March 30, 2020

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

Produced by the short-lived Parklane pictures and distributed by United Artists, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) follows the exploits of low-level private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker). After picking up a distressed woman (Cloris Leachman) on a highway, Hammer finds himself embroiled in a mystery too big for him to even understand, leave alone solve. A group of men with sketchy motivations, looking for “the box”, try to kill him, while every woman he comes across falls heads over heels for him. The more Hammer tries to get to the bottom of things, the farther they seem, and the more he risks losing. Ultimately, the film poses this question: how far will the detective go in his violence, misogyny, cynicism and pig-headedness before he realizes that he is only a tragic hero, doomed to failure?

Kiss Me Deadly was adapted by A. I. Bezzerides from Mickey Spillane’s detective novel of the same name. Bezzerides, a novelist himself, strips down concrete references from the source material. The object of everybody’s search becomes a box containing a nondescript “whatsit” instead of a drug consignment. The mafia makes way for a nameless, faceless “them” who pull all the strings. Such abstraction lends the film to different readings. Thanks to a reference, however, to the Manhattan Project and the radioactive quality of the box’s contents, the film is traditionally taken to be a commentary on the anxiety about nuclear age. Hammer’s developing paranoia comes to fruition when a femme fatale Lily (Gaby Rodgers) who double-crossed him ends up opening the box on a whim.

In a peculiar fashion, the film proceeds on two fronts at the same time. While the plot marches forward steadily, Aldrich and Bezzerides devote their attention elsewhere. Instead of accompanying Hammer in his search for truth, they reverse the gaze, looking rather at Hammer’s seedy operation, his obstinacy and his escalating paranoia, desperation and violence. Two or three things seem to be happening in parallel in every scene of the film. A debriefing sequence doubles as a game of seduction. A dinner with family becomes a confessional about a killing. Hammer goes to confront the story’s antagonist at the latter’s mansion, only to get into a long romantic exchange with the villain’s excessively forward sister. Full of stubs and false tracks, the plot appears to go nowhere, yet plot is the least of the film’s concerns.

It becomes clear as the film advances that Aldrich and Bezzerides are aiming less for a realistic detective story with allegorical underpinning than a myth with a very physical presence. The legend of Pandora’s Box particularly looms over the ending, but the whole film itself unfolds like a dream. The dialogue veers on the poetic and the actors’ line reading is weirdly protracted with pregnant pauses. Hammer’s dodgy cop friend Pat (Wesley Addy) speaks in an affectless, extra-terrestrial tone, his mechanic pal Nick (Nick Dennis) amps up the Mediterranean stereotype, Lily orders Hammer to kiss her in an incantatory repetition, while her boss, the doctor Soberin (Albert Dekker) makes pensive declarations full of mythological references.

The cumulative effect of these eccentric lines and dialogue delivery is the impression that what Hammer is navigating through is a nightmare of dilated time, a mechanical world of cold images programmed to perform specific functions. The surreal texture of the film’s soundscape is likely the reason British artist repurposed it for his recent experimental film, The Whalebone Box (2019), also about a mythical box with supreme powers. The movie’s oneiric quality is pitted against a heightened presence of the real Los Angeles. Several locations from the city feature in the film, most notably the uphill funicular known as the Angels Flight. In his epic study of the representation of Los Angeles in film, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), filmmaker and academic Thom Anderson deems Kiss Me Deadly “close to definitive as a portrait of the city in the mid-fifties.”

Accentuating the sense of the story’s oppressiveness is Aldrich’s muscular approach to direction. The story takes place in summer and, even when we aren’t sure where it’s headed, we feel the sultriness of the air. The film’s harsh, directional lighting scheme flashes the actors like headlights on a highway, as the camera lingers on their sweaty faces and jagged features. Doors are knocked down with more force than is usual in detective movies, the punches land harder. Hammer dispatches one henchman down a large flight of stairs. He’ll later jam the fingers of an elderly coroner in a drawer.

Like his peer Samuel Fuller, Aldrich employs a shot division that focuses largely on actors’ feet. The film’s first shot is that of a woman’s running feet. A while later, we see the same feet rise off the ground as the woman is tortured. As the film progresses, the image of feet accrues a frightening aura, belonging invariably to men sporting dark suits and heavy, leather shoes. This disembodied, faceless menace—sophisticated, emotionless and sure in its movement—becomes almost a metaphysical threat. We don’t know who these feet belong to, but we understand that its trace runs deep.

Matching the labyrinthine machinery of the plot is an equally complex cinematography. Shot by Hungarian emigré Ernest Laszlo, Kiss Me Deadly employs a camera choreography that rivals those of Orson Welles and Max Ophüls, as do the low-angle, deep space compositions. A three-minute scene of Hammer questioning a contact at a boxing gym is filmed in a single shot. It includes a conversation about a champion boxer in the ring without even a glimpse of the ring. Another three-minute shot, dominated by horizontal camera movements, finds Hammer grilling a soprano in a cramped hotel room. Aldrich varies his sequence construction from scene to scene, and the film remains as unpredictable on the visual level as on its narrative level.

The single most accomplished element of the film, though, is its multi-layered sound design that imparts complementary values to everything we see. This principle is evident from the credits sequence onwards, in which Nat King Cole’s I’d Rather Have the Blues is overlaid with the sound of heavy breathing of the girl in Hammer’s car—we know something is off right away. Throughout, Aldrich mixes in ambient noise—the buzz of the boxing gym, the sound of the sea, street traffic—in a way that expands the world we see on screen. At times, he superposes contradictory sound elements running against the grain of the image. So you have chamber music playing as a voice threatens Hammer on the phone. Or Schubert’s Eighth Symphony over the detective’s interrogation of a witness. In one stylized action sequence, Hammer’s escape is scored simultaneously to a piece of generic music, the sound of the ocean and sports commentary.

A B-movie with no stars or studio backing, Kiss Me Deadly has gathered a reputation among filmmakers and cinephiles over the years as a crime movie classic. The amoral, machine-like operation of Hammer finds an echo in the vigilante of John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), itself inspiring Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009). Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) pays tribute to Aldrich’s film in its suitcase with glowing contents. But the first to consider Aldrich as a serious artist—and this film a masterpiece—were the young critics at the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Charles Bitsch, who became a filmmaker himself, called it one of the most significant films of the decade and Aldrich, “the first filmmaker of the atomic age”.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

March 27, 2020

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

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  • A pre-code sex comedy is just as outrageous as it sounds. But Lubitsch’s sense of suggestion is so subtle and delicate that it suffuses the whole film, colouring ordinary lines and sequences with sexual charge. In another musical, the morning-after breakfast song, “Magic in the Muffin”, might pass largely without a guffaw. Every object becomes a sexual symbol, its value predicated on the fact that the connection isn’t made concrete. The whole movie talks about only one thing—the perils of testicular thought—without actually talking about it.
  • The scene between Colbert and Hopkins is a masterpiece of subversive feminism later reprised by Monroe and Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s a bedroom scene in which two young women fight, reconcile and drool over descriptions of their common lover in various stages of undress. They don’t discuss anything but the man, their need for the man, about the sort of song to sing for the man, the kind of lingerie they should wear to please the man. (And it turns out that the man needs nothing more.) And through these rather anti-Bechdel exchanges, they arrive at the film’s most memorable, moving relationship based on recognition of mutual desires and vulnerabilities. Both actors reproduce lines and gestures conceived by men, but their comic genius consists of owning it and making them their own. The scene simply collapses without their intelligence.
  • There’s hardly a funny line in the script, but the film is hysterical. All the comedy derives from the acting (Chevalier alone carries a ridiculous French accent while others speak American), line delivery, découpage and cutting. Seventy-four shots feature opening or closing doors (and countless others have doors and doorways as the backdrop)—every fourth or fifth shot of the film. Besides tying into Lubitsch’s obsession with what goes on behind closed doors, it performs a musical function here. Equally distributed as clusters of 3-6 shots through the film—but never happening during the song sequences, which unfold mostly in single shots—they lend a snappy, dance-like rhythm to the script and impart the viewer a feeling of constant movement.
  • The doors are also a brilliant means to sendup Old World mores, whose chambers of secrets barely conceal a neurotic obsession with sex. (The principle is the same in Polanski’s new film, but the object of obsession there are Jews.) Having spent a decade in America, Lubitsch is evidently taken by the cultural and intellectual directness of his new homeland (a fact that reflects in the stylistic sobriety of his Hollywood pictures). A sense of liberation is palpable in the way he ridicules pre-war European pretensions. The king of a tiny country in Mitteleuropa rues bourgeois power (“A thousand years ago they were even smaller than we. It’s only the last 700 years they’ve got anywhere.”) while his daughter threatens that she’ll marry an American if her wishes aren’t granted. But it’s a double-edged satire, directed as much at American puritanism (the hero is a slacker, womanizer, cheat and a decadent—this is established in the first minute) as European ritual.
 

March 17, 2020

Moonrise (1948)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

The story of Moonrise (1948), in many ways, is antithetical to the way Hollywood tells it. One of the ideological pillars of the classical Hollywood narrative is individualism, the idea that a person is what he chooses to be. In this view of things, factors outside one’s control, such as social milieu, upbringing or race, have little bearing on what one might make of their life. Moonrise, in contrast, foregrounds man as a product of circumstances. The protagonist Danny’s father is hanged for murder, and Danny (Dane Clark) spends his whole life struggling with the question of whether violence runs in his blood. In the film’s first scene, an overt bit of directorial messaging cuts from Danny’s father being hanged to the shadow of a suspended doll looming over baby Danny in the cradle.

As he grows up, Danny is bullied by peers, especially Jerry (Lloyd Bridges), the son of a wealthy banker. He is called by his second name, Hawkins, to remind him of his father’s sin. Danny lives in a constant state of fear and distress. As he puts it in an outburst late in the film, no one gives him a job, and girls stay away from him “like he was poison”. He carries a dead man on his back all his life, and he might be one himself. Danny keeps away those around him, with a few exceptions. He looks out for Billy the deaf-mute (Harry Morgan), the only one in town more unfortunate than him. He longs for the romantic attention of Gilly (Gain Russell), whom Jerry also courts.

In a tussle in the woods on a dance night, Danny ends up killing Jerry in a mix of pent-up rage and self-defence, and hides his body in a cave. As word starts getting around about Jerry’s disappearance, Danny grows desperate, meeting Gilly only secretly and frequenting his friend Mose (Rex Ingram) who lives in the woods with his hunting dogs. Mose is depicted a wise, well-read man who recognizes the dignity of every living being. He has no back story, but regretfully claims to have resigned from the human race. As a black man in the American south, he surely knows a thing or two about being judged for your involuntary inheritances.

When the noose starts tightening around Danny, another large-hearted figure comes into the picture. In contrast to the judgmental eyes of the small town, sheriff Otis (Allyn Joslyn) views Danny’s action in light of his difficult childhood. Like Mose, he recognizes crime as a product of social factors. In a powerful conversation with the town coroner, he says, “If you went into all the reasons why that rock struck Jerry’s head, you might end up writing the history of the world.” The Sheriff cuts Danny some slack, urging him to come surrender so that his sentence may be commuted. Gilly, too, sticks by Danny when she learns the truth.

These humane gestures are amplified by the film’s vision of small-town America. The story is set in Virginia and the place seems frozen in an unspecified time in early 20th century. People are referred to by their origin: hillbillies, Yankees. Prejudices run deep, especially against those way down the social ladder as Danny and Mose are. Soon after the murder, rumours float around about the killer’s identity. “A small town’s like a stomach—always digesting”, remarks the sheriff, referring to public incrimination by way of rumour-mongering. In the nuanced view of Moonrise, the familiarity enforced by small-town life is the source both of bigotry and saving grace.

This complexity is also extended to the anti-heroic protagonist, who is repulsive and sympathetic in equal measure. He is the result of his difficult circumstances, but he is also a difficult personality. While he fends for the hapless Billy, Danny practically forces himself on Gilly, who turns down his advances several times. When she gently criticizes him for his childishness, he pushes the pedal on the car he’s driving and crashes it. Emerging out of the crash, the first thing he does is to kiss a half-conscious Gilly. He tails her after the event, imposing himself despite her protests until she gives in.

Director Frank Borzage accentuates Danny’s shadowed existence by holding him at a distance from the viewer. We generally see the character under a blanket darkness or as a silhouette. At times, his face is blocked or covered by something on the foreground. Even in closer shots, he is filmed in profile and often with shadows creeping up on his face. This strategy also helps the filmmaker minimize his dependence on the capabilities of the lead actor, Dane Clark, a relatively new leading man in town. Clark plays Danny with an unflattering nervousness, a low voice and with no charm whatsoever. As a result, the viewer’s identification with the lead actor is weakened, if not thwarted.

Moonrise, moreover, progresses on a disharmonious scale from the start. After the execution of his father in the opening scene, we see young Danny being roughed up by his schoolmates. The murder takes place in the very next scene, as though a foreordained event. Danny courts Gilly in immediately afterwards, this segue into romance right after a murder producing an unnerving overtone. Save for a scene with Gilly at the town fair, Danny is never happy or at peace. This succession of one anxious scene after the other creates a sense of instability, a lingering feeling that it is not going to end well for the protagonist.

And yet, Moonrise makes an appeal for Danny. There’s a Christian charity at work in the film, no doubt part of Borzage’s temperament. Borzage, the most affirmatively Catholic of filmmakers in Hollywood along with John Ford and Frank Capra, shares the perspectives of Mose, Gilly and the sheriff. The church is present only at the margins of the story, but its fundamental spirit of forbearance suffuses the film. There’s a relentless seriousness about Moonrise that Borzage, unlike Ford and Capra, refuses to dilute with comic relief. There’s no irony or scepticism to be found in Borzage’s work, which embodies a sincerity almost pre-modern.

On the other hand, Moonrise signals a shift away from the director’s established style of soft, top lighting and diffusion filters. Working with fledgling cinematographer John Russell, freshly off Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948), Borzage goes for an expressionistic style of high chiaroscuro. The framing is deep, the edges sharp and the shadows dark. The fisticuff between Danny and Jerry is as rough as anything in Fritz Lang, as is the manic frenzy of a key scene involving a Ferris wheel. The focus on hands, as in the extended shot that opens a conversation between Danny and Gilly or the shot where the sheriff tries to trap an insect on a table, brings in a materialist, hard-boiled texture to the images, far from the ethereal aesthetic characteristic of Borzage, where human beings often vanish into pure concepts.

It isn’t wholly unlikely that this change in style was influenced by the production company, Republic Pictures, one of the smaller Hollywood studios. Modesty of means often calls for invention, as is evident in a sequence at a railway station. The whole scene consists of shots of five people waiting on a platform bench. We never get a reverse shot of the approaching train or its passengers. This displaces the scene’s focus from the new stranger entering town to the reaction of Danny and the townsfolk to his arrival.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

March 11, 2020

Masterclass by Saeed Akhtar Mirza

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[A report on Mirza’s masterclass at the Bangalore International Centre in February]

Saeed Akhtar Mirza in conversation with Aakar Patel.

“Don’t try to be good, try to understand”, remarks filmmaker Saeed Akhtar Mirza, reflecting on a hideous story idea proposed by two well-meaning acquaintances of his. To understand: that might be the verb Mirza most used at the masterclass organized by the Bangalore International Centre in February. In conversations with different hosts, Mirza talked about his childhood, his turn to filmmaking, the blossoming of his political awareness and various aspects of his filmmaking and writing practice, including the circumstances of production of the three films screened at the event. Together, the films and the conversations evoke the image of an artist for whom practice is an extension of one’s intellectual relation to the world, a transcription of one’s ‘understanding’ of it.

As the child of noted screenwriter Akhtar Mirza (Naya Daur, Waqt), Mirza found cinema and cinema-related discussions an integral part of growing up. But it wasn’t until his 14th birthday, when his father projected a copy of the Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, that the medium took firm root in his consciousness. The image construction, he says, was shocking. He’d subsequently have one classic of world cinema screened at home every month. The realization that cinema could accommodate ideas, conversations, polemics as well as narratives enthralled him.

Adult life, however, had different plans, and Mirza found himself working in an advertising firm. He experienced an internal crisis eight years into the job. Encouraged by his wife, he applied for a course at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), coming back to the road he had left behind in his adolescence.

At the institute, then under the direction of Girish Karnad, Mirza set out to document protests against slum evictions in Bombay. The sheer imbalance in clearing thousands of residents to make way for a few hundred government officials struck him, instilling an abiding desire to speak to people and hear what they have to say. Emergency was declared shortly after he finished editing the documentary, simply titled Slum Eviction.

How is it that a cosmopolitan—“internationalist”, in Mirza’s description—unmarked Muslim from west Bombay became a committed, politicized filmmaker producing work attuned to realities that had little bearing on his social situation? Mirza traces the transformation to an incident from childhood. At the age of ten, he refused to enter the Bandra mosque with his father to offer prayers on the day of Id. He didn’t believe in god anymore, he told his father, who asked him to remain seated at the steps outside the mosque. This original doubt paved way for others, taking him on a journey of progressive ‘declassification’ of the mind.

Mirza relates this opening up of the mind to diverse ideas, especially at the film institute, to the predicament of the protagonist in Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978). One of the two films produced by the quasi-legendary Yukt Film Cooperative Society (the other being Mani Kaul and K. Hariharan’s Ghashiram Kotwal (1976), in which Mirza also worked), Arvind Desai, says Mirza, is about being young and hailing from a particular social milieu. He adds that Arvind’s predicament, of rationalizing the gap between acquired ideas and lived experience, of harmonizing the two, was his own. “Our school education is status quo-ist”, notes Mirza, “we need outside ideas to shake it up”. Arvind Desai thus became this “journey of guilt”, tracing the chasm between received education and political action.

His subsequent film, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980), set around mill strikes in Bombay, is the story of the politicization of a bourgeois businessman. It came at the end of a significant personal change, says Mirza, the result of “being swept into a vortex of ideas”. “It was an age of questioning at a mass level”, he adds, referring to the international protests against the Vietnam war in the seventies. And Albert Pinto was another step towards engaging with the other, in this case with one of the largest organized workforces in the country.

Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (1984) adopts a sophisticated expositional framework that combines the tamasha form of theatre, a middle-class melodrama and a documentary. Even though the decrepit chawl we see in the film seems like a real slice of Mumbai, the film itself has only tenuous links to realism, weaves as it does in and out of a burlesque mode of narration. Bhisham Sahni’s dignified face, representing for Mirza ‘civility in an uncivilized world’, is pitted against the machinations of a caricatural Naseeruddin Shah, whose career rises just as the chawl continues to crumble.

On being asked about the long, revealing titles of his films, Mirza speaks of a democratic dialogue with the audience, of not wanting to deceive them. When the viewer buys a ticket, he says, he has an idea of the film he’s walking into. “It’s not some Khandaan or Jurm.”

In no other film is the title as illuminating as in Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989). The instruction—don’t cry over Salim the cripple—positions the film as a tragedy, with the fate of its lead character sealed from the start. Salim, a low-level hustler with dreams of making it big as a gangster, gets a rude awakening when he’s showed his place by a system that views him differently. The Mumbai slang of Salim and those who abuse him are far from the Byron-quoting urbanity of Mirza, who had to undertake midnight trips to Dharavi to talk to real underworld figures as part of his preparation.

Mirza describes the last of his five major films, Naseem (1995), as the final nail on the coffin of the idea of India. Set in the months preceding the destruction of the Babri mosque, Naseem paints an elegiac portrait of a syncretic, tolerant nation, thrown into disarray by the events of and after December 1992. Like Salim, but on a lower, more heart-breaking key, the teenager Naseem (Mayuri Kango) is forced to confront her social identity as reflected in reaction of those around her. Naseem finds Mirza articulating space with greater surety, with the fluid camera stitching the rooms of Naseem’s middle-class household into long, unbroken shots.

Responding to why he didn’t direct films at the same clip after 1995, Mirza said that he felt he didn’t have anything more to say, that he needed to gather himself. Over the next few months, he travelled extensively through the country, meeting people of all stripes from across geographical regions, in order to “regain his faith in people”. “The Babri demolition”, he adds, “was an assault on what my mother stood far”. And this journey across the Indian heartland was necessary to restore his belief in the basic generosity and benevolence of ordinary Indians.

Mirza’s energy and effort after Naseem were directed towards writing: screenplay for a children’s film Choo Lenge Akash (2001), but also two books. In a conversation with Aakar Patel on his writing output, Mirza detailed the idea behind his first book, Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother (2008). Letter, he says, is a tribute to his mother as an individual, but also a remembrance of history, an act of unburdening. His mother’s deep thirst for information was often checked by an insecurity about herself in face of an erudite husband and English-speaking children. With conversations unfolding at home in English, reflects Mirza, language became a tool of distancing. Letter was a way to address this distance, to recognize the silent revolutionary gestures of his mother—a document, then, at once personal and political.

“It’s unforgivable if you’re over 50 and don’t have a sense of our history”, asserts Mirza, pointing to the collective amnesia the country has developed around the Babri demolition. Just after the events, in a workshop with students of direction of the batch of 1992 at FTII, he admittedly asked students to mull over three questions: whether India was (a) more intolerant (b) more violent and (c) more religious than any other country in the world. When the students came to the conclusion that India was no special case, he counselled the students then to cut out the clichés and understand the causes and effects of historical upheavals.

Cause and effect. Words crucial to both the inner workings of Mirza’s films and his view of history. Marxist in spirit, Mirza’s work never settles for easy simplifications of human behaviour, even when framed as melodramas as Mohan Joshi or Salim is. It’s also a Marxist term he coins to characterize the changes the nation has been subjected to in the past thirty years; a “lumpenization of aesthetics” has taken place, he says, and the globalization of the economy has but resulted in a “ghettoization of the mind”.

“Each film I’ve done is a journey of understanding myself and the world”, reflects Mirza. His work invites us to undertake the same journey, to leave the self-imposed ghettos of our mind.

 

[First published at SilverScreen]

 

March 5, 2020

Posters from a Revolution

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[Posters at film screenings at Cinépop in Bab El Oued, Algiers, following Algeria’s independence – from Peuple en Marche (1963) by René Vautier and co. Cinépop was a dance bar converted to a movie theatre, later converted to a mosque.]

 

 

March 1, 2020

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

Classical Hollywood didn’t need a reason to make a film on Abraham Lincoln, a national icon revered across the political spectrum. By the time John Ford made Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) for Twentieth Century Fox, dozens of movies were already produced about him. Ford’s own brother, Francis, had played Lincoln seven times on screen. But Young Mr. Lincoln, featuring Henry Fonda in the titular role, isn’t a prestigious biopic about the 16th American president. It’s the story of Abraham the inexperienced lawyer trying to find his footing in small-town Illinois.

There’s a dual perspective at work in Lamar Trotter’s script. On one hand, for the film’s 20th century audience, Abraham Lincoln is already part of the collective consciousness as one of the greatest political figures of all time. The film plays on this awareness by hinting at foreordained nature of young Abraham’s destiny. Abe decides to become a lawyer by the toss of a stick at the grave of his first sweetheart Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore). He frequently stares at the ice-laden Sangamon river in the distance, as though heeding the call of a higher power. In the film’s final moments, he advances as a silhouette into the sunset. As he exits the frame, he walks into an approaching storm, the wind and the lightning suggesting the political tumult that awaits America in the coming decades.

On the other hand, Young Mr. Lincoln assures that it’s simply the story of a callow lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1830s. To this end, it minimizes the figure of Lincoln and instead presents him as an everyman unaware of what lies in wait. We see him judging a cooking contest, alternately chomping on an apple and a peach pie. He splits a piece of wood in record time. He plays ridiculous tunes on a Jew’s harp. At the first pangs of romance, he tosses a rock into the river. He has an awkward dance session at a ball with his wife-to-be, Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). Before his first trial, he polishes his shoes and cuts his own hair. The Lincoln of Ford’s film is not the solemn orator of history books, but an entertainer with a self-deprecatory sense of humour. This minimization, in fact, only adds to the legend-building project of the film.

The film contrasts Lincoln’s straightforward persona with the pompous airs of those around him. In the first scene of the film, Lincoln’s co-legislator in New Salem delivers a harangue in which he promises to chase out corrupt elements from politics like “dogs from a meat house”. His speech, full of sound and fury, is followed by Lincoln’s. His head lowered and hands in the pocket, Abe delivers a short and heartfelt speech in sinking intonations, suggesting an honest language very different from the painted words of his peers. Similarly, the words of the prosecutor (Donald Meek) at his first trial, leaning on Biblical references and thunderous exhortations, is followed by Abe’s jovial argumentation, which is evidently on the level.

At the same time, the film subtly reinforces Lincoln’s essential integrity and rectitude. In his first address to the people, Abe is framed tightly, centred, head-on, and from a low angle. Sunlight seeping through gaps between wooden planks forms a vertical, striated pattern in the background to evoke a notion of uprightness. Abe interacts plainly with plain folks of the New Salem village. He trusts them to pay for their purchase later. He doffs his hat when pioneers of the 1776 revolution pass by in a parade. Ford’s Lincoln is the son of the soil, a herculean figure as adept at working an axe as debating in a courtroom. Throughout, Abe is associated with nature, the trees and the river, his understanding of law deriving from the intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

Like various figures representing the law in John Ford’s westerns, Abraham of Young Mr. Lincoln is a man of the book intervening in a society that believes in mob justice. When two young men from a neighbouring village are accused of murdering a local ruffian, the whole town tries to barge into the prison to capture the men and lynch them. To stop them, Abe poses himself between the crowd and the prison. He wields his imposing physique as his first weapon, forcefully pushing back the barging pole with his foot. He assures the crazed men he’s not there to make a speech, but he slowly segues into a monologue in which he appeals to the good will of individuals over the wisdom of the mob. A while earlier, when the prisoner’s mother Mrs. Clay (Alice Brady, in her last screen role) asks Abe who he is to help them, he says, “I’m your lawyer, ma’am”.

This double signification of Abe as a greenhorn as well as a master rhetorician also manifests in the figure of Henry Fonda, who excelled at conveying good-to-the-bone innocence without making it seem boyish. His blank stares often serve as a clean slate on which viewers project their own emotions. Fonda is self-effacing in several sequences of the film. For most part of the final trial scene, his Abe is merely a dark silhouette seen from behind. He sits on the floor, refers to books at the corner of the courtroom, and stands at the judge’s desk with his head buried in his hands. It is not until he wins the case, when the familiar figure in a top hat walks transfixed towards cheering, off-screen crowds, that his character assumes a mythical aura, that his Abe finally becomes Lincoln.

Henry Fonda was a tall man, 187 centimetres in height, six less than the real Lincoln. Few directors understood as well as Ford that he was a great actor of the legs. The filmmaker accentuates Abraham’s clumsiness by focusing on Fonda’s long legs, which seem even longer the way he wears his trousers up over his navel. When we first see Fonda, he’s on a chair, with his legs crossed over a barrel. This horizontal position—made iconic in Fonda’s later collaboration with Ford, My Darling Clementine (1946)—will appear several times in the film, most strikingly in the final courtroom scene. When Abe is reading a book in the woods, his head rests on a log and his legs are posed against a tree. He then sits up, leans against the tree and works the log with his left leg. He scratches his right shin as he mulls over the words of the law. When Ann shows up shortly on the other side of a fence, he approaches her and hops over the high rail with an ungainly leap. Ford captures the actor in many such unflattering poses, making the legendary stateman feel more human, one among the people.

John Ford’s film exhibit great pictorial beauty and the director had the uncanny knack of finding the most powerful yet unobtrusive camera angles and movements. More crucially, he had the ability to infuse his stories—none of which he wrote himself—with an eternal, transcendental quality. A sense of the supernatural marks his death-touched Lincoln. A poem by Rosemary Benet describing the maternal yearnings of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother, opens the film. The spectres of his mother, his sister Sarah and his beloved Ann loom large over Abraham, who can’t but see them reincarnated in Mrs. Clay and her daughters. As he leans at Ann’s grave, whose demise is conveyed via a heart-breaking ellipse, the Sangamon river flows by in the background. This too shall pass.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

February 26, 2020

Smoking/No Smoking

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Hollywood
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To Catch a Thief

To Catch a Thief (1955, Alfred Hitchcock)

Stavisky… (1974, Alain Resnais)

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

 

February 20, 2020

Luc Moullet A-Z

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A for American Cinema

Perhaps more than any of his Nouvelle Vague comrades, Moullet retained a fascination with classical American cinema all through his writing and filmmaking life. Some count with numbers, some others with John Ford’s filmography.

B for Backpacking

Moullet has stated more than once that his real profession is trekking (which explains his love for movies with people on the move). That cinema is just a hobby. A hobbyist’s cinema then, free of the need to make statements or find a purpose.

C for Cinephilia

A great fidelity towards cinema over other arts. There’s are a few literary references, hardly any to painting and almost none to music or theatre in Moullet’s work—quite unlike his New Wave peers. The Cahiers du cinéma is the abiding literary material on screen.

D for Doors

Probably as many as in the Dardennes. There are four or five door-related events in the very first short film, including an appearance by Moullet himself. There’s a whole film about the different ways of bypassing the Paris metro turnstiles.

E for Economics

A perennial obsession with finances, both from a macroscopic, economic point of view and in the transactional, everyday sense. A shopkeeper recounts her dealing with a serial killer. Moullet: “Did he settle his account?”

F for Fake

Master of false histories and forged statistics, Moullet was a devoted explorer of the mockumentary. His short films, in particular, dwell in the slippage between the documentary form and the fictional nature of things being said.

G for Geography

Mountains, plateaus, marshes, rivers, grasslands, slag heaps are the central characters of Moullet’s cinema. It is what he paid the most attention to in his writing as well. Many of his works are virtually excuses to film certain landscapes.

H for Housework

“No helping hand to lend, no shopping to do, no firewood to pick up, or dishes to wipe. Everyone is condemned to the anti-dialecticism of intellectualism. Write, write, write forever. I think, therefore I am… but no, I think therefore I don’t wipe, for there’s nothing to wipe.” Not in his films though.

I for Irony

The Moullet persona is a product of contradictory impulses, his great delusions of grandeur undone by the pettiness of his concerns. A neurotic, self-deprecatory figure somewhere between Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen, with a touch of the silent greats.

J for Joke

The Moullet screenplay is an occasion for chaining together quips and visual gags. The joke is often a radical simplification of a situation (Moullet stealing newspapers from a vending machine) or a radical elaboration (a two-minute sequence of a man noting down something from a newspaper).

K for Kitchen

Food, of course, is at the centre of Genesis of a Meal, but has a tangential presence all through. Hunger grounds the intellectual being, the act of cooking, preparing the table and consuming all serve a purpose of reverse-transubstantiation.

L for Lists

“I have 72 ideas for key scenes, I arrange them to have a logical order”. Enumeration is the chief manner by which Moullet builds his films and texts, which overflow with lists of all kinds, often rattled off by the characters themselves.

M for Maps

The capital of French cinema, he wrote, is a rhombus in the Centre region of the French hexagon. The capital of madness, we are told, is a pentagon between the Alpes-Provence regions. A body of work suffused with cartographic imagination.

N for Nowhere

The cinema’s poet laureate of boondocks and bleds paumés, Moullet takes particular pleasure in discovering and deriding the most disconnected and isolated settlements in the country. Mean? Perhaps, what comedy isn’t?

O for Omnidirectional

A Moullet film is a collection of unicellular entities with no central nervous system or sense of time and space. It wants to go nowhere and everywhere at once. The longer the film is, the more apparent its atomization.

P for Province

For a filmmaker born and working in Paris, Moullet gives the city of lights awfully little representation. His cinema doggedly heads for the provinces, militating for a relocation of French capital to the town of Imphy, population 4000.

Q for Quantity

Moullet, who determined that 3.5m² was enough for a new parliament, is nothing if not metrically rigorous: “I had to buy half a dozen cutlets, a half-hour worth of wine, 100 metres of noodles, a litre of fresh eggs, 4 francs of olives, and a pound of cake.”

R for Resourcefulness

Shots, soundbites, narrative threads from one film, one piece of film criticism will be reused in other. Repetitions abound, and not just for the sake of humour. The Moullet cinematic universe—and one could speak of a veritable universe here—is finite and ever-shrinking.

S for Statistics

“I’d gather technical information—number and duration of shots and shooting, budget, box office of the film etc.—which made subjective positions sound objective.” “Contrary to expectations, certain statistics are even more subjective than critical opinion.”

T for Transport

Four people depart from Paris for the provinces. One leaves in train, one on a motorbike, another on a bicycle and the last one takes a car. The time to their destination is in inverse proportion to the speed of their modes of transport.

U for Unemployment

Moullet might be the filmmaker most concerned with unemployment, of all of France as much as his own. The sight of waste heaps strewn across Nord-Pas-de-Calais is for him as much an opportunity for job creation as it is aesthetic real estate.

V for Vélo/Love

“Here I had a satisfying relationship that could last hours. One I could dominate, one which involved no problems. I tried to ride in a straight line. The more circuitous things got to be, the more I liked straight lines. I wish my life were a straight line.”

W for Whip pans

The camera oscillates between two points of interest, expressing indecisiveness, or an act of comparison. This dishonoured device finds shelter in Moullet’s cinema, a veritable refuge for such kind.

X for Xerophilia

Fear of water is the main subject of Ma première brasse, but water bodies (or lack thereof) are permanent fixtures. Moullet stays away from the coasts and is attracted to the driest of regions in France. The one film he made in the US was set in Des Moines, Iowa.

Y for Youth

A perennial boyishness, self-styled petulance and a lifelong refusal to grow up and “be serious”. A film on mortality he made at seventy is shot through with an adolescent flippancy towards death.

Z for Zsygmondy

Like the eccentric accommodation scheme of the eponymous refuge, Moullet’s writing and films are often demonstrations of analytical frameworks that are in part or wholly arbitrary. Just like the setup of a good joke.

 

February 15, 2020

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Hollywood, Review | Tags: , , , , , , |
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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

 

Made by Paramount studios and starring Kirk Douglas who passed away this month, Ace in the Hole (1951) is one of Billy Wilder’s best-known pictures. The film is a satire about a newspaperman Chuck (Douglas) in rural New Mexico who orchestrates a media frenzy around a miner (Richard Benedict) trapped inside a mountain. Chuck colludes with the local sheriff (Ray Teal), who is running a re-election campaign, and the local engineers to ensure that Leo isn’t rescued for at least six days, by which time the story would snowball into a national phenomenon and he would be hired by the top agencies in New York. Wilder, known for his tough, cynical classics, was also producer on the film, ensuring that his acidic sensibility dominated the film.

Wilder develops the story wholly through the warped mind of Chuck, who it seems would do anything for a scoop, including sustaining a tragedy for the sake of readership. “Good news is no news. Bad news sells better.”, he tells his naïve colleague, the photographer Herbie (Robert Arthur). He isn’t religious and smirks at the local beliefs about Indian spirits haunting the mountains. But that doesn’t prevent him from exploiting the angle for his story.  Chuck thus positions himself as the rational man towering over the simpletons of hinterland America, who are little more than fodder for his media circus, an agnostic for whom nothing—not the living, not the dead, not the living dead—is sacred.

Wilder doesn’t overwhelm the viewer with all this pessimism right away. The film’s script modulates the character gradually and subtly. Chuck is introduced as a rather affable character—overconfident but eminently likeable for that reason. His wayward career shows no sign of a moral compromise and he does uphold certain ethical principles as a reporter for the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Moreover, being played by a star like Douglas naturally renders the character endearing. But the tensions slowly surface as Chuck’s sociopathic fantasies come forth, masked as professional aspiration. His eyes light up when he hears about a prospector stuck inside the mountains. Making his way through the caves, he tempts Herbie with stories of journalistic greatness.

Chuck becomes more and more menacing as the story unfolds, a transformation reflected in the accumulating paraphernalia around him: a new telephone connection, a fax machine in his room and, then, the return of alcohol. In the process, Wilder divorces the audience’s perspective from Chuck’s, who now becomes an object of critique rather than identification. Wilder’s satire spirals away from Chuck to include other characters who exploit Leo’s predicament in their own ways. Most important of these is Leo’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) who also wants to leave the boondocks by latching on to Chuck. In an unnerving scene, she cosies up to Chuck, who views her seduction as a deviation from the media narrative he’s crafting and violently slaps her to put her back in line.

            Chuck’s cynicism, though, hits a wall when his plans go awry. In the battle between the telephone cable and the cross on the wall of his room, old-fashioned values triumph: Chuck experiences guilt, which he tries to violently deflect on to Lorraine. And so, the film curves into a Christian fable of sin and suffering. Not a fable from the New Testament though: in the end, Chuck gets to address the crowd from the top of the mountain, but his speech feels less like Christ’s sermon than like Moses’ exhortations on the Sinai. Wilder’s film offers no redemption for Chuck, only punishment; he doesn’t even get to make his great confession.  

Billy Wilder’s renown as a scriptwriter has often come at the expense of his strengths as a filmmaker. True, the screenplay of Ace in the Hole is nimble and constantly moves forward without flashbacks or dream sequences. Even the passage of a whole year is accomplished with a straight cut. The virtues of the script, however, don’t take away from Wilder’s economic but vigorous approach to image-making and scene building. The triggering action of the script—an out-of-work journalist walks into a small-town newspaper office—is portrayed in just four shots, establishing Chuck’s character and nonchalant attitude right away.

            Wilder’s images in the film are dynamic, with an emphasis on the diagonal throughout. The recurring shot of Chuck peering at Leo through a gap in the rocks has a straight line slashing across the screen, producing a sense of both instability and claustrophobia. A scene of Chuck corrupting the sheriff by promising him a re-election is shot in a tight space to conjure an atmosphere of twisted intimacy. Wilder makes the lighting progressively dramatic, and the shots are increasingly invaded by shadows as the film advances. He films Chuck from a slightly low angle all through, the compositions taking his character from assertive to threatening to positively malevolent.  

             Central to the composition is the figure of Kirk Douglas himself. An emblem of classical, rugged masculinity, Douglas had a face that was uncertain in its signification. While his wavy locks and genial smile gave him an air of a Greek god, his cleft chin, like those of Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant, and protruding jaw line bestowed a slightly sinister aura. Douglas plays with this ambivalence in Ace in the Hole. His characteristic head tilt combines with his leaning posture to accentuate the diagonality of the shots. Douglas peppers his performance with fleeting but eye-catching gestures—a matchstick dragged over a typewriter, the flip of a bottle, a snap of the suspenders, a spectacular drop of his cigarette into a glass of water after persuading the sheriff—to suggest a master rhetorician at work.  

            Chuck is a New York man, a master of the universe for whom a job at a small-town press is just a sojourn. Douglas conveys this sense of superiority in the fable-like first scene in which he strolls, unannounced and unflappably, into the newspaper office to sell himself. His tone and gesture paint him as a man who stands tall over the poor chumps of Albuquerque. But he becomes restless when he finds himself stuck with his $60/week job even after a year. In a remarkable scene filmed in a single shot, he paces about the news room, delivering a begrudging paean to New York life, evoking both nostalgia and desperation. His zing returns when he smells a breakthrough story, and he plays up his east coast exceptionalism by rough-housing a deputy sheriff.

            While within the classical Hollywood tradition of satire, whose practitioners include Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, Ace in the Hole feels rather modern, partly because Wilder refuses to soften it with a morally upright protagonist. Its lampooning of people vacationing in front of the mountains is broad and caricatural, but it is also discomfiting in its pungent suggestion that it takes a city to bury a man. Like the best satires, Wilder’s film spreads wide outside of its immediate milieu to accommodate a broader cultural criticism.

Ace in the Hole is, in a way, a critique of capitalism, of the American promise of upward mobility so prevalent in its time. Everyone is Wilder’s film is either selling or consuming something at the cost of someone else. While Leo’s condition is a free resource for journalists and businessmen to exploit, Chuck conspires with the authorities to eliminate competition and ensure his monopoly. This idea of a systematic exploitation and commodification of human suffering—and not as the result of a single individual’s moral perversion, but as the rational logic of a system—is part of what lends Wilder’s film its unrelenting and unnerving quality. 

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

February 8, 2020

Out of the Dark

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of Hungary, Translations | Tags: , , , , |
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[The following is a translation of Georges Didi-Huberman’s Sortir du Noir, a long, open letter to László Nemes on his film Son of Saul, published by Ēditions de Minuit in 2015.]

—

 

Paris, 24th August 2015

 

Dear László Nemes,

Your film, Son of Saul, is a monster. A necessary, coherent, beneficial, innocent monster. The result of an extraordinarily risky aesthetic and narrative wager. How could a film about the Behemoth1 that was the Nazi extermination machine in the enclosure of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 not be a monster compared to the stories we are used to seeing each week in theatres in the name of “fiction”? Is your film something other than fiction? Of course not. But it’s a fiction that’s as modestly as it is audaciously attuned to the very particular historic reality it deals with. Whence the ordeal of discovering it. During the screening in the dark of the theatre, I wished at times, not to close my eyes, but that all that you bring to light in this film returned to darkness, even if for a brief amount of time. That the film closed its own eyelids for a moment (which does happen sometimes). As though darkness could offer me, in the midst of this monstrosity, a space or a time to catch my breath, to breathe a little amid that which was taking my breath away from shot to shot. What an ordeal, indeed, is this bringing to light! What an ordeal is this flood of images and this hell of sounds tirelessly giving rhythm to your narrative! But what a necessary and fertile ordeal!

Like many others, I went into the dark of the theatre equipped with some preliminary information—an incomplete knowledge, of course; that is everyone’s lot—about the (historical) story that your (filmic) story deals with, namely the Nazi death machine and the role played by members of the Sonderkommando, special teams formed from interned Jews whose terrifying work is soberly described at the beginning of your film in a title card that defines them with the expression “Geheimnisträger”, “carriers of secret”. Your story (your fiction) gets out of the dark: it “carries” the secret itself, but in order to carry it into light. It is dedicated through and through to the story (to the reality) of the diabolical fate of the Sonderkommando members at Auschwitz-Birkenau: not a single shot in the film that isn’t backed up, that isn’t directly drawn from sources, from testimonies, to begin with the extraordinary secret manuscripts that you claim to have discovered in the special edition of the Shoah History Review published in 2001 under the title Voices Under the Ashes2.

Despite having gone through the same sources as you, I was left without a defence, without any protective knowledge, by the images and cries of your film. They grabbed me by the throat in many ways. Firstly, I must confess that it felt like seeing something of my oldest and most painful nightmares in front of me. There’s nothing personal in that: it’s the power of nightmares to reveal to us the structure of reality, and it’s the power of cinema to reveal to us the structure of nightmares which so often make up reality itself. I automatically think of the situations that made up the reality you narrate—and which survivors like Filip Müller and Primo Levi3 attest to—these situations without respite for anyone, and where all of life’s energy, its capacity for invention, cunning, decision, persistence, with its genius for seizing the most improbable opportunity, well, all this nevertheless led to a death sentence.

(more…)

 

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