2012 (so far)

Since ECSTATIC only began in August of last year, I wasn't able to post an entry of recommendations from the first half of 2011, though it would have most likely included some of the films that ended up on my "2011 - Best Films" list, most notably: Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Zach Snyder's Sucker Punch, and possibly a few others that ended up in the "Honorable Mentions" category, as with Duncan Jones' Source Code (which I just recently watched again and liked even more than when I saw it last summer in San Francisco).  I can't say that the first half of 2012 has even yielded as many raves as that 2011 short list, but there have been a few standouts worth recommending in more detail:

1.  We Need To Talk About Kevin dir. Lynne Ramsay

It only seems fitting to start with an Oscilloscope release in the year that we lost this great distribution company's founder and Beastie Boy, Adam Yauch.  Hopefully Oscilloscope can continue the string of quality releases I reported on here, which includes the exceptional new release from Lynne Ramsay, We Need To Talk About Kevin. If you haven't seen the Scotish directors two previous features, Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar, they are definitely worth the time, particularly Ratcatcher which garnered a lot of attention for Ramsay upon its release, winning her the Silver Hugo at that years Chicago International Film Festival.  I regret having passed up a chance to see We Need To Talk About Kevin at that same festival last year (you can check out my 13-Day 2011 CIFF Diary, beginning here), and even more so since I caught up with it on DVD and realized what a rich directorial achievement it is.  This may have been set off by the fact that I screened it back-to-back with the Duplass Borther's Jeff, Who Lives At Home, which is similar in its attempt to move into new storytelling territory in the context of that directing duo, but with much less affecting results.  In Jeff that move seems to be away from being, as one of my students once put it, "one of those movie where nothing happens" to a movie that has an actual, physical dramatic climax.  Jeff does retain some of the great aspects of character-based storytelling that made the previous Duplass films successful (all of them more so, in my opinion), but in contrast to We Need To Talk About Kevin, their new film is lacking in both visual style and emotional resonance.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

We Need To Talk About Kevin

In Kevin, Ramsay creates a fascinating dynamic and a great deal of empathy around the central character, travel writer Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), while progressively showing us the ways in which she has been ostracized by everyone around her.  The reason for Eva being exiled within her own community is the hidden component of the film, and Ramsay weaves the story of Eva, her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly), and their son Kevin (brilliantly played and cast in three stages by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller) in non-linear fashion, eventually spiraling in on the films tragic center.  In some ways, Ramsay is using the tropes of the Greek tragedy, especially in the tension she creates by keeping the tragic action at bay.  Also at play are the tropes of the Horror film, ala The Bad Seed, or even The Omen.  But, what feels so fresh about Kevin lies in the reality of what it acknowledges about motherhood, parenting, and the nature of children, which is ultimately amplified by the fact that the film is decidedly not a horror film.  In fact, We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of the great films by and about women this year, revealing a truth that is certainly difficult to face, but which films about women and motherhood romanticize all too often.  Ramsay's direction is gorgeous, and Tilda Swinton gives one of her best performances in an already astonishing career.

2.  Keyhole  dir. Guy Maddin

If you've never seen a film by Canadian director Guy Maddin, don't start with Keyhole.  A better point of entry might be 1991's Archangel, or (to this day his most commercial success) 2003's The Saddest Music in the World.  Maddin's style is distinctive, to say the least, drawing from the influences of silent cinema to create studio productions not unlike the most artifice-bound films of Germany's UFA studios...except in modern day Winnepeg.  Among Maddin's best work are his distinctly Canadian and somewhat autobiographical Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), and My Winnepeg (2007), the latter featuring the great B-actress Ann Savage as Maddin's mother.  Maddins films are the work of a cinephile, for sure, and far removed from the trends of modern indy cinema, which makes a new Maddin all the more welcome.  Not only is Maddin working on his own aesthetic planet, but he is also a champion of the collective cinema experience in an age when great images are being compromised by the mass proliferation of smaller screens.  For Brand Upon the Brain! Maddin even did multiple art cinema presentations with live orchestras, foley artists, and revolving narrators, including Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach, Isabella Rossellini, and the director himself.

A Live Presentation of Brand Upon the Brain!

With Keyhole, Maddin is truly reveling in his creative impulses, crafting a cinematic space that is only loosely bound by narrative, but entirely haunted by the ghosts of Carl Jung, Sergei Eisenstein, Homer...and, this time around, Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.  The whole affair reminded me of the scene in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where the lead character journeys through his own subconscious...but mixed with a healthy dose of 30's Hollywood gangster pics, and all set in a haunted house--somewhere amid the confluence of all that you'll find Keyhole.  Maddin seems to be stepping up the madness a bit with Keyhole, to the delight of his fans, though it is ultimately one of his more trying pictures, purely relying on the experiential, dream-like quality of the narrative, and stretching his tendency toward frustrating the relationship between the horrific and the comedic to an unprecedented extent (as in a curious and deranged sequence involving "Kid in the Hall" Kevin MacDonald's character raping a maid).  The lead of the film is an utterly dedicated Jason Patric as Ulysses, searching for his wife Hyacinth, played by a Maddin favorite, Isabella Rossellini.  The script by Maddin and his frequent co-writer Greg Toles is as cryptic a psychological puzzle as they've created, as the mythic lead gangster journeys through his "dream house" in a circular, fragmented manner in search of his wife, uncovering family secrets with each labyrinthian pass.  There's a home made electric chair, a machine that operates a system of message-delivering tubes connected to various rooms throughout the house, a naked old man chained to a bed, and Udo Keir.  If all this doesn't immediately appeal to you, then maybe Maddin isn't for you.  If you're like me, you will be wide-eyed for every second, including the remarkable companion short included on the DVD, Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair, which also features Rosselini.  The score by Jason Staczek is remarkable, eerie and perfect--worth seeking out on its own.

3.  Cane Toads:  The Conquest 3D  dir. Mark Lewis

I once read an article where Werner Herzog was asked to recommend a few films...maybe documentaries specifically...and although I had seen some of the others he mentioned I remember an odd title standing out among them:  Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.  This little Australian film from 1988 is still worth seeking out if you haven't seen it, but definitely leaves you with the sense that the problem--some would say epidemic--of the Cane Toad can hardly be contained in a documentary that clocks in at under an hour.  Enter Cane Toads: The Conquest, in 3D no less, perhaps director Mark Lewis's nod to the Herzog bump, and something of a counterpart to Herzog's 3D cave exploring.  The Conquest comes on with an even greater sense of humor than its predecessor, displaying an adeptness at both telling the story of the Cane Toad visually, and allowing the real subjects of the film--those living with and against them--to tell their stories, which in some cases veer into the tragic.  For example, one of the lessons that The Conquest has to offer is that if you're out in front of the trailer on a warm night enjoying a few cocktails, watch where you strike with your frog spear--you may just hit a power line.

Ultimately, Cane Toads: The Conquest does feel a bit uneven as it favors the human stories of Cane Toad encounters over the visual exploration of more scientific aspects hinted at in some of the opening sequences.  But, The Conquest does deliver the alarming story of the Cane Toad migration and subsequent...well, conquest...with one of the most thoughtful and stunning uses of 3D cinematography yet, which is saying something for a movie about toads.  And, it leaves the audience with some true and pertinent questions about our relationship to nature, without mandating the bullshit Disney worldview found in this years Chimpanzee (which might make Herzog's skin crawl even more than March of the Penguins).  Though playing for laughs from time to time, The Conquest is a serious piece of nature cinema that considers through a variety of perspectives the very real problem of dealing with a toad that lays 30 to 40,000 eggs at a time.  No joke, indeed.   

Panos Casmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow

I was fortunate enough to see Cane Toads: The Conquest in 3D thanks to a festival that premiered this year, the Cinetopia International Film Festival in Ann Arbor, MI.  Coming quickly on the heels of the 50th Anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the festival premiered a number of films I'm anticipating catching up with in the coming months, particularly Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow, Emad Burnat's 5 Broken Cameras, Denis Cote's Bestiare, and Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister. 

DOUBLE FEATURE: "Renaldo and Clara" dir. Bob Dylan (1978) + "Masked and Anonymous" dir. Larry Charles (2003)

Bob Dylan and the movies have a long and difficult past, and there's no better example of that than one of only two films tagged with Mr. Zimmerman's directorial credit, the concert/documentary/fictional endurance test Renaldo and Clara.  And, yes, for those who have heard tale of this murky, underground-dwelling beast of a film, it does exist.  I am referring to the version that is often tagged as the "4-hour Extended Cut," though truth be told, it clocks in at about 3 hours and 46 minutes. Dylan also created a cut of his 1966 European tour with the Band called Eat the Document, which remains the only other attempt by Dylan to "direct" a film, though it never stood up to the iconic D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back (1967), the most prominent standing record of Dylan in the mid-60's.  Now 73 years old, Dylan has been through numerous transformations as a musician, having finally succumb to recording a Christmas album in 2009, Christmas in the Heart.  Though he has occasionally veered into the world of film--as a director, performer, and (most successfully) a seemingly bottomless subject of inquiry--it was always clear that the real performance, the real life, was onstage.  For those who have seen Bob Dylan's attempts at acting, it's hard not to hear the title of Todd Haynes' experimental, splintered bio-pic from 2007 ringing in your ears:  I'm Not There.     

Renaldo and Clara

I'm Not There

The Dylan mystique seems to have become an increasingly complex puzzle for filmmakers, rock critics, and fans since his rise to fame as an almost immediately reluctant "voice" of a generation.  But, considering the extent to which he has been poked an prodded by both himself (as in his 2005 memoir Chronichles: Volume One) and others (see the lengthy Scorsese documentary No Direction Home) since that time, it's difficult to say whether there is anything like mystique left at all.  If Don't Look Back was the petulant youth of a folk superstar, and Masked and Anonymous is the death of an increasingly absurd quest for nostalgia in the face of a bleak present, then Renaldo and Clara is a lost place somewhere between those two extremes.  The film begins with the strains of a tune that sounds a bit sorrowful given the career path of Dylan through the following couple of decades, the lyrics a bit muted by an eerie, clear plastic mask:  "Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent...when I paaaaiiint my masterpiece."  Like most of the concert footage in Renaldo and Clara it's a fantastic performance, exhibiting a symbiosis of musicianship that explains why many fans consider the "Rolling Thunder Revue" tour that the film partly documents to be some of the most coveted of Dylan's live output.

The Rolling Thunder Revue

But, before I begin to sound like too much of a Dylan fanatic, I should say that my impulse to seek out the monstrous cut of Renaldo and Clara had more to do with the legend of the film itself than anything resembling Dylan-mania.  Dylan has passed in and out of my life as a curiosity, but I just never took that ultimate plunge of obsession that he seems to inspire.  I listened to the Greatest Hits cassette excessively around my junior year of high school, and eventually saw him play live twice (once on Halloween in 1990, of my own choice, and a second time, by circumstance, ten years later; in '90 he barely moved or acknowledged the presence of the audience, and in 2000 he shook his hips like Elvis).  In other words, I've always liked Blood on the Tracks a lot, but I never poured over lyrics or coveted box sets, and I won't be sitting down anytime soon to listen to the entirety of Self Portrait or Empire Burlesque just to call myself a Dylan "completist."  In fact, the odds of that happening are now even slighter having endured the full cut of Renaldo and Clara, which is perhaps the definition of a "for completists only" artifact, whether musical or cinematic.  The film was originally screened theatrically, but was such a failure that it was ultimately cut down to a more concise concert film.  Having taken the time to dig up this strangely titled mystery with hopes that it might be some kind of tragically misunderstood, meandering experimental masterpiece, its hard to admit that it is, in fact, just in need of being edited down into a more concise concert film.  "Masterpiece" is a strong start...David Blue telling stories about meeting Bob while playing pinball, ok....Bob attacking "Hard Rain" like he's angry that anyone ever liked it in the first place while Sam Shepard looks on from the wings, awesome...Alan Ginsberg being brought on to "Everything's Coming Up Roses" after a lounge act version of "Cabaret," delightfully weird...  But, at around the hour-and-a-half mark, the reality of Renaldo and Clara really begins to settle in: it's painfully dull.  I can understand giving the crew some screen time in a concert film, as well as attempting some hotel room improv along the way.  I can even see dressing up Joan Baez for some faux-brothel scenes with a violin-playing boy clad in only underwear and angel wings.  But, the problem with Renaldo and Clara is that all of that (and more) are shot and lit with such amateurish skill, and then seemingly thrown at an editing machine in hopes that it all somehow gels.  By the time Dylan attempts to shoehorn in a mini-documentary about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, annoyingly fading up and down the audio of his epic song about Carter around some hopeless "person on the street" interview footage, the promise of Renaldo and Clara achieving anything close to the flow of a great, rambling Dylan ballad is lost.

Renaldo and Clara

My attention set adrift somewhere in the soupy middle of the film, I couldn't help but think about the Kuleshov workshops of the teens and 20's, and the stories of early Russian filmmakers working with prints of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as a way to practice editing techniques.  Not only is Renaldo and Clara not that lost, mysterious, rambling, avant-garde behemoth that I had hoped for, it would in fact be the perfect film to use for training film editors, similar to the way the Kuleshov workshop used Griffith.  Of course, this is only true because there is a pretty great concert film embedded in the nearly un-watchable Dylan cut, and certain other snippets that would play pretty well as interstitial compliments to some of that performance footage.  One of the first few numbers in the film is a devastating version of "Isis" that really shows the power of the live band, later complimented by Dylan solo, in white-face and framed in an unforgettably relentless close-up performing "Tangled Up in Blue," which is probably one of the most oft excerpted clips from the film (I still have VHS of it somewhere, dubbed from a Night Flight episode...Nigh Flight, anyone?).  It's these musical moments that still make Renaldo and Clara worth mentioning at all, but taken in its complete form as a directorial work, it's an utter mess.

"Tangled Up in Blue"

Larry Charles has described his collaboration with Dylan, 2003's Masked and Anonymous, as extremely process-oriented, to the extent of almost utter disregard for the quality of the product. This same sentiment was most definitely applied by Dylan to Renaldo and Clara, though the product suffers to a much greater extent than with Masked.  In fact, it's stunning how consistently the attempts at creating any original segments of drama or character fail in Renaldo and Clara, especially considering that Sam Shepard was contributing dialogue, and the occasional seasoned actor even shows up, as with Harry Dean Stanton.  But, the "scenes" are clearly improvised to an excruciating extent, mostly performed by Bob (Renaldo) and Sara Dylan (Clara), Joan Baez (The Woman in White), and a slew of others along for the Rolling Thunder ride. Though Bob himself ranks as one of the least engaging actors in the history of celluloid, notably rotten performances abound, as with Bob's wife Sara, Ronnie "The Hawk" Hawkins (who ultimately gets billing as "Bob Dylan" in Renaldo and Clara for a scene where he is mistaken by a reporter for Bob), and quite a few others. These scenes are truly what make Renaldo and Clara such a drag, in the final analysis, though the overall trip is not without the occasional sparkle of hope.  For every moment that sparks curiosity, or even the desire to read a bit deeper--Dylan shaking hands with the Rolling Thunder tribe while "People Get Ready" plays on the soundtrack, or Dylan and Ginsberg visiting the grave of Kerouac (one of those moments to keep in, editor-in-training)--there is the inclusion of two or three segments crying out for the editing room floor...like Roger McGuinn doing that goddamn song about the horse.

Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg in Renaldo and Clara

Although Dylan had played a supporting part (appropriately dubbed "Alias") a few years earlier in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and would go on to perform in the Joe Esterhauz-penned Hearts of Fire (1987), his most ambitious role would come much later in the somewhat overlooked gem, Masked and Anonymous.

Though "Seinfeld" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" scribe Larry Charles is now most commonly cited as the directorial collaborator on the Sasha Baron Cohen films (Borat, 2006; Bruno, 2009; The Dictator, 2012), as well as Bill Maher's 2008 doc Religulous, his first credit as director is attached to what might be considered a somewhat riskier project, given Dylan's track record in the world of movies up to that point.  Most of the conversation around Masked and Anonymous at the time of its release dismissed the experiment as an utter mess; an easy position to take, considering the film was shot in less than 30 days, and contains enough stars to automatically classify it as a disaster movie.  
  

Jeff Bridges as Tom Friend

Ed Harris as Oscar Vogel

Val Kilmer as The Animal Wrangler

Masked and Anonymous opens with images of violent revolt; we catch a glimpse of what looks like the streets of Beijing, juxtaposed in quick-cut fashion to what might be the WTO protests, while simultaneously we strain to uncover what Dylan song we’re hearing intoned in Japanese (“My Back Pages” by the Makagoro Brothers). This initial montage does a wonderful job of (dis)orienting us to the “in-between” world of Masked and Anonymous, as we are never quite sure what geographical or psychological borders we are straddling throughout this ode to the aging folk-rocker.  Dylan “plays” Jack Fate, imprisoned in a war torn third-world nation that just may be the United States in the mind of Dylan’s screenwriting persona Sergei Petrov, yet another alias to add to Dylan’s multi-layered network of disguises.  In fact, most of the characters in Masked seem to be operating under an alias, sporting names like Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman), Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges), Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson), and Pagan Lace (Penelope Cruz).  But, as the world of the film coalesces, it becomes clear that the characters in Masked are not really movie characters at all, but song characters.  In fact, the film sits a little easier read as a feature-length Dylan concept album, the "cuts" represented by thoughtfully interspersed scenes of Dylan and his band jamming (Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton, Guitar; Tony Garnier, Bass; George Receli, Drums), all cleverly framed by Charles and cinematographer Rogier Stoffers (who went on to shoot for Richard Linklater on School of Rock and Bad News Bears).

Because of the freewheeling process Charles and Dylan embraced in Masked and Anonymous there are a few moments that will no doubt leave audiences puzzled, as when Dylan goes off on what could be considered a monologue for the character of Jack Fate, expounding on the function of cellulose and how it's digestible by cows, but not by him or any other human...or something (I recall seeing the film during its theatrical run at the Music Box in Chicago, and audience members audibly calling out in the theater: “What?!" "What is Bob talking about?”). Added to that, the denoument of Masked, which concerns the attempted rape of Pagan Lace by Uncle Sweetheart, and a subsequent brawl involving Sweetheart, Fate, Friend, and Cupid is so unaffecting that it’s hard to leave this picture not wanting something more.  The multitude of cameos (including Bruce Dern, Fred Ward, Angela Bassett, Giovanni Rabisi, Cheech Marin, Chris Penn, and Christian Slater, to name but a few), although occasionally engaging, certainly don’t fill that void.

Giovanni Ribisi (The Soldier) and Dylan

Mickey Rourke (Edmund) and Dylan

To be fair, that “something more” is inched toward by the simultaneous action of newly empowered dictator and Fate's brother, Edmund, played by Mickey Rourke (in maybe one of his best dressed roles ever) taking militant action upon the masses immediately upon the death of the former President and patriarchal figure in the film.  Rourke thrives in this otherwise shabbily designed portion of the film, thrusting aside his mock Presidential podium while declaring, “There will be no more stupidity.  There will be no more mistakes.  It’s a new day.  God help you all.”  Dylan and Charles are not just filling half-baked characters mouths with discarded song lyrics in these moments, but striving for the bigger picture of celebrity politics, and the roots of corruption that have connected the US and Mexico for decades. The way the film allows the borders of North and South America to bleed across one another is itself a commentary on that history of corruption and influence, and the film ultimately emerges as a fairly effective, albeit broad, satire.

Another potent aspect of the film is personified in the journalist character Tom Friend, continually badgering Fate with questions rooted in an aching nostalgia, to which Fate is almost entirely unresponsive.  In these moments, there is clearly no line distinguishing Fate and Dylan, and, amazingly, something readable registers on Dylan’s drawn mug; not ego, but exasperation.  These particularly well-crafted scenes read as a message to all of the aging hippies like Friend, looking for those answers in their fallen heroes and lamenting a world they maybe refused to grow into.  It's that issue of growth that Dylan has been dealing with all along, continuing to trudge ahead through decades that seemed to value his musical endeavors less and less, and understandably not being able to create genius work that speaks specifically to that moment in history with each new album, all the while playing for audiences that were just shouting for yet another incarnation of “Blowing in the Wind.”  In one perfect moment of Masked and Anonymous, a mother asks Dylan/Fate to listen to her daughter sing the iconic folk song.  The young girl has committed his songs to memory, and her rendition produces on Dylan's face what has to be one of the most genuine reactions of his entire film career, as it seems our restless hero has found a fleeting moment of satisfaction amid the unrelenting nostalgia.

  
Dylan was never meant to be an actor, which is certainly no crime, especially in a time when some of the most over-used, lucrative actors are some of the least interesting people to watch.  And, though not a great actor, he is interesting to watch.  It may be that a lifetime of everyone looking at him is what kept him from having any kind of character as an actor at all.  And, ultimately, Masked and Anonymous is better for having him at the center, and not some Dylan stand-in (maybe they could have gathered up Harry Dean again? Or, Nick Cage?).  In the end, as Fate is driven away, we hear Dylan speak what is perhaps the most relevant bit of commentary on his forays into film.  His face clasped tight in defiance of any final, telling moment of expression, the camera follows him as he takes a ride in the back of a police van (maybe not unlike the mythic "squad car of Fate" from the end of Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour?), and in voice over we here him say in a weathered tone:  "I was always a singer, and maybe no more than that."

   

"Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" dir. William Greaves, 1968

As a young man, William Greaves went from being curious about science to being drawn to dance.  Symbiospychotaxiplasm: Take One is a film Greaves orchestrated in the Spring of 1968, and although it may be a radical shift away from the type of film he was commonly recognized for in his long career documenting the Civil Rights era and the icons of African-American culture, the film marks the completion of a through-line from those two early loves of a young intellectual from Harlem.

William Greaves in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

1968 was the same year that the experimental tendencies of the French New Wave were colliding with the social unrest in the States over Viet Nam, sparking a new breed of American film that combined the spontaneity of Allen Kaprow's "Happenings," and a cinema-verite sensibility that was beginning to blur the distinction between fiction and documentary.  One of the triumphs of this collision of influences is Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, a film that echoes Greaves' film in a few significant ways.  Wexler was documenting the tumultuous protest that took place during the '68 Democratic National convention in Chicago, and sending his actors into the very real melee as a way to channel the energy and threat of the protests into his Godard-meets-McLuhan film essay.

Robert Forster in Medium Cool

Meanwhile, Greaves was creating a bit of controlled chaos in New York's Central Park, as he began an experiment inspired by the Heisenberg Principle, augmented by Arthur Bentley's idea of "Symbiotaxiplasm" from a book called Inquiries Into Inquiry: Essays in Social Theory, and centered around the practice of Stanislavski, as applied to some rather cheap and provocative dialogue.  The layers go pretty deep, for sure.   But, as with the best experiments, the joy of viewing Symbiospychotaxiplasm: Take One is not just hinged on one's knowledge of those disparate academic references.  Rather, what Greaves accomplishes is a film that is a free-flowing and mesmerizing improvised dance sparked by a precision catalyst:  Greaves himself.

The basic idea:  shoot a single scene of dialogue between two actors.  Every couple of days or so, replace the old actors with new actors.  Camera 1 is dedicated to capturing the actor's work (or their "screen test," as Greaves sometimes calls it), which revolves around a scripted conflict that involves a married couple and their increasing lack of sex, frustration over the woman's multiple abortions, and the man's probable homosexuality.  If that dramatic conflict sounds a bit stale, it's important to note that it's not the real central drama of the film and that everyone involved, including Greaves, seems to find the dialogue repetitive, banal, and just plain terrible.

Camera 2 has a different agenda:  to shoot the actors and Greaves.  Having been a star in the black cinema of the 40s and 50s, and having studied with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner in the famed Actor's Studio in New York, Greaves knows a thing or two about acting.  What's interesting about his "performance" in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is the way in which he "plays" at being a director, often to the crew's dismay.  The crew eventually begins to recognize that once the camera rolls Greaves seems to take on the "character" of a director who, when asked questions about the direction of the film, offers cryptic answers that leave them wishing they had never bothered to ask.  Ultimately, part of what is so fascinating about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is the question of Greaves's performance, which may be one of the few examples of "performative directing" taken to this extent (at least since Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera).  Or, is it?  Taken by itself, the film isn't interested in definitively answering that question, and Greaves' portrayal of himself from an editing perspective is certainly not self-aggrandizing, but rather follows the rhythms established by the multiple strands of action in a way that leaves the question of his ultimate control open.  The real dramatic center of Take One has little to do with the script, but with the question of Greaves himself.

Camera 3:  capture the entire movement of the crew--including Greaves, the actors, the cameramen, sound technicians, etc.--as well as any other interesting or stimulating movement that happens to go down in Central Park, particularly if it relates to sexuality in any way.  Woman with large tits on a horse:  shoot it.  Shirtless guy rowing a boat:  shoot it.  A couple gently passing their baby between one another:  shoot it.

 

In order to contain all of this, Greaves sometimes splits the screen into two simultaneous takes, sometimes three, and ultimately has little regard for linearity.  The "story" at the center is hardly the point of the film, but rather the processing of a drama observed...and the observation of that drama being observed.  In a couple of instances in the film, Greaves is asked what the name of the film is, to which he replies "Over the Cliff," though he gives no assurance that the title will be the same once it's completed.  I have to think, given Greaves's background in the theater, that "Over the Cliff" is possibly a sly reference to "Mixing It Up," the title of the non-existent play at the center of Luigi Pirandello's seminal work of meta-theater, Six Characters in Search of an Author.  In Pirandello's play, there is a similar "3 level" structure to the piece, but where Six Characters is a fully scripted work, what Greaves is aiming to capture is what arises naturally, possibly from the scripted center, but also potentially from any other part of the process, or the ceaseless Reichian energy of Central Park.  In a few glimpsed moments, it seems clear that Greaves is not really sure whether or not the experiment is working, but given the profound nature of the final product, it's hard to imagine that he was anything other than consistently three steps ahead of everyone involved.  Even when sound technician Jonathan Gordon cops to Greaves that he didn't read the synopsis of the film provided for everyone, it seems that Greaves expected as much (and was maybe even counting on it?)  Ultimately, it took many years for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One to emerge as a significant part of Greaves' filmography, and the enthusiasm of Steven Soderbergh to get the film released properly.  Once the film was screened in a Greaves retrospective, the response to the film was so overwhelming that it spawned Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 + 1/2 in 2005 (available in tandem with the original via Criterion), which included some of the same actors who appeared in the first film, as well as Steve Buscemi as part of the camera crew.  Although Greaves had intended for the first film to be the beginning of a series of "Takes," Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One seems to survive best on its own.  Take 2 + 1/2 will prove interesting for those taken with Take One, but is, unfortunately, a weaker and somewhat unnecessary film, not nearly as expressive of the time in which it was created, and a reminder that Take One was perhaps the sort of "trick" you can't really play twice.

Buscemi and Greaves - Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 + 1/2 

Take One inspires that unique sense of awe, that ecstatic energy that doesn't come along often in film, particularly for something that might easily be shrugged off as an experimental gimmick (as Greaves seemed to consider it after its completion).  This is partly due to the fact that the experiment works, and in ways that Greaves himself could have never foretold.  For instance, one of the most exciting and unexpected moments in Take One (and I guess this is where a "Spoiler Alert" would be placed for what is, essentially, a plot-less film) is when the crew of the film "hijacks" the picture a few days into the shoot, meeting covertly in an attempt to unpack just what the hell is going on.  The discussion takes place, so they tell us, without Greaves' knowledge, and is mostly led by the film's producer, Robert Rosen, and Jonathan Gordon.

Robert Rosen

Jonathan Gordon

Although Rosen and Gordon acknowledge the fact that we, the audience, have no idea whether or not this "hijacking" is real, it is surely genuine.  Also, it's rife with the spirit of inquiry and mutiny associated with the late 60s in a way that, in comparison, makes other efforts from that era that tried to capture the same essence seem false (the musical Hair, for example; but even Easy Rider in the way it became a sort of fixed, iconic representation in the decades that followed).  So, on one level, the thrill of actually witnessing the democratic uprising of the masses (the crew) against their oppressor (Greaves, and, to a certain extent, the actors), is not only captivating in its spontaneity, but also elevates the film to another level of insight and allegory, and Greaves himself to a level of genius, as the "actors" within his film speculate that the intent all along might have been for them to steal the movie away.  Others want to simply vent--"He doesn't know how to direct"--but Gordon keeps pushing at the idea that they are perhaps what this film is really about.  It's difficult to tell who's convinced by the theory, and eventually, Rosen caps one of the meetings with the perfect compliment to Greaves:  "Nobody would come up with such a crazy idea for a film!"  

Not long after this, Greaves addresses the possibility of creative mutiny as he and Gordon discuss among the other participants that anyone is free at any time to take the reigns of the film and turn it into whatever they want.  It's this sequence that struck me the most this time around, particularly in the way it reveals the climate of the sexual revolution, and the suppression of language unique to that time.  Gordon's emphatic rant about the lame dialogue between the couple ("Freddy" and "Alice," most likely a take on Albee's "George" and "Martha" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?) represents another small revolt, as he shouts:  "Enough with the euphemisms!"  Gordon's insistence that the rawness of words is essential in the expression of the scene is then echoed in a naturally occurring scene that is the coda of the film, an encounter with a homeless man named Victor who lives in the park.  But, what's most interesting about the encounter with Victor is that the film seems to finally reach an organic moment of synthesis, as the filmmakers settle long enough to allow Victor to become the center of the film.  The film is once again charged with spontaneity here, as the actors are re-positioned to the "second level" of the film, and concede to the dominant personality of the moment.  In one of my favorite moments, the actor who has been playing "Alice" reacts to Victor's rant in a way that is more honest and expressive than any moment she's had all day as an actor at the center of the action.  Once again, the dramatic conflict does not reside in the script itself, but in the symbiotic shift of this moving, thinking, reacting organism that Greaves has set into motion. 

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One sits alongside some of the great experimental jewels of the late '60s/early '70s, like Robert Downey's Putney Swope, Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart, Peter Watkins' Punishment Park, and Wexler's Medium Cool.  To return to Medium Cool, there's a scene where TV cameraman John Casselis (Robert Forster) is paged to go on an assignment in a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago to cover a story about a cab driver who found a large sum of money and returned it to the police.  In that scene, Casselis is confronted by the family of the man who found the wallet and interrogated about the lack of representation of blacks in the media.  At one point, Wexler allows the camera to shift into a direct address mode, allowing the black actors in the film to speak directly to the audience, abandoning the conflict between Forster and the characters and re-establishing it as a conflict between the black community and the audience. To this day, the scene is arresting, and unfortunately still conveys a pretty righteous truth.   But, in contrast, its interesting to me that Wexler (a white director) was channeling the rage of the black community through the overtly confrontational tactics of cinema verite, yet Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One seems even a touch more revolutionary in its decidedly laid-back approach to subverting the cultural norms of the time, particularly in regards to race.  In other words, Greaves is aware of his "role" on yet another level:  that of a black filmmaker in the late sixties.  Though it may be easy for younger viewers to lose sight of today, Greaves's presence at the helm of Take One is a unique revolution in its own right, powerfully subversive, especially since the expectation of black filmmakers at that time tended to segregate their focus (and it should be noted that Greaves historical documentary work focusing on influential African-American figures, which comprises the majority of his directorial work, pre-dates what has become known as the "Ken Burns" style of historical film making).

Symbiospychotaxiplasm: Take One is not only an unprecedented work in the canon of African-American film but an essential part of the experimental film canon, as well; two worlds that don't often overlap.  In Greaves's worldview, there are invisible lines of interconnectedness that bind the consequences of our actions, or lack of action, to one another.  One of those lines leads straight through Chicago, from D.W. Griffith to Haskell Wexler to the inauguration of Barack Obama.  Criss-crossing that line is one that leads from Oscar Mischeaux to Greaves himself, and on to the filmmaker who has perhaps most adamantly taken up the conversation that Greaves began with Take One, Spike Lee.  Though Lee hasn't yet made anything as purely experimental as Take One, his commentary on the prejudices of the film business echoes the move Greaves made with Take One.  Actually, given Lee's occasional shortcomings with story, it may be the right time for him to attempt an experimental feature.  But, as much as I'd love to see that film, just having Take One out in the world is reassurance enough that someone will take up the thread of Greaves's subtle revolution.    

  

"Wings" dir. William A. Wellman, 1927

William A. Wellman's romantic WWI epic Wings is most frequently noted for being the first Academy Award winner for "Best Picture, Production" as well as one of the great final films of the silent era.  The new DVD released on the 100th anniversary of Paramount studios presents the film in a newly mastered transfer that looks superb, and also includes a newly recorded score and sound effects track, as well as a brief documentary on the making and legacy of the film.  Looking back at the film now, it's clear that although its accomplishments as a technical feat are astonishing, it fails to inspire the repeatability of the visionary work that came out of that same period, especially in the same year that gave us two masterpieces by German directors, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.  Admittedly, I bring this assessment to the film as someone who has never been crazy about war epics, and is more likely to get excited by brief experimentation than long form narrative.  But, what interests me most about Wings is how it's exemplary of an American combination of storytelling and flag waving that is still with us today, particularly in a year that has already given us the release of recruitment-as-entertainment films like Act of Valor, Red Tails, and Battleship.  While Wings is certainly not the beginning of using the cinema as a place to condition young audience members toward enlistment and amplify nationalistic fervor in audiences of all ages, it certainly falls into the cannon of that cinema, and serves as a reflection of what an indelible mark its template has left on modern movies.

Wings (1927)

Battleship (2012)

William "Wild Bill" Wellman was a director who came right out of the Army Air Corps, and by all accounts had served in the French Foreign Legion and lived the life of a daredevil pilot by the time he directed Wings.  He then proceeded to make films in a number of different genres for decades, working with everyone from James Cagney to John Wayne. His films have a far reaching influence, reflected most directly in recent works such as Steven Spielberg's Warhorse (2011) and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), with the later chronicling Howard Hughes' production of Hell's Angels (1930), a film that began production with the aim to top what Wellman had done in terms of airborne cinematography with Wings.  And, it does, which is no surprise since, as we now know, to call Hughes driven and well funded is a bit of an understatement.  But, unlike Wellman, Hell's Angels is nearly unbearable in its grounded, dramatic segments (for a closer examination and appreciation of Hell's Angels, read Marilyn Ferdinand here);  still, the German Zeppelin scene alone is well worth the price of admission, and still delivers a chill as the soldiers jettison themselves into the dark opening of the Zeppelin floor one by one to lighten the load.

Hell's Angels

Wings is also packing some terrific and tense action, with the final chase sequence providing an undeniably engaging bit of drama, as our hero Jack (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) unknowingly pursues his friend and fellow soldier David (Richard Arlen) who has stolen a German plane as a means of escape.  The drama on the ground in Wings is also benefited by the presence of girl next door Mary Preston ("IT" Girl Clara Bow), who of course joins the Army because, as the title card tells us, "Youth answered the call!"...but, mostly because she will stop at nothing to someday win Jack's affections.  Jack, of course, is in love with David's girl Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), which provides the central romantic entanglement of Wings (though a few moments between Jack and David have inspired readings that place the real romantic tension elsewhere).  All of this holds together as well as can be expected, but leads to a pretty predictable resolution.  Though Jack ultimately experiences a horrific turn of events due to the war that would most likely leave some psychological scars in reality, its all shrugged off with a kiss, and bolstered by an appearance earlier in the film by a young Gary Cooper as a seasoned fighter pilot whose shockingly brief character arc serves as a lesson of how fleeting life is during wartime.

Richard Arlen and Gary Cooper in Wings

The character relationships and depiction of war in Wings are surely informed by a film maker who was reaching the end of a prolific career in the late 20's, D.W. Griffith.  The influence of the Biograph one-reelers that Griffith had been making unceasingly since the mid-Aughts, and then the explosion of his war epic The Birth of a Nation in 1915 are difficult to ignore when talking about the films of this period, particularly war films.  Griffith's films are an essential and ethically complex part of film history, and the traces of their influence seem to recur with great frequency, not only in relation to silent cinema, but to American movies in general.  When I began studying films, and saw some of my first Griffith/Biograph pictures, along with a number of other silent era staples, I now realize that I developed a way to read those films that set them apart from the "modern" movies I was experiencing at that time, and held them to a somewhat different standard.  After teaching Griffith (always to at least a handful of students who seemed immediately anesthetized), I now find it impossible to set those works apart from the cinema of today (even though, in some cases, I probably like watching Griffith less than some of those students).  The Birth of a Nation and Wings are two huge roots in a very old tree, and carry a similar historical weight, though in comparison to the overt racism of Birth (adapted from a book titled The Clansman), Wings could be seen as progressive in some of its choices and characterizations of the war, as in the "furlough from Death" Parisian nightclub sequence, where those with quick eyes might glimpse a romantic touch between a lesbian couple in one of the films more artful tracking shots.

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

Griffith also seems relevant here in the precedence he established for mass distribution of films, and the political sentiments that came with them.  Once The Birth of a Nation hits theaters like the Biograph in Chicago, spooling out again and again to controversial screenings that were sometimes shut down by police officials for the potential to incite racial tensions, the long arc of the potential for movies to bear the weight of history and influence public sentiment begins.  This arc continues through the pictures of Wellman, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Sam Fuller, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone and Steven Speilberg, to name but a few.  With varying degrees of cultural sensitivity and controversy, these directors crafted a conversation of American militancy that continues to shape our national identity.  Though Wings is not without its recognition of the horrors of war, it is a far cry from the way in which WWII vet Sam Fuller would bear the realities of racial tension and treatment of POW's in 1951's The Steel Helmet, or Stanley Kubrick's anti-war sentiment in 1957's Paths of Glory.  The war film re-emerges post-Viet Nam with Coppola's Apocalyspe Now in 1979, Brando's Colonel Kurtz perhaps completing the narrative begun by Cooper's Cadet White in Wings, having been stripped of his illusions about war, pessimistically dismissing Arlen's lucky bear charm as useless superstition.

Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory

Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now

But the "Film School Generation" not only produces Coppola's legendary production, but also the less critical and more classroom friendly variations of war in the works of Steven Speilberg, which spans the cartoonish Nazi depictions in the "Indiana Jones" series to the critically untouchable sappiness of Schindler's List.  In the age of Speilberg, the historical war film enters the classroom, although in my experience it was never accompanied by any discussion of media literacy, but mostly simplistic commentary on what was depicted truthfully and what wasn't, as if movies like Glory (1989), Amistad (1997), or Saving Private Ryan (1998) were just attempts to visually replace history books.  In fact, when I think of Truffaut's famous claim that "There is no such thing as an anti-war film," it's Saving Private Ryan that is evoked most immediately.  At the time of its release, the popular buzz about the film seemed mostly reduced to comments about the intensity of its opening depiction of the D-Day invasion.  The film inspired multiple news stories of combat veterans being simultaneously honored and traumatized by the films technical achievement, and the conversation that arose around the film always seemed less like a thoughtful reflection on the horrors of war, and more like the reaction to having just played an intense combat video game, the likes of which would experience enormous and widespread popularity after the release of the film through the mass marketing of games like Halo and Call of Duty.  Spielberg's films have always struck me as "pro-war" films, very much in the tradition of Wellman.  Anyone who has seen the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan would most likely call it horrific, but maybe not to the extent that they wouldn't pay to take the ride again.  This is where the war film tradition of Wellman and Spielberg differs from the likes of Kubrick's Paths of Glory, and to a greater extent, Terrance Malick's The Thin Red Line.  Where Spielberg's action is air tight and relentless like that of a first person shooter game, The Thin Red Line is undulating, reflective, and truly horrific.

Saving Private Ryan

The Thin Red Line

Although I will always champion cinema that refuses to glorify war, I am not so naive as to ignore the fact that the history of war films is an essential component of how we understand our history and how we continue to shape our attitudes toward war.  And, as with most things in life, it's dangerous to think of those cultural artifacts as falling neatly into Red and Blue baskets, and to allow ones viewing habits to follow suit.  In fact, I will readily admit to enjoying some of the most propagandizing of war films (especially when they are as beautifully batshit crazy as the final sequence in Battleship!).  For instance, if you dismiss Rambo III entirely you might miss the story of the sculptor, which may not necessarily be tied to a great movie, but does reveal an interesting philosophical question about our natural inclination toward militarism that sticks with me more, for some reason, than a good number of more didactic anti-war films I've seen.  In other words, war films are rarely as "pro" or "anti" as essays in a freshman English course, and it's a mistake to approach them as if we could easily, conclusively assess their content in terms of the effect they have on a diverse audience.

Rambo III (1988)

Getting back to Truffaut's claim, though I believe it to be true in general, the digital age of documentary film making has certainly put his statement about the impossibility of an "anti-war" film to the test.  The era of the Bush wars and Fox News instigated some incredible films that excelled purely as anti-war statements, and advanced film making in one of its most crucial capacities (and one that seems to have dropped off a bit in the last few years): to tell stories and provide images that fall outside of the script of corporate news sources.  Films like James Longley's Iraq in Fragments (2006) and Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth (2006), which specifically exposes the ethical gap between military recruitment tactics and reality, both represent an exceptional new breed of journalistic film making that flip the script of the war film and the mainstream media to much needed effect.  Meanwhile, the fiction film front gave rise to such revelations as Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo (2006) and Paul Haggis's overlooked In the Valley of Elah (2007).  Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight (2004) seems also to be worthy of note here as it forms an essential thread in the long arc of the war film, creating a direct line from the mythologizing of the WWII war hero to the more media exposed quality of our current military conflicts through appropriating the propaganda films of maybe the most all-American of directors, Frank Capra.

Frank Capra's Why We Fight

Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight

As for modern propaganda, it may be that the success of a film like James Cameron's Avatar is the modern antidote to the jingoistic war films of the past. It seems a lot of adult audiences and critics took joy in mocking the films sci-fi take on a corporate military mining expedition in search of "Unobtanium" as juvenile, and while Avatar is perhaps not that sophisticated in its allegorical tactics, it seems clear that Cameron was speaking to a younger demographic.  Seen as a film for children, Avatar may be one of the most effective and subversive films to come out ina while (especially if the marketing arc proves to be anything like that of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or The Beatles).  And, frankly, even though I would never need or want to see Avatar again, I kind of want the next generation to be one that favors the big blue hippies over the corporate soldiers.

Avatar (2009)

When Avatar was playing in theaters, experiencing a success comparable to the Lindbergh era-fueled popularity of Wings' theatrical release, I attended a screening with a close friends two sons, 11 and 12, both first time actors in a theater production I was directing at the time, and both master Halo players.  As usual, an endless barrage of advertising played at full volume prior to the film, mostly consisting of ads we were familiar with from television, except for one.  As the first 30 seconds or so of this particular ad ran, the younger boys eyes widened.  He looked at me to see if I recognized, as he had, what film we were finally seeing a trailer for.  Then he leaned up and whispered in my ear:  "I think it's the Halo movie!"  This seemed reasonable to me, especially since the video game-to-movie transfer was becoming a pretty common practice by that time.  I feigned a bit of surprise.  Then, after a few more seconds of the "trailer," my eyes began to widen.  The "trailer" in question was actually a very expensive Army recruitment ad, carefully designed to pull in the viewer with all the mechanisms of the finest Hollywood hype-craft.  And, even though the realization that this was not, in fact, the trailer for a movie version of Halo was a let down to my fellow movie goer, I had already witnessed how skillfully they had hit their target.  If the cinema recruitment tactics of the late 20's are a WWI biplane, then the advertising of today is a smart bomb.