VOLUME 18 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1982

•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society ofLincoln Center Volume 18, Number 1 January-February 1982 Color Midsection: Art Direction ... 31 1981: The Year in Review ........ 52 Can another movie year have flown by so quickly? And with so little worth remembering? David Chute is no cynic: here he cele- brates a dozen filmmakers, some of whom you may even have heard of • (page 52). The names and films in To see a movie means to understand its visual design. That the annual flashback by Stephen was the motive for our first Midsection on Art Direction Harvey and Richard Corliss (May-June 1978). Now we update the craft, beginning with should be familiar; so should the Carrie Rickey's overview on page 32. Alexandre Trauner sensation of dashed hopes (page (Children of Paradise, D01l: Giovanni) talks with Annette 54). Plus: Six Ten-Best lists. Insdorf and Carol Weisweiller (page 34). Ken Adam, of I-R----=d=-----==T-h--1-9....:.8-1-B--k-R-----~6~6-f the James Bond filmsandPenniesJromHeaven, discusses his oun Up: e 00 evue .. work with James Delson (page 36). Richard Sylbert gives An economic recession hit the movie- Joseph McBride an inside view on the making of Reds book trade years ago, when publishers (page 43). And Jack Fisk, hot art director turned director of discovered that the Film Generation Raggedy Man, is introduced by Mary Corliss and inter- was interested in seeing, not reading. viewed by Carlos Clarens and Richard Corliss (p. 46). Still, a few hardy souls write books, Women .. 23 compile filmographies, collect stills and sketches; and others, like the no- The New Woman in table group below, review them. films comes on as TV Movies, by Tom Allen ...... 66 tough as Bogie. But Animation, by J. Hoberman .. . . 67 underneath, says The Industry, by Stuart Byron .. . 68 , Stephen Schiff, Film Noir, by J. Hoberman ..... 69 she's just mama, The Mogul, by Stuart Byron .. .. 69 pal, mistress or lady- Structuralism, by Amos Vogel ... 70 in-distress. Movie Stars, by Veronica Geng .. 72 Also in this issue: Three Independents: Guilty Pleasures ............ 62 1. Peter Greenaway ......... 18 Christopher Durang is your ordinary Journals ................... 2 In The Falls, this Englishman brings playwright (Sister Mary Ignatius). He David Chute reports on a new movie wicked wit to structuralism, and puts just has this thing about nuns .. .. by David (Scanners) Cronen berg and a Joy Buzzer in the palm of the apoca- Deborah (BIondie) Harry. Harlan lypse. By Harlan Kennedy. Television ................. 73 Kennedy sees Venice in the summer- Donahue and Family Feud: two guides time and , like Hepburn, is entranced. 2. Jean Eustache ........... 27 to Out There. By Richard Corliss. The maker of The Mother and the Redtime .................. 11 Whore died last year of a self-inflicted 1981 FILM COMMENT Index .. 75 Ragtime and Reds signal Paramount's gun shot. He deserved better; we de- big gamble that people want to see served more . By Dan Yakir. Orbits: Abel Gance ......... 79 films about radical dreams exploded The monarch ofNapoleon: born 1889; in early 20th-century America. David 3. Jon Jost ................. 56 reborn 1981. By Brooks Riley. Thomson argues that they bring dig- What are we going to do about this in- nity to the epic genre, and luster to corrigible American independent? Bulletin Board ............. 80 Milos Forman and Warren Beatty. Jonathan Rosenbaum has some ideas. Cover photo by Dan Weaks. E~itor: ~ichard Corliss. Senior Ed.itor: Broo~s Riley (on leave). Associate Editor: Ann~ Thompson. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Clrcu~atlon Manager: !ony Impavldo . Art Director: Elliot Schulman. Cover design: Michael Uns. ~.esea rch Consultant: Mary Corliss. Executive Direc- tor, Film Society of Lmcoln Center: Joanne Koch . Second class postage:: paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1982 by the Film Society ?f Lmcoln Center. All nghts reserved ..The opInions expressed m FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. This publication IS fully protected by domestic and International cop~nght. The publication of FILM COMMENT (ISSN 001S-120X) is made possible in part by :\\rts.support from the New York State CounCil on the Arts and the NatIOnal Endowment for the Su bscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers ~22 for twelve number~ . E.lsewhere:. $18 for SIX numbers, $34 for twelve numbers , payablem U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include theiroccupa- tlons and ZiP codes. Edltonal, subscnptlon, and back-Issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT, 140 West Sixty-fifth Street, New York, N .Y. 10023 U.S.A. 1

oumals Twelve New Movies: The Latestfrom Cronenberg and Venice. David Chute from L.A. terations in human bodies? disease\"); the abominable, on-screen Speaking by phone from his home in \"birthing\" in The Brood; the exploding Speedy, distractable Max Renn head in Scanners-these grisly, meta- (James Woods), who runs a cable televi- Toronto, Cronenberg waffled grace- phoric horrors dredge up a potent sludge sion station in Toronto, makes a good fully. \"There aren't any body changes, \" of terror and disgust. living beaming soft-core porn and he said, \"in the sense of a werewolf. It's graphic violence over the airwaves. So quite different. I think you will have a \"There are obvious parallels,\" Max is a logical choice for the hot seat lot of trouble anticipating the end of this Cronenberg admits, \"between me and when a talk show schedules a program film from the beginning. But I hope that this guy, Max Renn, who runs a TV on \"Television and Social Responsibil- by the end, the process will seem inevi- station and has his motives questioned ity.\" At the studio, Max develops a yen table.\" because he shows extreme stuff. But for another guest, the glitzy pop-psy- chologist Nicky Brandt (Deborah f! Harry). It's her theory that \"We all live in an overstimulated age. We crave stimu- Writer-director David Cronenberg with lation, gorge ourselves on it-sensual, Videodrome star Debbie Harry. emotional, and tactile. \" As it happens, Nicky is fairly \"overstimulated\" herself, Videodrome , Cronenberg declares, he's not really me, although the similar- to the point of dabbling in SM kinkiness will have more in common with The ity opens up questions. The movie goes in her spare time. Poor Max! He's such a Brood than with any of his other films. into more than the relatively simple is- wound-up workaholic that he barely And that's a wonderful omen. The sue of morality-like the ways in which picks up on the creeping weirdness in Brood, Cronenberg's best film so far, television does alter us physically. It's his life. By the time that he and a techni- gets right to the nub of his avowed proj- what Marshall McLuhan was talking cian at the station have isolated the ect as a writer-director: \"making mental about: TVas an extension ofour nervous broadcast signal of an underground, sub- things physical.\" In fact, it imagines a systems and our senses. \" scriber-only cable system specializing in radical new form of \"primal\" therapy \"snuff TV\"-and have discovered that that trains patients to manifest their An ex-biochemist, Cronenberg still the thrill-seeking Nicky is somehow in- mental illness phys ically, as welts or adopts an open-ended, quasi-scientific volved-it is much, much too late. lesions. approach when investigating his own nightmares. \"Rather than having a very All this stuff will come oozing off the \"This new film, \" Cronenberg told well-defined position that I intend to screen during the first twenty minutes of me, \"is not a hardware movie at all. It express through the film,\" he says. \"I David Cronenberg's Videodrome, shot in had the potential for that, but I deliber- am exploring implications-for myself, Toronto for a fall 1982 release through ately de-emphasized those elements. and then for whoever goes along with Universal. But Cronenberg is offering It's got a very seedy look to it, not high- me. I'm often surprised, in fact, by how few clues as to where this typically out- tech at all. It's not an action picture, like far an idea can go. The first-draft screen- landish premise will lead. So far, he'll Scanners. Like The Brood, it's a charac- play for Videodrome was very, very ex- say only that Videodrome extends the ter study in the horror genre, although it treme. I had to pull back from that themes of his earlier \"body-centered\" does take a couple of extreme turns.\" because I knew it would never get horror films , They Came From Within, made. So it's an adventure for me , and Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners. That is, For some, the graphic \"extremes\" in that's what makes it interesting. I would it explores what can happen \"when peo- Cronenberg's films still overshadow write essays if I was just going to state ple go too far in trying to alter their their idiosyncratic complexity and intel- my views on morality and censorship- physical environment, and it comes ligence. The sausage-sized intestinal and I have done that. But doing that in a back and alters them physically.\" parasites in They Came From Within (\"a movie isn't what intrigues me about the combination of aphrodisiac and venereal Special effects wizard Rick Baker, who created the lycanthropic transfor- mations for An American Werewolf in London, is hard at work on Videodrome. Can we assume that Cronenberg has dreamed up some outre interactions of men and machines-comparable to the telepath-to-computer hook-up in Scan- ners-that produce \"psychoplasmic\" al- 2

New York Zoetrope and Direct Cinema Limited are pleased to announce the American release of two films by Maurice Hatton. British 'ndependent Fi'msTM Maurice Hatton's Maurice Hatton's 1.ong Shot Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition LONG SHOT is an inside look at the world of movies . It is the story of a script in search of money and the produc- A bold , imag inative, now nostalgic , irre ve rent political ers , directors and stars encountered along the way. satire, PR AISE MARX AND PASS THE AMMUNITION portrays pseudo-revolutionary life in late 1960s London . The film is a picaresque tale of an independent film pro- Hatton 's first feature tells the story of Dom , a wou ld-be ducer whose attempts to finance a fi lm about a Scottish revolutionary who takes Trotsky 's dictum that \"Th e sexual \"o il boom town \" lead to compromise at eve ry turn. Made front of the class wa r is not to be underestimated\" as largely at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it hides a dead ly his method of subversion . earnest intention behind the velvet glove of its well - observed comedy. With his charm , passion and rhetoric , Dom is irresistible to women . He uses this advantage to seduce a succes- LONG SHOT casts real people as extensions of them- sion of bourgeois girls in the hope of bringing them selves . It contains a gallery of distinguished cameo around politicall y. appearances including Wim Wenders , Alan Bennett , John Boorman and Susannah York . In the wake of events in France and Czechoslovakia, Dom attempts to organize his English com rades . He is Th is ironic comedy ve ry entertainingly says that setting amazed that , in contrast to the activity in other parts of up a movie is a desperate mixtu re of crime and punish- Europe, the English party is still caught up in the ir cus- ment that only the hardest soul should contemplate. Art tomary rituals of motions and debate . and fakery go hand in hand until you can sca rce ly tell the difference . Through Dom 's persuasion , the party intensifies its efforts . Despite an unsuccessful strike , infighting and LONG SHOT is essential viewing for anyone interested trouble with the police , the struggle continues on a posi- in the current state of British filmmaking . tive note . It is a time of solidarity and action for Dom and his Revo lutionary Party of the Th ird World com rades . \" .. a film that's fresh , chee rful and very appealing :' They continue toward their goal of a more humane and The New Yo rk Times just society. The filmmaker cooll y, but not unsympatheti- cal ly, observes the anomalies inh ere nt in trying to \"... may become req uired viewing for both aspiring maintain a revolutionary stance following May 1968. filmmakers and studio execs:' Variety .. a ve ry ironic , very funny film :' Films and Filming .. the most incorruptibly independent among Briti sh independent filmmakers ... LONG SHOT is a ve ry funny \"The prevailing mood is ironic and the general and sati ri cal look at British Cinema , and incidentall y, effect ... is hilarious :' The London Sunday Times British life at large:' The London Times \"... impressive and entertaining .. .\" Pun ch 86 minutes 16mm Black & White / Color 1978 90 minutes 16mm or 35mm Color 1969 Maurice Hatton 's British Independent Films are exclu- For additional information contact: ~,~ sively available from the New York Zoetrope Fi lm Library. Rent these outstanding features for yo ur theatre , film Direct Cinema Limited Clnema @ society or class . PO. Box 69589 limited Los Angeles , CA 90069 (213) 656-4700

process. \" to yatter swoon fully as the whole of St. urchins tipple along the sidewalks in the Elsewhere, Cronen berg has carried Mark's Square, pigeons included, burst shadow of the same busty prostitutes, into the music of \"Summertime. \" and it all seems curiously meaningless in this line of argument a step further, de- 1981: long after Godard has given social claring, \"I'm not interested in 'social This year rain sploshed from a tem- realism such a twist that blank-eyed art,' in the sense of art that wants to peramental sky, alternating with a sun window-on-the-world verismo has direct society and show it what it should beating down without boxjng gloves, scarcely been a mainstream proposition do. I want to get under the social surface, and \"Summertime\" vied with the in cinema since the Sixties. to the unconscious, to the nightmare. \"Godfather\" theme for a photo fini sh at There is a very real sense in which, the top of the San Marco charts. Out on And sure enough it was just such a when someone is functioning as an art- the Lido, alias Festival Island, pile-driv- Deeply-Meaningful social document, ist, he has no social responsibility. \" ing cloudbursts drove the audience who from Germany not Italy, that won the had just seen the evening screening of warm embrace of the Golden Lion this For Cro nenberg, in other words, Miklos Janc so's new film back into the yea r. Margarethe von Trotta's Die hunting down the final implications of a auditorium to see the midnight showing Bleieme Zeit (The German Sisters) is a resonant, truthful image and serving it of John Stahl's 1945 Leave H er to tight-faced fable of anarchy and sis- up to the public is in itself a moral act. H eaven, whether they wanted to or not. terhood in which two siblings who grew Art and science are equivalent activities. (After fi ve seconds of blinding Stahlian up as children on opposite sides of a baroque they did .) temperamental gulf switch roles in When I spoke with Cronenberg in adulthood so that the shy one becomes a November, he had shot about half of Yet even in the teeth of wild weather, terrorist, the lively one a bewildered Videodrome ana expressed enthusiasm diminished budget, and absent films mother and bys tander. It's a single- about the way things were shaping up. (Peter Weir's Gallipoli, R.W. Fassbin- minded film made with antennae fully ''I'm very excited about the work James der's Lola, promised but not materializ- stretched to catch the political anxieties Woods and I are doing,\" he said. \"James ing), it's nearly impossible not to delight of modern Germany: the phantom of a is easily the best leading man I' ve ever in the Venice Film Festival. The bril- phoenix-Fascism arising from the Aryan had. And Deborah Harry has a terrific liantly successful new events-the noon ashes, the desperate weaponry of anar- face and voice and presence. This feels and midnight (mezzagiorno, mezzanotte) chist Terror used to combat it, the bewil- like my best film , and those instincts are screenings-were free , open to the pub- derment of those caught in the crossfire. usually accurate. On Scanners, I knew it lic, and packed to the rafters. In these was chaos from the beginning. But and other time slots movies so bad that But for \"single-minded\" you can also about half-way through I also knew that, one wonders how they crossed the la- read one-dimensional. Von Trotta paints ironically, it was going to be my most goon without curling up in shame and her film in bleak negatives and alarmist popular film , just because of the reac- dropping into the depths jostle with austerities-the best scenes are fright tions I was getting. And there are still wide-awake sleepers and real and thrill- satire (a prison visitor is body-searched people who think it's my best work- ing surprises. And in the Sala Grande, a by a butch female warden scarcely less although I most certainly disagree! \" prime and goldy-plushed viewing hall , thoroughly than the prisoners them- the con brio Italian public so rampantly selves), the worst, those in which any Scanners, plagued by production toss the flaky tropes of critical response kind of human warmth or casual sponta- problems, was an ambitious shambles. that it's like being back in the Salad neity is essayed-and the film finally But its financial success has won Decades of movie fever. (Leave Her to closes in on itself like a grouchy clam. Cronenberg his first major-studio distri- Heaven was a case in point-howls of bution deal and his largest production approbation for every close-up of Gene The socially righteous , anti-authori- budget: $5 million. If Scanners' blos- Tierney's waxen, wondrous beauty and tarian , grouchy-clam bent in the Venice soming, blood y, exploding head- Vincent Price's youthful essays at Gothic Fest, evident in the favoring of these which was featured in the trailers-is menace.) films, was dementedly obtrusive in the now the first thing many people think of selection of the big U.S. movies for the when his name is mentioned , Cronen- But for the yin oflove-of-flamboyance festi val. True Confessions, Blow Out, berg isn't complaining. \"Actually,\" he in Italy, there is-and it's more discerni- Prince ofthe City, and Cutter's Way are in says, \" I rather like the exploding head as ble every year-the yang of a different part or in degree conspiracy movies all, a symbol of the power of my films : the kind of extremism: a social-conscience and very fine when blowing into view human mind filled with so much energy righteousness that rides roughshod over one by one. But when seen together, as that it can't be contained physically.\" cinematic art in the pursuit of a hairshirt here, they seem like an endless replay loop of post-Watergate paranoia , in Harlan Kennedy from Venice holiness of purpose. Thirty years after which no corner ofAmerica can be found Rossellini and DeSica made Neo-real- in which Wealthy Capitalists do not walk In moviegoers' consciousness, Venice ism tick and anti-Fascism and proto-So- about, covering up heinous crimes has been a place of idiot enchantment cialism meld with human emotions, and/or clobbering prostitutes. ever since Katharine Hepburn planted Italian filmmakers are still churning out the Hollywood flag there in Summertime carbon-copy Paisans and Open Cities and • and cut across the sun-drowsed cadenzas Shoeshines in which the imprint of hu- of Italiano parlato with her brittle Bryn manity and originality gets ever fainter While Lions, Golden or Silver, were Mawr yap. and fainter. In movies like Peter Del prowling about seeking excellence to Monte's Piso Pisello or Salvatore Pisci- pounce upon , Top Roar should have Then the sun lashed down for 90 min- celli's Le Occasione diRosa, both bowing gone to two movies that combined food- utes, under full Hollywood warranty, as at Venice this year, the same peeling for-the-mind with fabulou s visual feast- Miss H swept into Venice from New Italian streets echo to the same fight for mg. England to meet Rossano Brazzi, to gog- survival and social equality, the same gle at his ruby-red Murano goblets and Siren's Island is a real find-stream- 4

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-' featuring: Carla Bley Jaki Byard of-consciousness from Switzerland. Di- year even film critics, sere austere breed, rector Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch creates a got their share. Being boated across the Chris Stein Muhal Richard Abrams moviegoer's Morpheus Descending . a lagoon for an evening's screening on an dream trip on stepping stones of the outlying island; the white wall of a villa Steve Lacy David Amram Dave Samuels drugged self into an Underworld/Under- used for a screen; local ladies pushing ground of floozy female crwnteuses, drag chairs about in the giant bougainvillea ~ .. ~ . acts, and the lunatic fringe of showbiz. tossed courtyard and speaking in a cata- Mostly set in New York but also slither- ract of argot (without English subtitles); rf ]~1 RTS ing for surreal variation through the a star-studded night looking down on a skull-piled catacombs in Rome, this no- stuttering projector, a giant beam of Film Music Is narrative fantasia is pure association-of- light, and a rapt audience. Our Forte ideas in film form. The spectator is Ulysses lured onto a multi-level island Further synesthesia and symbiosis of Exclusive Soundtrack Selections Bohemia by the siren-song of 1980s sub- place and event burst forth in Venice And Limited Editions! culture. The images are Dadaism at its proper in a huge Titian to El Greco exhi- most daffy and DeLuxe, from the slinky bition at the Doge's Palace. Wandering Over 1.000.000 LP'S available: vamp crooning \"Moon of Alabama\" at a through the gallerias hung with blown- In-Print and Out-of-Print. an array of waxwork of Jimmy Carter, suit and grin up movie frames painted 500 years ago, imports. highly-desired reissues. and intact, to the lady snake-dancer juggling you realize that cine-literacy doesn't be- original casts (on and off Broadway). giant pythons with a nervous smile. The gin with Lumiere and Melies and Porter metaphor that binds it all together is the and Griffith; it begins with the frozen- We offer the finest service stratification of the human mind , from embryo dynamics, poised tiptoe on the available - monthly auctions by mail the surface taboos and proprieties of the brink of motion, of the painted canvas. (rare. unique titles). the only monthly super-ego to the deep-down ferality and Visconti's movies sprang so clearly from Ftlmusic Newsletter \"Music Gazette\" non sequiturs of the id. We dive from the loins of Titian that seeing these skyscrapers to sewers in the course of paintings over again is like discovering For YO(JR copy of our extensive the film , and even a grubby service ele- Sensa and The Leopard anew. The im- catalog. a sample of \"Music Gazette\" vator becomes an up-down theater sym- pact of classical painting on cinema is a ($2 value). and monthly auction. bol, with shuttling proscenium and virtually unexplored study field , al- Please Remit $1.00 TODAY TO: quick-changing acts. It's a surreal movie though many of today's or yesterday's that jettisons \"narrative\" completely most darling auteurs-from Sirk to An- RTS. Dept. 19A and yet keeps up a riveting momentum tonioni-have specifically modeled of form and feeling for 100 minutes. scenes or shots on paintings. P.O. Box 687 Costa Mesa. California 92627 Tyrant's Pleasure. More narrative- Indeed if there was a common failure flouting legerdemain, this time from area in the films at Venice-Jancso, De (714) 544-0740 Tu-Th 12-4 pm Miklos Jancso. Given up for self-repeat- Palma, Siren/sland. and a few other con- ing in many circles today, the hero oflate tenders honorably excepted-it was Sixties Hungarian cinema is actually en- their visual slovenliness. Nothing to do tering perhaps his most fascinating pe- with prizing the statuesque above the riod . This fugal extravaganza on the kinetic (nothing could be more restlessly theme of political intrigue should be kinetic than De Palma) but with prefer- bottled and labeled \"Essence of Machi- ring crafted eye-impact to plonk-the- avellianism\": a convoluted carnival of camera-anywhere-and-shoot. camera roulades and courtly politicking in the tale of an exiled young nobleman Examples of the later were legion. In returning to Hungary from Italy, with a the British Film Institute Production troupe of actor friends in tow, and find- Board's Meave, co-directed by Pat Mur- ing himself the favored but frantically phy and John Davies, an Irish-born, schemed-around nominee to the throne. London-naturalized young girl (Mary The legato fluidity of Jancso's staging Jackson) revisits strife-torn Belfast and here extends even to moving the actors her family and worries about her loyal- around on unseen floats or skateboards ties in long wedges of awful dialogue. The camera, schooled in cine-verite so that human groups and galaxies whir murk, peers through the half-light like round each other in a ceaseless continuo an uninvited and increasingly pariah- like a solar system of power struggle. There are, in the true Jancso tradition, like guest. mists, masques, mimes, and mono- Kaleidoscope (Crwalchitra) gives us logues, and it's all magnificent. Indian director Mrinal Sen eyeless in • Calcutta. The self-proclaimed Marxist- Leninist Bard of Bengal gropes through It takes an Italian film festival to favor the visual and dramatic doldrums of a the far-out and present it in full unflinch- tale about poverty-pinched famil y life in ing close-up. Any country that can beat- the Big City. The unava ilability of pub- ify K. Hepburn's blackbird-caw into rapt lic transport, the polluting smoke of coal warblings trades in Magick. And this stoves: Sen hits the same point over the head so often-it seems to be the only 6

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Ce- ing themselves like pin cushions in We have a list of zary Morawski threads laconicall y every seamy Hades from subway tun- through the background of the tale as nels to public toilets-one still gazes potential clients the pre-papal Wojryla, while toplining agog at the fair old ferocity and realismus thesps Sam Neill, Lisa Harrow, and with which it's done. from all over the Christopher Cazenove stand up-front Sogni d'Oro. Nanni Moretti, who and deliver the bulk of the humanist looks like a lean-and-rueful Werner Her- Arab world who bromides masquerading as human con- zog and leans to windward like an unsta- versation . Zanussi appears to have ble gondola pole, wrote, directed, and have shown looked courageously over one shoulder stars in this delicious slow-burn comedy at the Vatican and over the other at Film from Italy. 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Stylish cam- last-century Portugal, the film's form is IAAIC era-swoopings and an Oriental love of so formal it becomes almost a new surre- foreground filigree-branches, rushes , alism: especially when the stately series 8306 Wilshire flowering trees-make this a stunning of tableaux vivants suddenly spurt into film to look at, although the human be- motion (a slapped face, a runaway horse) Blvd. Suite 198 ings don' t quite pulse to the same life as or when, conversely, a raging sea-view the landscape. seen through a window suddenly Beverly Hills, Christiane F. Case-history bestseller \"freezes\" into a painted backcloth. With of teenage drug-addiction becomes its teasing tensions of stillness and CA 90211 smash-hit movie. 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Top, Milos Forman directs his Ragtime actors; bottom, Warren Beatty as John Reed in Reds . by David Thomson looks like the tomb left by some earlier Emma was cast in Ragtime, her part and erased civilization, or like the space- played by Mariclare Costello, her scenes Thus did the artist point his life along craft from another planet, spreading un- shot; but she is gone now, along with the the lines offlow ofAmerican energy. reality through Manhattan. There is no regiments of history left out by even Emma Goldman in this movie, no op- E.L. Doctorow (no Wyatt Earp, no Jack -E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime Johnson, no Sarah Bernhardt-all con- film tracted for a Steve Allen Meeting of Milos Forman's film of Ragtime omits Minds) . Perhaps someone at Paramount many delightful views and moments COlVi M ENT remembered that Emma Goldman from the book. Why not? It is a film, and loomed large in Warren Beatty'S Reds, it has assets denied to the novel. It does portunity for Emma to administer that and feared that the Christmas audience not go to the North Pole with Peary and politicizing massage to Evelyn Nesbit, might muddle the two films. That's not Father, or to the pyramids withJ.P. Mor- or for Younger Brother to come so explo- a fanciful worry, for Reds leaves things gan. J.P. 's strawberry nose and his stom- sively out of his hiding place so that his out too. It doesn't trace John Reed's ach rumblings about reincarnation are \"filamented spurts of jism\" can settle on adventures in Mexico (where he may both dropped: apart from a \"newsreel\" Evelyn \"like falling ticker tape. \" have met Younger Brother, the bomb- flash, the film's Morgan is only the ab- man for bandi tos) ; it omits entirely the sent owner of a fatuous museum that pageant mounted by Reed, celebrating 11

the 1913 silk-mill strike, at Madison man Mailer to be party to just one psy- gard events. Square Garden (another gray-stone, be- chopathic crime; and the fond eye that This is not simply a matter of c1ose- laureled Stanford White construction). sees a terrible burst cherry appear in his Reds skirts the other women in John building-block brindled head. The ups. The cutting of the film is its con- Reed's life, it does not identify the movie is respectful of its own modest science-a dynamic but gentle thirty-two witnesses who revolutionize bigot, Father. His inability to stop see- connecting system, looking from here to the conventions of its drama , and it does ing Coalhouse as a Negro is not rebuked there, that the audience is required to not tell us that his wife Louise Bryant or underlined. Indeed, it seems less follow. Thus, Forman has reappraised died , too , alone in Paris, drunk and than just (by the scales of melodrama) the action of the novel and extracted this doped , in 1936 (the year Reed's Soviet that Father's efforts to help Coalhouse, key contrast: there are two outrageous nemesis , Zinoviev, perished in jail from and to serve as intermediary and hos- murders-Harry K. Thaw shoots Stan- purge and execution, perhaps not pain- tage, are rewarded with the loss of ford White, and the Coal house Walker lessly). Mother. But Forman's film knows that gang assassinates several firemen. They irony replaced justice when movies dis- are both enraged crimes, both mad, So, if we have read E.L. Doctorow, placed life. Doctorow gave Father a helpless responses. The one is frivolous, and looked at history enough to know much more substantial shortcoming: he though, and the other is profound. the need and the impossibility of warn- was not good in bed in the book. In the ing the Duke, we could quarrel with movie, it is rather that James Olson's Thaw's violence becomes a popular both films. On the other hand , they are entertainment: Younger Brother goes to two extraordinary, intelligent entertain- the trial, and even Mother tells Evelyn ments, the best things their makers have done , the restorers of dignity to the big- budget movie, and American pictures that want us to understand this century, rather than reel along in its momentum. In the moviefilms, he said, we only look Howard E. Rollins comforts wife Debbie Allen in Ragtime. at what is there already. Life shines on the shadowed screen, as from the darkness of face cannot register the same sympathy Nesbit that the family read about her one's mind. It is a big business. People as Mary Steenburgen's, and is not as and the case in the papers, kindness and want to know what is happening to them. vital as hers to the very precise ragtime celebrity confusing her instinctive dis- For a few pennies they sit and see their rhythm. taste for the squalid actuality. Thaw was selves in movement, running , racing in provoked by his own mania, by White's motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, em- Forman loves behavior. He has al- gracious philandering, by Evelyn's bracing one another. This is most impor- ways seen it as diverse, characteristic, cheery lack of principle (she is a chronic tant today, in this country, where and beyond judgment. That is why onlooker), and by his own fatal belief in everybody is so new. There is such a need Cuckoo's Nest is his most forced film, for the hugeness of petty things. The trial is to understand. it obliged him to dislike Nurse Ratched a fiasco: Thaw shouts that out at its con- and to take sides. Give Forman a face clusion, and he is correct for the first - Tateh to Mother, and he wants to see the best in it: He time because scarcely a word of truth has in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime shows us the pathos in the bogus rheto- been uttered in court. He will go to the ric of Booker T. Washington, the weary asylum, but he will be free soon. He is Milos Forman is an American citizen humor in Pat O'Brien's devious lawyer, seen at the end of the film, drinking with all the advantages of recent immi- the attempt at decency in Father's head- champagne in an automobile, as rich and gration. He knows that no one is Ameri- ache-tight face, and the creamy goodwill complex a vehicle here as it was in The can beyond the dispute of others; he has that radiates from Mother. Whereas the Magnificent Ambersons. He is the killer always enjoyed the profusion of the novel slips from the local to the large, set free, a daft monster the result of country, the way in which the swinging from fact to fiction, to excuse the silhou- privilege and that lunatic individualism audition in Taking Offwas like a version ette flatness and speechlessness of its so admired by America. of Ellis Island . America is a stage where characters, as well as the cool aloofness everyone wants to play American. That of the narrative tone, the movie is full of Coalhouse is mad from pride and logic need or envy in the immigrant never faces and the moral distinctions that -the first the crucial right denied by his dies or finds satisfaction: it is the force of come from the shyness and the assur- times, the second the process that white idealism and the reaching out of hope, ance with which the various people re- society prides itself on. He is wronged, despite every brutality or horror prac- ticed by Americans. What has always distinguished Forman in this flux is the kindness with which he viewed the big parade. Ragtime teems with kindness: it is like looking down into a steerage full of ea- ger faces. It is mercy when the grim voice of Rhinelander Waldo says shoot and Coal house Walker is saved from due process (and this is not in Doctorow). Consider the generosity that allows Nor- 12

and he refuses every opportunity to look with intelligence and feeling. a voice speaks through the child, telling keep the wrong at its level of triviality. Younger Brother is a follower and a vo- Houdini to warn the Duke, dips the He knows what it represents, and he yeur, as repressed as James Stewart in whole novel in melancholy, a feeling capitulates to the urging to give up his Vertigo . Brad Dourifs lopsided stare is a that times change for the worse and that own life and be an example. And so he vivid mistake of excessive good nature, history is the preoccupation of disap- kills, becoming an image of terror. He is of nobility and awkwardness and what pointed conservationists . We have to as much dedicated to fairness as Thaw's Doctorow calls \"the violence underlying watch the picture show, and Jack Ruby's trial travesties it. Coalhouse is humane, all principle.\" The sad twinkle of James aim will always be as sure, and as lucky, balanced, and talented. But because he Cagney looks through his swollen face as Gavrilo Princip's, and it will be over kills, we begin to see Thaw as some- and through the jagged frame of a bro- before we can shout out. The narrator of thing other than just a mad dog. Princi- ken window-the police do more dam- Ragtime cannot quite come to terms with ple meets uneasily in these two killers; age in Ragtime than any other gang. that fate: history is the wisdom of the they are twin zealots. But we are left to Cagney is immobile, but the old voice powerless; action is the decision of the measure the difference of issue, and to still spars with Warner Brothers belliger- helpless. grasp the banality of racism's damage. ence and John Reed idealism. I don't Ragtime the movie does not merely ap- think the casting was opportunistic; it In the film, this boy yawns over the plaud Coalhouse's stand-as Mac- was historically motivated, for Cagney soup that is never started , and looks Murphy's was in Cuckoo's Nest . It shows was one of the most pained radicals in sideways in bashful ecstasy when he meets the heiress to the Ashkenazy title. \\ James Cagney as Commissioner Waldo Forman films the children with genius: in Ragtime. they are delectable individuals, divine, Mary Steenburgen as Mother in erotic, and bored, without ever being Ragtime. Hollywood, and he was the presiding cute or sentimental; they are a tribute to champ of street battles. When he looks Our Gang, but also the proof of that us his sweet-faced arrogance, his vanity, down on the Morgan museum, you untaught vitality that Forman's eye al- and his final bewilderment. But it reacti- imagine \"Top of the world , Ma,\" but ways picks out. And , if Stanley Kauff- vates a cause that it would have seemed you feel the futile escapism of its show- mann is interested, the film's \"feeling of unnecessary to film today, so thoroughly biz bravado. Very subtly, a farewell ap- walking past a head-high fruit stand or a has complacent liberalism buried the pearance serves as oblique criticism of series of costume displays in a museum\" continuing reality of racial discrimina- the ethos of his earlier work. This is comes from Forman's recognition that tion. exactly the spirit in which Forman has the action is in large part seen and felt by challenged Americana with history. a child's consciousness. What in God's name possessed you on Thank God Robert Altman wasn't al- that? The country has facilities for indi- lowed to make a carnival of the project. Not that this stance is ponderous or gents . You took her in without sufficient The film has to be as precise as the persistent. The movie also cranes up thought. You victimized us all with your book. The faces are always examining and down to discover fresh settings, the foolishfemale sentimentality. an issue, just as the novel never forsakes movement being part exposition and the numb inability of the present to in- part commentary, for height is another - Father to Mother tervene in, or stop contemplating, the representation of time's vantage. The in E. L Doctorow's Ragtime past. camera style is less participatory than analytic. That's how cutting and the Yet another of the gifts Forman brings Doctorow's narrator is the child of the points of view compose the two leading to Doctorow is Coalhouse as a movie- family-but a child wrapped up in a female faces in a kind of polarity. You theater piano-player, witnessing the later life that we know has not been good cannot begin to see Ragtime without ap- newsreel that introduces the film and or easy, even if it had years in Our Gang preciating what Forman has done with which serves as that society's hectic, in- and lived on to see Marilyn Monroe. Mary Steenburgen and Elizabeth adequate record of itself. Ragtime the That magical but disarming interven- McGovern to illustrate \"that foolish fe- movie is about looking, and the lessons tion at the end of the first chapter, when male sentimentality.\" of cutting that juxtapose a face and a spectacle. Men in the film do sometimes A fascinating subversion affects the family home from the moment we see it: Mother and Younger Brother are framed like the couple of the house, and Father is the outsider. This way of seeing is too subtle for the characters themselves to notice. The humanity of Mother is something beyond her own awareness; ordinariness and excellence work to- gether, depending on our perceptive- ness. All that Fordian bombast of \"we are the people, \" and we won't stop say- ing it, slides into oblivion as we re- cognize the equation of directorial encouragement and the characters' po- tential in Forman's way of seeing. Time and again, Mother comes alive in Rag- time, but only with the meekness of a 13

woman tranquil in her normalcy and the Simultaneously, Forman is declaring cause of that sunny, lazy fecklessness actress's determined disavowal of glam- his highest faith in humanity and having that is her river, winding on, never our or attention. Tateh salute the profession they share. dammed and free from damnation. She If ever reverence might have smoothed is silly, frivolous, fickle, and grasping, The film asks us to see the differences away doubt, it is here, but Forman rises and all those warts are made into beauty between the anxious authority of James above smugness, thanks to the baby- marks. She is also honest: she knows Olson's Father-hardly one of his brittle face burping exasperation of Evelyn Harry's mad, she knows Tateh's an art- orders is obeyed-and the humble, Nesbit, a comic character as disreputa- ist, she can see what he sees in Mother, glowing rightness of Mother. Mary ble and adorable as Carette's poacher in she believes $25,000 in her bush (or very Steenburgen's face is still but active, like La RegIe du jeu. Elizabeth McGovern, close thereto) is better than $1 million in that of someone beginning to realize that the actress here, has come in for amazing prospect, and she knows how boring it is she has not been seen, but too modest to obtuseness, our critics have such diffi- when film directors rhapsodize over the show alarm. That is why the most ten- culty in watching a film. Stanley Kauff- light. Thus, straight after Tateh's toast, der close-ups are kept for her self-dis- mann thinks she is a \"dead loss,\" not and Mother's moment of annunciation, covery. Beneath the demonstration of pretty enough. She is not beautiful like a there is an overflowing close-up of the racism, the film suspects that the op- photographic model; she is notJoan Col- pouty, flirty sighs of injured long-suffer- pression of women is an even greater lins in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, ing from Evelyn. It's Elizabeth injury to ourselves. The ending is as the face a sultry-prim mask ofloveliness, McGovern's face, of course, Magdalene light and off-hand as a leaf falling up- shutting character out of the role. She is to Steenburgen's Nazarene-both as in- state, but the film has moved towards a beautiful if you rate that term according viting as peaches. wife leaving a husband who is brave, to the difficulty you have taking your striving for honor, faithful, honest ... eyes off her restless responsiveness to So warn yourselves (never mind the but wrong. Mother gives up this bleak passing surprises. She is also, I suspect, Duke) about possibly the most mistaken pillar of society for an opportunist, but very close to what was most admired in paragraph Pauline Kael has ever written. her new man shows love, delight, and a the age of ragtime. More important, she At the end of her dismissive review of sense of changing times. Irony remem- is a great actress playing an artless fool Ragtime, Ms. Kael lamented the scene bers that he is also the husband who who happens to inspire a killer, an artist, in which Evelyn is about to screw with once beat a tempted wife out of their and a lonely extremist. Younger Brother, naked but for black home. stockings, when detectives arrive. Like a little boy, silent and unno- Elizabeth McGovern as Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime. ticed, but still suckling the idea of his mother, Forman attaches the film to Evelyn Nesbit is character shrugging pounce on adultery, and offer the cut- Mary Steenburgen's face. When the off morality. She is wonderfully unre- rate divorce settlement of $25,000. black baby is discovered in the veget- deemed, undiscovered, and without McGovern plays the quite lengthy hag- able patch, the visual and aural conster- apology-all in a film that cherishes gling scene as naked as she was on the nation are resolved in the close-up of Mother's awakening. It is in the vein of brink of love. Younger Brother tries to Mother holding the baby. (She is too real Renoir to enjoy enlightenment and its stick a robe on her. But it only falls off to be a madonna, but we realize why she opposite in the same film. Evelyn lies in her concentrating person. (\"They are needs no name.) We know the answer to court. She makes silly photoplays and not pulling that one on me,\" grumbles where the baby will live before the ques- soaks up compliments like a pancake in the infallibly wrong and right Evelyn, as tion is asked. It is as if this is Mother's syrup. She is a victim of her own good McGovern's breasts sit at the bottom of first child, the fruit of aroused con- nature and of sexual leverage. As Doc- the frame like babes begging for atten- science. How remarkable then that the torow put it, \"It was characteristic of tion.) son's gaze is not ruffled by resentment. Evelyn that she could not resist some- When the Inspector proposes the one who was so strongly attracted to Kael thinks this is awful, and a mark workhouse for the baby-\"These peo- her.\" But she is never victimized be- of Forman's crudeness. I think it is one ple don't have the same sense of family of the best things in the film, for, if the as what we do. \"-punched out past the cigar that he has lit up at the family dining table without permission or re- quest-Mother's downcast face (look- ing down at the son's mute level) is filled with the humility of discreet dissent. It is the shot's moral weight that wills inse- cure Father outside (into the area of the vegetables) to discuss the matter fur- ther: this is also her first quitting of the house. And, much nearer the end of the film, when Tateh/Ashkenazy toasts light, on that word we cut to Mother and she turns towards the camera and the man like a New Rochelle Liberty that has felt the warmth of the light, discov- ering herself and a true context of reality in the same instant. 14

actress's nakedness is appropriate for Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant in Reds. love-making, then why is it gross during the intimacies of money? Love and pose of this country. shedding a tear. If the film is a great hit, money are loyal American companions, Beatty is asking that the American it will be because any conservative can and ,Ms. Kael should remember love and reconcile the aroused feelings of some money. It is the epitome of Evelyn's public should warm to the lives and young Americans once upon a time with nature ' that she negotiates in the raw, hopes of two Communists. They are sweeping entertainment. and then counts the bills against the frills lovers too, of course, furiously at logger- of fat in her tummy. Ms. Kael should heads sometimes in domestic travail, But even our staunchest Red-scare understand the repression that lurks in blindfold rivals in their work, and con- guardians could not write off the Com- Younger Brother's attempt at cover-up: joined in the romantic twilight of fuck- munism that makes John and Louise so he will make the fireworks that kill with ing. The Communist ethic is offset by fresh, so alert and handsome, so sensi- the same righteousness. Evelyn's flesh the portrait of two endearing and war- tive to others. That is the new version of and McGovern's openness are a judi- ring individualists. But the oldest ploy of the lawless attractiveness that made cious match, and in that one scene we weepies makes us yearn for their union. Bonnie and Clyde disconcerting. No learn so much about desire, gratifica- As if they were Margaret Sullavan and one in the movie is lampooned or stereo- tion , and the superstition that sex is Robert Taylor in The Monal Storm, they typed; and no one is allowed to stray into sanctified and bodies more secret than are separated, thwarted , then brought the fantasy fields of absolute right or behavior. back together in the railway station of wrong. Eugene O'Neill can tell us how lost loves. The film also insists-you far Reed's radicalism is also a pretext for • can feel the line being pushed in as the a playboy to wander. Jerzy Kosinski's far budget rose-that revolution would more weathered and tested face exposes Warren Beatty doesn't yet have For- never work in America. It observes the the softness that surrounds Beatty's man's touch. But he is already a far more first defeats of idealism by expedient questioning eyes. And Diane Keaton al- accomplished director than he was on bureaucracy in Russia, as Zinoviev cuts ways looks at him like someone who has Heaven Can Wait. Reds never swings lemons, onions, and speeches without had more than enough of his nonsense like Ragtime; but it charms and it roars like the two songs that it harmonizes: \"I Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman is visited by Beatty's John Reed in Reds. Don't Want to Play in Your Yard\" and \"The Intemationale.\" It doesn't aspire to the delicacy ofcutting or the choice of what to see that make Ragtime so de- tailed. Reds has two early scenes-the night-long discussion petween John Reed and Louise Bryant, and their next encounter at a polite salon-where edit- ing stands on its head to be clever. For the rest of the time, the filming and the pacing are sensible, efficient, and head- on; indeed, it's directed the way a pro- ducer would appreciate. The drive and the 196-minute grip of Reds reaffirm the neglected critical principle that the the- matic and entertainment personality of American films have been the signature of great producers. Warren Beatty is our David O. Selznick-more sophisticated, less headstrong, more troubled, less passion- ate-but still a producer with the overall vision and stamina to run a war or a revolution. He shows rare taste in his choice of collaborators; he allows those people the most intelligent latitude and invariably inspires their loyalty; his eyes never forget the great audience. Just as Heaven Can Wait was a surprisingly flimsy picture, but a shrewd estimate of 1978 moods, so Reds is more coura- geous, more coherent,and more ambi- tious than Bonnie and Clyde. Conceived in the age of Nixon, and now offered to the public in defiance of our window of vulnerability, Reds seeks to remind America of an era, a hero, and a longing, all of which sprang from the original pur- 15

and hardly an hour of his true attention. face. Reds is a domestic interior in which the subject of Reds: they blanch the vi- The faces, once more, are the most two people struggle with need and its gorous scarlet epic with sorrow, pity, failures . By implication, their revolution doubt, and contradiction. The movie telling political statements. Ultimately, deserves the same tolerance that they opens and closes with the muttering the question of whether Bolshevism or acquire in life. words of memory. The witnesses dis- Americanism is right for the world takes pute one another, and they often under- second place to the same everyday prob- Reds would be just a new Gone With cut the romance and assertions of the lem that is grit for the pearls in Ragtime: the Wind, a Dr. Zhivago less becalmed in movie drama. But they honor human Can a man and a woman live together? its own epic grandeur, but for one ele- frailty and vagary. They show us history Reds begins with a rupture: Louise Bry- ment: the witnesses. They are the only as time's peeling of every mind and ant scandalizes her dentist husband in crazy thing in the film, the one shot in emotion. The blazing faces of the nearly Portland by posing in the nude-are the dark that Beatty has ever allowed dead are marooned in the present, inca- there always Americans alarmed by himself, and the closest he has come to pable of getting a message through to skin? She seems to live on her own, or to grace. the Duke, but unable to forget-or re- have a private establishment, even be- member-him. This is mankind in the fore this break up. That's where she As he researched the project, he be- toils of the past, committed to historical bases her wish to be a writer, and where gan to put some interviews on film. awareness but unable to master it. she takes Reed to show him her work. Somewhere between then and now , a All that night, he anticipates a seduc- research tool grew into a radiant reitera- Reds is usually as robust and powerful tion. But then the opportunity to talk tion of the interviews in Citizen Kane as Selznick, but in these amazing asides takes away his ardor. It is only when he with a Dos Passos-like wish to spread it gains the dismayed awe of Major Am- has forgotten sex that she drags him into the story out into reality. Moreover, berson staring into the fire. It is a trans- the bushes. In sexual politics, Louise is Beatty saw the interviews in terms of forming cultural window , explained by so much more radical and urgent than stylistic consistency. Wherever he went, E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime: \"Father Reed . She has been oppressed; Reed he took a roll of black background and kept himself under control by writing in has only seen and read about the pictur- cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The his journal. This was a system too, the esque suffering of others. Diane system of language and conceptualiza- Keaton's performance in those early Keaton and Beatty in love in Reds. tion. It proposed that human beings, by scenes presages her best work yet. She the act of making witness, warranted seems to shake and fidget with the thirty-two witnesses are faces on the times and places for their existence threat of provincialism; but she is still right of the screen, isolated from con- other than the time and place they were uncertain enough to be on the point of text, speaking to Beatty but sometimes living through.\" giggling at her own outrageousness. It is half-aware that they are addressing an ingenious manner, suggestive of pe- death with the pitch-black past behind • riod even if it is invented, and a way of them. The faces are as bright as bone: making Reds start out as the story of a not since Kane has an American film had There's quite a lot wrong with these woman on her way to suffrage and iden- such tenderness for age, its lines, its two films. Early in the second half of tity. spittle and watery eyes, its wavering Reds, there may be too much detail on spirit, and its ruined flesh. But the el- socialist in-fighting. More important, The best things in Reds remind us derly in Kane were Mercury in make-up. throughout the picture, Beatty mistrusts that color stands for lovers' rows and These are the real veterans, so many of spatial relationships-too often, strong reconciliations as much as for Russian them dead before the film opens. I think medium shots confront one another and revolution . Beatty is not the easiest actor any reaction to Reds will be tempered by the sense of authentic physical continu- to play with: he can be chilly and hidden the entrance-way to the past these men ity is lost. The dog in Reds should have on screen-not so much out of vanity as and women provide. So grave, so in- been put down. It is a far more serious caution. Some actresses have wilted in tense, so out of the producer's control, failure of generosity to leave us ignorant his presence, but Keaton assaults him, they say the dark behind them is already about Louise's future and the identity of reads him the riot act, mauls him until lost or muddled by the turmoil of differ- the witnesses. Ragtime falters with the actor-producer-director rediscovers ent opinions, recollections, and lives. Coalhouse inside the museum. I think his own charm-that speechless per- that the film needed to open out again at plexity in which the mouth gapes, the I don't know if Beatty intended this; I that point: the willful holing up of the head turns, and a grin steals across the suspect he didn't quite grasp it, but his terrorists being matched by an explosion face so that we know he will never grow instinct gets credit nonetheless. The of references to the outside world. up. In such moments, Reed's fame recollections of the witnesses relocate That's where Houdini would have seems that much less mature than Bry- worked so well, forever escaping but still ant's. As she complains about being imprisoned by life and death. At the overshadowed by him , we want to reach very end of Ragtime, there is a pregnant out and tell her she's better, deeper, image of Houdini, hanging upside more real. Her love for him never forgets down, rid of the strait jacket but still the dread of being slighted, but it learns tethered and suspended. It's Forman's a compassion for his boyishness. In all verdict on the land of the free, and it Reds' length, battles and street riots are extends as far as the anxious beauty of mercifully restrained. When Reed Warren Beatty, at liberty but haunted, speaks at a Petrograd strike meeting, his like the rich man seeking to enter the limelight is a glare that spills admiration kingdom of heaven. The troubling maj- and sadness onto Louise's complicated esty of these films is in letting us know that freedom is not enough. ~ 16



Peter Greenaway: HisRise and 'Falls' by Harlan Kennedy the co-winners for the year's BFI award While battles rage in the world of for Best Film (scooped up in previous movie form , and structuralism and nar- Peter Greenaway-philosopher or years by such as Robert Bresson, Alain rative filmmaking fire at each other from comic, auteur or anarchist, poet or Resnais, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jean- either side of a Big Divide, Greenaway clown, sage or onion? Luc Godard) were Peter Greenaway's is perhaps the one movie maker working three-hour absurdist fantasia The Falls today who is happily colonizing and cul- On the closing evening of the 1980 from Britain and Xie Thien 's Two Stage tivating the fertile territory in between. London Film Festival, British Film In- Sisters from China. For close on thirty Impervious to flying bullets, he plants stitute director Anthony Smith mounted years and thousands of films , it was the sumptuous stretches of hybridized horti- the dais in the National Film Theatre's first time a film by a British director had culture. From the early shoots of Win- main auditorium and announced that ever won or shared the award. dows and A Walk Through H to the 18

, bumper harvest of The Falls. Greena- film: \"An ideal history of the world is his films hint at terror and disorder in the way's movies have blended the non-fig- most perfectly told by a history of all its everyday, cosmic fears camouflaged by urative rigors of structuralism-in which subjects. The impracticability of such a British phlegm, the crack of doom con- form rules and the processes offilm itself history, like a full-scale map of the cealed in the neutral recitations of bu- dictate a pattern-with the associative world, mocks human effort-a compro- reaucratic dossiers. The half-hidden resonances of narrative filmmaking. mise will have to do .\" absurdist thrust of The Falls is the notion Greenaway is currently in post-produc- The result is a dovetailing of lawless of mankind turning into birds at the dic- tion on his latest feature, The Draughts- arbitrariness with an obsessive orderli- tates of some giant Judgement-Day mcm's Contract. a big-budget narrative ness that is spellbinding. Anarchist and mutation. Physical deformities set in, starring Janet Suzman, and a co-produc- archivist are yoked together in a de- identities and personalities change tion of the BFI and Britain's hot new TV mented bureaucratic acte gratuit. as if an shape, and human contact breaks down station, Channel 4. existential poetry had blown through the in a babble of half-formed language. Just Greenaway is British cinema's Jorge corridors of institutionalism whooshing as in other Greenaway films , tools of Luis Borges: perfect form and pinpoint the dust off the filing cabinets and mak- communication-from telephones and detail go hand in hand with a giddy flow- ing the dossiers dance. alphabets to road-maps-hover on the ering of marginalia. Around severe and As alternating voice-overs earnestly brink of a comic-frightening gibberish. poker-backed methodologies-de- relate the details of the biographees' For all the movie's length and ramp- fenestration statistics in Windows . ritual lives, Greenaway's visuals provide a col- ant visual eclecticism, the cutting is uses of the telephone in Dear Telephone. lage of initially confounding non-sequi- swift and purposeful and the electronic- biographical dossiers of disaster victims turs gradually given harmony by their jingle music (by Greenaway's long-time in both his TV film Act of God and The repetition through the film as leit- collaborator Michael Nyman) plinks and Falls -Greenaway twines absurdist ara- motiven: bird photos, paintings, shots of splashes buoyantly over the soundtrack besques of infinite floridity. running water (\"Sashio Fallaspy was a The Falls. futhermore-its 186 min- dreamer, Category One-Water- utes divided into ninety-two sections- Flight\"), and old archive footage (e.g. of is not only a giant and enchanted garden Van Ricquardt's doomed \"flight\" from in its own right but a seedbed for the the top of the Eiffel Tower). The con~-:::=:::::==-• • future of moviemaking. With the stant juxtaposition of images of Flight Spring-like burgeoning of home video and Fall hint at the notion of an Absurd- systems and the falling demand for cin- ist Apocalypse which lies behind ema seats, movies are moving ever more the whole film. under the push-button control of indi- And indeed behind most vidual viewers. Greenaway's epic- of Greenaway's work. with its vast shaggy-dog structure of an- Spearheaded by ecdotal episodes like an eighteenth- The Falls. century picaresque novel-is propheti- cally tuned to the push-me-in-punch- me-out video phenomenon where the spectator has the right of \"final cut.\" Prolixity, in doses of the new film- viewer's own choice, becomes not a lia- bility but a new, free-form attraction. • The Falls is a hydra-headed biopic. It documents the lives of ninety-two vic- tims ofa \"Violent Unexplained Event.\" Conjured into being as a modern Babel myth, the \"VUE\" has left its victims with the ability to speak one or several of ninety-two different new-minted lan- guages (Capistan, Alow-ease, Hartileas B., etc.) and with a myriad of physical changes to boot. The victims chosen for the film are randomly picked from a total of 19 million VUE casualties because they all have surnames beginning with \"Fall\": from Orchard Falla and Con- stance Ortuit Fallabur to Leasting Fallvo and Anthior Fallwaste. The events of their lives, both before and after the \"fall\" of VUE, are encapsu- lated in biographies ranging in length from five seconds to five minutes. Says Greenaway in his preface to the

whenever a new biography is intro- The Falls. earnest and the absurd dance in de- duced . Although Greenaway's style is monic equipoise. His work thrives on predicated on a montage of static shots peachable truth. Greenaway's brilliantly the presence of opposites and on their rather than on camera movement, his chosen voice-overs-sonorous and mat- seesawing, vertiginous tension. eye for set-ups and character blockings ter-of-fact-unite with the sheen and - e.g., in the front-on interviews with clarity of the images to create a sedi- On January 16, 1981 , unsuspecting the VUE victims- is so keen and quirk- tious, po-faced, unchallengeable purity. British citizens sitting in their sitting- ily surreal that it renders camera-move- As lief attack the Great Wall of China rooms were Greenawayed by the direc- ment almost superfluous. He will find with a toothpick, Greenaway makes the tor's first movie for television. Made just the perfect visual relationship among filmgoer feel, as unpick the sober monu- after The Falls and similarly apocalyptic setting, character, and camera, and the mentality of his movie. in theme , Act of God is for the unbap- perfect lighting to sculpt the tableau into tized as spry and eerily compelling an a bright, offbeat three-dimensionalism. • introduction as any. It documents, in (Throper Fallcaster, 13, sits in a bed- quick-cut collage style, the case histo- room shiny with seraphic light, telling In all Greenaway's films abstraction ries of a dozen-odd surviving people bird jokes while a white egg on a string and adventure, structure and story, the struck by lightning. There they stand or sit, slotted and streamlined into Greena- pendulum-swings before his face a la way's immaculate compositions telling their tales. True? Apocryphal ? Exagger- Piero della Francesca.) ated? Understated ? The pro-filmic real- As a biographical marathon , The Falls ity refuses to go on trial in Greenaway's movies: you accept it while you're is an elevation ad absurdum of Andy watching it or the film dismisses you . Warhol's dictum that \"In the future ev- (Act ofGod was enthusiastically received e ryone will be famous for fifteen min- at the 1981 N ew York Film Festival.) utes.\" Indissolubly blending truth and triviality, it is Pop immortality run riot, a Viewers of Act of God will see: a mar- parody of the mass-media age whose sa- ried couple on a lawn behind their sprin- cred text is Percipi est esse : To be seen kling-machine, reminiscing through the (on the small screen or large) is to be. In bowing lines of spray; a man relating his the age ofTruth twenty-four frames-per- lightning experiences while sitting in second , or 525 lines-per-TV-screen, The front of open French windows beyond Falls feints mischievously at falling in which a dark sky furiousl y threatens; an with the grand fallacy that earnest pre- invisible interviewee's voice burbling sentation is an imprimatur of unim- IANIA fl filM flIII~Al •((Music ana the Movies\" Jlpril23-29, 1982 In 1980 the First Santa Fe Film Festival : NEW DIRECTORS! c( '- -\"'\\ NEW FILMS featured guests Michelangelo Antonioni, Christian Blackwood, Felix Falk, William Fraker, Chuck Jones, Rouben ~'-' Mamoulian, Michael Powell, John Sayles and Robert Wise. In 1981 the Second Santa Fe Film Festival: THE WESTERN FILM featured guests Robert Altman, Niven Busch, James Coburn, Iron Eyes Cody , Buster Crabbe, Peter Fonda, Monte Hellman, Charlton Heston, Alexandro Jodorowsky, Ben Johnson , Katy Jurado, Lee Marvin, Tom McGuane, Warren Oates, Jack Palance, Sam Peckin- pah, Harry Dean Stanton, and King Vidor. In 1982 the Third Santa Fe Film Festival: MUSIC AND THE MOVIES will feature the artists, celebrities and filmmakers who have most memorably and brilliantly in- tegrated the two art forms. For information and application write: THE NATIONAL FILM PRESERVE 1050 Old Pecos Trail Santa Fe, New Mexico 87503 20

through an unhooked telephone whose · Greenaway's films well as a filmmaker, and he gleefully curved white back joins in a perfect vis- have so finely shaded plunders tropes and allusions from all ual arc with the house glimpsed through absurdism into the media in his movies. It's another of the the open window behind it. rational-seeming that aspects that make him a moviemaker you cannot determine peculiarly suited to the video-cassette Throughout Act of God the editing is where truth ends and era. Consenting cineastes lucky enough incisive, the compositions are icily stun- Fiction and Folly to have their own copy of a Greenaway ning-David Hockney paintings vivants begin. opus can unfold his movie labyrinths -and the camera itself is as starkly over and over, in the privacy of their own vigilant as it cuts from tableau to tableau irreverence aimed squarely between the homes, and espy new subtleties and as in The Passion ofJoan ofArc. eyes of cine-critical pretension, but one crazy harmonies with each viewing. doesn't have to take seriously the more Yet far from being rigor-mortised by pie-eyed pontifications of semiological Media cousins of cinema, painting, its own doom-carrying deadpanness , the textists to see that many films can indeed and the written or spoken word , figure movie has a hilarious intensity. It's a ha- be read: that is, construed, decoded, hugely in Greenaway's work; not least in giography of ordinary humans rendered raked for recurring themes and images. his best short film A Walk Through H. A rare and holy by coincidences beyond Greenaway's films are a feast for such dead ornithologist narrates \"his last jour- their control-haply holding a seed of delvings: not least because they make ney\" through an imaginary landscape. common apocalyptic experience is all no pretense whatever that they are uni- The landscape is represented by as- Greenaway needs to grow his vast forests cultural and \"pure\" of other art forms. sorted maps (designed by the filmmaker of statistical-biographical fantasy. Greenaway is a novelist and a painter as as Byzantine water-color mazes) , and the camera roves over them, occasion- What matters, as in all absurdist art, is ally interposing real-life shots of birds- that logical methods work overtime to in-flight. cope with the wildly bizarre. Greena- way's films have so finely shaded ab- In all these movies Greenaway the surdism into the rational-seeming that absurdist holds sway over Greenaway you cannot determine where Truth the formalist. A delight in human foibles ends, and Fiction and Folly begin. seeps through the frugal intricacies of the form and the immaculate ceramics of • the imagery. And the structures that hu- man beings build around themselves to The parody one-liner often bandied ward off the evil eye of chaos are the around' at film festivals-when semiolo- subject of the films' satiric fire as much gists walk darkly about, speaking of \"reading the text\" ofa movie-is \"Have you read any good films lately?\" It's an THE NOSTALGIA BOOK CLUB PRESENTS: gorgeous ... evocative . ..\" What A 9lorious Teeling! - The New York Daily News And you' ll be hap-hap-happy again when you rediscover the splendor ancfbeauty of that unique American art form in the book that says it all : Hollywooa Musicals by Ted Sen- nett. 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TwELVE FILMS as the strategy of their style. endary ornithologist Tulse Luper to Van Hoyten, keeper of birds at the Amster- THAT SHOOK • dam Zoo, to Cissie Colpitts, without THE WORLD whom the Goole Water Tower would Vertical Features Remake is the only not be what it is. And every Greenaway The ed itors of American Film have ca re- Greenaway film , in recent years at least, fetish, from linguistics to ornithology, is fully selected twelve outstandin g motion where the director seems to be lured into gleefully aired as if it were the daily pictures, including Psycho, Citizen Kane his own line of fire. His last film made currency of our culture. and The Philadelphia Sto')\\ and captured before The Falls , it's Greenaway's closest th eir essence in an attractive wall calendar engagement with movie structuralism. Is The Falls a great film or a great folly? for 1982. Though the film's starting point is fic- Possibly, and plausibly, both. Certainly tional-fantastic, it slowly turns into a a great labyrinth, worthy to stand coiled Tastefully designed , useful and in- near-abstract exploration of cinema and intricate beside Borges's stories and fonnative, ~Twelve Films That Shook the form, bleeding its images of emotional Thornton Wilder's The Bridge ofSan Luis World\" is the wall calendar film lovers will association and using them as building Rey, two of the clearly discernible influ- wan t to display this year, and save for years blocks in a collagiste experiment with ences upon the movie. Like Wilder's to co me! cutting, tempo, and the counterpoint of novel, a fabulous fantasia of biographical sound and image. miniatures linked by a common, violent A two-page s pread is devoted to eac h apocalypse, Greenaway's film gives us a month- a full page' photo from one of th e The film's title refers to the series of biographical mosaic whose pieces are chose n films , and on the adjoining page. a \"vertical features \" from the English seen to join only in the grand overview brief di sc ussion of the film, plus an attrac- landscape that were allegedly collated of a Violent Unexplained Event. tive day/ date layout with plenty of room for by the late, great, apocryphal naturalist making personal notati ons. Order today to Tulse Luper (before he died) and made The harmonies and cross-references ensure delivery by Chris tmas! into a short film. Luper's opus has disap- in The Falls , like those in Wilder or in peared, of course, and VFR documents Borges, are as vivid and haunting as in a 9\" X 12\". softbound , Special Member the successive attempts of the sinister piece of music. It's an abstract film with Rate $6.95. Institute of Reclamation and Restora- a strong undertow of leitmotiven, a cas- tion to remake the film from odd bits of tle-in-the-air built on sensate founda- a Mail to: surviving footage and related papers and tions and with real and shivering winds Wall Calendar photographs. blowing through it. Just as Borges builds The Ameri can Film Insti tut e his steepling structures of seeming noth- John F. Kenn edy Center VFR 's zany-skeletal raison d' erre ingness with stones quarried from the Was hin gto n, D.C. 20566 quickly disappears from view, however, real world of philosophy, history, and being no more than a McGuffinesque religion, Greenaway creates his sym- Please send me copies of pretext for what proves a series of (for phonies of sinister systematization from Greenaway) surprisingly dour and for- real-life material: philology, ornithology, \"'Twelve Film That Shoo k th e World ,\" a malist impromptus on a theme. As no institutional bureaucracy. It's a movie re- less than four IRR reconstructed-films alization of Borges's mad-methodical wall calendar for 1982. at just $8.00 eac h unspool before us, our eyes are snagged cosmos Tlon, where \"Metaphysicians and spiked on a staccato of trees, pylons, do not seek for truth or even for verisimi- ($6.95 + $1.05 postage and handlin g). palings, and goalposts, all set to Michael litude, but rather for the astounding. Nyman's music, hornpiping on our ear- They judge that metaphysics is a branch I' ve e nclosed a check or money ord er drums like a synthesized version of a of fantastic literature. They know that a Mahlerian scherzo. system is nothing more than the subordi- made pa ya ble to The American Film In- nation of all aspects of the universe to Although structuralists put Vertical anyone such aspect.\" stitute in th e amount of $ _ _ __ Features Remake, with its formal purity purged of all but a vestigial narrative Greenaway's films are monomania amI:' - - - - - - - - - - - - interference, at the top of the Greena- made marvelous, systems made sym- way pantheon, its formal fandangoes for phonic, delight twenty-four frames-per- Alioiress _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ many of his devotees lack the comic-as- second. The Falls makes its bow lih _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ sociative richness which is precisely prophetically at a moment in movie his- what sets him off from other filmmakers tory when the literary and verbal heri- Sial l' _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Z ip - - - fascinated by structure. tage of television, born of sound, radio, and the spoken word , is finding itself l _______________________II _t.2M_I _ Greenaway quickly got back onto the having to mix in more-and-more with wide and flowery path of his own mag- the visual heritage of cinema, born of nificent obsessions. The Falls is the cin- photography and painting. Film forms ema's ne plus ultra of Poetic Pedantry: a are bending into new shapes; media are hair-splitting hosanna to all things statis- interbreeding; viewing habits them- tical, a paean to Pseudoscience, Edward selves will need to change and adapt to Lear wrapped up in the Encyclopaedia live and flourish . The Falls is the flex- Brittanica. The Falls is the grand reposi- iform shape of cinema to come, and tory of all Greenaway's mythic material, Greenaway a prophet-polymorph for the and a sound argument could be made new millennium. Keep watching the that it's not the \"last\" Greenaway film screens!® but the first (to borrow some topsy-turvy Greenaway logic). All the director's clas- sic characters appear here: from the leg- 22

Diane Lane and • Amanda PLummer; Carrie Fisher; Faye Dunaway; by Stephen Schiff Adrienne Barbeau; Kate NeLLigan. She's tough. She walks fast, with her head up and her chin thrust forward. She never says more than she has to. And she has mastered the Clint Eastwood stare. She can use a gun-in fact, she likes to. When she's shooting, she grasps the pis- tol in both hands, and yet she's never trembly or out of control the way Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck some- times were. No, she has acquired the cop's surly stance, and added to it a dar- ing twist or two of her own. Spreading her legs for stability, she deliberately, almost wittily cocks her hip. Insouciant. Sexy. A wink with every bullet. She grins-a mean, knowing little grin, never very far from a challenge, a ri- poste, or a threat. She can punch, too; she can knock a man down. That's part of her mystique. But so is the ladylike fear that simmers beneath her bravado, deep down so that the men can't hear it -until it turns into a scream. 23

The gunslinging woman is not new to women's movement into American in American movies has stopped with the movies, but her resurgence comes as a surprise. Gena Rowlands in Gloria, movies of the Seventies seems half- the New Woman. Those mid-Seventies Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Carrie Fisher hearted-and wrong-headed. The radicalization plots are still being in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Blues Brothers, Adrienne Bar- gung-ho feminism of a movie like An dredged up and flung back onto the beau in Escape from New York-all of them hold their own in the man's fantasy Unmarried Woman, for instance, is screen (in Private Benjamin, for in- world of crime and adventure, and all of them are provocatively, defiantly sexual. grounded in fantasy-the fantasy of a stance), but mostly they've been re- And yet, though they appear strong and independent, the way good post-femi- rich, beautiful divorcee who can capture placed by new forms. In Reds, Keaton's nist women ought to, they are also some- thing of a throwback. Never fully a hunk like Alan Bates on the first date Louise Bryant doesn't need radicaliza- realized characters, they're sheep in wolves' clothing, sugar-and-spice trying and then get away with snubbing him. tion, but she sure needs something. At to pass itself off as snips, snails, and puppy-dogs' tails. Many of that film's ideological sisters are the beginning of the movie, she's an Watching them in one recent movie pious reveries of radicalization, often in- ersatz superwoman who can't get any after another, spitting wisecracks and narrowing their sardonic eyes, I began to volving the intercession of the wise and respect around a real (and decidedly ma- realize that a change had taken place in the way American films depict women. sensitive male: Kris Kristofferson in ternal) superwoman like Maureen Sta- The gunslinger has reappeared at a time when certain casually racist elements are Alice Doesn't Live _Here Anymore, Ion pleton's Emma Goldman. Louise is too creeping into the movies-witness the servants in S.O.B. and Seems Like Old Voight in Coming Home, Ron Liebman ambitious,too spiky, too flirty and girlish Times-along with the flippantly pessi- mistic view of the future exhibited in in Norma Rae, Robert Redford in The -too feminine. And what in the world Outland, Escape from New York, and Heavy Metal. Something in the culture Electric Horseman, and so forth. Oddly might smooth her rough edges? Why, has made those elements seem natural and right. Perhaps they are reflections of enough, nearly every lane Fonda film devotion to a good man, that's what. the widely shared perception that left- leaning social programs haven't worked. since Fun with Dick and Jane has been Only when Louise hunkers down and And maybe it's true that liberal and fem- inist ideas can go only so far in the Amer- the story of a woman's radicalization, learns to love Warren Beatty's 10hn Reed ican cinema, because American movies are made by conglomerates and corpo- which is to say the story of Fonda's own does she become the sort of creature rate types, who nod benevolently at lib- eral ideas but rarely nurture them. In life-from bimbo to politico, from sex- wise old Emma can admire. any case, we suddenly find the bland liberalism that informed the Seventies pot to superwoman. In the rare instance Then there's Absence of Malice. movies of1ane Fonda and 1ill Clayburgh fading. One generation of movie women that a superwoman appears full-blown in Watching it, one can't escape the feeling is being replaced by another. a movie, the way Faye Dunaway does in that Sally Fields is a lousy reporter be- In retrospect, the assimilation of the Network and Diane Keaton does in Man- cause she's a woman. She's naive, easily hattan, she's likely to be a neurotic manipulated by the men in her world, harpy; in Manhattan, Keaton is enough and oddly willing to sleep with her sub- to send our hero scampering back to the jects. And the movie uses her femininity understanding innocence of Child- to prompt our forgiveness: sure, she Woman Mariel Hemingway. Elsewhere, ruins a man's life and causes a woman's the superwoman's independence proves death, but then what does she know? too much for her. Leaving the guidance She's just a girl. We can always use more of her daddy but refusing to find a hus- women's roles in movies, but Absence of band to replace him, a woman like Malice might have been a lot more hon- Keaton may well wind up meeting Mr. est if the reporter in it had been a man- Goodbar instead. except that if he had, the filmmakers None of this is very satisfying, but for would have had an awfully hard time a long time one took it to be a beginning. convincing us he's not a villain. Beneath And so it's disheartening to realize that its polished TV-movie surfaces, Absence the progress of female characterizations of Malice exploits a certain Hollywood- fed presumption of female incompe- tence. In the movies, men have all the competence-what women have is heart. In Whose Life Is It Anyway?, doc- tor Christine Lahti is very caring and soulful and sweet, but you don't get the impression that she's a terrific doctor. Sigourney Weaver in Alien. ~, ''!.- Sally Field in Absence of Malice. 24 Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Movie Women: Tough but Weak Grand Thespians Comediennes Gunslingers To show you what I mean, I've de- Glenda Jackson Diane Keaton Faye Dunaway vised a chart-perfectly unscientific, Maggie Smith Shirley MacLaine Angie Dickinson but suggestive nevertheless-in which Vanessa Redgrave Adrienne Barbeau I've categorized most of the major Katharine Hepburn Liza Minnelli American screen actresses of the last five Cicely Tyson Maggie Smith Karen Allen or six years. The ones who have come Liv Ullmann Barbra Streisand Sigourney Weaver into their own since about 1977 are listed Jane Alexander Goldie Hawn ih red; the ones who emerged earlier are Joanne Woodward Madeline Kahn Carrie Fisher in black; and actresses who belong in Meryl Streep . Carol Burnett Gena Rowlands more than one category have been Margot Kidder granted a berth wherever they fit. The Skin-Deep Beauties Bette Midler Screamers categories are oversimple, and I suppose the whole enterprise is less than sport- Jacqueline Bisset Lily Tomlin Faye Dunaway ing, but I think it useful anyway. Grand Candice Bergen Mary Steenburgen Angie Dickinson Thespians, in the top left column, is Bernadette Peters Adrienne Barbeau reserved for those women who are gen- Raquel Welch erally thought of as actresses first and Ali MacGraw Romantics Sissy Spacek character types only later (if at all) , re- Lauren Hutton Karen Allen gardless of whether they deserve such Faye Dunaway Sigourney Weaver distinction. Skin-Deep Beauties is ~.;p---- Julie Christie Jamie Lee Curtis what I call those thoroughly adult, thor- Cicely Tyson Nancy Allen oughly beautiful women who cannot be The New Woman Liv Ullmann Carol Kane taken seriously as actresses and yet, Margot Kidder unlike dozens of other model types (re- Jane Fonda Diana Ross Brooke Adams member Cornelia Sharpe and Ingrid Katharine Hepburn Meryl Streep Genevieve Bujold Boulting?), have continued to land lead- Brooke Adams ing roles. The New Woman, of course, Jill Clayburgh Kate Nelligan Femmes Fatales is the creature who dominated so many Diane Keaton Lisa Eichhorn Seventies movies, embodying the lefty- Liza Minnelli Amy Irving Faye Dunaway feminist ethos that's eroding before our Barbra Srreisand Kathleen Turner eyes. Comediennes are just what you Goldie Hawn Child,.Women think they are, and Romantics are ac- Faye Dunaway Jessica Lange tresses whose relations with men are the Goldie Hawn focus of their films-women who per- Sally Field Genevieve Bujold sonify Passion. It is at this point in the Glenda Jackson chart that you'll notice the beginnings of Ellen Burstyn Nancy Allen a shift. Actresses who emerged before Vanessa Redgrave Bo Derek about 1977 seem to dominate the cate- gories on the left of the chart, and post- Liv Ullmann Sissy Spacek 1977 actresses the right. The Skin-Deep Marsha Mason Shelley Duvall (albeit grown-up) Beauties of the pre- Susan Anspach 1977 era are replaced by the Child- Jane Alexander Amy Irving Women; Gunslingers stand in for the Joanne Woodward Brooke Shields New Woman, and the voices of horror- Gena Rowlands Susan Sarandon movie Screamers are heard once again Meryl Srreep Kristy McNichol in the land. The strong, Forties-style Mary Steenburgen Femmes Fatales, sweeping through Blair Brown Nastassia Kinski movies like Body Heat and The Postman Shirley MacLaine Tatum O'Neal Always Rings Twice, are anachronistic ex- Genevieve Bujold Debra Winger ceptions that prove a surprising new rule: that in today's movies, women are Jody Foster weak again-even when, like the gun- Candy Clark toters, they look pretty tough. Beverly 0'Angelo Diane Lane Farrah Fawcett Carol Kane Bernadette Peters Elizabeth McGovern 25

Every time she turns around, some man same sort of thing happens between whom they must always rely for protec- is waiting to put her in her place-either John Cassavetes, alerting her to tradi- Blair Brown and John Belushi in Conti- tion. tional medical ethics, or Richard Drey- fuss, alerting her to the ethics of free nental Divide, also written by Raiders' It's the men, of course, who insist choice. And in On Golden Pond, Jane Fonda undergoes an unusual sort of Lawrence Kasdan.) upon that last word-protection. In the metamorphosis; spilling out of bikinis and halter tops during most of the film Among the Gunslingers on my chart, post-feminist world, where women are and pouting little-girlishly because her daddy intimidates her, she finally gets there are two who do without men, and superwomen and what men are is any- up the gumption to be the girl he always wanted: a tomboy. Having watched Jane rather refreshingly, too. Still, when body's guess, the fellows who produce radicalize so many times, and having watched plenty of movie tomboys blos- Sigourney Weaver is stripped to her T- culture may not feel secure enough to let som into women, we may find it disturb- ing to see Jane as a bimbo who turns shirt and panties and faced with the women need men simply because biol- herself into a boy. And yet that's the very sort of change that created the gunsling- slimy Alien, she is essentially an old- ogy makes the world go 'round. What ing woman-the woman who's trying to turn herself into Clint Eastwood. fashioned Screamer-a frail woman with women on the assembly lines, on And failing. What invariably happens whose strength can only surprise us (as the police force, and in the boardrooms, in the gun-girl movies is that our heroine proves more fragile than she thinks. The indeed it does) . And though Gena men may be feeling oddly dispensable; hardness of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back is viewed, Rowlands's gunplay depends on no if women don't need us for protection, healthily perhaps, as a defense against femininity; one spends those movies man, her life as a renegade is intolerable, what do they need us for? Male terror is waiting for her to drop her combative fa<;ade and melt into the arms of Luke and she can leave it solely by escaping to probably the reason why the movies Skywalker or Han Solo, ,both of whom are eager to play white knight to her the role that hidebound tradition insists have us ogling children-real ones like damsel in distress. (And let us not forget the tomboy heroine of Dragonslayer, is woman's destiny: motherhood. Brooke Shields, or phony, grown-up who becomes vulnerable just as soon as she drops her pretense of manhood and Those compromised female toughies ones like Farrah Fawcett, Bo Derek, admits to femininity.) Likewise, the Ka- ren Allen of Raiders of the Lost Ark can are the latest proof of a venerable axiom: and Suzanne Somers. And the invasion take care of herself only until she meets a truly formidable (male) evil, like the that any subversive or threatening tidbit of the Child-Women coincides with the Nazi played by Ronald Lacey. Then she must depend on the masculine swash- that shows up in the cornucopia of return of the Screamers. Together, they buckling oflndiana Jones; it's worth not- ing that their first love scene occurs as American culture is bound to be create a composite portrait of the new Allen binds her hero's wounds. (The snipped, sliced, diced, and Cuisinarted, movie woman: frightened yet forward, and then plopped into the melting pot, voluptuous yet vulnerable. In short, a there to blend with the rest of the pushover. vaguely sweet-smelling stew. No idea, That is not a particularly salubrious no issue, no conundrum reaches the image; it's unhealthy for women and American public without first being di- even less healthy for men. But the Gun- luted in that whimsical kitchen which slinger isn't much better; neither, for goes by names like \"the movies,\" or that matter, was the New Woman. \"television,\" or \"magazines.\" The gun- There are certainly actresses and roles slinging woman is what happens when that don't fall into the clutches of my feminism is found to be difficult to di- categories-Faye Dunaway in Mommie gest. Initial by-products-like the New Dearest and the TV movie Evita Peron, Woman-are, quite correctly, seen as comes to mind-and more power to only fleetingly nutritional. Swallowing them. And there are also stirrings of feminism whole is a quick route to dys- other female images in movies, wobbly, pepsia. And so the women's movement intriguing, and not yet fully developed is processed in a way that neither ignores creations like the modern (but unfortu- it nor allows it to be threatening. The nately inhuman) Femme Fatale that attractive, sexy, gunslinging women of Alice Krige plays so elegantly in Ghost the movies promote the notion that Story or the free-spirit Fatale that Jodi women are powerful, all right-but only Thelen plays so unsteadily in the wildly when they act like men. And still , off-key Four Friends . But I'm afraid they're not as powerful as real men, on most movie images of women in the Eighties make me miss the actresses of the Thirties and Forties: the Hepburns, Bacalls, Stanwycks, and Lombards, and even the real femmes fatales-Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Jane Greer, Gene Tierney. I miss them not just for the reasons a feminist might advance but for reasons that I suppose one might call \"masculinist.\" If the movies were to give us women who were truly strong and truly sexual, who didn't present themselves as imitation Eastwoods or as thumb-sucking dollies, then we might rediscover an old and comforting truth: that women need men simply because women need men. The mystery of that need, and its reciprocal, is vast and vola- tile enough to fuel Hollywood forever.~ 26

, felt unable to crystallize his own sensi- by Dan Yakir bility, his delicate self crushed by the conflict between the rigorous asceticism \"If! knew what it was that I wanted, I wouldn't wake up in the morning to a la Bresson and the open-sore angst- filled protestation a la Godard. These make films. I'd do nothing. I'd try to live conflicting tendencies are clearly at without doing-or producing-any- work in The Mother and the Whore; Mes thing.\" These words, by Jean Eustache, petites amoureuses is more in the appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur nine Rohmerian mode in trying to \"cover up\" years ago, just before his The Mother and the pain by detachment and propriety. the Whore (La Maman et la putain, 1973) In The Mother his angst is expressed was shown at Cannes. \"You could say via the prolonged, almost logorrheic that in my film Jean-Pierre Leaud has a monologues of his characters, while in beautiful life: he doesn't give a damn, Amoureuses the void in him comes forth spends his time fucking, going to bistros via the lingering of the camera on empty and reading. His days, I think, are full- spaces long after the action has termi- only he isn't happy.\" nated. This is \"a decor that searches for This confession goes a long way to- something but then what is searched for ward explaining why the 42-year-old di- disappears and it remains empty.\" Simi- rector took his own life last November. L-_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _..... larly, in Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (Le Eustache who in 1977, when the follow- hidden clue, but ended up tearing him pere noel ales yeux bleus), one of the two ing interview took place, admitted that apart, leaving him in a state of artistic episodes ofBad Company, the emptiness \"the films I made are as autobiographi- schizophrenia. and desolation of the city of Narbonne cal as fiction can be,\" used the cinema as \"I'm not too satisfied with the work on Christmas Eve reflect the inner state a means of self-exploration, a quest that I've done, because I feel it's incom- of the youthful, drifting characters it de- was doomed to fail. His meager output plete,\" he said. \"I feel my films are links picts. -seven pictures in nineteen years- in something larger that! don't know yet An outsider, Eustache was often im- since his 1963 debut, Les mauvaises and that I'd like to know one day. Per- poverished enough to have to shack up frequentations (Bad Company), consists haps I didn't do what I had to; I didn't with friends and wonder where his next of two medium-length documentaries say what I wanted to.\" But \"my films meal was coming from. His marginality (La rosiere de Pessac, 1968, and Le co- did change my way oflife and this is why extended to his position within the in- chon, 1970); one unreleased feature (Nu- it was difficult afterward.\" He might be dustry in France: like Maurice Pialat, miro zero, 1971); and one referring to a lov{t affair with a woman on whom he cast in a small role in Mes medium-length fiction film, his swan whom the Franc;oise Lebrun character petites amoureuses, Eustache was taken song, Une sale histoire ( A Dirty Story, in The Mother and the Whore was based. seriously by critics but, with the sole 1977). Only twice-in The Mother and After the premiere, the woman commit- exception of The Mother and the Whore, the Whore and Mes petites amoureuses ted suicide and, according to a French was considered box-office poison. He (1974)-did his vision emerge in a fully- journalist who knew the man well, Eus- had an affinity for Sam Fuller and Nick developed, coherent form. Signifi- tache was never the same again. Ray-old lions who worked within the candy, the two films are diametrically He was a director in search of a style, a system only to be discarded by it-and opposed: the former is a monumental, man in search of himself and others. even acted alongside them in Wim Wen- loquacious, and nervously energetic Perhaps his sense of failure stems from ders' The American Friend. But unlike work about the anguish of the post-1968 his inability to rid himself of the legacy them, he was deprived of the pleasure of generation and the impossibility of love of filmmakers like Eric Rohmer, Jean- martyrdom, of self-sacrifice on the altar in a gray, drizzly Parisian hell, while the Luc Godard, and Robert Bresson, of \"pure cinema.\" There was no chance latter, his only experiment with color, is whose influence he acknowledged. It's for him to reject commercial projects, a solemn, intimate meditation on the not that his talent was derivative: The because they were never offered him. mute agony of growing up in France's Mother and the Whore was original \"I think I'm an amateur filmmaker. I sun-drenched countryside. It's as if each enough to merit its acclaim as a land- think I'd be incapable of making a com- effort was meant to bring him closer to a mark of the Seventies. It's that Eustache missioned film. I make films when I 27

can't help doing so. I could very well not a rare instance in French cinema where lean-Pierre Leaud in Les make films for five or ten years ifI don't the battle of the sexes is portrayed not have a strong need.\" from the male point-of-view alone. up alone. That's when I stopped the Veronika asserts her sexuality aggres- film.\" Eustache admitted that it was sively: her desire to make love and touch Rohmer making \"his first two Moral Alexandre's penis frightens and repels In The Mother and the Whore , the two Tales in 16mm, in black and white, in him, just as she herself expresses her women function as both mother and the street and on the terraces of cafes, fundamental ambivalence toward sex whore in their rapport with men. In one with amateurs, a hand-held camera, and and men. If Eustache's women talk scene, where the three principals are to- no sound\" that made him realize that back, it's because \"in Alexandre's atti- gether in bed, there's even a moment of \"cinema could be made.\" The films he tude there is such provocation and such a fusion, physically and metaphorically, went on to make were to a great extent, will to destroy that they are obliged to between the two women. Eustache's \"a reaction against films that displease answer. If they left it up to him, they'd women often use the support of their me, against something that appears to be trampled upon. In the end, it's he own sex to confront men-to question, me false,\" namely, the pat complacency who is destroyed by them, but he was denounce , insult. In The Mother and the of French cinema,\"which finds itself in looking for it all along. After his voyage Whore , Leaud is seated in his car when its most mediocre period ever. into madness and depression, he ends Lafont, accompanied by a girlfriend, comes up and spits in his face. In Mes \"I strive to make my films socially petites amoureuses, two girls pass by a just,\" he continued, \"to place the char- gallery of cafe habitues in search of the acters in a well-defined social system. In almost all my films, my characters aren't Leaud, Bernadette Lafont and Fran~oise Lebrun in The Mother and the Whore. rich; they're socially very low, which en- ables the metaphysical problem to pass through the social problems of poverty and misery. They are intricately en- meshed. It seems to me necessary: the political, the social, and the moral neces- sarily go together in literature as well as in cinema.\" • Eustache's characters constantly try to reach out, to make contact, but seldom succeed. \"I see suffering all over. I've always seen it. I hope people don't suf- fer in vain,\" he stressed. In Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, \"the boy [Jean-Pierre Leaud] learns that girls-that is, life- are not as untouchable as he thought, but the lesson is small and uncertain. The step he takes is indeed a step ahead, but he remains quite the same. It's a character who always appears more stupid than he really is, because he can't be himself in his milieu. He must put himself on the level of the others, which is bound to fail. \" In Mes petites amoureuses, Daniel (Martin Loeb) is of- ten rebuffed when trying to make con- tact. Whether ignored by a friend in the schoolyard or unrecognized by a girl he meets, he protests violently. His failure to communicate with his stepfather, however, brings no protest. Similarly, when his desire for an education is deemed illegitimate by his mother (In- grid Caven), he remains silent because \"he is powerless before the strength of the adults.\" The Mother and the Whore-which ex- amines the relationship of Alexandre (Leaud) with an older woman off whom he lives (Bernadette Lafont) and a pro- miscuous nurse named Veronika (Fran- ~oise Lebrun) via a series of long walks, conversations, and lovemaking-marks 28

~--------------------------------------------------------------, although people do discuss sex, they do so in a derogatory tone. \" mauvaises frequentations. \"I learned a lot about life from films that moved me,\" included in the film a scene Eustache tried to counter this trend village Don Juan who has just deserted from Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, with his Dirty Story, about a man who one of them, neve'r quite making up with Ava Gardner. \"American cinema peeps through a hole in the men's room their minds on a course of action. This is was a vehicle for dreaming life. That's into the women's room adjacent to it. primarily because Eustache's man is al- what gave it its splendor. I wanted to \"It's about sex being the mirror of the ways involved with two women at a show the importance of dreams for the soul. When one touches the soul, the time, his allegiance therefore split be- young boy, how they function and taboo of sex remains. I showed that sex tween them. Even Daniel in Mes petites where they come from . So I chose a film has nothing to do with morals, not even amoureuses finds himself between his from the Fifties. What is sorious is that with aesthetics. Sex is a metaphysical mother and grandmother. even the great Hollywood films have affair.\" The film is comprised of two lost the power to make us dream. It no episodes which tell the same story in Unlike The Mother and the Whore, longer exists, just as the way Daniel ac- different ways: one is improvised by nar- which \"takes place at a time when one costs the village girls has disappeared. In rator Jean-Noel Picq , who scripted from was asking oneself questions about be- Hollywood films one didn't speak of his own experience; the other, featuring ing happy with what one does and with sex. It was evident that the hero and the Michel Lonsdale, is fiction . The two one's sexual life,\" Mes petites heroine got along together sexually. were meant to question the rapport be- amoureuses presents sex as joyless \"be- Now the values have shifted a lot, but tween reality and fiction. cause it takes place in a period when sex was a taboo and was associated with While the filmmaker's first two films shame.\" Eustache, who admitted that were \"pre-planned, almost drawn out,\" he later decided that camera angle and -_ 1 movement are best discovered on the Martin Loeb in Mes petites amoureuses. set, not least for \"the suicidal factor of shooting a scene, searching as one would search for the next sentence, and then cutting.\" In both The Mother and the Whore and Mes petites amoureuses, Eus- tache uses fade-outs so as \"not to tamper with the image. If I use a fade in the beginning and the end of a scene, it's already edited, like a completed sen- tence. I prefer to do it as I shoot, to give a sign to the cinematographer to end an image, rather than in the lab, where it's mechanical. It would damage the im- age, which is why I don't use dissolves - they're only possible in a lab.\" During the editing, he tried \"to let the film be born and breathe on its own, not to impose 'pretty tricks' but allow the rhythm to impose itself.\" In favoring fades , Eustache prevents incidents from being fully formed in front of the cam- era. He prolongs an image by fading on it just as he destroys it before it becomes concrete. \"I try to remove the sense of anecdote,\" he explained. \"I want to put myself in a state where there are no longer any meanings.\" He cuts from a scene before a real confrontation can take place. In Mes petites amoureuses, a little boy on a tree is spared a confronta- tion with an irate hunter. Similarly, a girl in a church who causes Daniel's first erection is saved from his sexual flutter- ings by a fade. In short, the filmmaker always prefers image to incident. \"Mes petites amoureuses, which is about consciousness, stops each time the boy learns something new about life. There's a succession of scenes, in each of which he learns something. This im- poses the rhythm and duration of a se- 29

COLLECTOR'S CATALOG quence. In The Mother and the Whore , it is necessarily very funn y. Jacques Demy NO.2 NOW AVAILABLE was not important whether each speech is a very pessimistic filmmaker even if in was destroyed by itself or by another. It's his films one sings and dances all the ONLY $3 .00 not real time; it's expanded time. In time. A sad film is unbearable without principle, in well-constructed films , the laughter, but then despair makes one Original scenes become shorter and shorter to- laugh too.\" Posters ward the end , to preserve the spectator's interest. Of the one hundred sequences • rare of Mes petites amoureuses, the last lobby cards twenty make up half the film. Similarly, In 1971 , Eustache had said, \"The in The Mother and the Whore , as the film goal I tried to attain in my first film was @ proceeds, the sequences become to return to Lumiere\" -to cherish the longer. It's curious, but not willed. \" integrity of what was filmed , as the Lu- CI~~M@~()~ miere brothers did in their newsreels of \"The Mother and the Whore is a film of hurtling trains and workers leaving their CoUections Bought. Sold, Traded words and Mes petites amoureuses a film factory. \"One must respect what one 12·6 p.m. Tuesdays· Saturdays of looks. T hese are two ways of making films ,\" he elaborated. \"One of the most contact, different yet similar. In the time difficult things in cinema is to capture (415) 776-9988 of silent cinema, people thought that a the true light of things, which I think 1488 vaUejo St., San Francisco, CA.,94109 film was a form of visual expression. I was the virtue of Lumiere. I don't want think that sound has as much impor- the camera to add or select anything or tance. If someone speaks all the time move too much so that one doesn't see and the text is interestin g, it's no less what is filmed.\" cinema th an a shot of th ousands of ex- tras in motion. In the T hirties and For- This refusal to let anything stand be- ties , Marcel Pagnol a nd Sacha Guitry tween his camera and the image was also were acc used of making filmed theater , a factor in his opting in favor of amateur bu t thirty years later they were recog- over professional actors. \"Amateurs are ni zed for what th ey are: trul y modern in not aware of the thing they participate spirit and visual express ion. Whether I in. In Mes petites amoureuses, where the make a film like Amoureuses , in which only actors were the mother and the one hardl y speaks, or Th e Moth er , grandmother, they didn't even read the which is very ve rbal, I try not to think of script. They just obeyed orders, which it as a probl e m. It's like a book in whi ch was quite convenient for me, because there are both descripti ve passages and everything was emptied of meaning. di alogu e . If Alexa ndre speaks a lot, it's This is why the meaning came out of the becau se he tri es to hang on to and , at th e very things themselves rather than sa me time , destroy, what he knows through their delivery. about life.\" His monologues, like \"Up to now, I've been interested Veronika's, are seen by Eustache as ca- more in the depth of people's faces than thartic. But in Veronika's last mono- in their range of acting. Maybe I was logue, words become incantatory, even wrong. I was afraid of actors. In The masturbatory, as she incessantly repeats Mother and the Whore they were friends, the word \"putain. \" \"I was taken by my which made a big difference. I wrote the own game there,\" Eustache remem- film for Jean-Pierre Leaud, because I bered , \" by the lyricism of that discourse. felt he could go further than he did in I didn't dominate it at all. I just followed the films of Truffaut and Godard ; I it. In the scene rio , it was half-laughing, sensed that there was a potential in him half-crying, Fran<;:oise Lebrun did it all for a certain madness that he didn't ex- crying, but since she was not an actress press in their films .\" and was quite reserved in real life,. I understood I had to leave it the way it The \"madness\" Eustache himself was . \" pressed in his oeuvre may be described most accurately by his own assessment Still, there is humor in Eustache's of Chabrot's Les bonnes femmes , which work. In The Mother and the Whore, he he admired: \"Out of the flattest reality, pays tribute to the screwball comedy it created something oneiric; it achieved routines of the characters of Howard a dimension of the fantastic in a vulgar Hawks and Leo McCarey via his own and mundane universe. \" For all his self- protagonists' monologues-for exam- deprecating laments offailure, Eustache ple, a woman's lengthy account of her has succeeded in converting pain into narrow escape from a passionate ampu- poetry with an austere intensity rare in tee in New York City. French cinema. It is for us to lament that his \"madness\" wasn't allowed to reach \" In cinema, as in life,\" explained its full eruption. Eustache, \"a long and funny story has a chilling effect, while a very serious film The author thanks Michael Brodsky for his insights, which were helpful in the preparation ofthis article. 30

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Theatrical Realism by Carrie Rickey the Boris Leven-designed West Side both attended at the University of Story (1961), the Jetsjeteed in the con- Southern California Architecture School If it's true , as Marie Antoinette's mil- demned Manhattan squalor where Lin- in the early Thirties. Smith graduated to itant milliner Rose Bertin claimed, that The Wizard of Oz and Leven to Alexan- \"There's nothing new except what's coln Center today stands. In the next der's Ragtime Band-notable projects been forgotten,\" then there wouldn't be because Oz's structure inherently coun- much creative incentive for artists. Her scene, a Jet or two serenaded Officer terpoises dream with waking \"reality,\" disrelish of novelty might have been Krupke in the studio set, an unheard-of while Alexander's has a flabbergasting founded during film's infant years when juxtaposition in film's early days, when sequence in which bandleader Tyrone -although it was possible to be an in- the disjunction between real and artifi- Power belatedly realizes chantoozie ventor in a realm without precedents cial backdrop was considered too jarring and conventions-art directors com- for the audience. Alice Faye's love for him. It is a preco- posed the canvas of a set by borrowing from theatrical and painterly modes lost Such disjunction is what gives the cur- cious example of Theatrical Realism: and found -again. But came the day rent wave of art direction its distinctive Power hightails it off the dais to pursue when actual exteriors were introduced flavor. Devise an oxymoron and call it Faye down a typical studio-set \"back- into movies and, as art director and his- Theatrical Realism. Or Conceptual Re- stage\" corridor at the end ofwhich a door torian Leon Barsacq concluded, \" the fu- alism. Just as color theorists discovered opens out to ... an untypical rear-screen- ture of the film set was virtually in the middle of the last century that the projected vista of San Francisco Bay by decided. \" abutment of two contrasting colors in- moonlight, becoming their rousing tensifies the value of each, so the con- clinch with breathtakingly phony back- The original Year Zero of movie de- trast between \"reality\" and \"unreality\" drop. The net effect is one of mixing sign, when the constructed set tailored heightens a movie's dramatic impact. diamonds with rhinestones , so dazzling for the mobile camera replaced the static Deriving its particular edge from such you no longer can distinguish the differ- proscenium appropriate for a static audi- ragged juxtapositions , Theatrical Real- ence between radiances-you see only ence, has come round again as subse- ism is an art directorial mode Bertolt aglow. quent generations of art directors Brecht might have championed: its self- reinvent realism-a process, Mlle. Ber- consciousness acknowledges that, • tin notwithstanding, far from reinvent- though a given set captures the distorted ing the wheel. At first, constructed sets and exaggerated vistas of lived experi- Leven's and Smith's first credited ef- were simulacrums of \"reality\": modular, ence, it is unquestionably the work of emendable. A Romanesque loggia in artificers. forts carry the seeds of Theatrical Real- Death Takes a Holiday could be \"re- ism, but it probably wasn't until West dressed\" to become a cottage-style One could assign paternity ofTheatri- Side Story that the contrast between the drawing room in Peter Ibbetson. Like- cal Realism to Leven and Jack Martin real and the deliberately unreal was wise, the nineteenth-century country Smith in America, and to Alexandre maintained throughout the movie's home of the Bennetts in Pride and Preju- Trauner-A. D . for such memorable course. And it wasn't until yet later- dice is transformed into the contempo- Carne-Prevert movies as Hotel du Nord, perhaps 1964-that the felicitous pair- rary suburban digs of Father ofthe Bride. Les Visteurs du soir, and Les Enfants du ing of an innovative art director with an paradis-in France. Smith, the MGM ambitious director dictated such dra- The second Year Zero came postwar, contract art director who worked on such matic interspersing be employed in a with the alfresco movies of Italian Neo- Vincente Minnelli movies as Meet Me in nonmusical. realists, and the city-as-studio plein-air St . Louis, An American in Paris, and filmmaking that commenced in America Yolanda and the Thief, used musicals as a Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in 1964 (Art Director: Ken Adam) and Ar- with The House on 92nd Street. In its first natural laboratory for experimental jux- thur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde tapositions because of the built-in dis- (A. D.: Dean Tavoularis) were signal phase, set design was dominated by the junction between \"the book\" and the events because the movies' \"look\" numbers. Trauner worked the other stirred the same kind of critical notoriety reconstructors of reality. In its second, way, using his super-real sets to enlarge as their content. What was it about these the stylized actors who inhabited them. movies that so galvanized audiences vis- unmediated realism (actual subways, al- Trauner built his sets from the ground ually? While it had been a convention in up; his simulacrums were so astonish- musicals to switch gears from book real- leys, railroad flats) was ala mode. ingly authentic-looking on screen that ity to the transcendence of its numbers, Carne's genuine locations tended to to do so in a drama was to defy audience Now a third Year Zero has begun: the look fake. expectations and narrative fluidity. And prevailing art directorial style is an inter- since the \"shocking\" violence in these mediate between realism in the raw and Smith and Leven, not coincidentally, two movies waffled at the border of the realism reconstructed. In one scene in 32

documentary and the operatic, the audi- Modernist architecture. dox a dramatic frame. ence was manipulated at the levels of Whither the direction of Theatrical both content and form. Whether the German anti-naturalist Realism? Directors like Martin Scor- The mid-Sixties saw the increasing movies of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, R. W. sese, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, frequency of such incursions into the and now Jack Fisk (having joined, with realm of Theatrical Realism. But it Fassbinder, and Daniel Schmid were an Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Autant-Lara, wasn't until the early Seventies that this and Mitchell Leisen the illustrious ranks became a dominant art directorial mode. influence on art directors like Adam, of art director-turned-director) have in- Movies like Badlands (Jack Fisk, 1973), ternalized the mode at the very heart of The Conversation (Tavoularis, 1974), Fisk, Sylbert, and Tavoularis or were their movies. In Scorsese's 1977 New Chinatown (Richard Sylbert, 1974), Don York, New York (A. D .: Boris Leven, Giovanni (Alexandre Trauner, 1979), infuenced by them is hard to gauge, demonstrating that the original might and the James Bond series (most of still be the greatest), Leven's moody, them designed by Adam) changed the since there was an efflorescence of The- artificial sets were the backdrops to the texture of film. It had become the rule painful psychodramatic pyrotechnics of rather than the exception that the art atrical Realism in Hollywood and Ham- Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. director's means were impure, eclectic Fisk's own Raggedy Man , a careful re- -authentic and ersatz gemixte-rather burg simultaneously. Whichever construction of Dorothea Lange dust- than purely theatrical or strictly docu- bowl anomie, was set against a Texas mentary. direction the influence traveled, it hamlet, all the better to derive power from its temporal and emotional disjunc- This, of course, paralleled new the- looked like a revisionist International Style. • Cultural causes for the rise ofTheatri- cal Realism are two . First, is the intro- duction of new technologies. Sophisticated surveillance equipment is the putative subject ofThe Conversation, Dr. Strangelove, Fisk's Phantom of the Paradise, all the Bond movies, and they Dean Tavoularis's One From the Heart Vegas set. ories and practices in architecture, long required visual correlatives. Since items tions. Tavoularis, having learned from the most profound influence on art di- like wiring, bugs, weaponry, and the rection; where purity and formalism had like are often innocuous (which is the Las Vegas, recently completed Cop- hegemony until the early Seventies, source of their tyranny over our lives), it pola's One From the Heart, a conceptual suddenly architects were \"learning from was often the art director's task to objec- musical like Pennies From Heaven, di- Las Vegas\" instead of abominating the tify these gadgets, make them appear rected by Herbert Ross and art-directed vulgar pluralism of Sin City's behavior- menacing. To do so meant to exaggerate by Ken Adam. control ambience. Sylbert, in his evoca- them, give them presence that they tive Chinatown and Reds, establishes a might not have in reality but which Theatrical Realism has come full cir- psychological mood of the period by cre- \"read\" on the screen. cle. The technique was born in staging ating sets and dressing them with ob- movie musicals; now Theatrical Real- jects that have a yellowed patina to Second, and more basic, is the explo- ism's greatest practitioners are applying them. Not as they would have looked in ration of new modes of dramatic pun- it to a new generation of the genre, ac- 1917 (Reds) or 1935 (Chinatown), but as gency. While the would-be \"law of knowledging their source. If closing the they look to a modern viewer looking emotional contrasts\" had its prehistoric circle means another compass of the back at artifacts of an earlier generation. phase in musicals of the Thirties, it took track, we can anticipate juxtapositions Sylbert's sets are weatherbeaten, used, much longer to apply its force in a non- between reality and unreality so exag- as though they've been excavated. melodic setting; Theatrical Realism gerated that the visuals of movies like Sylbert allows the present to intervene, didn't obtain as a legit device until the Syberberg's Our Hitler might be the way to comment on the past. Like post- Sixties and Seventies because it took a the future looks. And if closing the circle heterodox milieu to accept so unortho- means the end of an era, then art direc- tion is once again at Year Zero. 33

b1'tt d1'Cecio'C.1 c1udes Peter Sellers' last film , The Curse is surface, it's light. Looking at a win- ofFu Manchu, and Bertrand Tavernier's dow, an architect wonders how it closes, Alexandre Trauner current Coup de torchon. or how the house will hold together. In interyiewed by the cinema, these things hardly interest • us! Carole Weisweiiler and Annette Insdorf What is the role ofan art director? How is a decor created? To help the mise en scene so that the There are three stages: 1. research; For more than fifty years, the magnifi- spectator has an immediate grasp of the 2. a passage from imagination to design cent set designs of Alexandre Trauner characters' psychology. To do this , you -the painted sketches; 3. finally, the have given shape to French and Ameri- must show only the elements that are construction, which returns to the most can films. Born in Hungary in 1906, he necessary, and which can be varied ac- emigrated to France during the Thirties cording to the unexpected things that realistic execution of details. In the after studying painting at Budapest's people accept as true-a box of matches sense that we try to obtain things photo- School of Fine Arts. Earning little as a can have as much importance as a build- graphically, this gives the effect of the painter, he was sent by a sculptor friend ing. You can't show everything; ulti- real. to Lazare Meerson, the leading set de- mately, what you don't show is almost as signer of the period , who was looking for important as what you do show. It's like What does the research consist of! an assistant.This meeting changed the the work of a sculptor: It consists of Again, elimination. It's like a painter course of Trauner's life: He became who searches for his colors in different Meerson's assistant and worked on films Alexand~ Trauner, foreground. shops to have a better red or a better by Rene Clair (Le Million), Jacques elimination. For example, in the design Feyder(Le grandjeu), and MarcAllegret of a doctor's office, the viewer must un- yellow. It's very precise work. If the film (L' Hotel du Libre Echange). derstand at first glance whether it's a takes place in Paris, the Parisians must poor doctor or a wealthy one. To symbol- recognize their neighborhood . What By 1937, when Traunerwas himself a ize the library of a man of the theatre, a counts in research is not so much exacti- set designer, he met the French poet detail, a book, a color, or a certain light- tude as inventiveness. You can't know Jacques Prevert, who was writing for ing should evoke the theatre instantly. everything, but you have to have a de- Marcel Carne. The three became a fa- veloped intuition. For example, when I mous and inseparable trio in the French Do youfeel closer to the painter or to the had to decorate Jack Lemmon's studio cinema; their films together include architect? in The Apartment, I went to The Mu- Drole de drame, Quai des brumes, Hotel seum of Modern Art to check the most du Nord, Les Visiteurs du soir, and the The painter of course! You have to popular reproductions. We didn't want undisputed piece de resistance, Les En- judge a decor a bit like a painting. For our character to have bad taste, with fants du paradis . (Resistance in more me, decoration is first of all an illustra- things from The Saturday Evening Post ways than one, since Jews were forbid- tion, then the creation of a space in on the walls, or pin-ups! One detail is den to work in the French cinema dur- which the cameraman can put his light. marvelous in the film-that the key to ing the Occupation, and this Jew had to Set design in films is the opposite of the washroom symbolizes the transfer of design this film in secrecy.) architecture: Architecture is structure, power. That's documentation! and what we show in the decor of a film Trauner met Orson Welles in the Fif- Can an art director influence a style of ties and provided the decor for Othello. In this period, Trauner began his prolific cinema? creations for American as well as French Surely. Lazare Meerson had a great films. In Hollywood , he worked with Howard Hawks, Anatole Litvak, and influence on a certain form of Billy Wilder, who became one of his cinema.The visual side of Rene Clair is closest friends and collaborators. To- Meerson-this lightness, these photos gether they gave visual form to Witness without special effects of transparent for the Prosecution ; Love in the After- things, as if seen through a veil. During noon; The Apartment (for which Trauner this period, expressionist cinema was received an Oscar); One, Two , Three; Ir- dominated by black, and Lazare Meer- ma la Douce; Kiss Me, Stupid; and The son is the man who brought in white. Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. When this began to have a certain suc- cess, the art director from MGM came to Trauner's designs graced the films of Paris and we had long discussions about William Wyler, Jules Dassin, Stanley how to realize these photographic Donen, John Frankenheimer, Fred Zin- effects.This was the root of a change: nemann, John Huston, and Joseph Lo- the MGM lion became white. Sud- sey, first on Monsieur Klein and Les denly, everything became white pastry. Routes du Sud, and finally on Don Thus, the great art director of the Amer- Giovanni. Here, his experience in deco- ican cinema, Cedric Gibbon, made rating homes as well as movies served white pastry in almost all his sets. him well: with an unerring eye for natu- ral decor and architecture, he adapted And who influenced you? the work of Palladio to Mozart's music Since I consider myself to be first and and Losey's action.Trauner never rests foremost a painter, I was especially in- on his laurels: his most recent work in- fluenced by the Impressionists and the Cubists. Mainly Bonnard and Vuillard among the former, and then Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Juan Gris. As bizarre as this may seem, when you look at the 34

Fedora. workmanship of the Cubists during this pended from a ceiling, mounted in alu- Irma La Douce. period, their painting is neither rigid nor mInum. hard . It is painting in which light floats .continually. In 1979 you designed the setfor the film Don Giovanni, which was shot in Italy in You have decorated apartmentsfor your the houses of the sixteenth-century archi- friends. What is the difference in concep- tect Palladio . What happens when a de- tion between decorating for film or for signer has to create a decor which already someone's home? exists? Aside from certain technical and fi- It had been decided that we would nancial problems, there's no big differ- shoot Don Giovanni in the decors of Pal- ence for me. Whether it's for a film or an individual, great discretion is necessary. La pouce a l'oreille. You put yourself in the service of the film director or the apartment's owner. In both cases, you have to try to understand who they are, the people who will in- habit it, how they live, who their friends are, and so on. The psychological ele- ment is as important as technical knowl- edge. The secret is to translate each personality into volume and color. But always, in a home or on the set, there are questions of budget. Isn' t this constraining ? Yes and no. Yes, because you must often modify the script according to the budget: cutting scenes, locations, etc. But this also forces us to have ideas, to find cunning devices. For example, Or- son Welles' Othello did not have enough money to make the soldiers' armor, so we made it out of oil cans. In The Apartment, we had to create the biggest office in the world. We searched throughout New York but since there wasn't enough money to use an entire floor of real offices, we were forced to design it. The set was entirely mounted through perspective.There were no two elements alike: the whole set was sus- 35

Don Giovanni. Klaus Adam. Born in Berlin, Ger- many February 1921. Educated Berlin: ladio, and that imposed a style. My job between Palladia's time and Mozart's, a Le College Francais. Edinburgh: was to complete them in the style of this century later ? Craigend Park School. London: St. frame. Thus, Don Giovanni's house is Pauls School. Studied 1937-39 London the \"Rotonda.\" For instance, I always I don' t think of eras in terms of chro- University: Bartlett School of Architec- added elements-like stairs-to create nology or exactitude. Palladio is the re- ture, recei ving articles with firm of archi- continuous spaces.The scene of the turn to classicism-a certain dream. The tects and civil engineers: C. W. Glover & Commander was shot in different regularity and rigidity ofPalladio go very Partners. Upon outbreak of Second places, which required that there always well with Mozart's musical organization. World War, joined Pioneer Corps, trans- be links. I used spots of color to recall One can always interpret--as long as ferred in 1941 to the R.A. F. Trained as this scene. there is a correspondence between the pilot in U.S., seconded to U.S.A.F. and style and the spirit. retu rned to U. K. in 1943 as an R. A. F. Besides, much of the set did not exist fighter pilot. Served in England and on in the original architecture, like the Which was the hardest set for you de- the Continent in the 609th W.R. Squad- cemetery and the beginning of hell. To sign in your career? ron until October 1946. express all these locales, I thought of a glass factory where fire is the main ele- Oh, it's never the big complicated After his demobilization from the ment. This fire was the symbol of Don sets, but rather a hotel room-as in R.A.F. in 1946, Ken Adam obtained his Giovanni's entry into the flames. We Carne's Dr8le de drame-because of its first job in film, working as a draughts- used a transformed glass factory from impersonality. Into someone's room, I man. After two years he moved up to Murano, which was reconstructed. can bring a kind of description of the assistant art director. Hollywood was character, his tastes , his social level. But making films cheaply in Europe in the So you saw the film's style as traveling there are so few elements in a hotel late Forties and early Fifties, and Adam room! found continuous employment because of his facility in several languages and for his superb craftsmanship , especially where ships were concerned. Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) led to The Crimson Pirate (1951), The MasterofBaL- Lantrae (1953), and Helen of Troy, for which he designed the Greek war fleet and supervised the draughting depart- ment under art director Edward Carrere. Upon completion of Helen of Troy, Adam stayed on in Italy in 1955 to do pre-production budgeting for William Trauner's sketch for the kitchen in How to Steal a Million ... and the set. 36

\\\\)rler's Ben-Hur (released in 1959). Re- cess to reference material. I knew noth- approach. It was the first time I got men- turning to England, he struggled ing about rockets, so out of desperation I tioned by the critics, and, to my sur- through the next few years, supple- went to Victoria Station and found some prise, I got the first prize for art direction menting his income as a full art director science-fiction magazines. That night, at the Moscow Film Festival that year.\" by designing London's first coffee bars. while Bill Menzies went through a bot- tle of my Scotch, I did a vague charcoal After Sodom and Gomorrah (1963) Then Mike Frankovich, head of Co- sketch of a three-stage rocket, which with Robert Aldrich, Adam began work Todd was delighted with.\" Adam re- in his longest and most profitable part- lumbia, U.K., introduced him to Mike ceived his first Academy Award nomina- nership: the James Bond pictures he Todd, who was preparing Around The tion for his work on the film. would design for Albert \"Cubby\" Broc- coli (and, at first, Harry Saltzman). Since World in 80 Days. Now he was a full art director, collabo- 1963 he has designed twenty completed \"Mike Todd was very impressive, rating with such directors as John Ford, pictures, including seven Bond films, Jacques Tourneur, Jack Cardiff, and Ro- two for Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Stange/ove enormously possessive, and incredibly bert Aldrich. In 1959 he took his first and Barry Lyndon), and five for Herbert frightening,\" Adam told FILM COM- credit as production designer on The Ross , including his latest, Pennies From MENT. \"He had a suite in the Dorcester Rough and the Smooth for Robert Siod- Heaven. where he conducted his business like a mak, and has retained the title ever king in his throne room, summoning since. At this point he abandoned his The Bond films represent something people to meetings and dispensing or- strict architectural training,casting aside unique in contemporary film: the pro- ders at all hours and without warning. his hard pencil for felt-tipped \"flo- gression of one production designer's One night, William Cameron Menzies master\" pen for his sketches. The stage work in an ongoing series of increasingly [for whom David O. Selznick devised was being set for his break into the world popular films, growing from a tentative the term \"production designer\" to de- of big budgets and creative freedom that talent into a protean artistry. Pennies scribe his work on Gone With the Wind] would make his name synonymous with from Heaven , like Barry Lyndon and Dr. came to me , shaking all over. He had imaginative opulence and superb crafts- Strangelove before it, proves that Adam's just come from a press conference Todd manship. \"I did a little picture called work cannot be measured exclusively by had called to announce that he [Todd] The Trials ofOscar Wilde in 1960,\" Adam which mad genius' lair will rise out of had thought of the space satellite before recalled , \"in which my set budget was structural steel to threaten world peace. Eisenhower. The press said, 'All right, £15 ,000 from an overall cost of Like Menzies and every other great pro- Mr. Todd. Now give us documentary £250,000. But because of the budget duction designer, Adam is a collabora- proof.' So Todd had turned to Bill Men- limitations, I was forced to do a lot of tive craftsman, facing self-doubt, zies and said, 'Get Ken Adam to design stylization, rather more of a theatrical super-budgets, creative battles, and the me a rocket by tomorrow.' It happened chance of colossal failure-and emerg- to be a bank holiday; all the stores and libraries were closed, giving me no ac- Ken Adam on the war room setfor Dr. Strangelove. 37

I had a lot of fun onGoldfinger. I was allowed to look at Fort Knox from the outside, though not on the inside. But I knew, more or less, what bank vaults looked like and how gold is stacked be- cause of weight problems, and I didn't want that sort of realism. I felt the audi- ence had to feel they were behind bars and would want to see stacks of gold behind that enormous grill. It was com- pletely unrealistic and impractical, but it paid off-we got a lot of mail from peo- I ple all over th~ world asking how we \\ \\ were allowed to shoot in Fort Knox. How accurate was the laser? Bond's climb to the Penthouse sketch . Pretty accurate for that period. When the time came to create the laser unit, I ing remarkably unscathed as he enters when it worked it became more impor- rang up the two technical advisors I'd his 36th year in the film business. tant from film to film. used on Dr. No, and they okayed what I • Did you use existing reactor plans for was doing. We couldn't use it for real, so You ' ve designed seven of Cubby Broc- your nuclear control room? the actual laser beam had to be added coli's twelve James Bond pictures: Dr. That was one of the biggest sets I had optically afterwards. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only done to that point, so I used two techni- I suppose the Aston Martin is the most Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, cal advisors to be sure it was accurate. I famous prop from the Bond series . People The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moon- also liked Dr. No's underground apart- still talk about it. raker. But in the beginning, what was the ment with the fish tank. But the set I I had great difficulties in talking As- feeling you had about the first little was keenest on was the big tarantula ton into letting me have one, which adventure film? room, with the circular opening in the eventually became two. The ideas for all In the first draft that I saw, Dr. No ceiling. Simple, but ominous. its gimmickry and gadgetry came quite was a monkey or an ape or something. It Your work on Goldfinger was a major easily to me, because I was a sports car wasn't very good, and I had serious trend-setter in the mid-Sixties. Asidefrom freak, and I could get rid of all my frus- doubts about whether I should be in- the gold girl, the golden Rolls Royce se- trations at once. The special effects by volved with it or not. I had read some of quence, cmd all the other delights, you John Stears were of great importance, the Fleming Books, which I had liked. broke new ground with the Fort Knox set, because it's one thing to come up with And Terence Young seemed to have a the laser, and, above all, with the Aston ideas, but it's another thing to make certain panache, identifying himself Martin. them work. with Bond. Harry [Saltzman] was brought up as a showman and started talking in those terms , so it became rather an exciting undertaking. From the first film , you manage to con- vey a futuristic feel to the villains' lairs . Did this arise out of the script? General discussions ? When shooting Dr. No began in Ja- maica, Terence and I had some prelimi- nary discussions about how we visualized the film. He continued to shoot while I went back to Pinewood [Studio, outside London]. Because we were short of time, I had to design and start to build four or five stages full of sets before the unit came back. So when they arrived they were really faced with afait accompli . But Terence really liked them , and Harry agreed. There seemed to be a lot ofcopper in Dr. No's underground house . Stylistically, that carried over to the other Bonds as well. We faked that with a process system, as well as a lot of other metal , which I'd never done before. I was trying for a slightly tongue-in-cheek, slightly The space ship in Moonraker. ahead -of- contemporary concept, and 38

Did it ever'occur to you that you might be taking things too far, or did you just let yourselfgo completely? Completely. I went through a crisis of wondering if I was going too far-or going mad altogether-when I de- signed the volcano on You Only Live .,I ~ I)~t\" Twice . , But eachfilm seemed to grow in propor- tion to the previous one's box office. We were very conscious of the fact that we had to keep up the spectacle of the visual effects. And on Thunderball you added the new dimension of underwater scenes, only The penthouse design for Diamonds are Forever. hinted at in Dr. No. That was in keeping with this specta- M's conference room, which I designed Live Twice? cle idea. We had the exotic Bahamas with tapestries that went up exposing Until that picture, we had stuck very locations , the Vulcan Bomber, the charts underneath and the close to the original Fleming stories. But underwater scenes, the hydrofoil \"Disco S.P,E.C.T.R .E . conference room , when we went to Japan to scout loca- Volante,\" and the bomb carrier. The where the seat disappears tions he talked about, we couldn't find only two sets I tried to go bigger on were What was the crisis during You Only them. So we began to improvise, which became standard operating procedure ever afterwards-and which I some- OO'TACE times regret. After covering two-thirds of Japan by helicopter, we found a vol- cano on Kyushu and thought , \"Wouldn't it be fun to have our villain inside a volcano?\" So that became the ~. ,r most important and most expensive set I we've ever had. /' d'always assumed it was an indoor set, aided by glass shots or mattes. It was all real! Roughly 400 feet in diameter, 120 feet high , with a 70-foot diameter sliding door set at an angle at the top. Too big for any sound stage in the world. So we built it free-standing, and waterproofed it as best we could. I suddenly broke out in eczema all over the place. All I could think was, \"Am I going crazy to take on a million-dollar set?\" I must have used 700 tons of struc- tural steel. With that much effort we should have built a soundstage and put the set inside it so it wouldn't have been such a total loss after the picture was finished . But it was so tall , and had such an odd shape, and it had never been done before. We built it to be shot from the inside only, with the steelwork fol- lowing the contours of the set. I covered myself by calling in firms of structural engineers, but it was still experimental. When the real helicopter came through the roof door for the first time, neither the pilot nor we knew whether there might be updraft, downdrafts , or some- thing else to wreck him. It was nerve- racking , but ended up working extremely well. Ken Adam in the massive soundstage for The Spy Who Loved Me. Were most ofthe interiors for You Only Live Twice shot at Pinewood? All but two, the sumo wrestling and 39

From sketch to set: the bank sequence from Pennies From Heaven. different \"look\" in mind. My Bond designs and all my other the scene where Bond meets his bride- There was a basis in reality for a lot of to-be. Two of the Pinewood sets- what I did, for example, Willard Whyte's ahead-of-modern designs were always Osato's office and Tanaka's office, with penthouse. Cubby Broccoli had been a very linear; simple but effi~ient, with a its two copper television monitors-are friend of Howard Hughes, so I based the bareness of line. But on Spy I also went among my personal favorites. penthouse on his, but more operatic, into curved shapes. The. combination less realistic. I was trying to carry a mood excited me, and that excitement re- Did you have any involvement with On of absurdist reality in the moonscape flected on some of the other designs I Her Majesty's Secret Service? and lunar-vehicle chase sequences-al- did. Something just clicked, and I knew though, again, I used N.A.S.A. photo- I'd done it right. I did some initial location work in graphs for the moonscrape. The Switzerland, but then the picture was diamond satellite I designed to look like There was more ofan overallfeel to the postponed, so I did Chitty Chitty Bang a cross between a mobile and a radar picture, reflected in another Oscar nomi- Bang instead. I was glad to skip that dish, collapsible so it could be carried nation following your win for Barry Lyn- Bond, because it gave me a chance, after underwater. don two years before. Chitty, to do some smaller, low-key films with Herb Ross, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and You skipped the next two Bonds as well. I was functioning not just by creating The Owl and the Pussycat. That way, I I went straight from Diamonds into individual sets, but by having a produc- was all pepped up again when Diamonds Sleuth, with Joe Mankiewicz, then di- tion-design progression. I did go Are Forever came along. rectly on to The Last ofSheila with Herb through a slight insecurity period again, Ross and Barry Lyndon with Stanley however, because although it's an ad- \"Pepped up\"? How about \"offthe deep [Kubrick], so I couldn't do Live and Let vantage to get as much freedom as I end\"? From this picture onward, there Die or The Man With the Golden Gun. have in designing the Bond films it's an seemed to be very little contact with real- But you returned for The Spy Who immense responsibility. ity, or with the original Fleming plotlines. Loved Me. And you seemed to have a Especially when you're building a Everything had become bigger than sound stage to hold just one set, and that life, though still tongue-in-cheek. sound stage costs $1,800,000 in 1976 cur- rency. I had to design and build the inside of a supertanker which would accommo- date three submarines and a control room. And having no desire to repeat the workable but ultimately wasteful free- standing set idea we did in You Only Live Twice, I designed the supertanker inte- rior in terms of what could remain for use after the film was finished. And that's how the James Bond 007 Stage at Pine- wood came into being. Instead of build- ing the set inside an existing stage, none of which were big enough anyway, we built the stage over and around the set. Everything in Spy was big. From the reality of the pyramids and temples of Egypt to the villain's submersible lair, Atlantis. It was contagious. I even scaled up Anya's bedroom, making it big and pala- tial to play against the usual concept of Russia. And I did the same thing with Gogol's office-in part inspired by Eisenstein, though no one may have no- ticed-to counterpoint M's office, which is so typically English. On Moonraker the plot was dictated, more or less, by a series of location hunts and brainstorming sessions, rather than coming from the book. Were you comfort- able working that way? Spy had been conceived and shot in much more controlled circumstances than Moonraker, so I was happier on that. And for $13.5 million against $30 million for Moonraker, we really got our money's worth on screen. But Moon- raker was the biggest, most complex 40

film I've ever worked on, with up to four and that really appealed to me. think will be wonderful. I think the separate units shooting all over the world This seems very much a studio picture, dance numbers wi ll provide a relief, at once, plus all those special effects! We when we open up the sets both physi- shot combinations of reallocations , full- like Scorsese's New York, New York. It's cally and through lighting. scale mockups, partial mockups, and the style which will carry the audience miniatures in a number of sequences, through, more than the story. The bank set is Bondian in proportions. and they cut together quite well. But it It wasn't originally intended to be Its size was a big bone of contention. shot entirely at the studio, but that's the was a logistics nightmare. For tax rea- way it worked out. Because of severe In the BBC series the film is based on, sons we had to shoot most of our inte- budgetary restrictions, all the scenes we the scene took place in the manager's I riors in Paris where there wasn't very were going to shoot on location in Chi- office of a small provi ncial bank in Eng- much stage space. As soon as we'd finish cago were brought back to MGM. I built land. For the film, the story was re-set in on a set it would have to be struck and a part of the Loop area on a sound stage, Chicago, though it was still kept in the new one built in its place. This meant and though I questioned having to do Thirties, so I went there looking for lo- having to go on location a lot. In fact, on that at first, I'm convinced now it was cations and photographed a number of Moonraker we shot more location inte- the right choice. In the end , having to banks from the period. They were enor- riors than on any previous Bond. shoot everything at Metro was stylisti- mous , neo-classic palaces. I finally made We found the chateaux in and around cally correct. my point when I showed the photos I Paris, and used the Pompidou Center We had innumerable battles because I had taken to Herb and Dennis Potter for part of the Drax Complex, including strongly believed all the time that we [author of both miniseries and film]. Holly's office. We shot locations in Bra- had to start off with a big number, to set They agreed that it was the right sort of zil, Egypt, and Venice, and used various the tone up a few notches from the de- concept. boats and gondolas I designed for the pressing mood the film sets during the I designed a bank, then we had argu- chase through the canals. Interiors for first few minutes. So we start off with a ments over whether it should be bigger many locations were precise, including big dance number in the bank, which I or smaller, but I stuck to my original the Vennini Glass Museum; but, obvi- ously, the key to the whole picture was the space station. The copy line everyone was using around the time of Moonraker's release was, \"This film isn' t science fiction, it's science fact.\" How does that apply to- wards a space station? Before I designed our space station, I spent some time at N.A.S.A., looking at their conceptual designs for real ones. But when I actually designed our sta- tion , I departed sharply from their futur- istic concepts, because Stanley Kubrick had already used the wheel in 2001. I thought it would be a difficult thing for interior settings because it's rather like shooting inside a bicycle tire. N.A.S.A. had another concept, a series of cylin- ders which would be bolted together in space. But that was rather boring, visu- ally. So I compromised. I still used the cylinder idea, but I designed the space station like a mobile, in a completely irregular form, so that once it begins to rotate the audience gets a different com- position from each angle. Was Pennies From Heaven your next project after Moonraker? No, I worked on three other films, all of which fell through: The Aquarius Mis- sion, an underwater adventure picture; Destiny, a John Frankenheimer picture about the Cuban resistance movement and the Bay of Pigs; and Dress Gray, a picture about West Point that Herb Ross was going to direct. I was very demoral- ized, because I'd never had that happen before. But then Pennies From Heaven Top, the sketchfor the el Street; bottom, as it appears in Pennies From Heaven. came along, which Herb was also doing, 41

The volcano set from You Only Live Twice. concept again. I also wanted to intro- couldn't do the hooker number, because the back or side, with a long, narrow duce an Art-Deco element into the film , that would have been very interesting barcounter. Not all that interesting. So I rather than going for the neo-c1assic style visually. came up with the idea of doing it like a I had seen. The Board ofTrade Building speakeasy in the film. You went down in Chicago has a lovely Art-Deco feel- Was the street done as a straight set, or into the basement, and it has the same ing, so I used that for our bank exterior, using forced perspective? cramped, dark mood until the dance and the whole thing became a marble number begins. Then it opens up and cathedral to the power of money. I The hooker street would have been becomes livelier. thought it was important to see the con- done with forced perspective, but the trast of the Depression and this monu- actual el street wasn't. Instead, I re- With the possible exception of Sleuth, ment. duced it in scale, having found , on my yourfinest work in the past two decades in trip to Chicago, that it was very difficult the non-Bond world has been for Herbert There are a number of smaller, more to see the eI in 1.85 Panavision unless Ross and Stanley Kubrick. Could you com- intimate sets in the picture, like the flop you were very far away or tilted the cam- pare the two directors ? house, the movie theater interior, and the era up or down for each shot. I simply hotel bedroom with its imaginary elevator reduced the height of the eI to make it Herb, having been brought up in the for lovemaking. work for the film. theatre and ballet, is much more actor- oriented. He's very literal in explaining Those were designed for dual pur- The bar sequence, when Chris Walken to the actor the way he sees a role , and poses , fantasy and reality, as was the dances for Bernadette Peters , seems to very often has to go through innumera- major set we built, the \"e1\" street. We illustrate what you were saying about ble permutations to get that right. Stan- shot a number of scenes there with our opening up the sets. When I saw the pre- ley will also permutate through an actor's characters and planned to do a big dance stills, it looked very small, but it's performance to the nth degree in order hooker number, but the transformation huge during the dance. to get what he thinks is right-but I of the el to the hooker street and the sometimes feel that if Stanley could number itself were cut for budgetary I had looked at a lot of the bars in make motion pictures without actors, he reasons. Chicago, and they were all about the would be happier. same: street level, long, reasonably nar- The street looks very real, not as stylized row rooms , maybe with a poolroom at as the rest ofthe major sets. Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon . That was a major concern to every- one. No one thought it would be possi- ble to obtain a believable exterior feeling on a sound stage. The reality of an actual street was elusive, but with our superb craftsmen and painters I think we managed to get it. The street was designed for interiors and exteriors, and included Arthur's record shop, the Nighthawk cafe, and the cinema. Herb was particularly keen on some of the painters of that period , like Reginald Marsh and Edward Hopper. So I incor- porated Marsh's \"A Movie Theater\" and Hopper's \"Nighthawk Cafe\" into the street. The employment agency and the pawnshop came from photographs by Walker Evans, and a second-floor fur shop was also included. It became a jig- saw puzzle of varying artists of the pe- riod. It was just unfortunate that we 42

Richard Sylbert has worked with War- Sylbert's Chinatown design, sketch by Joe Hurley. ren Beatty from the beginning of Sylbert's sketch for John Reed's apartment in Reds. Beatty's film career: he was art director on Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass in 1961, and since then has been produc- tion designer on two films in which Beatty acted (Lilith, The Fortune) , one which he co-wrote, produced, and starred in (Shampoo) , and now Reds, on which Beatty was also the director. As perhaps his closest collaborator aside from writer Robert Towne, Sylbert is in a unique position to illuminate the ele- ments contributing to Beatty's artistic triumph in the $42 million epic Reds, unquestionably the high point of both men's careers. Born in 1928, Sylbert began his career in television during the early Fifties, de- signing two Hallmark Hall of Fame Sha- kespeare productions starring Maurice Evans, Hamlet and Richard II, as well as series including Inner Sanctum. Kazan launched him on his film career with Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd, and he has designed many of the most im- portant American films of the past two decades, such as The Manchurian Candi- date , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolj7 (for which he won an Oscar), The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Carnal Knowledge, Fat City, Chinatown, etc. Recently, he designed Partners and Frances (the Frances Farmer biographical film) and has helped Towne with the design of the writer's directorial debut film, Joe Hurley's sketch ofJ.J. Gittes' office in Chinatown. 43

PersolUll Best. design problem, and who have the mus- shot. We did more work in one day than On two occasions in his career, Sylbert cle to say that's how it's gonna be. David Lean did in two weeks on Dr. Zhivago, and we did it all the time. What has branched out of the design field, first Do you find periodfilms more challeng- slowed the picture down was the interior as executive producer on What's New ing than contemporary films? scenes. Beatty shot an enormous Pussycat? in 1965, then as a Paramount amount offootage: 1,600,000 feet. He's production executive from 1974 to 1978. No, they're just a bigger pain in the getting warmed up by the thirty-fifth He is the identical twin of production ass, because you're always looking take. Not only is he committed, he is the designer Paul Sylbert, who won an Os- around to get rid of a television antenna most careful man, he is truly the most car for Beatty's Heaven Can Wait; they when you should be thinking about considered person I have ever known. worked together on Baby Doll and A something else. Period films are won- After all, the man is the best producer in Face in the Crowd. Anthea Sylbert, the derful to do, but contemporary films are the business. And the reason he's a great costume designer, is Richard's sister-in- just as hard to do right. That's why I like director is he directed story. He didn't law and worked with him on six films, pictures like The Graduate. They offer care about anything else. One day he Rosemary's Baby, CarlUll Knowledge, The you very little to start with; you've got to said, \"Dick Sylbert is the director of how HeartbreakKid, ChilUltown, The Fortune, dig it out, and it's there to be dug out. this picture looks. Vittorio Storaro is the and Shampoo. Sylbert was interviewed You have to put Mrs. Robinson in a tiger director of how this picture's lit. And I in his office at Zoetrope Studios in Hol- dress inside of a jungle: it's just a solar- am the director of the emotions.\" lywood on the day Reds opened. ium, but the reason for it is not that it's a solarium, but it's a jungle and she's a When did he first start talking to you How does a production designer differ tiger. Those things require thinking. about Reds? from an art director? Catch-22 was the most expensive pic- ture I've done until Reds. You don't want After Lilith, around 1966, we talked a It's just a way to get more money or to to do a lot of those in your lifetime. You little about it. Four years ago, maybe feel more important. I did the same want to do one every ten years. It's won- five, is when he figured out that the only thing when I was an art director. \"Pro- derful because they're serious. But you way to do this picture is to have \"The duction designer\" is a title that's looking can get winded. I spent two years on this Witnesses.\" It's a great idea because it one. gives reality. When he got that idea, he for a job. Very few people actually de- knew it could be made. Then he started sign a production. There are a few peo- Why did the shooting take so long? talking to people and taping them, not ple who do have the leverage and who Outside, this picture moved like a do think of the picture as a whole, as a Sketch artist Bill Magor's rendition o/the Castevet's apartment in Rosemary's Baby. 44

filming. People like Walter Lippmann. Sylbert's sketchfor the Provincetown cottage in Reds. And he watched them die as he was talking to them. One of the reasons I tion design is that what I do is so real that in a warehouse in Madrid for $50,000; I think he said \"Let's do it\" is that they you can't tell the difference. We didn't told my construction guy I wanted all were dying like flies. Several of that want to lie about certain things in this the vinyl marble sheets he could find. group he got on screen are dead now, picture, because they're important aes- My joke was, that's the \"vinyl solution.\" and others you don't see on screen are thetically. The two big problems I had I don't want any credit for designing were the U.S. Senate hearing room and Smolny Institute or the Senate hearing dead too. the Smolny Institute, where Lenin room-it's already been designed by In your own research, did you study makes the speech. They are both classi- somebody-what interests me is to be cal rooms, which is very important for Russian films such as October and The me, because it was the center of power able to do it, to be strong enough, and to End of St. Petersburg? for both countries. The room where have a cheap answer. I'm extremely Lenin spoke is still there; it's preserved practical, and I don't like to waste Eisenstein used John Reed's book to in beautiful condition. I walked through things. I was much better off making the make October-he gets a screen credit it and took a lot of pictures. I built picture in Europe than I would have -but it's the most boring movie ever Smolny in London at Twickenham for been here because they don't tear things made. And also it's a lie. But they had an $75,000. I built the Senate hearing room down so fast, in spite of the fact that they advantage: they could shoot exactly were bombed to shit. The picture would where it happened. What you were looking at was the real thing. That helps. You get a few thoughts. After that, you've got to start digging. I got everything that's known in print about the Russian revolution, I bought books in Russia; the most important books I found were The Memoirs ofa Revolution- ary and The Captured City: Petrograd 1919-1920 by Victor Serge. Those are the most convincing portraits of the rev- olution. Then I found a guy in London, a graphic artist, a maniac Trotskyite who's got file cabinets full of pictures. He's got stuff the Russians don't have. More pictures of Leon Trotsky than there are of Marilyn Monroe. Books about agitprop trains. Pictures of Third International meetings. Pictures ofJohn Reed. Pictures of Emma Goldman. It was everything I needed. I've never seen a picture which had as many sets as Reds. There were 140 sets, all in different places. My whole philosophy of produc- The dorm room in Carnal Knowledge: sketch by Bill Magor. 45

have cost thirty per cent more if it had all a lot of books, art, pictures.A lot of life. been made here. There was nothing in Russia. Barren. When the mob actually stormed the Win- ter Palace, they wrecked the place, but But they aLso want to liberate them- when it happens in Reds there's very little destru ction . seLves from possessions, and that's one We couldn't. It's not our house. That reason the spaciousness of the early Rus- was a find. It's a famous house, Lancas- ter House, where the man spent more sian sequences is exhilarating. money than anybody else has ever spent on a house in England , and he broke They're free. That's why the ceilings everybody doing it. Queen Victoria used to come there and say, \"Now I know get higher and higher. No top. My Rus- what a palace looks like.\" When he died, the crown took it over because sian image was height-Russia's a big nobody could afford it, and used it for dignitaries. We didn' t even have to dress place. In America, when they have that The wind rustles through a Jack Fisk it. We got as close as possible to showing the destruction without hurting this big fight, it's so tight the ceiling in their set. It whips across the BadLands, down place. We tried to do it by having people running around and throwing things in bedroom is right over them. the street-lamped San Francisco slopes the air and all that. The Russians tore it apart; two people were killed. But the ALso, in America the film is in tight in Heart Beat, through the evocative whole thing is a lie: 1,500 people did not charge into the palace; there were 400, close-ups and two-shots, but when they get haunted houses in Carrie , Days of and they went in the back. One guy drowned in the wine cellar. Some Revo- to Russia it pulls back and they're just Heaven, and Raggedy Man . These are lutionaries! The revolution took two minutes. They made it all up. smallfigures in a mob. the lonely places, outposts of the old and DidlohnReed take part in the storming They' re very big in America and new wilderness. People are at risk in ofthe palace? they' re very small in Russia. Which is these settings. They don't fit; they can The Russians invented that. He missed it. He was asleep. He got there really the story. They were completely get lost in its vastness, and in its reflec- in time to do what we showed. He stole a dagger and he felt very guilty about it overwhelmed. Jack Reed and Louise tion of a troubled national spirit. No later. Bryant are innocents abroad; that's al- How did you arrive at the subdued, al- most monochromatic color scheme of the ways been my image of them. This poor film ? sweet American couple in this mess. He The film was printed with a black- and-white overlay. That put some of the was this bumpkin, this big energetic silver back into it, and it's the silver that gives it the richness. It's also flashed , so kid. The fool. And Warren Beatty is the it has a soft brown look. And I used a lot of ivory coloring, which gives a basis to one actor I know who's never afraid to the blacks. The whole point of it is that there is only one color you should see, play a fool. And after the revolution, and it's pretty obvious what it is. When you saw red, you saw red. And you also Russia was a pigsty. Rotten, rotten. saw the American flag. Also, the world of 1915 was not a colorful world; people They were eating horses. But with all wore black in those days; they didn't wear pop outfits. Ragtime is grotesque: the reading I had done, I never got the you go to a police station, it's powder blue. Give me a break! Those were \"the picture I really wanted-I kept saying to brown years,\" as Lewis Mumford called them. myself, \"How dare one?\"-until I read In the American scenes of Reds every- the two books by Victor Serge. The piss thing is cluttered, there are a lot ofobjects, material things; and then when you go to was so heavy in the buildings that when Russia, suddenLy it's empty. it thawed out you couldn't breathe. If It's all done consciously. Not that they had so many material things-they you had a wooden leg, somebody would didn't have much money-but they had have taken it off and put it in the fire. It was a disaster. They were killing people day in and day out. We went back and tore the banister off when John Reed went into that place where they had lived. That was important, to just have P( one image, to see something actually breaking that you used to see when he wonder Jack Fisk admires Edward Hop- walked up. per, whose paintings-as dark, volume7 At the end the scaLe become intimate less, and uninhabited as an empty old again, when the personaL story takes over billboard-tracked loneliness down because the revoLutionfails. mean streets and Main Streets. Hopper After that doesn' t work, what does? votaries form a line a mile long these That's the panic. As Henry Miller says, days; echoes from his urban landscapes now you have to worry about yourself. painted half a century ago reverberate Warren Beatty knows the grammar of through several current movies. But film, and I don't mean the Spottiswoode Jack Fisk is following no trend. Instead book; the grammar of film is structure. of picking Hopper's bones, he has The first time you see Jack Reed, in slipped into his skin, and made movies 1914, he's running after Pancho Villa's look a lot better. revolution. That's a very important im- Fisk isn't locked into bleak isolation. age in the picture. At the end he's still His sets for the Thirties pastiche Movie running after the revolution. The last Movie are not only knowledgeably witty, print I saw, a month ago, he got on the they generate appreciative laughs by carriage. I said to Warren, \"I thought you their perfectly calibrated exaggeration. went back and changed that.\" He said, For Brian De Palma he devised the \"I'm going to.\" He doesn't get to the high-tech sheen that glinted around the carriage. That's Jack Reed. Phantom ofthe Paradise; and, in Carrie, 46

it was Fisk's whiter-than-white shower stalls and electric-blue prom decor that threw the red of spilled blood into all- American relief. When he goes on the road, he takes the moviegoer with him: the locations in Terrence Malick's Bad- lands and Days o/Heaven, George Armi- tage's Vigilante Force , and his own directorial debut, Raggedy Man , seem both \"found\" and always there. There is drama in these stretches of asphalt and earth, and the opportunity for doom. A character goes out driving one ordinary dusk, and detours into the dark night of the American soul. In Raggedy Man , Nita (Sissy Spacek) needn't ever leave her home to find that detour: the shadows thrown across her front porch are the specters of war and ignorance, and of men with designs so dark they The sketch/or the house in Days of Heaven The reader will have to catch the sound Hurt, in Lahore, Pakistan-my father of her Texas laugh, and Jack Fisk's soft, worked for his father in the State De- gentle voice-and , of course, the wind. partment. And in high school, in Alex- andria, Va. , my best friend was David -M.e. Lynch. We were always very competi- tive. We shared a studio where we both JACK FISK: I'm not a movie buff. I worked on our art, and he'd be drawing wasn't a movie kid. I grew up wanting to realistic street scenes, so of course I had be a painter; Edward Hopper was my to go into abstractions! Years later, I had idol. But now I can see there were hints, a small part in Eraserhead-I was the indications as to how I might wind up. guy pulling the levers-and when funds As a kid, I lived next door to William painting/or Heart Beat. -, can't recognize them until they find ... and how it looked on the screen . themselves acting them out-to the death. So it's surprising to meet Jack Fisk. This herald of the New American Gothic turns out to be smiling and se- rious, charmingly shy, a boyish 35 , and sufficiently anchored in his own talent that he can deflect whatever pressure may attend being known to most of the movie world as \"Mr. Sissy Spacek.\" In an important sense, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Fisk seem something like a model Hol- lywood couple: using their gifts in col- laboration with other gifted young filmmakers, bringing the style of sub- stance to a cinema that often teeters on the brink of exhaustion or boredom. Sissy volunteered to accompany her husband on this interview, and her inter- polated comments are included here. 47

- got short, Sissy and I gave David some protect the workers, and ended up doing what drove the crew away. Terry'd be money to complete the film. And then , that by keeping newer workers out. I struck by some beautiful moonrise over five years ago, he went and married my remember a lecture that Gene Allen, the the mobile home, and the production sister! head of the guild, gave at the A.F.!. He manager had already sent the crew off to described what you had to do to become some 10cation.People who've worked I worked at painting for a few years. an art director: work eight years as a with Terry either love him or hate him. I But I destroyed my work by thinking too draughtsman; then approximately two love him. Badlands was a real turning much about it. I realized I had to work years as an assistant art director; and point for me. We'd spend hours talking from my gut. Today, with film , I'm try- then you become an art director. But about things, and then the next day I'd ing to keep that gut innocence-to do producers aren't eager to entrust mil- look at the rewrites, and there'd be all something without knowing exactly lions of dollars to assistant A. D. 's who the things I told him. why. So ,I switched media. I designed never had that responsibiliry. I came up sets at the Theatre of the Living Arts in to Gene Allen after his talk and said, \"I FISK: And halfway through shooting, Philadelphia. And I created environ- can't wait that long.\" He said: \"If you he'd be asking Sissy what young Holly ment s- sc ulpture yo u could walk really want to get in, you'll find a way.\" would do, because she'd become the through. Very cold and minimal, until Seven years later, I got in-through character. Which is kind of how I'd pre- people walked through them , became non-union films. pare the design of the film: The part of the work, brought it alive. Mak- Stanislavsky Method. I'd have an over- ing movies, I do the same thing: build Badlands was my big break. You all visual concept, but in designing the tiny sets with miniature tractors , baby know, there were three cinematog- more intimate spaces I'd think of the houses, and little people-and then we raphers on that film, lots of editors, characters-how they live, what things build a big set, and the actors, the peo- sound men-except for the actors, the they have. I'd ask the actors about it, ple walking through it, bring the thing art department was the only one that because they'd spent so much time with alive . Hitchcock did it that way. completed the film. If the picture sur- their characters. That closeness with ac- vived all those problems, it's because tors helped me when I directed Raggedy I wasn't involved In film while I was one thing was consistent: Terry Malick's Man-that and living with Sissy for living in N ew York. When I went out to vision. I learned a lot from him. What- seven years. That counts for something! L.A., I tried to get a job painting bill- ever you see in Badlands is Terry's style, boards. Instead I latched on to some not mine. He's very strong visually. He SPACEK: And Jack rehearsed me for exploitation films-bike movies, black has ideas; he's familiar with photogra- the Carrie tests. action pictures. I started art direction not phy. On Badlands and Days of Heaven , knowing what an art director did. So to he was always willing, eager to change FISK: Brian De Palma is more me- educate myself I tried to do just every- things. He'd see something in the yard thodical. Very methodical. He knows thing. and say, \"Let's put it in the bedroom.\" exactly what he's going to shoot. Like That's one thing I learned from him: Hitchcock. But in a way I had more free At this time , I was 26, and the average spontaneity. rein with Brian. On Phantom ofthe Para- age of members of the Sociery of Motion dise I'd think of the most outlandish Picture Art Directors was about 65. Like SISSY SPACEK: Course, that's also thing I could, and he'd say: \"A little a lot of unions, this one started out to more, please. A little weirder. \" Fisk's restaurant sketchfor Heart Beat. 48