Some Came Running

Leonard Cohen in Spain and/or Germany

In the first hour or so of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1970 Beware of a Holy Whore (original German title: see poster) the characters, youngish (mostly) film crew members, loll about in the lobby of a Spanish resort hotel, drinking heavily and playing the jukebox, and most of what they play is Leonard Cohen. As I write in a new post at the Criterion Collection's Current blog,  these "drunken, despairing, love-starved children of the counterculture aren’t just consumers of Cohen’s music; they could be characters in his songs." The timelessness of Whore (at least as I intuit it) can slightly obscure the fact that the Cohen tunes, all from his first album, late 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen, were contemporary at the time. (It would be a year after Fassbinder's film that Robert Altman would apply them, anachronistically, to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.) What Cohen and his cult following have become, and come to mean, in the intervening years, puts a different light on the songs. But one doesn't need to have been around at the time Fassbinder's film was made to see his characters in a particular relation to Cohen's music. While Canadian, Cohen was perceived as an American artist, one of Dylanesque pedigree; his embrace by this group of Europeans is not just a plausible signifier of a pop-culture mode of exchange at that time, but a signal of the alienation that the characters both genuinely feel but also like to wear as a kind of armor. Not an ironic one, either; these aren't hipsters, if you will. 

The use of music in Fassbinder is always staggeringly spot-on and sometimes practically prescient. It satisfies diegetic plausibility and increases perspective. It's different from the towers of song that Wes Anderson builds for his characters in pictures such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It's more immediate, as befits Whore's idea of taking what had been the stuff of Fassbinder's life over the past nine films and throwing it on screen. Looking at Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas recently, and doing a bit of research on it, I thought a little bit about the likelihood of urban gangsters sharing Martin Scorsese's taste in '60s and '70s rock, and agreed with what Scorsese had pointed out in, I think, more than one interview, that stuff like Donovan's "Atlantis" and Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" was coming out of jukeboxes and radios in the period depicted in the film. Still, there's something about the freedom of Fassbinder's use of music, freedom taken advantage of before the pop-song soundtrack became another commodity in a movie's marketing plan, that's exhilarating. In the Criterion blog post, I examine one particular song and its use in an extraordinary Fassbinder work in some detail. Check it out here. 

Sidney Lumet on film form, film critics, and a seeming paradox

No blues: Charlotte Rampling in Lumet's The Verdict, 1982

Q: You've talked about the irony of how some critics referred to Prince of the City as "realistic" whereas you deliberately made it in a more expressive style—in terms of the lenses you used, forced perspectives, making certain objects prominent in the frame. It's almost as if you did your job too well, because the viewer does get caught up in the emotional reality of the story.

A: Prince of the City is a highly stylized movie. And one of the reasons I'm glad it's not discussed from a stylistic point of view is, to me, it's bad style if people spot it. However, I'm not letting critics off the hook. You're a critic because you should be able to spot it. You know, you're not a critic just for your opinion. My elevator man has got an opinion. Theoretically, you know movies enough technically so that you can recognize what lenses are being used, so that you can recognize a color palette. The color palette in The Verdict is wonderful and so carefully worked out. You know the color blue appears only once in that movie? I couldn't get the sky out of the shot. And I looked for a way to change the lens, but I needed that lens for another reason. But that kind of control on a movie is what my work is about. 

And then I said, "Wow, I didn't notice that about The Verdict at all," and then Lumet punched me in the mouth and said "Go! And never darken my towels again!" and then...

But seriously, that's from my 2007 interview with Lumet, in the Fall edition of the DGA Quarterly for that year. The whole thing is available on line here. I put this up as my contribution to the Great "What Should A Film Critic Know" Debate Of 2014, of which this Criticwire survey response and this impassioned manifesto by Matt Zoller Seitz are major parts. 

For some reason I am also reminded of Martin Scorsese's recollection of Sergio Leone's reaction to Scorsese's The King of Comedy: "When it was shown at the first night of the Cannes Festival, I went backstage with Sergio Leone and he looked at me and said, 'Martin, that's your most mature film.' I don't know if it was his way of saying he didn't like it. I guess that comes to mind because over the years my friends and I have had a running joke about slow movies, where the camera doesn't move, as being 'mature.'" 

Your cat and music

The Pinkster, in his rarely seen Mark Jacobs ad.

In her September 20 A/V Club piece "Should Some Movies Be Taken More Seriously Than Others," Stephanie Zacharek, doing the sort of end run that's become a reliable feature of the "Your Art Film Sucks And So Do You" thumbsucker, characterizes the music score of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master as "interesting," and then muses that that term, which she put in quotes to begin with, "might just be a euphemism for something you wouldn't want to play at home with your cats around." In a parenthetical, she then adds, "And I say that as someone who has subjected her own cats to Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and late Coltrane, God help their small ears."

I should add here that Stephanie is a friend, but also that I feel for her as Edmund Wilson did for Vladimir Nabokov, that is, a "warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation." 

Anyway, you get what she's doing there—she's trying to tell you, and in an ingratiating way, that just because she's hostile to this particular piece of possibly "difficult" art, she's hardly hostile to ALL such art. Dan Kois did the same thing in his notorious "cultural vegetables" piece when he admitted that he eventually "got" Derek Jarman's Blue, which still tops the shameless self-aggrandizement chart in that it bids to make himself look not just open-minded but gay-friendly and compassionate. (Jarman himself has yet to tell Kois "Good on yer, mate!" or any such thing, alas.) But I'm not writing this to decry the rhetorical device as such. I'm writing this because cats really don't care what kind of music you play in their presence. For the most part.

We like to romanticize and anthropomorphize our delightful feline friends, but let's face it: the domesticated feline consciousness, such as it is, is simply not wired to respond subjectively to, let alone process, music. Cats are attentive, sure, and have very sharp senses. But their senses are arranged in a way that's entirely different from our own, and their pleasure centers have very little to do with those of humans. It stands to reason that the inverse follows—they're annoyed by different things. Loud noises startle cats, to be sure, just as they startle humans. A blaring saxophone, played by Coleman, Ayler, or Coltrane, simply doesn't register to a cat the way it does to us. Cats don't try to make sense of it because A) their intellectual apparatus is not so sophisticated as they're able to make sense of it and B) there's no practical need for them to make sense of it. They categorize sounds in an almost binary way: those that are specifically friendly and inviting (your voice, the snap of a cat food can opening) and those that either threaten them or put them in stalking mode (as in the chirp of birds on a branch outside a window). If you put on No New York, your cat won't saunter in front of the speaker, raise a cat eyebrow, and ask "What's HE on about" as James Chance and the Contortions subject "I Can't Stand Myself" to a seizure. 

My cat, the above-pictured Pinky, a.k.a. The Pinkster, a.k.a. Beast, a.k.a. Purr Beast, a.k.a. about two dozen other really stupid nicknames, never showed any visible reaction to any of the music I played in my apartment during the period of our cohabitation, which was from 1990 to 2006. He was five years old when my cohabitating girlfriend of the time, Beth "The Shermanator" Sherman adopted his adorable ass, and we had no idea what environment he came from or what kind of music was played in it. As you can imagine, what with my being a very nearly professional Rock Snob of a certain age and having come of a certain age in a certain era, the amount of ostensibly Unlistenable Noise in my music library is pretty formidable, and I can find it for you in pretty much nearly every genre in which the quality of unlistenable noisiness is possible. From AMM to Xenakis with DNA, Metal Machine Music, Swans and The Velvet Underground in between, the Pinkster heard it all, and frankly, he didn't give a shit. 

All except for one recording. The 1991 Gramavision CD The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, a particular iteration (the 1984 "Melodic Version") of a piece by the American composer LaMonte Young. Young is a composer with a particular interest in long durations, microtonal intervals, and drone music, and unlike his The Well-Tuned Piano, High Tension Line Transformer is not, on the face of it, a particularly complex or knotty piece; it consists here of an ensemble of trumpet players who chose between four specific pitches and play them at varying lengths. The first time I played it at home on my stereo, which was/is pretty good and can get pretty loud, it made Pinky very nervous. I don't know if it was the specific pitches, or the phases they might seem to go in and out of, the sounds in relation to the silences, but the piece made him immediately extremely nervous. In  very specific way: he began pacing in front of the speakers, and pausing, and then he would look at me, and then he would pace some more, then look at me. It was the damnedest thing. After about four minutes I just had to turn it off. He never reacted to any other music, including the scant amount of Young music on disc, in the same way again. And, you know, in the interim, Keiji Heino made A LOT of records and I owned and played a lot of them. 

Some time soon after the unfortunate experience with The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer I had the occasion to interview LaMonte Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, and I told him this story in the spirit of sharing a droll anecdote. Young is a man of rather gentle demeanor, but that did not prepare me for his reaction: he was genuinely upset, almost hurt. Whatever his overt intentions concerning his music, causing unrest in the nervous system of another living creature did not figure. The idea that it did my cat some brief harm was not even vaguely amusing to him. 

Artists are unusual people. And their thought processes are unusual, and the extent to which their thought processes are unusual is often not unrelated to the medium in which they work. Later in Zacherek's article about...whatever it's about, she says "[t]he movie I’m yearning to see again was not made by anyone who has been deemed a great artist, but by a sometime-director who mostly writes screenplays." This movie is Premium Rush, which I haven't seen. I couldn't review it because not one but two friends worked on it, but I hear it's very good and I look forward to catching it. I rather doubt, however, that sometime-director David Koepp would really appreciate having his movie adopted as a club with which to attempt to beat The Master and its fans over the head. The implication Zacharek is barely bothering to try to cover up is that there are some directors who like you and who want you to have fun, and some directors who hate you and want to punish you and make you do homework. Because no actual pleasure can be had from a "difficult" film. Even if you do own some Albert Ayler records.

Before I get too exasperated, I'll give the last word to Orson Welles, who, in a mid-'60s interview for a British television show called Tempo, is asked by the interviewer: "To what extent, though, do you normally consider the audience you're going for?"

Welles pauses for a good five seconds, then answers:

"Not at all. Impossible to. Sounds arrogant. It isn’t meant to be and I don’t think it is. It’s because the public is so unimaginably large. Whenever I do a play I think not only of the public but of the specific public of that year and that time. And what it will be like. That’s part of what’s good about the theater. And part of what’s bad. What limits it even as it makes it wonderfully immediate. But a film you simply cannot think of the public because it’s made up of people in Manila, in the mountain vastnesses of the atlas in the Andes, in Indianapolis, in Manchester, in…tin huts in the jungle. You simply cannot think of that audience or think what they like because…they simply aren’t an audience. It’s just a whole…population, you’re making it for, of the globe, some percentage of which…will drift into a hut or a movie palace and see what you did. Which is what limits films to an extent but which to a great extent frees you. But the people, the PURELY commercial people, the downright movie hacks who 'give ‘em what they want' are not thinking of the public they’re thinking of the distributors. They know what the distributors want, but they’re not anymore thinking of the public than I am. They can’t imagine that public any more than I can. They just know the distributors say, 'There’s a market this year for tough, sexy spy movies. So give ‘em what they want.' But they’re not really thinking of a public that likes them. They’re thinking of bookers who will play them and report that we did that much money. I think it’s an important distinction."

The Tempo interview is an extra on the excellent foreign-region Blu-ray disc of Welles' The Trial, a movie that wants to punish you and make you do homework. 

Here is another picture of my cat Pinky, God bless him, who I miss every day and whom I aspire to be more like all the time. As in, for instance, this: 

A nice little chat with Rita Tushingham

Tushingham in Zhivago. Screen cap from the DVD Beaver review. 

As I discussed in last week's Topics, etc. at The Auteurs' Notebook, there's a lovely new Blu-ray edition of David Lean's 1965 Doctor Zhivago coming out...today. Last week I spoke not only with Ned Price of Warner Home Video, but with actor Rita Tushingham, who plays title character Zhivago's unknowing daughter, credited simply as "The Girl," who hears the film's story from Alec Guinness' Yevgraf in a frame narrative. The role came at a peak in Tushingham's fame. She was not even 25 at the time, but had achieved near-iconic status several years earlier for her portrayal of Jo in the film version of  Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey. The Angry Young Man of British literature, theater and film of the mid-to-late '50s and early '60s had its opposite number, of a sort, in Resilient Waif, and Tushingham's Jo was really one of the most memorable of them. (See also Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room.) Tushingham went to work for the redoubtable Lean after having acted for some of the most energetic Britain-based directors of the day: Tony Richardson, Sidney J. Furie, Richard Lester. She was one of the poster girls for newly Swinging London, and here she was doing a period piece for a venerated old school master. At least that how we critics/pseudo-historians see it. As a working actor, Tushingham saw it rather differently. 

"I think it was…luck, to be able to get A Taste of Honey," Tushingham told me last week. "But also it was a breakthrough, I guess because it was something more noticeable; all of a sudden actors were playing different kinds of characters, more everyday people, but not the type of everyday people that you had in most plays or films, who were just background. And there began to be stronger roles for women. These characters, even if they seemed forsaken in some sense, were strong and they did find their ways. They didn’t fade into the background.

"As for Zhivago, yes, it was a wonderful opportunity to be part of, and it was a different kind of thing, but at the time, you don’t necessarily think of it like that. You think, 'Oh it’s nice I’m doing this film!' But obviously, the standout difference here was the budget, it was a very different budget from the films I was used to working on. So there was, among other things, more time to do things, and there wasn’t a need to rush and scramble to get it all done. They got made quite quickly in the ‘60s, although some would sit on the shelf. I know The Leather Boys [her film with Furie, released in 1964] sat for about a year, nearly two years before it was released."

Although she play's a crucial part in Zhivago, her character doesn't figure as a part of the film's larger narrative; she is, in one sense, an audience surrogate. I asked about how she approached the role and its particular perspective. "Obviously I knew the story," Tushingham said—Zhivago was of course adapted from a world-wide best-selling novel by Russian poet Boris Pasternak— "but you have to be at arm’s length from that, because the character truly doesn’t know. She had no knowledge of who she really is, and, more important, of what it is that Yevgraf is asking for. So I tried to make myself inhabit that feeling of ignorance."

The picture was a remarkably frustrating one for Lean; he had to shoot in Spain, which he didn't see as the ideal location in which to reproduce Revolution-era Moscow, and he couldn't shoot in his preferred format of 65mm. According to Tushingham, he didn't make his frustrations known to his cast. "The stress didn’t show at all. I suppose the thing is, in the end, the fact that you’re going to do it and you’ve got the script, you’ve got the actors, so you get on and do it. If you look at Bridge or Lawrence, they’re all massive, aren’t they? Huge films, huge locations. Zhivago worked...it didn’t have to be in Moscow, he was able to create the illusion…because so much of it is real. He couldn’t get the location, but today, you know, if they need to show an army, they can shoot massive scenes with hardly any people in them and then CGI the army in…but it shows, doesn’t it? And I don’t like it when I hear people say, 'Oh, we can fix it in the editing.' I don’t think that ought to be said. I know sometimes you’re running against a clock. But the craft is…you should be able to do it. People could do it years ago, so why can’t you do it now? And that was something Lean never said, and if there was anyone who actually knew how to fix things in the editing, it was he; editing was where he started. And he would have a very good idea of what he wanted, and he would shoot to get it. Whereas, working with Richard [Lester], you almost felt that he more or less edited as he went along."

As she beat me to bringing up Lester, I thought I'd pursue that, and asked if she still stayed in touch with the now-retired director. "All the time, he and his wife are my closest friends…" I mentioned that of all the directors out there who ought to retire, it's a shame that Lester is one who actually did, because we could use him back. I then brought up Getting Away With It, the Steven Soderbergh book which threads a long Lester interview with a frank diary of Soderbergh's career travails of the pre-Limey '90s, and Tushingham very nearly leapt out of her chair. "I would love to work with him," she said, going on to note that yes, Steven and Richard remain in touch with each other. "He's getting films made that are important films. I think he’s amazing. He reminds me of what we had in the ‘60s, that energy, that vitality…I think he’s fantastic." 

And, well, at that point I mentioned that I myself had worked with Steven, on The Girlfriend Experience, and then it came out that Tushingham herself was preparing to make a film using the digital RED camera, and the talk turned into an S.S. lovefest and disquisition on working with the RED, which was nice for the two of us but probably wouldn't be too great for you to read. So I never got around to asking Tushingham if she was aware of having been something of a bete noire for the legendary critic Manny Farber, whose essay "Pish-Tush" excoriates Rita, Jeanne Moreau and Giulietta Masina for, among other things, "swell[ing] their proportions with giantism with gestures and decor." I'm not sure I would have had the heart to bring it up even if I'd had the time. 

I should also note spoke prior to the passing of Lynn Redgrave, who had been a friend and a colleague (they costarred in 1964's Girl With Green Eyes and 1967's Smashing Time), or else Redgrave would have surely been the main topic of discussion.

The uses of sacrilege: On Von Trier, Tarkovsky, and "Antichrist"

On the one hand, Lars von Trier's new provocation, Antichrist, often seems hardly worth the trouble of discussing. Its opening—that is, its opening once you get past the ostentatious title cards announcing the auteur, the title of his latest opus, and the fact that this first section of the film is a, ahem, "prologue"—depicts, in luscious, satiny black-and-white, the film's unnamed central couple making violently uncontrolled love as their adorable toddler toddles out of his crib, onto a window sill, and out the window, stuffed animal in tow, falling to his death. Not only does the sequence include the requisite hardcore-sex insert shot (a staple of Scandanavian cinema since 1974's They Call Her One-Eye, I guess; here stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are doubled by Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship), but it's scored to the aria "Lascia ch'io pianga" ("Let me weep," doncha know) from Handel's Rinaldo. Underscoring the difference between know-something-ishness and blatant pretentiousness by partaking equally of both, it's a scene so silly that it practically begs you to laugh at it. And, as the sage Spencer Pratt once said, "that's the problem." 

Or, rather, that's one of the problems. By now you've no doubt heard of the putative cinematic atrocities that follow as von Trier transports his troubled couple—he's a therapist, she's a stalled academic—to their place in the woods, called Eden of course, wherein the male intends to cure the female of her grief. It's not just the sickening violence, sexual mutilation, boogity-boogity lighting effects and other shock maneuvers that rankle. It's the intellectual incoherence, the scattershot introduction of nonsensical ideas that doesn't quite camouflage the fact that all von Trier is doing is showing a lot of behavior. It's that despite all this behavior—and Dafoe and Gainsbourg don't flinch from any of it, although you might not come away from the movie believing that that's necessarily to their credit—we never really understand who these people are, their characters are so woefully underwritten, underdeveloped. It's the damn red herrings—wait a minute, their child, named Nick, had...cleft feet? What, is this movie The Omen all of a sudden?

It's all of that and more. So my question for myself is, why the hell is this movie still working me over, to the point that I believe it's the main cause of my waking up in a completely shitty mood this morning?

Such are the mysteries of cinema. 

Oh, but I see I haven't yet addressed the title of this post. 

"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. 

Before He Was Stumpy: Walter Brennan in Hawks' "Barbary Coast"

This is my contribution to the Early Hawks blogathon. Thanks to Laszlo Szabo for inspiration.

In Joseph McBride's indespensible Hawks on Hawks, its subject, Howard, reflects on the narrative function of what McBride calls "the old man character" in Hawks' westerns, the most famous of which is quite probably Walter Brennan's extremely ornery Stumpy in 1959's Rio Bravo. "I think it's a way of telling the story, telling the plot. They tell it in an interesting way. You're not conscious that you're getting the plot; you're being amused by him." No fool, Hawks—he knew what Shakespeare knew about so-called fools, and how they could amuse while also putting forward necessary (but often dreary) expository stuff. 

We think of Hawks as a great story-teller, and he was, but there's another side of him, a side exemplified by an anecdote related to me recently by the above-mentioned Mr. Szabo (which he cited by way of explaining some of Godard's inspiration for Made In USA) and also found in George Eel's biography of Robert Mitchum: "Hawks approached [Mitchum] about costarring with John Wayne in El Dorado...[Mitchum] inquired what the story was. 'Story? There's no story,' he later claimed Hawks replied. 'You and Duke play two old cowboys.'" Other versions of the anecdote have Hawks saying, "No story, just characters," but you get the idea. In any case, while Rio Bravo's Stumpy serves an exemplary narrative function while utterly delighting us, Hawks' casting and subsequent use of Walter Brennan as Old Atrocity in 1935's Barbary Coast—the first of the six collaborations between the actor and the director—show the "no story, just characters" ethos at work. 

On the new Hong Sang-soo

It's called Night and Day, it's a stitch, it's at the New York Film Festival, and I talk a little about it at The Auteurs' Notebook, here. 

Image of the day

Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay, 2002 (with Samantha Morton)

Where the hell IS Lynne Ramsay these days, anyway? I thought Callar was, well, miraculous, and I've been jonesing for a followup ever since...

Image of the day

Barbara Stanwyck in Anthony Mann's 1950 The Furies, a top-knotch psychological Western just recently released on disc by The Criterion Collection. It's very strong stuff but suffers a bit from what I call "Gilda Syndrome:" that is, after serving up a tantalizing nest of vipers for your viewing pleasure over the course of an hour and twenty minutes, the movie kind of takes it back and insists that the vipers were just a couple of crazy American kids trying to make good. Ah, convention. But up to the point when it's obliged to give us figures to root for, it's absolutely exemplary in terms of ratcheting up tension after tension.