Friday, May 17, 2013
Enough beef for hungry cinephiles
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared Sept. 30, 2008. I'm re-posting it as part of The Howard Hawks Blogathon occurring through May 31 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
Has any filmmaker shown mastery in more genres than Howard Hawks? Sixty years ago today, Hawks released one of his best Westerns (not a motel) in Red River, which also gave John Wayne one of his best roles and Montgomery Clift a notable early screen appearance.
Hawks made other great Westerns (most notably Rio Bravo, which also featured Wayne and Walter Brennan), but Red River, despite its abrupt climax, remains my favorite with its tale of a long cattle drive, surrogate father-son conflict and unmistakable gay subtext. Wayne admittedly was a limited actor, but he always was at his best when he played a character steeped in darkness and obsession such as Thomas Dunson here or Ethan Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers. He's helped immeasurably by getting to act opposite the young Clift, the antithesis of acting style when compared to Wayne. Hawks' direction of the film itself truly amazes, especially in the many scenes of the huge numbers of cattle, all done in the days without the easy out of CGI (A scene of the drive even earned a shoutout in Peter Bogdanovich's great 1971 film The Last Picture Show). He also manages to include plenty of his trademark humor, mostly through the ensemble of supporting character actors led by Brennan (whose character loses his false teeth in a poker game) and including Hank Worden (the decrepit waiter in Twin Peaks for those unfamiliar with the name) who gets plenty of throwaway lines such as how he doesn't like when things go good or bad, he just wants them to go in between.
Hawks even manages to toss in what may be an example of the ultimate Hawksian woman with Joanne Dru as Tess Millay, who doesn't let a little thing such as an arrow stop her from nagging a man with questions. Hawks astounds viewers to this day with his versatility among genres: Westerns, screwball comedies, musicals, war films, noirs, sci-fi — pick a genre and Hawks probably took it on and scored. It's a mystery to me why his name isn't brought up more by people other than the most obsessive film buffs. Red River isn't my favorite Hawks, but it's one of his many great ones and continues to entertain after 60 years.
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Labels: 40s, Bogdanovich, Clift, Hawks, John Ford, Movie Tributes, Twin Peaks, W. Brennan, Wayne
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Friday, August 03, 2012
Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (40-21)
Fritz Lang made a lot of good movies, but nothing equaled this tale told in his native language. Peter Lorre made his mark as the hunted child killer in a film filled with atmosphere, suspense and thought.
Kept from the public for years after its initial release, the one plus to its exile was that I experienced this masterpiece of a political thriller — 50 years old this year — for the first time on the big screen in a crisp, black-and-white print. I hope that Jonathan Demme’s misguided idea of trying to remake this classic didn’t sour the original or scare younger viewers away from seeking out Frankenheimer’s version. The 1962 Manchurian Candidate contains many attributes that make it worth recommending, but every film lover must witness Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of Mrs. Iselin, a contender for the top 10 screen villains of all time.
My much-missed dog Leland Palmer Copeland didn’t usually watch TV, but whenever this classic came on, she was drawn to it. One time, Leland even seemed to sit on the couch and watch it from beginning to end. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the colors. The sad side effect of Leland’s affection for this film that no one truly ever outgrows is that now that she isn’t here to watch it Dorothy and her friends with me any longer, Oz sometimes proves too painful for me to revisit.
No one gives this film the credit for its darkness that it really deserves. This isn't sappy sentimental drivel; this is about a man who feels as if he's been pissed on all his life and finally reaches the end of his rope. James Stewart's talent, Capra's gifts and the script by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett make George Bailey's journey plausible and touching. Only a Mr. Potter could hate this film.
Howard Hawks directed John Wayne to his second-greatest performance in this thrilling tale of a cattle drive and bitter rivalries. It also contains the perfect example of a Hawksian woman as Joanne Dru keeps talking, even with an arrow protruding from her body. I feel as if Hawks has slipped some in esteem among the old masters as far as the younger critics out there go. This master of nearly all genres seems long overdue for resurgence.
I wrote in my 2007 list that The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde constantly swap slots for my choice as the best film of 1967 and damn if they haven’t done it again five years later. One of the many great lines in 2009’s (500) Days of Summer comes when the narrator, in describing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, says that an early exposure to sad British pop music and a misreading of The Graduate led him to believe that the search for love always leads to The One. (If I’m still around to make another top 100 in 2019, I suspect you’ll find (500) Days of Summer there — after multiple viewings I believe it’s the 21st century Annie Hall.) Back to The Graduate itself, Nichols’ direction looks better with each viewing and the cast remains remarkable. It’s just that my reaction to the story itself that waxes and wanes. It’s never bad – it’s just that sometimes I find myself loving it a bit less than the last time.
The history of movies doesn’t lack for great teamings of directors and actors and the man who more or less made John Wayne an icon with the way he introduced him as The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach also directed the Duke to his best acting performance here. Wayne always worked as a good guy, but he proved his acting chops when someone inserted an element of darkness into his characters. The Searchers also has proved to be a useful template for many other films, most notably Taxi Driver and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Ford brought a lot of great imagery to this story and it arguably contains the greatest closing shot of his long career.
As I foretold a couple notches back when writing about The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde holds the higher esteem in my heart in this snapshot in time. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the journey I took through Penn’s entire filmography following his death, but it’s a great film regardless. Each time I watch it again I become more convinced — harrowing moments of violence aside — this truly plays as much as a comedy as The Graduate. At the time I re-visited it, watching how the Depression-era bank robbers became folk heroes to the masses, the resonance with the destruction 21st century Wall Street bankers wreaked on our nation’s economy was easier to identify with than ever before.
In the 1927-28 contest for "Artistic Quality of Production" at the Oscars, this film faced off against Sunrise and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. While Sunrise won and I wouldn’t argue against its status as a superb film (It’s not that far back on this list after all), I admit to preferring Vidor's film and its tale of striving to succeed as everything in the world appears to conspire to keep you down.
There's a good reason that so many cite Robert Towne's screenplay as one of the great examples of writing for film. If only all scripts (including some of Towne’s) were this superb. It remains one of the best examples of a modern noir, filmed in color, as well as Polanski’s best work. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes came in his unbelievable and unforgettable run of great 1970s performances that began with 1969’s Easy Rider. It also gives us one of the sickest screen villains in Noah Cross, played so well by John Huston. Chinatown always will live on in the pantheon of film’s with last lines so memorable even people who’ve never seen it know the words.
You know 1950 was a great year for movies released in the United States when a picture as great as All About Eve only finishes third on my list for that year (behind The Third Man and Sunset Blvd.). That takes nothing away from All About Eve though with its brittle and brilliant dialogue and multiple great performances, including Bette Davis’ best, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter and, most especially, George Sanders as Addison DeWitt.
Death comes in large doses in The Wild Bunch, but its violence, despite Peckinpah turning the carnage into quasi-ballet-like imagery, isn’t what makes the film so remarkable. The film delivers its true eulogy not for its human characters but for the death of an era and a way of life. As with so many of Peckinpah’s great films, too many misunderstood the film’s intent but The Wild Bunch only grows more evocative and timeless with age, thanks in large part to its ensemble of acting veterans who display the film’s themes through every crease and line on their faces. With the recent death of Ernest Borgnine, Jaime Sanchez (Angel) remains the last living actor who belonged to the bunch.
Billy Wilder (like Howard Hawks) had the talent to soar in almost any genre and this quintessential film noir is a supreme example. How it lost the Oscar to Going My Way and Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson failed to get nominations still puzzles me. Wait — no it doesn't. The Academy picks wrong much more often than they pick right. Barbara Stanwyck gave a lot of great performances, but Phyllis Dietrichson may have topped them all — and if she didn’t, the others better look out.
Kurosawa gets routinely mentioned by many as a master (and deservedly so), thanks mainly to his great sword-laden epics, but for me this "modern" film stands high as one of his strongest, telling the sad story of a long suffering bureaucrat who seeks meaning in life when he's diagnosed with terminal cancer. A truly touching, remarkable film.
Has there ever been a more touching image placed on film that the ending of this silent film, made well after silent films were dead, when the newly sighted blind girl realizes her benefactor was a little tramp? I don't think so either.
The film that marked Woody’s leap from pure comedy to something more still stands as one of his very best 35 years later. With a structure that deserves comparisons to Citizen Kane in that you’re never quite sure what comes next that guarantees a perpetual freshness no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Allen threw almost every trick he could think of into Annie Hall — animated sequences, subtitles to translate what characters really thought, split screens (even if they actually filmed scenes in a room with a divider — and produced an instant classic. Diane Keaton delights as the title character, the film overflows with priceless lines and timeless sequences and the first great Christopher Walken monologue.
It's almost become shorthand to argue that Part II bests Part I in The Godfather trilogy, but I disagree. The original still takes the top spot in my book. I don't think the crosscutting of Michael and young Vito ever quite meshes and instead interrupts the rhythm of Part II. No such problem in the original, an example of making a movie masterpiece out of a pulpy novel. Examining the film more closely again earlier this year for its 40th anniversary while I enjoyed and admired it as much as ever, for the first time I had to acknowledge that unlike later mob classics such as Goodfellas or TV’s Sopranos, The Godfather does romanticize the Corleones. You never see innocents suffer from their line of work — Vito even denies they’re killers. It doesn’t change the film’s status as a fine piece of cinematic art, but it did make me think harder about it than I had before.
Many directors deliver great one-two punches in terms of brilliant consecutive films and Lumet pulled off one of the best of them in 1975 and 1976, beginning with this masterpiece based on a true bank robbery. Al Pacino delivers what may be one of his top two or three performances. It also contains the best work of the sadly too brief career of John Cazale and a peerless ensemble. Lumet’s direction aided by the editing of Dede Allen produced one of the most re-watchable films of all time. If I run across it on TV, even cut up, I stay glued to the end.
After more than 70 years, John Huston’s directing debut still sizzles. Watching Bogart embrace his first real role as a good guy exhilarates the viewer as he thrusts and parries with the delightful supporting cast of Mary Astor, Ward Bond, Elisha Cook Jr., Gladys George, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Barton McClane and Lee Patrick. What many forget about the film comes in that unforgettable climax that basically consists of five characters talking to each other for nearly 30 minutes — and it’s riveting.
The film that really put Spielberg on the pop culture map remains to me his greatest accomplishment. Two distinct and perfect halves: Terror on the beach followed by the brilliance of three men on a boat. It's also an example of how sometimes trashy novels can be turned into true works of film art in a way great novels usually miss the mark in translation (though Peter Benchley's novel at least killed Hooper off as well leaving nonexpert waterphobe Brody as the victor and sole survivor, which would have made for a slightly better ending but I'm nitpicking).
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Labels: Arthur Penn, Capra, Chaplin, Coppola, Hawks, John Ford, kinpah, Kurosawa, Lang, Lists, Lumet, Mankiewicz, Nichols, Polanski, Schrader, Spielberg, Towne, Wilder, Woody
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Monday, May 07, 2012
Love Story
— Orson Welles on Make Way for Tomorrow
By John Cochrane
No one film dominated the 1937 Academy Awards, but with the country still in the grips of the Great Depression and slowly realizing Europe’s inevitable march back into war, the subtle theme of the evening in early 1938 seemed to be distant escapism — anything to help people forget the troubled times at home. The Life of Emile Zola, a period biopic set in France, won best picture. Spencer Tracy received his first best actor Oscar, playing a Portuguese sailor in Captains Courageous, and Luise Rainer was named best actress for a second year in a row, playing the wife of a struggling Chinese farmer in the morality tale The Good Earth.
Best director that year went to Hollywood veteran Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth. McCarey’s resume was impressive. He paired Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together as a team, and he had directed, supervised or helped write much of their best silent work. He had collaborated with W.C. Fields, Charley Chase, Eddie Cantor, Mae West, Harold Lloyd, George Burns and Gracie Allen — almost an early Hollywood Comedy Hall of Fame. He had also directed the Marx Brothers in the freewheeling political satire Duck Soup (1933) — generally now considered their best film. The Awful Truth was a screwball comedy about an affluent couple whose romantic chemistry constantly sabotages their impending divorce that starred Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy — and a breakout performance by a handsome leading man named Cary Grant — who supposedly had based a lot of his on-screen persona on the personality of his witty and elegant director. Addressing the Academy, the affable McCarey said “Thank you for this wonderful award. But you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”
The picture that McCarey was referring to was his earlier production from 1937, titled Make Way for Tomorrow — an often tough and unsentimental drama about an elderly couple who loses their home to foreclosure and must separate when none of their children are able or willing to take them both in. The film opened to stellar reviews and promptly died at the box office — being unknown to most people for decades. Fortunately, recent events have begun to rectify this oversight as this buried American cinematic gem turns 75 years old.
Based on Josephine Lawrence’s novel The Years Are So Long, the film opens at the cozy home of Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi), who have been married for 50 years. Four of their five children have arrived for what they believe will be a joyous family dinner — until Bark breaks the news that he hasn’t been able to keep up with the
mortgage payments since being out of work and that the bank will repossess the property within days. Bark and Lucy insist that they will stay together, regardless of what happens. With little time to plan, the family decides that, for the time being, Lucy will move to New York to live with their eldest son George’s family in their apartment, while Bark will be 360 miles away — sleeping on the couch at the home of their daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon) and her unemployed husband Bill (Ralph Remley). For the film's first hour or so, we see Bark and Lucy trying to adjust to their new surroundings. While George (an excellent Thomas Mitchell) tries to be as pleasant and accommodating to his mother as possible, his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) and daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read) display little patience and dislike the disruption of their routines. Meanwhile, Bark spends his time walking around his new hometown, looking for a job and visiting a new friend, a local shopkeeper named Max Rubens (Maurice Moscowitz).Many filmmakers develop a visual signature that dominates their work, but McCarey employs a fairly basic and straightforward style, using group and reaction shots as well as perceptive editing that places the emphasis on the actors and the story. Working with screenwriter Vina Delmar, McCarey creates set pieces that blend touches of light comedy and everyday drama that feel so correct and truthful that audiences likely feel a sometimes uncomfortable recognition with them. Often, this stems from McCarey's use of improvisation to sharpen his scenes before filming them. If short on ideas, he would play a nearby piano on the set until he figured out what to do. This practice creates a freshness that, as Peter Bogdanovich points out, gives the impression that what you’re watching wasn't planned but just happened. A large part of the film’s greatness also comes from the cast, headed by Moore and Bondi as Bark and Lucy. Both theatrically trained actors, vaudeville star Moore (age 61) and future Emmy winner Bondi (age 48), through the wonders of make-up and black and white photography prove completely convincing as an elderly couple in their 70s.
Moore performs terrifically as the blunt, but loving Bark. Bondi gives an even better turn as Lucy. In one scene, representative of McCarey’s direction and Bondi’s performance, Lucy inadvertently interrupts a bridge-playing class being taught by her daughter-in-law at the apartment by making small talk and noticing the cards in players’ hands. She’s an intrusion, but by the end of the evening, after being abandoned by her granddaughter at the movies and returning home, she takes a phone call in the living room from her husband. Critic Gary Giddins notes that as the class listens in to her side of the conversation, she becomes highly sympathetic — and the scene now flips with the card students visibly moved and feeling invasive of her space and privacy. Then there’s the crucial scene where Lucy sees the writing on the wall and offers to move out of the apartment and into a nursing home without Bark’s knowledge, before her family can commit her — so as not to be a burden to them anymore. She shares a loving moment with her guilt-ridden son George. (“You were always my favorite child,” she sincerely tells him.) His disappointment in himself in the scene’s coda resonates deeply. Lucy’s character seems meek and easily taken advantage of when we first meet her, but she’s really the strongest person in the story. It’s her love and sacrifice for her husband and family that give the movie much of its emotional weight, and the unforgettable final shot belongs to her.
McCarey and Delmar create totally believable characters and it should be pointed out that while friendly, decent people, Bark and Lucy, by no means, lack flaws. Bark doesn't make a particularly good patient when sick in bed two-thirds of the way through the story, and Lucy stands firm in her ways and beliefs — traits that can annoy, but people can be that way. Even the children aren’t bad — they have reasons that the audience can understand — even if we don’t agree with their often seemingly selfish or preoccupied behavior. This delicate skill of observation was not lost on McCarey’s good friend, the great French director Jean Renoir, who once said, “McCarey understands people better than anyone in Hollywood.”
As memorable a first hour as Make Way for Tomorrow delivers, McCarey saves the best moments for the film’s third act. Bark and Lucy meet one last time in New York, hours before his train departure for California to live with their unseen daughter Addie for health reasons. For the first time since the opening scene, the couple finally reunites. The last 20 minutes of the picture overflows with what Roger Ebert refers to in his Great Movies essay on the film as mono no aware — which roughly translated means “a bittersweet sadness at the passing of all things.” Regrets, but nothing that Bark and Lucy really would change if they had to do everything over again.
Throughout the story, the Coopers often have been humiliated or brushed off by their children. When a car salesman (Dell Henderson) mistakes them for a wealthy couple and takes them for a ride in a fancy car, the audience cringes — expecting another uncomfortable moment — but then something interesting happens. As they arrive at their destination and an embarrassed Bark and Lucy explain that there’s been a misunderstanding, the salesman tactfully assuages their concerns. He allows them to save face, by saying his pride in the car made him want to show it off. Walking into The Vogard Hotel where they honeymooned 50 years ago, the Coopers get treated like friends or VIPs — first by a hat check girl (Louise Seidel) and then by the hotel manager (Paul Stanton), who happily takes his time talking to them and comps their bar tab. Bark and Lucy's children expect their parents at George’s apartment for dinner, but Bark phones them to say that they won't be coming.
At one point, we see the couple from behind as they sit together, sharing a loving moment of intimate conversation. As Lucy leans toward her husband to kiss him, she seems to notice the camera and demurely stops herself from such a public display of affection. It’s an extraordinary sequence that’s followed by another one when Bark and Lucy get up to dance. As they arrive on the dance floor, the orchestra breaks into a rumba and the Coopers seem lost and out of place. The watchful bandleader notices them, without a word, quickly instructs the musicians to switch to the love song “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Bark gratefully acknowledges the conductor as he waltzes Lucy around the room. Then the clock strikes 9, and Bark and Lucy rush off to the train station for the film’s closing scene.
Paramount studio head Adolph Zukor reportedly visited the set several times, pleading with his producer-director to change the ending, but McCarey — who saw the movie as a labor of love and a personal tribute to his recently deceased father — wouldn’t budge. The film was released to rave reviews, though at least one reviewer couldn’t recommend it because it would “ruin your day.” Industry friends and colleagues such as John Ford and Frank Capra were deeply impressed. McCarey even received an enthusiastic letter from legendary British playwright George Bernard Shaw, but the Paramount marketing department didn’t know what to do with the picture. Audiences, still facing a tough economy, didn’t want to see a movie about losing your home and being marginalized in old age. They stayed away, while the Motion Picture Academy didn’t seem to notice. McCarey was fired from his contract at Paramount (later rebounding that year at Columbia with the unqualified success of The Awful Truth), and the film seemed to disappear from view for many years.
The movie never was forgotten completely though. Screenwriter Kogo Noda, who wrote frequently with the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, saw the film and used it as an inspiration for Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953), in which an elderly couple journey to the big city to visit their adult children and quietly realize that their offspring don’t have time for them in their busy lives — only temporarily getting their full attention when one of the parents unexpectedly dies during the trip home. Ironically, Ozu’s film also would be unknown to most of the world for decades, until exported in the early 1970s, almost 10 years after the master filmmaker’s death. Tokyo Story, with its sublime simplicity and quiet insight into human nature now is considered by many critics and filmmakers to be one of the greatest movies ever made — placing high in the Sight & Sound polls of 1992 and 2002. In the meantime, Make Way for Tomorrow slowly started getting more attention in its own right, probably sometime in the mid- to late 1960s. Although the movie never was released on VHS, it occasionally was shown enough on television to garner a devoted underground following. More recently, the movie played at the Telluride Film Festival, where audiences at sold out screenings were stunned by its undeniable quality and its powerful, timeless message. Make Way for Tomorrow was finally was released on DVD by The Criterion Collection and was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress on the National Film Registry in 2010.
The funny phenomenon of how audiences in general dislike unhappy endings, and yet somehow our psyches depend on them always proves puzzling. Classics such as Casablanca (1942), Vertigo (1958), The Third Man (1949 U.K.; 1950 U.S.) and even the fictional romance in a more contemporary hit such as Titanic (1997) wouldn't carry the same stature or mystique in popular culture if they somehow had been pleasantly resolved. Life often disappoints and turns out unpredictably, messy and frequently filled with loss. Even though many people claim they don’t like sad stories, it comforts somehow to know that we aren’t alone — that others understand and feel similarly as we do about life’s experiences. It’s what makes us human.
Make Way for Tomorrow serves as many things. It’s a movie about family dynamics and the Fifth Commandment. Gary Giddins points out that it’s also a message film about the need for a safety net such as Social Security — which hadn't been fully implemented when the
picture was released. It’s a plea for treating each other with more kindness — in a culture that increasingly pushes the old aside to embrace the young and the new, and it’s one of the saddest movies ever made. At its most basic level, it’s a tender love story between two people who have spent most of their lives together — knowing each other so well that words often seem unnecessary. However you choose to look at it, Make Way for Tomorrow remains one of the greatest American films — certainly a strong contender for the best classic Hollywood movie that most people have never heard of. Leo McCarey would create highly successful hits that were more sentimental later on in his career — including the enjoyable romance Love Affair (1939) and its subsequent color remake An Affair to Remember (1957), starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. He also would direct Bing Crosby as a charismatic priest in 1944’s Going My Way (7 Oscars — including picture, director, actor) and its superior sequel, 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s (8 nominations, 1 win), co-starring Ingrid Bergman, but he never forgot about Make Way for Tomorrow, which remained a personal favorite until the day he died from emphysema in 1969. Leo McCarey did not live to see his masterpiece fully appreciated, but that wasn't necessary. In 1938, he knew the film’s value.It’s a marvelous picture. Bring plenty of Kleenex.
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Labels: 30s, Bellamy, Bogdanovich, Capra, Cary, Deborah Kerr, Ebert, Fields, Ingrid Bergman, Irene Dunne, John Ford, Luise Rainer, Marx Brothers, McCarey, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Renoir, T. Mitchell, Tracy, Welles
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Monday, March 12, 2012
Is the magic and the meaning in the movies or ourselves?
was meant perhaps to suggest a mixture of horror movie and automated toyshop, but now just provides noisy irritation. Films
have become a lot quieter since then — at least in the music department. And above all the acting seems weirdly dated,
with its deliberately sought-out stiffness and posing.…Now the performance just looks arch, and we know that stylisation in film requires more extreme measures — a real marionette-effect, for instance. It's notable that in this film Resnais succeeds best
with his anti-naturalist note when the actors are either quite still — so still you don't know whether they are in a moving picture
or a photograph — or dancing, rocking slowly, dully, to the sounds of an unearthly waltz.”
— Michael Wood, The Guardian, July 14, 2011
By Edward Copeland
The above quote appeared in a piece Wood wrote on the occasion of a 50th anniversary engagement of Last Year in Marienbad. Despite the way it reads, Wood's overall tone was positive. Putting aside that he must not go to new movies that often if he thinks film scores today have become a lot quieter, his words about the acting in Marienbad struck me as another reason why Resnais' film entrances me in a way other films that could be called "similar" don't. I can't imagine anyone, fan or foe of the film, watching it thinking that acting or
characterization had occurred in Marienbad or even had been desired. Using the actors as props but attempting to make them "real" in other movies that could be lumped into the same category as Marienbad might be why works by a filmmaker such as Lars von Trier or each successive effort by Terrence Malick don't: They go to the trouble of pretending they care about narrative storytelling and their poor performers, such as a Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia or a Sean Penn in The Tree of Life, try to create characters in universes where that doesn't matter. At least Resnais and Robbe-Grillet made it clear to everyone that the actors' importance equaled that of the ceiling fixtures (probably less) in Marienbad so that doesn't get in my way. It's been a progression for Malick. His film that I tolerated best was Badlands. Then came Days of Heaven, pretty but blah with a voiceover from a poorly educated person with a Southern accent waxing philosophical as if she were in a Coen brothers movie, only not doing it for laughs. It got even worse in The Thin Red Line, so much so that I skipped The New World (with its Clue-like 15 different versions) entirely. So many spoke glowingly about The Tree of Life (I even let my contributior J.D. run a positive review of it before I saw it), even people who didn't care for The Thin Red Line, that I decided I'd give The Tree of Life a chance and went in with an open mind. I should have known better. Malick and I just aren't cut out for each other. I've been saying for a long time he really should be a nature documentarian because narratives aren't his forte. I can feel the anger of his fans exercising their fingers to beging composing their replies. Now, I didn't just write my anti-Malick feelings to get a rise out of them but also to remind people of one of the central objectives of this second, more generalized Marienbad-inspired post: All opinions about movies are subjective. Before we move on, just to calm the Malick fans before I whack on Lars von Trier, check out this interview with my good friend Matt Zoller Seitz, an ordained archbishop in the Church of Terrence Malick, and his five-part video essay series on Malick's films from Badlands through The Tree of Life for The Museum of the Moving Image. 
As for Von Trier, we got off on the wrong foot with poor Max von Sydow's voiceover leading the somnambulistic tone of Zentropa. Somehow Emily Watson overcame his traps to give a good performance Breaking the Waves, which I otherwise rejected. I admit that I still would like to see The Kingdom and I liked Dancer in the Dark. Never saw The Idiots. Never wanted to see Dogville. The Five Obstructions sounds interesting as an experiment, not necessarily a movie. Perhaps a reality TV show. Then came Melancholia — ay caramba — though you definitely see the Marienbad influence there: He even had similarly sculpted trees. If you want to see a 2011 film that involves the sudden appearance of a planet in the sky, rent the indie Another Earth. It's shorter, better written and contains actual characters. It will mean sacrificing Udo Kier's appearance as a wedding planner complaining that the bride ruined his work. I'm certain I've said enough in this section to get blood pressures boiling, so now I can move on to what too many people — both moviegoers and critics alike — tend to do: Take what's said about their favorite movies and filmmakers way too seriously. Forgetting that the things I wrote above are my opinion and, more importantly, opinions about movies and filmmakers. This is hardly the equivalent of, let me think of a recent example, Rush Limbaugh calling a law student testifying to Congress about a friend's medical reason for access to contraceptives a slut who must have lots of sex and if health insurers cover female contraceptives, he should be allowed to see tapes of her having sex on his computer. Big difference between that and me saying I don't think Melancholia is a good movie. I'm giving a subjective opinion. Rush is being an asshole.
Thinking about how upset people can get when a favorite film has been attacked takes me back to my days as a working critic. I usually received angry letters or phone calls, since my paper fortunately didn't run movie critics' photos. I preferred anonymity, like a food critic. Ironically, given my physical state now, I once received a letter from an organization for disabled people taking me to task for referring to a character in a movie as being "confined to a wheelchair." They were right and I never used that phrase again even before I learned the hard way why those words are inaccurate. I recall the woman who called the day I gave The Beverly Hillbillies movie the smackdown it so richly deserved. (That's one plus to this nonprofit blog thing — with the exception of my
obsession of trying to see all the major Oscar nominees each year, I only see what I want. I feel sad for those few remaining paid critics who still have to sit through Adam Sandler movies.) Anyway, this woman called almost as soon as I arrived in the office that morning to harangue me about the bad review — even though she hadn't seen the movie. What cracked me up was her question: "Do you think the people who made that movie appreciate you writing those things about their film?" I didn't have phone numbers for Penelope Spheeris or any of the cast members to get the answer. The absolute funniest phone call came from an older-sounding man horrified because I'd given something a good review. It was the Monday after The Crying Game opened in our city. I already had placed it at No. 1 on my 10 best of 1992 list, but its January 1993 opening gave me the first chance for a full-fledged review. The man couldn't believe I liked that movie. "It made me ill," he told me. "I felt like I needed to take a shower afterward." It took every ounce of restraint I could muster not to respond, "You found Jaye Davidson attractive, eh?" The final one isn't really funny and it took place in person. I was heading to a dreaded radio-promoted screening of something and I stopped by the concession stand to get a drink. The kid working knew who I was and gave me an unmistakably dirty look, so obvious that I had to ask what was wrong. "I used to respect you. Your reviews were the only good ones that paper ever had," he said. I asked him what I did wrong. Turned out that he couldn't believe how I tore apart Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. He was working and so was I, so I didn't have time to try to explain subjectivity or how great I thought Pauline Kael was though I probably disagreed with her more than I agreed, but what can you do? 
The other issue I wanted to address was whether meaning matters, though the person who responded most specifically to that query answered it more than 45 years ago and died nearly seven years ago. Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" struck me like a lightning bolt this week, probably quite annoyingly since I imagine many out there had read it long ago and I'm cheerleading it as if I just found out the world was round and am telling everyone I know. Sontag quotes a famous saying by D.H. Lawrence that I had heard before that might be the most concise warning against reading too much into art, be it literature or film: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” Sontag drops his line into Part 6, which I quoted a couple times in my review. She also writes there, "Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories." Sontag carries it further, questioning (in 1966 remember) what role criticism should take. In Part 8, Sontag wrote:
"What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary — a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary — for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.…
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis."
Her essay really builds up a head of steam, so by the time she reaches Part 9, Sontag's words ignite a virtual bonfire of ideas, ideas that she had placed on paper decades earlier that I'd said and thought often before without knowing her essay existed. Part 9 added more to contemplate:
"Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.…
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art — and, by analogy, our own experience — more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"Against Interpretation" is an essay divided in 10 sections, though Sontag's last section consists of a single sentence calling for "an erotics of art." As I've said, I've never been one who spent much time trying to decipher a film's meaning. As I read Sontag's essay, the words sounded like an echo of my present sent from someone else's past. When Sontag added how overburdened her senses were — in the early to mid-1960s — compared to the overload now, it was as if I'd found a holy text by accident — but I promised you a punchline and I will give it to you, but first I'm going to share all the friends kind enough to contribute to this with thoughts on Last Year at Marienbad, films they love but can explain, style vs. substance, etc. Thanks to all who replied. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
"I would offer Syndromes and a Century as a movie that defies conventional understanding yet totally transported and transformed me: I left the theater in an elated state, but not sure how I got there. Couldn't begin to tell you what it 'means': there's no 'story' in the usual sense, yet I knew I was in the presence of a masterful filmmaker casting a spell I didn't want broken. Apitchapong Weerasethakul's films are both abstract and down to earth, so that they never feel pretentious the way, say, the late (Theo) Angelopoulos often did, where every gorgeous frame asked you to admire his (sometimes ponderous) brilliance. But of course many people find these Thai films baffling and boring. Chacun a son gout."
"Great art fills you with awe and wonder — whether it’s through substance, a particular style (the hallmark of a great artist, who may eventually seem like a friend on the same mental wavelength as you) or usually some combination of both. Being able to explain it eventually helps, but ultimately art is an emotional experience that changes you or takes you to a different place. If you are in the same frame of mind afterward as you were at the beginning, it’s probably not great art."
(1) “Why does Movie X work for me, but not for Critic A or others?” Because something “working” is a two-way street between the text and each member of the audience. We all have movies we love that we know we shouldn’t, and we all have movies we greatly admire
but dislike. There’s no accounting for taste.(2) “How can a director…have either fans who think he walks on water or people such as myself who mock him mercilessly but seemingly few who look at him dispassionately from the middle ground?” In the case of Lars von Trier, it’s because he’s an agitator; his work is designed to provoke extreme reactions, and he wants you to either love or hate his movies — and I think he’d actually prefer you hate his work. (I’m actually on the dispassionate middle ground with him.) And remember that critics have agendas, too; some are simply provocateurs. More generally, directors/authors make connections with some people and not with others.
(3) “Does the magic reside in the movies or within ourselves?” Yes! The best critics don’t merely provide summary judgment; they show you how something worked or didn’t work for them. Essentially, they’re articulating and supporting a deeply personal reaction.
"'Substance' is such an abstract term when it comes to any discussion of the movies; I suppose, if you go by the conventional definition, Amistad has substance, whereas Bringing Up Baby does not…but does anyone reading this regard the Spielberg entry as the superior example of the filmmaker's craft? I think you need to accept each and every film on its own terms, and judge them based on how well they succeed in achieving their own objectives; you can't measure them all by the same scale, and it's probably a mistake to use subject matter, or even stylistic aesthetics, as your guide in determining the worth of any particular enterprise. There isn't a particular 'type' of film that I'm more inclined to like more than any other — you take them all on an individual basis (in reference to Marienbad, which I haven't seen, there are some very oblique films — The Tree of Life is a recent example — that have really connected with me…whereas others have left me absolutely cold.) That's the nature of the beast — whether it's gourmet cooking from a Five-Star Chef, or a damn good cheeseburger, a good eat is a good eat."
"I've always been a big believer in the idea that style is substance. I like this quote I found in the comments section of a Jim Emerson blog post: 'Style is supposed to express content, dammit — not disguise a lack of it! The meaning of a film is in what these images on the screen (and don't forget the sounds!) do to you while you experience them. (As you so eloquently put it: a film is about what happens to you when you're watching it.) If you ask me, we should stop seeing style and content as separate entities. In a good film, they're a natural unity.' I understand that this person is using 'content' instead of 'substance,' but I thought it still applied here. In fact, I liked it so much I used it as one of my blog's epigraphs."
"I, too, like Last Year at Marienbad. I like Delphine Seyrig. The formal garden. The chorus line of cypresses. It had the order and mystery of a de Chirico painting. I've often wondered why Pauline Kael and Manny Farber were so tough on it. But I saw it in the '70s, when it was an artifact of another civilization and not an expression of contemporary weltanschauung.
"When Pauline begged to be disinvited to the "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" and Manny described the star of La Notte as 'Monica Unvital,' they were fighting a stealth battle against the New York intellectuals who assumed that film art came from Europe. (Manny and Pauline both grew up in the Bay Area and were somewhat suspicious of East Coast intellectuals. They saw art in American movies. My hunch is part of their irritation at the more Symbolist of the French and Italian new wave was because the intellectual quarterlies didn't respect American movies. Interestingly, Susan Sontag — who was raised in North Hollywood! — was one of those NY intellectuals they railed against.)
"As to the basic question: When we go to films we project ourselves and values on the screen. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
"Malick represents pure visual storytelling, which I find exciting as long as there are no lava lamps or dinosaurs."
"Last Year really builds on its predecessor, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was a collaboration between Resnais and Margeurite Duras, the screenwriter/novelist. It kind of pushes the techniques of Hiroshima to the next level, juxtaposing elliptical or poetic editing and voiceover to create something very close to an experimental or puzzle film. I admire it more than I like it, and I think some of the people who made fun of it at the time as a film that was flattering art house audiences for 'getting' it when there was nothing to get might have had a point. It's mainly a stylistic and atmospheric exercise, I think, ultimately far less effective than Hiroshima because it's not rooted in psychological and historical specifics. It's a bit more aware of itself as a tour-de-force, as an attempt to top what the director had done before. It verges on self-parody rather often, and Resnais is not known for his humor, so I suspect most of this is unintentional."
"It doesn't take much for people to disagree about a movie, and that's partly because there's always so much to like or dislike: the story and the dialogue, the tone of the cinematography, the settings and costumes, the actors and their performances, the director's point of view. The closeness or distance of what's onscreen from your sensibility, and then how you feel about that. And it's complicated — loving a movie and respecting it are two different things. I don't care for Citizen Kane and I love Myra Breckinridge. I can't defend this preference on any sort of critical grounds…I know intellectually that Kane has all the virtues of script, acting, art direction, photography, and theme ('meaning,' in other words) and that Myra is an incoherent mess. But we don't evaluate movies intellectually. More than any other art form, they're an experience, and no two people have the same experience, even of the same event."
"I was once in a play called Slow Love. It was written by an Australian man who had epilepsy. He envisioned his work to come in a series of staged images that would be framed by lights up — some kind of abstract action — blackout. This would repeat maybe a hundred times to make up the content of the play. Of the many referenced works in the play was Last Year at Marienbad, which was quoted throughout. I think in the play it was meant to mirror what the writer was feeling, about the echoing of brief but substantial, memorable images. I suppose that film, therefore, does much of what every other art form does — it can be both abstract and entertaining. I think ultimately there is some kind of deeper meaning people take from even the most abstract works. It probably isn't a shared experience, the way it would be with a more accessible, universal story. In the end, I think it comes down to you, on that
day, as to whether the film will piss you off or pull you in. I was far more moved and intrigued by what Von Trier did in Melancholia that what Malick did in Tree of Life, perhaps because Tree of Life felt like a singular experience of a certain kind of family — whereas Melancholia (Take Shelter, too) was closer to what I think life is really like in 2011. But I guess I'd have to say that, ultimately, the magic resides within us — and depending on how much energy we have that particular day to struggle with a meaningless film. This year seemed to offer up many fairly abstract, challenging stories that sort of meant what you wanted them to mean. But too many of those and you tune them out, reaching instead for the ones that tell stories that aren't open to interpretation. Marienbad stands out because it was one of a kind. It's hard to find anything that is one of a kind now.
The great thing about it all, I guess, is that there is room for both — frustratingly opaque art and pleasingly transparent entertainment."
"All I can say is that I do think movies cast a kind of spell when they work for you. I've seen movies under different circumstances and have had totally different reactions, other times my attempt at rediscovering something I thought maybe I was unprepared for only leaves to the depressing realization I was 'right' the first time."
"At the risk of polarizing some people here, I'm one of those biased moviegoers who thinks movies always need to be entertaining and — for the most part — have a plot, in order for me to be invested. At times I'm willing to bend the rules, of course; whenever kids at my college campus tell me they can't finish 2001 because it has no story, I always try to tell them that the film is meant to be an experience, full of ideas, and that a plot doesn't emerge until two-thirds into the movie…but at least it's telling a story. On second
thought, I guess Killer of Sheep didn't really have a story at all, but you know what? Burnett still drew me into that world. I got a feel for that environment. So, I love that movie too.Again, though, being — for the most part — a proponent of movies with stories, I do have a bit of problem with movies that are all about exercises in style. This is why I have a more difficult time appreciating Godard than some of my peers in the blogosphere, or why I can't watch Soderbergh's Ocean remakes. The actors are clearly having fun on the screen, but I'm not having any fun watching them.
Again, though, there's always that Killer of Sheep-style of filmmaking: slow, slow case studies of slow characters. Uncle Boonmee and Gus Van Sant's Last Days both come to mind, and I love those movies, too. But those are the films in which all entertainment value derives from exploring those slow, introverted characters through repeated viewings. I had an even easier time appreciating Melancholia and Tree of Life because they have more of a narrative to them, though they're clearly also exercises in style.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: if I were a director, I'd want to be a storyteller, first and foremost. Have a good style, sure, but good substance first. Some of you guys are bringing up Howard Hawks, whom I do like, but the fact that most of his movies *are* mostly just full of talky sequences of camaraderie and bonding without much plot to them is probably the reason why you don't hear me raving about his work as much as others. Maybe that's why I enjoy John Ford's movies a little more.
By now, it certainly will seem anticlimactic, but as I previewed, I also stumbled upon an essay Susan Sontag wrote. Titled "Thirty Years Later," the essay was published in the Summer 1996 edition of The Threepenny Review to mark the reissuing of Against Interpretation on its 30th anniversary. What Sontag had to say as she looked backward began promising enough.
"The great revelation for me had been the cinema: I felt particularly marked by the films of Godard and Bresson. I wrote more about cinema than about literature, not because I loved movies more than novels but because I loved more new movies than new novels. Of course, I took the supremacy of the greatest literature for granted. (And assumed my readers did, too.) But it was clear to me that the film-makers I admired were, quite simply, better and more original artists than nearly all of the most acclaimed novelists; that, indeed, no other art was being so widely practiced at such a high level. One of my happiest achievements in the years that I was doing the writing collected in Against Interpretation is that no day passed without my seeing at least one, sometimes two or three, movies. Most of them were 'old.' My gluttonous absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films which (along with my roll-call of favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting did they seem to me in their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty."
Then the essay turns decidedly toward the pessimistic side, not that you could argue with her much even though that is now almost 16 years old. "The world in which these essays were written no longer exists," Sontag wrote. "Instead of the utopian moment, we live in a time which is experienced as the end — more exactly, just past the end — of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.) An illusion of the end, perhaps — and not more illusory than the conviction of thirty years ago that we were on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think." If Sontag felt this way in 1996, imagine what she'd think of our world today where the GOP presidential candidates try to outcrazy each other, little of good, substantive policy can be created in D.C. since both parties in Congress would rather do nothing that let the opposing team take partial credit for a "win" and, though film lovers such as myself hate to admit it, while television played a primary role in the debasing of our culture and still does with the various Real Housewives and Jersey Shores, the best shows that TV produces regularly exceed in quality the best in movies whether the films come from Hollywood studios or are produced independently. What grabbed me the most in "Thirty Years Later" were when Sontag wrote these words:
"So I can’t help viewing the writing collected in Against Interpretation with a certain irony. Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of — it may take some effort of imagination — the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to, then, as 'popular' culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its burden of seriousness, of depth. I thought I’d seen through certain kinds of facile moralism, and was denouncing them in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, 'unrealistic,' to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision of temperament, probably unhealthy, too."
Surely, she can't be serious. I think she was and her name was Susan, not Shirley. It was enough to break my momentary spell. While I certainly agree with much of what Sontag wrote, where would we be without a little levity? (Watching nothing but Terrence Malick films, he said, followed by a rim shot from the drummer.)
I wish that I had had more time to organize these posts more coherently and given the number of comments I've received on the first two parts, I doesn't seemed to have sparked the conversation I'd hoped for either. Oh, well. Do you all think there was a subliminal message in Airplane!?
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Labels: Books, Coens, Criticism, Dunst, Godard, Hawks, John Ford, Kael, Malick, Oliver Stone, Resnais, Sean Penn, Soderbergh, Spielberg, Van Sant, Von Sydow, von Trier
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Sunday, December 25, 2011
A human life is strictly as frail and fleeting as the morning dew
"There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio." — Robert Altman
By Edward Copeland
Akira Kurosawa was 40 years old when he made the film that truly made moviegoers outside his native Japan take notice. Rashomon began filming July 7, 1950, and, in amazing turnaround time, debuted in Japan on Aug. 25 of that same year. However, the rest of the world didn't get to see Rashomon until 1951, starting with the Venice Film Festival in September where it won both the Golden Lion and the Italian Film Critics Award for best film. It unspooled next in the U.S., where it premiered 60 years ago today.
The Altman quote that I began this piece with comes from an introduction he taped for the Criterion Collection DVD release of Rashomon in 2002. While Altman certainly had it right about the visual wonders that Kurosawa summons in Rashomon, with the invaluable help of cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, with whom Kurosawa was working with for the first time, ironically (given the movie's subject), I
believe the other much-missed filmmaker's memory may have been faulty when it came to the amount of dialogue. Granted, Rashomon isn't overly chatty, but the film says nearly as much verbally as visually, not that I fault Altman — those images beckon you to lose yourself in them, even if subtitles get missed as a consequence. After all, Kurosawa himself admitted in his autobiography Something Like an Autobiography that he tried in Rashomon to recapture the spirit of silent movies that film had lost when sound came along. Criterion printed an excerpt of his memoir in the booklet that accompanied the DVD. "Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the aesthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past," Kurosawa wrote. "In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the aesthetics that had made them special. Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research."
Know what tickles me about writing a tribute to this film? Rashomon liberates me to go into excruciating detail (if I desire) about scenes — for instance, I can describe the scene where The Woman (Machiko Kyô) turns on both her husband, the samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the infamous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), accusing them both of being weak and egging them on to fight to the death over who gets to keep her — because that's merely one version of what happened that led to the samurai's death. No character in the movie nor any viewer in the audience can declare with 100% certainty which version, if any, depicts the truth. Rashomon makes the need for giving readers spoiler warnings moot, praise be not only to Kurosawa but to his co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto and especially Ryûnosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two short stories, "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which inspired Kurosawa to make the film in the first place. Once Kurosawa had all his elements in place — cast, crew, shooting locations, set being constructed — even his assistant directors came to the director and admitted that the screenplay "baffled" them and asked Kurosawa to explain its meaning. In his autobiography, Kurosawa wrote, “'Please read it again more carefully,' I told them. 'If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.' But they wouldn’t leave. 'We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.' For their persistence, I gave them this simple explanation:
"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
"After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work went well.)" It saddens me the number of books I'll never find time to read. I wish I'd read Kurosawa's autobiography at a younger age — I have
so many unfinished and unstarted books lying around the house as it is. I digress. Rashomon may have puzzled Kurosawa's assistant directors, but I grasped it from the first time I saw it as a teen. Then again, perhaps geographical differences explain the comprehension gap. Sure — they shared a common country of origin with Kurosawa, but the director had immersed himself so deeply into Western culture through movies and literature, he might as well have hailed from the U.S. as Altman and I did, despite the large differences in our three ages. In fact, in my sophomore year of high school, not long after seeing Rashomon for the first time, my English teacher gave us an assignment to write something about our own time period based on the form of Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, which we'd just studied in clsss. The teacher made no requirement that our piece be true or realistic so I titled mine Rashomon, American Style and fabricated an attack on a classmate and wrote five letters by different people, each giving different accounts of what took place, though my piece didn't dwell remotely in philosophical realms — it aimed solely at the satirical side of life. I'm proud to say I received an A on the assignment. With that little anecdote, I've finally remembered to give a broad outline of the plot of Rashomon, which I've neglected to do so far. As much as I do love Rashomon, it might not make the top five if I ranked my favorite Kurosawa films. I know it doesn't make the top four. For Altman, it and Throne of Blood were his two favorites. In that introduction, Altman said:
"Rashomon is the most interesting, for me, of Kurosawa's films.…The main thing here is that when one sees a film you see the characters on screen.…You see very specific things — you see a tree, you see a sword — so one takes that as truth, but in this film, you take it as truth and then you find out it's not necessarily true and you see these various versions of the episode that has taken place that these people are talking about. You're never told which is true and which isn't true which leads you to the proper conclusion that it's all true and none of it's true. It becomes a poem and it cracks this visual thing that we have in our minds that if we see it, it must be a fact. In reading, in radio — where you don't have these specific visuals — your mind is making them up. What my mind makes up and what your mind makes up…is never the same."
Since I've avoided, not on purpose mind you, giving even a cursory synopsis or Rashomon's plot, I suppose now offers as good a place as any other to pen a brief summary for anyone unfamiliar with the film (in the unlikely event that their eyes remain fixed on this Web page this deep into the post). The title refers, according to Kurosawa's autobiography, the main gate to the outer precincts of Japan's 11th century capital city. As the movie opens, a Commoner (Kichijirô Ueda) seeks refuge from a heavy downpour of rain beneath the gate where a Buddhist Priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a Woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) sit visibly shaken, repeating variations of how they just don't understand and never have encountered a story as strange as this one. This intrigues The Commoner, who pumps both men for information about their rambling. "War, earthquakes, winds, fire, famine, the plague — years where it's been nothing but disasters. And
bandits…every night. I've seen so many men getting killed like insects, but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this," The Priest tells him. "This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul." When The Priest says that, The Commoner starts to lose interest. He just wanted to get out of the rain, not listen to a sermon, he responds, then The Woodcutter shares his involvement in the story and we get our first flashback, filmed as a long tracking shot through mountainous woods behind from behind the Woodcutter before it circles around him and continues as he walks toward it — stopping when he discovers a woman's white hat and veil hanging off a bush. He continues on and finds another item on the path until he finally stumbles upon the corpse of The Man and runs back to report it to the police. The Commoner learns that The Priest and The Woodcutter had come to the gate after being at the courthouse where they listened to the testimony of the famous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), who was apprehended by a Policeman (Daisuke Katô); The Woman (Machiko Kyô), who was discovered at a temple; and even The Man (Masayuki Mori), who may have been murdered, but tells his version of events through a Medium (Noriko Honma). No one's version of the events matches the others' completely and The Woodcutter believes everyone, even the dead man, lied. "Dead men tell no lies," The Priest insists. "It's human to lie. Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves," The Commoner replies, repeating nearly verbatim what Kurosawa told his confused assistant directors. Most character lists you'll find for Rashomon agree to call Chiaki and Shimura's characters The Priest and The Woodcutter, but you'll find many names Ueda's role such as The Commoner, The Peasant, The Beggar, etc. Within the movie itself, only Mifune's bandit receives a name, Tajômaru. Somehow though IMDb gives full names to The Man and The Woman who could be called The Husband and The Wife or The Samurai and The Wife, but never get proper names.While I didn't intend for this anniversary tribute to end up reading as if it were a paid advertisement for the Criterion DVD of Rashomon, the disc also contains excerpts from the documentary The World of Kazuo Miyagawa where the late director of photography explains how he pulled off the complicated dolly shot of the Woodcutter's trek through the woods as well as other tricks on Rashomon. The movie marked his first teaming with Kurosawa. The Woodcutter's walk was one of the very first shots scheduled, so Miyagawa set out to impress the director. He had the track built so the camera could do a 180-degree turn and then at the proper time had Takashi Shimura cross over the track to allow the camera to view the actor from the front. Some other Rashomon secrets that Miyagawa (and Kurosawa) share
in the excerpt involve what tricks they employed to get desired effects in the woods of the Nara, Japan, region where they filmed because the trees stood unusually tall. As a result, it interfered with Kurosawa's wish for shadows and light reflecting on the actors' faces at various times. Miyagawa used the same tool to help with both problems — mirrors. To deflect the distant rays of the suns on to the performers, Miyagawa stole the full-length mirror from the costume department and set it up so it would catch the sunlight and direct it exactly where Kurosawa sought to aim it. The director also sought to darken portions of the actors' faces with tree branches — which would have been fine if the cast all had been about 8 feet tall. Since they weren't, they jerry-rigged some mesh out of sight of the camera and attached branches to it. After that, they again made use of the mirror to reflect the shadows of the standalone branches where they wanted on the actors. One other detail the documentary excerpt includes came only from Kurosawa, who talked about the trouble of filming rain. He said that when you want to film rain, it always had to be a downpour otherwise, the rain never shows up on the film. Even then, in the case of Rashomon, he admits that they tinted the color of the rain to make certain it could be seen. Though Miyagawa and Kurosawa worked together well, they only teamed up two more times since the two men seldom worked at the same Japanese studio at the same time. Their next collaboration didn't occur until Yojimbo and, though he wasn't the d.p., Miyagawa did consult on the photography for Kagemusha. Since Miyagawa served as cinematographer on more than 80 features between 1938 and 1991, he did work with many of the biggest names in Japanese cinema at least once (often multiple times) including Kon Ichikawa, Takashi Imai, Hiroshi Inagaki, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Kenji Mizoguchi(including Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu), Yasujirô Ozu (on Floating Weeds) and Masahiro Shinoda, among many others.
Though the importance of the visual ingredients of Rashomon shouldn't be understated, I believe that ultimately the film's success depends on the two separate trio of performers. First, we have Shimura, Chiaki and Ueda as The Woodcutter, The Priest and The Commoner, essentially static characters that function as narrators of a sort as well as our surrogates, debating the philosophical ideas that the movie raises. The Priest struggles with his faith in light of what he has heard while The Woodcutter already has abandoned his on the basis of what he has heard and saw. The Commoner, who receives all the information about the events in the woods second hand, serves both as the audience surrogate and as
someone who long ago realized that the world doesn't function in black-and-white terms and that horrible things happen every day. When he first arrives, The Priest informs him that a man has been murdered. "So what? Only one? Why, up on top of this gate, there's always five or six bodies. No one worries about them," The Commoner responds. At a later point, The Priest seems unable to listen to any more. "I don't want to hear it. No more horror stories," The Priest pleads. The Commoner fails to react with the shock of the other two men. "They are common stories these days. I even heard that the demon living here in Rashomon fled in fear of the ferocity of man," The Commoner tells him. That part always reminds me whenever a news anchor reports on a workplace shooting somewhere and leads his or her report with someone being "shocked." How many of these over how many decades do these news readers have to talk about until they feel it's OK for them to drop the illusion of being shocked by them? I've also heard there's gambling at Rick's. All three actors serve their roles well but, as always, I'm amazed at the physical changes Takashi Shimura undergoes in his various Kurosawa roles. From a "modern" detective his own age in Stray Dog to The Woodcutter here, from the old dying civil servant in Ikiru to the main samurai in Seven Samurai — I'd be hard-pressed at any time to tell you how old he really was or what he looked like in everyday life. By cheating, I can find his age. He was 45 when he made Rashomon. He died in 1982 at 76.
The second trio's task provides a more difficult acting challenge for Mifune, Kyô and Mori. The three performers aren't simply portraying The Bandit Tajômaru, The Woman and The Man — the film requires them to play widely divergent versions of those characters while still staying within the roles' essential frameworks. All three do well but, as you'd expect, Mifune stands out, though Kyô gives him a run for his money as The Woman. When Tajômaru gives his version of events, he testifies about The Woman's reaction, saying, "Her face turns pale. She stares at me with frozen eyes, her expression intense like a child's." However, when The Woman gives her own testimony, The Woodcutter and The Priest who were at the courthouse say she was docile and nothing like Tajômaru described. The Man's tale given through The Medium paints yet another portrait.
When The Woodcutter finally comes clean about witnessing the events instead of just finding The Man's body afterward as he said before, he draws a sketch of The Woman as completely manipulative and evil. Kyô excels at all these variations. There comes a moment in one version where she's lying on the ground sobbing and suddenly sits bolt upright and lambastes both men that will send a chill down your spine. Mifune's most consistent quality is The Bandit's maniacal laugh, but his face seems incapable of exhausting possible expressions. He can be menacing, romantic, insane, sad — you name it, he probably plumbs it as Tajômaru. They even go so far as to show the difference in fighting abilities in the different version. In Tajômaru's testimony, he claims that he and The Man had a spirited sword fight and that no man had fought him as well as this samurai so he felt he owed it to him that he die admirably. In the account told by The Woodcutter only to The Priest and The Commoner, The Woman forces the two men to fight and their swordplay is sloppy and not done very well. Altman says in his intro that when Tajômaru's interrogation takes place, we never see anyone asking him questions because the audience is doing the interrogation and he was on the money about that. It's not as clear in the testimony from The Woman and through The Medium, but Tajômaru looks right into the camera and speaks to us. In that respect, Kurosawa achieved his goal of going back to the past and recapturing the days of silent movies because in many ways, that's how what divides the film and its two trios. The three men at the gate reside in the talkie and while dialogue exists in the woods, much of what happens, each time that it happens, occurs on the actors' faces.
The pair of prizes Rashomon picked up in Venice were just the first two in a long string of honors and nominations the film received stretching from September 1951 through the spring of 1953. Before Rashomon officially opened on Christmas Day 1951, the always-and-forever mysterious National Board of Review, shortly after changing its name from The Illuminati, awarded Kurosawa best director and gave the movie best foreign film more than a week earlier. The Oscars didn't have a competitive foreign language film category until 1956
so at the ceremony for 1951 films (held in early 1952), Rashomon became the fifth foreign language film to receive an honorary Oscar from the Academy's Board of Governors "as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States in 1951." The previous four went to Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief in 1947 and 1949, respectively; Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent (1948) and René Clément's The Walls of Malapaga (1950). (Three additional foreign language films receive honorary Oscars before the regular category was added: Clément's Forbidden Games in 1952, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell in 1954 and Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai, The Legend of Musashi aka Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto in 1955.) Apparently, Rashomon didn't make it to England until 1952, because it was for that year that it received a nomination for best film from any source from the British Academy Film Awards, handed out in spring 1953 (and not yet merged with the British TV Academy to form BAFTA). What doesn't make sense is that NBR and the Academy both recognized that Rashomon's U.S. release occurred in 1951. Somehow though when the 1952 Oscars rolled around, the Academy nominated production designer Takashi Matsuyama and set decorator H. Motsumoto for their black-and-white art direction. Forget for the moment the question of how they ruled Rashomon eligible again but consider that being eligible the Academy ONLY nominated it for art direction in 1952, that year The Greatest Show on Earth won best picture. Also for the year 1952, Kurosawa received a Directors Guild of America nomination, the only DGA nomination he ever received, though he lost to John Ford for The Quiet Man — one of the 17 other contenders in the category. Hell, we’re already spending too much time talking about this year’s awards, I’ll stop talking about awards six decades ago now.
Besides, the honors aren't what matters in the end, it's the influence and it would be impossible to list all the movies, TV shows, plays and novels that have been influenced by Rashomon, which, of course, had its own influences to draw on before Kurosawa filmed it. Movies made before Rashomon had told a story through multiple points of views (most notably Citizen Kane), but nothing had really had alternate versions of a single event until Rashomon. When I watched Rashomon again most recently, the most recent film that popped into my mind was (500) Days of Summer where Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character's interpretation of Zooey Deschanel's character and moments they shared changed depending how he felt toward her at that given moment. In 1964, Martin Ritt directed an actual American remake called The Outrage that set the story in the Old West and starred Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom in the roles equivalent to The Bandit, The Man and The Woman and Edward G. Robinson, Howard da Silva and William Shatner in the parts equal to The Commoner, The Woodcutter and The Priest. Two recent films with similar premises, updated for the modern age, were Courage Under Fire and Vantage Point. A little Rashomon peeks out at times in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. Many TV shows, especially sitcoms, have enjoyed borrowing the premise over the years, including a classic All in the Family where Mike and Archie differ over what happened when a TV repairman and his African-American apprentice came over. Almost by formula, any police or detective show has that quality to some extent. However, The Simpsons delivered by far the funniest dialogue exchange referring to the movie. In the 10th season episode "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo," Marge says to Homer, "You liked Rashomon the last time we saw it" to which Homer replies, "That's not how I remember it."
What remains important about Rashomon is that 60 years later, we do still remember it and the film has injected itself far enough into the cultural bloodstream that we'll continue to reference it. Sadly, the same can't be said for so much of our past works of film, television, music and literature as we increasingly become a disposable culture where it's been decided the most things should have an expiration date, usually tied somehow to the date Entertainment Weekly began publishing. Thankfully, Rashomon seems to have slipped by the pre-1990 terminators. Long may it baffle.
"It certainly changed my perception about what is possible in film and what is desirable. You just have to be able to let the audience come to that conclusion and they say, 'Oh, that isn't what happened.' Everybody that you would talk to about it — you'd sit down and make a person see the film — and ask them questions, you would not get the same answers from anybody which is the art of art. That is what art is — it penetrates your intellect…and your experience and history has to react on this new information. You're reacting from your own persona on it, but that's what gives it the power." — Robert Altman
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Labels: 50s, Altman, Awards, Books, De Sica, Edward G., Foreign, Gordon-Levitt, John Ford, Kurosawa, Mifune, Movie Tributes, Newman, Nonfiction, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Shatner, Silents, Tarantino, The Simpsons
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