A Girl and a Gun

Cool Docs

The indispensable Cinetrix is pulling extra duty these pre-Oscar days at the Bravo website, and she opens a recent entry with a characteristically pertinent question: "When did documentaries get so cool?" I had trouble getting the question out of my mind.

In the 1960s, when I discovered that there were books and a few magazines devoted to the intelligent discussion of film (as opposed to panting fandom), I found out about documentaries.  Up to that time, my exposure to the genre had been pretty much limited to the high school classroom and such guaranteed giggle sources as the adventures of Sammy Sperm and Ellie Ovum, along with other products of the divinely named Erpi Classroom Films.  I had seen but one genuine documentary that I can remember prior to that time, Epic of Everest (1924), about the George Mallory attempt to make it to the top.  A camera team accompanied him and Andrew Irvine a long way up, and when they could go no farther, the two men went on, never to return.  The big name in those film-as-art publications was of course Robert Flaherty.  With some difficulty (pre-video and -DVD days), I finally caught Nanook of the North (1922), Man of Aran (1934), and Louisiana Story (1948), as well as the John Grierson-organized Night Mail, but while I couldn't dispute the artistry in them, I never quite got over the sense that I could have been using my time to watch Godard or Ginger and Fred.  They were a bit like castor oil, perhaps good for you but to be taken only under duress.

It was in the late 1960s that, I think, documentaries started getting cool.  Wiseman's groundbreaking Titicut Follies and Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (both 1967) opened the doors, swiftly followed by the latter's Monterey Pop (1968), which combined documentary and the concert film, and the Maysles Brothers' Salesman (1969) and Gimme Shelter (1970).  The brothers had served as cameramen on Monterey Pop.  In 1969, Marcel Ophuls released La Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), for my money still the greatest documentary made, and ignited the still-running debate in France on the years of occupation, collaboration, and resistance. 

The quality that united much of documentary from Wiseman on was that, unlike even Flaherty's work, they frequently avoided the celebratory and indeed came closer to critical examination of the sort that came to be known as investigative journalism (R.I.P.).  This orientation has fortunately persisted, from Lanzmann's staggering Shoah (1985) through Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Mr. Death (1999) and into the better work of Michael Moore.  The celebratory and often sentimentalized strain continues, to be sure, although much of it has shifted ground slightly to biopic, presumably because we have come to expect more edge from documentaries and biopics have more license to distort.  Television has also become a major player, with mixed results; the work of Ken Burns continues to give us a steady dose of PBS liberalism, which is an eyelash to the left of corporate liberalism. 

Documentaries are certifiably cool by now, the investigative/advocacy pieces like Spurlock's Super Size Me, Moore's Farenheit 9/11, and Demme's The Agronomist (all 2004).  But gifted filmmakers have also shown that celebration has a role in the documentary: Demme gives his subject a deserved place in memory; Mark Moskowitz actually made a terrific film, Stone Reader (2002), about the romance of books; and the best documentary of recent years, Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect (2003), combines a moving search for identity and for a father scarcely known with some of the most extraordinary architectural photography on film.  Moreover, there is the pleasure of simple whimsy and humor, like Morris's Gates of Heaven (1978), a film about pet cemeteries, his Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997), and Jeffrey Blitze's lovely Spellbound (2002). 

Docs are not only cool now, they're hot, with big distribution deals coming out of Sundance and more and more production money showing up from HBO and other television sources.  That's always reason for some pause--the whole sad saga of what used to be called "independent film" is a sobering corrective to what happens when you hit the big time--but for right now, the immediate future of interesting documentaries looks promising.

Smart Talk

Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) reinforces the view that he is the current reigning cinematic master of intelligent conversation.  US movies don't much go in for that, in case you hadn't noticed, tilting instead toward car chases, computerized battles, and biopics almost indistinguishable from tongue-baths.  But with Before Sunrise (1995), Tape (also 2001), and Before Sunset (2004), Linklater reminds us that people have minds, that human communication through the use of them is one of the chief pleasures of life on earth, and that the process can also have substantial dramatic heft.

In Waking Life, a nameless central character goes around talking to people.  That's pretty much it.  But the people are thoughtful and the talk is about dreams: his, theirs, dreams in general, and from any number of perspectives.  Henry James once famously counseled younger novelists, "Tell the dream, lose the reader," but Linklater shows how his chosen medium can make dreamland an arresting, engaging place.  He does this in part with the sheer substantiality of his script (it takes weighty ideas and communicates them clearly, but not by dumbing them down), in part with the visual presentation.  He shot on film, then had art director Bob Sabastino overlay the images with a computer graphics program which Sabastino developed.  The result is just a step removed from reality, never unrecognizable, but always a slightly different world from, yes, our waking life.  The voices include Wiley Wiggins (from Linklater's Slacker [1991]) as the protagonist, a brief moment with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, and Linklater as the man playing pinball, appropriately enough, at the end.

Trying to summarize this film farther is pointless and self-defeating.  It's like grabbing a handful of fog: what you reach for is perfectly real, but when you open your fist after grabbing, there's nothing there.  Netflix has it and you ought to get it. 

Festival Conclusion

The Film Comment Selects series closed yesterday with a terrific wind-up, Memories of Murder (2003).  It's a tight, beautifully executed police procedural that started making the festival rounds--and gathering critical praise--a couple of years ago.  As of yet, it has not lined up a theatrical distributor in this country, principally because it's a South Korean film, which US distribution outfits consider as equivalent to saying "may cause bubonic plague."  Pity: it's perfectly accessible, utterly compelling, and far superior to most homegrown policiers. 

The time is 1986, and there have been a couple of rape/murders in a provincial Korean town.  The ranking local detective on the case, Lieutenant Park, is a big, tough guy who has convinced himself that he can determine infallibly whether or not a suspect is lying to him.  If, in his judgment, it's a lie, he lets his goon go to work on the putative perp, twists and even manufactures evidence, all to nail someone who is, after all, guilty--so he believes.  But along comes Detective Seo, an experienced and objective cop from Seoul who sees the evidence a different way and explodes Park's case against some of the suspects.  But while they seem to be getting closer to a solution, the killings go forward and panic is spreading in the populace.  A Korean audience does not need to be told, of course, that 1986 was smack in the middle of the Chun military dictatorship, and though Bong has little to say about it overtly (we see briefly one anti-Chun demonstration), its traces are everywhere.  Indeed, Memories of Murder is really about the way in which the regime's corruption and rule by coercion have seeped down into the criminal justice system and out into the provinces.  Park and his people are unable to run down the killer because the easiest weapon for them to use is force, and it's unavailing.  Even Seo finds that the case has become personal for him, and he starts cutting corners, with disastrous results.  In the hope that Memories of Murder will find its way to US screens, I won't go any farther, except to say that there are lots of surprises along the way.  Moreover, Song Kang-ho's performance as Park is complex, energetic, and rewarding. 

In my judgment, the best new films that I caught in the series were all South Korean: Park Chan-wook's Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (my reactions here) and this beauty by Bong, far less explicitly violent than Park's films but disturbing and vastly entertaining all at once. 

Death of a Temptress

Simone Simon, who died Tuesday at the age of ninety-three, made a tentative jump from Paris to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, where she had some leading roles in non-leading pictures.  I have in mind Seventh Heaven (1937) in which she starred opposite James Stewart who played a French sewer worker named Chico.  (I don't make up these things, you know.)  Her reputation in the US has pretty much hinged on a couple of B efforts from the war years that have, for reasons I've never been able to fathom, become cult favorites: Cat People (1942) and Return of the Cat People (1944), which sounded like a sequel but wasn't.  Her best work was as a woman whose voice (in English, her French accent was like aural Cialis) and radically seductive eyes promised pleasures for which you knew you'd pay a high price but had no intention of passing up all the same.  I think her best work was in 1941's The Devil and Daniel Webster as Bella, the Mephistophelean messenger who tempts Jabez Stone away from his oh-so-good little wife.  Can't say I blame him.  As Séverine Roubaud in Renoir's La bête humaine, she was the temptation Jean Gabin's Lantier could not forswear, and it cost both characters their lives.  It was Gabin's film, but without her, it wouldn't have moved an inch. 

Festival Update: Swiss Marxism

The revivals at the Film Comment Selects film series have been as spotty as the new films: Sam Fuller's two war films, Fixed Bayonets (1951) and The Steel Helmet (1950) are interesting in their fashion but not up to his best work; Le Pont du nord (my reactions here) had its moments but not enough of them; Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) is an acknowledged work of satirical genius; and I couldn't squeeze in Barbet Schroeder's Schroeder's Mistress (1973) so can't offer an opinion.  But in the middle of all this is Alain Tanner's La Salamandre (1971), a joyous Swiss comedy (brought you up short, that bit, didn't it?) I saw not long after its brief US release which has only become better with age.  It's available on VHS only, and Hollywood Video has a copy.

Rosemonde is a young woman in Geneva, who has been accused of shooting, but not killing, her uncle/guardian with his army rifle.  Pierre, a non-fiction writer, has been hired to do a script for a television film about her, and gets his buddy Paul, a fiction writer, to put down the paint brush he wields on houses to feed his family and join him.  Paul insists upon working entirely from his imagination; he reads a tiny press clip about the shooting, and develops his own script from what it inspires in his skull.  Pierre goes out, interviews Rosemonde's friends, former employer, finally finds her and interviews her, even gets her into bed, but still can't figure her out.  Paul inevitably runs into her, and her reality explodes his imagination, ruins his fictional creation.

It's not that Rosemonde is like some mythological heroine, a dragon-slayer and spiritual model.  It's that she's such a typical product of her time: beautiful, but also whimsical, irresponsible, bouncing from one crummy job to another, hating them all, having an illegitimate child which she immediately dumps on her mother, preferring to disappear into the crashing rock music she plays at full blast.  We first see her as a sausage-stuffer in a meatpacking plant, fitting the sausage skin over a metal tube, stepping on a pedal to fill it, running her hand over the finished product, repeating.  This parody of eroticism, assembly-line style also serves to tell us that Rosemonde is just another stuffed sausage, filled with the do's and don'ts of modern society, a creature told to cultivate work discipline and stability and save her money and make the correct decisions but never told why.  She doesn't understand, just doesn't have the temperament to be a worker bee in the capitalist economy, or anything else (like a mother), for that matter.  She knows how to be what she thinks of as free, but that's all.  Pierre and Paul are trying to make sense out of her, trying to fit her into a narrative, something which another branch of the capitalist economy, television, can merchandise.  But she utterly defeats them without trying to do so.  She's like mercury; every time they try to pin down some sort of essence, she squirts away.

This might come across as rather turgid Marcusean agitprop were it not for Tanner's whimsical style, fully understood by his lead performers.  Bulle Ogier is perfect as Rosemonde, not so much elusive as intractable; she's funny and believable, but also maddening enough for us to understand the writers' frustration.  As Pierre, the superb Jean-Luc Bideau is a gangling, stooped-over goofball, now madly dedicated to his work, now all silliness and sound effects run amok.  Jacques Denis is the equally wonderful Paul, a man who starts to sing whenever he feels sad, which is reasonably often.  Rosemonde at one point compares them to Laurel and Hardy, and indeed the two pull off an hysterical stunt on a Geneva tram which still makes me chortle when I think of it.  Tanner gives us one important tip on the nature of his Marxist commitments: in one corner of Pierre's pitiful little flat, we catch a glimpse of that famous formal photographic portrait (blown up to poster size) of Karl, and when the camera moves slightly, we see a poster featuring Harpo and his brothers.  Je suis un marxiste, tendance Groucho, said the Parisian student soixante-huitards. 

The Grim Reaper (1962)

In 1960, when he was twenty, Bernardo Bertolucci was taken on by Pier Paolo Pasolini as an assistant on Pasolini's first film, Accatone.  Needless to say, he learned a lot, although in his own mind he still remained a poet (and his first book of poetry, which won a major prize was published the next year).  Pasolini then got Bertolucci a gig as a screenwriter of a treatment Pasolini himself had written earlier, La Commare secca (The Grim Reaper).  Bertolucci and seasoned writer Sergio Citti worked up a script in a couple of months, whereupon--since Pasolini was submerged in one of his own projects--the producer asked Bertolucci, now all of twenty-one, to direct.  He was the youngest person in the crew that made the picture.

The Grim Reaper is a Rashomon-like story of a murder and the interrogation of witnesses or people who might have been witnesses.  These people talk to the police, and the camera then cuts to the action as described.  We see it from all different angles or points of view, each piece of testimony advancing the story and the time toward the ultimate revelation of the killer, and each ending with the same thunderstorm and a view of the victim, a prostitute arising from a nap, then making coffee, then dressing, then going out to the park where she met her end.  It's effective enough, although the post-dubbing (to save money on sound equipment on the set) is a little annoying.  But while the producer had insisted that Bertolucci make a "Pasolinian" film because of the commercial success of Accatone, Bertolucci was intent upon putting his own stamp on it.  He turned it, in his mind, from a thriller into a story about the passage of time, and indeed these moments--when a couple has a running fight, when young boys are flirting with their girlfriends, when a soldier with an overnight pass wanders through Rome--are the film's best.  Bertolucci also wanted to do the exact opposite of Pasolini visually.  Whereas his mentor preferred static, frontal shots in the style of modernized altar pieces, Bertolucci wanted constant camera movement, an option he has continued to select through fourteen uneven but consistently fascinating feature films.  The visual texture and rhythm of The Grim Reaper is mesmerizing, reasonably close to what Bertolucci claimed to be trying: "to make poetry with a movie camera."

The Criterion DVD also includes a nice interview with BB about the making of the film, and a lovely little joke on himself: after all this effort to set himself off from Pasolini, he took the film to the Venice Festival, whereupon the Italian critics rendered a unanimous judgment--"a thoroughly Pasolinian work."  It's not one of Bertolucci's great achievments, but it's worth seeing and of more than historical interest.  We owe Criterion yet another vote of thanks for making it available.  Now the question is, how do we persuade them to get us equally fine DVDs of Before the Revolution, The Conformist, The Spider's Strategem, 1900, and even Luna--all available only on VHS. 

Festival Update: Le Pont du nord (1982)

This is but the sixth offering in the Film Comment Selects series I've been able to attend (the posts begin here and continue intermittently), and it left me in a state of mild perplexity.  Jacques Rivette was one of the earliest and most original of the New Wave filmmakers, although he has achieved more critical than commercial success.  His films, of which I have seen few, are intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, but obviously made with passion and great craft.  Apparently, Le Pont du nord had started out to be another film entirely, in fact a sequel to an earlier work, but he wanted to use the same cast and they weren't all available.  But who needs a big cast when you've got Bulle Ogier?  She is one of the premier actresses of French cinema, making her astounding and unforgettable breakthrough in 1971 with Alain Tanner's La Salamandre, which is showing in the festival next week.  Ogier is not well known in this country, where she's only made three English-language films, all in supporting roles.

In fact, Ogier and her daughter, Pascale, then twenty-two, had both committed to Rivette's film, and when that cratered they made one up themselves.  It's about Marie, a woman who has just been released from a one-year hitch in prison, and the girl, Baptiste, who attaches herself to Marie in Paris.  Rivette has said that these characters were borrowed from Don Quixote, Baptiste as the semi-delusional Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the more worldly, practical Marie as Sancho Panza.  OK, I'll play along.  The film is certainly something of a picaresque tale, with Baptiste more or less creating adventures which are largely imaginary and Marie trying to maintain some connection to reality as she recognizes it.  But her own reality is complicated by her lover, Julien, with whom she is trying to reunite.  Julien (Pierre Clémenti) is a ne'er-do-well who keeps holding her off with some murky doings involving the contents of his briefcase. Eventually, the two women find what's in the briefcase, try to make sense of it, and end up taking a gridded map of Paris they find inside and turning it into a board game.  (I swear to God.) 

Even if Rivette knew exactly where he was going with all this (which I seriously doubt), I have the unmistakable sense that he was more interested in the images of Paris he and William Lubtchansky, the brilliant cinematographer, were able to compose.  Many of them were of fabled center-city sights, but even more were on the outskirts, where the dreadful housing projects of the late 1970s were defacing the landscape.  It is as though historical Paris was being surrounded and laid seige to by this cordon of ugliness, and the implications of it for the most beautiful city on earth were as unpleasant as the sudden shock that greets Marie.

Pascale Ogier takes a very difficult role--Baptiste is essentially what the French call a lunaire, which I can translate only by using an antique English word, "mooncalf"--and makes it both believable and sympathetic.  Like Quixote, we laugh at her, but we also ache with her.  The world customarily has little room for people like Baptiste, and apparently it had little for Pascale Ogier: she died of a heart attack in 1984, at age twenty-four. 

The Remake

I've never sorted out the status of copyright in movies, specifically what sorts of protection are available if you made a film called, say, The Italian Job, nearly thirty-five years ago and opened your newspaper one day to find a review of a film called The Italian Job with the same name for a couple of the lead characters but otherwise bearing not much relation to your effort.  All right, your screenwriter got a credit for his 1969 script, of which a few gimmicks are reproduced, but not much else; basically, this was a gesture to keep the WGA quiet. 

Fortunately, I suppose, the director of the original Job, Peter Collinson, was spared this rather rude surprise; he died in 1980, twenty-three years before the remake appeared.  (Interestingly, a sequel to the 2003 film is in the works, and it's entitled The Italian Job II.  Shouldn't it, in the interests of accuracy, be III?)  But Mike Hodges, who wrote and directed the 1971 Get Carter, was still around when someone named Stephen T. Kay directed a film called Get Carter in 2000 with a protagonist called Jack Carter whose exploits, while transferred from Newcastle, England, to Las Vegas, NV, are almost shot for shot identical to Hodges' script and film.  Since Hodges got no script credit in the remake, one assumes--certainly hopes--he received some sort of remuneration; since he's long had difficulties in getting films made, one also hopes it was generous.  But it must be troubling to have a shining little gem like the original Get Carter ripped off and to see Michael Caine's pitch perfect Jack Carter of 1971 soiled by Mr. Subtlety himself, Sylvester Stallone. 

This sort of thing is not precisely without precedent.  Just thinking about films I've admired, I come upon Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) remade the following year as Algiers--again, shot for shot.  Or Brian Helgeland's Payback (1999), a straight lift of John Boorman's masterful Point Blank (1967).  The remake of course credited Donald Westlake's novel, The Hunter, since copyright on books is a rather stricter matter. 

Apparently, the irony is lost on Hollywood that it yelps to high heaven about Chinese film piracy but thinks nothing about its own version of it.  So if they don't care, I shouldn't either.  I will add that, after giving it about five minutes' thought, I could only come up with one remake that outdid its original: Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) actually improved upon the Don Siegel original from 1956, no small feat.  Otherwise, I don't think I've deprived myself of any magnificent cinematic experiences by avoiding remakes.  Of course, the little link at the bottom of this post gives everyone an opportunity to prove me wrong.

Dan O'Herlihy (1919-2005)

Dan O'Herlihy had a large number of films but was not exactly a major presence.  This Irish actor may be best known in the US for his role as General Black in Fail Safe (1960), the man who nukes New York.  Well into his seventies, he gave an incisive version of Mr. Browne to John Huston's The Dead (1997).  But one role dominates all the others: his portrayal of the title character in Luis Buñuel's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954), for which he won an Oscar best actor nomination (the statue went to Brando for On the Waterfront).  O'Herlihy was on screen for the entire film and gave expanded to the idea of one actor "carrying" a picture.  And since it's ñuel, at a somewhat restrained but still imaginative level, it's a delight to watch.  Widely available on tape and DVD, it's worth a look.

Secret File (2003)

Another report from the Film Comment Selects film series.  Secret File is the English title given to Segretti di stato, i.e. "State Secrets," a film by Paolo Benvenuti which the program notes inform me was "the scandal of the Venice Film Festival of 2003," presumably for political reasons.  It has no US release date, and indeed Benvenuti's previous twelve films have rarely shown outside of Italy.  This one is, for want of a better label, a sort of historico-legal procedural: a lawyer unraveling a case in which little is as it seems at first.  It's set in 1951, the style is something like docu-drama, and it's a crisp, spare little piece at eighty-five minutes. 

Here's the story: in 1947, a coalition of Socialists and Communists in Sicily won an upset in a local election and staged a big rally to celebrate.  There was some shooting, and ten people were killed, perhaps as many as fifty wounded.  The authorities blamed the legendary Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano and his gang, who were on hand, and a few days later Giuliano was killed under mysterious circumstances.  It was never clear why Giuliano would want to kill working-class demonstrators, since he had always styled himself a sort of Robin Hood and his ability to evade the law depended in no small part upon popular support.  His surviving fellow-gang members went on trial in 1951, and it was in that process that one of their defense attorneys began coming across anomalies and contradictions.  He sorts through forensic evidence, revisits the scene of the rally and shootings, interviews Giuliano's principal lieutenant, and begins to piece together an alternate version.  The more he looks into that version, the more it seems to fit together with other--often circumstantial--evidence that exonerates Giuliano himself, implicates one of his lesser lieutenants, links most of the shooting deaths to a group of Mafia gunmen who were on the scene, links the Mafia to the ruling right-wing Christian Democratic party and to the upper reaches of the Vatican, then ruled by the fiercely anti-Communist pope Pius XII and the head of the Vatican secret service, the man who became Pope Paul VI, and then links them all to the US Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, and Harry Truman's early Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s and early '50s.  Benvenuti insists that much of this is to be found in a group of secret files which researchers have only begun to uncover, though he doesn't quote any of them directly as far as I can tell, which might have been interesting.

Although the film clips along smartly, there are two problems that an American audience might find.  The lesser one is that unless you have a fairly good working purchase on postwar Italian politics and the revelations about them that have been coming out during the trials of Mafia leaders over the last fifteen years or so, you're liable to find yourself at sea from time to time.  Perhaps because Benvenuti is not accustomed to making films for foreign audiences, he doesn't slow down for curves which might throw people who don't subscribe to Italian newspapers.  (People leaving the screening I attended were muttering things like, "Who the hell was this Togliatti guy they were talking about at the end?")  More troubling, there is of course the aroma of conspiracy theory to Benvenuti's story, to which I suspect he would replay: yes, it is my theory that there was a conspiracy, and remember, even paranoids have enemies.  But going back to the JFK assassination and running right up through the Florida fiasco of November 2000, we have had so many of such theories on our front pages (and, lately, web sites) that we have become reasonably immune to them.  That is not to judge Benvenuti's view here--he may very well be right, for all I know, and my own prejudices say I hope he is, although my faith would have been strengthened by some actual evidence--but simply to say that the reflex reaction of American audiences is liable to be, Yeah, right, I've think I've heard this one before.