In a West German TV studio, 1964.

Stax/Volt Revue Live In Norway 1967

The whole thing is so goddamn beautiful, but what really gets me is the shot that starts at around 1:51. I don't recommend skipping ahead -- just wait for it. These guys know how to use their legs. Watch their legs.

[Thanks to Michael Castelle for the tip.]

Watch His Face

Excerpt from an episode of Press Your Luck aired June 11, 1984

You wanna see drama? Or a "great performance," for that matter? This little clip's got both.

This is the notorious "Michael Larson incident," or the Larson Sweep, or whatever you wanna call it. In the summer of 1984, Michael Larson, an unemployed Ohioan and Philip Seymour Hoffman-lookalike, won a little over $110,000 on Press Your Luck, a chance-based game show where final winnings were usually capped off at $25,000. Watch his face, because Larson isn't lucky: using months of preparation and a VCR, he figured out the seemingly "random" patterns of the game board. This is a performance of intense concentration and hand-eye coordination, a man who has put himself through rigorous training, pretending to be a game show contestant. When they analyzed the show and figured out exactly how he'd done it, the producers tried to keep from paying, but nothing in their rules qualified him as a cheater.

He spent almost all of the money trying to win other contests and lost the rest to Ponzi schemes and burglary. He died of throat cancer in 1998, estranged from his family and on the run from the IRS.

Performance by Tatsumi Hijikata, 1972

The Beauty of TV #1

Roza Rymbaeva peforms "Aliya" on Song of the Year '77

Landru's Beard

I think all period films can be divided into two categories: those for which the actors grow out moustaches, and those in which they wear false ones.

Chabrol's Landru falls squarely into the false-moustache category. As Landru, Charles Denner wears the falsest of false beards. I can think of only one falser: the beard Jim Caviezel wears in The Final Cut, a beard so glaringly fake it makes you suspect that the movie is secretly an over-the-top farce and that Caviezel might yank it off any second if he thinks it'll get a good laugh from the audience. With his thick, fake eye-brows and heavy make-up, Denner looks like a waxwork. It reminds me of the make-up Christopher Walken wore in Heaven's Gate (which made him look like a drag king, like a woman doing her best impression of a frontiersman) or the old man who puts on a dandy’s mask to go out to the dance-halls in the first segment of Le Plaisir. Denner’s froggy voice sounds like a little boy imitating an adult, or maybe like Alpha 60.

When we talk about films, we tend to equate falseness with shoddiness. “The acting was unconvincing,” we say. Or, “the special effects were bad.” This is a little ironic, considering the fact that the image itself is always false. There's a function to falsehood. Cinema finds a function for everything. As there is an element of the fantastic that can only be accomplished by a certain adherence to reality (Louis Feulliade discovered that principle; Michel Gondry is the one that practices it most fervently nowadays), there's an emotional reality that can only be achieved through total falseness. A few examples out of an uncountable number: the detail-less rooms of Monsieur Verdoux (more on that one in a bit) and Der Verlorene; the cutaway sets of The Ladies Man, Tout va Bien, Absolute Beginners or The Life Aquatic; the mismatched dubbing of numerous Fassbinder, Antonioni and Rossellini films; the oversized walls of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Nightwatching; those inaccurate accents that take on lives of their own, veering into the abstract, the voices becoming instruments, like the Southern twangs of Robert De Niro in Cape Fear and Nicolas Cage in Con Air; Eugene Green’s imaginary lions and ogres, the way long spans of fictional time lapse in a single take in Doomed Love, the backdrops of Percival and The Lady and the Duke. The false often offers a more direct path to truth than the realistic.

[I’ve already mentioned one Wes Anderson film in this text, The Life Aquatic, and it’s difficult to write for very long about a perceived “falseness,” especially if you wanna talk about cinema at the present, without mentioning Anderson. The point of so-called “distanciation” is to bring the audience closer – for Brecht, to the idea, for Anderson, to the feeling. Anderson, with his storybook pictures, folds Brecht’s principles back in on themselves, using techniques devised to mitigate involvement to involve an audience. His films are earnest. They’re nearly naked in their emotion—genuinely naked, not merely nude like so much “confessional” fiction.]
Making Landru, Chabrol drew on the same nasty little story as Orson Welles did when he came up with the scenario for Monsieur Verdoux. The story is fairly simple: Henri Landru, born in 1869, was a petty fraudster who’d done a little time. World War I rolls around. The middle-aged Landru is running a resale shop. Maybe the money’s no good, maybe he just wants to be better off than he is. Either way, he starts putting personals ads in the paper, saying that he’s moderately well-off and looking to marry. Widows and spinsters answer the ads, and Landru strangles the wealthier ones once he gets hold of their savings. He burns them in his stove; 10 in all, plus a snot-nosed kid who knew too much.

The character of Verdoux can be described as Chaplin’s understanding of Landru. For Chaplin, Landru is a metaphor. It should be noted that, acting the part and directing himself, he makes no attempt at making his Verdoux resemble the historical Landru physically (Chaplin may be doing so out of personal vanity, but vanity has brought us many good things). He makes the character into the genteel gentleman his victims must’ve imagined him to be. Verdoux is “the dream of Landru,” much as Johnny Depp in Public Enemies is the dream of Dillinger more than a historical representation (the difference, though, is that Depp's Dillinger has dreamt himself, whereas Verdoux could only be dreamt up by the society he preys on—an ideal husband, father, murderer and convict).

The perverse truth about Denner’s make-up in Landru, though, is that Henri Landru really did look like a wax figure; he was a creepy, trollish little man. Denner’s Landru talks like a man pretending to be refined, whereas Verdoux is genuinely intelligent. Both Landru and Monsieur Verdoux are comedies, but whereas Chaplin’s targets don’t become obvious until the latter half of his film, the falseness of Denner’s Landru makes Chabrol’s target obvious from the first scenes. He is after all those who would believe a Landru.

In making a sympathetic killer, Chaplin makes the society around him seem ridiculous. In creating an utterly false killer, Denner and Chabrol turn the attack from satire to absolute farce. In Monsieur Verdoux, society seems to be on the wrong path. In Landru, it's a joke. Even the judges wear false moustaches.

Playing Nosferatu

Il Divo's not much of a movie -- a good lazy afternoon watch if you catch it on TV, though it'll probably never play on TV in this country. Politics, as Guy Ritchie would describe them to you. It's worth it, though, for Toni Servillo, who plays Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Max Schreck's Nosferatu and one of Richard Barthelmess' Chinamen. Hunchbacked and heartbroken, but also eternally calm like one of Barthelmess' cyphers, who were too Expressionist to be ethnic caricatures -- to be accused of that, they'd have to seem like human beings first. Servillo neither humanizes nor villifies Andreotti -- instead, he finds, within the likeness of a public figure, a strange creature, someone who casually walked in from some netherworld into ours and simply hasn't found the time to leave.

Thoughts on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand and foot prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater
(from Wikipedia)

We're far removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger now. He's changed addresses, moved from the lobby poster to the political ad, from the movie theater to television news. Sure, a part of the old Schwarzenegger--the 1980s Schwarzenegger--remains on DVDs and the occasional midnight revival, but he's married to his politics now, and we can't separate the two (let alone divorce them) in our memories.

The last twenty years have infected the image of Schwarzenegger in the same way they've infected the songs of Michael Jackson. Schwarzenegger and Jackson stood out on the cultural landscape of the 1980s, so effortlessly alien. No one moved or talked quite like them. There had never been pop stars or film stars so devoid of pathos or motivation. Schwarzenegger would turn as though there were hydraulics hidden beneath his muscles; when you saw a photograph of him or Jackson, it seemed as though their bodies had been custom-built for the frame.

Schwarzenegger was not dispassionate; he simply made passion irrelevant. He approached every line of dialogue--the sarcastic quips provided by the screenwriters--with an astounding indifference. He was never human, never a feeling--he was always a sound and an image, and we never wondered what secret feelings might motivate him, but instead imagined ourselves as machines. Why have love when we could have love scenes? Why have hate when we could have a punch, a pistol shot, a well-worded put down? He made dispassion into a force, transforming inertness into inertia. He replaced acting with actions. Van Damme had an ace's cockiness, Stallone had Jerry Lewis's earnestness, Bronson had weathered distance, but Schwarzenegger would emit vaudeville puns like radio signals, as though he had a transmitter in place of vocal chords. His mouth was a slit in his face. He showed you that there was nothing human about the human body. You take the context away from a hand, a pair of shoulders, a head and it's no different from a chair, a window, a wall.

Watching his films forces me to question myself. History has a funny way of turning our interests against us. The 2003 California gubernatorial recall is an ugly but inseparable footnote to Commando and Red Heat. "Am I playing into the hands of Schwarzenegger the politician?" I think. The "man of action," the "thing that needs to be done" that exists outside of context or emotions, is the fallacy that serves as the basis of reactionary politics. The dream of the action film lead to the reality of a conservative America.

Did the dream fail? Or was it always waiting to betray us? I have a doubt, like a cough in the back of my throat: is fascination a surrender? Is interest an approval?

La Ronde / Private Fears in Public Places: The Theatre

I followed up the EU Fest screening of of Alain Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places with a VHS copy of Max Ophüls's La Ronde. Both films are based on plays, and neither attempts to hide the theatricality inherent--but at the same time the way it's handled and used in the two is radically different.


1. First, Ophüls's film: several vignettes, linked by a narrator who pops in bit parts, costumed, and returns us to the visual metaphor of the merry-go-round (ronde) as a linking set. The stories transition from one another slowly, spending as much time in between as it would take the stage hands to move new set pieces out behind the curtain in a live production. It's an element of the theatre, that live fluidity, that Resnais's film disposes of by linking its stories with a cross-dissolve to falling snow, therefore suggesting a white and icy Paris while managing to show the city itself once--and even that evokes a theatrical trick, some choice lighting and a backdrop.
But here things go in an odd direction: Ophüls, whose film is meant to replicate the feeling of attending a performance, right down to timing, lack the immediacy of seeing something performed. After all, popular theatre (including opera and ballet) derives its power from being immediate--from the fact that the sets are being changed in a room with us, or that the singers or dancers are on an immobile stage, performing for us. Watching someone sing in a movie and seeing them do in real life is not the same thing, and Ophüls circumvents the problem by replacing every theatrical trick with a cinematic one--scenes that rely on the presence of live actors in a play are reinforced by camera movements, long takes that by their very nature seem more impressive than the long take of real life.

2. Resnais, on the other hand, transposes and footnotes. In La Ronde, cinema is substituted for theatre, but in Public Fears in Private Places, theatrical performance is presented in its true form with cinema as a form of commentary. The sets are sets, with some photographed from up above with a transparent ceiling; most are only ever shown from one side, like the bartender's cozy kitchen, framed so as to never show his bed-ridden father yelling from the next room. Even the detail is used theatrically--objects and details are never lingered on (as they would be only specks to a live audience), and on close inspection one realizes that a TV in one of the main sets is not plugged into anything.
For the most part, the film evokes a European television project from the 1960s/1970s in its two-medium-shot set-ups and waist-level camera--it's something that put me off at first, but you have to fight that aesthetic fascism within yourself and see whether it's genuine dislike or simply prejudice. But occasionally a cut or a camera placement radically alters the (theatrical) space, re-describing in ways that can only be done in the aftermath of a live performance. And it's not just the acting that is altered by cinema: by cutting between differently lit versions of the same set, Resnais is able to use lighting both theatrically (as drama) and cinematically (as expression). In one sequence, a warmly lit room becomes a cold and foreboding interior during a minute's worth of difficult conversation; in another, the garish hotel bar, whose purples now seem intertwined with the film in memory, is re-lit with a single spot-light, suddenly showing it as a place no different from any other fashionable bar--not the comforting Technicolor lounge the characters hang around.

Cinema as a Revue

The Gene Siskel just concluded the first half of Jacqueline Stewart's excellent African American Auteurs series, which focuses on two race film directors (Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams) and two middle-aged, contemporary black directors (Spike Lee and Charles Burnett).
I wrote this down in my notebook after the screening of Spencer Williams' Juke Joint (shown as a double feature with the Dirty Gertie From Harlem, which is probably the best way to see Williams' films):

Juke Joint don't seem to come from a cinematic source--rather, it seems like an attempt to film "performance" and put it on the screen.
You've got to think of all the wide shots as performances--every edit within a set-up, every close-up, is not as much a cut as a digression. The cutaways feel awkward because they are canned inserts into what is essentially documentary (the documentary of how these actors and musicians perform fiction). Scenes with several characters seem jarring because every character is performing their "routine," their vaudeville act, without seemingly any cooperation. The film feels most natural when an "audience" is present--such as the extras in the juke joint scene, who react and laugh at the dialogue.

The film's juke joint sequence, which inspired these notes, is standard race film fare--a few dance teams, a band--the kind of number you find in any Micheaux or Williams film. At the start of the scene, a pair of dancers--Mack and Ace--perform several a lengthy routine. The female dancer has thighs out of an R. Crumb comic. At one point, she does a handstand while the male dancer pretends to mimes the bass part of the backing band on her leg, transforming her body into an upright bass. Suddenly, you can hear some snickering, and realize that there is a live audience behind the camera (Williams' films use one-track sound, so the soundtrack is always either direct, or completely post-synced; more on that later).
After another, less impressive duo performs (with a much shorter routine), the film's featured band, Red Calhoun's Orchestra, begins to play. Extras wander into the shot and dance naturally--the feeling is of total documentary, perhaps even a tad voyeuristic. The microphones have been placed near the band, so we can't hear the dancers talking, but we can see their lips move as they flirt and joke around.
Occasionally, cutaways of the band (possibly the only angled shots in a film full of room-encompassing wide shots and above-the-waist medium framings) are inserted, but they feel like interruptions--not only because they are clearly shot at a different time, but because they seem to break the flow of the "performance." Which is what Juke Joint essentially is--a revue, a set of performances, broad comic acts and beauty pageants. In Juke Joint (and in Dirty Gertie), Williams builds films out of neither the tradition of sound nor image nor narrative nor even acting, but out of the simple idea of watching people "perform"--the idea of a stage rather than a theater, if you will.
The film's strongest scenes therefore all occur towards the end, in the titular juke joint, where the actors, with their clashing talents and acting styles, have a real audience to perform to. Extras turn and laugh to each other in the foreground as Inez Newell attacks Leonard Duncan, playing the part of her philandering, lazy husband. At one point, Katherine Moore, playing the black sheep daughter who wants to run away with the juke joint owner to Chicago, almost swears, but the take is kept (no doubt due to budget constraints). It's almost like everyone is waiting for their number: tap dancer Howard Galloway, who plays the aforementioned juke joint owner, stumbles over dialogue, but in a scene where he has to introduce the band and attract the (real) audience's attention, he shines as only a showman would.

In the more visually dynamic Dirtie Gertie from Harlem, which features many of the same actors (including Spencer Williams himself in drag), it the sound and not the cutaway that creates digressions from the performance. The film's island setting requires effects to be added to the soundtrack (such as the sound of steam ship announcing its arrival), and these drown out all dialogue. The acting in the film is also more traditional, more caricaturish than archetypal. The film also features a dance number, featuring Howard Galloway as one of the lead tap dancers--his routine is fantastic, but the sound has been replaced by a crisper recording of the band, therefore leaving us with the eerie result of a tap number with no clicking-and-clacking sounds.
Dirty Gertie does feature the most astounding single "performance," though: a non-actor, a servant playing a servant, whose single line, "Yes, ma'am," is said in a way that more instinctual and automatic than any actor could ever manage. It takes more than a lifetime to perfect it: it takes generations.