•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 22, Number 6 November-December 1986 Smalltown Psychosis ............9 'MOSqU.ltO'Man .... ......... ..23 From the Victorian samplers The man from Down Under of D.W. Griffith one-reelers to doesn't like to talk. He just the suburban fantasies \"of likes to get under your skin. Steven Spielberg, Hollywood He gotcha in Gallipoli , and moviemakers have cozied up got nominated for Witness. to the notion of small town Now, Pat McGilligan gets America as a nesting place for Peter Weir to talk about his dreams and nightmares. current The Mosquito Coast ... Richard Corliss assesses and the interior. three controversial new films that take on Smalltown with a A Fistful of Festivals vengeance (Blue J.0lvet), a lace-valentine nostalgia Time was people went to (Peggy Sue Got Married), and movies to feel their pulse the eye of a cobra who fell in quicken; now, like Bryant love with his victim (True Gumball, they listen to golf on Stories). the radio and swallow to see if they're still alive. But the Sigourney Sniffs at Danger....... 18 intellectually fearless (or is that idle?) go to film festivals! Our Winner, Best Nostrils And we have a passel of Award, Sigourney Weaver has reports: Harlan Kennedy nosed around Mel Gibson, from Venice (page 34), and the Sta-Puff Marshmallow David Paul from Gdansk guy, and blew away the Bug (page 38), and Pat Auf- Mom of Aliens. In Half Moon derheide from Toronto (page Street, she's a PhD. and 45). Plus Stephen Harvey, Michael Caine's rent-a-date. Elliott Stein, and Harlan Marcia Pally gives her the Jacobson on the 24th New third degree. York (page 50). Journals ....................2 Hip Hopper ................62 TV: Peter & Pee Wee .........76 Beth B bares her fine filmic fangs at You think Dennis Hopper is some kinda Ustinov goes to Moscow and talks Fundamentalists, and Susan Seidelman nut? They don't rate him \"dynamite\" for peace with Harlan Kennedy. Pee gives he-men the heave-ho for a robot. nuttin'. Chris Hodenfield talks to Wee Herman wants your kid's brain. By Stephen Schaefer has the details , plus Hopper, who says he's cleaner than Jack Barth. more on Comic Magazine's Tokyo TV. Bible class and devoted to Duchamp. And Dan Yakir parses Roger Donald- And you're Mary, Queen of Scots. Back Page: Quiz #22 .........80 son's Pentagon picture. Katz People, claws encounters Goebbels Dept ..............74 The Nazis made films that helped the Cover photo: The Saul Zaentz Company. Holocaust happen. Now the National October's Sid & Nancy cover courtesy Center for Jewish Film wants you to Samuel Goldwyn Co. take a close look. Daniel Kimmel has the scoop. Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richa rd Co rliss. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Adverti sing and C irculation Manager: Tony Impavido. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Assistant Editor: Marlaine Glicksman . Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Co ntroller: Domingo H orn illa , Jr. Editorial Interns: Andrea Alsberg, Alexandra Juhasz. Executive Director, Film Sociery of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1986 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMME T do nor represent Film Sociery of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. FILM COMME 'T (ISSNOO 15-119X) . 140 West 65th Street, New York, N.Y. 10023, U.S.A., is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rares in the United States: $12 for six numbe rs, $22 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere $18 for six numbers, $34 for rwelve numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribe rs shou ld include the ir occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News, Sandusky, OH 44870. Postmaster: send address changes to FILM COMME T, 140 West Sixry-Fifth Street , New York, N.Y. 10023, U.S.A.
Beyond B-Movies THE RIGHT & MR. RIGHT No one is dancing as Manhattan's Salvation. Eventually, Audrey Matson was cast, only Limelight disco rocks. On this to be replaced by Exene, who, despite a sweltering summer afternoon, herself violently around the stage as the small role in The Twilight Zone movie, everyone is working against the clock. Louma camera chases Beth's directions remains best known as cofounder of X, Filmmaker Beth B is filming a music and swoops down for the close-up. Even the Los Angeles rock band she formed video parody for Salvation! Have You though Exene is doing a Rita Hayworth with her ex-husband, John Doe. Said Your Prayers Today?, her new (lip-syncing to someone else's vocal movie with Los Angeles rocker Exene track) , she gets quite carried away each \"When I was 13, I used to see X at the Cervenka . Previously titled Benefactors, take. Whiskey,\" says ex-Los Angelino Domini- Salvation is a satire/parody on religious que Davalos, a strikingly attractive bru- fundamentalists. Exene plays Rhonda, a \"The chains work real good,\" says nette who was one of Howard the Ducf{s suburban, born-again, New Jersey house- Exene. all-girl band members (\"Now, I really wife who begins donating all her money know how to play bass\") and plays Exene's to the TV reverend played by Stephen \"Everybody in their position! Let's go,\" sister in Salvation. \"We would sneak in McHattie. Her husband and sister shouts barefoot Beth, dressed, like many and I used to love her work. Now, I'm scheme to get some of the loot for here, all in black, and anxious after hours working with her! It's the best.\" themselves by plotting to seduce and of technical delays to get her footage. \"You've got to keep smoking until the Dominique, 20, came to this movie blackmail the reverend into putting music comes up,\" she instructs the because of her rock roots. She is the lead Rhonda on his show to \"save America special effects man with his Fog Master singer for Dominique, the band whose while soliciting funds.\" mac~ine , then turns to confer with crazy-looking guy back-ups are onstage Francis Kenny, director of cinematogra- for today's video. \"Beth knew I was going The perspiring crew, along with the phy. to do the role before I did,\" she explains. black-Ieather-and-chains rockers on the \"She hired me for her video, Dominatrix stage, ignore the lack of air conditioning \"This is a Christian band; explains the Sleeps Tonite, two years ago.\" On Beth, in Peter Gatien's disco-built-in-a-church. publicist during an unexpected break Dominique has the last word: \"When Air conditioning costs extra. Salvation, while Exene's orange wig has to be she's off the set, she's a wild woman. while Beth's biggest-budgeted feature yet untangled from a guitar handle. \"Exene When she's on the set, she's all business.\" (at $800,000, but only \"$200,000 in first comes on looking like she's come cash\"), is already splurging on an impos- from The Lawrence Welk Show, and then If you think Salvation sounds vague- ingly long Louma crane. she disrobes to this.\" ly like Desperately Seeking Susan, you are not too far off. Only five years Beth wants her Louma crane, which is \"No chains please,\" decrees Beth, and ago, Susan Seidelman, like Beth B, was rented by the hour, because it delivers Exene's jangles are gone. working on low-budget, made-in-New visual richness cheap. The crane, now stretched out on the center of the dance Salvation has had the usual birthing floor like some malicious antenna, allows pains of any independent feature, includ- for not only high-angle shots but a ing a revolving leading lady. Ann Magnu- dizzying dexterity as it swizzles around son was an early contendor for Rhonda. capturing full-stage shots, then zooms down for rapid close-ups . . On the makeshift Limelight stage, a huge silver cross is erected, easily upstaging the drummer. Periodically, smoke clouds the performing area. Exene, dressed like some demented leather queen out of a Batman comic with a brilliantly bright, nearly f10urescent orange wig down to her waist, is vocalizing with the heavy metal group that obviously never realized Kiss was yesterday. The band is lip-syncing \"Destroy All Evil,\" with lyrics courtesy of Beth. Buxom but petite, Exene throws 2
\"Best organized, most complete book •••for anpJne interested in movies\" -FILM WORLD Updated 5th Edition - with so much new infonnation it's almost 200 pages bigger! If you could own only one movie book, this is the one. For 3 main reasons: I. MANY more fIlms - over 12,<XXl! 2. MUCH more information on each fIlm: plot, cast, credits, reviews, ratings, awards, all key statistics, video versions, much more - EVERYTHING to help you decide whether a fIlm is worth your time and money. 3. For every entry, the Halliwell touch: wry, sharp-eyed, challenging. This is the fIlm reference that's FUN to read. A few of the useful features *171 new pbotos and posters AU Academy Awards and nomina- * *tiOl~ Oversized 7% x 10 - weigm over 4 pwnds! Alpha- *betical lilt: some 1,200 alternate titles Englisb and foreign titles of * *foreign flbm HUGE: 1,150 pages Enjoyable bonus: prom~ tional taglines for over 1,000 fIlms o Raves for the older editions 0 \"Stupendous .. . complete and detailed and reflective of the author's flair for cocky, keen humor.\"-':Son Diego Union \"Remarkable ... massive, practical.\"-Film News \"A knockout ... almost everything you could possibly want to know about thousands of movies.\"-Chicago Use coupon to get Tribune this indispensable $42.50 \"Magnificent.\" - Times' Literary Supplement \"No other work offers such comprehensive and entertain- film reference FREE ------------ - --- ----- -- - ---- -------.----.------.--.- - ---ing information in one volume.\"- Libmry Journal - -- - How the C~b Woru • •YI~/~.I~.IAI• •~.I Every 4 wed<s (13 times a year) you rtt a free copy of the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS, which offers ~• •KCI.'~ Fe -38 the FeallJred Selection plus a nice choice of Allernates: books on film;, TV, music, occasionally 15 Oakland Avenue· Harrison , N.Y.1052B *records and videocassettes. If you want the FeallJred Selection, do nothing. Il will come Please accept my membership in the Movie/Entertairunent Book Oub and send me, FREE and postpaid, the new *automaticaUy. If you don't want the FeallJred Selection or you do want an Allernale, indicale $42.50 5th Edition of Halliwell's Film & Video Guide by *your wishes on the handy card enclosed and rellJm it by the deadline dale. The majority of Club Leslie Halliwell. I agree to buy 4 additional books, records or *books are offered at2().30OJ, discounts, plus a charrt for shipping and handling. As soon as you videocassettes at regular Oub prices over the next 2 years. I buy and pay for 4 books, records or videocassettes at ~lar Club prices, your membership may be *ended at any time, either by you or by the Club. If you ever receive a FeallJred Selection without *having had 10 days 10 decide if you want i~ you may rellJm it at Club expense for full crediL For every book, record pr videocassette you buy at ~lar Club price, you receive one or more Bonus Book Certificates. These entitle you 10 buy many Club books at deep discounts, usually 60-80% off. also agree to the Club rules spelled out in this coupon. *These Bonus Books do not count toward fulfilling your Club obugation but do enable you to buy fine Name I State Z·lp _ __ I books at giveaway prices. PREVIEWS a~o includes news about members and their hobbies. You Address C1'tY * *are welcome 10 send in similar ilems. The Club will pubUsh any such ilem it deems suitable, FREE. This is a real CLUB! Good service. No compulers! Only one membership per household. tXXXXIIXIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIXXIIIIl
York movies. Now she is in Miami with a scene, someone worries that the aquar- Deceit ofPower $9 million budget, making Making Mr. ium fish will die if they don't have Right, in which a robot obviates the need bubbles. The filter is plugged in-but \"I lost 20 pounds on this film:' says for any further search for \"Mr. Right\" by a only between takes, because the sound Roger Donaldson. \"Not because of successful, married career woman. recorder would hear it. physical effort, but because of nervous- ness. I think about it all the time. I dream For her leads , Seidelman went off the Seidelman altered this scene from about it ... :' familiar track. John Malkovich , whom Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank's original nobody would call Mr. Right, will be not script. \"On the set you'll find little things The New Zealand bred filmmaker, only the title character, an android, but that change. For me, what's important is a whose American credits include The his nerdy inventor. Seidelman says she really good structure, a script we can play Bounty and Marie, is referring to No Way likes his \"internal\" quality. As Frankie, her around with. For instance, originally Out (originally titled Deceit), a thriller set cigarette-smoking careerist heroine, she Trish was to bring out a baggie full of in the Pentagon. \"I feel it's a risky project:' cast Ann Magnuson. Magnuson played joints. I didn't want a pot-smoking scene. reflects Donaldson, \"because it stands or She [HeadleyJ took the character and falls on the relationships. Usually thrillers the cigarette girl in the Magic Ciub in grab the audience's attention easily, but Susan ; her credits also include the role of I~ here ... it all depends:' \"the New Wave slut\" who's David Bowie's first victim in The Hunger. /' It depends on whether the audience will respond to the complex rapport Seidelman is indoors today, and the Meet Mr. Right. between Pentagon official Kevin Costner soundstage reverberates between takes and Secretary of Defense Gene Hack- with pounding hammers and whirring made her a girl who's flaky and a bit man; the latter befriends the younger machines. Seidelman is shooting Magnu- affected.\" Did Seidelman strike the pot man-playing mentor and father-yet son and Glenne Headley's entrance into scene to avoid an R rating for drug use? can't disguise his superior manner and the apartment, complete with luggage \"No, Susan was a PG-13 , and there was cavalier attitude. The two men are also and live dog. the whole scene with Madonna smoking involved with seductive Sean Young, a grass.\" But that was before the new woman who firmly believes that more is sMr. Right shares much of Susan guidelines. \"I'm also glad she changed it,\" more. Seidelman replies , \"because [havingJ affection for cultural collisions, weird people sitting around smoking pot seems As scripted by Robert Garland, Cost- characters, and trash can furniture gratuitous. Trish has this slightly precious ner witnesses a crime that he is later revival. Frankie's apartment is a dreamy air about her, and it adds something with ordered to investigate, knowing all the evocation of Fifties futurism that includes the little bottles that joints don't.\" while that he himself is the target of his a livingroom/diningroom, adjacent own investigation. According to Laura kitchen , bedroom with bath, and twisting But Seidelman also filmed a scene with Ziskin, the movie's co-producer, it's in the stairway that leads to an upstairs office. Magnuson twice-with a bra and without vein of The Wrong Man , with the Headly (Mrs. Malkovich offscreen) plays it. Wasn't that for the ratings board? \"I Pentagon serving as a backdrop (\"all Trish, Frankie's best friend , who is think it's an adult comedy, but I hope these people making major decisions that married to Hart Bochner, cast as a mature 14- or IS-years-olds might like it. affect our lives\") rather than as a focal daytime soap star. He's having an affair For me, if something's not necessary, why point. Of course, the hero's trajectory with a costar (Susan Anton), and Trish throw it in? If the movie is about a sexual unveils the power and hubris that natu- has come for some Miami R & R with issue, that's fine. But this movie isn't rally go with the place, but the emphasis Frankie. There are several rehearsals about boobs or joints-the scene works is less on exposing than on entertaining. with the props and the business of getting without it, too.\" through the door and onto the couch, Although Costner's Pentagon official is where Headley will do \"girl talk\" while Enter Magnuson. Though witty, she admittedly reactive-which the actor pouring drinks from airline-size little gets serious after venting her anxieties finds frustrating- his presence lets the bottles from her makeup case. about working with somebody else's lines audience identify with a character from a and direction: \"What makes this enjoy- shadowy organization. But Costner is What about the Fifties look? \"Because able is working with someone you winning in Silverado and as Elliot Ness in the movie is permeated with androids, I respect, like Susan. If you're Play Doh , Brian De Palma's update of The Untouch- didn't want it to look high-tech or cold,\" you want to trust the person who's ables. says Seidelman. \"We were trying to come molding it.\" What about Mr. Right as a up with a look in collaboration with Ed robot? \"It's a fantasy - I don't know if you Pentagon interiors were re-created on Lachman [cinematographer, who shot want any broad, sweeping statements stage 27 at MGM, where The Wizard ofOz SusanJ and Barbara Ling [production about feminism-God! I don't even want was shot. Exteriors for the $10 million designer! that would both be modern and to talk about what you could read into it!\" movie were shot at the capital. Out in have a sense of humor. We thought of the Pasadena, the Caltech Atheneum recep- Jetsons and the New York 1964 World's -STEPHEN SCHAEFER tion room is serving as the New Zealand Fair.\" Embassy, where Costner first lays eyes on Young, whose pink silk low-cut dress After clearing the set, the scene runs is padded where it counts. Whenever the smoothly as Seidelman directs Headley: cameras aren't rolling, she pulls the \"Give it that girlfriend feel- play the padding out with a sigh of relief. Costner dialogue.\" The scene almost crackles, sports a tux, as do Hackman and Will higher in energy, and yet familiar. Except Patton, another Pentagon pal. Headley says \"masseuse\" instead of \"masseur,\" necessitating another take. Donaldson, easily the tallest and most While Seidelman sits on the coffee table casual presence on the set with his faded in front of the couch discussing the 4
Presenting\\a theatre experience you won't outgrow. The Best Short Plays 1982-1983 Edited by Ramon Delgado by David Hare Take any 4 books forNot Available in Canada * 7138 $l:~~ber~;~;~\"\"'\" * warning: Sublect matter or language may be oHenslve to some. How the Club Plan works: You'll get your choice of ANY 4 BOOKS FOR $1 (plus shipping and handling) and r - - - - - - - - - - ....,F~IreS~Ide Theatre Book Club® your FREE HIRSCHFELD CALENDAR when accepted as a member. We reserve the right to reject any applica- I IDept BS-887 Garden City NY 11535 lIOn . However, once accepted , if you are not fully satisfied wi th your introductory books, return them within 10 I I\" , days at our expense. Your membership will be cancelled and you will owe nothing . The FREE CALENDAR is Please accept me as amember of the Fireside Theatre Book Club, and send me yours to keep In any case. I Ithe 4 books I've numbered in the boxes below, plus my FREE CALENDAR. Bill Attractive selection: As a Club member, you'll have dozens of titles to choose from : the best of every theatre me just $1 plus shipping and handling for the 4 books. I agree to the Club plan season , Broadway and Off-Broadway successes, practical guides to performance and production techniques, I Ias described In thiS ad , Will take 4 more books at regular low Club prices during and other volumes-many not available In any store at any price. the coming year, and may resign any time thereafter. The FREE CALENDAR is How you save money: The Club offers its own complete hardbound editions (sometimes altered in size to fit special presses) . CLUB EDITIONS SAVE YOU UP TO 40% OFF PUBLISHERS' HARDCOVER EDITION PRICES. A shipping and handling I mine to keep even if I don't remain a member. I charge is added to each shipment. I Mr. .I I II Club bulletin:Enjoy the convenience of at-home.shopping with your free Club Ms. bulletin , Curtam Time. About every 4 weeks (14 times a year) you 'll receive the bulletin describing coming Selection(s) . In addition , up to 4 times a year, you may receive offers of speCial SelectIOns , always at discounts off publishers' prices. If you want the featured Selection(s) , do nothing-shipment will be made automatically. If (Please prinl) you prefer an Alternate-or no book at all-indicate this on the order form and return I Address IApt. # _ _ __ it by the date specified . You 'll have at least 10 days to decide. If you have less than 10 FREE City State Zip _ _ __ I days, and receive an unwanted Selection , you may return it at our expense and owe I If under 18, parent must sign . I nothrng . LMembers accepted in U.S.A, a·:::nd'CC,a::n::ad<=a-::o:::nl;::-y.\"O\"'ff::erC:s\"i\"lg::;:h\"'tlyC-d\"i'f\"'fe:-:-re:-::n7t \"in\"-;;CC:-an:-:-:;ada: The choice is always yours: Your only obligation is to take just 4 books at regular low 1987 HIRSCHFELD Club prices Within one year. You may. resign any time after purchasing your 4 books, BROADWAY CALENDAR or conllnue to enJoy Club membership for as long as you like. with membership _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _02;U1,2...J
Uchida Banana Power and hubris. Tokyo was having a heat wave. And a raging, wet typhoon. As the All jeans and cool manner, feels at ease Nippon Airways 747 landed , it Yuya Uchida. seemed very Japanese to see Typhoon 7 talking about such hardcore Americana in close-up on the cabin's Sony TV, was a taboo subject;' he says of Mosquito. courtesy of the wheel-level camera. This \"It's about a Japanese cop who becomes a as D.C. politics. \"I don't feel compro- hair-raising cinema verite, was merely a thief. prelude to an Ozu-style interview with mised in any way making a film about Yuya Uchida. ''I' m not a professional actor;' he says. \"I can't play myself. Maybe fragments of American culture;' he explains, \"because Yuya plays a Mike Wallace-style TV myself. I didn't have to watch journalists reporter in Comic Magazine, which he to prepare. In jail I saw enough when I it's something that is exported world- also conceived, co-scripted, and co- was being interviewed. I started acting in produced. In Japan, comic magazines 1981 in Pool without Water, which is wide. I grew up on the movies and the account for a quarter of all publishing when I met John and Yoko:' earnings. They're read by adults more music made in the U.S:' (Marie was about than children and tackle nearly every Yuya collaborated with Isao Takagi for genre, from sex fantasy to sci-fi. the final script on the advice of his government corruption and shot in director, Yojiro Takita. To make Comic A satirical look at sensationalistic, Magazine, they formed an ersatz TV Nashville.) inane and competitive TV journalism, team with three cameras and a mini-crew Comic Magazine opens with a couple of and began covering real events. \"We shot \"I get my best ideas in the shower;' says statements: first , that the news events for six months and tried to sustain the really took place in 1985 and, second, tension, but it was a struggle. Sometimes Donaldson. \"I get in there in the morning that this is a crazy film no one wanted to it was like a battlefield:' make. Yuya's media star/journalist typ i- and my mind is totally free .... As soon as I cally accosts a celebrity at an airport and Comic's coup is having Kazuyoshi is ignored (far more convincingly than Miura on-camera to discuss his predica- get on the set I go blank:' Still, he likes Sean Connery in Wrong Is Right). ment. Miura, a businessman, is accused Instead of junking a meaningless non- of having murdered his wife and, maybe, what makes movies work, putting ordi- interview, it is broadcast and analyzed. his mistress. \"When we went to the airport to cover the actual arrival of nary people in extraordinary situations. The film climaxes by re-staging the Miura;' Yuga says, \"we were despised by happy collision between a gaggle of the real journalists:' By contrast, Gene Hackman is most journalists who were squatting outside a gold speculator's residence and two hired It was difficult to get Miura to go before intrigued by stressing his character's hoods who broke into the apartment. a camera and dodge questions about the They murdered the speculator and left, case. \"Just before his arrest he was humanity -by playi ng someone \"with a politely posing for photos on the way out. persuaded ;' Yuya recalls. \"While acting, it The film changes the story by having was real drama. Very weird-what was soft underbelly, a tragic flaw; someone Yuya's reporter galvanized into ineffec- real and what wasn't. It seemed like a fifth tual action. dimension. It's still one of the most strong but with moments of weakness:' sensational cases. He's still in court:' Yuya, seated on the floor in a private The party scene is on. There's silence dining room is a reflective, austere Meeting the yakuza, aka \"the Japanese presence in his blue suit. Now 40 years Mafia;' was also actually filmed as it on the set. Costner and Young are drawn old (\"In America;' he says blithely, \"I want happened. Admits Yuya, \"The criticism to start as 36\"), he describes himself as \"a in that scene was I didn't have the nerve to each other, surrounded by tuxedos and rock and roller without a smash hit:' He to go to the big guys, so instead I was .tagged as \"Japan's Mick Jagger\" 20 interviewed the children:' gowns and the fanciful sensuality of years ago due to his onstage enthusiasm. -STEPHEN SCHAEFER Maori dancers waiting their turn 'to In the States, Yuya is almost, but not quite, a blank screen. He made a entertain. Hackman is amused, Young nonsensical but artistic video commercial for a department store that's Tokyo's flirtatious, Costner enchanted. Soon, this equivalent of Bloomingdale's; he swam- in a tux - in the East River at dawn: and civilized veneer will be shattered and the in 1983 , reportedly complete with samu- rai sword, he stormed the office of Japan's three will worry about deceit. largest rock promoter to denounce the preferential treatment of foreign versus As the music increases and the hors native rockers. Some people thought it simply a stunt to hype Mosquito on the d'oeuvres diminish, our trio orchestrates 10th Floor, a film which was opening then and which he also scripted. \"That its own scherzo: Hackman is concen- trated yet relaxed; Costner intense and alert; and Young casual and freewheeling. And Donaldson makes them do take after take. Nobody gets impatient, even as the huge floor fans fail to relieve the scorching California summer heat. \"Cut!\" says Donaldson , wiping his sweaty brow. \"If this one makes it, it'll be my biggest hit ;' he says. ''And if it doesn't , it will be my biggest flop! \" How's that for No J#zy Out? - DAN YAKIR 6
New Yorker Films 1986 Doris Dorrie's MEN . .. Solanas' TANGOS, THE EXILE OF GARDEL Claude Lanzmann 's SHOAH Milos Forman'S AMADEUS* Hector Babenco's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN* ___________________________________________________________________ ~so: Godard's HAIL MARY, Diegues' QUILOMBO, Mowbray'sA PRIVATE FUNCTION, Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE, Cox's MAN OF FLOWERS, Lerner & MacAdams' WHAT HAPPENED TO KEROUAC? *non-theatrical only For further information and a copy of our 1987 catalogue , call or write New Yorker Films. 16 West 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10023 (212) 247-6110
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--T-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------y It's aWonderful life. We're together. And I love you.\" his famil y's improbable lives in the We know better. Forty million Dallas moment before his death . Or maybe Pam by Richard Corliss is dreaming now, and she will soon wake viewers spent more than a year inside up to find Bobby dead and Mark Grayson Oh, Bobby, it was awful,\" Pamela Pam's dream. So did characters from the in bed beside her. Anything is possible in Ewing keened, leaning into her CBS soap who had nothing to do with a suburban Dallas spread where one of late husband's chest. \"When I Pam. So did her beleaguered brother-in- the country's richest oil barons still lives woke up I thought that you were dead. I law Gary Ewing out in California. Gary with his mother, where his dead father had a nightmare. A terrible nightmare. went south for the funeral , brought back keeps threatening to come back to life , And Bobby, it seemed so real. There was mementos of his slain brother, even and where none of the Ewings noticed Sue Ellen, and there was Mark .. .. \" Pam named his child after Bobby. When will that for a full year the family matriarch is raving now, still in her demented he wake up? Or is all of Knots Landing had been replaced by Donna Reed! reverie, the way Dorothy Gale was when still Pamela Ewing's fantasy? Maybe she awoke from the Technicolor halluci- somebody else is dreaming Dallas this Or maybe the whole thing was the nation of her trip to Oz. And like a season. Yeah-Bobby Ewing! He really most highly hyped, most labored and beefcake Auntie Em, Bobby comforts was totaled saving Pam's life , and every- elaborate show-business \"in\" joke ever Pam. \" It's over. None of that happened. thing since then has been the final flash of perpetrated. Leonard Katzman, who had 9
Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart. Reagan. The Eighties are the Fifties, and nice. In the Lumberton of David Lynch's father knows best. Hardworking folks Blue Velvet, things are pretty darn weird; produced Dallas before leaving in a feud who really care, A-frame houses with and in the cozy California town where with the show's executive producer, manicured lawns , a freckle-faced paper Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Mar- returned in triumph this season. \"Pam's boy romping with his cocker spaniel, the ries takes place (it was shot in Santa dream\" could have been Katzman's way Lutheran church on Main Street, the Rosa, location for Shadow ofa Doubt and of telling his cast: It's OK, guys. Last year charity drives and quilting bees , all Smile), the romance of recapturing a was a nightmare, with tension on the set sprouting from the family tree of friend- small-town past is tempered by the and meandering plot lines of Greek ship. And no crime, lies , unseemly sex, protagonist's realization that she's stuck dragon ladies, Donna's miscarriage, and or darkies who play their radios too loud. in it. But in each film the only logic is that South American emerald mines. But now It's a lovely old world. Things must be of a dream: the dream of community and it's over. We'll pretend none of that simpler, warmer, better there. continuity, of traditional small-town happened. Dallas is together again. America facing the modern world and Spend a little more time in Smalltown then averting its face. Anything can Pam and Katzman know better. They and find small minds and dark hearts. happen there-as long as we can pretend, know that just about everybody wants to The Lionel Barrymore of Dr. Kildare, finally, that it never happened. wake up from the dreary dreams and dispensing bromides with his Bromos , claustrophobic nightmares of their own gives way to the Lionel Barrymore of It's Three angels above lives - that the present is edged with a Wondeiful Life, \"the richest and The whole human race tension and boredom and, seen through meanest man in the county,\" crippled by They dream us to life the soft focus of nostalgia, the past is as loathing for the little people whose lives They dream me aface. sweet as first love. Wouldn:t you like to be he tyrannizes. A community of homoge- told your last year was a bad dream? With neous souls breeds ignorance and preju- And you dreamed it all a wave of the Divine Producer's wand you dice; anything Other is a candidate for And this is your story are a year yo unger; the trouble you've lynching. Saturday night is when the kids Do you know who you are? made for yourself was just a scenario of get wasted and Jim Anderson beats his You're the dream operator. disinformation; the rut you've been in is wife. The pet pooch is Cujo, the family revealed as a path through the meadow of next door runs a chainsaw deli, and - David Byrne infinite possibilities. (Or not. Maybe you there's a severed ear in the field behind had a better year than most people.) Jeffrey's house . Everybody is locked into T hree angels above listen while seven futures sadder than the present. You don't people-George Bailey's mother, his And now go bigger. Wish away the escape Smalltown, you just wear down wife, his daughter, the pharmacist, the whole modern urban world, so con- and out. tavern owner, the cop, the cab driver- gested, so impersonal, and enter the pray for a man on Christmas Eve. \" Is he latest vision of small-town America: So the movies' latest dive into the sick?\" the first angel asks. \"No,\" the Norman Rockwell born again as Ronald fantasy pool could be an admission by second replies , \" he's discouraged.\" And filmmakers that life is so grim it can be no again: George Oimmy Stewart) is treated only as the involuntary shudder a deathly sick of life in Bedford Falls. The restless sleeper makes before the night's picket fences are prison walls for a man dreams begin. But it is also a justifiable who has always itched to explore and boast of the medium's formal and emo- escape. But responsibility to his father, tional elasticity. Movies are supposed to his wife, and his friends-a nearly heroic have two therapeutic functions: to show suppression of his largest instincts - has us ourselves, and to take us out of kept George at home . Now his frustra- ourselves. And plenty of small-town films tion has driven him to the point of have tried to do both by painting the suicide. And the third angel, a fussy soul traditional rural picture and then dressing named Clarence Oddbody (Henry it up in wouldn't-it-be-nice fantasy or Travers), must somehow convince God-help-us horror: Fury, The Wizard of George that \"You really had a wonderful OZ, Penny Serenade , Shadow ofa Doubt, life. Don't you see what a mistake it The Miracle ofMorgan 's Creek, Intruder would be to throw it away?\" Clarence is in the Dust, Invasion of the Body the dream operator here, or at least the Snatchers, The Birds, Badlands, Smile, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Places in the saprojectionist; he spends the bulk of It Heart , Back to the Future , and the Wondeiful Life watching a flashback of sultimate small-town homily, It a Won- George's first 39 years, and the climax showing George what Bedford Falls deiful Life, which celebrates its 40th would have been without him. Clarence's anniversary this Christmas. task is simple and daunting: to dream George back to life. This fall , some very sophisticated movie people have been taking the Frank Capra's domestic epic is clear- viewer through Jean Cocteau's liquid eyed in both its tribute to and its criticism mirror and into the netherworld, other- of small-town life. George may be the world, futureworld, neverworld of small- anchor of Bedford Falls-helping people town America. In True Stories, David buy their own homes, giving credit on Byrne creates the imaginary town of character, saving at least two lives by the Virgil, Texas , where everyone is pretty 10
time he was twelve - but he has never felt a beaut: Dad's nervous breakdown. And his debt. Sam Wainwright cables a loan of a part of it. He hates being \"cooped up\"; when he staggers out of the house in up to $25,000. The gruff sheriff who he wants to shake \"the dust from this desperate supplication, he gets punched holds a warrant for George's arrest shreds crummy little town off my feet and see by a man in a bar. \"That's what ya get for the paper and smiles. Violet, whom the the world\"; he hates the \"nickels and prayin',\" George observes. town blue-noses may have wished out of dimes\" that virtually buried his father. town, cries, \"I'm not going to go, \"Get out of this small town,\" Dad What he and his friends get for praying George! I changed my mind!\" Harry the advised. Dad's roots were so deep that he is Clarence; what the moviegoer gets is war hero braves a snowstorm to fly in and couldn't fight mean Mr. Potter, but film noir, Capra style. In this vision of the propose a toast: \"To my big brother George has a spark in him; he is smart town without George, Bedford Falls is George, the richest man in town.\" and ambitious , and made bold by his now called Pottersville. Main Street is Clarence gets his angel's wings. Then, on restlessness. When his father dies, pocked with jitterbug dives , pawn shops, Christmas Eve, the congregation sings George can tell off the crippled banker bowling alleys, and a burlesque house \"Auld Lang Syne. \" (And Potter, presum- because he thinks he has nothing to lose. billboarding 20 GORGEOUS GIRLS 20. ably, keeps the $8,000.) It's fierce, He'll soon be out of this dead-end town. Violet Bick is now the local floozy instead shameless, and wonderful, like the life of a flirt. The tavern has become a bar and the movie Capra has created from the He won't, though. George's brother (with a Negro piano player) that serves contradictions of small-town America. Harry goes off to college; George minds \"hard drinks for men who want to get the store until his return, then stays drunk fast.\" Gunfire spits across the A candy-colored clown they call the longer when Harry marries into a good town square. Everybody has a sour sandman job. He is told the Building & Loan will disposition, from George's mom to Mary, go under unless he agrees to run it; he now a frightened old maid. The cab Tiptoes to my room every night sighs and stays. He and his bride Mary driver's wife left him when he lost his Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper (Donna Reed, a generation before she house to Potter. The pharmacist young \"Go to sleep. Everything is all right. \" impersonated Miss Ellie) are heading for George worked for has gone to jail, and their honeymoon train when a Depres- gone insane, for poisoning a child. In dreams I walk with you sion bank panic forces him back to the Brother Harry, whom George had res- In dreams I talk to you Building & Loan, and by the end of the cued as a boy, is dead, and so are the In dreams you're mine all ofthe time afternoon his savings are squandered but dozens of soldiers Harry would have Forever in dreams. the business is saved. Still George saved in the war. squirms under all the benificence he - Roy Orbison ladles out, whether to the town's biddies Before George had bolted from his or to Violet Bick (Gloria Grahame) , a family he visited his sick daughter, who Ayoung man with a taste for faraway flirtatious baggage who leaves lipstick on insisted on staying up to care for a flower places comes home to tend the his cheek like a flare sent to him from the she had brought home from school. big cities he never reached. Poor George. \"Give the flower a drink,\" George told He wanted to be a builder, not a loaner. her, in his last generous act of the He must come close to agreeing when evening. \"Go to sleep, and then you can Potter observes that George hates the dream about it. And it'll be a whole \"garlic eaters\" of Bedford Falls almost as garden.\" Without George's good words much as he does. and works, it seems, the tidy garden of Bedford Falls would turn into a fetid And on Christmas Eve his world seems jungle of violence and impersonal ill not worth inhabiting. He and those who have made this small town their lives are feeling- in other words , a big city. His failures by the standards he set for efforts alone have kept Bedford Falls the himself; and those who got out, like charming anachronism it must have been Harry and his friend Sam Wainwright, even in 1946: a small town. Capra, of have become war heroes and made course, was as ambivalent about these fortunes in plastics. Meanwhile his dith- virtues as George. For years he had been ery uncle has misplaced $8,000 (which painting his heroes into the corners of Potter has secretly claimed) while the their principles, and with each film bank examiner waits sternly for an (American Madness , Mr. Deeds, Mr. accounting. That night the little things Smith, Meet John Doe) the resolution mean a lot to George: his elder daughter's became more improbable. Now, he said insistent piano practice, his younger in effect, it's better to live than to kill daughter's cold, the tinsel one of his sons yourself. No man is a failure who has drapes on his head , the neighbors' new friends. A small town is better than no car, even the staircase newel post that town. comes off in his hand. The Merry Christmas festoonery Mary has arranged Having digested the gruel, Capra then mocks him. This drafty house has too ladles on the treacle in an ogasmic arc of many children; the small career he has triumph. George returns to Bedford Falls been able to fashion is about to collapse and finds The Bells of St. Mary's playing in the shame of bankruptcy. His own where the 20 Gorgeous Girls had been. Christmas surprise for the wife and kids is In his home sweet home , the good townspeople- the prune-faced bank examiner, too - have chipped in to defray 11
family business after tragedy strikes his for safety and a better view. The next film, as Jeffrey walks to Detective father. A pretty young girl becomes his night he returns- \"I looked for you in my Johnson's house to confer with him on the partner in domestic adventure; the town closet,\" she whispers - and accompanies severed ear he's discovered, we track siren seeks his help and, naively, he gives her to bed. \"Hurt me!\" she pleads. \"No, slowly into the ear; unearthly sound it. There is corruption behind the small- I want to help you,\" replies Mr. Modern effects cue us to a change of film tense, town smiles: the richest and meanest Building & Loan. In the Forties, a small- from the present t6 the conditional; and man in the county controls just about town gentleman could prove his friend- at the end of the nightmare, a couple of everyone in power, and when our. young ship by lending a fallen woman a few light bulbs pop out and we track out of hero challenges the forces of evil he gets bucks; now he is required to slap her Jeffrey's ear into the happy ending. Once humiliated for his pains. The film is an around and chip her tooth. The Good inside the dream, Blue Velvet coexists in inverted vision of rural life, with a giddily Samaritan must be a good sadist. several postwar decades: the huge wall optimistic Hollywood ending. In the portrait of Montgomery Clift in Sandy's coda, families are reunited, illnesses are What's Jeffrey up to? What's Dorothy healed , sins are absolved , and a heavenly into? She's the easier one to figure: a more bedroom suggests the Fifties; the Roy choir sings in celebration. or less \"normal\" working wife who's Orbison song \"In Dreams,\" lip-synched been terrorized into playing victim to by Frank's partner-in-slime Ben (Dean We refer to Blue Velvet , the evil twin of Frank's torturer. Toward the end, when Stockwell), is from the Sixties; the film's It's a Wondeiful Life. Bedford Falls is she appears naked on Jeffrey's doorstep pace and preoccupations remind us of the here called Lumberton, a place where and is taken hysterical to Sandy's house, early Seventies, the last time American smiling firemen wave at David Lynch's Dorothy murmurs, \"He put his disease filmmakers so assiduously courted sexual camera and flaming red roses embellish a in me.\" For her, the straightforward weirdness; the cars and computer equip- white picket fence. Dad hoses down the sadomasochism of her affair with Jeffrey ment hint at the Eighties. Only Jeffrey garden out back, until he's struck down is just an entr'acte in the nightmare, a way operates in all of the film's tenses and by an u,nexplained malady. Jeffrey Beau- of finding sexual release within the limits times, directing the action while standing mont (Kyle MacLachlan), the protago- of the \"disease\" Frank has put in her. outside it. He watches; he assimilates; he nist, could be the young George Bailey: \"You're my special friend,\" she tells refuses to judge. He's David Lynch, wholesome, intelligent, curious for expe- Jeffrey. \"I still have you inside me. It small-town boy come home. riences outside the horizons of his home helps me. \" (Seeds of male potency worm town. But instead of settling down with into Dorothy and define her obsessions.) The big surprise of Blue Velvet is how his high-school sweetheart, this nice Her final revelation to Jeffrey- \"I love many people have snuggled inside this fellow gets mixed up with the European you. Love me\" -is the most plaintive disturbed vision. On its face, the film falls equivalent of Violet Bick and her fast confession and demand. Instead of \"Blue somewhere between the surreal and the friends. Velvet,\" Dorothy might join in a refrain preposterous. Surreal: the frump brigade from True Stories: \"We don't want of groupies at Ben's place; henna-haired Jeffrey's sweetheart is Sandy Johnson freedom,/We don't want justice,lWe just and overweight, they look like Larry (Laura Oem), who assists him in his want someone to love.\" She is the \"Bud\" Melman clones in drag, except for Hardy Boys-Nancy Drew sleuthing with- Woman from the Big City at a loss trying the lifesize doll in sweater and tutu. out understanding what he's after. \"It to cope with small-town psychosis. Preposterous: Stockwell's preening turn sounds like a good daydream ,\" Sandy as Ben, which Lynch pampers with a cautions him about his plan to unravel the A wise man said, \"Normal people are bunch of closeup reaction shots. In the mystery, \"but actually it's too weird.\" the strangest people,\" and Jeffrey is past, some unwritten Hollywood law has The Other Woman - very Other - is about the very strangest. Nice boy, right kept Hopper and Stockwell from appear- Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a out of a Fifties boy scout troop. But there ing in the same movie frame. But for chanteuse with a kidnaped child, an are anomalies: that hoop earring he Lynch too much is never enough, so here earless husband, and a penchant for wears; his goofy rendition of \"the they are in scenery-chewing one- being abused . Her color is not violet but chicken walk\"(David Byrne, take note); upsmanship. These aren't the only acting blue. She is called the Blue Lady; she his allusion to an old school friend, the styles that collide like drunks in the dark; sings the Bobby Vinton tune \"Blue one with \"the biggest tongue in the the blinkered innocence of MacLaghlan Velvet\" and wears a robe ofthat material; world.\" Jeffrey plunges into his adven- and Dern is laid out with the same dead when a nasty acquaintance assaults her tures with a kid's enthusiasm, but without pan intensity. Here is a movie that almost sexually in her apartment, he stuffs the considering-or being much affected by begs to be laughed at. Yet on a recent robe's sash in his mouth. And Jeffrey -their moral consequences. He allows it Manhattan Monday afternoon, the big watches it all. all to happen to him because it's there. crowd watching Blue Velvet giggled not at Sandy says, \"I don't know if you're a all until Rossellini's buffo apparition. In Wondeiful Life George's relation to detective or a pervert, \" but he's probably Critics too have been kind to this Violet was one of generous disinterest, neither-just a consuming curiosity strangeness. but it was open to misinterpretation. Her attached to a passive soul. His response lipstick imprint on George's cheek to a night of fists and fucking with It is an imposing picture, and hand- earned a suspicious stare from the bank Dorothy is an understated \"Man oh somely made, setting off the cheery examiner and a rasping insinuation from man\"; his description of the sick beating pastels of the domestic sequences against Potter. In Blue Velvet Jeffrey goes quite a Frank gives him is \"Things got a little out the dark gouaches of Dorothy's and Ben's bit further. He hides in Dorothy's closet of hand.\" This scrubbed, ordinary kid apartments. In a movie era straitjacketed as she enters the apartment and has the emotional torpor of a sleepwalker by formula, we welcome a film so undresses. When she discovers him , she through Nighttown. personal and cryptic, so defiantly unin- forces him to strip. When the kidnaper, gratiating, so determined to keep from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), arrives And why not? Blue Velvet is mostly a glamorizing the eccentricities of its and ravages Dorothy, Jeffrey hides again dream, isn't it? Ten or 15 minutes into the characters. (Is there anybody besides 12
Frank who could get off on the depiction rumor. But Jerry Liechtling and Arlene Knows Bests Betty Anderson , sailing of his sexual assault on Dorothy?) But I Sarner, the husband-wife team who wrote through high school , teasing her beaux, wonder if Blue Velvet hasn't shell- the script, have more on their minds than and acknowledging the cramped wisdom shocked 'Or brainwashed its audiences by Buddy Holly did. They are matching the of her elders. But Peggy Sue is young the very flakiness that might have made it time-warp fun of Back to the Future only in body (and, as incorporated by the a figure of fun. And if the metropolitan (which was produced after Peggy Sue Got great Kathleen Turner, not that young) . smoothies who have made the film a cult Married was written) with one more Her memories and emotions are those of hit aren't too ready to accept this image of the skeptical , 1985-model Peggy\" Sue. small-town scabrousness as revenge for shomage to the small-town fantasy of It a She knows what she's been through and the bad rap big cities have received . See , what's in store for the kids in her class. guys , Reagan's rural America holds Wonderful Life. She knows that the stars of high school- suppurating secrets too, and Blue Velvet This time it's not George Bailey's story especially Most Popular Charlie (Nicolas is Taxi Driver with crabgrass. Cage) and her own majorette eminence but his wife Mary's. She'.s a woman with - can fizzle into adult frustration. Charlie You recall the girl that's been two children, a nice job , and a husband had eyes to be the next Dion; instead he'll In nearly every song. who has taken over his father's business at sell records and tapes as the California This is what I heard. Ofcourse the price of discarding the dreams he had Crazy Eddie. In this Sixties Bedford The story could be wrong. of big-city stardom . But even if old Falls , only the misfits were able to escape Charlie had not run off with the town and succeed: the track-team beatnik She s the one, I've been told. bimbo (hi, Violet!), Peggy Sue would still Now she s wearin ' a band ofgold be tired of life. \"How does it feel to have (Kevin J. O'Connor), who writes a novel missed the sexual revolution?\" two Peggy Sue got married not long ago friends are asked at the Class of 1960's inspired by a night he spent with Peggy - Buddy Holly 25th anniversary reunion. Peggy Sue Sue; and the brilliant, curdled nerd (Barry knows exactly how it feels. \"We just got Miller), who makes a fortune in com- Peggy Sue Got Married is based on married too young,\" she confides with puters with her retroactive nudging. perhaps the dippiest and least suc- miserable acuity, \"and started blaming When Peggy Sue gets back to the future, cessful sequel a major rock artist ever each other for all the things we missed.\" she must make do with her status as muse made to a No. 1 record. The speaker is All right, so she's 42 and pooped; next to the art and industry of the Eighties. merely gossiping about pretty-pretty- case. But Peggy Sue has one more shot at pretty-pretty Peggy Sue, whom he had her teen dreams . As she is crowned An adult glancing back at adolescence loved and needed in the orjginal hit; and queen of the reunion , she faints into the is going to see things differently. Her he is none too sure of the validity of his past, and suddenly it's 1960. Peggy Sue is husband-to-be, who once seemed the 17 and the world is young. smooth operator in his gold lame jacket (, Iyour eyes look like pools of moonlight, She ought to be as carefree as Father J0 HN ZORN On THE BIG GUNDOWN, \"the Lower East Side's reigning musical thinker\" (Vogue) reworks the music of Italian film composer Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon A Time in the West). \"Like Bernard Herrmann's work for Alfred Hitchcock, Nino Rota's for Fellini, or John Barry's for the James Bond mov· ies, Morricone's writing for Sergio Leone marks one of the pre-eminent composer· director collaborations ... Zorn's foxy, intrepid arrangements latch onto the soundtracks only to crack them open:' (from the liner notes) Nonesuch /Icon (79139) N NONESUCH NONESUCH RECORDS. STANDING APART FROM THE SLAGHEAP OF GUTLESS CONFORMITY.* ® 1986 Elekrro /Al ylu rn lN o new ch Record. , 0 O;\"', ;on 01 Worn e r Comm urlicotion, Inc., O' (\"Chicago Trilunel 13
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Peggy Sue.Adult frustrations and teen dreams. trucks demonstrating their jolly erec- tions, or a gang of 4-H kids banging sticks and the tide rushes in\"), is going to is secured. The film comes close to and tin cans in a rendition of \"Hey Now\" appear pretty dinky, chatting up moral defining melancholy; it is a lace valentine that suggests Pixote on peyote. responsibility with his future in-laws, or to everything we lose by growing up and refu sing Peggy Sue's sexual proposals old . A la recherche du temps, Peggy Sue. Everybody has a house in Virgil , but (\" You say, 'If you love me , you will' - would the Building & Loan have financed that's a guy's line\" ). The girlchat is Here where you are standing them? Louis' place has a big WIFE adorably inane; Dad's threats strike not The dinosaurs did their dance WANTED sign out front; the Cute Wom- fear but condescension; the voice of her The Indians had their legends an's home is pink and frilly, with framed grandmother, soon to be dead , sends Now it has come to pass . . . portraits of rabbits and duckies adorning chills through Peggy Sue. The movie is a Underneath the concrete the walls; the Laziest Woman in the plea to treasure life's ordinary gifts , to see The dream is still alive World has a mansion that recalls the the routine of school days, family phone A hundred million lifetimes dramatic homestead that Boris Leven calls , pajama parties , even Mom's mantra A world that never dies. dreamed up for Giant; her servant, who to \" be a good girl, \" as precious things, performs white magic on the side, lives in precisely because they can't last. Soon J# live in the city ofdreams a house studded with gravestone markers enough , hopes and high spirits will give J# drive on this highway offire and antelope horns . From the first way to compromise and resignation; it Should we awake andfind it gone Talking Heads single (\"Love Goes to a comes with the territory of middle age. Remember this, our favorite town. Building on Fire\") a decade ago , Byrne's And when Peggy Sue finally comes out of songs have lingered long on the subject of her dream , she seems sensible enough to - David Byrne houses , and as the Narrator in his own admit the philandering Charlie back into movie he rhapsodizes about metal build- her life. Too sensible. Peggy Sue, and the I n Frank Capra's favorite town, Bedford ings and company headquarters. You film , lived a dream ; then she got married Falls, everybody wanted a home , and certainly can't burn down the house that and the dream died. George Bailey helped them get one. But Varicorp built. \"It's cool,\" says the there was a uniformity in his sense of Narrator, of the company plant. \"It's sort The whole picture is a dream of its community. The bit players knew their of a multipurpose shape- a box. \" Vari- time , that wonderful year on the cusp of place; the Irish cop and the Italian corp controls Virgil as tightly as Mr. the Sixties (d., but don't see, Stand By barkeep and the colored maid provided Potter ever dreamed of running Bedford Me and My American Cousin). The film the hum of ethnic Muzak that lulled begins and ends with shots in a mirror : Bedford Falls through the storybook Falls. But nobody seems to mind much reflexive cinema with a fine sugar frost- Twenties and into the Depression. In that the modern small town is a wholly ing. If, in between , it indulges in too David Byrne's favorite town , Virgil , owned subsidiary of the modern corpo- many time-warp jokes; if Cage's man- Texas , the bit players are the movie. rate state. It's still a decent place to live. nered goofiness grates on some nerves Their eccentricities stoke the film's plot (not mine , I think he's fine and funny); if and fill in the filligree . You can see True So is True Stories: decent , ingratiating, it flirts with Spielbergian grandparental Stories as being (mainly, sort of) about bordering on mellow. Which should voodoo toward the end ; if it lacks the the attempts of good 01' boy Louis Fyne come as a surprise, and maybe a audacity that critics pine for in films to snare a wife, but you ride that narrative disappointment, to Talking Heads fans directed by Francis Coppola (the same track at your peril. Every few minutes who have been thrilled watching David Coppola so often bopped by these same you'll be derailed by the image of an burn. You'd look at the early Byrne-even critics when he skydives into expression- executive at Varicorp perfecting his the apparition in Jonathan Demme's ism), Peggy Sue still finds anchor in that breakdancing, or a parade of pickup concert film Stop Making Sense (1984)- part of the gut where It 's a Wondeiful Life and form an unlikely scenario. Buddy Holly did not die. He was pulled out of the aerorubble in 1959 and institutional- ized for 20 years. When he came out he was streamlined, blank-faced, a twitching hipster of jerkdom. Thus a star was born: the Showman from Outer Space. And thus the tone of Byrne's movie is suspect. Not even the pose of angry anarchy; not the trace of a psycho killer. This SoBo boho claims he really likes these down-home bohunks . Oh, sure. Son of Paleface, tooling down the Texas freeway in his red '85 Chrysler Le Baron convertible Gust like Jeffrey Beaumont's fIoptop, but brighter) , revels in the oddities of yodeling wranglers , Shriners driving toy Mustangs , the June Taylor Golden Age dancers , and a dozen fat and tiny folks lip-synching his songs. I think he does. No David-not Lynch, not Letterman, not Byrne- would devote his talent to an hour and a 16
Madri Gras in New Orleans with half of stupid people tricks. And though a Fellowships Professor Longhair and others movie shouldn't be praised or faulted on available the amiability of its intent, this one is to study ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE clearly beguiled by Eighties folkways. film at We're in Beth Henley country, remember, New York LES BLANK'S as well as in a D avid Byrne space station. FLOWER FILMS Her plays (Crimes of the Heart) and University's movies (Nobody's FooT) are at pains to Tisch School presents ON VIDEO idealize doodlers in the margins of of the Arts southern propriety; the script that she MUSIC, FOOD AND FUN and her frequent collaborator Stephen Each year the Willard T. C. Tobolows ky delivered to Byrne is Johnson Foundation considers \"Blank's on the scene 'motion' picture work crammed with lovable geeks. applications from emerging is cinema vitalite.\" filmmakers for two $10,000 And Byrne has blended their off-center fellowships for study at New Andrew Horlon, Film Quarterly sentimentality with the cool gaze of York University'S Tisch School Downtown Art. True Stories is the fourth of the Arts. One is available to FLOWER FILMS film of 1986 to emerge from the SoHo undergraduate students; the community, following Down by Law from other to graduate students. 10341 SAN PABLO AVE., Jim Jarmusch (who directed a Talking EL CERRITO, CA 94530 Heads video) , JoAnne Akalaitis' Dead We are now conducting a End Kids (to which Byrne contributed a national search for filrrunaking (415) 525·0942 song), and Laurie Anderson's Home of students of exceptional talent the Brave. But it is likely to be the first of and promise. Candidates will be WRITE FOR OUR CATALOG OF the Downtown film s that engages the rest judged on the basis of creative AROMA ROUND EVENTS, FOLK CULTURE of the country in something more benign work , academic standing, and DOCUMENTARIES, AND MUSIC VIDEOS than a mandarin sneer. leadership potential. The Complete Films of You can tell from the nine songs Byrne For more information and an composed for True Stories that he wants application, contact Dean Elena ,,:.KENNETH ANGER to meet these strangers from tabloid tales Pinto Simon, TIsch School of more than halfway. The lyrics are almost the Arts, New York University, \"... comes from that beautiful night from which jubilant in their banality; the images are 721 Broadway, 7th Floor, emerge all the true works. It touches the quick of inchoate, as if they sprang from the free- New York , N.Y. 10003; the soul and this is very rare.\" - Jean Cocteau wheeling mind of just anybody singing in (212) 598-2816 . the shower or the car. The tunes are (Be sure to indicate undergradu- VOLUME 1: Fireworks. Rabbit's Moon. Eaux simple, too, and infectious as a radio ate or graduate level. ) d'Artifice (34 min.. b/w) jingle for a chili chain - the Cal-Mex beat of Ritchie Valens (no kin to Dorothy) is as Applications must be recei ved no later VOLUME 2: The Inauguration of the Pleasure insistent as the echoes of Texas' own than January 15 , 1987. Dome (38 min., color) Buddy Holly. (I guess that makes Louis Fyne the Big Bopper.) Byrne has written NEWYORK VOLUME 3: Kustom Kar Kommandos. Puce music these people would like. And, RSI1Y Moment, Scorpio Rising (37 min.. color) yeah, he likes these people. New York Uni ve r ity is an affi rmati ve VOLUME 4: Invocation of My Demon Brother, \" Look at a field ,\" True Stories' civic ac tionleq ual opportunity institution. Lucifer Rising (39 min.. color) leader tells Byrne's narrator. \" Picture a house. Picture a lot of houses . What good 17 Each volume is $50, and the boxed set of four is available for is a field but to build houses on?\" Like $200. The first 200 sets will be signed and numbered by the just about everything else in the film , this filmmaker and include a 24 pp. monograph on Anger's films. All speech is both ironic and heartfelt. For orders are prepaid INYS residents add 8'~% sales taxI. PI~ase beneath the mystical Levittownism of add $2 per tape for shipping and handling. and specify VHS or the burgher's spiel is an old dream : the magic of building a network of mortar and Beta format. Exclusively from: muscle. What is True Stories if not a parable of creating a community on the mystic ~IRE \\'I~EO road to nowhere? It might be SoHo, or a small town in California, or a mall town 24 HORATIO ST. #31'; NY NY 10014 near Dallas, or the synthetic community (212) 645-2733 of a movie set. And as the song says, each person's favorite town is built on the WRITE FOR OUR CATALOG OF AVANT GAROE CINEMA. LIVING deeds and despair of a hundred million lifetimes that preceded it. The global _~_ _ - . l _ _:ru.~rR&ARr Rmr.R~PHY-ANO SPIRITUALVmEflS village might be called Bedford Falls, or even Lumberton, but we're stuck together in it - the world that dreams are made of. Our town. @
• Cinema, Theroux... r.u~al.-Pk-~~s ~unnyby Marcia Pally o nt I\"Lots of women like uncompli- cated sex;' snaps Dr. Lauren CSlaughter, research fellow at the colleagues' highjinks, Weaver-striking, intell!gent, and - struggles to find her nIche as leading lady. The problem is ~o not new to her. Born to an old, wealthy, ~ASP family, she was too tall and goofy to fit the part of debutante. Arab-Anglo Institute in London. In Bob . Swaim's film of Paul Theroux's Half Weaver's paternal grandfather, Sylves- Moon Street , Sigourney Weaver plays ter Weaver Sr., made the family Slaughter, a Harvard Ph.D. who can't fortune selling roofing materials in Los make ends meet on her institute salary. Angeles; his wife wrote operas. Their To supplement her income, Slaughter son, Pat Weaver, became president of moonlights at the Jasmine Escort Ser- NBC, creating the talk-show format with vice, where she has more control over the Today and Tonight programs. He men and money than she does at the married the British actress Elizabeth office. Up in the ivory tower, they publish Inglis , and had two children. Young Susan her research under their names and pass (the name her parents gave Weaver) saw lucrative field trips along the old boy her father \"trying to transform television network. According to the rules at ... pushing against the commonplace all Jasmine, she decides what she does after the time:' dinner and sets her own terms. She During the Fifties, Susan and her enjoys herself. brother Trajan moved \"about 30 times\" On one of her dates , Lauren meets with their parents. The great television Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine), a liberal performers of the decade- Milton Berle, politician who is trying to mediate a Steve Allen, Jessica Tandy-regularly peace accord between the Arabs and visited the Weaver homes, which Israelis . Bulbeck falls in love with his egg- included a Sutton Place apartment that head escort, and unwittingly, Lauren once belonged to Marion Davies and a becomes a pawn in some very dirty Amoving lady. Sands Point, Long Island estate. Susan politics. The rest is predictable policier. dish, get someone else. attended the Brearley girls' academy and Swaim provides some measured (by However improbable, Weaver's role the exclusive Ethyl Walker School. She American Rambo standards) punch- takes a swipe at one of the last vestiges of was the \"nerdiest girl in my freshman throwing and gun-cocking, as he did in La the double standard, the one that divides class\" and thought that her status had Balance. At the end, a Scotland Yard johns and hookers. We no longer think improved considerably when she was SWAT team saves the day. that \"ladies don't move;' or that men lust voted \"Junior Birdman;' the funnies~ of Glamorized fantasies about the high and women don't. But when senators, the third-year students. In school plays, times of hooking seem to be the modern news anchors, and philosophers employ she always took the trouser roles. At age update on the whore with a heart of gold. ladies of the night, they remain senators, 14, Susan adopted the name Sigourney, They're cropping up more often in the news anchors, and philosophers , after a minor character in The Great media. Margot Kidder played the part in respected and admired. (If the press Gatsby. \"I was so tall ;' Weaver explains 1981 in Some Kind of Hero, Kathleen wants a scandal, it had better involve an seriously, \"and Susan was such a short Turner spiked her heels in Crimes of underage boy.) The ladies, however, are name:' Passion two years ago, last summer Faye whores plain and simple. Staring Bulbeck Weaver got her first theater job in a Dunaway appeared on television as the down, Lauren asks, \"Why is this damag- Connecticut summer stock troupe, Beverly Hills Madame, and the May- ing to me and not to you?\" As a prostitute where she was told she was \"uncastable\" flower Madame's press party still isn't once explained to me, when a woman because of her five-foot 10 1/2-inch over. Fortunately for Weaver, there's a takes money for sex, she's marked for the height. Her next venture was helping the twist in Half Moon Street that makes her rest of her life. The john gets a red badge state of Israel by working on the Hill of role a bit more intriguing than these too- of courage, the prostitute the scarlet Isaac Kibbutz. She left during her third good-to-be-true tales of the happy letter. week after blowing up a potato-peeling hooker: Lauren uses her own name on Weaver dominates Half Moon Street as machine. She endured Stanford Univer- her evening assignments. It's Dr. Lauren she has none of her previous films save sity a little longer. It was the Sixties; Slaughter who is your call girl, and she the Alien pair. Linda Hunt had the plum Sigourney ran around in elf costumes, talks with bite and authority about part in The Year of Living Dangerously, lived in a tree house, protested the international economics. If a woman in and the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man ate Vietnam War and ROTC, and graduated tweeds and glasses is not a hot enough up Ghostbusters. Cast as sideline to her with a degree in English. Onward she 18
p went to the Yale drama school where she was also \"uncastable\" and told that she \"had no future\" in acting. She showed up at her final examinations in a blue blazer that opened to reveal a piece of muslin painted with a bulls-eye target. While at Yale, she befriended play- wrights Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You), Wendy Wasserstein (Uncommon Women and Others), and John Guare (House of Blue Leaves). She left the school wanting out of the theater (\"I thought I'd get a nice safe job, like working in a bank\"), but Durang gave her a part in The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, and Sir John Gielgud cast her as an understudy in the national tour of The Constant Wife, starring Ingrid Bergman. In 1977, she played a compulsively neat Swedish maid whose job it is to clean a glacier in Guare's satire, Marco Polo Sings A Solo. The next year, she auditioned for Alien. After the screen test, Alan Ladd Jr. worried that her portrayal of Ripley would be too \"hard:' He called in all the studio secretaries to see if they liked her. Since her victory with the typing pool, Weaver has played opposite William Hurt in Eyewitness, Mel Gibson in The ~ar of Living Dangerously, Chevy Chase in The Deal ofthe Century, and Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters. Her Broadway debut in Hurlyburly-costar- ring Hurt-earned her a Tony nomina- tion in 1984. In the last 18 months, she's done three films, Aliens, Half Moon Street, and One Woman or Two, directed by Daniel Vigne with Gerard Depardieu and Dr. Ruth Westheimer (see FILM COMMENT, July 1986). Her relationship with Chris Durang has proved the most fruitful over the last 15 years. Weaver played a schizophrenic with a penchant for violence in his Titanic and a woman who has an affair with her bisexual analyst in Beyond Therapy. Together they wrote Das Lusitania Songspiel, a satire of Brechtian theater that includes an update on \"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend\" entitled \"The Song of Economic Reality:' For Esquire they wrote and performed a parody of the typical fanzine interview, which may be expanded into a film script and is excerpted here: C.D.: Tell me, how did you get the leading role in Alien? S.W.: I slept with the director. C.D.: And Eyewitness? S.W.: I slept with the director and the writer and the crew. C.D.: And The Year of Living Danger- ously?
s.w.: I slept with the Australian con- picture. sulate. \"The book - which is based on a real C.D.: And your new film, Ghostbusters? 'Dr. Slaughter' who is at a think tank S.W.: I slept with Menudo. somewhere in California-is one blow In 1983, Weaver married theater direc- tor Jim Simpson. True to style, Weaver job after another. I adored it because it's a had two ministers officiating-one male, one female. Bagpipes and bongo drums real satire. My father-in-law read it, then accompanied them. As a token of the newlyweds' affection, each guest at the my father, then my mother-in-law, who party received a washable tattoo. had the good taste not to mention it to The day Weaver and I talk, she sails into The Eclair, an Upper West Side me. coffee shop, six minutes past the appointed hour. She spends the next six \"It was a challenge to play someone minutes apologizing. The Eclair's clien- tele, at midday, consists mainly of elderly intelligent instead of being told I look too people chatting away in Yiddish or Russian. What with the bubbeh atmo- smart for the role. It was a challenge to sphere and Weaver's self-flagellation, we aren't getting off to a very glamorous play someone who is so sure of herself. start. She's wearing no makeup, a goldenrod colored shirt and plaid pants. When Lauren returns to the West from Over potato soup, she asks me questions about where I grew up and went to China, she doesn't feel she's subject to school. Some of my best friends are more standoffish. the same rules as everyone else because ''All the kids in your school were little Chinese values are so different from ours Jewish kids?\" she asks. \"I wanted to convert to Judaism. I went to one of those that it explodes the notion of what values schools where religion was a loose amorphous thing. If I'd married a Jew, I'm are . I love her confidence; her natural sure I would've converted. Don't write that-my mother will be shocked. No, arrogance. I don't want to see her get her go ahead . come-uppance. It's such a shock for her \"In college all my friends were Jewish, and I felt deprived of an important to realize she's been stupid, like everyone experience - not that the WASP tradition doesn't give you a colorful heritage. else. Her arrogance is a character flaw. When I worked on the kibbutz, I expected to laugh all the time because my Any tragedy that comes out of a character Jewish friends here were all so funny. But, of course, Israeli culture isn't the same as flaw interests me. . men and women because of childbearing. Jewish culture. The Israelis were all very serious workers:' Getting serious, she \"I think a lot of women will understand The nightmare sequence where Lauren adds, \"I remember when a friend of mine who grew up in the South told me about what Lauren wants, even if they don't sees horrible visions of her dates is the the anti-Semitism there. I just couldn't believe it. I can't understand why anyone become call girls . I have so many friends first indication that something is escaping would make it their business to hate people who have contributed so much:' who work 18 hours a day and earn her control. The social and psychological Eventually we get round to her contri- nothing. Lauren is the penultimate Yup- costs get to be too much for her. Lauren is butions. \"I loved my part in Half Moon Street. I fought hard to do it. Swaim saw pie - healthy, clean-living- and she naive to think she won't be affected by it. every woman who'd ever read from a script. Fortunately, many of them were decides to go for the money. When she That's her character flaw. The point is, put off by the material. Swaim was under pressure to tone the sexual parts down, falls in love it's with a man who embodies anyone would be affected by it. and when I read the second version of the script I was disappointed because it had all the things she wants to be: powerful, \"I know, I contradicted myself. I'll clear gotten so tame. I was a lone voice telling Swaim he couldn't do this as a 'safe' rich , and charming. it up. I think prostitution would affect \"This is the first story about a woman anybody, but casual sex may affect men involved with kinky sex who isn't a Jekyl and women differently because of biology and Hyde character. She uses her own - at least some of the time. name; she is herself on her 'dates: She \"Most men aren't as affected as women doesn't feel like a victim . She sees men of by the birth of their children-especially power, and they're putty in her hands. those who talk about participating in \"Lauren's line 'A lot of women like childcare and then see that it isn't all that uncomplicated sex' is my line. I put it in dazzl~ng. But I know a few fathers who the script. Lauren thinks it's true. This is are dazed by the experience. They want her backlash against the idea that men to spend so much time with their babies, can have meaningless sex but women they practically snatch their kids from can't. Even some women say that only their wives' hands. It may depend on the men can have casual sex, because job: if a man is climbing the corporate pregnancy and childbirth make us inher- ladder, it's harder to be a father. Maybe ently more delicate about these things . I corporations will realize it's better for don't agree. I'm with Lauren here. The men to have paternity leave. When they doubl~ standard is too black and white. If get back to work, at least they'll be eager there was an orgasm machine on the to be there:' market , as many women would use it as Smen. Look at vibrators. peaking of motherhood, in the 1979 \"On the other hand, if meaningless sex Alien, Ripley (Weaver's character) was were so great, women would've found a the first woman space warrior; in 1986 way to have it. I think everyone agrees she's a woman fighting to save a child. Is that it's better making love with someone that the difference between Sigourney- you care about. And I've noticed that or women-then and now? since Jim and I are planning to have a \"There are other changes in Ripley family I've begun to have different between the 1979 and the 1986 films that feelings. You become a little nest-like. So are important to me. I'm older now and I maybe there are differences between wanted to play an older person. Ripley 20
isn't the eager young ensign anymore. my part to guide or instruct was met with The definitive Her own daughter has grown old and died amusement by her:' record of the two years before the film begins. I had a 1985 U.S. picture of my own mother to look at in Does Weaver feel aggression is as movI•e season the scene where Ripley is shown a photo available to women as mothering is to of her daughter. She's shocked that 57 men? \"I just can't agree with generaliza- * 1,000 photographs years have gone by, none of her friends or tions about women and men - they're family are alive, and everyone distrusts crazy. There are differences between * Casts and credits her. That happens so often: you work sexes but there are also as many * Oscar winners hard at something and no one under- differences between me and other * Promising newcomers stands what you've done. In Alien, women. I'm praised for being a feminist * Biographical listings Ripley's choices are those of a lucid, by some and criticized for being 'mascu- * Obits ambitious person. In Aliens she's got to line' by others . It can be argued forever. * lO,OOO-entry index go back and fight the monsters because For me, films are about individual she has no choice. Nothing is left for her people. I'm always asked if my characters 1986 FILM ANNUAL here. represent women. They don't. Each one represents one woman. Aliens is the story BY JOBIWILLIS \"As for Ripley's mothering, women are of Ripley-a civilian-becoming a war- the strongest characters in the film. Even rior, not a woman becoming a man. The VOLUME 37 the alien is more intelligent because of moment Ripley explodes in anger and her maternal aspect. And who's inter- goes after the alien, she drops back in $24 .95. at your bookstores or use coupon to order. ested in fighting a dumb monster? Newt evolution and becomes everything she [the orphaned girl) is really the strongest: despises. That can happen to anyone. It::IPVN PUBLISHER5l1iJ she's survived the longest, she's thinking the most clearly. The maternal experi- \"Though I like the throne room scene r ';;2-'~~w-;~B~;-R7,1;;.~;;. ence for Ripley isn't a throwback. It could where Ripley attempts to negotiate happen to a man. Besides, when Ripley peacefully with the bug queen , I also I I34 Engelhard Ave ., Avenel, N.J . 07001 and Newt are in danger they're col- think it's important to have a woman save IPlease send me SCREEN WORLD : 1986. I leagues. They postpone the mommy the day-especially for kids, who usually stuff till they're safe. Like any love story, see only male heroes...\"When the ques- I enclose $24.95 plus $1 .50 postage and this relationship must be earned. Ripley tion of women being drafted came up a Ihandling . NY and N.J . residen1s , add sales makes Newt a promise and she goes back few years ago, I thought that there are to her to earn it:' Leaning towards me some people who are better at fighting I tax . IO·day money-back guarantee. Weaver adds, \"though when I read the than others. Some of them are men, I I0 Enclosed is my check/money order. OR script I said I'd never make that promise. some women. I Icharge my 0 VISA 0 MasterCard I'm too scared. \"I knew we were playing into some- I# IExp . Date__ \"I learned something about mothering thing trendy with Aliens-the Rambo I Signature I from working with Carrie [Henn, the commando complex where the hero actress who played Newt in Aliens). You singlehandedly mows down his oppo- I Name I don't nurture and protect children, you nents. If I see my role as a Chinese I Address I just talk and are equals. Any attempt on warrior, a Valkyrie, or as the Henry V- who-I'II-never-get-to-play, then I'm inter- State _ _ Zip__ I ested in it. It's a chance to do a classic male part. If I see it as gun play, I'm not .... interested. The use of weapons is always ------------L City the least important aspect of a film to me , even if it's the most effective with the audience. I tried to see Rambo but I couldn't sit through it. It's awful. In making Aliens I think I underestimated the degree to which [director Jim) Cameron would pay attention to guns- though, beGause he's so skilled, the film does transcend the violence. The glory of grease, sweat, and guns may have limited appeal in this decade. It may ultimately date the film:' For opinions like these, Wemer has been called a gun-control activist. \"I'm not an 'activist' but I'm actively con- cerned. I think the work of actors makes us sensitive to humanitarian issues. We look into individual souls; that itself is a humanitarian pursuit. We care about human beings. If you don't, you don't become an actor. Also , living in Europe 21
taught me how horrible they are. And this to men, but women hear it more. does in her life. \"I'm glad I married a doing science fiction films teaches you Sometimes I get a chance to read fellow artist. Any success I've had so far that we're a species, not a collection of producers' comments on the actresses juggling my private and professional lives races and nationalities. If I could take they audition , like: 'So-and-so is comfort- is because of Jim's generosity. He's made world citizenship right now, I would. able with her femininity. She doesn't feel more compromises than I have without Though I'm very glad to be American:' the need to bark out feminist comments: 'billing' me for it. He's not interested in Once I see that, I know I don't want to trade-offs. He gave up work to live with Y et Weaver has been in three fairly work with that person. me in England last year, and he was violent films: the two Alien movies wonderful on tour when I didn't have and The Deal of the Century. \"Deal is a \"Women shouldn't 'know their place' on much energy left to give to a marriage. very antiwar film. Had it worked , it the set. The biographies of the great would've been a very nasty satire on the female stars are very instructive. Most \"Jim is younger than I am, and that's pervasive attitude about arms in the U.S. suffered terrible discrimination, espe- helped us. He knows I'm in the thick of And ultimately, I think Aliens says that cially in terms of economic control of things now and have to take advantage of people who rely on guns aren't wise to do their work. Female stars still get paid it. Though when some friends suggested so. Real courage is physical and emo- much less than the men-unless you're I go into politics, he drew the line there. tional. Ripley would've gone down to get Streisand or Hawn and go into producing. It's wonderful to live with someone who Newt even if she didn't have a gun. And believes you can do anything-especially she would've been killed. \"I'm 'accused' of always playing strong for a woman. It's so supportive, and so women. If I read a script and a disaster is rare. What attracted Jim to me was that I \"One of the few saving graces of taking place, and the woman is standing was so powerful, and that itself is unusual. celebrity status is that I can call attention there checking her clothes, it's not real. to certain political issues. A few days ago I So I suggest a change. I've always been \"I wouldn't have taken on three films was privileged to speak at the Lawyers outspoken. I think it's a service to the last year without his encouragement. Committee for Human Rights benefit writer. Having written my own stuff, I And the one I wouldn't have done was honoring Mrs. Aquino. I want to con- know it's important to get feedback. Aliens, because that was the last offer. tinue working with this group. It's a You can film only for so long without a nonpartisan organization investigating With Michael Caine. home life or else you go batty. And I had human rights abuses under all govern- \"I think I'm hired now in part because I this wonderful home life. I'd love the ments , left and right:' chance to do the same for him. I'm aware can complete a full sentence and say what I've let down my end, and I don't want Last year, Weaver said that screen I think about a scene. Last year my him to make up for it too often. It's not violence is the moral equivalent of a nude directors wanted the kind of work I do good for him, and therefore it's not good scene. I ask her how. \"The decision to do with my characters. One Woman or Two for us . Now we have to think about a nude scene is as important as the was more problematic. I had differences working this out with children. The decision to do a violent one. I'm certainly with [director Daniell Vigne about how balance gets much more complicated:' asked for a lot of gratuitous nudity in the comedy should be played. I think the films I do . I like Half Moon Street styles lurch in that film between realism T hree years ago, Weaver did a photo beca,use the nudity is a necessary part of and farce. I don't care about getting my session with Helmut Newton for the the character and plot. It's not there just own way. I care about being heard. If we Italian and American J0gue magazines. to lure audiences into the theater:' don't question things before we shoot, She objected to being the object of his nothing is ever tried or tested. fantasies, and he groaned at the model On the whole, has she been satisfied who wanted to contribute ideas to the with her roles? \"I've liked every role I've \"In a general way, women's roles are shoot. They worked it out. After finishing taken. I'd rather have a small part in a improving. Though movies are always the project they agreed to do another that movie I love than a bigger part in a movie behind what the public deserves, I'm now would focus on her fantasies. That shoot I don't care about-though I loved the reading scripts where the women have is still pending. responsibility last year of carrying a film. jobs and careers, even friends. And they I'm very picky about my roles , probably don't wait around for the action to start \"Newton loves women's psyches. He's too picky. when the man's story begins:' ready for the whole Pandora's box. I was used to the studio approach, the hair-in- \"There are women - ~istorical figures For Weaver, a character must grapple place nice girl look. Helmut was just the -that I want to play, like Georgia with the balance between her per- opposite. He took some shots of me in a O'Keeffe and Amelia Earhart. I thought sonal and professional lives, as Weaver patent leather bathing suit with a riding Meryl's work as Isak Dinesen was some crop standing on a mountain of film. He of the best she's done. I'm trying to figure took another series where I was dressed out how to do them without the films as a man looking at himself dressed as a becoming 'vehicles : I don't want to be in a prostitute. movie where the whole purpose of the project is to give the actress a big part. I \"I'd like to explore the sex goddess want to be part of a company:' image with him - not a satire, that I could do with any photographer. I want to Weaver has , however, been known to explore the madness of it. To me, Louise make changes in a script when the part or Brooks was the sexiest person in cinema. the lines don't suit her. \"Well yes, I do. Her eyes were a furnace. Helmut could The situation for women in film is far find a form for that. He's very controlling. from perfect. Studios are still worried that But when I saw his work, I said: Okay, a female character won't be 'sympathetic' control me:' ~ if you play her full-out. Producers may say 22
• . . .and Theroux. between commercial and artistic demands. His films still course with Peter Weir interviewed subcurrents of emotion and psychology. by Pat McGilligan He is drawn to people losing and finding themselves in exotic cultures, of the Subsequent to my meeting with human spirit transcendent over villainy, Australian-bred director Peter Weir, politics , and broken relationships. As a I had the odd experience of being \"colonized\" descendant, Weir seems asked, within 24 hours , the nearly haunted and propelled all the more, identical question about him by six, therefore, into these various international seven , eight people. Was he as searching, contexts. Each motion picture is very as spiritual, as mystical as his films? Well, different from the preceding one, and yet he seems down-to-earth, practical, and there are manifest links in their material rational, and he winces at references to and accents. Even Weir's camera has \"mystical\" or \"magical\" qualities in his rhapsodic moments when it seems to work. take on a life of its own, floating above and circling round , as if infinitely wise. His films , however, include: The Cars That Ate Paris (his low-budget, first His Gallipoli was neither as trenchant feature), Picnic at Hanging Rock (his first nor as angry as Bruce Beresford's Breaker U.S . release, an evocative allegory about Morant , yet it is equally involving. Weir British schoolgirls who , on an innocent lacks Fred Schepsi's piercing iconoclasm, outing, answer the siren-call of the unknown) , The Last Wave (his foray into ala his Barbarosa or Iceman. Weir sees apocalyptic dreams and the Aboriginal subculture of urban Australia) , The himself as a Romantic , in the 19th Plumber (real Brian De Palma terrain, a century meaning of the word. His films psycho-sexual suspenser made for Aus- do not have vitriol or sting; instead they tralian TV), Gallipoli (Aussie conscripts convey great muted feeling and passion. sacrificed by British indifference during They are not likely to inflict pain, but WWI), The Year of Living Dangerously count on them for strange foreboding and (the power of myth in rebellion-torn mesmerizing pleasure. Indonesia) , Witness (B-movie with cop- on-the-run Harrison Ford finding virtue Weir sees his limitations in the area of in the arms of Kelly McGillis and the story craft, and he may be right. There Pennsylvania Amish), and now the adap- are holes in The It?ar of Living Danger- tation of Paul Theroux's novel The ously and Witness that spoil the near Mosquito Coast. mastery. That is one reason he has shifted from the realm of the senses and Weir does not pretend to enjoy inter- hunkered down to storytelling. Admira- views, and he does not consent to do bly, he can take on big, old-fashioned love many of them. He prefers not to say stories set against backdrops of revolu- anything about himself at all. When tion and criminal intrigue and still remain pressed, he squirms, equivocates, and true to insti,ncts. replies-but with qualifications. His ulti- mate goal as a \"commercial\" director is to Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito have his signature become more \"invisi- Coast is a nigh-mystical tale of an ble:' Is Howard Hawks an ideal? Sorry, American hybrid of Don Quixote and says Weir, he is not familiar with the films Robinson Crusoe run amok in a remote of Hawks. Pressed further, he rather jungle territory. It is a perverse, hypnotic reluctantly says \"Jean Renoir:' It begins to adventure that beguiles with its charm make sense. and lyricism and then bedevils with its descent-into-Hell third act. Interestingly, Of the pack of stylish directors to Paul Schrader's and Weir's script softens emerge from the Australian cinema in the some of the uglier aspects. Gone, for Seventies, Weir has managed to \"go instance, is Theroux's final image of a Hollywood\" yet maintain an equilibrium vulture gulping down the hero's tongue.
But Weir (who often writes his own films) was the pre-television era, when the has worked more compassion into the street was your life, and there were always script, giving Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) a other kids in the street to play with . more rounded character. A lot of people grew up with the I met Weir in Los Angeles, working on matinee serials, but not every filmmaker the scoring of the film with composer chooses to escape into that sort offantasy Maurice Jarre. After an Australian career and, in a sense, back into boyhood. spent in television, documentaries , and It's a very rich line; perhaps it's nearly short films, Weir is now one of Holly- exhausted. Certainly it is in the hands of wood's most admired young directors, lesser talents. Comics were the other though he still resides with his family in factor in my upbringing, rather interest- Sydney. There are glimmers of influ- ingly, without making too much of it. I ences-Freud , Jung, even Scrooge don't know if there is an equivalent today, McDuck - in his work that he has picked but you collected comics, you swapped up , absorbed, and submerged along the and sold them. Perhaps it was just a way. Some he prefers to eschew, but craze, but it seemed to go on for years. though Weir would protest, it's all there in American comics would specialize in one his films-unmistakable and difficult to character or another. I liked the Disney unravel. comics , the Scrooge McDuck stories- We talked in the shaded patio of his he was so mean - and Gladstone Gander, suite in the Bel Air Hotel, a watering hQle because he was less goody two-shoes. of nouveau Hollywood , miles from the And comics like \"The Phantom\" and studios and the L.A. tangle. Weir could \"Blackhawk:' the pilot. easily be one of his own leading men - a Then television hit in '56-let's see, I slighter, more cerebral Mel Gibson or was born in '44 - and I became very Harrison Ford-boyish and handsome, interested in America. It was so new, you determinedly low-key, reticent, and just sat there fascinated , no matter what casual. If he were to film our brief was happening. encounter, the camera would probably As much as I try, I cannot see the not hover on him. No doubt it would influence of comics in your work. It is creep in on the plaster gaping beast difficult to categorize your films, except behind us spewing water into a small as \"Peter l*ir films .\" You avoid genres, fountain. save Witness, which really transcends -P.McG. genre. Yes. I don't tend to think in categories, T ell me about growing up in really. I think of myself as a storyteller, Australia, and how you were and I would have chosen another medium influenced by movies. if films hadn't been available, presumably writing. It was a postwar baby boom experience When I was a kid, my father used to tell fairly similar to that of kids anywhere in me serials . He'd make them up. It was a the Western world , in the sense that the great treat for about three or four years. big excitement was to earn enough Because of the active, outdoor life, pocket money, or to be treated by your naturally they'd have trouble getting me parents, to the Saturday afternoon mov- to bed. One of the temptations was that ies. First, my father used to take me, then my father would give me an episode of his I went with the kids in the street. I rarely serial. If I really had to single out an missed a Saturday, so I grew up with influence, I'd choose that experience- American film culture. the pleasure of telling the tale. Because the Australian film industry His longest-running one, which went was in eclipse at that point? over 12 months at five minutes a night, That's right-with the exception of the was called \"Black Bart Lamey's Treasure:' Australian newsreel, and the work of Which was pretty clearly a pirate title, set Charles Chauvell and Ken G. Hall. Of in the Caribbean. I think he borrowed course, it was mainly western serials. It some from Rafael Sabatini, and God was interesting to see Lucas and knows who else, but it was a great title, Spielberg, in various films, revive that and I can still recall certain passages. He memory. was a very good storyteller - it had l*re movies the dominant aspect of nothing to do with his occupation; he was your youth ? a real estate agent - but he had the knack No. It was just part of the fabric of life, of spinning a yarn . He would always leave as much as the beach and swimming. I it as a cliffhanger. And \"Black Bart\" was grew up in a very middle-class neighbor- such a success that it went on and on, hood near the sea in Sydney harbor. It until finally it did come to an end. He just
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ran out of inspiration, I suppose. When I Of course, later in the Seventies, I saw man business, quite successful, and he begged him for another one, he started a virtually all of Chaplin's work I could get looked forward to \"Weir & Son\" on the whole story about witchcraft, which my hold of, in some sort of chronology, and I window. I sold real estate for a year and a mother banned because it was so fright- was flabbergasted - ann laughing! It has half, and I was very successful at it too, ening I couldn't get to sleep. always interested me that you can see especially when I was selling land. I was something one time and it doesn't work only a kid of 19. I saved up enough to buy Did your father have any artistic for you, and later on it will. And vice a ticket to Europe, which is really what I aspirations? versa. In fact, the reverse is really painful. wanted to do. I got out a Visconti film recently that so During the war, when he was very short inspired and excited me at one period, Why? of money, doing odd selling jobs and and I found I couldn't get into it at all. I'll I don't know. Just to get out. Some- whatever, he wrote for the radio. They always appreciate it as the work of an thing was building up. Some pressure. It's were always advertising for scripts for the artist, but where was the fire? It's a most a rather uncomfortable period to remem- long-running serials. I found one of his unpleasant sense of loss. It happens with ber. I felt like I was playing a part. I didn't once in a cupboard with a whole batch of books, too-and music sometimes. I'm feel like I fit into that rather lovely world I radio plays that he'd written for a series sure it happens with people, too. was growing up in. It was part of a whole called Dr. Max, a human interest series unrest that was happening all around the about a country Gp, each one centered Did this realization about films push Western world. around a specific case. He had two you further toward directing? produced, I think. Were you influenced at all by the No, it was really through the theater. I Sixties? It was a tremendous discovery. In my went to London and Europe when I was I was very much on the edges of it. I whole family background I couldn't find 20, in 1965. On board ship, going over, I went through all the various fashions of anybody with an interest in culture. Nor got involved with a couple of other the day and the fashionable ideas and any real records of who we were before characters doing a shipboard revue. It's a ways of seeing the world, which bring we came to Australia. Which is quite very long trip-five weeks. The days faint embarrassment when you think typical of the immigration pattern. passed very slowly, and there wasn't back on it. A lot of it was just youthful There's a kind of veil dropped over the much entertainment on board . Somehow naivete and arrogance, really, and I think past. or other, these other characters and I got it is the arrogance of the times that I find permission to take over the entertain- myself uncomfortable with when I Could this be one reason why, so often ment on board, and we did a little reflect. Perhaps all we're left with is some in your movies-as in Gallipoli, or television satire on a closed-circuit good music. Witness, or The Mosquito Coast-the system. movie is observed through a boy's eyes? Certainly you distrust politics, politi- A boy in the shadow ofa father? I got terribly excited by that experi- cians, and ideologies. That comes ence. We met again in London, and through strongly in yourfilms. I think that's coincidence. Pure various things happened out of that. We chance. became collaborators. We didn't know Yes. All of them. I've never been a what we were doing really, but we did Jomer. Does this draw you to a story? manage to appear as a comedy act on an Hmmm. No. Not that I'm aware of. amateur night in a folk club in London. Is that partly a result of your experi- We wrote a book based on one of the ence in the Sixties? When did you first become aware that characters we invented on board the ship. films could be art? I later made it into a film, actually-it's Yes, that really confirmed me. I think I That's interesting. I guess with Stanley called The Life and Flight ofthe Reverend burned myself; I don't think anyone did it Kubrick. I was not exposed to any film Buckshotte. It belonged to a series of to me. I'm astounded when I think back culture in my late teens. The Sydney short black-and-white films I made prior on how I allowed myself to be susceptible Film Festival had started in the late to my first feature film. to the fairly cheap propaganda put out by Fifties, but I was not aware of it, not until my peers and comrades-in-arms at the sometime later. I might have been in my Prior to this, had you any involvement time. But I'm not angry about it, just early twenties when I first saw Dr. in show business? realistic. Strangelave, and that led me to see earlier Kubrick films, and to watch out for No. I had dropped out of the univer- Did what happened then prompt the him. He struck me particularly as being sity. I was a pretty hopeless student. I had explosion of filmmaking in Australia in different because, up to that point, I had some Student Prince idea of it all that the late Sixties and early Seventies? thought of movies, the way most of the we'd be laughing and talking and there'd public does, as being entertainments. I In my view, very much so. It had to do was quite unconscious of any greater be girls .... with the [Vietnam) war first. Not only resonance. I got to my first lecture, there were 900 war, but great social upheaval, if one looks back through history, has always I had seen the odd bits of Charlie of us , and there was an ant down in front caused great movements in the arts, Chaplin and thought they were quaint- with a microphone talking about James immediately after or during. Post-World he didn't move at the correct speed - and Joyce. I looked at the fellow next to me, War I France. Post-revolutionary Russia. at the time I thought they were a little bit who became a very good friend, and said, This country [the United States), after inflated. My father took me to see a \"I can't believe this!\" Afterward, we went and during the Vietnam War, particularly couple of Chaplin pictures that were for a beer, the beginning of many beers in movies. A whole generation of filmma- revived in the late Fifties. He sat there, and many skipped lectures .... kers came out of that period. It was very falling all about, while I sat there feeling true in Australia, particularly for a country rather curious. It must be like the music So I went into real estate. My father that had been so conservative in all areas of your parents that you can't quite plug was glad to see me get out of that time- up until the Vietnam War. into. wasting process; he was looking forward to me joining him. He had a small one- There was the debate in the streets- 26
On the set ofMosquito Coast. sweeper. Meanwhile, I was working with these things .... two or three friends doing off-off-Broad- father against son, brother against sister way-type theater, almost the next stage When and why did you decide to - about the rights and wrongs of the war. out of university revue , as a writer- become a film director? That's the only conversation you heard performer. We wrote our own stuff and I went back to Europe in ' 71 for six anywhere-buses, trains, lifts. But peo- directed each other. It was not a months on a study grant from the ple were talking to each other, and these commune, as such, but there were five or government film commission . I was conservative people would hardly say six of us, eventually, and we worked as a studying British feature film production. I hello to each other in a doctor's waiting group and had a great time. saw the Monty Python series and knew it room. There is a certain sort of social was all over for me as a writer-performer. stiffness that exists in our country - Qot I began to make little films to put on in They were just so good. And we were just so during that period. the shows. It was a period of multimedia, beginning to break through - at that and I used to enjoy taking some of our point we had been commissioned to do a Add to that the youth upheaval , the more complex sketches that we couldn't half hour comedy series for the Australian rock 'n' roll, the long hair, the dope, the do on stage and shooting little 16mm Broadcasting Company. I pulled out at whole swirling cauldron of change.... black-and-white films. Sometimes I was the last minute. I sold my sketches to The excitement and the thrill of chaos in them and sometimes I wrote them, but them and left the group. It was a bitter produced all sorts of interesting things , I always directed them. I didn't realize I thing between us . some of them short-term, some of them was directing them. In fact, the first long significant. Restaurants for alternative film I did (Count Vim) , 15 minutes long, I But I had an instinctive feeling about ways of eating, clothes, leaving your put on \"produced by Peter Weir:' film. Partly it was my ignorance of film father's business to become a... culture and film history that allowed me Was it painful for you to leave the to have so few inhibitions , to see a future Filmmaker. Sixties behind? Is there any residue in for myself as a director. Exactly. I was caught up in it and did all your work? those things, and to my family's amaze- I would guess-especially on the basis ment and horror, when I came back from I'm very much another person from of Picnic at Hanging Rock , The Last Europe in '66, I was radicalized, as they who I was then. It was just like you were a Wave, and The Plumber-that you were used to say in those times . I came back pilot in the Air Force, and suddenly your reading and heavily influenced by socio- long-haired, antiwar, married, with no application was selected for not just an logical, anthropological, andpsycholog- money, and determined to go into theater astronaut program but for really deep ical texts throughout the decade. or television. They couldn't believe or space probe. You were one of six, eight, understand that. I went away one person ten individuals who were going to go to Yes, yes, yes. and came back another. Saturn . That's what happened to me .... You seem to wince at that. Why? So I dug ditches and delivered bread Because I have moved on . I was and all sorts of odd jobs until I got a job in It all became irrelevant. . . . reading Carl lung, Carlos Castaneda, television as a stagehand and floor- Now, over coffee, I can just smile at 27
Emmanuel Vellokovsky-I can still dip television series for a British company, a That began a period of years of reading into him - and the Old Testament, colonial tale of 13 episodes, in 1973. He and talking and eventually of film, an among other things. Not so much Freud, made me realize that everything I had effort that to me was always a failure, whom I am just now starting to read. And been taught in school about the Aborig- because I captured so little of what I got not political texts either. ines was total hogwash. Through long to know over that period. It remains, to conversations with him, I realized the this day, a real frustrating memory for me. I had concerns then, and though other absurdity of the history books, which things besides books influenced me, it teach that the Aborigines were a kind of That means you are not satisfied with was just like finishing with an author: I Stone Age people in the dawn of time, The Last Wave as an exploration ofthose moved on. But they became part of what nomadic , without any culture of signifi- themes. I was rather than my current state of No. It's only two or three percent of thinking. Incidentally, a lot of the reading cant or enduring qualities , that they what I knew. Maybe what I discovered was meant to be personal. Maybe it and investigation cleared up my mind on collapsed in contact with a more wasn't something I was meant to put in a certain points; and if the mysteries were advanced, superior, and complex culture. film. It was something that interested me, that's all. not cleared up, for me their importance One thing about these films of the receded. Though I remain fascinated by Seventies-leading up to Gallipoli-they are intensely \"serious\" and surprisingly religious philosophy, by spiritual inquiry, humorless for someone whose professed background was comedy shtick. by the human condition. Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Your films have a preoccupation with Uizve seemed to go together. It was a pretty unfunny time, this tale end of the dreams and illusions, with the subcur- Sixties, with all its excesses. One of the unfortunate things about a conversation rents of reason , with ancient, forgotten of this kind is that the serious side of me tends to come out, whereas in life I like to beliefs. think I am a good jokester and that there's a lot of humor on my sets. In Witness, for I must say that is abundantly apparent example, Harrison and I cooked up some of the comedy while shooting- it's there now, but I can't say that I was aware of in the dance in the barn and in the breakfast scene, which was Harrison's being aware of it at the time. I'm idea and comes from an audition he once failed. somewhat uncomfortable with that pat- Comedy is bloody hard to do, incident- tern. It gives me no particular pleasure. I ally. But I have not given up on comedy. For the moment, for me, the best don't think there is anything significant comedy springs out of genuine drama. But the type of comedy I would like to do about it. is Lolita-very black, tense humor; that's the type that thrills me. These are just things I got very The end of that period of speculation interested in ten years ago and began to in the Seventies came about in a very sharp, particular way. I was making a investigate in myself, and to think, read, documentary in Sydney, which I really did as a favor for a friend, a potter- highly and talk about. While I did so, I was least regarded, charming, much loved-who was retiring from teaching pottery after in touch with these things . Fortunately, I many years at a technical college in Sydney. An arts foundation wanted this realized this after some years-that it was filmed record of his work, so I said, \"All right, if I can make it my own way:' best not to talk about them and then they I found his story very interesting. He will come back with all of their richness. had been a prisoner of war of the japanese captured in the fall of Singa- Of course we all have dreams as part of pore; he had endured the hardships and horrors in a japanese prisoner-of-war our psychic makeup. There are simply camp, and yet, after he came out, he had become a potter. Of course, anyone who unmeasured abilities we have, forms of becomes a potter has to go to japan and immerse himself in the history of the communication, or ancient influences great masters of pottery. I found this very interesting-that a man who had experi- that have come through the very genes that make us what we are. It's a subject with no boundaries. But I've explored it consciously enough to decide it's best to leave it alone and to concentrate on craft. Did the Aborigines become a source of concern or guiltfor you? Yes, sure, though I don't know about guilt. It became personal for me by meeting an Aborigine and getting to Witness. know him slightly- [actor] David Gulpi- iiI, who was in The Last Wave-and who, Talking with David, I realized the as you may know, is a tribal man and a Aborigine culture was very much alive, if very curious case, because he would go underground, so to speak. It was simply a between the two worlds and do his acting different culture, and we had been in the city, with an agent and a fee, looking at it with our definition of culture. reading scripts and turning up for make- The Aborigines use the same word, up calls; then he would disappear for six culture, to mean something far richer months, during which time he might as than what we have come to mean by it. well have been on another planet or in Here was a most interesting case where another time. He goes back in his time we had lost something since contact with machine to his tribal lands, where aU the the Aborigines-something they still ancient laws apply to him. I met Gulpilil had. They lost something, too-the land when I was shooting an episode in a and a lot of tribes. 28
enced prisoner-of-war trauma ended up European cinema, but even so for a while TommyUdo having this kind of Oriental aspect to his that was very influential in my personal talks about personality, apart from his pots. cinema. Apart from rare, isolated figures Marilyn... in the American tradition, it seemed as if Part of this film involved meeting a there were fewer \"serious\" directors in If you know who Tommy Udo is, Japanese potter called Shiga, a master Hollywood. you must subscribe to Films who was living and working in Australia. I in Review. If you don't, then filmed him one night when he opened his But one changes and one's personality you have to! kiln and brought some pots out. It was changes. For me, it wasn't the influence very exciting for me. And over many of films or directors, though someone like In a recent 3-part article in glasses of sake that night he talked about Kubrick, who is artistic and mainstream, Films in Review, Richard Widmark pottery - about art and about craft. That was a model. I don't spend much time in looked back on playing opposite conversation that evening came to the cinema. It's a cliche-but I was never Marilyn Monroe. change my view about filmmaking, and it satisfied, I was always changing, and that \"She was a vulnerable kid ... a movie remains unchanged to this day. is what kept me going. It was frustrating animal .. . never a professional actress for me, trying to get certain subjects . .. murder to work with. Putting it simply, f~r him there was no right. For me, it was a question of new We thought Marilyn isn't going art, it was all craft. He talked about how territory. to make it.\" the great potters didn't sign their pots because it was considered a vanity to do For a long time I had been asking This is only one of the fabulous so; how their pots were utilitarian objects myself: Is film a craft, or is it an art? career articles that appear in rather than something just to be stuck on Should I be making small, serious Films in Review month after month, the wall, like paintings; how you make pictures for art houses or big, expensive along with biographies of legendary these vessels to be used, for eating and ones for large numbers of people? The stars of the past ... filmographies . .. drinking; how you make each one to the result of these conflicting thoughts over exclusive historic photographs .. . best of your ability-using Head, Heart, the years was that craft was the correct reviews ... interviews ... the latest arui Harui-which is what I called the emphasis for me. Because I found myself video and TV news ... noted documentary-in perfect balance. How happiest in the Hollywood tradition, and columnists and much, much more. you should never think about making a I needed to find a healthy attitude toward work of art because you would be what I was doing. $2.50 at your newsstand punished if you did. That the gods ACT NOW AND SAVE 28% choose when to touch your hands, and What then? you will never know when that may be. I had to teach myself how to make ----------------One year's subscription only $18.00 You must keep working, and every now movies. I had made three features-but and again, when the gods do touch your in some ways, the more I went on, the Send me _ subscriptions to Films in Review. hands, out will come this wonderful harder it became, the less I knew. I was I enclose a check or money order in US dollars creation. It was so fundamentally like a primitive filmmaker. for~ . (Subscriptions are $18.00 each) opposed to the European idea of, Send to: simplistically speaking, the artist-as- I stopped filmmaking in 1978 and put Films in Review, Box 589, New York, NY 10021 . God. myself though a course I was sorely lacking. For 12 months I watched movies; FIRST NAME (please print) LAST NAME I loved his approach. Here were movies I was in touch with a library with a very -which were items to be used and good collection of world film culture. I STREET ADDRESS APT. NO. consumed in your daily life and then started with Griffith; then I moved from thrown away. When I returned to feature him to the Russians; then I moved to filmmaking, the emphasis for me was England and looked at Hitchcock's films; clearly on craft, and to forget about the then I shot back to the States for Chaplin; artistic propaganda trip that I felt had then I went across and dipped into been perpetrated. France, then Germany, working my way forward up to the period of the Forties Of course, inspiration is still part of the movies, which is where I'd begun, process-head, heart, and hand. The through television, to see the great area of the heart, or presumably, the soul, filmmakers. ' the unknown area, provides that leap of imagination that touches the fires to the I was astounded, astonished, and brain. But after talking with Shiga, I fascinated with the great gift of these found I had a kind of pocket philosophy films and so glad that I hadn't looked at that would get me through some ups and them earlier. If I had, I don't think I would downs, and threw me back into the fray, have made films. Because I was at the trying to understand this wonderful craft I bottom of the hill. was involved in. And I was free of the curse of thinking of it as an art form. Who were paragons for you-then and now? Ui>re you experiencing some crisis as regards filmmaking? I don't have anyone I have a sort of rogue's gallery, my own Madame Tus- I really had been growing up under the saud's of living and dead who inspire me. crossfire of Hollywood and the films of Of the current filmmakers, I will watch the great European directors. I sensed a anything by Andrzej Wajda. I was great deal of pretension coming from the CITY STATE ZIP 29
particularly struck, recently, by Danton, beyond words . Originally, the project belonged to and I'm fascinated by the controversy In the middle of some scenes, the [producer) Jerome Hellman. He loved surrounding it in France, which is as the book, bought it, and brought in Paul interesting a story as the story in the camera becomes sensuous, carrying Schrader to do the screenplay. If you look movie. From this country, there is always emotion and subtext, and really trans- at Mishima and then read Mosquito Woody Allen and Marty Scorsese to porting the audience to another level. Coast, you'll see the connection. I met watch-and Spielberg. From the past, I the two of them in Sydney and we talked, suppose, from one's much-thumbed I think that's true of a lot of films I've because I wasn't sure I could bring it off. book of filmmakers in the back pocket, done, but I've become so aware of it that Paul's draft was a classic example of an there is always Jean Renoir. I've tried to strip it out of The Mosquito adaptation: it was simple, it was true to Coast. I've attempted to eliminate my the material, while transmuting it into the What was your own breakthrough own style as much as possible, like some film form. The script was a great film? sort of personal cultural revolution. I attraction. think style can become inhibiting to a Gallipoli-which came after that film long career. Though I revised the script, Paul and I course. It was the first time I think I had never really worked together. We had real confidence in what I was doing, some I have consciously eliminated it from long talks by phone. In the end we were understanding of craft, while still being this picture and made it plainer, more going to have the credit arbitrated, an apprentice. I think my least personal straightforward. For other reasons, too- because I felt I had contributed my share film , andfavorite film, is Gallipoli. It has the material and essential ideas of this of the screenplay. But in the editing the least to do with me, really. film are so contradictory to mainstream room, ironically I ended up cutting more American filmmaking, are so deeply of my scenes and my dialogue. So the cut There is still a transcendental quality unconventional , that I felt the form and that you will see ends up being fairly close in the later films as well, The Year of shape of it should be very conventional, to Paul, which is pretty faithful to Living Dangerously and Witness. There Theroux. are soaring passages. Are you familiar With Mel Gibson. with liln Morrison? in order not to repel the viewer. What attracted you to the story, per se ? The challenge of the story was, for me, Oh , yes. In fact , the opening sequence has some that it was a tragedy and very particularly These moments remind me of some of the plainest opening images I've ever an American tragedy. It's in the great incomprehensible liln Morrison lyric had , even bland. I shot another opening tradition of the tragic form. It reminded which he sings over and over again in at the same time because I was aware of me of certain operas, of Shakespeare some rhapsody. On some level it is this problem. Originally, I shot a very certainly-of Macbeth , which I have gibberish, or just words, but he is mysterious, Peter Weir-style opening always loved, and of Othello. My favorite striking something deeper, soulful, spir- with dark figures on the horizon and all productions of both those plays always itual, something at once articulate and sorts of weird things going on, then I very held me in deep thrall. I've always inarticulate, moving himself and the cleverly revealed what it was. I thought it enjoyed watching this great soldier, listener. But one couldn't say what is might be too close to Witness, but I Macbeth , watching this ambition awaken being said precisely or-sometimes- decided it was just my style. At the dailies in him and consume him, and with what it is you are saying. everybody was impressed. \"Wow. This is Othello, the same with jealousy. really you at your best. That music you I saw Allie Fox like that and wanted to Maybe that is some essence of art . You played over those images -wow! It blew present a story where you understood really can stare at a painting, can't you? me away:' I thought about it and thought what happened to the man and felt Particularly when it is a landscape, or about it and dropped it all. It was a something, not necessarily for him , but some 18th-century English gentleman symbolic gesture, but it did echo on felt something at the end other than whose name is not known. You have to sit throughout the film. anger toward him, which people who read down and stare at it. You can't put your the book felt. It should be as if you are finger on it. Though you have been involved for imagining your own father somehow, quite some time , Paul Schrader's script whom you believed in, and whose That's what I've loved to discover for existed before your commitment. weaknesses you begin to see; this giant of myself in opera in the· last ten years. a man only gets smaller and smaller as Some I don't like and have propelled me you grow. You have to find a new way to out of the theater. But those I have loved see this person. Then you see the have always been in a foreign language. weaknesses in yourself, and it's all I'm always disappointed when they wonderfully difficult. announce it will be sung in English or To add to that , the final excitement of with subtitles. Because I love to not know the charge: Could one present this form wh at they're saying, and to just go with in the American cinema, in the Holly- the mu sic, really. wood narrative tradition? To my knowl- edge, it has not been done . Music is the fountainhead , the source The American tradition - and Witness of all my in spiration, in a way, if you can served that tradition- is to have the hero, generalize. It certainly doesn't have the leading man , particularly these rare anything to do with words and such . people like Harrison Ford, with his great Storytelling is my trade , my craft. But strength and integrity- these people like music is my inspiration ; and my goal , my John Wayne and Steve McQueen , who metaphor, to affect people like music . The images should float over you like music, and the experience should be 30
are part of the fiber of the culture-to \"displaced,\" ofbeing a colonial descen- The deeper aspects-you don't really have the hero start off with a flaw that is dant, an uneasiness about what it means choose those courses, you are just drawn healed or cleansed. At the end, he walks to be Australian. in certain directions. I'm doing what is off into the sunset, and he's a better man natural to me. for the experience. It is as much a part of Most Australians don't think about it the American myth as the poor kid selling and they feel very comfortable about But I am looking for ways to force newspapers on the streetcorner who being Australian. I guess I'm just one of change on myself. I am trying to drop grows up to become president of the that group that has a particularly different stylistic aspects, to remove myself fur- United States. It's all part of the winning vIew. ther from the film, to allow other turbine that drives this country to influences to come in, to find a fresher succeed, to triumph, to overcome the It's a very fascinating subject for me , as approach, and to not become too predict- odds. But it's left untouched the whole a European really, whose family was able. I'm looking for a way to eliminate, to tradition of drama that goes back to the transported, pulled up roots, and moved simplify, to rely on fewer tricks and Greeks and beyond - of failure - and of to Southeast Asia. Australia was built on a gimmicks, and in a way I've been trying to visions that are too limited. Of great men series of failures, horrible experiments, do that for years. who collapse. and the results of those experiments are still in progress. In recent years there's The word I would choose to describe There was the excitement, the chal- been quite an accelerated attempt- my work, which we haven't fooled around lenge, the feeling of fresh ground with the artificial, almost - to create the Australian with, is wonder. What an interesting word story, to take such a man and see if I could character in a hothouse and to get it that is! It's certainly a word I would apply hold that audience. blooming, so that we can say, \"Look, to my first viewing of the first film that left we've got an identity:' But that's a very me in a state of wonder, as a kid, which Is Mosquito Coast a way of comment- recent acceleration as a result of advances was The Wizard of Oz. That stays with ing on America? in the media. me, the experience of $eeing that picture, probably in re-release, when I was ten or No. God, no. I'd cringe at the thought. This is obviously the empathy you 12. Why? bring to The Year of Living Dangerously That is the school of propaganda, of or to the Amish colony of Witness. I see It was a world I didn't fully understand, sociology, of teachers who feel they need Mosquito Coast in the same vein, with which is a part of wonder, and without to change society through film. That is Allie Fox as a kind ofone-man colonizer question I have attempted to do that in just not my approach, which is definitely with no regard for the native peoples. ... my films and I still do. Because of the storytelling. As is Theroux's. pleasure of that wonder. To be made like But I think the story is an obvious- I hadn't particularly thought of him that a child again , really, when you see a film. Parable? way, but it's very interesting to see him as [Laughs) Not in the sense, of course, that les. setting off to start a new colony.... a lot of the committees down the road I think Theroux placed it very cor- mean it. \"We're all kids at heart ... :' rectly as the subtext and didn't moralize in y ou seem so resistant to any defini- an obvious way about it. I put it out of my tion. I bring to you examples of It's just ... not knowing ... and to come mind and I refused to ever think about it. motifs in your work: of intuition and out of the theater into the street and you Because it would always be there and it madness, ofunderlying social conscious- don't know if it's night or day, or raining, had to find its rightful balance, and so I ness, of \"lost\" individuals transforming and you bump into people and you get never went for a cheap shot in that area, themselves in a clash of cultures-and into the wrong car and you go down a though of course it's there and it's what's you say, \"Partly accidental, partly coin- one-way street the wrong way. Those are driving the whole thing. cidence.\" the kinds of experiences in the movies Are you a little tentative, in general, that I like. about filming stories about America or Totally. I was thinking the other day, Americans? Bruce Beresford seemed at \"Gee, that would make an interesting film Are you wary_of losing yourself in home with Tender Mercies, and Fred ... ;' some short story I was reading, then I Hollywood? Schepsi does westerns like Barbarosa, but thought, \"Oh no, it's another thing of a No. The only person you have to be you seem a little more wary. person going into a foreign culture ... :' So wary of, really, is yourself. Being a Being from a colony like Australia, it's I decided I can't do that. filmmaker, I have this image in my mind that much easier to find your way into as an analogy. There is a movie I can't certain aspects of life here, and to feel Why do you frown at it? remember the title of, a World War II quite at home. Then again, every now It's too obvious. Also, I like to feel I'm story, an American or British picture, and then, you strike an area in which you more private than that. I don't take any about the captain of a small destroyer people are as foreign as Frenchmen, or as pleasure in interviews because, like a lot dueling with a U-boat commander, and any other country where you don't have of public entertainers, professional enter- the entire picture is this cat-and-mouse language as an apparent way of under- tainers, absurdly this contradiction exists between the two vessels. The captain of standing the culture. for me of wanting to stand up and get the ship and the U-boat commander It's certainly easier for us to come here applause while at the same time wanting spend the entire movie plotting to kill than the English, perhaps because they to retain privacy. each other. That's my current analogy. I come here with such a highly defined But as the number of pictures build up, am both skippers, trying to outmaneuver culture, a known past. Whereas with a someone with a head on his shoulders myself, avoid sinking myself, playing colonial people, the dispossessed of the can fairly easily sit down and form a chess with myself. Hollywood is just world, the whole country is built on that portrait of the person who made them. irrelevant. They just provide the room That's not unreasonable. starting-again notion. I talked earlier about altering style, but you play in. ® You have a very keen sense of being I think that's something like clothing you wear. That's something you can change. 32
• ection
by Harlan Kennedy oMelissokomos. e T ake a beautiful tree-girt island. and prizes and attract only the homeless tn Some Adriatic sun. A view of the and desperate. There is a \"Venezia TV\" world's most beautiful city across section for clapped-out ~eledrama,s, some Amorosa. the lagoon . Italian wine, food, and charm. networked long ago; a \"Spazio Libero\" did. And the facilities for an international film (Open Space) section for any movies festival. And how do you screw it all up? seeking an identity outside the competi- But Italian film critics are something tion; and a Glauber Rocha retrospective else again. Every day in my presence they You appoint Gian Luigi Rondi as impossible to attend if you go to the would bitch, moan, and complain about festival director. And then you make sure competition films. the films or the festival. But the next day, he doesn't have enough money .to run the when you read their columns, a miracu- event. Most of this would constitute a mere lous change had occurred. Praise galore hard luck story and incite pity rather than flowed from their pens. The resemblance The Venice festival is in chaos ; sinking anger. But there are also overstaffing and between their real selves and their public slowly but surely under the weight of incompetence at Venice which amount to selves is much the same as that between a bureaucrats, mini-Mussolinis, young Fas- a joke or a scandal. (Take your pick.) In \"real\" criminal and his photo on TV or in a cist-for-Christ ticket-takers , and other any situation where one ticket-tearer, or newspaper. Every saving quirk of hon- power-crazies attracted by the perverse catalogue-keeper, or press-key-issuer esty, or humor, or humanity has been challenge of running a major festival in would suffice at other fests, Venice will bled out from the synthesized portrait. the least festive way. treble the number. Most of what little Still, they have to be invited back next fresh funding there is must go toward year; wined, dined, and ensconced in This dispatch comes straight from the paying these superfluous flunkies and comfortable hotels at the festival's front line the day before the Mostra Del toward lashing out luxuries for a 14- expense. It's understandable. It's also Cinema ends. Critics have already been person jury (l4?! There were only 12 part of what's wrong with Venice. There's dropping like newts. Some are rumored Angry Men), rather than toward provid- no such thing as a free lunch (dinner, to have been strangled by the Mostra's ing good films and enough places to see hotel. ..). You have to pay the piper. excess of red tape , their bodies stowed in them. a cellar of the Hotel Des Bains, famous And chief piper is Rondi: a figure setting for Death in ~nice. Others are For a while, I happily jostled for seats conspicuous at Venice by his absence or said to have accidentally set fire to their with the paying public. They cheer and seigruorial remoteness. There is much hotel rooms in an attempt to burn the \"bravo\" a good movie. And whistles, cat- speculation that he is a modern El Cid, candle at both ends. For the festival calls, and boos are never far from their strapped to his horse (or desk) long after schedule-programmed for maximum lips when a film is a pretentious stinker. the vital spark has departed. As if to sleep deprivation - requires one to go to An Italian audience is the most honest I dramatize his elusiveness, the one official bed at 3 A.M. and get up at 7 A.M. in order know. I would trust my life to them - and meeting penciled in between Rondi and to see all the major films . the press took place on the morning before the festival began. I myself finally This year's Venice fest, the 4~rd , may caught a brief glimpse of him one day in be the last in terms of being a major international event. Projection is poor, sound is poor-to-lousy, and inadequacies rage. Chief shock this year was that the screening venues on the festival island have shrunk to three. (Compare the 30- odd of Cannes and 20-plus of Berlin). There is no attempt to renovate two old auditoriums in the Palazzo Del Cinema (they are now reportedly patronized by rodents) ; nor to open up the public screenings in the outdoor Arena to critics and fest guests; nor to bring back the giant movie tent that imperfectly - but surely improbably - held overflow view- ers last year. However, more screenings in Venice and Mestre have been opened to the public. To match the incredible shrinking screen space on the fest-hosting Lido , there is an incredible shrinking program- ming imagination. Rondi offers a compe- tition mainly composed of old masters past their prime and young newcomers who seem unlikely to reach any prime at all. Outside the competition the side- show events are like condemned fair- ground stalls, which have run out of treats 34
Fatherland. a young ~st German coming to terms cast sets about Christopher Hampton's with his ex-Fascist dad . (And never the English dialogue. And the famous names the Excelsior bar, as I was on my way to train they meet?) fly about like bats: \"Here comes D egas\"; the toilet. \"I'd like you to meet Mr. Strindberg\"; \"Do All meat and drink to this critic. He has you like Monet?\" A nd then there were the movies. long believed that the world's socio- These, if not individually as nota- psychological obsessions wash in waves We catch Gauguin in 1893 between ble as in some years past, at least had an over the world's movies at any given time, visits to Tahiti, when he isn't doing a lot of odd generic interest. The films at a film often near invisibly and always near painting but is doing a lot of talking about festival don't usually come with a single unconsciously. With the world ruled over painting. He also beds his models . But he prevailing theme; though critics try their today by Reagan and Thatcher (not to draws the line at the 14-year-old Judith damnedest to impose one. \"This year at mention Signor Rondi), who's surprised (Sofie Grabol), his landlady's daughter, Cannes vegetarian anarchism was in the that mythicized mums and dads crop up who falls in love with him and whose air. ..;' \"Berlin was abuzz with mythocen- in today's pies? diary punctuates the film in voiceover tric Trotskyism ... ;' etc. extracts. As well as the parent-kid movies , the But just for once, at the 43rd Venice old-young love stories have a similar Here, as in Angelopoulos' film , the Mostra, there was a leitmotif you couldn't provenance. Indeed the Angelopoulos young generation is knocking on the door ignore. Every other movie seemed to be a film, like most of this Greek helmer's of the older generation's soul asking to duet between old and young: parent- pictures, has political allegory written all come in. But this time the older child tussles or across-the-generations over it. Mastroianni wears a walrus generation has fitted burglar-proof locks . sex stories. When not goggling at Mar- mustache and a rueful look as the old Gauguin-Sutherland preserves his soul cello Mastroianni being attacked by a beekeeper whose life is disrupted by a by refusing the young access. It's a Loony nude nymphet in Theo Angelopoulos' 0 strip of a girl (Nadia Mourouzi). She Tunes movie, but there's clearly some- Melissokomos, you stumbled over the follows him; she bunks up in his twin-bed thing interesting buried beneath the prone body of Donald Sutherland as hotel room (bringing a lover so Marcello awful dialogue and the fancy-dress pe- Gauguin, being swarmed over by the can watch); she makes him leave his wife riod. What to make of Max Von Sydow in jeunes fiUes of post-Impressionist Paris . and ignore his bees; she finally crawls mustache and rearing red wig as Strind- Not a pretty sight. (That film was over him and near-rapes him in an empty berg? Henning Carlsen's Oviri [Wolf at the theater. Door]). No sooner did you leave Ken Jostling with these up-market Lolita Loach's FatherLand, about a young East In short-and we've see it before in stories were different generations of war German coming to terms with his ex- Euripides' The Bacchae-the young films: ones in which the young-old Fascist dad, than you walked into Markus Greece makes the old Greece mad before tension exists between fathers and sons Imhoof's Die Reise (The Journey), about it makes it history. Sex, jeans, and rock rather than sylphs and senior citizens. In 'n' roll bring death under the guise of Britain's FatherLand, Trevor Griffiths (of liberating delirium. All this to a narrative Reds) scripts the tale of an East German style as slow as the seasons and as rock singer (Gerulf Pannach) whose exclamatorily bare as Angelopoulos' pre- subversive songs get him kicked out of vious pies with vocative titles (0 Thias- the GOR. It's a choice between two years sos, 0 MegaLexandros) . The symbolism in prison or exile. This provides a perfect is none too subtle. The hero's bee opportunity to track down Dad, who is vocation makes him a walking symbol of missing-presumed-hiding in the West Athenian tradition, a Mount Hymettus after a dodgy wartime record . shepherd tending the heraldic honey. And we end with the full self-sacrificial Once ovt:r the border, our hero gets works, as Mastroianni overturns his hives involved with a record company and with and bares himself to his insects in an an attractive young French plot device \"apotheosis of movement and color\" (says (Fabienne Babe). She is implanted in the Angelopoulos), in order to die. movie to befriend him and guide him to his father, whose wartime Gestapo work It's not quite clear whether the filmma- helped decimate her family. The film ker thinks his hero should stick to his moves, with arthritic inevitability, toward honey and his glum life, or smash his way, the parent-son confrontation: in which as he does , into new experience. (Liter- Dad's past proves to be not one of blanket ally, in one scene he drives his van into villainy but a patch-quilt of loyalty and the window of a cafe where the girl is betrayal, of being manipulated as much as sitting.) Trouble is, we don't care much manipulating. either way. The pace is leadenly hieratic, and Mastroianni as a Greek beekeeper is Griffiths' script is at once tendentious about as convincing as Laurence Olivier and indigestible. The message is simple- would be as a veteran Brooklyn Dodger. aminded and leftishly La mode-that all Or as Donald Sutherland would be as Gauguin. In this Danish-French bio- power exploits and corrupts , whether pic by Henning Carlsen (of Hunger) we emanating from Hitler's Germany, are in co-production Paris . Accents clash Ulbricht's GOR, or Roosevelt's America. like knives and forks as a multi-national But the dialogue and narrative arteries through which the message runs are clumsily overintricate. They give director Ken Loach no chance to exercise the 35
free-running humanism that infused his Bemberg's Miss Mary. they are not above giving Miss Mary an Kes or Looks and Smiles. arrival gift of a perfume bottle containing takes wing, when men die but memories a warm and golden liquid of human Markus Imhoof's Die Reise is another stir into legend. origin. \"Hmmm ;' sniffs Christie with \"What did you do in the war, Daddy?\" pic. distaste, \"Argentine perfumd\" Daddy in this decade-hopping Swiss film Tavernier paces the two-and-a-half- is a Nazi poet whose son (Markus hour film as if no one is going to hurry him Since the movie's framed by black-and- Boysen) reacts against his Third Reich - not even producer Irwin Winkler, white montage sequences of political childhood by becoming a radical activist farped for such tender movie largos as unrest during the years of the story (1938 verging on terrorist. Then dad snatches Rocky W. Trauner's sets and Bruno De to 1945), Bemberg is doubtless intending his kid from his raving red mother - she's Keyzer's photography create a visual purr a larger blast at Argentine life and society. about to join the PLO - and runs off with from the rain-slick streets and false- \"The famil y-symbol of the oligarchy\" him on a journey of self-discovery. perspective vistas, and after Sunday in intones the press synopsis, portentously, Resembling a mixture of Fatherland and the Country and this, French cinema has apropos our main characters. But if they Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities , this is found in Tavernier a genius of mood. are meant to be looking down the barrel an appealing tale finally sauced by too of the director's satiric rifle, they show not much deja vu. Maria Luisa Bemberg's pic is a wackier the least fear or remorse. The film is a affair. Lording it over the Argentine romp , Christie's acerbic English propri- Two generation-gap films in Venice, pampas is the mock.:fudor mansion ety the perfect foil to a gang of nutty however, got the recipe wholly right: where Julie Christie comes to be govern- decadents whom one would be sorry to Bertrand Tavernier's Around Midnight ess to young sisters. She's the title's Miss see overthrown by any revolution. They and Maria Luisa Bemberg's Miss Mary. Mary. Soon she discovers the discreet should be put in a museum. Come to charm of the Argentinian aristocracy. think of it, they have been put in a Tavernier's movie reminds one Mum is a pale and angular weirdo who museum - the living one of cinema. instantly of Paris Blues: mainly because keeps playing the same dirge-like tune on it is every good thing that Martin Ritt's the piano. Dad is a ladykiller who's lethal At the heart of this film , as of most Seine-side jazz odyssey was n't. There, if around the billiard table. Mum's younger Venice movies, is the notion of the young you recall , Newman and Poitier blazed brother- mustache, specs, cigar-looks getting ready to assume the mantle of the away on the metalware between bits of like Gaucho Marx. And as for the kids , wet love story and trips around tourist Paris. \"Gee, is that the Eiffel Tower?\" ... cut to smoky dive and \" Bee-ba-ba-bee·· boo!\". ..\"Hey, guys, that must be Sacre Coeur or Notre Dame\"... back to smoky dive, and \"Bop-bop-bee-da-da-wah- WAAAH ... :' Darkly surreal, Tavernier's Paris is built on a soundstage of doyen art director Alexandre Trauner and the hell with the Eiffel Tower. Hither comes drink- wracked tenor sax Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon) , a veteran with a burnt-out voice that sounds like Lionel Stander after speech lessons from Brando's godfather. But he plays like an angel!! And he strikes up a friendship with a young French hero- worshipper (Francois Cluzet), an Alger- ian vet with his own cargo of pain, who becomes the hero's pal, nurse, confidant, and apartment-sharer. There is a lot of bebop - be warned , non-addicts - but at least in this film we discover what makes all those smoky dives so smoky. It's genius burning itself up. For Dale, finding new avenues of beauty each night is a guaranteed form of torture and slow exhaustion. We hear it in the parched voice, we see it in the weary gait and patrician fatigue. The old man is propped up by the youngster- Boswell to his Johnson, Sancho to his Quixote- then he goes back to New York to playa few last clubs, take a few last drugs (he's sworn off drink in tribute to Cluzet's friendship), and finally die. Around midnight is when the day ends and jazz begins, when the body tires and the soul 36
sold. In Ken Harrison's On Valentine Tisch School of the Arts challenges you Day, three generations of genteel Texans (c. 1917) yammer their way through to think about photography writer Horton Foote's talky family saga. I•n new ways. In Jacques Doillon's La Puritaine, Michel Piccoli stages -literally, with a At New York University's Tisch School of the Arts we believe troupe of actors in a theater and a lot of the process of making a good photograph begins with a clear cutesy trust games and impromptus-a idea. That is why we offer more than the mechanics of the welcome for his returning prodigal daugh- camera and the chemistry of photo development. We teach ter. And the screw-loose heroine of Mai you to think as a creative visual artist while you come to terms Zetterlings truth-based Amorosa, based with your own talent and vision. on the life of schizophrenic Swedish writer and early feminist Agnes Von The curriculum combines rigorous technical study with an Krusenstjerna (Stina Ekblad), is taken in intensive examination of photographic theory and art history. hand by older husband-mentor Erland It includes a wide variety of liberal arts course options as well. Josephson. The irony here is that Josephson turns out to be just as mentally This B.FA . program provides you with outstanding oppor- unstable as she: an irony but hardly a tunities and resources , including: surprise, viewing the actor's track record as a crackpot specialist for Bergman and • An unusually accessible faculty of nationally recognized Tarkovsky. photographers and eminent scholars, including Ellen Brooks, A. D. Coleman, Tom Drysdale, Elaine Mayes, Paul With all these generational polarities Owen, Shelly Rice, and Fred Ritchin going on, it became a relief to see a film about peers. Eric Rohmer's movies are • The resources of a major university always a breath of spring. In Le Rayon ~rt (U.S. title, Summer), he improvises • One of the finest photo training labs in the country dialogue, uses 16mm that says never mind about artistic visuals, and casts an • Extended visits by guest lecturers and artists unknown young leading actress-yes, another unknown young leading actress • Regular shows of professional and student work at the Photo - who delivers the same high-octane Center Gallery tears-and IQ performance as her prede- cessors. Marie Riviere seeks romance • Professional internships with major photographers and through the long weeks of a summer institutions vacation and finally finds it: via Jules Verne, la nouvelle cuisine, and the • New York City-the most active photography center in the spectrology of sunsets. world Alain Resnais' Milo was rapped by NEWYORI( For more information, many as \"filmed theater;' being a set- including an application, bound version of Henry Bernstein's play RSI1Y return the coupon or call about love and adultery in Twenties Paris . (212) 598-2305. It comes complete with a between-acts A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY INTHE PUBLIC SE RVICE curtain and credits on a turning playbill. But spitfire performances from the cur- -------------------I Tisch Schoolofthe Arts II rent Resnais repertory troupe-Sabine New York University Azema, Andre Dussollier, Pierre Arditi- help subvert the proscenium mold. And I 721 Broadway, 7th Floor so do Resnais' occasional darkling dives New York, N.Y. 10003 into surrealism. Name Milo was shown out of competition in I Attn.: Dr. Roberta Cooper Address I a competition that sorely needed it. Also Juori concorso was the annual consign- I 0 Please send me information I ment of big American commercial mov- about the B.EA. program in City/State/Zip Code_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ ies : Aliens, Ruthless People, Heartburn, I photography. I Legal Eagles, and the Like. These might I o I would also like information Telephone_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ I have imparted some life to the main I about the summer seSSions: \" I event. -------------------~L. New York University IS an affirmatIve actIon/equal opportunity institution. FC 11/86 The 14-person jury, after many a 37 comfortably upholstered deliberation in the Excelsior, finally gave the Golden Lion to Rohmer's Summer. I thought (and so did virtually every other critic on the Lido) that it should have gone to Tavernier's Around Midnight. ®
Gdansk: Pole Position The Great Race. AChronicle of Love Affairs. Top Dog, and Camera Buff. Several other customs officials who move with all the politically daring films , including Wojciech Marczewski's Shivers, had by David Paul alacrity of hibernating tortoises - but been completed and were either just soon finds himself, contrary to \"Iron released or awaiting release. The old Baltic city of Gdansk is as Curtain\" stereotypes, in a land where no full of history as it is picturesque. one fears to speak his mind, and where, Martial law brought the censors a Here the first battle of World War despite chronic shortages of many every- renewed surge of power; films like Man of Iron and Shivers were chased into the II was fought. Here in 1970, government day goods and services, the black market underground video circuit, and many new projects were scrapped . Wajda's Film troops massacred striking shipyard work- will deliver almost anything for modest Unit \")(\" - singled out as the biggest political offender among the eight feature ers; ten years later, Gdansk became the amounts of any Western currency. film units-was disbanded. Wajda sought work abroad; so did Zanussi, whose \"Tor\" center of the Solidarity trade union as Poland's Communist regime makes a Unit nevertheless remained intact. In Warsaw, \"safe\" projects often under the workers gained the upper hand nation- show of toughness, having forced Soli- direction of mediocre talents were favored; politically controversial screen- wide. Though outlawed in 1981, Solidar- darity underground, but within Roman plays were either turned down by the studios or, once produced, withheld from ity lost none of its emotional and spiritual Catholic churches dissident political distribution. A number of actors and actresses, including the brilliant Maja force-to which the bouquet-adorned activity is carried on openly and without Komorowska, were temporarily black- listed for their Solidarity activities. The Shipyard Monument, as well as the interference. In contrast to the Anglo- period 1982 to 1984 was a time of declining morale in the studios, accom- Solidarity Memorial Chapel in St. French legal tradition, where that which panied by a serious falloff in film attendance. Bridget's Church (Lech Walesa's home is not explicitly forbidden is allowed, and Some change was perceptible in 1984, parish), still bear witness. It is fitting that the Russian tradition, where whatever is though the signals were mixed. Zanussi returned to direct Komorowska in A lear the Gdansk film festival is held within a not explicitly allowed is forbidden, Poles of the Quiet Sun. The film drew official criticism and was given only a limited few hundred meters of both sites, for the will tell you their tradition dictates that Polish distribution, but it was released internationally after capturing the grand Polish cinema, as always, remains inti- which is forbidden is allowed. prize in Venice. Kidlowski, Zanussi's colleague in the \"Tor\" Unit, was allowed mately bonded to the country's social and For several years prior to the imposi- to complete No End, which wove together the themes of official perfidy, political realities. tion of martial law (December 13, 1981), Solidarity intransigence, and rational despair. No End, however, was held up by Polish cineastes insist that the key to the brightest talents of the state-owned the censors for more than a year before being given a restricted distribution understanding their country is to assume cinema-Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof during the summer vacation period. a surrealist perspective. Poland is a place Zanussi, Feliks Falk, and Krzysztof The screening of No End, followed by a wide-open Kidlowski press conference, where the logical and absurd coexist, and Kidlowski - had distinguished them- was the high point of the 1985 Gdansk festival. The festival jury, under strong where appearances are dependably mis- selves by combining originality of style political pressure, could not give the film an award. Still, the screening-which was leading. To enter the country, the foreign with bold explorations of the socio- in doubt up to the last minute-was a sign of hope, as was the screening of Wieslaw visitor must surmount a vexing series of political terrain. Already well- known Saniewski's Custody , a film about life in a women's prison that had been withheld obstacles-visa formalities, mandatory abroad were Man of Marble, Man of after its completion in 1983 . currency exchange, long queues past Iron, Camouflage, The Constant Factor, These indications aside, morale remained low among the leading Polish 38
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filmmakers last year. Neither Wajda nor in the Seventies (as well as similar vices in French, part Polish-but 100 percent Zanussi went to Gdansk, and those with many another land). In Hero ofthe It?ar, caught up in the martyr complexes of his whom I spoke unanimously believed that we see the same guy, Danielak-played, Polish half. He dreams of escape but sees the future was bleak. Most of the festival- as before, by the rubber-faced Jerzy Stuhr images of (pre-1939) Poland on the map, goers expected to see nothing in 1986 - a few years older, trying to claw his way in the shape of Christ on the cross. Very worth writing home about. back to fame after a big fall. One night on heavy material, this; Zaorski, perhaps the TV, he sees Zbyszek, an average, decent most gifted filmmaker of the post- T hey were wrong. The eleventh citizen whose willingness to criticize Zanussi generation, had wanted to film Gdansk festival was not the event of public-works officials has saved some the story since the beginning of his career the decade , but it did have its moments of 16 years ago. He might have waited a few excitement - the first occurred when the apartment-dwellers from a gas explosion. government released all imprisoned Soli- Danielak sees in this honest person a years more. His style owes much to darity activists. Over at St. Bridget's, vehicle for the revitalization of his own Tarkovsky (Zaorski admits being influ- Walesa and an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 career and dreams up a show centering enced by The Mirror and Nostalghia) but others gathered to welcome the returning around the \"Hero of the Year.\" Just when lacks the Russian master's convincing prisoners. The consensus was that the success appears to be within Danielak's personal obsessiveness. government's action represented some- grasp, the \"Hero;' Zbyszek, protests all thing beyond plain humanitarianism, but the hype and hoo-ha, and walks off the Like Childhood Scenes, Bodensee is a no one felt that it signaled major political stage. Fast-paced and rich in characteri- literary adaptation. Other films in this change. zation, Hero of the It?ar is very much category shown at the festival included about Poland in the Eighties, when tired the grand prize winner, Witold Leszc- Parallel to the release of prisoners, old schemes concocted by tired old zynski's Siekierezada, and Wojciech Z61- though of course not directly connected, manipulators succeed only in parodying towski's debut film, In the Shadow of were growing indications of a less themselves. Hate. Though showing the marks of a restrictive censorship . The Great Race, a first film - some scenes could be more film written by Feliks Falk and directed More controversial was Tomasz tightly edited - Shadow of Hate is a by Jerzy Domaradzki, was taken off the Zygadlo's Childhood Scenes from Provin- compelling story about a Polish woman censor's shelf and screened for the festival cial Life, inspired by Stendhal's Le Rouge who finds herself unexpectedly harboring audience. The Great Race had been et Ie Noir but set in Poland in the a lO-year-old Jewish girl as the Warsaw completed near the end of 1981 but Seventies. The young Julian's wanderings Ghetto goes up in flames . It's not a immediately fell victim to martial law. Set lead him from his hometown, after a subject Poles like to talk about, and the during the Stalin era, the film centers on turbulent love affair with the mayor's wife, film was passed over by the jury. two youths who form a friendship while to Warsaw, where he becomes personal competing in a three-day, 30-kilometer secretary to a retired politician. (The old The title of Siekierezada associates the \"peace race:' This seemingly innocent man , Poles are eager to note, bears an Polish word for \"ax;' siekiera, with the plot frames an ugly picture of a commu- uncanny resemblance to the late Wlady- legend of Scheherazade. (The festival nity led by scoundrels whose political slaw Gomulka, who headed the Polish program rather cutely translated the title rituals and ebullient slogans overlie a Communist party from 1943 to 1948 and as ';.txiliad.\" Get it?) It's about another system of fraud, injustice, and hypocrisy. again from 1956 to 1970.) Julian pro- wandering young man, this time one who ceeds to betray his boss's trust by getting leaves his education behind to live for a The Great Race vividly captures the his daughter pregnant. There is much while among lumberjacks. He discovers, red banners and arcane ideological lan- weighty dialogue that resists translation, however, that life in the woods is both dull guage of Stalinism. In one of the film's and the film seems unable to make up its and cruel. The story is told in a rich and humorous moments , a young slogan- mind whether it is mainly about Julian's poetic language, yielding a film with soft, leader is solemnly instructed not to get romantic passions or the old man's magical qualities. \"Long live ...\" and \"Down with . ..\" mixed labored philosophical reflections. Never- up. Older viewers found it remarkable theless, there were those in Gdansk, all Less satisfying, though likely to be that director Domaradzki, who was in of them Poles, who admired Zygadlo's very popular, is Radoslaw Piwowarski's primary school during the early Fifties, attempt to capture the spirit of the My Mother's Lovers. Last year Piwo- could so accurately re-create the mood of Seventies in a language that is densely warski charmed audiences at both the the era. Today's senior party officials who metaphorical. (The final scene shows Gdansk and Venice festivals with his started their careers at that time do not Julian pointing a gun at the mayor's wife, debut film, It?sterday, a story of Beatle- fancy the film's portrait of youthful who has slandered him , just as sirens mania Polish-style, circa 1964; Yester- overzealousness; one juror reportedly sound and an earthquake hits-the day's international distribution was held walked out after the first 20 minutes, earthquake of Solidarity?) up because of problems over the rights to labeling the picture a \"provocation:' His the many Bearles' songs on the colleagues nevertheless voted to award Another film steeped in tragic Polish soundtrack, but happily it is available Domaradzki a Silver Lion for direction- introspection is Janusz Zaorski's Boden- now. Piwowarski's new offering, My in a clear indication that this year's jury see, flaunting top honors from this year's Mother's Lovers, is the story of a would not be politically bullied. Locarno festival. Bodensee is set in an precocious ll-year-old boy who mothers unusual Nazi internment camp near the his mother, an alcoholic, suicidal bar- Another Silver Lion went to Falk, for Swiss border, where foreigners captured maid/prostitute. Krystyna Janda bril- directing Hero ofthe It?ar, a sequel to his in Poland were kept until they could be liantly plays the mother's role, but the 1979 film, Top Dog. The protagonist of exchanged for Germans held by the boy, despite equally remarkable acting by Top Dog, a media celebrity who made his Allies. It's a tricky film that wanders in young Rafal Wegrzyniak (try pronounc- career through dishonesty and manipula- and out through the imagination of its ing that name), is far too good to be true, tion , stood for all the ills of Polish society hero, a young prisoner who is part and the picture suffers from Spielberg- like hyper-sentimentality. 42
Several titles were in contention for Roman Wionczek's sequel to Dignity nity. Understandably, such a forced worst festival film. Topping (bottom- (1984), a film that portrayed Solidarity as attempt at creating a Polish Gary Cooper ing?) the list was Whole Hog , a made-for- a band of syndicalist thugs. Wionczek's doesn't play well; according to one TY crime story that packs into its 85 new film continues the story, set immedi- report, Dignity had opened in Warsaw to minutes an entire season's worth of ately during martial law (\"See what those an audience of eight people. It is unlikely Miami Vice-like adventures. Memoir ofa [Solidarity] people have brought upon that TIme ofHope will draw many more. Sinner, Wojciech Has' newest period us ;' bemoans the hero's wife). In both piece, offers lush and eerie visions of pictures, falseness lies not so much in Almost as bad a film is Roman 18th-century England, but the visual outright lying- some Solidarity propo- Polanski's Pirates. Already a flop in the effects are wasted on this endlessly nents will admit the unionists were West, the North African/multinational tedious yarn. capable of overzealousness-as in distor- production was given its first Polish tion. In Wionczek's eyes, Solidarity's screening in the lZ00-seat Leningrad Then there were two political entries excesses were the norm; the good worker Theater of Gdansk's Old Town. The from the government's corner. Episode who resisted the calls to strike becomes a place was overfilled, as many uninvited Berlin-West is a propaganda piece about a kind of High Noon hero standing up to fans managed to sneak past three ticket writer who defects to the West and finds the prejudice and hysteria of the commu- checkpoints. Few thought the movie any not glitter but grime. TIme of Hope is good, but the rumored appearance of PROFESSIONAL FILM BOOKS! by Film Professionals FILM DIRECTORS FILM SCHEDULING/FILM AComplete Guide '86 BUDGETING WORKBOOK Michael Singer, Ed. Ralph S. Singleton FOURTH ANNUAL Companion to \"Film Scheduli ng\". ~~ INTERNATIONAL EDITION Contains the entire screenplay to Francis Coppola's Academy Award nominated Ii v 1600 DIREC1DRS-DOMESTIC THE CONVERSATION as well as ••l,\"S,SIHQUTOH & FOREIGN sample production and budget forms to be completed by the reader. v Birthdate, Place, Year, Addresses, ALL SHEETS PERFORATED. Agents v Full length features, telefilms ISBN 0-943728-07-X 296 pp. $15.95 v Alphabetical cross-reference of 15,000 films v Index of Directors v Interviews & Photos of Michael Cloth 486 pp. $39.95 MOVIE PRODUCTION & Apted, Martin Brest, BUDGET FORMS ... INSTANTLY! Joe Dante, etc. Ralph S. Singleton ISBN 0-943728-16-9 8W' X 11\" r-------------------------~ This book plus one photocopier equals ~ every production and budget form FILM SCHEDULING needed to make a full length feature Ii Or ~ How Long Willlt Take or teleplay. Completely redesigned and To Shoot Your Movie? integrated forms that are Blfz \"x 11\" \"-~ :::;'; =: c.o.I~\"\" format-easy to tear out and use again ...\"'\"!_,, ......,. ,\"00.. ......-.. Ralph S. Singleton and again. The complete step-by-step guide to ALL SHEETS PERFORATED professional motion picture scheduling, detailing how to create a production ISBN 0-943728-14-2 136 pp. $15.95 board, shot-by-shot, day-by-day. Complete production board of THE CONVERSATION in color. YES! Please send me the following books: CALIF. FC:86 TAX ISBN 0-943728-11-8 224 pp. $16.95 QTY. BOOK PRICE 2.60 SHIPPING Recommended for college courses. 1.10 UPS _ _ _ FILM DIRECTORS '86 39.95 1.04 5.00 $ - - - _~ ~. LONE EA<9L..E . _ _ _ FILM SCHEDULING 16.95 2.50 $ - - - 1.04 2.50 $ - - - YOUR SOURCE FOR PROfeSSIONAL FILM SOOKS _ _ _ FILM SCHEDULING/BUDGETING WKBK. 15.95 ___ MOVIE PRODUCTION & BUDGET 2.50 $ - - - FORMS... INSTANTLY! 15.95 SHIP BOOKS TO: TOTAL ENCLOSED $ _ - - Name/Company _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ , Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ LONE EAGLE PUBLISHING 9903 Santa Monica Blvd. LONE EAGLE PUBLISHING : City State _ _ Zip _ _ _ __ Beverly Hills, CA 90212 9903 Santa Monica Blvd. 213/471-8066 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 : 0 Please bill my credit card . 0 M/C 0 Visa Call for faster service 213/471-8066 : Account No. Exp. Date _ _ : Signature _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ 43
Polanski kept everyone in his seat. Before debut; he plays the aging alter ago of the turned. Several films shelved by the the projectors started, it was announced story's teenage protagonist Witek, who censors in 1981-82 await release, includ- that Polanski was indeed on his way experiences the sad sweetness of first ing two by Zaorski, Childish Questions there; his plane had been delayed by a love and separation amid the signs of (released before martial law but subse- bomb threat, but he would arrive before impending war. The scene is Wilno quently called back) and Mother ofKings the conclusion of the screening. The (Vilna), deep in the heart of the Polish (never released) . There is hope that these opening credits rolled, and the director's eastern territories destined to be lost in and others will make their way into name drew applause. So did that of the ensuing conflict. distribution during 1987. KieSlowski's No Wladyslaw Komar, the former athlete End has been released abroad, and who plays a Mongo-like character. In fact, Rather than flashing back from the Zanussi hopes to work again in Poland each Polish name in the credits made the older man's point of view, Wajda chose to next year. Falk and Domaradzki are just crowd a little wilder-and at the end, set the story in 1939. The older man hitting their stride, and there is reason to when the stuntmen were listed (most of simply appears from time to time, a expect good things from Zaorski, Piwo- them Poles), it was like a curtain call at ghostly intruder who holds brief conver- warski, and Z6ltowski; the last three are Broadway's biggest hit. sations with his youthful self without all in their thirties. Zaorski has recently influencing the course of events. Only in formed a new unit, \"Dom;' to promote Polanski is the legendary native son the final scene does he appear in flash- the careers of still younger filmmakers. gone off to fame and fortune, and though forward, visiting a cemetery. As for the Moreover, there is an abundance of good his films are not (and really never were) looming war that will destroy the boy's actors and actresses; from veterans \"Polish;' many Poles insist he still has a world, its evidence creeps into the story KrystynaJanda and Daniel Olbrychski to \"Polish\" sensitivity. (I heard one claiming intermittently as soldiers march in the the fresh young players in A Chronicle of that the landscapes in Tess look like those background. The penultimate scene is a Love Affairs, the acting departments of near Bialystok.) When he finally dreamlike reunion of the separated lov- Poland's film and theater schools have appeared at the end of Pirates, Polanski ers, who run gaily through a meadow and brought forth some of the best talents to spoke warmly and emotionally, paying off the screen while bombs land around be found anywhere in the world. special respects to Jerzy Bossak and his them. other teachers at the L6di Film Acad- Paradoxically, the Polish cinema simul- emy and mentioning that he had gotten In a way, this picture brings Wajda's taneously finds itself in what is now being his start in Gdansk, where he shot Two oeuvre full circle. His first films, pro- openly called a crisis. Boxoffice statistics Men and a Wardrobe. The following day duced 30 years ago, told stories that look bad-a 16 percent drop in 1985, a he held court in ajammed press room; he would logically follow A Chronicle: the continuing decline this year- and the spoke again warmly and wittily, often World War II trilogy (A Generation, government, under economic pressure translating his own answers from Polish Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) from all directions, is reluctant to con- to English and vice versa. describes the same generation, having tinue its subsidization of the film indus- passed from innocence to bitterness as a try, currently amounting to half the price Not to be upstaged was Andrzej Wajda, result of the intervening chaos. of each admission ticket. Fiscal reforms the uncrowned king of the Polish cinema. have been approved, but no one knows Wajda stayed in Gdansk only long enough Wajda's new film tells something about how to apply them without creating to present his Chronicle of Love Affairs, the mood in the Polish cinema during the turmoil in the studios. Meanwhile, the also to a packed house at the Leningrad year past. In the entire festival, there was general mediocrity of production and out of festival competition. The only one comedy, Janusz Majewski's between 1982 and 1985, together with crowd applauded the film with enthusi- tightening household budgets and, of asm and gave Wajda, like Polanski the r aC. K. Deserters, a World War story la course, the appeal of television and night before, a long standing ovation. Shy (mostly foreign) video have all combined and uncomfortable before the public, Good Soldier Schweik. No fewer than to keep potential audiences at home. Wajda paid tribute to the cast and eight films - including Wajda's - contain production team, and he shook many suicide themes. Even more than usual, As in many other countries now, hands before the evening was over. He death and tragedy have been on filmma- cinema-goers are predominantly under held no press conference, however, and kers' minds. 25 years of age. The top draw last year returned to Warsaw the next day. was Sex Mission, Juliusz Machulski's Still, there was a new hopefulness as of high-nudity sci-fi comedy; third- and A Chronicle of Love Affairs - the early autumn. For one thing, the fourth-ranked were two children's films. English title weakly approximates the presence of Wajda's disbanded Unit \"X\" Second was Raiders of the Lost Ark, untranslatable original- is Wajda's first continued to be felt; former members of joined by Poltergeist, E. T., Blue Thun- Polish-made film since Man of Iron. It the \"X\" team captured four awards in this der, Tootsie, and Dogs of War-six shows a new Wajda, given over to a year's festival. Several of them have found American movies finishing in the top lyricism reminiscent of the early scenes refuge in Janusz Morgenstern's \"Per- nine. Thus, the overriding problem today from A Love in Germany. Several foreign spektywa\" Unit; A Chronicle of Love can be described in terms familiar to film critics called A Chronicle Wajda's Amar- Affairs is a \"Perspektywa\" production, as industries around the world: amid the cord, for the story takes a nostalgic and were the winning films by Falk and onslaught of glitzy Hollywood imports personal look backward from an older Domaradzki. Zaorski, whose Bodensee and the home comfort of TV and video, man's perspective. The screenplay is by was also produced by \"Perspektywa;' is how can the Polish cinema recapture the Tadeusz Konwicki, one of Poland's most another former \"X\" member. adult audience and continue to produce important contemporary writers and high quality films that phrase universal himself a sometime film director. In A Wajda shares the guarded optimism of and enduring sentiments? ~ Chronicle, Konwicki makes his acting other filmmakers. Though the poLitical situation is still shaky, it appears to have 44
tempo Alia en el Rancho Grande. by Pat Aufderheide can films mounted by Toronto festival from Brazilian Arnaldo Jabor, called Eu deputy director Helga Stephenson and Sei que Vou Te Amar (Love Me Forever or The Latin American experiment in programmer Piers Handling, jarred Never); and a revisionist musical (the cinema is a complex enterprise, expectations of homemade or crudely Argentine lyric exile's lament) , an ironic fraught with all the contradictions militant movies . \"They will see at this paean to socialism and its contradictions of national cinemas caught in the shadow festival ;' said Cuban Cinemateque head from Cuba, and a Brazilian transforma- of Hollywood. But its image in North Hector Garda Mesa, \"not only our films tion of The Beggar's Opera. America over the last 20 years has been but our societies:' The showcase built a unidimensional. The legacy of the suc- category of Latin films that bulged with You could trace history by the film cess of such films as Cuban Tomas diversity. schedule. Measuring the distance Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underde- between the grim mid-Seventies and velopment and Brazilian Glauber Rocha's There was: Tiempo de Revancha, a today, for instance, were the retrospec- Antonio das Mortes - first showcased in tight suspense drama by an Argentine tive's Colombian offerings. Showcased New York at the Museum of Modern Art who studies Hitchcock for style; the were both the sober, slow cinema verite in 1968 - has been a kind of Third World Mexican dream novel Pedro Paramo , documentary Los Chircales (The Brick- radical chic. made into a surreal odyssey starring makers) from 1972 and the glossy, action- (recent U.S. ambassador to Mexico) John packed but anti-macho western Tiempo That's why \"Winds of Change:' a Gavin ; an intense exercise in middle- de Morir (Time to Die), made from a retrospective of post Fifties Latin Ameri- class marital madness - with tour de Garda Marquez story. And yet accident force performances by the two actors- and tragedy are always around the corner 45
in Latin American cinema; the town tinely by political oppositions and shown squatters with nowhere to go. A savagely where TIempo de Morir was filmed very in precarious or art house settings. Birri's funny caricature of politicians, a tender shortly afterward was swept off its hillside career is as illustrious, varied , and comedy of young lovers, a boisterous by a volcano. obscure to most Northerners as is lampoon of macho idlers, the film builds Figueroa's, but on the flip side of the via vignettes that bring a spirit of For some, such as Peruvian filmmaker filmic coin. In the Fifties, Birri founded in Daumier to the screen. Alberto Durant, whose suspense film upriver Argentina the Santa Fe Film Malabrigo debuted in North America at School, an alternative to Argentina's Birri's films set in motion an alternative the festival , it meant an opportunity to commercial cinema, to capture Argen- film tradition, evidence of which was crack new markets. \"How are we going to tine reality in the way that Cesare clear at Toronto: from 1968, the strident get money back from the Empire into our Zavattini (Shoeshine , Bicycle Thief) was documentary La Hora de Los Homos countries?\" he hollered with rum-fueled doing in Italy. Zavattini's tour of Latin (The Hour of the Furnaces); and from abandon at the opening night smash. (No America in this period had a profound 1973, the feature-length indictment of danger that anyone heard , however, in the impact on filmmakers from Cuba to corrupt union politics Los Traidores (The din.) Argentina, as evidenced in Toronto by Traitors). But military rule, censorship, the showing of such other neorealist and state terrorism resulted in the exile of The life's work of Mexican cinematog- classics as Nelson Pereira dos Santos' Rio Furnaces co-directors Fernando Solanas rapher Gabriel Figueroa - showcased in a 40 Graus (Rio-40 Degrees) and Vidas and Octavio Getino , and the disappear- filmclip retrospective at the festival- Secas (Barren Lives). ance of Traitors director Raymundo traverses one axis of Latin American film: Gleyzer. Birri went to Italy. the work produced in conjunction with large studios, often in collaboration with The era created cinema of tremendous Hollywood, for mainstream distribution. passion and desire, according to Birri: You can follow, for instance, the evolution \"Everything we did, even the expression of the comedia ranchera, the Mexican of our deepest anger, we did with an singing westerns, in Figueroa's films , intense sense of love, with a dedication to starting with Alta en el Rancho Grande. the future:' Birri now plans the first film school dedicated to \"New Latin Ameri- A collaborator with Bunuel (The Exter- can Cinema:' Based in Cuba, it will open minating Angel), John Ford (The Fugi- next year with students chosen by the tive), John Steinbeck (The Pearl), and B. committee of Latin American filmma- Traven (Macario), and part of the heady kers. art scene in Mexico that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Figueroa Cuba is central to the \"Winds of recalled a good moment. At a European Change\" retrospective. The Cuban film festival, the photography in the first film institute, ICAIC, has been making reels of a Philippine film had dazzled him. Then the film fell apart. \"The next day;' movies since going into the streets in he said, \"a critic wrote, 'At first we expected to see the work of an Eisen- 1959 to \"capture the revolutionary real- stein, a Pudovkin, a Figueroa... :\" ity:' It was Cubans who gave the name of Despite Diego Rivera's assessment that Figueroa is \"our finest muralist. ... New Latin American Cinema to this people come to see my paintings, but you take your art all over the world;' and distinctive film phenomenon, on display despite his refusal to work on what Figueroa politely called \"a bad script\" for since 1979 at the Havana Film Festival. Viva Zapata, and despite his technical wizardry (genesis of what are still known What Latin American filmmakers share is as \"Figueroa clouds\" on film), Figueroa is hardly a household name in film circles an Iberian-root language (both Portu- up North. guese and Spanish), a tradition of \"What has always been most important to me, the one principle that has guided Fern(1ndo Birri. colonialism and neocolonialism, and a all my choices , can be put simply: to live similar perception of los Yankis. with dignity:' Figueroa refused to film Rambo II, \"because it didn't agree with Two of Birri's first films became No wonder that identity is a central my politics :' He's hard at work on another film project in Mexico. founding artworks for the \"New Latin theme of all Latin American art, and The presence of Argentine Fernando American Cinema;' the cinema that especially of popular art. It's the exasper- Birri, who popped up everywhere wearing his trademark black broad- strove for a direct connection between ating problem that Uruguayan artist Luis brimmed hat and cape, limned another popular art and the political and social Camnitzer described in New An Exam- axis of Latin American filmmaking- that processes of mass society. The 1958 iner recently: \"The difficulty in finding done independently or even clandes- short documentary Tire Die (Throw Me a . Latin America's identity is that colonial Dime) and the 1961 neorealist feature Los contamination cannot be erased - it has Inundados (The Flood Victims) were become part of it:' shown in the North for the first time at \"Every act of cinema is also an act of Toronto. Tire Die is a shocking film of cultural resistance;' said Mexican filmma- exurban squalor. Inventive and often wry, ker Paul Leduc (Frida-Naturaleza it begins with a pseudo-solemn travel- Viva; Frida-Still Life) during one of the ogue and ends with the sociological retro's round tables. \"It looked a lot more punch line of a mother revealing that her to me like a handful of the national children need to beg to help the family bourgeoisie saying we want these mar- survive. Los Inundados re-creates a kets for ourselves;' said one acerbic family's forced evacuation from the Northern distributor. upriver Argentine flood plain filled with Both were right. Militant, resolutely 46
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commercial, or dreamily aesthetic, Latin Patakin. documentaries, woven with fictional American filmmakers are always fighting scenes - often send-ups of pompous a cultural-commercial battle. And you make up the story as we went along:' bureaucratic policies - which carry the can't play without money. Cuban produc- How did she manage to get her ironies and energy of those early days. tion assistance often helps. National One of the characters (the central figures, subsidies, especially in Argentina , Mex- fictional characters into the live action? of course, are all reactionary dropouts ico, and Brazil, do too . The still-faltering \"That was the easiest part. You see, trying to beat each other to the aristo- attempts to distribute films regionally entertainment figures , like soap opera cratic treasure) collects a \"tax\" to see a hold out promise of return and , eventu- and movie stars, were so important in revolutionary monument and starts to ally, possibilities for production. And mobilizing public protest that nobody flee when he sees a bunch of militiamen. status in the Latin American upper blinked when they saw the actors around They pursue him - not to arrest him but middle class is not to be slighted. the platforms and at the political meet- to pay him the tax as a donation to the (Government subsidies often require, for ings. And the journalist - people thought cause. instance, a financing guarantee that can she was a real journalist, especially the mean mortgaging not only your home but politicians. One of them looked at her The Latin tradition of documentary your parents'.) funny, though, when he looked at her has never had the cool evenhandedness notebook and realized she was just of the Anglo-Saxon TV model. Every And even then, the odds are against scribbling on it:' Yamasaki's convinced documentary is also an essay, and usually getting a Latin American film on a that what's onscreen is more probable a sharply critical one. Documentaries domestic screen, much less transporting than what really happened. After all, her from Central America shown in the retro, it northward. \"Of course making movies industrialist only supports politicians; the for instance, whether from the govern- is impossible for us ;' said Cacho Pallero, character he's modeled on in real life is ment-sponsored film institute of Nicara- who produced New Latin American now running for office. gua or from guerrillas in El Salvador, Cinema classics such as Bolivian director assumed a kind of dialogue - even argu- Jorge Sanjines' Courage of the People. T oronto's screening of the rarely seen ment - with the spectator that would \"So we improvise:' 1962 Tomas Gutierrez Alea film Las make a public TV official in this country Dace Sillas (The Twelve Chairs, the run for the standards manuals. I mprovisation is a central feature of same story that Mel Brooks filmed) is not Latin American film - for instance, in only a hilarious Cuban comedy but also a Out of this tradition has come aesthetic its incorporation of documentary lan- visit to the early days of the Cuban experiment at least as ambitious as guage and material into feature narra- revolution. Evidencing early use of non- anything in features. Toronto showed tives . Tisuka Yamasaki's Patriamada fictional footage, Gutierrez Alea incorpo- some of the pioneering work of Santiago (Dearly Beloved Brazil) uncannily melds rated street scenes garnered for ICAIC Alvarez, the passionate master of mon- reality and fiction . It's a story of a tage from Cuba, and also the epic-length journalist, an industrialist, and a filmma- (four hours , originally made for TV) Acta ker during Brazil's 1984 demonstrations General de Chile (Chile-a General for direct elections, which precipitated Record), just made by Chilean Miguel the final fall of the generals' rule. The Littin. Littin (Alsino and the Condor) journalist falls in love with the industrial- returned incognito to Pinochet's Chile, ist, while trying to convince him to take not only to visit but to film a story of an active, pro-democratic role in politics. survival and resistance (his own mother Meanwhile, her filmmaker friend falls in didn't recognize him in his businessman's love with her, at the same time that he disguise). Marked by elegant images of begins to doubt his own role as a Chilean landscapes and daily life, the film politically engaged artist. makes hash of any preconceptions about victims and also demolishes any easy The journalist interviews major enter- Northern ignorance of oppression. tainment figures, such as musician Milton Nascimento, and political figures For those whose image of Latin up to the then-president of Brazil. The American cinema is frozen in the industrialist shakes hands with the major image of the 1968 MOMA retrospective, it politicos during actual congressional ses- was fascinating to see what has happened sions in the halls of Congress; the to the cinematic revolutionaries of that filmmaker makes his way through a era who called for a cinema that rejected million-person demonstration , fighting the values of \"well-made\" First World for the right angle. \"When the demonstra- films. Many today are working commer- tions started to mount ;' Yamasaki cially, often for the only thriving part of explains, \"I was working on a musical that the industry - television. would really celebrate Brazilian culture for a change, a rich entertainment, and Mozambican-Brazilian Ruy Guerra, also a social statement. Documentary? I whose early political and avant-garde didn't want to get near it. But I couldn't work in Os Fuzis (The Guns) and A ignore what was happening outside my Queda (The Fall) was also on display, window. So we just took cameras down showed his latest, a musical, Malandro. there - no money, borrowed equipment Taken from a Brazilian operatic transfor- - and started filming. We figured we'd mation of The Beggar's Opera composed by Chico Buarque de Holanda (one of 48
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