THE AVENGERS

Blair McClendon on some of the unsettling political and cultural implications of the still-reigning champion of this summer’s box office.

Death comes from above. Half organic, half metallic aliens descend from a place where the sky has been rent open and tear New York City apart. Police officers and Firemen direct bewildered civilians away from danger, even though it has become clear that there is nosafe place. Buildings collapse, debris crashes to the ground, groups of huddled men and women await their death at the hands of foreign captors. The Avengers, like a number of films before it, is not afraid to unleash mayhem on American soil. There is, however, something eerier at play in a film that shows Captain America and a team of guns-blazing superheroes battling through the street of a New York that has been decimated by an alien flying force.

I do not mean to suggest that The Avengers is just a high-powered, CGI parable of September 11th. That would be giving it too much and too little credit. The Avengers is not a political film insofar as one might use that moniker for Far From Vietnam or even In The Valley of Elah. Nor is it interested in meditating on a moment of national crisis that has colored American policy and ideology ever since. Yet, a movie distributed by Disney and aspiring to outdo the “level of ZOMG-ness” of Transformers 3 laying waste not to a stand-in, but to an acknowledged New York City, does not do so without recognizing the visual and emotional relationship between what is shown and what is remembered.

It is strange to say this about a film featuring a rage monster, a Norse god and a flying aircraft carrier, but The Avengers for all its glitz and gloss aspires to a more relatable level of realism than its unnamed rival - The Dark Knight trilogy. Obviously, I have not yet seen the final installment of that franchise and so cannot speak for that film’s mechanics. Proceeding from the previous two as guideposts, and excluding a radical reconception of Nolan’s style, there is a greater interest in the myth, and in the hero as someone who creates, perpetuates and suffers from it. The heroes of Whedon’s film, for all of their mythic imagery (Captain America hurling a shield painted with a star and stripes at his foes) and backstories, are ultimately petty people. I do not say this to insult them; they are petty in the way that all of our divisions, fears and insecurities might seem to be in the face of our comprehension of reality melting away as what appears to be the mouth of hell itself opens above us. Whedon’s realism stems from this fact. Romanoff, Stark, Rogers and the gang may all be extraordinary but they are as whiny, self-righteous, selfish and irritating as any member of the great mass of people they are called on to protect. These people are not better than us, they are just more powerful.

It is because of this genuine effort to generate an attachment to these characters, not just as symbols and heros but as people, that destroying New York becomes important. When the Joker paints Gotham red, he is doing just that - painting Gotham red. The trailer for The Dark Knight Rises similarly obliterates American icons – a bridge spanning a harbor, a football stadium, the stock market - but it still does so to a different America, to one in which Gotham exists. Whedon’s world is one where The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings are cultural touchstones, coming up in casual conversations. The Avengers destroys the New York that upwards of eight million people call home. What’s more, when The Hulk and Ironman careen around the city fighting off the invaders, they seem to cause almost as much damage as their enemies. Of course, this being a PG-13 movie, there isn’t much blood and the direct consequences of either side’s actions are implied, but not shown. It isn’t really necessary and would probably detract from their attempt to generate the all out adrenaline rush the film’s last sequence aims for. Nevertheless, when buildings fall in the middle of the afternoon in New York the casualties will be high. 

Iron Man, perhaps the rudest and most relatable member of the team, offers the team redemption. If going to bat against the alien menace was not enough, he offers himself up as a sacrifice for the human threat. Having lost faith in The Avengers ability to defeat the invasion, the shadowy members of S.H.I.E.L.D. launch a nuclear missile at Manhattan. No real authority figure from the United States government ever asserts itself during this crisis. Although the army is called into action during what is undeniably the beginning of a war, they are largely ineffective and Whedon does not cut away to show the President issuing any orders. The highest authorities are effectively those at S.H.I.E.L.D. who see it most fit to turn their weapons against themselves in hopes it will stop the enemy. Again, TheAvengers is not an explicitly political film, but it is not without its subversions. Iron Man, knowing that he will likely not make it back, meets the missile out over the Atlantic, steers it through the wormhole and hurls it into space.

The man-meets-missile scene is not unique to Whedon’s film. Two precedents immediately popped out to me: The Iron Giant (helmed by fellow Disney man Brad Bird) and Dr. Strangelove. The three films do, however, differ in how they resolve the threat of impending doom. Kubrick brings the bombs down with a laughing cowboy; Bird apotheosizes the alien robot willing to die for a small town; Whedon saves Iron Man and blows up the bad guys. Apparently, all’s well that ends well. 

But how empty that seems when New York is in pieces. The movie ends with a collection of reporters interviewing survivors who vacillate between unconditional gratitude and fear that no one seems to be in control of these man-powered weapons of mass destruction.  “What should be done about these superheroes?” is effectively the movie’s parting shot. The idea may not be new (The Dark Knight ends on this note, the X-Men saga revolves around it), but it is a nod in the logical direction. No one really did anything right in this film: Nick Fury was a liar; The Avengers fought recklessly; S.H.I.E.L.D. almost murdered everyone in New York. Admittedly, the populace doesn’t know about the first and third, but they are not willing to completely accept their extraordinary defenders. Even Captain America, who in a stroke of genius is both an actual person and a pop culture reference within the film’s world, cannot be trusted.

Ultimately, The Avengers comes down on their side: the authorities are incompetent (the police need Captain America to tell them how to do their job), absent (no one higher in the chain of command than foot soldiers and first responders is shown) or somewhere between duplicitous and terribly misguided. In short, they cannot be trusted when the way things are become the way things were. A band of mismatched, divided compatriots must put aside their problems for the greater good. This is the adored politics of the center with a dash of just less than vulgar patriotism - all is well that end’s well, as long as things get done. Marvel and Disney did not set out to make waves. They set out to make a movie that would break $200,000,000.00 in its opening weekend. Whedon may not have set the high water mark for smart superhero movies, but he has offered an alternative to Nolan’s brooding. More importantly, he offers an alternative to the film his team tried to outdo. Behind the “eat your heart out, Michael Bay” explosions, The Avengers takes us on a ride that will outlast the ringing in our ears.

Dispatch from Paris: Philip Glass Does Dracula

Blair McClendon  reports on a live score by Philip Glass and The Kronos Quartet that accompanied a recent screening of Tod Browning’s Dracula at the Cité de la Musique in Paris.

Fifteen minutes into the performance, the conductor started waving his hands hoping to get Philip Glass and The Kronos Quartet’s attention. Their backs to the screen, they hadn’t noticed that the movie had stopped playing. The audience giggled. The conductor turned to the room full of Parisians and apologized. The subtitles were missing, so they were going to start over. First there was laughter and then applause. When you’re sitting in a concert hall, listening to Glass and the Kronos Quartet perform a live accompaniment to the 1931 version of Dracula, technical difficulties are not enough to ruin the night. The lights dimmed once more, the music set in and there on the screen was A Tod Browning Production. 

This is the kind of film that I would have assumed I had already seen. It seems that at some point during the years I spent watching almost anything and everything that came on Turner Classic Movies, I would have come across the most iconic monster performance in film history. With my taste (I think Pierrot le fou should be in contention for greatest film ever made) I often hesitate to make such wide-ranging decrees about what does or doesn’t qualify as a “foundational” film. However, Bela Lugosi’s incarnation of Count Dracula is so powerful, so thorough that it has largely infiltrated popular culture right down to that subtle inflection of the voice we use to say “children of the night.”

Dracula is so succesful, because on the one hand Browning is at the height of his powers in regards to the image, and on the other there is a deep understanding of what makes Dracula’s story so frightening. The vampire, recent variations notwithstanding, promises death and damnation with an undercurrent of sexual violence. Allowing Lugosi to reprise his role from the Broadway play broke with the two most well-known vampire films before this one: Nosferatu and Vampyr. In those two, the vampire is unattractive and so definitively of another world that while frightening he is tucked safely in a fantasy. Browning offers no such space. Yes, he revels in examples of his powers - transforming into a bat, the ever present fog - but he sets up his attacks in a much more mundane manner. Handsome, and apparently of noble stock, he is able to gain access at first to a young lawyer and later to the family of a well-respected doctor. He turns the first into his minion, whose last vestiges of will power drive him insane, and attempts to pick off the most beautiful members of the other.

Of course, no vampire movie is complete without the attack scene. Dracula attacks a nameless young woman in the street; Lucy, a friend of the doctor’s family; and Mina, the doctor’s daughter. In each case, the treatment of the scene always offers up a subtext of sexual predation. The woman in the street offers to sell the count a flower and, as the mist closes in on them, he steps towards her, opens his arms wide and draws her near. All that is left is a brief scream and a body. Browning repeats this formula throughout the film and each time the movements are slow, careful and frightening as much for their real world equivalent as their supernatural one. When he finally comes for Mina, in her bedroom no less, the count’s gleaming eyes steadily approach the camera. His head lowers out of the lower left corner of the frame, presumably to suck our blood. In the morning, Mina has been bitten.

This undertone is reinforced as she fights for her own sanity, torn between the knowledge that she is now possessed by Dracula’s power and still in love with her well-meaning but largely unhelpful fiancé. She tries to explain what has happened, but she can only bear to get out “Count Dracula…. he…” Her fiancé understandably panics, “He what? What did he do to you?” Until someone mentions the potential damnation of her soul, nothing in the scene sounds like she’s getting at being made into a vampire’s minion.

As far as Browning’s image goes, I implore you to make sure you watch a good print of this film. The film is so set in deep blacks and grey that when white does arrive (the shirt of the mad minion or that of the comic relief insane asylum janitor) it’s almost shocking. The set is meticulously designed and sets up enough visual possibilities that when he needs to move away for a trick shot, the resulting image only calls attention to itself insofar as it is an impeccably constructed one. For example, when Dracula rises from his coffin, the film is confronted with a problem. The vampire is a graceful creature, even during violent outbursts. There is not, however, a graceful way to get out of a coffin. Browning instead shows us but a hand gripping the lid, pulls back and pans to the left. The focus is deep and in the back of the frame a wrought iron window catches the dying of the light. We push in and pan back to the right to see Dracula, already standing, rolling back his shoulders. This exact sequence is repeated for the next night and while the doubling makes its immediate purpose obvious, it leaves the higher goal intact. We never see Dracula out of control. Even when the heroes do kill him, his death does not come in an awkward struggle, but rather as he lays calmly in his casket waiting for the sunset.

When the film was over, the audience applauded for quite some time, first for the film, then for the musicians. Glass and the quartet achieved the near impossible - they disappeared. As world famous musicians, performing Glass’ composition, it would have been easy to steal the show. Instead they played in synch with it. Rising with the camera, falling to let Lugosi go to work. When the film first came out there was no score apart from the credits. Just voices and a few effects. The night at the Cité de la Musique may not have been faithful to the original experience, but it offered something rarer: the complete communion of the works of a handful of a geniuses, some of whom had long since passed. 

Love Streams

What’s in a name? Will Noah deconstructs the title of Cassavetes’ final film.

Love Streams.

The title to John Cassavetes’ 1984 swan song fits the film as perfectly as any title could possibly fit a Cassavetes film; which is to say firmly but incompletely, for what string of words could ever contain the vast, teeming expanses of life Cassavetes presents in his work?  Faces is about a good deal more than faces, but faces act as a window into the realms that the film explores.  The Killing of a Chinese Bookie depicts the titular event, but the stiff objectivity of the title fails to encompass the metaphysical rifts that Cassavetes tears open within the fabric of the film.  But while these titles provide straightforward entryways into the films they only begin to describe, Love Streams demands interrogation.

The title appears incomplete.  Perhaps hearing it pronounced aloud would clarify whether we’re dealing with noun-verb (emphasis on “streams”) or adjective-plural-noun (emphasis on “love”).  It cries out for punctuational clarification, be it exclamatory (Love Streams!), epistolary (Love, Streams), or, most appropriately as it turns out, inquisitive (Love Streams?).  Perhaps it’s a typo: Cassavetes really meant to branch out into the far reaches of Dadaism (Glove Streams), or perhaps make an attempt at summing up his entire oeuvre (Love Screams).    

Having seen the film, I’m not sure there’s only one appropriate way to read the title.  In the interest of science, however, let’s take the noun-verb form as our hypothesis.  We are examining love, observing its effects on two principal subjects (species: human; relation: sibling), to see how it will behave.  Our hypothesis: it will stream.    

“Love is a stream,” declares Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands), “It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.”  Sarah’s declaration raises more questions than answers.  “My love is a stream” would be easier to get a handle on: here’s the self-characterization of a bleeding heart.  But as it stands, the statement constitutes a philosophy, speaking of love as a universal force.  Armchair Socratics will no doubt waste little time pointing out the obvious problem with such a statement: streams flow in one direction, while we generally like to think that our love is reciprocated, at least sometimes.  Is Sarah’s philosophy a solipsistic one then, viewing her love as the universal love?  Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it might ring equally true for someone else.   

The statement sounds eye-rollingly transcendental at first: love never stops.  Gimme a break.  But look at it another way: streams might never stop, but whatever floats down them—driftwood, garbage, people, youth, etc.—never floats back.  Is the love stream a wave or a particle?  I think we might need to narrow the scope of our inquiry.

So, hypothesis: Love Streams.  Well, does it?  Step one: identify subject.  Love definitely exists within Cassavetes’ world, though it can be hard to distinguish from imposters.  Sarah’s brother Robert Harmon (Cassavetes) spends much of the film surrounded by women, and says “I love you” to a lot of them, but we quickly detect the presence of that perennial wolf in sheep’s clothing: lust.  Closer to Sarah’s philosophy is Robert’s son Albie, who declares his love for his father after he has taken him to Vegas and left him alone in the hotel room to go get laid.  One minute the kid’s so anxious to get away from his dad that he bashes his head open on his mom’s front door, the next he’s declaring his love for him, blood flowing down his forehead.  Like blood, love’s stream is inexorable; it can’t be stopped by even the most deadbeat of dads.  And then there’s Sarah, whose love for her estranged husband and child resembles extreme psychosis, prompting twin dream sequences that constitute the film’s terrifying, hilarious, and moving climax. 

It would seem that Sarah’s hypothesis holds true at least for children and herself—makes sense, she often acts like a child, at one point buying out an entire pet store—but what about her love for her brother?  And how about his love for her?  This two-way stream (anti-stream?) is perhaps the most mysterious in the film.  Robert appears overjoyed to see Sarah, then repeatedly leaves her as soon as he returns home.  Yet he flings himself whole-heartedly into taking care of her and the animals after she falls ill, even begging her not to leave.  Sarah, in the film’s conclusion, abandons the brother who loves her, at least for the moment, in favor of the husband and child she’s supplanted in reality with dream visions.  Love’s stream must be an awfully bendy and circuitous one.     

Well, in conclusion, does love stream?  Uh, sometimes, yes.  Which is hardly the conclusion that Sarah’s philosophy seems to demand.  She’s wrong in at least one respect: the stream does occasionally stop, or is at least submerged.  The film’s final shot frames Robert in his house through the window as rain drips down the pane.  Here, the visual streaming of the water runs along the surface that divides him from his sister, and the audience.  If one is on land, streams are generally viewed as a divider and not a connector.  What does that say about interpersonal connection?  Hmm, our experiment seems to have broken down.  The subjects have been contaminated by the intricacies and contradictions of reality; Cassavetes Laboratories are revolutionary at least partially for their poor insulation.  Well, I think we can say with certainty that love does something.  It streams sometimes, but it also cuts, bruises, and burns.  And plenty of things stream as well: we’ve seen blood, water, and I haven’t even mentioned time.  So, uh, I guess the best we can say is Love _____s and ________ Streams, but further testing will be required before it can be determined with statistical accuracy whether love does, in fact, stream.

“THE PSYCHO BIRDS”

John Colella analyses the bird imagery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

In the famous interview conducted by François Truffaut of Alfred Hitchcock, the topic of birds arose during their discussion of Psycho (1960).  “I was quite intrigued by them: they were like symbols.”  Sure, this might sound like a bland statement, but it hints at a more substantial thought.  Indeed, birds, to Hitchcock, aren’t arbitrary;they are reflections of characters and representations of ideas.   He uses birds craftily in Psycho, but in his following film, The Birds (1963), the animal dominates the film, as the title suggests.  What is this particular “intrigue” that inspired Hitchcock to feature birds in these two films?

Hitchcock first introduces birds in Psycho during the scene in which Marion Crane is eating dinner with Norman Bates in his parlor.  While on the run after having stolen a large sum of money from one of her employer’s clients to help out her divorced boyfriend, Marion has just found refuge at the Bates Motel during a rainstorm.  As the parlor scene progresses, Marion and Norman’s conversation slowly tends more toward the topic of Norman’s mother.  All the while, Hitchcock has made the viewer aware of Norman’s collection of stuffed birds, with some perched on shelves or hanging from the ceiling, but at the moment of this subject change, the birds take on a more significant role.  As Norman begins to discuss his mother, Hitchcock deviates from the previous match cutting to introduce a new shot of Norman, in which he is sitting on the right side of the frame while a large, ominous owl looms over him on the left side.  Here Hitchcock is clearly making a connection between the bird and the conversation, linking the animal more closely to Norman’s mother as he begins to discuss the possibility of defying her.  Owls, in nature, are birds of prey, and it is no coincidence that Hitchcock would be likening Norman’s mother to an owl.  She may not physically prey on him (how could she; she’s dead!), but psychologically she has done all but killed her son.  Even in this particular shot, Norman’s head is framed right near the beak of the owl, as if mother is pecking away at his head, or, more importantly, his brain.  When Norman admits that he could never defy his mother, he sits back in his chair, making the owl more prominent within the frame.  This, again, helps to demonstrate the immense power mother has over Norman, as if she is literally looming over him and watching his every action.

Birds loom over Norman, but they prey on Marion.  When she first enters the parlor, Hitchcock places a close-up of the previous owl in between two shots of Marion, worriedly looking up at it.  Even before Norman talks of his mother, the birds in the parlor have a predatory relationship with Marion.  Hitchcock establishes a sense of uneasiness in the scene through her worried expression, but what is making her worried?  The birds.  At first, this tension is a general idea of threat, but once the owl becomes associated with mother, the relationship between Marion and the birds takes on a heightened significance.  This relationship is strengthened after the famous shower scene when Norman knocks down a picture of a bird while cleaning up.  This small detail demonstrates mother’s physical predation, as it is her surrogate who makes the picture fall, a motion that reflects the way Marion falls over the edge of the tub after mother “kills” her.  Certainly as the non-predatory “crane,” Marion had no chance of survival, but instead was doomed to be mother’s prey.

If Psycho uses birds to hint at fear and death, then The Birds is the physical manifestation of these ideas.  The film tells the story of Melanie Daniels, who comes to the small town of Bodega Bay in pursuit of her lover, but is soon caught up in a frenzied attack on the whole town by birds.  Marion’s role as prey carries over to Melanie Daniels, and the two characters are physically and emotionally similar.  Both characters  find themselves to be unsatisfactory in the eyes of a mother: for Marion, it was Norman’s mother, and for Melanie it is Lydia Brenner, her lover’s mother.  There’s a sense that Lydia is the mother bird, fearing that Melanie is going to take her son Mitch away from the home nest, but unlike Norman’s mother in Psycho, Lydia is herself a victim as well as Melanie.  Although she may be the mother bird to Mitch, the birds that terrorize Bodega Bay don’t recognize her authority.  So, then, what are the birds in this film?  At first, they represent an impending doom, apparent through Hitchcock’s brilliant pacing of their violence.  When Melanie first arrives in Bodega Bay, the birds aren’t even present, it is only until she rides back from Mitch’s house on her motorboat that a bird swoops down and pecks her head, the first indication of their existence.  This small act of violence is built upon throughout the film, becoming more intense when the birds terrorize the children at a child’s party and then again at the school.  The school scene in particular is an interesting microcosm of the tension Hitchcock builds in the film, as he slowly increases the number of birds on the jungle gym behind Melanie, until the whole structure is covered in them, as they wait menacingly for the children to leave the building.  In addition, before this scene, the birds looked primarily like seagulls, but now they have changed to crows, a more foreboding bird that has historically represented death and decay.

All of the anxiety Hitchcock builds up through these small snippets of violence culminates in the final sequence.  Boarded up inside of their home, Melanie and the Brenner family experience a deafening onslaught of birds trying to force their way inside.   Hitchcock doesn’t actually show the birds, but instead floods the soundtrack with their croaks and pecking, creating an aural attack on both the characters and the viewer.   Here, Hitchcock is building suspense for Melanie’s personal confrontation with the birds in the attic.  The confrontation scene is oddly similar to the shower scene in Psycho: Hitchcock exclusively uses close ups, and he intensifies the editing to give a visual sense of the birds’ attack and to suffocate the viewer, extending the birds’ violence onto us as well as Melanie.  Whereas in an earlier scene Hitchcock allowed Melanie and the viewer to be trapped safely inside of a telephone booth as the birds attacked the town, in the attic both Melanie and the viewer are trapped without any protection.   Finally, despite Melanie and the Brenner’s escape from Bodega Bay, it is the birds that have dominated the town and the film, as Hitchcock leaves the viewer with a haunting image of the birds surrounding the house.  The sheer number of them consumes the image, a fitting final note to their accumulated violence and terror over the course of the film.

Isn’t this all merely coincidental?  Indeed, both of these stories aren’t original Hitchcock works (they are both based on written works), so his inclusion of birds is almost compulsory because of the material.  In the interview with Truffaut mentioned earlier, there isn’t any attempt to connect these two films based on birds; for that matter, there’s no reference to bird symbolism other than in that small section about Psycho.  Maybe this is just a fan’s wishful attempt to form a deeper connection between the films of one of his favorite directors.

However, this can’t be.  It may be farfetched that one director really put as much emphasis on birds as suggested, but this isn’t outside of Hitchcock’s realm.  Hitchcock was widely known for his borderline sadistic enjoyment of toying with audience members.  Using devices such as the MacGuffin, which is essentially an object that he makes us believe is important but really isn’t, or briefly appearing as a passerby in almost all of his films, Hitchcock considered the film medium not only an outlet for expression, but also a playground.  The bird imagery is no exception, albeit not so playful as menacing.  While appearing most prominently in the two films discussed, he also uses them as symbols for violence and death in some of his previous films.  The Lady Vanishes (1938), in particular, includes a short scene in which two men are fighting in a train car and a bird gets loose from its cage and flies into the middle of their scuffle.  The association between birds and violence continues in Vertigo (1958), although a bit more subtly.  When Madeleine “dies” for the first time, her death is connected to birds through the hummingbird pin she wears on her lapel.  This is further emphasized by the manner of her death: falling out the window of a bell tower, as if she was an injured bird.  These moments, and others, certainly build up to the heavier uses of bird symbolism in Psycho and The Birds, demonstrating a traceable progression of birds in his works.  Hitchcock was too smart of a director for these moments to be arbitrary.  It’s simply another testament to his genius that he was able to turn one of the lesser intimidating animals on the planet into a nightmarish demon from hell, terrorizing characters and audience members alike.

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING

Maria Giménez Cavallo reviews the landmark 1974 art film, a new 35mm print of which is playing at Film Forum through Thursday, May 10.

Jacques Rivette traces the history of cinema itself through this apparently unassuming film. He first presents us with the silent era as Julie (Dominique Labourier) follows Céline (Juliet Berto) through the streets of Paris without the use of any dialogue. Slapstick antics ensue as Julie disguises herself and chases Céline, as if they were in a film noir. Rivette uses older nonverbal methods of giving information to the spectator. We learn Céline’s name and occupation from a written card and the occasional inter-titles establish the setting. These titles quickly become emblematic of Brechtian alienation as they interrupt the action and acknowledge the film’s self-reflexivity. The remainder of the movie is characterized by a postmodernist style, as the protagonists interact with characters from a highly-stylized film within the film. Throughout, Rivette references many different genres – such as the musical when Julie takes over Céline’s role at the cabaret and theatrical drama when Céline dons a white gown and emphatically speaks of love and poetry while pretending to be Julie. Rivette amazingly manages to make these whimsical happenings flowing naturally from one to the next in this plot wrapped up in truth and fantasy.

Rivette comments on voyeurism and how its expression in film has evolved over time. During the silent sequence, the protagonists take turns observing each other. Julie follows Céline, letting us watch from her perspective, until Céline boards the tram and then in turn allows us to watch Julie through the frame of her window. This transference of viewpoints makes us equally connected to both protagonists and encourages us to question spectatorship. Later, they both dress-up as and impersonate the other, perhaps in order to better understand their opposite points of view. After the investigations of their lives is complete, Rivette takes us on a journey with these characters as they go on a journey with the characters from another film. These characters who are being watched, Céline and Julie, transform themselves into narrators who watch others. In doing so, we are able to identify more with them and unquestioningly accept the images they show of their memories as reliable.

Rivette also redefines the art of storytelling as Céline herself tells them in circles, accompanied by interspersed flashes of memory which cut back to reality through radical montage. In fact, the film they watch is nothing more than fragments of memories, symbolic of how we ourselves perceive the past. Each time the protagonists go to the house where the second film takes place, they discover a new element of the story and come closer to solving the mystery. Rivette shows images of Julie and Céline acting out the same role, cutting in a carefully crafted yet seemingly random way, to depict the act of repetition. Towards the end, they reciprocate the audience’s feelings by saying that they do not want to return to the house because they simply do not care enough anymore. By the third hour, I was just about fed up with their going around in circles and became desperate to leave. However, by the end I was glad to have stuck with the characters during their whirlwind adventure. The whole film is, in essence, a repetition of itself as the same images are played out again and again with subtle changes until all of the puzzle pieces make sense. One appreciates this movie for the same reason one might enjoy minimalist music or a Philip Glass opera. This epic of over three hours is more of a meta-cinematic experience than a film, which is well worth one’s patience.

OBITUARY: MCA (1964-2012)

“As a side note, MEEK’S CUTOFF is so real feeling and looking that I suspect Kelly may have stolen our plans and completed work on a time-machine that we had been putting the finishing touches on, and that MEEK’S is actually a documentary that she went back and shot in 1845. If anyone has any evidence to that effect, please contact me directly ASAP. My email address is any@oscilloscope.net ” - Adam Yauch, 1964-2012

       

A CONVERSATION WITH WHIT STILLMAN

 Joseph Pomp  talks with the writer-director behind Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, and Damsels in Distress about the French New Wave, finals clubs, film finance, etc.

Whit Stillman on the set of his new film, Damsels in Distress, now playing in New York (BAM, Landmark Sunshine and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas) and 50 other screens across the country. Coming soon to a college town near you.

Look closely at the above photo of Whit Stillman, who burst onto the American independent film scene with his so-called “Doomed Bourgeois in Love” trilogy [Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998)] but sadly did not return to the big screen until 2011, when Damsels in Distress premiered at Venice and Toronto.  It pictures him in his typically preppy garb, but more importantly it shows him with a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in hand.  A self-proclaimed cheapskate, Stillman considered the steady supply of Boxes o’ Joe on set a luxury. He assured me that Damsels’ budget was far lower than the figure estimated in a recent New York Times profile.

As frugal a filmmaker as he may be, Stillman first caught the film bug in a breeding ground about as affluent and élite as they get: Harvard College.  Some of his fondest memories of Harvard are from his days as a member of the Fly Club, a finals club that (along with the A.D. Club) is a Roman-letter offshoot of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.  Incidentally, the Bee (the female counterpart to the Fly) now operates out of a building that used to be occupied by D.U., a club that serves as the namesake for the Roman-letter frat that the girls (played by Greta Gerwig, Megalyn Echikunwoke, and Carrie McLemore) in Damsels in Distress frequent.  It’s as if Violet and Heather’s quest to take over D.U., perhaps the most philistinic of the frats at the fictional Seven Oaks College, has become a reality.

Although he did become quite interested in filmmaking while at Harvard, it was outside of the classroom.  Film was already being taught to some extent while Stillman was there, but by a “rarefied” group that defined itself in opposition to popular filmmaking and aligned itself with the visual arts department.  Although a fan of professor Richard P. Rodgers, memorialized in The Windmill Movie (2008, Alexander Olch), Stillman was inspired above all by a double bill at a Harvard Square theater of Bed and Board (1970, François Truffaut) and Claire’s Knee (1970, Eric Rohmer).  “I gravitated more toward the Truffaut,” Stillman told me, which is unsurprising, given the scene in Damsels in Distress in which Tom, a creepy French womanizer, shows Lily Stolen Kisses (1968).

Writing about Noah Baumbach, the filmmaker probably most similar to Stillman, Jonathan Rosenbaum compared the former to Jean Renoir and the latter to Rohmer.  But, as the anecdote above confirms, Stillman does not feel exceptionally close to Rohmer (in contrast to Baumbach, who modeled Margot and the Wedding in some ways after Pauline at the Beach and even named his son after the director).  Like Wes Anderson, the other director most commonly associated with Stillman and Baumbach, Stillman adores and draws much inspiration from musicals and the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s (especially by Preston Sturges).  Highly erudite though his films may be, Stillman is no austere auteur.  Damsels in Distress in particular showcases his zany and whimsical way of framing the world. 

Part of the magic and sheer joy of Damsels in Distress may derive from the fact that it’s been gestating for a while.  After working on several projects in the early aughts that never came to fruition, Stillman penned the script in 2008.  Also, despite being shot digitally, it has a deliberately anachronistic look and feel.  One of Stillman’s big aesthetic choices, for example, was not to include cellular phones and other technological gadgets.  They distract the viewer from what’s most important in a movie: the characters.  

Of course, technology has become an even more unwelcome distraction from going to the movies in the first place.  In an age when far too many people do their movie-watching on Netflix and other sites on the internet, Damsels in Distress will be only in theaters for the foreseeable future.  “We’re doing it slowly, the old-fashioned way,” Stillman said about the film’s release.  After opening in just a few major cities on April 6, Damsels has been expanding each week and will reach its peak when it opens in about 100 more theaters all across the country this Friday, May 4.

As for what’s next, Stillman said that the trials and tribulations he faced trying to bring various novels to the screen over the last decade have made him not want to deal with living writers whose works are under copyright and need to be optioned.  While he would be open to adapting older writers whose work is in the public domain, he seems most of all set on making his “Jamaican film,” tentatively titled Dancing Mood.  I asked Whit to promise to include instructions on how to dance the ska (like the ones he gave for the Sambola at the close of Damsels), to which he responded that in fact he wants to make his own version of the ska dance entirely.

DISPATCH FROM PARIS: ELLES

Blair McClendon, spending the semester abroad in Paris, reports on France’s new releases.

Elles (Dir: Malgorzata Szumowska)

After enjoying its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, the film opens tomorrow, April 27, at the Angelika Film Center and Clearview Chelsea in New York.

The issue film is a trap. It is rarely done well and often it has little to do with the talent of those behind the film and more to do with the project’s conception. Its origins can be rather divergent, ranging from an earnest conviction to treat a subject to the desire to profit off of the day’s scandal. Frequently, the result feels inorganic at best or patently false at worst. Malgorzata Szumowska’s latest film tends toward the former. Elles, a French film about the sex trade and obliquely student poverty, is the strange work that is simultaneously a success and an utter failure. The cast, led by Juliette Binoche, is fantastic. In fact, a great deal of the film’s achievements are owed to the strength of the acting. Some plaudits must, however, be reserved for Szumowska, who serves as both the director and co-writer. The last act alone is a masterpiece. A dinner, which has been in the works since the beginning of the film, turns into a Buñuelian exhibition of Johns that Binoche’s character could not possibly know, but whose apparitions haunt her nonetheless. Her abrupt departure, return and attempt to do for her husband what the young girls have done for their clients ends in an awful rejection. Szumowska’s willingness to mix a fluid tracking camera with static and alternate the brightness of the party with the deep blues and blacks of Binoche’s are beautiful examples of manipulative effects the medium can have on the spectator.

Indeed, the entire film progresses from a tired rehashing of visual and thematic platitudes towards genuine artistic invention. Unfortunately, some of the weight one is supposed to feel in the end has already been alleviated by earlier indulgences in well-trafficked clichés. Perhaps the most egregious of which is yet another shot of a woman’s hand pressed against the inside of a shower as she breathes heavily and sorrowfully to let us know that, yes, she is disquieted by what she has seen and heard. Using such obvious and melodramatic shorthand is something that must be earned within the context of the film, and Elles completely failed to do so. On a thematic level, it is rather tiresome to hear once again how a member of the upper middle class has descended into the streets, seen the sights and returned with an understanding that life is not so rosy as one might have thought. The mere fact that Szumowska has made Binoche’s character a journalist only highlights the sense that all these lives can ever be is the subject of research and herein lies the problem in the issue film. I am not proposing that there are certain subjects that one does not have the right to treat, but if the desperation of destitution must be shown let us avoid making the type of film that shakes us but eventually lets us off of the hook.

Elles shocks us in the way a well-written human interest piece shocks us. Perhaps we ought to give the journalist an award, perhaps we ought to launch an investigation of some sort - or perhaps we ought to go grab a bite to eat before turning in for the night. As a director, Szumowska fully demonstrates her capacity to create cinematically brilliant sequences, but if the film is approached as a whole she does not demonstrate that she deserves to be categorized amongst the best directors of her day. There are numerous debates over the worth of a canon, and perhaps hierarchies within the group of masters are futile, but ultimately Elles only shows the director’s potential for reaching that group. We reward those artists who not only have great technical skill, but who demonstrate some unique sensibility and some willingness to dispense with the hackneyed. We remember those who start the revolution or are its culmination. While the last act alone is worth the price of admission, the revolution is not a dinner party.

THE CANON: CHILDREN OF PARADISE

Will Noah reflects on catching up with the film canon, in which Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise has a secure spot.

The one-week New York run of the new 4K restoration of Children of Paradise has elapsed, but you can look forward to a stunning Criterion Blu-Ray in the coming months.

4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH

“The Bitter End”: A Reflection on 4:44 Last Day on Earth by Max Nelson

Opens in New York: March 23 at Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center

Hemingway was wrong. An honest story is not necessarily an interesting one – unless the storyteller lives like Ernest Hemingway. Case in point: Abel Ferrara’s new doomsday drama 4:44 Last Day on Earth. In a boisterous Q&A following the film’s Friday-night premiere at the IFC Center, Abel Ferrara suggested that the couple at the heart of the film are surrogates for the director and his girlfriend (not surprising, given that the female lead is Ferrara’s real-life partner). It’s a safe assumption that Cisco (Willem Dafoe)’s onscreen response to the world’s imminent demise is quite similar to what Ferrara’s would be. This makes 4:44 Last Day on Earth both an honest film and a difficult one to critique: would I, who have never even met Abel Ferrara, be justified in claiming not to respect the man, or in finding the way he’d choose to spend his final moments shallow and uninteresting (two responses which are, after all, practically the same thing)? 

I’m forced to admit that I don’t find the onscreen behavior in 4:44 Last Day on Earth particularly meaningful. But I have, if not respect, a great deal of affection for this film. It’s not just Ferrara’s boundless sincerity that makes me like the film in spite of myself, though that’s part of it. I like 4:44 Last Day on Earth because, of the many high-profile doomsday films in recent memory, it strikes me as the only one that’s actually about the end of the world. A film like Melancholia might be ostensibly apocalyptic, but it’s the apocalypse as a plot device – as an excuse for Lars von Trier to articulate his ever-more-despairing view of human nature. The instinct of any doomsday director is to go universal - to observe how people might react to the world’s imminent end and to draw from those observations general conclusions about what people in general value. The film becomes more about those conclusions than about the situation that inspired them.  

 None of this for Ferrara. 4:44 Last Day on Earth is one man’s answer to how he’d spend his final hours: I’d make love to my girlfriend, drop in on a few old friends, get into one last fight with my ex, consider getting high. Ferrara’s answer—and, more elliptically, that of his painter girlfriend—are all we get. Everyone else’s responses, among them demonstrations of religious devotion and final musical performances, we see only through the eyes of this single couple watching TV in their apartment. A Chinese delivery boy’s farewell to his parents, made possible by Cisco’s Skype account, lacks subtitles—if the film’s central couple doesn’t understand the boy then neither do we.

By making the film about him and only him, Ferrara (perhaps even inadvertently) makes the film a challenge to us all. A film like Melancholia doesn’t force each of its viewers to ask themselves how they personally would spend their final moments—to dismiss the response of von Trier’s protagonists to their impending doom as unrealistic or insincere is to disagree with a particular view of what people in general are like. But the only point of comparison we have for evaluating one man’s individual response to the end of the word is our own personal response. Before we can pass judgment on Ferrara’s final hours we must first imagine how ours would differ from or improve on his.  

Is 4:44 Last Day on Earth a shallow film? Maybe. But I know that I spent the entire subway ride home from the IFC pondering why I found it shallow, and in the process I was forced to investigate what I considered important and meaningful in life. I was denied the comfort of abstractions, unable to fall back on lines of thought that speak only in impersonal, universal terms. I had to ask myself whether my own hypothetical response to the end of days was worthy of respect. Is there another film in recent memory whose merits originate precisely from its lack thereof, whose very real and quite profound depths emerge only from its shallowness?