Some Came Running

A Man Called Destruction: The Apocalyptic Male Gaze Of Andrzej Zulawski

Sophie Marceau and Tchéky Karo, L'amour braque, 1985

When a great artist dies, among the (sincere) bromides offered in tribute is "He/she will be missed." With the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, that idea doesn't automatically apply, only because the films he made were so relentlessly singular and extreme and unlike anything else that it's still difficult to actually believe they exist. So never mind missing him—as it happens, Cosmos, his first movie after a fifteen-year absence from filmmaking, just had its first screening in New York and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Kino Lorber—it'll take years of viewing and re-viewing just to assimilate him, if that's at all possible. The thirteen features and two shorts he completed between 1969 and 2015 may not be "enough," but they are an awful lot. 

When I learned of his death, I was laid up with an ailment that made movement rather challenging, and certain types of concentration perhaps more so; with some resultant unasked-for time on my hands, I decided to check out three films that surround, temporally, his most famous film worldwide, the notorious 1981 Possession. As was the case for many American cinephiles of a certain age, Possession, in a ridiculously edited U.S. home video release cobbled together for the Extreme Horror market, was my first exposure to Zulawski, and it certainly did make an impression. I was not entirely surprised, trawling the Internet for writing on the maestro, to learn that the film's reputation as a genre film has exasperated some of our most exacting hierarchy minders, for instance the critical entity known as The Ferroni Brigade, who wrote in the intro to their 2012 interview with Zulaski: “Although associated with a visceral, trembling style and lamentably compartmentalized for his most lurid ideas—like the horror creature Isabelle Adjani shacks up with in Possession (1981)—Żuławski's work teems with the inventiveness of a highly cultured man, resulting in a provocative mix of big ideas and emotional torrents (mirrored in the director's decision to mostly reject conventional explanations, while conveying the themes with a painful and ecstatic nakedness, frequently extending to his female protagonists).” Now I don't want to bag on these guys like it's late 2009 or anything, but that "frequently extending to his female protagonists" strikes me as more than a touch coy. We'll get to that. 

One crucial thing I discovered in revisiting 1975's L'important de c'est d'aimer, 1984's La femme publique, and 1985's L'amour braque is that, absence of Possession's Lovecraftian fifth-dimensional sex octopus notwithstanding, not one of the films is substantially less lurid than Possession—indeed, in a sense L'amour braque may beat it by several lengths—and that all of them are more or less the same film. And they are all films which, in spite of their letting each of their female leads fly their freak flags high and wide—or perhaps I should say, giving their female leads the opportunity to explore new and bold and unrepressed avenues of free expression—indulge in a pretty retrograde perspective on gender dynamics and/or relations. In each of the films, with this being LEAST the case in L'important, which is the only film of the batch with no basis in 19th-century Russian literature, the conception of woman is very Baudelaire High Romantic, with an early exit ramp on to amour fou Surrealism. 

Woman—and all the better if she is young, proud, newly nubile woman (and again, in L'important the stress is slightly askew because the female lead is Romy Schneider, obviously beautiful but nearly 40 at the time of shooting and maybe playing someone who'd BEEN a lead in a Zulawski movie much earlier in her life) is both the vital life force and the destroyer of souls. Man is so flummoxed by Woman that he is literally divided by her. ("None of which equals the poison/welling up in your eyes/that show me my poor soul reversed..."—Baudelaire, "Poison," translation Richard Howard.) All of these movies are ostensibly love triangles but really, the males "competing" for Woman's love, such as it is, are twins albeit not doppelgangers—doppelgangers do show up to make a kind of peace, as in Possession—and the conflict between them is just the MAIN conflict taking place within Man himself. Woman, tormented by doubt and self-loathing, cannot be fully REALIZED without Man sacrificing Himself, allowing Himself to empty Herself into Him, and out of what He receives from Her, He shall create/destroy, create/destroy, create/destroy until somebody, most likely Him, just cannot take it anymore. 

In the world view of these four Zulawski movies, there is one thing no Man, not even the most Highly Cultured Man, is immune to, and that thing is the name of Bongwater's third LP.

Michel Robin, who has his books, and his poetry to protect him, in L'important c'est d'aimer (1975)

Given these circumstances, I don't think it's unfair to note that these Zulawski films are steered by a male gaze, but that they're steered by a nearly vehement male gaze. Vehement as in obsessive, mind you, not necessarily malevolent. It's amazing to see in film after film how Zulawski goes back to certain key, or you could say seminal images when considering his male protagonists: the blood on the face, the affected/infected eyes (at the end of L'amour braque the Prince Myshkin figure of the story has on similar yellow-eye contacts to Sam Neill's in Possession) and these signifiers have a certain correlative in the perfect grooming he gives to Valerie Kaprisky in La femme publique and particularly Sophie Marceau in L'amour braque, their first film together. 

Valerie Kaprisky

Sophie Marceau

"Is she an intellectual?" "No, an actress." That's an exchange from L'important, and in both La femme publique and L'amour braque a manic divided male (played in the former film by Francis Huster, in the latter by Tchéky Karo) will call the female lead his "star."All of these movies are about moviemaking, and L'amour braque is possibly the most audacious in this respect, not least in its casting of Marceau, who was just about at the end of her run as French cinema's answer to Molly Ringwald at the time. Here she struts about and vamps it up and screams "I destroy everything I love" and just generally CANNOT BE CONTAINED. It is, I suppose, the inescapable primal aspect of the female performances in these movies that, multiple allusions to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov notwithstanding, leads to their misapprehension in the CineBroverse as, to borrow a phrase from a disgusted friend, "Emo breakup movies." (See here.)

It's worth remembering also that the allusiveness stretches every which way. L'amour braque, rather surprisingly, hits almost every actual plot point from The Idiot while managing to actually look (and feel)  like a Pigalle-set-remake of Walter Hill's 1984 Streets of Fire. The Ferroni Brigade turn up their noses at the lurid, but it's not just the casting of Klaus Kinski in L'important that suggests Zulawski was conversant with sleaze cinema; elsewhere in the film Schneider's character is referred to as having appeared in a softcore film called Nymphocula, which might well be one of the millions of alternate titles one of Jess Franco's millions of Eurosex cheapies circulated under. 

If you think I'm bringing all this up to "call out" Zulawski on several charges of Problematic, think again. As a predominantly heterosexual male of a certain age I can't honestly get into a snit over male gaze. But let's call a spade a spade here. What the Ferroni Brigade call "ecstatic nakedness" extending to Zulawski's "female protagonists" is arguably that, but it's mainly something else. And again: I am not complaining. What Zulawski brings to his views of all his lead actresses inspires a kind of LOOK AT HER awe that is...well, it's awe, is what it is. What I am saying—finally!— is that cinema deals in images and sounds prior to dealing in ideology, even if the images and sounds are arguably ideologically determined. What I'm saying is that the erotic chaos that Zulawski so convincingly simulates in his pictures is privileged over culture or "culture." Or maybe that his whole conception of culture is necessarily filtered through erotic chaos. As in L'amour braque, which depicts a production of The Seagull which may as well have been Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Sophie Marceau vamping, with helpless idiot Francis Huster

So maybe The Ferroni Brigade and the Birth. Movies. Death. bros have a little more in common than they believe.  There are only so many ways I can put this, though, so here's Muddy Waters:  

My Friend Brett Smiley

Brett Smiley in London, circa 1974. Photograph by Gered Mankowitz. ©BOWSTIR Ltd. 2016/Mankowitz.com.

Brett Smiley in Brooklyn, August 2013. 

At Brett Smiley's wake on the evening of January 13, a week after he died in his Carroll Gardens apartment (thank God), his people had set up a small TV display, and were playing DVD-Rs of some of his performances in the early aughts, backed by a band that featured his childhood pal Errol Bulut on lead guitar. They were taped at places like Pianos, the Lower East Side back room, and some joint on Chrystie Street where there's a sliding glass door leading to the sidewalk behind the stage. As we watched, another friend, a musician himself, observed of Brett, "He's really on point here." He was/is; singing voice strong, his right hand steady and straight across the strings of his black Ovation Celebrity. He sang some songs from his much-hyped but abortive 1974 debut album Breathlessly Brett, which was finally released to what they call "cult acclaim" in 2003, and a bunch of newer tunes. solid if not world-shaking stuff. The exception being the anti-anthemic "I Ain't So Cool Anymore," in which a onetime cock-of-the-walk looks back on some ruins. "I went to the doctor and he looked at my blood/a Fifty-five Scotch and a forty-five slug/He said you ain't/so cool/anymore." Of course the fact that the character/singer/Brett could still stand up and sing the song suggested that there was some cool in reserve. And anyway, yeah, he and his band were delivering. We asked Errol when the performances dated from; he said 2005, 2006. 

I first met Brett in 2010. Something had clearly gone wrong, or maybe I should say further wrong, in the interim. 

Brett and I made our acquaintance a short while after I had taken my last drink. The correspondence was not coincidental. We had a shared interest in staying away from drink and drugs, and in short order, a mutual friend—a well-intentioned but somewhat brash and pushy fellow in certain respects—suggested it would be a capital idea were I to "work" with Brett on more actively promoting that interest. I did not consider myself competent to do so in any way, shape, or form, but Brett was actually rather eager for me to help him out, so there I was. 

Even though he could be very chatty, I was not the recipient of the raconteur material Brett could lavish on wide-eyed interlocutors from various and sundry fanzines as they tracked him down over the years. The story of how at a performing arts high school in Los Angeles he was in a woodshop class with Michael Jackson, and how he and Jackson were partnered on making a chessboard and how they got a D on the project—I only heard about that the other night, at Brett’s wake. I had seen the Breathlessly Brett CD at Other Music when it had came out, and I knew of Nina Antonia’s book The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened to Brett Smiley, but I never put together my Brett with Brett Smiley, not until about seven months after we’d really started to get to know each other, and someone said, “Oh you’ve never seen Brett’s infamous British talk show debut?” I had not. Eventually Brett had mentioned the book, and I looked at the clip from the Russell Harty Show in 1974 on YouTube. "Well, that was interesting," I said, discussing it a little later. He looked at me as if he was expecting me to follow up with "What the hell did you go and do to yourself," but I did not, so he said, "You know, I was never really into glam rock." And I said something like "Pshaw. You were into rock, and you were into dressing up. Of course you were into glam rock." As a Broadway baby, though, he was more enamored of traditional "quality" vocalizing than the contorted, strained post-Anthony-Newley-isms of David Bowie's Stardust period. Nor did he have much use for Varispeed Munchkinized backing vocals. A bit of a classicist, as his "Over The Rainbow" on Breathlessly Brett testifies. 

By spring and early summer of 2012 we'd developed a bit of a routine: early morning at the place where we got coffee, then off with one or two other coffee-drinkers to Court Street Grocers, where we'd get a proper breakfast. When Brett was in an up mood, he could get awfully garrulous. "Eat your sandwich, Brett," I'd have to say to him periodically. I once timed him. Ninety minutes for one Breakfast Sandwich. It was unbelievable. I don't remember what he was talking about. 

There had been one time when we were chatting, about stuff he was going to do—there was always stuff he was going to do—and he mentioned that he'd recently found some demos he'd made in the late '70s, that Del Shannon had produced. "Ooh, Del Shannon," I said, as one will. Yes, Brett replied, Del Shannon. This time in Del's life had not been good, he continued, laying out some observations on Shannon's drinking, and some struggles involving sexuality. "Hold on, hold on," I interjected. "Del Shannon was gay? Wow, all of a sudden so much makes sense..."

Couple months later and we're doing the Breakfast With Brett Club and somehow the subject comes up again, out of my mouth. And Brett looks at me like I'm nuts. 

"Del Shannon wasn't gay." His somewhat nasal speaking voice crackled a bit when he was mildly agitated. "Who told you Del Shannon was gay?"

I sputtered, as one will. Okay, as I will. "Dude, you did."

He rolled his eyes. "Oh forget it. Del Shannon wasn't gay." He paused reflectively and looked at me again. "Everyone experiments." 

He had me there. 

If I were going to write a memorial of Proustian length I would make it about Brett's Roommate Situation, because I could, but I'll limit myself to one anecdote, which I file under "Brett Smiley's Iron Will." Sometime wintery time in 2011, I think, Brett had acquired a roommate, a sort-of musician who looked like an aged prototype for Father John Misty and/or one of the Deliverance rapists. I did not really warm to him, and kept my distance. One day Brett told me the fellow had found a turntable out on the street, brought it back to the apartment and worked on it a bit, and now, when they weren't sniping at each other over nothing, they were enjoying Classic Rock (Beatles, etc.) On Vinyl. Groovy. Eventually Brett decided this guy had got to go, and he asked that I come by the apartment on the day of the move and help the guy take his stuff down from the fourth-floor walkup, and make sure nothing untoward happened during this fellow's departure. "Sure," I said.

"There's one thing though."

"What's that?"

"I'm keeping that turntable." 

So I spent about ninety minutes reasoning with Brett as to why if this guy wanted to take the turntable out with him, he was entirely entitled, and that this kind of self-centered thinking went against several important principles and that insisting on keeping the turntable would hinder Brett's SPIRITUAL GROWTH. And Brett was very calm and very receptive and said, "Everything you are saying is absolutely one hundred percent right."

"But?"

"But I want to keep the turntable."

How could you not love this guy? Really. 

Anyway. The time came when the beardo was pretty much all packed, and he didn't even mention the turntable, so that was the end of that. "Don't gloat," I said to Brett. "Oh I won't," he said. 

For all that steel, he could not get it together to do what he had done on those stages a relatively mere half-decade before. I will not go into the shambolic gigs I and his good roommates would escort him to and from. Suffice it to say that if you think the bottom of the barrel in New York rock-and-roll is sitting in the Continental at 2 a.m. enduring some seventh-billed band while trying to shake off the cocaine and Jagermeister sweats, you ought to consider yourself lucky. The poor guy. A couple of years ago I acquired a snazzy new Gibson guitar of storied model number and I showed it off to him one day. "It's heavy," he said as he lifted it. He played a verse and a chorus of "I Ain't So Cool Anymore." Without swagger. It was pretty heartbreaking. His body was dealing with a huge variety of ailments—various outlets have named hepatitis and HIV. I don't want to be indiscreet but honestly that was the tip of the iceberg. He was pretty funny about it sometimes. There was this outpatient facility he went to that he called "HIV Romper Room." Addicts in recovery like to say that drinking and drugs had made their lives unmanageable, but the thing about Brett that I often got was that he'd never had any schooling on managing his own life in the first place. And by the time I met him, he was in such crummy shape physically that I don't think there was a single day that he wasn't in some kind of pain. I took him to the hospital at least once for every year I knew him. After which I'd buy him a Vonnegut book (that was his favorite author) and encourage him to stay in the hospital for as long as he could. He needed full time care, I always thought, but the intersection of America's highly frayed social safety net and the aforementioned Iron Will meant this was not possible.

What stories he told me in these down times weren't of past rock and roll glories, but of lost loves and fuckups. He was gratified that I knew of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, with whom he costarred in a '70s softcore pastiche of Cinderella (which I have on DVD but have never had the heart, or lack of it, to watch), and who died of a heroin overdose in 2002. A tale of a particularly harrowing arrest in Broward County—he still had a warrant outstanding in Florida in recent years, and we were both rather flummoxed about what he could do about it—was how I learned that he had actually had a bit part in American Gigolo, because he associated his part in the picture with his time in jail. 

That's Brett at far left, number 1. Richard Gere, far right, is number 5. 

Once or twice in our travels, Brett and I ran into a female friend of mine, someone not in our shared circle. She told me recently that, his haggardness and slightly distracted mien notwithstanding, she could see a "flare" of his still-present charisma emanating from him. Indeed. But even that started to go out once he injured himself in a way that further damaged his appearance, and at that time, a few months before the August 2013 photo was taken, I began to worry even more about what life was going to bring to Brett. At his wake, Brett's brother-in-law, the writer Richard Pyle,  observed that throughout his life, Brett had experienced "all the luck in the world." ALL OF IT, he emphasized—the good and the bad. In the past couple of years the luck had been a lot of bad. It was absolutely a mercy that when his terribly, terribly frail body went out on him for the very last time, he was at home, not out on the street, out on the subway, out in some bad company. It's a shame, though, that he was alone. I miss him terribly. He drove his poor sister Brenda completely crazy over so many years, and at his funeral, she quoted Hamlet—yes, Act Five, Scene Two. "Now cracks a noble heart/good night, sweet prince." And yes, exactly, I feel exactly the same goddamn way.

  Brett Smiley, again by Gered Mankowitz, ©BOWSTIR Ltd. 2016/Mankowitz.com

UPDATE: With respect to Cheryl Smith's cause of death, see Paulina Victoria's comment below. My citation derived from a recollection of a conversation with Brett. The Wikipedia entry cites complications from liver disease and hepatitis. I don't want to be the cause of more confusion so I've struck (as of January 20 2016) the information in this post.

Personal thanks to Gered Mankowitz for allowing me to use his beautiful images, and supplying me with the materials.

Vilmos Zsigmond, 1930-2016

Susannah York and Cathryn Harrison in Images, directed by Robert Altman, 1972

One of the many limitations of an early education in auteurist-based cinephilia is that you tend to look exclusively for directorial signatures. Or you tend to look at just about everything noteworthy in a given film as an indication of the directorial signature. Yes, the art is collaborative, and yes, Orson Welles put cinematographer Gregg Toland on the same title card as his on Citizen Kane, but unless we'd also read Bazin's rhapsodies on the deep focus in The Little Foxes, we weren't necessarily identifying a Toland style. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was reportedly proud of the fact that no one film he shot looked the same as another, but that's not to say that he didn't have a signature, a style, a vision. 

It was My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ who first pointed out to me what he considered a classic Zsigmond effect, in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are several shots in the scene a little under 45 minutes in, in the Mission Control Receiving Center, when Bob Balaban's character blows everybody's minds by revealing that the signals they've been getting from outer space are coordinates. Zsigmond shoots the high-ceilinged, gray-walled, largely blue-lit room so that the backgrounds are always a little out of focus; in the shot where Balaban's character is picking up the readouts coming out of the printer he's the only actor in perfect focus. The white-haired actor in the blue suit in front of him is also a little blurry, and a little blue light glints off his white hair. These manipulations of focus and lighting marked Zsigmond, to my mind, as a kind of stealth Impressionist. There was never a skimping on filling the frame with the visual information to get the point of the shot across, but there were also pockets of evocative beauty in the frames; in this scene they offset the workaday realism of the speculations and the calculations of the befuddles scientist and kept the film's other foot where it always wants to be, in a realm of wonder. 

When MCPFRG™ hipped me to this, it was pretty early in our relationship, late 1978 I guess, and we soon embarked on a several-year-long-project of getting high and seeing lots of movies in Manhattan rep houses, and I determined to pay more attention to cinematography. So when I saw McCabe & Mrs. Miller for the first time shortly thereafter, Zsigmond's impressionism, or Impressionism I guess, walloped me again, despite it being in an entirely different register than that of Close Encounters. And it worked wonders in the context of director Robert Altman's gritty, cold, frontier pessimism and fatalism as it did in that of Spielberg's wish-upon-a-star vision. It also works a treat in Altman's The Long Goodbye, and in a lesser-known Altman that's raggedy and brittle and doesn't quite pull off its conceit, but which I love anyway because of when I saw it, who's in it, and how it looks. That is, 1972's Images, from which I took the top image and from which the next three still captures are derived (the other actors besides York and Harrison are Rene Auberjonois and Hugh Millais). 

Like Lee Garmes, like Gregg Toland, like John Alton, like Raoul Coutard, like his friend and fellow emigre László Kovács, like Gordon Willis, Michael Chapman, Michael Ballhaus, and many others, Zsigmond's way of shooting (and exposing) film derived directly from a way of looking at the world, and processing what he saw, not from the pursuit of a contrived ideal. He was one of cinema's great artists, for sure. 

Maureen O'Hara: An Alternate Canon

With Tyrone Power in The Long Gray Line, John Ford, 1955

The memorial encomiums for Maureen O'Hara have tended to stress the same bunch of movies—Hunchback Of Notre Dame, How Green Was My Valley, Miracle on 34th Street, The Quiet Man. Which is all well and good, except, you know, they're not the only pictures O'Hara made that are of cinephile or even general interest.  

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

O'Hara's more-or-less debut film (her first, at least, under her stage name) is frequently pooh-poohed as "minor Hitchcock," and the director himself disparages it in Hitchcock/Truffaut on account of having been given a hard time by Charles Laughton, but let us never forget that "minor Hitchcock" is better than 95 percent of "major" whoever. This is a highly cracking, cinema-wise, period piece—"[Hitchcock] did not fall into the trap of historical reconstruction but focused instead on making a baroque and highly embellished work," Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol aptly enthused in their study of Hitch—and young Maureen, entrusted with the job of both carrying the narrative and acting as audience surrogate, does an exceptional job, especially for an 18-year-old. 

The Immortal Sergeant (Stahl, 1943)

Andrew Sarris: "In The Immortal Sergeant, for instance, Henry Fonda is in the desert with a mental image of Maureen O'Hara emerging dripping wet from a swimming pool. This is the cinema of audacity to the point of madness, and yet always preferable to the relative sanity of discretion." I won't tell Jeffrey "I always had this fantasy O'Hara was great in the sack" Wells about this if you won't.

This Land Is Mine (Renoir, 1943)

It is interesting to contrast Renoir's affectionate near-exasperation with Laughton with Hitchcock's dismissive account of his frustration. But we're not here to discuss Laughton, O'Hara's mentor (had her under contract and everything). This too-little seen wartime quasi-allegory (set "Somewhere In Europe") features O'Hara quite convincingly portraying an ordinary person under extraordinary circumstances, a school teacher beloved of sad-sack colleague Laughton, who finds his courage and voice after being accused of killing O'Hara's quisling boyfriend (George Sanders!). Renoir seems hemmed-in by RKO's backlots, but the movie is not without its touches—a firing-squad scene witnessed by Laughton, the relative nuance of Una O'Connor, of all people, and more. 

Buffalo Bill (Wellman, 1944)

One of Wellman's goofier pictures but not unattractive visually—like the more-frequently-cited (with not illegitimate reason, I suppose) The Black Swan, it's part of O'Hara's  claim to "Queen Of Technicolor" 

The Long Gray Line (Ford, 1955)

Many would call this Pedro Costa favorite a truly improbably tearjerker, but it gets me every time. Must be some Irish thing. Seriously, though, this is a remarkably rich movie and O'Hara's character is one of her damnedest, in a way an even more stubborn lass than The Quiet Man's Mary Kate. Tag Gallagher cites "Maureen O'Hara's marvelously full-bodied stylization, contrasting with Tyrone Power's woodenness." 

The Deadly Companions (Peckinpah 1961)

Early Peckinpah in lyrical mode, with Brian Keith as a scarred (in many respects) ex-soldier and O'Hara as a dance hall girl whose son Keith has accidentally killed. They band together to cross Apache territory to bury the dead by his father. O'Hara (who found Peckinpah "objectionable") is fiery in grief; the chemistry between her and Keith is rather different than what they displayed in The Parent Trap, on screen that same year.

Spencer's Mountain (Daves, 1963)

O'Hara and Henry Fonda, two decades after Immortal Sergeant, in a proto-Waltons family saga based on a novel by  Earl Hammer, Jr., who'd later go on to create...The Waltons. Solid in that Daves way, with Mimsy Farmer adding some jaw-dropping-for-their-time notes of hotsie-totsieness as a girlfriend of a Spencer clan member. 

UPDATE:

My young friend Diana Drumm, a fine writer on film and a family friend of Ms. O'Hara, commended me, on Twitter, to Sentimental Journey, a 1946 film directed by Walter Lang. Diana cited a "bizarre plot that goes off the emotional deep end" and adds "O'Hara is wonderful in it." After The Quiet Man, Diana says, it was a "great personal favorite" of O'Hara's. 

Mr. Joseph Failla, whom George Harrison might refer to as "a friend to us all," wrote to me to say "Don't forget about Dance, Girl, Dance (Arzner/Del Ruth, 1940), which may be my favorite Maureen O'Hara film outside the group that is normally mentioned. The difficulty here is that most people recall it as having Lucille Ball's best performance (which it does) but O'Hara gets her chance to shine here too as a hard working young woman who pursues her dream to be a ballet dancer. It's also refreshing to see in a movie of this vintage, the leading lady choose her profession over a man and believe in herself."

And below, in comments, The Self-Styled Siren extols the virtues of The Forbidden Street (Negulesco, 1949).

Chantal Akerman, le patron

Akerman in Je, tu, il, elle, 1975; image cribbed, with gratitude, from Only The Cinema

About 12 years ago I was at a modest cocktail party—bare office space and bottles—commemorating the hanging-up-the-towel of a veteran indie film publicist. I was in a conversation with a stranger, an older woman who had connections in some New York distribution circles, or something like that, and the name Chantal Akerman came up, and I was taken aback to see the woman sneer. “She’s not a director any more,” the woman continued. “She’s a gallery filmmaker. She makes installation films.” This took me even further aback. Although I had not been able to keep up with Akerman’s work in an entirely steady way over the years, I considered her an artistic and, yes, political hero, and beyond that, I actually actively enjoyed all the work by her that I’d been able to see. In other words, a fan. And no matter what the disposition of her career at that time, there was no reason to dismiss her. That idea held and continues to hold.

I found her latest movie, now her last, No Home Movie, a spectacular experience. Spectacularly trying, in a sense; it won’t do to describe it as a return to her “raw” filmmaking mode of the late sixties and early seventies, as the medium here is digital video rather than celluloid, and Akerman, as a master of cinema, is bracingly aware of the multivalent ways in which the medium is the message. There are a large number of static shots in No Home Movie, held for long periods of time, in which the main point of visual interest seems to be in the video apparatus trying to decide just what the white balance of the image ought to be. The film, a documentary of sorts, addresses the death of Akerman’s mother, or, rather, the presence of Akerman’s mother ultimately opposed to the absence of Akerman’s mother; the movie’s title, No Home Movie, could just as well be No-Home Movie. It hit me hard in part because of my own personal experience this year. But it’s also hard-hitting as an aesthetic and philosophical marker; far from being a film that’s under-directed, as one critic who didn’t care for the movie observed, it is a virtual treatise on filmmaking choices—especially filmmaking choices that are explicitly related to human mortality.

Human mortality: Chantal Akerman’s death, age 65, was announced this morning, as No Home Movie is about to be screened to the public at the New York Film Festival. As I write this, differing account of the cause of her death are circulating in French and British newspapers.

Obituaries will invariably cite her breakthrough feature Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, made in 1975, absolutely one of the Great Films and a true experimental movie because it put theory into practice in melding the structuralist film with a more explicit narrative than had been applied to it up until that point; and the movie can still provoke fevered arguments. It’s hardly her only Great Film though. I’m still besotted by her 2000 La Captive, a modern-day Bad Romance extrapolated from an episode in Proust.  I believe it remains the greatest of screen adaptations of Proust in part because if the liberties it takes with the source material, liberties that enable Akerman to more fully engage the psychological and philosophical uniqueness of Proust’s work and explore time through purely cinematic means. (And yes, I hold Ruiz’s Time Regained in high esteem, but its approach to Proust is entirely different in that it engages the whole idea of “Proust” as an object for the purposes of a not entirely unserious cinematic pastiche.) It’s also a very mordantly funny film; the sexual jealousy of its lead character is no less maniacal and toxic than that of Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, but its articulation is so restrained and refined as to evoke a different kind of mortification. I also often go back to her early autobiographical films, the “raw” stuff; her New York landscapes of 1976’s News From Home are indelible, haunting. One takeaway from 1975’s debut feature Je, tu, il, elle is the inability to ever watch Cannon the same way again. And that, my friends, is the only funny I can make in the face of this awful news that one of the most vital filmmakers of her or any other age (I think Lena Dunham owes as much to Akerman as she does to Nora Ephron) is gone far too soon.

On "The End Of The Tour"

The sagacious Jeffrey Wells has informed me that word "around the campfire" (yeah, I know) is that I've "had it out" for The End of the Tour since before its shooting even wrapped, and that my opinion of it now that it's a real live film is not to be trusted. It's true; I didn't think that making David Lipsky's useful book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself into a movie was a particularly commendable idea, but once the film was a reality I tried to go into it with an open mind. And, to be honest, I ended up hating it even more than I could have reasonably anticipated. So much that I sat through it twice, just to be sure. Just like with Where The Wild Things Are. 

The results of my consideration of the film are published today at The Guardian. Getting this piece out has been a long and painful process, but, contrary to what David Poland has implicitly speculated, it's not because I feel left out of the lovefest that's now being celebrated—inexplicably, to my mind—on the film's behalf. As if I'm really that weak with respect to my own opinions. No, it's painful because David Foster Wallace is someone I still miss. And because the portrayal of him in the movie is not a "tribute." And I hope that the phrase "ghoulish self-aggrandizement" sticks like shit to the bottom of Jason Segel's shoe throughout his shitty Oscar campaign. (In case you were wondering why this post has no illustration from the movie.)

GQ, as part of the aforementioned lovefest, put up a piece called "5 David Foster Wallace Pieces You Should Read Before Seeing The End Of The Tour." For the very first time, I was actively pleased to see a Wallace recommendation list that did not include "David Lynch Keeps His Head" and "Big Red Son." I've written about Wallace before, on this blog, and was interviewed about him by Jeremiah Kipp; the Guardian piece is my first professional effort on the subject. 

Growing Up Lee

Joseph Failla, my movie-going pal from the late 1960s on, and a sometime DVD reviewer for Premiere back in the early aughts, wrote me with some reminiscences and observations on the late Christopher Lee, which I reproduce below: 

It was my mother who first introduced me to the world of Christopher Lee when she bought me the Famous Films issue #2, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN / HORROR OF DRACULA magazine, which featured both Hammer classics in pictorial form. Except for the cover art, all the pics used were in black and white, the magazine did, however, get across the unique tone of the films. Already having a background in Karloff and Lugosi, I knew (so to speak), I wasn't in Kansas anymore. It thrilled me to read a film in comic book form, in a sense this  became my first keepsake of an actual movie.

 

And this brought me into the orbit of Christopher Lee, who would have such a presence outside the confines of horror and fantasy that when the time came for me to widen my view into other genres, Lee was still there in full force. Although I was never quite able to separate him from the humble Hammer productions where I first learned of him, he remained a recognizable, charismatic and enduring connection to my own youth as my movie appreciation and understanding continued to grow.

 

To explain the longevity of my relationship with Lee and his films, the first time I saw Lee onscreen in a theatre was in DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS in 1964. The first time I saw HORROR OF DRACULA, it was on Super 8 black and white film, projected on a sheet in a friend's garage, even though it was only snippets of the film's highlights, it was extremely exciting to experience in any form regardless. It would be another 30 years before I could see a 35mm print with slightly faded color, projected properly in a legitimate theater.

 

While HORROR OF DRACULA cannot be beat for shocks, tautness, and the teaming of Lee with Peter Cushing, I may actually prefer DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE as my favorite Lee Dracula film since it's the most religious of the series, making the struggle between good and evil even more profound.

 

Lee was the best of all possible Fu Manchus in some of the oddest films made about the character. 

 

He was a great Bond villain in one of the weakest Bond films. Which led to him saying about playing a Bond villain, his only regret was "you can only do it once". 

 

A favorite Lee performance was a rare turn as the hero battling sin and depravity in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, a wonderful flip side second feature with HORROR HOTEL, starring Lee as his own devil worshipping "opposite number" .

 

His expert swordsmanship was on full display in Lester's THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS. It was here he seemed to inherit the same fate of Basil Rathbone, who also could slice up any of his fellow performers but was not allowed to win any of his screen sword scuffles as we could not ask for a more effective villain.

 

One of the great strengths of Jackson's Rings Trilogy of films is the casting, even down to the smallest of roles. But no actor was made better use of in this series than Lee himself. He was a most believable practitioner of the black arts, having demonstrated an affinity for such mischief in a host of prior films setting the foundation for a evil film persona in stone.

 

Perhaps now his involvement in the STAR WARS prequels will garner a little more respect for the much disliked recent series of chapters. I for one couldn't have been happier to see Lee join the ranks of STAR WARS in any capacity but his Count Dooku, while recalling his gothic villainy, complete with cape and castle bring more of a sense of symmetry and coming full circle with the original trilogy than any other element I could imagine. Although belated, Lee would now join his former screen partner Peter Cushing once again as a participating co-star, at least in spirit. 

Call Mr. Lee

Inveigling Suzan Farmer in Dracula: Prince Of Darkness, Terence Fisher, 1966

I don't know why I took the news of Sir Christopher Lee's death so hard this morning. It's not as if his face and his voice have been crucially intertwined with all the reasons I love movies, or anything. Oh, wait. it is that. But, you know, he WAS 93. Maybe I thought he was going to live forever.

One of the greatest pleasures of my professional life, hell, maybe of my life, period, was an hour-long interview I conducted with Lee in late 1994. I don't even remember what the occasion was, but it was for a column I had at TV Guide so I guess he had a special or some sort of hosting gig. In any event, I had been told that Lee could be a prickly interview subject, but that absolutely turned out not to be the case when I spoke with him. Perhaps he was in a terrific mood. Maybe I had good questions. All I know is that at a certain point I thought, "I'm not going to be able to get him off the phone." This observation was not a complaint. 

The most moving and surprising portion of the conversation was when Lee was recalling his friend Peter Cushing, who had just passed away in the summer of that year. Lee missed his friend terribly but also delighted in telling me the way the two would keep each other entertained in the down time during the shoots of the many films they worked in together. Apparently they were both keen Looney Tunes fans, and used to conduct entire conversations in the voices of their favorite characters. To demonstrate, Lee actually laid his Foghorn Leghorn impersonation on me. 

I'll let that sink in for a second. 

I also asked Lee about his occasionally misbegotten work with microbudget auteur Jesus "Jess" Franco, and elicited a rather amusing backhanded compliment from Lee about the filmmaker: "Not an untalented man, by the way." There was more, quite a bit of it, too much for a 500-word column in TV Guide (which my editor, cheekily and to my great delight, headlined "Christopher And His Kind") and I thought that when I could get around to it, I'd whip up a complete transcript and give it to my friend-who-I've-still-never-met-in-person Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog.

I bet you know what happens next. I lost the tape, and have never been able to find it. To this day, whenever I come upon an unmarked audio cassette in the bottom of some drawer and file cabinet, I pop it in my recorder with the small mad hope that it might be the Lee conversation. It never is. But I still remember. And I'll never forget.

Richard Corliss, 1944-2015

The above shot of Richard is from 1974. I purloined it from Film Comment magazine. You almost wanna say "Look at the you-know-what hipster," don't you? I didn't meet Richard until, oh, well over twenty years after this picture was taken, and his mode for dealing with younger film critics was quite a bit more avuncular than anything this shot suggests. I still love this shot of him because he has this air of both confidence and poetic dreaminess, and also of potential extreme volubility. These qualities are always is present in his writing, and were always present in his conversation. I think everybody who knew Richard even slightly, as I did, is heartbroken today...but also feels very lucky to have known him at all, because in addition to being a really terrific critic and journalist he was also BOTH a mensch and a prince. 

If you weren't lucky enough to have known him, well, there's a lot to read, but I'd actually start with the wonderful interview he did with David Thomson for the above-mentioned Film Comment, which captures his voice and his erudition and enthusiasm wonderfully. Then buy his BFI Film Classics monograph on Lolita, and mourn that he didn't do more stuff along these lines. Then curse the gods, or rather the devils, that have somehow conspired to keep from you from accessing "Afternoon With An Obsession," Richard's late-'70s Village Voice profile of Carole Laure, perhaps the only male-written "I'm smitten with this film star" piece that will not inspire instantaneous projectile vomiting (Anthony Lane ought to have looked it up before meeting Scarlett Johansson). Richard Zoglin's reminiscence of him at Time's site is also very good. But mainly read Richard, always a delight. And you know, he wasn't really wrong about Speed Racer either. 

FInal blast from the past

I was recently recollecting the bad old days when I thought I was some kind of Internet Film Criticism policeman, and I got into it with not Some Dude™ but a guy I've come to have a reasonable relationship with, and one of the points he tried to make was that I had some nerve giving another writer TMI grief when I myself posted vacation pictures on my blog. Well. It was/is MY blog, and they were, you know, vacation pictures. And now, as I begin outlining a hopefully brief piece concerning the critical reputation of Woody Allen, I relax by sharing with you a last few treasures from my late mom's seemingly bottomless photo stash. 

I sometimes tell close friends that as a baby, I was so fat that my parents could pretty much leave me alone anywhere and be assured that, unless I was kidnapped, I'd be at the spot at which they left me when they returned, because I literally could not move. (And as for kidnapping, no one save a cannibal wants to snatch a fat baby.) Anyway, I didn't have any actual recollection of this state, but now I have photographic proof. 

My sister and I had an often fractious relationship in our childhood and teens, so this mid-60s snapshot inspired lots of oohs and aaahs from older relatives, "Look how nice they can be together," that sort of thing. I'd like to say that whatever cinematic allusion attaches to my costume—Rules of the Game, for sure!— was entirely deliberate, but of course it was not. 

I include this shot not to mark the beginning of my younger brother's brief but powerful Jodie Foster phase, but to again provide a form of photographic proof: Yes, those long shirt collars in Goodfellas were a thing. 

Eighth Grade Yearbook photo, 1972. Glenn Kenny, The Awkward Years, Part II, a saga which I believe is still ongoing. 

Two things about this photo: One, how is it that nobody in New Jersey with a cheap camera between the years 1962 and 1985 knew how to properly compose a shot? Even the most headroom-batty among us would have to cop to the overabundance of negative, no make that useless, space in this photo, which I have declined to crop out of respect for verisimilitude. Actually, the culprit might be yours truly: that Ken Follett book is from 1982, the asphalt beneath the beach chair is a driveway; this places the shot at Katz Avenue in West Paterson, where my mom and I (and sometimes my brother) lived for a few years until I finally up and moved to the Big City full-time in '86. 

Two, I don't want to slog Ken Follett, but it's doubtful that whatever my mom was thinking when I, or whoever took the shot, took the shot, was spurred by that thriller. I don't know if it's me or if today's atmosphere of cultural discourse is so inflamed or what but I feel weirdly compelled to defend my mom's reading habits here. Hell, I kind of liked Forsyth's Day of the Jackal myself. Yep, my mom liked potboiler thrillers but she also loved Rex Stout, who really is the V.S.O.P. of what he did, and it's due to her influence that I got into him—and to Conan Doyle as well. When she saw me reading a biography of Oscar Levant, she asked to borrow it when I was done, and she enjoyed that.  And my mom adored Simenon—when she died, she was halfway through a new translation of The Late Monsieur Gallet that I brought her at the hospital. She liked the Silvina Ocampa poem I read her in the days before her operation, too...but she liked the Eliot cat poems I read to her from Kingsley Amis' collection of light verse a little better. Thank you T.S. Eliot and Kingsley Amis. Love you mom. Miss you every day.