Blogs Crosscuts

See Hampton Alexander for free

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  Written by Dean Otto While the main screenings of Location:MN wrapped up last month, one key historical work continues to play for free in the Walker’s Lecture Room through this weekend. Hampton Alexander was shot around the former Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and grew out of the work of the Inner City Youth [...]

 
Written by Dean Otto

While the main screenings of Location:MN wrapped up last month, one key historical work continues to
play for free in the Walker’s Lecture Room through this weekend. Hampton Alexander was shot around
the former Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and grew out of the work of the Inner City Youth League.

Bobby Hickman, a leader of the Inner City Youth League, was inspired by the lessons spelled out by his
uncle Gordon Parks in his book A Choice of Weapons. Parks challenged his readers to pick up pens,
paintbrushes and cameras instead of guns and knives to fight oppression and injustice. Hickman took
this to heart and worked tirelessly to inspire young people in the community by providing opportunities
for them to realize their ambitions.

Hickman had travelled to New York to visit the set of Shaft which was directed by Parks. The director
had paired most of the crew with interns to shadow the technicians and this was a revelation to
Hickman. He was moved that every opportunity to mentor young people was adopted, and this could
be extended into his work at the Inner City Youth League.

Upon returning to Saint Paul, it didn’t take long for that work to begin. Timothy McKinney, a budding
writer who had written a play about the Chicago 7 and the musical Life is TCB had prepared the script of
Hampton Alexander, but didn’t have the resources to produce the film on his own.

Hickman wrangled help from institutions and locations throughout Saint Paul. Film in the Cities
provided the 16mm camera. Shooting was difficult as they were working with non-professional actors
whose schedules were difficult to coordinate, but the determination was there. There was no light kit,
so natural light had to suffice. Hickman noted that there was a change in the tenor in the community
as the excitement for the project grew. People gathered around to watch the filming that lasted over
8 months and was shot around the Green Felt Pool Room around Selby and Dale, the Melvin Goss
Building at 1039 Selby and the James J. Hill House on Summit Avenue and the Inner City Youth League
on Victoria.

Their tenacity paid off as the 56-minute film was finished providing rich experiences for the cast and
crew. Timothy McKinney stayed active in local filmmaking helping with projects for Film in the Cities.
The film’s cinematographer Kokaya Ampah later moved to Los Angeles where he worked as Associate
Producer of The Five Heartbeats and location manager for many films such as The Soloist, Million Dollar
Baby, The Color Purple and Mystic River.

Hickman is proud of this film that is such a vital document of the area of St. Paul in the aftermath of the
destruction of the Rondo neighborhood and hopes to initiate some screenings of the film in the area in
the future.

Walker Film and Video Flashback, 1977: ‘Ride the High Country’ and ‘Point Blank’

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  On August 25th 1977, the Walker Art Center screened two films as part of its tribute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film, Ride the High Country (1962), and John Boorman’s trippy actioner Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin in what may be his most iconic role. (Point Blank also played, incidentally, as part [...]

Sam Peckinpah

 

John Boorman

On August 25th 1977, the Walker Art Center screened two films as part of its tribute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film, Ride the High Country (1962), and John Boorman’s trippy actioner Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin in what may be his most iconic role. (Point Blank also played, incidentally, as part of the Walker’s Summer Music & Movies series in 1999.) A double-feature that would surely inspire fist-clenched euphoria in any fan of classic Hollywood action movies, Ride the High Country and Point Blank remind us of a time when action movies bankrolled by major American studios—at least when commandeered by gung-ho iconoclasts like Peckinpah, Boorman, Samuel Fuller, or Robert Aldrich—could pulsate with more subversive energy and intense creativity than many other Hollywood releases. They were tough-guy movies, but they also happened to be unassumingly smart (and distinctly weird).

The 1970s saw the swift decline of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which at one point had been arguably the wealthiest and most elegant of the Hollywood studios. Their roster of stars once included Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy, and their staff of directors featured such names as King Vidor, Erich von Stroheim, and Tod Browning. This is the company that, in 1939, released both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Under the semi-tyrannical rule of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, MGM was synonymous with Tinseltown elegance.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, however, MGM—even more than contemporaries such as Paramount and Warner Bros.—underwent a drastic decline that coincided with the increasing popularity of television and several court cases that limited the oligopolistic power of the Hollywood studios over American film production, distribution, and exhibition. This negative trend continued into the 1970s, a decade which saw MGM decrease its rate of production, close numerous sales and distribution offices, sell large portions of its backlot to other production companies, and focus its energies on its more lucrative hotel and casino establishments. Even at this low point, however, MGM’s esteem and vast collection of classics were great enough to garner retrospectives from national cinematheques and arthouses like the Walker—comparatively rare tributes not to directors or stars, but to a movie studio.

Ride the High Country

Ride the High Country was Peckinpah’s second film after the low-budget The Deadly Companions; most avid Peckinpah fans consider it his first great movie and the first indicator of his thematic interests (among them the difficulty of upholding honor and justice in a corrupt society, the destruction of the Old West and its myths by encroaching modernity, and camaraderie among men). It concerns two aging ex-lawmen, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) and Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), old friends who are hired to transport a shipment of gold from a mining camp to a bank. The two men actually plan to steal the gold right from under the noses of the industrialists who have hired them (more as a matter of principle than of wealth), but these plans are unsettled by a young, reckless sidekick named Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) who falls in love with a young woman named Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley). (Even the names of the three male protagonists are satisfyingly true to Western form.) Elsa is engaged to marry a horrific, drunken miner who plans to prostitute her to his equally despicable brothers; when the trio of heroes rescues her from the mining camp, they also gain a threesome of psychotic villains on their tail, further disrupting their planned heist. The sequence in which Elsa is nearly raped by both of her fiancé’s brothers is intense, rapidly-edited, and disturbingly nasty in a way Peckinpah could manage better than nearly anyone else—one of several sequences in Ride the High Country that point towards the brutal yet operatic treatment of violence for which Peckinpah would eventually be known.

Another standout scene which predates (and, in some ways, rivals) Peckinpah’s later films, with their aesthetic precision and breathless intensity, is the final shootout sequence. Westrum and Judd approach the three villainous brothers proudly, confidently; guns are drawn, the wind is still, good and evil are demarcated more clearly than they will be in later Peckinpah films. But the meticulous style of this climax clearly belongs to this director: editing with increasing swiftness between swooping crane shots, low-angle dollies, and off-center close-ups, all of which take full advantage of the widescreen CinemaScope format, Peckinpah both embraces the Western genre and points towards the stylistic and thematic changes it would undergo throughout the following two decades. (Paradoxically, Peckinpah was both a purist and a revisionist.)

Since this was one of Peckinpah’s first studio jobs, however, Ride the High Country exhibits little of the grubby nastiness to be found in later films like Straw Dogs or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The director was not yet able to fully embrace his predilection for brutal, somber fatalism. Death and violence in this film are tragic, but not apocalyptic; at times the tone is even light and comedic, as in this early fight scene (with its priceless reaction shot of Westrum and Judd protecting some fine chinaware). It wasn’t until 1965’s Major Dundee—financed by Columbia—that Peckinpah would gain a reputation as a renegade troublemaker, consistently drunk onset, ignoring producers, abusing his cast, and firing crew members for little to no reason. Ride the High Country, on the other hand, was a relatively problem-free production, one of MGM’s finest Westerns and the work of a director continuing to hone his craft and develop his artistic sensibility.  

Lee Marvin in 'Point Blank'

If Ride the High Country offers solid craftsmanship with subtle indications of its director’s uniqueness, Point Blank goes much further: it’s one of the most psychedelic, bizarre, mind-expanding action movies ever made. It also may be the best showcase that Lee Marvin ever received, a role tailor-made for the actor’s almost hyperbolic manliness and gruff iconicity. (Marvin didn’t even have to speak in most of his roles—his one-of-a-kind face, with its toughness seemingly etched in stone, did all the talking for him.)

Marvin plays Walker, a professional thief who is betrayed by longtime friend and partner Mal Reese (John Vernon). At a post-robbery drop point (atmospherically set at the recently-abandoned Alcatraz prison), Reese shoots Walker and absconds with a small fortune, $93,000 of which rightfully belongs to Walker (Reese also manages to flee with Walker’s wife and partner-in-crime). Left for dead in one of Alcatraz’s barren cells, Walker stirs back to hallucinatory life in a completely insane prologue which shuffles back and forth in time (and space) without even trying to ease the viewer comfortably into the proceedings. After recuperating, Walker makes it back to San Francisco and seeks vengeance, single-mindedly and viciously, against Reese and against the monolithic Organization, a crime syndicate headed by a series of increasingly shadowy villains. In the amoral, existential world of Point Blank, Walker isn’t that much more heroic than any of the badguys he offs—it’s mostly an arbitrary matter of principle that sets him on the side of good rather than evil (in reality, he just wants his share of the take from the last heist). Point Blank’s dreamlike coolness and psychedelic nihilism accommodate a loose interpretation of the film: that Walker does, in fact, die at the beginning, and that the rest of the film is his mindless, inhuman quest through hell, defined by alienation, violence, greed, and meaninglessness.

Yes, it’s the same plot as Mel Gibson’s Payback (both films are based on Richard Stark’s novel The Hunter), but the two movies couldn’t be further apart. In fact, Lee Marvin only agreed to star in the film with the assurance that John Boorman would direct—and the first thing Boorman did was throw out the script, making up the chronology and much of the dialogue as they filmed. This helps to explain the disorienting leaps in space and time (and logic), but only Boorman’s intuitive skill as a vibrant pop-philosophical stylist can explain the astounding visceral setpieces in Point Blank. Marvin’s footsteps echoing ominously as he ferociously stomps through a fluorescent hallway; a bubbling brew of perfumes and otherworldly liquids commingling in the sink of a mod apartment bathroom (see below); Marvin’s aggressive torture of a suspect by ramming his car relentlessly against two concrete pillars under a highway overpass—these scenes are breathtakingly intense, raw and angry, as cool and terse and irresistibly mean as Marvin’s antihero. Point Blank is still the strangest, most electrifying, most unsettling action movie Hollywood ever made, a pinnacle of style and overwhelming soullessness made, astoundingly, by a studio that used to be the most powerful in Hollywood. It’s a product of its time and place: a distressed howl of late-1960s anomie, with a main character who finds it so difficult to discern a meaning for his existence that he (like the U.S. itself in the ensuing years) comes to desperately embrace violence as his very essence.

'Point Blank''s bubbling, psychedelic brew

Face to face: 8-ball with the interns

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As a form of late introduction (or internduction) we took a swing at interviewing each other. See below for Matt Levine’s interview of Jeremy Meckler, and Jeremy Meckler’s interview of Matt Levine (or vice versa). 8-Ball with Jeremy Meckler: 1. What was the last film you saw in theatres? I saw Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World [...]

As a form of late introduction (or internduction) we took a swing at interviewing each other. See below for Matt Levine’s interview of Jeremy Meckler, and Jeremy Meckler’s interview of Matt Levine (or vice versa).

Interns Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler in our Film/Video interns private box, overlooking the Walker Administrative offices.

8-Ball with Jeremy Meckler:

1. What was the last film you saw in theatres?

I saw Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (Welt Am Draht) at the Trylon. It’s a 3 1/2 hour made-for-tv film by the notorious New German Cinema rock star. It predicts The Matrix about 25 years earlier in an age before microchips (though admittedly, The Prisoner did the same thing 6 years earlier).

2. If you had to pick, who would you say is your favorite director?

Two-way tie between Wener Herzog and Orson Welles.

3. What experience first got you hooked on film?

Supposedly (I can’t verify it myself) as an infant, my dad and I watched the Ridley Scott Alien. Apparently Sigourney Weaver blasting that alien into space was the only thing that could get me to fall asleep.

4. If you could describe your overarching artistic aspirations in one word, what would it be?

“over-theorized”

5. If you could adapt one written work into film, what would you choose?

I’ve always wanted to see an adaptation of James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks. It would probably be terrible, since the book is so poetic and bookly, but it was a childhood favorite that I’d love to see on the big screen.

6. What enticed you about the Walker? What was your first memorable experience here?

I came to see Walid Raad speak. The audience got really upset and passionate. A woman was yelling at him, angry that he had misled her. It was awesome. The video is on the Walker Channel.

7. If you could have made one film (that someone else already has) what would it be?

F for Fake

8. What is your favorite VHS tape you own?

A video-store pirated copy (like in the good old days) of The Way Things Go (Der Lauf Der Dinge). I used to put it on during house parties and watch people zone out into the hypnotic movements.

 

8-Ball with Matt Levine

1. If you had to pick, who would you say is your favorite director?

Jacques Tati (although I could have just as easily selected about a dozen different directors…).

2. What experience first got you hooked on film?

When I was really young my parents wouldn’t let me and my sister see Dumb & Dumber, so they rented Charade instead, which is a great, really silly and elegant spy comedy with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. I was about twelve years old and I really loved it.

3. If you could describe your overarching artistic aspirations in one word, what would it be?

“Discombobulating”

4. If you could adapt one written work into film, what would you choose?

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

5. Which artist blew your mind as a teenager?

J.D. Salinger, especially Catcher in the Rye. Probably a clichéd answer, but it’s true.

6. If you could have made one film (that someone else already has) what would it be?

Rules of the Game.

7. What is your favorite VHS tape you own?

It may not be the best, but I have a totally beat-up copy of Face/Off on VHS that I’ve probably seen about thirty times now.

8. What would you be doing if you weren’t working in film?

I’ve been getting into math a lot recently. I ordered a pre-calc textbook in the mail just so I could get back into it, basically. I’m hoping to work my way back up to really arduous, mind-bending advanced problems. So yeah…we’ll say calculus.

Reality, realism, and Richard Linklater

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Earlier this week, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody posted an article online entitled “Camus, Car Crashes, Cinema.” A piece as multivalent and stimulating as its title suggests, Brody uses the recent hypothesis that Albert Camus’ 1960 death was not an accident but a meticulously staged assassination by the KGB as a springboard to ponder the [...]

Albert Camus

Earlier this week, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody posted an article online entitled “Camus, Car Crashes, Cinema.” A piece as multivalent and stimulating as its title suggests, Brody uses the recent hypothesis that Albert Camus’ 1960 death was not an accident but a meticulously staged assassination by the KGB as a springboard to ponder the intersection of Camus’ life with the legacy of French cinema (and, tangentially, the prevalence of auto accidents among a lengthy roster of famous French actors and directors, and as a significant motif in landmark French films like Godard’s Weekend). Characteristically, Brody’s writing is light and intuitive, almost stream-of-consciousness, as he jumps (logically, yet unpredictably) from one concept to another.

Especially interesting in Brody’s article, I think, is a lengthy excerpt that he cites from Camus’ 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala, which Camus delivered shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus was not exactly a devout supporter of the cinema; in fact, Brody makes the point that, when the film magazine La Revue de Cinéma was losing money in 1948, Camus (who was editor at Gallimard, the publishing company responsible for the magazine) shut it down. (Film lovers shouldn’t feel too spurned by Camus’ disinterest, though: out of the ashes of La Revue de Cinéma arose the publication that would soon become Cahiers du Cinéma.) Nonetheless, in Camus’ Uppsala lecture (entitled “The Artist and His Times”), issues of cinema and its ability to convey reality (or, as Camus words it, the life of a man in its totality) were central. Brody cites the following passage from Camus:

 

What is more real … in our universe than the life of a man, and how could one hope to revive it better than in a realistic film? But under what conditions would such a film be possible? Purely imaginary ones. One would actually have to posit an ideal camera that is fixed, night and day, on this man and ceaselessly records his slightest movement. The result would be a film, the screening of which would last a lifetime and that could be seen only by viewers resigned to losing their life in the exclusive interest of the details of someone else’s. Even then, this unimaginable film wouldn’t be realistic—for the simple reason that the reality of a man’s life isn’t found only where he is. It’s also found in the other lives that shape his—first of all, the lives of those he loves, who would, in turn, have to be filmed; but also the lives of unknown others—powerful or downtrodden—fellow citizens, policemen, professors, invisible companions in mines and factories, diplomats and dictators, religious reformers, artists who create myths that govern our behavior—all told, humble representatives of the sovereign accidents that reign over even the most orderly existence. Thus there’s only one realistic film possible, the one that is endlessly projected for us by an invisible apparatus on the screen of the world. The only realistic artist would be God, if he exists. Other artists are, of necessity, unfaithful to the real.

 

Of course the cinephiliac debate over what is film’s true “vocation”—portraying reality as doggedly as possible, or embracing the film camera’s transformative, non-realistic capabilities—has persisted basically since the dawn of cinema in the late nineteenth century. And of course, the debate can never be settled because cinema has no true single vocation; as most audiences have recognized (wittingly or not) over the last 120 years, film is necessarily, inherently a blend of the two artistic modes, at once convincing in its realism and markedly expressive in its deviations from reality.

Nonetheless, this old argument is usually worthy of reconsideration, especially when voiced as eloquently as Camus does here. The argument is familiar: no single film can encompass the totality of a life, if only because a movie has to begin and end at some point, and because certain elisions and ellipses are (usually) necessary. What’s more, if one assumes that the cornerstone of a realistic film is a fixed, observational camera that never strays from its human subject, such a rigid perspective would necessarily avoid the numerous other agents and institutions that affect that person’s life.

Just as claims to the cinema’s true vocation are never successful, so, too, are arguments against film’s essence or nature always faulty in some way. (Again, there’s always that middle ground.) What Camus seems to be talking about here is not conveying reality onscreen but the aesthetic and thematic movement of realism as it has developed in film. When he speaks, for example, of a fixed, ideal camera trained on a subject night and day, he seems to be thinking ahead towards the minimalist style of observational realism that would be practiced by European arthouse modernists from the 1960s onward. We may think, for example, of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), two films that seek primarily to observe their main characters through piercing, unwavering stares. Camus was speaking in 1957, around the time when this aesthetic tradition was first coming into play, as it was practiced especially by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1955’s Ordet and, to a lesser extent, 1943’s Day of Wrath. (Dreyer would carry this unflinching observational style to its fullest expression yet with 1964’s Gertrud). A few years after Camus’ speech, in 1962, Agnès Varda would further develop this style of observational realism with Cleo from 5 to 7.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles

But is this brand of minimalism really the fullest embodiment of reality onscreen? This train of thought, it seems, has persisted to this day, as modern examples of “realism” onscreen might bring to mind the films of the Dardenne brothers (Rosetta, L’Enfant) or the visceral immediacy of Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff). At the time of Camus’ lecture in 1957, though, critics such as Andre Bazin and James Agee were espousing a different kind of realism (or, maybe more precisely, reality) onscreen: one that operated via the linear editing and narrative style of more traditional films but that adopted new aesthetic techniques in order to suggest the individuals and institutions that heavily affected the lives of characters. For both Bazin and Agee, Jean Renoir and William Wyler were among the most accomplished practitioners of this form of cinematic reality: films like Rules of the Game (1939) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) adopted deep-focus cinematography, on-location shooting, and ensemble casts of characters emblematic of different strata of society in order to encompass the turbulent changes then influencing French and American society, respectively. Maybe the high point of this brand of cinematic reality was Italian postwar neo-realism, embodied by Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), which began casting nonprofessional actors—real people selected from the streets of Italian cities—in order to lend these films a greater semblance of gritty reality. If we adopt these films’ strategies (and Bazin’s and Agee’s theories), the most convincing and thorough form of cinematic reality is not unwavering minimalism but a polyphonic and visually complex style that would, as Camus might say, point towards the “humble representatives of the sovereign accidents that reign over even the most orderly existence.”

Bicycle Thieves

Again, this style is in marked contrast to the fixed, observational camera of, say, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be realistic (or at least, not in the literal stylistic way that we might assume that to mean). Some have called Akerman’s film hyperrealistic: its strict aesthetic conceit forces us to go beyond observation, to dig beneath the surface. The long takes and constrained perspective of the film force us to analyze what we’re seeing, to process the deceptively simple information; the style of the film aims for psychological complexity, not an observable reality. The same might be said of Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó, a seven-and-a-half hour behemoth that offers such gruelingly long takes and narrative circumvention that its minimalism becomes a form of abstract self-commentary, forcing us to question the very nature of cinematic looking (and, perhaps, to ponder the misery undergone by the characters onscreen). Even though a rigid observational style is often seen as the embodiment of cinematic realism, these telling examples aren’t necessarily trying to portray reality onscreen—they’re trying to go beyond it.

All of this is a way of saying that the “best” (most convincing, most powerful) portrayals of reality onscreen have nothing to do with their aesthetic strictures. Realism is an aesthetic category; reality, or an impression of reality, may be conveyed through a wide variety of stylistic choices. Camus may be right that the most realistic “film” possible is the one “endlessly projected for us by an invisible apparatus on the screen of the world” (an appraisal which succinctly conveys the power of cinematic looking and spectatorial identification), but he’s wrong when he claims that artists (other than God) are, “of necessity, unfaithful to the real.” The real is something to be experienced, not portrayed absolutely.

Slacker

The Walker Art Center’s upcoming retrospective of Richard Linklater films may shed some unexpected light on this debate. Few would think to label Linklater a “realist” director; he does not typically employ the stylistic or thematic traits we usually associate with realism. But look at his body of work again, and it seems, in a way, that almost all of his movies try to convey reality in their own way. Slacker jumps between an eclectic assortment of realistically flighty Austinites; Before Sunrise and Before Sunset use long takes and a gracefully observational camera to bear witness to endearingly awkward conversation (and, by being released about a decade apart, also bear witness to the passing of time and how aging changes us in small but significant ways); Tape uses raw digital video to give expression to its characters’ hostilities and desperation; subUrbia, with its heavily-scripted pronouncements of suburban ennui, tries to give urgent voice to a specific time and place; Dazed and Confused, maybe Linklater’s most pleasurable and sheerest comedy, nails the singular joys, alienations, friendships, and bright sense of expectation of the high school (and immediate post-high school existence) in 1976; and Waking Life, seemingly the most unrealistic selection in our retrospective, hyperbolically illustrates the most nagging, unanswerable questions we face as individuals going through everyday lives. (Linklater’s other films display an even further interest in tackling the mysteries and difficulties of human life—not least of them Boyhood, which Linklater has been filming periodically since 2001, and which is set to be completed in 2015. By filming certain intervals of the first fourteen years of a young boy’s life, Boyhood offers maybe the clearest example yet of Linklater’s striving for an impressionistic portrayal of the fullness and unpredictability of human life.) These Linklater films employ a wide array of aesthetic, narrative, and conceptual tricks in order to reflect, intuitively and vibrantly, the astounding richness of the human experience. (No wonder Linklater is sometimes labeled as the most humane director currently working in American movies.) As films as widely varied as Jeanne Dielman and Waking Life suggest, reality (as opposed to realism) onscreen takes on a vast number of forms—something which, considering the hugeness and extraordinary polyvalence of human life, only seems appropriate.

Robert Breer, Avant Garde Animator, Dies at 84.

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Avant Garde Animator, Robert Breer, died on August 11 at 84 in his home in Tuscon. A painter, filmmaker and animator, Breer worked with such luminaries as Claes Oldenburg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and developed an intensely formalist aesthetic, focusing on the minutest detail of the moving image. Working mostly with hand drawn images on 4 [...]

Avant Garde Animator, Robert Breer, died on August 11 at 84 in his home in Tuscon. A painter, filmmaker and animator, Breer worked with such luminaries as Claes Oldenburg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and developed an intensely formalist aesthetic, focusing on the minutest detail of the moving image. Working mostly with hand drawn images on
4 x 6 index cards, Breer invented his own style of animation in concert with film scratchers, flicker films, and soviet montage artists.

Robert Breer’s father Carl was an engineer, notable as the designer of the Chrysler Airflow, who in his spare time invented such ahead-of-their-time devices as a homemade 3-D camera he used to photograph family vacations. In his father’s footsteps, Robert went to Stanford for an engineering degree but was soon turned to art, and eventually abstract painting. While living in Paris in the 1950′s, Breer was inspired by modernist French painters like Marcel Duchamp, and became fascinated with injecting movement into his abstract painting. Experimenting with flipbooks, based on the paintings he was producing, Breer started to play with the moving image. Soon, he was animating his flipcard drawings on a Bolex 16mm camera. By the time he returned to the US in the late 50′s, he found a scene with whom he had already been unwittingly in dialogue. Avant garde film was thriving with such makers as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka and Marie Menken, and Robert Breer was able to insert himself relatively seamlessly into the scene.

Breer continued experimenting and playing with the medium, leading the way for animators like Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, and for the slew of contemporary video animators (Steve Reinke, Jim Trainor, Barry Doupé, Daniel Barrow, Martha Colburn, paper rad, Takeshi Murata, Bruce Bickford, Joanna Priestly, Jessie Mott, Bill Plympton, Paul Bush, and even more literally, for his daughter, filmmaker/animator Emily Breer) active today. For the last 30 years, Robert Breer has taught at The Cooper Union in New York.

Robert Breer’s work was most recently shown as a part of the Walker’s 1964 exhibition, in Stockhausen’s Originale: Doubletakes. Before that, Robert Breer visited the Walker in 2000 for Breer on Breer (a short series of his films) and in 1980 for a series called Filmmakers Filming in which he taught an animation workshop. The film produced in that workshop is now safe in the Walker Archives. The Walker salutes Robert Breer’s remarkable life and career. Most recently Robert Breer’s Rug was shown in A Shot in the Dark and has since been added to the permanent collection.

 

Links: A more in depth biography of Robert Breer, The New York Times Obituary for Robert Breer

‘It was the pictures that got small…’

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In addition to the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies series (which, as it happens, featured a retrospective of director Billy Wilder’s works back in 2002), the month of August will provide Twin Cities moviegoers with a handful of Billy Wilder films screening throughout Minneapolis. Bona fide classics like Some Like it Hot and Sunset Boulevard [...]

Billy Wilder

In addition to the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies series (which, as it happens, featured a retrospective of director Billy Wilder’s works back in 2002), the month of August will provide Twin Cities moviegoers with a handful of Billy Wilder films screening throughout Minneapolis. Bona fide classics like Some Like it Hot and Sunset Boulevard will be playing this month at the Heights, but lesser-known standouts like The Fortune Cookie and Ace in the Hole will also be screened at the Trylon. The full schedule for Take-Up Productions’ Billy Wilder series can be found here. (Along with the Fritz Lang films that are playing at the Summer Music and Movies series, we might call August the Twin Cities’ month for German expatriate directors who electrified Hollywood’s mid-century output.)

It may seem absurd to claim that Wilder is an underrated director. After all, the legendary comedic filmmaker (who, in the 1950s at least, was second only to Alfred Hitchcock in terms of celebrity Hollywood auteurs) is now unquestionably associated with dark-edged satire, sparkling verbal pyrotechnics, a bittersweet (or, sometimes, simply bitter) cynicism, and a full-frontal grappling with (and deconstruction of) lascivious subject matter that other stateside contemporaries wouldn’t have dreamed of touching. Wilder—often abetted by co-screenwriters with a quick wit and comedic dexterity to match those of the director (Charles Brackett, I.A.L. Diamond)—was responsible for an astonishing run of classics especially between 1944’s Double Indemnity and 1960’s The Apartment, a roster of great films that, even taken on an individual, film-by-film basis, would have cemented Wilder’s place in the pantheon of film masters. The caustic, bizarre excessiveness of Sunset Boulevard, the ten-jokes-a-minute agility of Some Like it Hot—by themselves such works would be deemed classic, but taken together, as distinct but like-minded fragments of a cohesive filmography, such films attest to a funny-sad worldview and artistic temperament that was multilayered and astonishingly consistent.

But I’m still tempted to claim that Wilder is underrated—not for his classics (which are rightfully esteemed) but for his alleged flops, not for his pitch-perfect dialogue but for the tragic themes that he often explored, as well as for his stylistic precision. Especially in his late period of filmmaking (basically from 1960 onward), a collection of movies which are often dismissed as the steadily declining work of a once-great film artist, we encounter a number of small-scale but fascinating comedy-dramas that are thematically obsessed with impeded lust, torturous sex and jealousy, the delusions and lost dreams of once-legendary figures, the preponderance of visual media in everyday life, the melancholy nature of aging and facing mortality, and what it means to be human in a greedy, corrupt world. They may not be as funny as the movies typically called his masterpieces, but they’re sometimes wiser, they’re more concerned with how our actual human experience differs from what we see in the movies. And if we consider the films that Wilder scripted before becoming a studio director—especially several Hollywood movies written with Charles Brackett—we must add a few more gems to the list, such as 1939’s Midnight and Howard Hawks’ sublime Ball of Fire (1941). (We also are forced to recognize that, sometimes, an auteur’s touch is provided by somebody other than the director, since all of the personality in Midnight comes courtesy of Wilder and Brackett’s script, not from Mitchell Leisen’s lackluster direction.) In short, Wilder is not only as good as he’s commonly perceived to be—he may actually be better, and more fascinating than we might expect him to be upon revisiting his films.

In honor of these upcoming Wilder screenings, this film/video intern offers his humble and arbitrary opinions on the director’s eight finest films (some of which are screening theatrically this month, while others are always worth revisiting on DVD). Why eight, one might ask? Simply because anything less and I would have had to cut a film that simply could not have been omitted…

The Major and the Minor

 8. The Major and the Minor (1942)

Wilder’s Hollywood directorial debut seems like a completely absurd project, something that studio heads may not have minded tossing off to a headstrong German screenwriter who wanted to get behind the camera. In a way, The Major and the Minor’s complete ridiculousness is what makes it charming: it grabs hold of an inane concept and embraces it fully, never pausing long enough to consider how unbelievable it all is. Ginger Rogers plays a woman desperate to get out of New York; she passes herself off as a 12-year-old in order to get a reduced-fare train ticket and, trying to evade a couple of conductors, finds herself in the compartment of handsome Major Kirby (Ray Milland). That’s the whole setup. The rest of the movie concerns a fully-grown Ginger Rogers trapped on an Army base in Michigan, surrounded by sex-starved young soldiers, trying to pass herself off as a twelve-year-old. Milland is supposed to be a dashing charmer, but as we watch him ogle and flirt with this supposed preteen, all we can do is squirm uncomfortably and gape at the screen. (It’s all okay, though, because the movie ends with the two of them running off to get married—the major’s preference for extraordinarily young girls will apparently go on unchecked.) Even the trailer for the movie is packed with disturbing non-sequiturs and pedophiliac wisecracks—the movie operates on the same wavelength for 100 minutes! If Wilder would be celebrated almost twenty years later for turning cross-dressing and nonstop sexual puns into the stuff of Hollywood comedy with Some Like it Hot, here he gets away with turning the major’s Lolita complex into slapstick inanity. Here, for example, is a telling exchange:

 The Minor: “You see, you are a strange gentleman…”

 The Major: “Yes, but we can soon fix that.”

Double Indemnity

 7. Double Indemnity (1944)

Adapted from James M. Cain’s novel and co-written with Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity is awash in crackling film noir bon mots, but the ratatat dialogue is even more subversive, more electrifying, when given the Wilder treatment. Fred MacMurray, stepping over from his usual average-family-man terrain, plays insurance salesman Walter Neff, who stumbles into a torrid affair with inimitable femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and finds himself embroiled in murder, conspiracy, and blackmail. Repressed lust may be the primary catalyst for Neff’s all-too-eager leap into moral bankruptcy (a lust immortally conveyed by MacMurray and Stanwyck’s first burning interaction), but as played by MacMurray, he also seems like a man so disgusted with life, so burnt-out and hopeless, that his dabbling with murder and crime almost seems more like an existential experiment. Double Indemnity is irresistibly nihilistic, in the best film noir sort of way—a bleakness unforgettably intoned by MacMurray’s voiceover narration, which is muttered into a Dictaphone while Neff slowly bleeds from a gunshot wound. A trace of compassionate pity is provided by cigar-chomping Edward G. Robinson, playing Neff’s friend and mentor Barton Keyes; their relationship remains one of the most sensitively drawn throughout the director’s entire career (which is saying something).

Some Like it Hot

6. Some Like it Hot (1959)

No comedic subject matter was taboo for Wilder. Even the Second World War (during which Wilder’s family died at Auschwitz, and which Wilder had to escape by fleeing Berlin in 1932) practically became a sitcom in Stalag 17. But Some Like it Hot is debatably the best example in the history of American movies of laughing at sex, at ridiculing what had been deemed off-limits by the Production Code. Even if Wilder’s later movies, such as Kiss Me, Stupid and Irma la Douce, turned sex into comedy more explicitly (and, at times, shockingly), Some Like it Hot remains his most subversive comedy. It doesn’t just play with audience expectations, it upends how Hollywood comedies are supposed to end: sure, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe ride off into the sunset, but they’re being driven by Osgood Fielding and Jack Lemmon, who, it seems, will provide the second of the movie’s two romantic unions.

Proof of the movie’s comedic genius abounds, but here’s my favorite scene, which for my money features the best usage of a salami in any movie.

A Foreign Affair

5. A Foreign Affair (1948)

Filmed in the bombed-out rubble of postwar Berlin, A Foreign Affair is a comedy about lecherous US Army captain John Pringle (John Lund), who strikes up a relationship with a hardened German woman named Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich), former lover of several Third Reich higher-ups. He supplies Erika with designer gowns and padded mattresses, increasingly rare commodities among the ruins of Berlin; both of them, it seems, realize that their relationship is hollow and insincere, but it’s a convenient affair, and they’ve been hardened by the world to prioritize convenience and practicality. Since this is a comedy, a prim-and-proper Congresswoman from Iowa will of course be shipped over to investigate fraternization between American soldiers and German women. And she will learn how to have fun, and he will learn that emotion and true love aren’t simply illusions. And they will fall in love.

But A Foreign Affair is and isn’t a comedy. Actual scenes, shot on location, of postwar Berlin remain staggeringly bleak, and a brief scene in which German citizens barter for necessary commodities (which is where Pringle exchanges a birthday cake for a mattress) is far more tragic than it is funny. This is a truly schizophrenic movie, and (along with The Apartment) may most fully embody Wilder’s happy-sad dichotomy. It also features one of Marlene Dietrich’s best performances; just as glamorous as her appearances in Josef von Sternberg’s early-1930s films (but with an extra decade of world-weariness), her Erika von Schluetow is an unforgettable portrait of the beleaguered German people, doing what they must to survive. Her musical performances here—like this, or this, or this—are among the most beautiful moments in any Wilder film.    

Sunset Boulevard

4. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

It still seems incredible that both Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve were released in 1950: a one-two punch that shattered the elegant veneer of Hollywood, this pair of blistering comedies (if that’s the right word) laid bare the sordid dreams and delusions festering underneath. Depressed, destitute screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) stumbles into the life and decaying mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a superstar of the silent film era who now surrounds herself with the relics (cinematic and otherwise) of her past. Like many of Wilder’s films, it’s both bleakly funny and overwhelmingly sad, but it also embraces a baroque level of absurdity reserved for the highest level of wealth, fame, and glamour—in other words, for movie stars and film directors. The funeral ceremony for a pet monkey, Desmond’s garish recreations of Chaplin routines, and of course the ingenious gimmick of the movie’s otherworldly voiceover narration: these all point to an attempt on Wilder and Bracketts’ part to take tragicomedy to new operatic heights. And for all of its criticisms of Hollywood as a shallow, emotionally lifeless swamp, what remains most surprising about Sunset Boulevard is how overwhelmingly sad it is—a portrait of a place where the dreams are indistinguishable from the nightmares. 

Ace in the Hole

3. Ace in the Hole (1951)

After the success of Sunset Boulevard in 1950, Wilder apparently was emboldened: rarely had Hollywood created such a vitriolic portrait of itself, but the movie was received enthusiastically nonetheless, even winning three Oscars and garnering eight more nominations. Wilder responded in 1951 by making arguably the bleakest, most cynical, most hopeless movie of his career: Ace in the Hole, a portrait of an American populace so hungry for sensationalism and spectacle that they exploit the impending death of a trapped miner in order to make a buck (or simply to gawk at the tragedy). Wilder even ditched his co-screenwriter, Charles Brackett (Sunset Boulevard was the last film they would write together), for two darker-edged writers: Lesser Samuels (No Way Out) and Walter Newman (The Man with the Golden Arm). There’s no denying the misanthropy that runs throughout Ace in the Hole, but what’s stunning about the movie is that it still demonstrates Wilder’s steely brand of humanism: humanity may indeed be this repugnant, but we don’t have to be. Presaging a post-modernity of relentless mediation, grim spectacle, tawdry celebrity culture, and all-American hucksterism, Ace in the Hole still seems ahead of its time in its horrified condemnation of modern American sensationalism. (You could trace a direct genealogical path from the heartless exploiters in Ace in the Hole to the producers of most reality shows on TV today.)

The result of Wilder’s uninhibited bleakness was poor box office receipts and mediocre reviews; in fact, Ace in the Hole effectively ended Wilder’s nine-year-long stretch of commercial and critical successes. Viewed today, though, Ace in the Hole emerges as one of the director’s most brilliantly prescient commentaries, as well as the work of an unmistakable satirist who so ardently wants to live in a world that’s better than our own.

The Apartment

2. The Apartment (1960)

The Apartment set a precedent for all comedy-dramas that would follow, meaning, I guess, that Wilder’s effortlessly bittersweet film was indirectly responsible for both The Royal Tenenbaums and Little Miss Sunshine. We’ll call it a draw on that one. But aside from influencing indie comedies that happen to feature attempted suicides, The Apartment is notable for being at once one of the director’s saddest and funniest films. Of course there had been sad comedies and comedic dramas before, but few of them had imbued their laughs with such soul-crushing loneliness before, and few of them made their sadness so cosmically absurd that all you can do is laugh. Jack Lemmon would never give a better performance as C.C. Baxter, aka “Buddy Boy,” the lovable schlemiel who rents out his apartment to corporate higher-ups for their illicit sexual trysts; Fred MacMurray is his boss, Sheldrake, a despicable portrait of an executive who’s come to believe that he’s entitled to everything around him, people included. (Sheldrake is a horrifying vision of what Baxter might become decades down the road, if he continues on his path of meekly kowtowing to men who are wealthier and more powerful than him.) The turbulent relationship between Baxter and depressed elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) is overwhelming every time—they’re two sad people who suddenly find a version of happiness and are unsure what to do with it. Always an astute pacer and self-referencer, Wilder makes sure we’re bowled over by the emotional climax of The Apartment by playing off of earlier scenes—like these, for example.

Vanishing perspective in widescreen

Not only an emotional firestorm, The Apartment is also Wilder’s most compositionally rich film: some of the director’s critics have accused him of using a bland, non-cinematic visual style in order to foreground his dialogue, but such criticisms completely disregard the subtle precision of this film’s widescreen images. Wilder utilizes the unique perspectival effects of the rectangular frame to, for example, distort Baxter’s workplace into an endless eyesore, or to synthesize multiple visual planes in one shot for scenes in Baxter’s apartment. The Apartment ultimately reveals Wilder to be as sensitive stylistically as emotionally.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

1. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Maybe it’s the stubborn auteurist in me that prefers Wilder’s late-era, melancholy revision of the Holmes legacy to his “masterpieces”—The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is unabashedly a self-referential work, about fading celebrity, about aging, about the gap between our public personae and our personal selves. It’s also unimaginably melancholy, bittersweetly romantic, and incredibly complex—Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond tackle a new idea in practically every scene. In addition to the aforementioned themes, the movie ambiguously comments upon Holmes’ drug addiction and his possible homosexuality, revealing the hero as a depressed, insecure man who cannot bring himself to believe that mental fortitude and methodical practicality do not trump all in the modern world. Even more impressive, especially given Wilder’s slate of sexually frank causes célèbres in the 1960s: these potentially scandalous themes are hinted at respectfully and sensitively, as though Wilder respects his main character enough to give the man his own troubled private life, free from our prying eyes. In other words, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes could not be further from the Holmes and Watson we see now in Guy Ritchie movies: really, Wilder is using the Doyle stories as a metaphysical (and metacinematic) springboard to question a plethora of eclectic concepts, some of which he’s never shown an interest in, in his earlier works.

Maybe it’s too convenient to believe that, with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the 64-year-old director was evaluating his life, redressing mistakes, facing criticisms—this is a truism of auteur studies that cinephiles sometimes embrace all too eagerly. What’s unmistakably true, though, is that with Sherlock Holmes, Wilder made his most plaintive film and his most endlessly fascinating—a movie that still pulsates with the director’s wit and seamless style, at once encapsulating Wilder’s previous filmmaking sensibility and broadening it in wildly unexpected directions.