Two Weeks Since You've Been Gone: Notes on Action Movies

Charles Bronson with his Wildey .475 in a promotional still for Death Wish 3

I've been watching a lot of Anerican action films lately--the kind of pure action that flourished from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Before that, action had to have at least a bit of adventure to it--a sense of removal. In the pure action film, though, reasons and locations are treated as banal--every house, jungle, fortress and oil rig is introduced with the same auspicious pomp, so that we no longer assign locations or motivations significance. The pure action film is the opposite of the noir film--not only does the situation of the world not seem hopeless, but in fact there is no situation at all. Even in films such as the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cobra, which, like many pure action movies, builds it basic premise around the audience's moral outrage at crime, the underworld seems not to matter because it is emphasized as much as the ordinary world. There is no class struggle in the pure action film--only the struggle of individuals against each other.
This is because the concept of a class struggle not only opposes the predominantly right-wing politics of American action movies, but also destroys the hermiticism inherent to the genre. Action movies must exist in a vacuum. The forces we are expected to rally against--liberal neglect, drug cartels, kidnapping rings--are reduced and personified. In order to give the film a sense of resolve, the enemy is always quantifiable and defeatable; there is a concrete solution to a concrete problem. Even in the Death Wish movies, where Charles Bronson, with his middle-aged man's physique and dour expression, seems to be fighting the whole world, there is always a sense of complete resolution in the end. The entire series rests on the denial of the existence of other problems--Bronson seems endlessly surprised whenever he stumbles upon a gang or a crime syndicate, moving from city to city. The action movie rests of the denial of the big picture--not only moral questions (the prevalence of political intervention, or, for that matter, murder), but contexts as well (and this includes contexts familiar to the films' intended Reagan/Bush American audiences). The films therefore paradoxically strive to play off of the audiences' fears (reductionism, ascribed values, and other products of capitalism) while simultaneously attempting to deny outside influences or possibilities making them, therefore, material in every respect.

Andrew Bujalski Interview

As Mutual Appreciation is seeing a DVD release via HVE this month, I'm reposting a brief interview with its director, Andrew Bujalski, I conducted shortly before the film's Chicago premiere in the fall of 2006.

Mutual Appreciation is in black and white. Funny Ha Ha was in color. How is Mutual Appreciation more a black and white film than Funny Ha Ha? Was it something you intended while writing the film?
My quick answer is that I believed Mutual to be a (peculiar) comedy, and that I thought black & white would be funny. I can't remember at what stage in pre-production I settled on [black & white] but I'm sure Bob Dylan/Don't Look Back had something to do with it; that said my great fear was that people would read it as merely an allusion, a tip of the hat, to all the great cinema in that format, and I didn't mean it as such. The fact that [black & white] is relatively rarely used for narrative features these days doesn't mean that the medium isn't still alive and kicking and packing a punch. It's a great thrill to get [black & white] rushes back from the lab and project them on a wall; contrary to what that one Paul Simon song says, I'd argue that everything looks better in black and white.
We've reached a point where video and video-editing has developed very far--far enough, in fact, that it's a separate medium and a separate approach to the world from film-based editing and shooting. Why have you choosen film?
Because it's still better! I was hanging out with a friend the other night and we turned on the television and stumbled upon a very peculiar episode of The Monkees, which deviated from the regular sitcom-y format, this one was just a psychedelic documentary of the group on tour--the footage was all gorgeous, the editing was bizarre and gripping (old school avant-garde, there's an oxymoron for you), and whatever technology has come since to replace all that hasn't won my heart the same way.
I've read that Chantal Akerman was your thesis advisor. Has she been an influence on your work?
Chantal was indeed my thesis advisor. I'm hugely fond of her personally, am sure I learned a lot from her directly then, and of course [I] am a fan of her oeuvre as well. That said, as a cinematic forebear I don't think I've taken more (or less) from her than I have from 100 other filmmakers whose work has stuck with me.
Did you make any films before Funny Ha Ha? Shorts and the like?
Sure—my Chantal-advised thesis was a 26-minute fiction film. Not very good! But an incredible learning experience all around, there's no question I couldn't have made Funny Ha Ha without getting through that one first. Also a handful of other student shorts, both on my own and collaboratively. Some documentary work, which I think has been massively influential on how I approach fiction.
What was the documentary work like?
We learned from the ground up: here's how you load film in the camera, here's how you run the Nagra, here's how the Steenbeck works. Go out and shoot. The observational tradition.
A friend of mine once said that at a certain economic level, every movie becomes a documentary: i.e., with a low enough budget, filmmakers rely on places they actually know and the day jobs of their actors for material. Do you feel that there's a documentary aspect to your films, that in a way you're portraying the lives of people you know in a fictional manner? And is this your primary interest, or, as the friend suggested, a question of economics?
Most good fiction films borrow some energy from documentary, just as the reverse is also true. Which doesn't mean necessarily that I am "fictionalizing" my friends' lives, on the contrary, I'd more likely say they're "documentarizing" my made-up story. I sort of agree with your friend but think he's looking at it backwards—it takes a lot of money to bleed everything resembling life out of a film.

The Weight of Money

Jens Lekman photographed in Athens, Greece

It's lucky for Jens Lekman that his native Sweden's currency rhymes with Barcelona. The title of "I Don't Know If She's Worth 900 kr," a light pop ditty built around coo-ing girl group backing vocals and a Jens' trademark lazy-electric-rhythm-guitar, is wonderfully casual in its mention of economic realities: the truth is, can Lekman spare the money to visit a girl in Spain? He starts the song by admitting that he falls in love too easily--that the gap of social reality (money) and social fantasy (a love affair) forces him to confront the validity of the latter. It's a natural though process we engage in daily; we greatly underestimate the role economics, or the concept of value in general, plays in the way we analyze our surroundings. We guage how much we liked a film by whether we'd pay to see it again, how much we enjoy the book we're reading by whether we'd buy it, how much we liked the song we heard based on whether we'd buy the CD.
It's the weight of money on our everyday decision making, and its a weight largely absent from the cinema and television of the United States. It's taboo to discuss exact sums in films unless they're unrealistically large heist takes--you're more likely to hear about hundreds of millions in a duffel bag than $67.50 for the electric bill. It's opposite of a noir film, where the world always felt so hopeless because the numbers were so exact. Sitting in the darkened theatre, we wondered whether a person's life was really worth the $200,000 (even after we adjusted it mentally for inflation) in Nightfall, or the few thousand dollars in Thieves' Highway.
Even poverty is a rootless conception, a vague state, the opposite of Chaplin, when we were constantly reminded of hunger, of running away from police and petty stealing just to get a bite to eat; instead, we just have the image of Chaplin, as though the tramp costume is enough for us to understand what it's like to be poor (or, for that matter, rich, as wealth is equally vague in American films). Poor people live in exaggerated squalor now in American films (David Fincher, after all, made decay art design fashionable), but this "hyper-reality" is only connected to social reality by a few choice buzzwords (Welfare, Medicaid), in the same way Casino Royale's James Bond is modernized with the invocation of 9/11.
By denying this social reality, we create a social fantasy that will define the American mindset as well as exact figures would: a desire to portray problems without describing their causes, a post-Left liberalism of gestures that are not as much empty as disconnected. It is the lie that will eventually tell the truth, for cinema has a capacity for history that exceeds that of the written word--a writer, after all, can only write down what he or she knows or notices, but in a movie, there are so many outside factors; an absence is as informative as a presence. We'll go down in history as the Imaginary Generation, using our sense of history to create a pre-historicized present that pretends to exist as a commentator outside of the American (and international) narrative rather than the latest episode of it. Or perhaps that is how every generation has been.

Notes on Two Chaplin Shorts: A Dog's Life / The Idle Class

In A Dog's Life, during the lengthy dance hall scene, there is a sequence where Chaplin is on the dance floor, the titular dog on a flimsy leash behind him; at one point, the dog stops, and stares off-screen--at a crew member, or possibly its owner, clearly looking for approval. The moment is short, but disarming--not because it subverts the fictional nature of the film, but because that moment we realize how little a movie means to a dog: the dog, however well trained, does not realize what a camera is or why it's being filmed.
So is it still cinema if the subject in unaware that they are being filmed? Or do "hidden camera" films constitute a different form of expression altogether--the more I watch movies, the more I realize how essential the relationship between the subject and the camera and microphones (the audience's eyes and ears) is. The dog is incapable of completing this relationship--it becomes "a part of the landscape," a true non-actor.

The Idle Class finds Chaplin and leading lady Edna Purviance playing rich people named Charles and Edna. But it's a double role for Chaplin, as he also appears as the Tramp, and a case of mistaken identity leads Edna (Charles' wife) to flirt with the Tramp at a a costume party.
How is Chaplin both the Tramp and the rich man? How is he able to parody himself (a rich man with marital problems) while remaining a different character, a yet be instantly identifiable with both? It's Chaplin's greatest strength--that the concept of Chaplin can be identified with both the innocent Tramp and Monsieur Verdoux, with the tragic clown of Limelight and the farsical demagogue of The Great Dictator. The real Chaplin, like the characters in The Idle Class, was both the symbol of Hollywood glamour and a working class hero. It is a conception of identity that only the cinema could have invented.