t.  Ultimately, I think it’s (appropriately) a lot like pre-code cinema, which featured a round-robin of rotating character actors. That is, if you are familiar with (know in a sense) Ruth Donnelly, Guy Kibbee, Allen Jenkins, Emma Dunn, Ned Sparks etc.,you’re given a key to go deeper with those films. The rhythms of those movies change and the jokes resonate in a different way and in some cases the jokes only exist because of knowledge of the actor and their previous roles. That being said, obviously Blessed Event isn’t any less of a movie if you don’t recognize the actors, it’s just a slightly different one.  Fassbinder’s films function similarly.

In terms of withholding and showing, what’s been very interesting and surprising to me thus far has been people’s different interpretations, not of what things mean so much as what is actually happening—who is saying what, who has the camera, where the sound is coming from, what’s on purpose and what isn’t, who is acting and who isn’t.

GK: There’s also a subtextual interrogation of the mechanics of desire going on in this movie. At some point each of the female actors who’s portraying the Bette Davis role comments upon, or makes a physical adjustment to, her frontal presentation, so to speak. Giving direction to one of your male actors, you are heard saying, “But…you’re a man…”  There’s a brief montage, three shots I think, of unlaced female garments. Whence does/did this arrive from?

GT: I’d almost rather hear you talk more about this than answer the question myself because I’m always thinking about gender and its relationship to cinema on and off screen but I’ve never thought of the movie that way or seen those images in that context when I’ve watched it.

That being said, I think there are a few practical answers to this question.  In terms of the frontal adjustment, I think those shots came to be because 1), people were not thinking about being filmed 2), it was a no-budget set and everyone is wearing many hats, with the actors pretty much taking care of their own wardrobe 3), the microphones were being difficult.  My decision to use those shots likely also stems from many places—the rhythms of movie at those moments, the lighting, the person in the frame, what was being said etc..

I do think the women totally stole the show though, which is due to both the scene itself and the specific people I gathered to perform the scene.

GK: I seem to recall reading somewhere that you were continuing to move away from conventional narrative in your work. Which, I’m sure you’re aware, is kind of interesting given that so much of your critical work is devoted, in several respects, to great narrative filmmaking of classical Hollywood. I’m not suggesting there’s some kind of discrepancy in that, but there are folks who’d say it’s a shame that someone of your obvious talent and vision is working at a remove from the mainstream when the mainstream could use more vital young female filmmakers. Does this sort of concern ever cross your mind?

GT: Well, before my predictably practical answer, thank you! The main thing here is that I’m a working class woman, that is, I have to support myself.  Short of people coming forward to offer their producing services and someone handing me enough cash to make a more traditional movie and also support myself in this obscenely expensive city with shelter, food, and health insurance while I made that traditional movie in its many stages (research, writing, casting, pre-production, shooting, editing, promoting) that isn’t looking like something that is going to happen anytime soon.  My last two films are very much the product of my having a day job, a day job I take very seriously and care about.

Do I think it’s a shame that making movies isn’t my job? I don’t know. It seems an unproductive question for me. I do think having a job keeps me grounded in and connected to what it means to be a person living in this horrific capitalist system, which provides a tension in my work that I think is missing in a lot of current filmmaking, especially art house and “independent” fare. It also forces me to constantly adapt, to think outside the box and challenge myself and I like that. In theory I guess I’d love to not have a traditional job and to make movies and travel around the world with them but also who knows, I’m a Taurus and I like stability. Plus, I mean, I’m always bloated and tired when I travel and it would suck to be bloated all the time. And I’d really miss my friends.

In terms of Hollywood and women directors, I of course agree that I’d like to see more women in the mainstream. I am currently obsessed with Beyond The Lights and [writer/director] Gina Prince-Bythewood kind of said it all when she told NPR that she’s offered tons of work but that she isn’t able to make movies that she writes, the stories she actually wants to tell. 

So, in a way I guess my answer to your question is that you’re asking the wrong person because ultimately it isn’t up to me.

Watching the detectives, and other housekeeping notes

I've neglected to mention in this spot that I'm hosting another film series at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, this one a study of the cinematic private eye, entitled "Detectives: Good, Bad and Ugly," and tonight I'll be introducing Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep at 6:30. Next Wednesday I'll bring in another Marlowe, an underrated one by my lights, Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet. As the series continues we'll take in both Hank Quinlan and Inspector Clouseau. Come by; the library has a recently updated DVD projection system, so it'll look good, and there'll be hopefully lively words before and after. 

Over at RogerEbert.com, I've got examinations of the works of two very different filmmakers, on account of some new DVD box sets of their career highlights: first, vintage-footage orchestrator Bill Morrison, and then, the delirious animation and perversion maestro Walerian Borowczyk. Check em out, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say. 

A few early notes on the film version of "Inherent Vice"

Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice opens with an epigraph: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" which the author designates as "Grafitto, Paris, May 1968." The sentiment is frequently credited to the philosophers and activists now called "the Situationists," and beyond the nod to a certain mode of radical thought, the quote's resonance as the novel begins is, depending on how much context you freight the quote with, both melancholy—the events of the book take place in 1970, well after the May strikes were squelched, and soon after Manson and Altamont and all that perceptually put a stake through the heart of the counterculture—and kind of wry, as the semi-lost souls who populate the book are operating in and around a California beach town inspired, it is said, by Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon reportedly lived in the late '60s and early '70s while writing Gravity's Rainbow.

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the book places the epigraph at the very very end of the movie, after the final credits unroll. It's the movie's "stinger," so to speak. I can't speak to why Anderson chose to place it at the very end, whether that means he's paying a perfunctory respect to the philosophical current it represents (I don't believe that anyway) or whether he thinks that waving the Situationist flag in any form these days is perceptually the contemporary equivalent of going and carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. But it's there. And it's not unimportant. 

More prominently placed in this beautiful film (and it is beautiful, from the very beginning, when a tight shot of a serene Joanna Newsom is interrupted by what looks like a blossoming deep blue lens flare, which turns out to be a dissolve into the nocturnal weed haze inhabited by the lead character "Doc" Sportello, a Firesign Theater idea of a private dick if there ever was one) is an observation about addiction and recovery and who's running that whole show in these United States. On investigating an entity called "the Golden Fang"—an entity whose identity shifts, in absurd and absurdist degrees, through Pynchon's narrative—the paranoid (or, rather, "paranoid") Sportello hits on an idea: "It was occuring to Doc now, as he recalled what Jason Velveeta had said about vertical integration, that if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and sell them a program to help them kick? Get them coming and going, twice as much revnue and no worries about new customers—as long as American life was something to be escaped from , the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers." The second half of that passage is repeated verbatim in Newsom's voiceover, and it's crucial. 

The movie walks a very particular high wire, soaking in a series of madcap-surreal hijinks in an ambling, agreeable fashion to such an extent that even viewers resistant to demanding "what's the point" might think "what's the point."  Which isn't to say the humor isn't delightful. Anderson has mentioned Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (EARLY Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, to be sure) as a reference point, and it's there, as in the near-obscene sight of Josh Brolin relishing a chocolate-covered banana in soft focus, or the dialogue misunderstanding beginning with "Go to bed." Hints of Jerry Lewis, too, as in a wonderful shot of a line of people veering to their right while Sportello, holding up the rear, continues straight ahead. But this is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie: the fun stuff engages but holds you in suspension, waiting for the kick in the gut. Which does happen, There is, about an hour and forty-five minutes into the film, a turnabout, a scene which again reproduces the dialogue and to a certain extent the action of a scene in the novel, but shifts the emphases in a way that's pure Anderson, bringing a shocking amount of raw emotion and wrong to an exchange that the book almost throws away. The scene delivers what the film has been withholding, and this places everything that's come before in a sort of relief, and colors everything that comes after. It is, to my mind, pretty incredible. And despite the scene being "only" two people in a room, it speaks to everything the movie has on its mind. It's funny; we can talk ourselves silly about how Gone Girl may or may not have a "woman problem," but when it comes to discussing the notion of how dominant ideology in a capitalist system also determines power relations between the sexes, it's "check, please" time. I'll leave it at that for now. 

In hewing close to Pynchon, Anderson finds a new freedom, or a further elasticity to the freedom he started exercisng most strenuously in Magnolia. I've seen a scene in which Sportello is surrounded by a group of nose-picking FBI agents described as "cringeworthy;" and it is, if what you demand from motion pictures is a straight line, an unwavering tone, a particular fidelity to, I don't know, EXACTLY what it is that Altman or Ashby did and you no want his One True Inheritor to keep doing, or something. Pynchon's freedom is manifested in, say, the above-quoted sentences, which contain mordant observations on this American life juxtaposed against a character named "Jason Velveeta." The whole of Gravity's Rainbow, from banana breakfast to the head of a V2 missile touching the roof of a London cinema, is a musical, for heaven's sake. 

I wasn't going to write about this movie until more people were able to see it, but I wanted to get these ideas out there, as people are talking about it and are going to talk about it. I'll have more at a future date. I should extend my appreciation to the New York Film Festival for the opportunity to see the movie at such an early date (it comes to theaters on December 12). I think it's great. 

Waiting For "Birdman"

Even skeptics can anticipate. I won't be seeing Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman (a still is above, featuring costars Michael Keaton and Edward Norton) until about a month from now, and of course I'm highly curious, albeit not particularly keen on participating in any "wars" about the thing. As it happens, when the director's last film, Biutiful, was in theaters, I contributed a piece to Film Comment entitled: "This Can't End Well: How We Live Now, or The New Humanism according to Alejandro González Iñárritu." The piece, which appeared in the November/December 2010 issue, cannot be accessed online, or else I'd just link to it. So I've distilled the gist of my argument from the essay's final paragraphs, for your consideration: 

[…]Iñárritu’s films […] always withhold anything even vaguely resembling a happy ending […] are nevertheless in the uplift business. While trucking in […] liberal pieties, his that’s-just-the-way-it-is perspective resists explicit ideology, so as to evade the idea that there might be anything resembling a genuine political response to any of the human misery his films depict. […] This really does let everybody off the hook, but the perspective doesn’t so much come out and congratulate the audience as it does Iñárritu himself: for his seemingly self-proclaimed insistence on looking at all of the pain of human existence with an unflinching gaze. And of course it is that which spurs on a form of audience self-congratulation: ‘He gets it, and I get it the way that he gets it.’ Iñárritu invites you to wallow in his tragic sense. And this, of course, is what makes his films sort of critic-proof. But it’s also what makes so many critics feel he’s a strong-arm artist, a filmmaker who instead of allowing the audience to respond emotionally, bludgeons or even blackmails them into being moved.

Near the end of [Biutiful], [Javier] Bardem’s character, grinding closer and closer to his death, takes his young daughter in a tight embrace and, almost melting into her, begs, “Remember me. Don’t forget me, Ana.” The shot is simply composed, the sentiment the character expresses is, you’ll excuse the term, universal, and the actors note-perfect. It’s as naked and ‘real’ and moving a thing as Iñárritu has ever put on film, an unabashed and unadorned depiction of human frailty, vulnerability, and vanity. And then he has to go and spoil it all by cutting from that to the in-your-face resolution of a storyline involving a couple of the film’s Asian ‘entrepreneurs,’ which rings ten times more falsely than it ordinarily would have, had the prior scene not rung so true. It’s as if Iñárritu can’t help himself. Again: can he? Looks as if we won’t find out until his next film. 

"Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor" publication date nears...

In a week and a day, my book for Cahiers du Cinema/Phaidon, Robert De Niro: Anatomy Of An Actor, sees publication. It is only right and fitting, I am told, to use this blog, which is my own, as a vehicle for its promotion. And so. 

Two events celebrating the book are happening next week. The first is its official launch party, on Monday, July 28, at my favorite local bookstore Book Court, on 163 Court Street in Brooklyn. I thought it would make the event more festive if I had along my buddy Dan Callahan, who recently penned a first-rate critical biography of Vanessa Redgrave, a book rightly praised by no less a personage as David Thomson. Dan and I will read from our respective works and kick around a little talk about the iconography of screen acting and stuff. It should be fun. The link to the event is here. 

Then, on Thursday the 31st of July, I'll be doing an event at the Williamsburg venue Videology. This one is me solo, with a moderator perhaps, and since it's at Videology, I'll be talking about the book and its subject with the accompaniment of pertinent clips from some of the films I discuss in the book. That, too, should be fun. The link is here. 

My publisher and I are eager to book more events, so if you're interested, give me a holler via e-mail ([email protected] is my preferred address nowadays). 

The first review of the book is up, over at Slant/The House Next Door, and I have to say I'm pleased with it. If eery notice I get is this thoughtful, I'll be delighted. I'll be posting links to other reviews as they appear. But as I am a firm believer in Fussell's Law (which I've elaborated on before, more than once), I won't comment on the negative ones, merely note their existence. It's a slippery slope in the world of the INTERNET, right people?

Such is the book news of the moment. More to come, and thanks for indulging me. You can just make the whole thing a lot easier by buying a copy yourself, either online or at your local and preferably independent book venue. 

BAM Cinemafest: "Boyhood," "Ellie Lumme," "The Mend, "Something, Anything"

I've been pretty busy pursuing other projects and thus didn't have the temporal opportunities to see all that many of the movies screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Cinemafest, but those pictures I have seen, four in all so far, have been very good to extraordinary. Three of them have already screened at the fest, the fourth will be there on Thursday. 

Richard Linklater's Boyhood, the opening night picture, is one I imagine you've heard a lot about, and I agree with all the enthusiastic and maybe even gushing things said about it. It really IS all that; one of the things that's remarkable about it is the way Linklater stuck to the cinematic grammar he had decided on—a simple but not unsophisticated one—throughout the twelve-year shooting process, and how this grammar yields a relaxed, seamless viewing experience that gathers emotional power in ways the viewer won't necessarily notice until very near the end. The movie also has one of the absolute greatest final shots in cinema. When I first saw it (and I plan on seeing it again, and maybe again, and with pleasure), I mentioned on social media that it was "Edward Yang-level great." Let me expand on that: the movie has the compassions and directness of Yi-Yi and the ambition and concentration of A Brighter Summer Day. (One thing it does not have is Yang's anger, which is undetectable in Yi-Yi, the movie more than once cited by "I did SO like a three-hour movie" types who might be in for a rude shock if they ever happen to see Summer Day.) I think every resident of the United States ought to see this movie; I don't know if IFC can pull that off, but they release the picture on July 11. 

The erudite and perspicacious young film critic Ignatiy Vishnavetsky went an unusual route for his deput picture, Ellie Lumme, contriving a haunting, satisfyingly feature-like experience within a barely (not even, even!) 45-minute running time. Set and shot in Vishnavetsky’s home base of Chicago, Ellie Lumme begins, it seems, as another examination of The Mating Rituals Of Today’s Irritating Young People. But via increments, in specific camera movements, lighting shifts, and cuts, it mutates into something odder and disquieting. Stephen Cone, a filmmaker who also was a coproducer on this, is excellent as Ned, the initially indifferent fellow who becomes a persistently bothersome presence in the life of the title character, played a few notes higher and finer above the Generic-Indie-Female register by Allison Torem (above). The movie's cinephilic currents are kind of subterranean, which is all to the good; in particular, Cone's character reminded me of a '40 or '50s noir demon, a persistent negative presence in the mode of, say, Robert Ryan in Fritz Lang's persistently great 1952 Clash By Night; but that's not quite it. 

I met Mr. V., with whom I’ve had a number of invigorating (and sometimes intemperate—my fault as usual, and sorry) exchanges online over the years, at a social gathering on Saturday after the movie’s BAM screening, and he’s an impressive fellow, and taller than I had imagined as well. At the party I remarked to another friend that I thought it was kind of a shame that Ignatiy had made the movie a longer-than-average short; it felt to me that he could have taken this story to a more conventional feature length without stretching the material too thin. “Sure,” my friend said, “but isn’t it admirable that he went and made the movie he wanted to make?” So okay, there’s that.

 

The Mend, which screened Sunday evening, is not just a staggering debut feature, it’s a staggering movie full stop. The scenario setup might seem on the conventional side: One seeming hellion of a brother (Mat, played by Josh Lucas [seen above] with what one might call phlegmatic commitment, among other things) reconnects with the other attempting-to-be-a-normal-person-in-Upper-Manhattan brother (Alan, an excellently often-recessive Stephen Plunkett). But that’s the only thing conventional about it. Writer/director John Magary opens with an arresting iris-out opening image that recalls Arnaud Desplechin, and the movie, like many of Desplechin's, has a deliriously packed feel. Content arrives in the form of dialogue, inflection, eye movement, camera movement, cutting, lighting, music, sometimes all at once, but nothing’s ever on-the-nose; seldom does a shot or a sequence resolve on a consonant note. But Magary’s in full control of his dissonance. The movie is never not profanely hilarious, but it’s also almost nerve-wrackingly tense throughout. The movie’s opening is a good example of how Magary confounds standard film grammar, cutting from a down-and-dirty seduction scene to a screeching shit fit in which the seducee banishes the seducer, without depicting the precipitating act. In the hands of a less assured filmmaker this kind of ellipsis can seem affected, but Magary makes you like it, as he does the long, alternately mortifying, titillating, and immersive party scene that follows. The movie’s side-steps into genuine surrealism, largely centered around a dodgy power situation in Alan’s apartment, are also consistently exhilarating. I should make a disclosure here that Magary is a cordial acquaintance who’s been a longtime commenter on this blog, so I came to The Mend with some good feelings and high hopes. The movie itself exceeded them, I have to say. Magary is definitely a Director To Watch and I hope The Mend finds distribution soon so it can find an audience. It deserves a big, smart one.

Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything, which screens this Thursday, June 26 at 7 p.m., is a substantially quieter film than any of the above. It’s a beautifully concentrated story of a young woman in Knoxville, Tennessee (Peggy, played by Ashley Shelton, seen above) who’s living her life in the way everyone, including herself, expects of her. Works as a real estate broker, marries a hotshot young professional from the social circle she’s likely been in since high school, etcetera. An inopportune turn of events that everyone around her, including her husband, treats as a life-glitch sends Peggy into a tailspin, and a postcard from a former high-school acquaintance who’s now a monk inspires her to undertake a spiritual quest. She doesn’t quite get into Diary of a Country Priest or Meetings With Extraordinary Men territory, but her embrace of a particular asceticism confuses the people around her, including the estranged husband. Harrill’s writing and directing is sensitive in the best way possible, highlighting small details of behavior sharply but unfussily. And Shelton’s performance has a steady intensity that gives off a soft but beautiful light throughout. 

Gravy/Oscar post-mortem

So. Here's where the gravy whose making I chronicled on Friday ended up, mostly. Turned out pretty well all told. (I did not take the picture; an appreciative guest did.)

What happened was, a couple of friends of My Lovely Wife and mine are talking about a move to the West Coast and Claire thought it would be nice to have them and another couple over for dinner before they flew the coop. So Claire offered a few potential dates and the consensus acceptances were for March 2. Once that was established we realized that March 2 was the night of the Oscars. Ooops! Our friends like movies but they're not big awards mavens so we weren't gonna suddenly morph the event into an Oscar party. 

Anyway, missing the Oscars was not without precedent: last year we didn't see the Oscars either, because we were vacationing in Iceland. The ceremonies were taking place the night before we were to fly home, I think. Because I write, professionally even, about movies and, to a lesser extent, the industry that produces them, watching the Oscars isn't something I frown upon, and in past years I've had fun (I think) watching and live-tweeting and all that. But, you know, I'm not DRIVEN to watch the Oscars. On our last night in Rekjavik I wondered idly if there wasn't some all-night bar or something where Icelanders were watching the Oscars—maybe that Big Lebowski-themed bar on the main drag?—with the five-hour time difference and all...and after a desultory exploration of my options, I just decided to sleep. 

Last night's dinner was awfully pleasant. I was particularly happy with the way I'd smoothed out the gravy, and the lasagna itself was as close to perfect as I've gotten it—moist but not wet, held together really well, and was super-tasty. I reiterated to my guests how my lasagna-baking is related to the bell-casting episode that ends Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, and that went over well. Eventually the conversation got around to music, and one of our guests asked another what he made of Bob Dylan's Chrysler commercial. After the does-he-really-need-the-money question was batted around a bit, I attempted to wax philosophical. I shrugged and said, "Dylan's in show business. Always has been. Show business people do commercials." To say that show business and art-making aren't mutually exclusive activities/endeavors is a huge understatement, and although it's an occupational hazard that one's show-business activities could have a deleterious effect on one's art, I'm not one to think that Dylan's Chrysler commercial destroys or even substantially recontextualizes "My Back Pages" or "Masters of War."

So anyway, we missed the first couple of hours of the ceremony and once we tuned in I thought, I'm not gonna join the Twitter commentators, because why start in the middle. I know that I've gone through patches during which I've come off like The Angriest Man and/or The Biggest Asshole on Twitter, but I think I've straightened out my act over the past year and a half or so, which still might be too soon for me to say this, but still: Man, people sure are cranky about this stuff. I mean, I understand why, I suppose, but I can't quite grasp how some people can build up a head of righteous indignation and/or feigned boredom with genuinely pissed-off undertone year after year over an event that is pure show business, and represents the most bullshit-suffused aspects of show business. Oh no, not "grotesque, runaway narcissism," right, because there's nothing at all "look at me" about live-tweeting the Oscars in and of itself. Jesus. Try coming up with some material, maybe. Or, like the guy in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross says, "You don't like it? LEAVE." 

See what I did there? No, I don't either, actually. But, as I've learned, the thing is, one needn't watch, and if one watches, one needn't say anything. As for myself, I won fifty bucks on a bet I was pretty stupid to make in the first place, so I can count myself as lucky. And I thought it was pretty goddamn delightful when 12 Years A Slave won Best Picture, because if there was any real justice that action alone would put the "Oscar blogging" cottage industry out of business. (If you weren't following, the conventional wisdom was that Slave was award-doomed because old, out-of-touch, Going My Way-preferring Academy members were too a-scared to even watch it, let alone vote it an award or three. Ooops. Also: Eat It, Toby Young!) And there are two sides to every story, as an exchange between two critics I greatly admire and also personally like a great deal, Richard Brody and Dave Kehr, demonstrated this morning. Linking to his own Oscar post-mortem (which is well worth reading despite its unfortunate reiteration of a Wolf of Wall Street four-hour-director's-cut myth) , Richard tweeted, "I hate to be a recapper of bad news, but the Oscars had a chillingly tamped-down and neutralized uniformity." To which Dave replied "Oscars may be bland but they do support an important archive and library." So there's that. Which isn't nothing. 

Scorsese/DiCaprio/Ziegfeld

On Thursday and Friday of this week, February 13 and 14, the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan hosts a unique event: a mini-retrospective of the work of director Martin Scorsese and actor (and sometime co-producer) Leonardo DiCaprio. Thursday's screenings will be The Aviator, The Departed, and the new The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf screening will be preceded by a conversation, moderated by Kent Jones, with DiCaprio, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Terence Winter. On Friday the films are Shutter Island, Gangs of New York, and again, Wolf. Information and ticket purchase options can be found here. 

I recently completed a book on Robert De Niro that treats his career via ten discrete essays on ten movies; four of the essays are on De Niro/Scorsese collaborations. Certainly were Cahiers du Cinema, my publishers, to commission a similar book on DiCaprio, well, I can't think of one of the five above that I'd leave off of a list of ten. Alfred Hitchcock hit several career highs with Cary Grant and James Stewart, and vice versa, but what's unique about the Scorsese collaborations has something to do with the sequence. De Niro did not begin his work with Scorsese in the position of the director's surrogate: In Mean Streets that role went to Harvey Keitel, as Charlie. Johnny Boy, the De Niro character, was of course Charlie's secret sharer in a sense. With Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull the sense of De Niro speaking through and as Scorsese, or particular aspects of Scorsese, could be palpable; with King of Comedy, Scorsese's most intellectual film up to that point, a mode of detachment/examination sets in. It's only in the got-what-he-wanted-but-lost-what-he-had register of Casino that Scorsese and De Niro found that particular kind of tandem. 

With DiCaprio the synergy can be equally strong but it's used for different ends, and it functions differently. DiCaprio is not Scorsese's surrogate but his instrument. In a sense the character of Amsterdam (as in "new") in Gangs of New York is almost a "My Back Pages" rumination for Scorsese, a young perspective on the old problems he's ever grappled with as an artist. One of the great misunderstandings of Shutter Island is the insistence on reading it as a (failed or successful) puzzle movie, when it's really an emotional exploration as acute and horrific and effective as Raging Bull or the short The Big Shave. If you're lucky enough to be able to see all five of the movies over the two days, what I think will be revealed about Wolf of Wall Street is its semi-perverse expansiveness; the tragic anti-heroes DiCaprio plays in The Aviator and Shutter Island replaced here by an unreliable narrator of  bodacious braggadocio and decidedly shallow emotional affect. It's a virtuoso performance from DiCaprio that's also arguably a minefield of alienation effects.