•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 19, Number 4 July-August 1983 The Right Strikes Back. . . . .. 9 The Big Fix..... . In the Vietnam Era, movies As the pop epics speed their kneejerked their derision at au- way to megagrosses, another thority. Now the Right has thun- tendency slowly rears its head dered back. Harlan Jacobson in Hollywood and European gloms Jedi, WarGames , Blue films. Time stands still when Thunder, and other new films and these pictures get a fix on the finds war lovers under every plot modern man watching, wait- (page 9). Harlan Kennedy ing, alone with the camera. ponders the trek of Alec Guiness David Thomson exposes from Ealing Everyman to Star the trend. Wars Superman (page 12). _I_r_a_n_: _C....i. nema in Flames ...... 56 American Flashdance ....... 33 For a while the Shah of MTV is not just a video jukebox for the reviving music indus- Iran could smirk and say: try; it is a home nickelodeon for one art of the future. \"Ayatollah you so. \" The Richard Corliss (page 34) and J. Hoberman (page 35)cast flames ofKhomeini's revo- critical eyes and faraway hopes on Music Television. Richard lution consumed the cellu- Gehr mines an MTV Aesthetic (page 37). In Busby Berke- loid of many talented , ley and Scopitone, David Ehrenstein finds MTVancestors not-q uite-revol utionary (page 40). Arlene Zeichner looks inside the business- big filmmakers. John Mo- and getting bigger-(page 41) and profiles a dozen top vid- tavalli chronicles the rise eauteurs (page 46). Elliot Schulman visits Bob Giraldi, di- of Iranian film and the rector of Michael Jackson's Beat It (page 48); and Mary tortured journeys of its Billard gauges MTV's cross-pollinating future (page 48). strongest artists. Also in this issue: Dan O'Bannon's 'Thunder' ... 52 Back Talk ................. 75 He and John Carpenter made Dark Presenting FILM COMMENT Quiz Journals ................... 2 Star. He created the chest-busting Number Two (relatively easy this In Cannes, Mary Corliss inhaled tear- Alien and the killer copter in Blue time). Also: the winners and the an- gas, sat through sloooow movies, and Thunder. What do you do for an en- swers to F.C. Quiz Number One. found three promising women direc- core? Marc Mancini finds out. tors. In New York, Enrique Fernan- Independents .............. 76 dez profiles some Cuban-born film- EdgarG. Ulmer ............ 60 Tales from the crypt: a \"new\" Pasolini makers breaking into Anglo-wood. In a land boarded by Edward D. film, a surprise from Hungary, and Wood and Billy Wilder lived an ace Philippe Garrel's Secret Child. Jean-Jacques Beineix ........ 16 director of low-budged thrillers and His first film, Diva, was a critical and Yiddish classics. By Bill Krohn. People We Like ............ 78 popular hit. His second , The Moon in Ex-stuntman Richard Farnsworth the Gutter, evoked the noisiest howls Diane Kurys ............... 65 won an Oscar nomination for Comes a at Cannes since l' Avventura. A conver- The director of Peppermint Soda has Horseman. Now see and savor him in sation with Dan Yakir. an affecting new hit, Coup defoudre. the Canadian film The Grey Fox. Dan Yakir interviews Kurys and her Guilty Pleasures ............ 24 pussycat of a star, Miou-Miou. Back Page ................ 80 With Pink FLamingoes and Polyester, A tribute to MoMA's Margareta Aker- filmmaker John Waters was the arbiter Books .................... 70 mark by her friend Joanne Koch. of bad taste. So what are his secret David Thomson on Irene Selznick. sins? Marguerite Duras movies! Carrie Rickey on women critics. Cover photo: 20th Century-Fox. Editor: Richard Corliss. Senior Editor: Harlan Jacobson. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impavido. Art Director: Elliot Schulman. Cover Design: Mike Uris. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. Research Consultant: Mary Cor- liss. Editorial Assista~ts: ~arcie Bloom, Jac.k Bru:th. Circu!ation ~ssistant:. Deborah Freedman. Accountant: Domingo HorniIla. Editorial Interns: Hanna Rubm, VICtor Zak. Execul:Jve Director, Film Society of Lmcoln Center: Joanne Koch. Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1983 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. The publication of FILM COMMENT (lSSNOO IS-119X) is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers, $22 for twelve numbers. Else- where: $1.8 f~r six num~e~s, $34 for twe!ve numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Edltonal, subscnptJon, and back-Issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT. 140 West Sixty-fifth Street, New York, N .Y. 10023 U.S.A.
Cannes and Crossover Dreams, '83 Mary Corliss amura's The Ballad of Narayama would ques Beineix, he seemed determined to say. From a film school tyro this slow- prove that his first film, Diva, was a de- lightful fluke. The Moon in the Gutter from Cannes ness would be understandable, even moved like a pastel hearse through a story of dream and obsessions, stranding commendable; not every director a trio of appealing actors: Gerard Depar- dieu, Victoria Abril, and Nastassia Cannes' new Palais des festivals should want to be Steven Spielberg. But Kinski. Say this for Beineix: he provided the festival's flash point with a two-hour squats on the Riviera beach in trapezoi- from the director of Mouchette or Andrei press conference in which the assem- bled journalists slung their outraged ar- dal indecision, as if the Pizza Hut from RubLev or Vengeance Is Mine, it is not. As rows at his misfortune. Beineix will re- bound to make a better movie. Outer Space had just landed and any philistine would say: The medium , In the Genuine Weirdie category couldn't decide where to go. Walk in- after all, is known as moving pictures. were two multinational productions: Erendira and Merry Christmas, Mr. La- side, and the ramps and escalators and All these films won their sincere parti- wrence. The first movie, directed by Ruy Guerra from a screenplay by Ga- stairs, stretching back and up as far as sans, both for the assurance of their pris- briel Garcia Marquez, is a road movie about the attempts of the 14-year-old the eye can see, give the visitor the feel- Erendira (lovely Claudia Ohana) to escape the humiliating prostitution ing of slouching toward heaven . It was a forced on the girl by her vengeful destination not many visitors to the 36th grandmother (Irene Papas in a hilarious, bravura performance). Erendira and her Cannes Film Festival reached. The in- boy friend plot to kill the mad Papas, but like Rasputin she is just about indestruc- ternational press corps, never noted for tible; near the end the old woman stands defiantly by her grand piano-Joan its sense of direction, charged that the Crawford in Johnny Guitar-the only in- habitant of the fantasy world Garcia Palais was poorly organized. Aesthetes Marquez' teeming imagination has cre- ated for her. Mr. Lawrence, an English- called it \"Mitterand's Alphaville,\" Japanese co-production by the estima- ble Nagisa Oshima, is pretty much of a though the place was planned almost a bust, laughable and grotesque by turns (and some times simultaneously), as it decade ago; and, besides, just about ev- recounts the experiences of Her Maj- esty's finest in a Japanese prisoner-of- ery public building erected in France (or war camp during World War II . Butamid the rubble one can see the splendid form Britain or Germany) in the past 20 years and knockout star quality of David Bowie, whose combination of searching has the same granite prison gloom. The intelligence and sexual danger made him the most beguiling eminence at local medical students went on strike Cannes. Tout Le monde, take note. and tried to spruce the palais up by toss- World, take heart: three of the finest films on display at Cannes were made by ing balloons filled with red paint against women in their early- to mid-30s. The big surprise came from Chantal Aker- the fa~ade. man, whose first feature, Jeanne DieLman . .. , a three-and-a-quarter-hour It may be that the grousing about the essay in structuralist soporifics, was a controversial entry in Cannes' 1975 Di- nouveau palais was one way of inveigh- ing against the state of film art as dis- played at the world's gaudiest and most prestigious film convention. The festi- val's main competition was stocked with Irene Papas in Erendira. \" brand names\" -new offerings by Ro- bert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Er- tine imagery and as beneficiaries of manno Olmi, Shohei Imamura, Carlos auteurist sentimentality. What is pecu- Saura, that crowd-that failed to ignite liar is that their lack of movie energy also much more than informed cafe chatter infected the works of younger directors. along the Croisette. One could diagnose Charles Sturridge, an Englishman who a tendency toward enervation, a slack- brought a lovely sense of period detail ing of film juices, among many of the old and a gentle touch with actors to the TV masters. The manic bustle of the festi- series Brideshead Revisited, lost it all val outside may have had something to when he made the feature film Runners. do with it. The critic would dash from This story of a man from the Midlands in his press box to the nearest bar for a search of his missing daughter lurched cafefiLtre, then elbow his way through a from ludicrous plot points to over- mob of fellow journalists into the audito- wrought acting (by James Fox and Jane rium, collapse into a cushioned seat ... Asher), and Sturridge treated the whole and find life on the screen proceeding silly baggage with a stylistic stiff upper with the alacrity of a snail on Valium. lip. (The e1even-year-old girl has run \"Parse me, digest me, admire me,\" each away to \"work\" due to her dread fear of museum-wall image from Bresson's competition in today's job market. L'Argent or Tarkovsky's NostaLgia or Im- Come on!) As for Frenchman Jean-Jac- 2
.. SOLDIER'S PLt..y *6627 5074 *6510 2782 6254 BR@ADWAYOS BR~GHTEST H~TS ~ Take any 4 books for only $1 with membership ~~NNwice~kalenbd~ III UT1lE ME -=. . .- -- - THE GINGER8fUD LADY .::.~lIooc:::- 6700 THE PNSOHER OF SECOND AVEHIJE TME SUNSHINE BOYS THE GOOD DOCTOR GOO 'S FAVOfUTt ~,:\" 3970 How the Club w . You 'll receive You orks. tote bag when ac r 4 books for only $1 ( . However on cepted as a memb plus shIPPing and h . r - - - -- ¥~~~~k~/~gt:~~~~~te$o~~ ~:~~R?~~~~~~;h~~~,rife~~:r~;~g;a~~d/p~~rc~t~;n I ~~~~?,E rHEATRE\"~tIhh:tyieew,pe~aomi~lrler~)d,nb~etYer~sOs~.Ufe~o)'n~rllmY~trOCteOU~bfU~cYns:eOtp~~Us~e~yca~odI~uaaJttl~oPoSemI~eJS/?a~ep~ttcieosctc~aiik~flolei~ynee~sdp,tI~i.f,ni;rn'.%~aC~oehusu4;r~. wet~Ipna:af'inear~tbd~atedhn~iect~iAoa,fonnlet~cea,~etruun~llprea~edtt:deoJaS0~n4~;d/t;wm~ght~e~eeueos?Oknn/sa(efkw(Oys)~ke,SSeadtrewo~/yei~otnch~utoiiinotm~hn1gai(/s.g0)'.' C~lP~ulde~aJs~~e;~ai~c~c~le~~pk~t~Ume~p'e~e~~v:i~rgnd~Pe~,'nt:dC~g:Int~y~,~;N~~~ly~m.~~1~B1eA5/Ol3s~o0~O~s;TK-h~ega~Ct-r~eL~B-O~UO~krB-CBl®uI/bI- - , ;~gyU/,amre'OtWheCIUbfte~~~~~dd~nnthglsthaed~~~N:~;m,permo'raegrbee tko~~~ --, n,oethemctglo.nFbireecsaiud:~hOUt at all, return ' I rea er Commg year and 00 s at I hsa'dlavleessatthleaanst1100d~ayys mg and handlin added to all I .2 ' may resign I II 3_ III to decide. If yoJ 1. gCe~arge0.IS III M II a tered in size to . ea re offers its own s, return it at Club ~xpenanseuannwdanoWtede edition prices special presses Complete hardbound YI fIt sa %Cluobffger~;gt~//osnhse,rss'O. hmaerdticmoevser ~~yneCeodntbinuuyeotnolyen4j'obyo~C~/~nbgayboreuguuplatrolo4w0 I after which you s. Tr~lORTfEE I • eneflts or resign at s wlthm 1year. \" Addre (Please prim) I Wallllng: Expl/clt ss _ _ _ _ '81, langua,e, Or Vlotence. any tIme . ' 'City Apt. # _ II'\"'L, M e m ; - - - State - Zip MEMWBEItRHSHIP rs acCepted in USA - IC\\J - _ _ _ ••• and Canada only Of-f - I- - - _ _ _ _ _. _e_r Sl_ight_ly different in Canada.
rectors Fortnight. Since then Akerman Enrique Fernandez aired before the program changed has been flirting with conventional nar- from New York hands. And Universal gave them an as- rative; but few could have been pre- pared for her latest, Les Annees 80 (The signment. Universal! Hollywood! Eighties). In the first 40 minutes, a bunch of funny kids audition for a musi- \"Rudy Veloz is us ,\" says Manuel Crossover dreams! cal; in the last 35 minutes, Akerman and her kids put the show on right here! Arce, producer of Crossover Dreams. They were to develop a story set in Jacques Demy meets Arthur Freed in a delightful pastiche that is almost too friv- \"The only difference is we're not Miami , but-a point that now stimu- olous . Marguerite Duras may not ap- prove of Akerman's headlong dive into dead.\" In the film, salsa star Ruben lates Leon Ichaso's suspicions-having the mainstream but, who knows, a mass audience may. Blades plays Veloz, an ambitious Latin nothing to do with drugs . Coincidentally, musician from Ne~ York's barrio who Universal was planning another Miami Ann Hui is a 36-year-old Chinese, liv- ing in Hong Kong. Because her film tries to break out of the low-paying, ex- feature, Brian De Palma's Scarface, very Boat People was shot mostly in the Peo- ple's Republic of China, and because it ploitive, Latin music circuit, and almost much having to do with drugs, and attributes certain post-war crimes to offi- cials of the Socialist Republic of Viet- makes it. \"If this isn't it,\" says actor Ichaso now wonders how much of their nam, a few romantics of the Western Left have denounced the film as revi- Reynaldo Medina (the handsome Latin work wound up as research for that film. sionist propaganda. To an extent, all films are propaganda; but Boat People in all those Spanish-language cigarette Unwary, the Mambru team set out to makes sufficiently clear that the atroci- ties committed in Vietnam after 1975 are ads), who worked on El Super and was work on what they thought would be no more than the grimy ring left after the American bloodbath. The film can more slated for a role in Crossover Dreams at their first crossover film, A Short Vaca- fairly be compared with dozens of hu- manist, anti-authority films made in ev- an early stage of the project, \"if this isn' t tion, a surreal comedy about a young ery corner of the Third (and second and first) World: winsome widows, resource- our crossover, then we might as well give Cuban American working in the New ful street kids, and an audience surro- gate who sees the harsh light. Boat Peo- up. Why struggle? Better move to the York ad trade whose Miami vacation ple resists the outlook of political tunnelvision; it is a haunting, Southeast Caribbean and devote yourself to con- winds up in a series of increasingly in- Asian updating of The Ugly American. templation and sex.\" sane mishaps, including a plane hi- Diane Kurys' Peppermint Soda (1977) was sweet and simple, with just enough Like Blades himself-(and like Arce jacked to Cuba. It was Ichaso's homage emotional carbonation to make it fizz in the memory. CouP . de foudre, Kurys' and his filmmaking company, Max to the Hollywood screwball comedy, third film, is a full-course meal of con- trasting moods and feelings. This is a Mambru Films)-Veloz covets that with a festive tropical touch. The group memory movie: of Kurys' mother (played by Isabelle Huppert) and father Cover-of-RolLing-Stone-American-Pie worked feverishly and joyously for a (Guy Marchand) and her mother's best friend (Miou Miou) in a French town in fame. Unlike his screen character, year, delivering first a treatment and the Forties and early Fifties. Mom is a closet bohemian, before her time and Blades is no barrio naif, but a law-de- then a full script. The project was out of her class; Dad is a hard-working guy, perplexed that his wife can't restrict greed, business-savvy, literate Panama- canned. Universal owned it, and if they herself to a view of the world as himself and their two daughters. Temperaments nian. He has earned an international wanted it back they would have to pay change with the seasons, as ordinary people grow up and, without realizing it, reputation as salsa's hottest star, but, the whple bill, including research trips grow old within themselves. In a splen- did acting ensemble, all three characters even internationally, the circuit is lim- to Miami and conference trips to Holly- emerge as poignant, human studies, and Kurys, as writer and director, comes of ited, and Blades is still struggling to wood. The high life was over. \"We age. CDUP de foudre was the film that most reverberated with life as it is expe- break through to Bruce Springsteen ter- would have had to pay back every filet rienced outside a film studio, a movie theater, or the granite mausoleum that ritory. Arce, director Leon Ichaso, pro- mignon and lobster salad we ate,\" was the rest of Cannes '83. ~ duction designer Octavio Soler, Mariano Ichaso reflects wistfully. Ros, and the other Cuban Americans \"The mistake we made after El Su- who a few years ago surprised the world per,\" explains Arce, \"was not having an- with El Super believe that Crossover other project ready to pitch.\" This time, Dreams limns their struggle. while working on A Short Vacation, the El Super seemed to be the passport for Mambru team was also working on an- this team of talented filmmakers who other project, which they hoped would labored in the world of Latin advertising be their second Universal film. They while they strove to enter the exclusive and Panamanian singer-songwriter Ru- club of American filmmaking. An ele- ben Blades were admirers of each gant fable about the Cuban exile super- others' work, and the filmmakers hoped intendent of a New York building that to develop a film around the charismatic became an arthouse and college circuit salsa star. So, they started to write a story . hit, El Super induced hopes that Holly- about a Latin singer who made it in the wood was around the corner. The group Rock mainstream. \"Like The Harder continued to survive on commercials, They Come , but upbeat,\" was the way mostly for Spanish TV, but also some Arce described it at the time. Brought very inventive English blurbs for Goya up on Latin rhythms and rock and roll, products. They made two Spanish fea- these young Hispanics saw the fusion of tures: an English-language comedy re- these musical worlds as natural. leased in Spain as Angeles Gordos (Fat When, in March of 1982, Universal Angels), and auxiliary work on a vehicle said thanks but no thanks, the film- for Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias, di- makers' optimism turned to frustration. rected by El Super co-director Orlando Undaunted, they went to work on the Jimenez-Leal. secondary project, but this time without Then, in 1980, Saturday Night Live anyone's baclcing and with a story (bear- assigned them four shorts, two of which, ing some similarities to the Broadway hit Pepe Gonzalez, about a New York mata- Dreamgirls) that understandably was no dor who fights traffic, and Sweethearts, a longer upbeat. In the new Crossover noir spoof about a laundromat holdup , Dreams, the young Latin singer burns all 4
GIANT MOVIE POSTERS in original full color - take them all for ON LV $1.39 Each poster measures a full 22 x 34 • Superb color reproduction on fine glossy stock • Posters come rolled in protective tube - NOT folded and creased These classic posters sell for $3.98 each. .BERGMAN· HENREID You get all 6 for $1.39 with membership in the Movie/Entertainment Book Club - a saving of $22.49. (UtlDE CDlW SYOlilty pm l RAINS ·VllDT .GRHNSTREET·toRR( AHAL &.WALLIS PRODUCTION 0.:\"'-.1/.1.,. MICHAEl CURTIZ - - : ; . \"'.-:;. ••'~-'::.-=-.:.. ~:;:' ._. r - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - .How to get all 6 color posters for ONLY 51.39 I ..,./ftiftlAII..-r 118811 CUll 15 Oakland Avenue • Harrison, N.Y 10528 I I II enclose $1 .39 . Please send me all 6 color posters offered in this I Iad , postpaid and at no additional charge . At the same time please Iaccept my membership in the Movie / Entertainment Book Club . I agree to buy 4 books over the next 2 years at regular Club prices I plus shipping and handling . After I buy and pay for 4 books at I Iregular Club prices , my membership may be ended either by me or counts. I'll be offered a new Club Selection plus Alternates every 4 weeks (13 times a year) in the Club bulletin , PREVIEWS . If I want the Selection , I will do nothing and it will come automatically . If I want an Alternate or no book at all , I'll notify you by the deadline date specified . If I should ever receive a Selection without having had 10 days to decide if I want it , I may return it at Club expense by the ClUb . I will be offered some 200 books on movies and enter- and receive full credit. PREVIEWS also includes news about my fel - I Itainment , the majority at 20-33% discounts plus shipping and han- low members and their hobbies . I am welcome to send in similar I Ior more FREE Bonus Book Certificates which entitle me to buy such item it deems suitable, FREE . dling . For every book I buy at the regular Club price , I receive one items about myself and my interests . PREVIEWS will publish every I Imany books at far below regular Club price , usually at 60-80% dis- Fe - 24 NameI0 I don 't care to join the Club but I Address CityI enclose $23.88 , for which you will Isend me all 6 color posters offered I in this ad . You will also pay all LI _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Ipostage and handling charges State ZiP ~
his bridges in order to make it in the Ruben Blades and Lori Carson in Crossover Dreams. American world: Veloz walks out on the can instrument. Aida's Bailadores, who rhythm on champagne bottles. Rudy Latin music circuit, leaves his Latin, had been waiting for hours to dance, Veloz' crossover debut was a hit. live-in girlfriend, quarrels with his best grew bored hanging around a closed bar • friend and musical partner. In spite of a (this was a low-budget production, so there was nothing hard to drink). Ruben The Mambru team is made up of flashy start, Rudy Veloz fails. His rec- Blades divided his time between his on- young Cubans whose parents left their ords don't sell, he runs out of money, camera work and charming the dancers country after the revolution (lchaso's fa- and can' t go back to his roots. \"They got to keep their spirits from flagging before ther, Justo Rodriguez Santos, is a noted you hard and they didn't even jerk you the dance sequences. When toward the Cuban poet). While they were strug- end of a long day the band cleared the gling with their crossover dreams, a new off,\" remarks one cynical sidekick. In a stage for the cameramen to film the cinema-perhaps the most remarkable dancers, the energy supply was still in- of the · third world-was emerging in last-ditch attempt to get money for a tact: skirts whirled, arms and hips their homeland. The Castro govern- comeback, he takes up drug-running swayed-the fictional party became ment was largely responsible for the and winds up shot dead on a Miami real. Not surprising-these were the flowering of the new Cuban cinema, street. After his death, Veloz' crossover same folk who go straight from work since it institutionalized the means for it record becomes a big hit. every Wednesday evening to indulge to thrive. But the seeds for this phenom- their dance obsession at a salsa club. enon had already been sown by a first Crossover Dreams is a very Latin film, generation of Cuban cineastes whose ac- but it's also very American. It's an affir- The scene was repeated at the rock tivities predated the revolution. mation of those Anglo-Saxon virtues of venue, Danceteria, which was the set- self-reliance, perseverance, and pluck. ting for Veloz' debut in the American Castro's historical convulsion divided Either Latins would make films about scene. This time, the band looked hip in that film generation. The founder of the themselves, or no one would. Privately Kid Creole tropical duds, and the music Cuban film society, novelist-screen- financed , and made with the coopera- was not salsa , but Blades' crossover writer-critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante, tion of Latin musicians, writers, club tune , \"Good For Baby.\" The song was moved to London where he would write and studio owners, and, of course, film- played repeatedly for the camera; non- some remarkable screenplays-includ- makers, the film is already a monument musicians, like salsa critic Tony Sa- ing Under the Volcano for Joseph Losey to a community's cohesion and drive. bournin, who'd spent a lifytime watch- -but which, with some notable excep- ing the masters , had all the salsero tions like the cult hit Vanishing Point, Dominican cinematographer Claudio moves down pat, while veteran players would never be filmed. The most Chea shot the film; New York Latin ac- seemed more inhibited about wielding successful emigre, Nestor Almendros, tors Shawn Elliott and Elizabeth Pena, their axes in pantomime. No Bailadores gained fame as Rohmer's and Truffaut's along with veteran musician Virgilio this time, but a crowd of dress-for-suc- cinematographer, and later earned his Marti , play leading roles; there are per- cess types playing record industry big- Oscar for Days ofHeaven. formances by legendary Hispanic artists wIgs. Yomo Toro, Manny Ocquendo, Andy Unlike the emigres, Tomas Gutierrez and Jerry Gonzalez, David Valentin, and The shot called for the audience to be Alea , a promising filmmaker sent to It- Marco Rizzo; salsa critics Tony Sa- swept away by the rhythm into a dance aly in his youth to study, returned to bournin, Jessie Ramirez, and this writer frenzy, but after the first take, Ichaso Cuba and became the brightest star in play cameo bits; Aida's Bailadores, a warned, \"It has to look spontaneous.\" the post-revolutionary cinema and group of salsa dancers who've been par- And so Amanda Barber, who plays Ms. Cuba's first internationally acclaimed tying together since the Fifties, are fea- Funky, a deejay, stood up to dance, then tured in the dance club sequences, most Juan Valdez, a tall handsome Dominican auteur. In April , Alea came to New York of which take place at the Corso, Man- in an Italian suit, rose and faced her with hattan's most famous salsa venue. arms and hips tuned to the same beat, for a Third World Film Conference There are, of course, non-Latins in the and finally, the rest of the makeshift cast sponsored by Hunter College. He had film , including assistant producer Susan danced, yelled, and clinked out the seen El Super and liked it, and offered a Rollins, editor Gary Karr, Joel Diamond chance to meet with the Mambru group, playing the record exec who sponsors he accepted. At a screening of a rough- Veloz, and the New Wave band Ballistic cut of Crossover Dreams, Cuba's great- Kisses. But Crossover Dreams is all about the energy of the growing Latin community, destined to become this country's largest minority by the end of the decade. At the Corso, on the edge of Spanish Harlem, the \"band\" gathered for the shoot. Dressed in Saturday Night Fever suits and bright red polyester shirts, the mix of virtuoso salseros and non-musi- cians went through their paces ad nauseam for several takes. After a while, they became a real band, goofing on the scene, wise-cracking at director Ichaso's commands, getting down on some im- promptu jams led by Yomo Toro's riffs on the cuatro-a guitar-like Puerto Ri- 6
est filmmaker and the Cuban American The1.7th hopefuls met for the first time as peers; International as a child Ichaso had alread y known Tourneeof Alea, who was a friend of the family. Animation After the screening, Ichaso , Arce, Soler and Alea went to the Mambru of- fice to talk about the now-bifurcated Cuban cinema. The Cuban director Alea had the advantages of age and ex- perience, and of having worked in his own country under a generously funded state program; the young Mambru team were more cosmopolitan (Soler and Arce had been part of the Warhol scene). Be- sides a common cultural heritage, all shared the lean muscle that struggle de- A tribute to the animation velops: Alea's strength came from work- ing within narrow ideological confines, artistry of the and the isolation that Cuba still suffers; National Film Board of Canada the Mambru filmmakers have a market discipline derived from their constant reaching for that elusive crossover. Alea had been nervous about the en- A feature-length program of 21 award-winning counter; Cubans on opposite sides of the short animated films. fence seldom meet politely. And Ichaso, Available for rental in 16mm from: who is a bundle of nerves at a screening of his work, was doubly wired with anxi- ety. When politics eventually reared its ugly head-after a couple of beers-the 4530 18th Street discussion became heated, but re- San Francisco, Calif. 94114 mained respectful. Ichaso: \"I told him I (415) 863·6100 lik~hisfil~butiliou~tiliqwe~~=================~====~====~~_ commercials for the revolution; Alea said, 'you don't understand, those are not commercials, as you call them, I'm in love with the revolutionary process, I believe in it and I'm going to stick it out.' Then I told him , I may not be a communist or a socialist, but these peo- ple you see here (Mambru) all work to- gether and share everything. If one makes money, we all eat, and if we don't, we starve together.\" The most fruitful result of their meeting was the possibility of collaboration . The Mam- bru team would like to film on location in Cuba, and Alea considered the idea of making a film that dealt with Cubans in the U.S. Sooner or later, a Latin cinema will FILm FORum emerge in the U.S. Luis Valdez, whose Zoot Suit (also for Universal) was a pro- vocative failure, has been signed by Jane ATWIN CINEMA NEXT DOOR TO SOHO Fonda to work on the adaptation of a story by Mexican novelist Carlos Presenting NYC premieres of independent films Fuentes. And whether Crossover & retrospectives of foreign & American classics Dreams crosses over or not, Arce, Ichaso June 22-July 12: PRIX DE BEAUTE starring Louise Brooks and Soler will continue to make films, July 13-19: QUEST FOR POWER and TARGET NICARAGUA though not necessarily on Latin themes (lchaso's next project is a romantic July 20-Aug. 2: WERNER HERZOG: New Documentaries Aug. 3-16: A KUCHAR SAMPLER Aug. 17-30: Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR story). Filmmaking is all they ever Open 7 days a week. Call or write for calendar & member discount information. 57 Watts Street, NYC 10013 Box Office: (212)431-1590 wanted to do, all they have ever done, Partially supported by the NYS Council on the Arts & the National Endowment lor the Arts and all they will ever do, come Holly- wood or high water. tIP 7
Nuclear Issues Films & Video Eight Minutes The 1\"You Love No Place To Midnight Freeze To Hide This Planet A Portrait of Dr. Helen Caldicott An Overview of the Arms Race Growing Up in the 1981 Academy Award Nomination Dr. Helen Caldicott on Nudear War Shadow of the Bomb Best Feature Documentary Robert McNamara, Paul Academy Award 1982 Warnke, Dr. Herbert Scoville, Jr. Best Documentary Short Narrated by Martin Sheen This 1981 Academy Award and Dr. Helen Caldicott are National Film Board of Canada nominated film is a portrait of among the notable speakers Vintage film clips shcw how activist, Dr. Helen Caldicott , to present detailed information In a campus talk, Dr. Helen America was sold on the idea the pediatrician and author and balanced viewpoints on Caldicott, noted author and that nuclear attack is surviva- engaged in the struggle to the nuclear arms race, includ- pediatrician, clearly emphas- ble in a fallout shelter. Martin inform and arouse the public ing excerpts from 5 award izes the perils of nuclear war Sheen's narration recreates the to the medical hazards of the winning films on the nuclear and reveals a frightening pro- nightmares of a child growing nuclear age. disarmament issue. gression of events which up during the cold war. 25 minutes Color 1983 would follow a nuclear attack. 60 minutes Color 1981 26 minutes Color 1982 29 minutes Color 1982 Rent these outstanding films Direct Cinema Limited ~,~ for your group, theatre or class . Post Office Box 69589 For additional information contact: Los Angeles, California 90069 cinema ~ (213) 656-4700 limited @
Thunderon the Right WarGames Situation Room. ogy has been picked up off the ground by Harlan Jacobson where it had briefly rested like the dis- carded medals of the Vietnam veterans, What a bunch of good oLd boys there and been given a shine. Hey, it ain't so were in the pLatoon . bad in the army! There are times a man -The Naked and the Dead -or a woman-has gotta do what a per- son's gotta do. Somehow it only seems natural that COMMENT Just ask Luke Skywalker. The main- the disappointment and futility of the spring of the Star Wars trilogy always Vietnam War would have spilled over everything during the Seventies. And it appeared to be identification with the into suspicion of the military, and that seems the di sc ussion of what went resistance and revolt against the imperi- suspicion would've lasted so much wrong has been redirected from the alist forces of Darth Vader. The hook of longer than it has. True, there is a long body count in the rice paddies back up- both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes history of blaming the message bearer stairs to Nixon and Kissinger with the Back lay less in their underlining of John for bad news and the spear carrier for bad publication of Seymour Hersh's The Wayne's individualistic regency-after war, and for a while-when the atmo- Price ofPower. all, it took two nervous boys , a yo ung sphere was superheated with dissent Perhaps that is where it always be- girl, a gorilla, and two robots to stand up over the ongoing war-the defense es- longed. The popular view of the military for freedom-than in the futuristic vis- tablishment, or war department (de- has always been clouded by-oddly ual surprises that occurred seemingly pending upon your reading of a complex enough-its human face. Clearly, the frame by frame . set of values), took its lumps . . stars of M*A *S*H , whether on the silver The comic-book vision that Lucas In fact, some of the domestic shellfire screen or the home screen, were not had pulled from inside his head and only medics , they were our medics, landed onscreen fomented something of lobbed at the military has been defused even if they patched up a platoon of its own aesthetic revolution . There were Koreans and achieved antiwar status. In a few critical carpings about the card- or returned , a La William Westmore- land's pending suit against CBS' 60 Min- utes, which came to symbolize the coun- the last six years, in important ways, not board characterizations, but no matter. tervailing check on just a bout only the military image but the mytho1- Kids returned on a scale approaching 9
logarithmic, and young professionals' that were bothersome. The film seems in American films, wh rode like a dinner parties buzzed with snippets to have been hijacked by the Muppets, tidal wave over the futility films ofApoc- about the Freudian narure of the rela- with Miss Piggy having gotten her entire alypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Com- tionship between Luke and Vader, extended family roles as Jabba's footsol- ing Home. In these, the heroes lost their whose name sounds suspiciously like fa- diers; there's no rationale for the height- legs, lost their wives, lost their hearts, ther in German. College educations ened violence other than that fairy tales minds, and lives. Whatever was gained were put to poor use: I seem to remem- do it; the feeling persists that Billy Dee cost t90 much. The root was , of course, ber mouthing something about parallels Williams has been cast as a piece of toast All Quiet on the Western Front, in which between Empire and Mao Tse Tung's in a saga of Wonder Bread Goes To War the military was depicted as Pied Piper (that's how I'll always spell it) Long for no reason other than Lucas felt he to a meat grinder. March. had to stamp out the (unfair) charge of racIsm. Maybe it's since Private Benjamin that Even in Los Angeles Times reporter the idea has again taken hold that the It isn ' t that Lucas has lost his touch in military is good for you. It was followed Dale Pollock's fact-packed account of the intervening years as much as the in almost indecent succession by Stripes, George Lucas' life, Skywalking, the psy- audience has changed-or, more ex- An Officer and A Gentleman, Taps, and cho-dynamics behind Lucas' retreat to actly, been changed by the very techno- The Lords of Discipline. All these films Marin County after Universal's manhan- graphic wizardry and anthropomorphic express some kind of longing for a truly dling of American Graffiti manifested it- outer world Lucas so dazzlingly placed democratic instirution to make us all self in the Star Wars trilogy. Writes Pol- before us originally. Shifting into Hyper- equal, to put us all back in the same boat lock: \" Hollywood is the Death Star, and space is something toilet bowl cleansers in these fractious times-so long as we Lucas is the eternal rebel.\" Or later, now accomplish in TV commercials. can lead the platoon. \"Jedi is a movie he first wanted to make Chewbacca, the gorilla-wookie, is less as Apocalypse Now: the story of the little startling and more capable of conversa- The subtext in these romanticizations guys fighting the technological super- tion than the Plasmatics, and, in fact, has less to do with the army as a neces- powers and winning because they be- most people would sooner have him sary mechanism to keep the peace or lieve in themselves.\" Thank God Fran- over to dinner. make war than it does with the disorgan- cis Coppola swiped the Apocalypse ization of personality that the hero or project from Lucas. The one constant in Jedi that holds heroine-and , by extension, the con- over, but less strikingly, is the technol- temporary audience-experiences. You So, it was to Jedi that I went with the ogy. I have always thought that what we can put the pieces back together again in same expectation of evil's vanquish- viewed as important or amusing in Star the armed services, you can find your ment amid the visual candy of the Wars-the simple, comic-book story, hidden strengths, you can discover The screen. But at the screening one quad- the normality of geekish relationships, Force within you. What else was a dec- rant of the balcony declared its rebellion etc.-took a back seat to the airplanes ade of self-help books, cultism, and against Lucas' cultural imperialism with everyone darted about in. Sure they of- mysticism dancing around in orange pa- loud gales of laughter. They were guf- fered wonderful, laser-like roller-coaster jamas at the airport but a rejection of fawing at the painful soap-opera pallia- rides, made even more fun by Han what had been the standard, secular tives for the ache in Luke's oedipal Solo's \"Let's see what this crate can do.\" cure-all for being a mess, the military? heart. And they were right. But they also looked and handled a lot like the U.S. Air Force's F-1S, and since It's one thing to make pro-military- Jedi's structure is vaudevillian: smack seeing Star Wars I've wondered how life films, even when they are as offbeat the mules in the nose early with some- many generals in how many client states as Stripes, which basically advocated cre- thing freakish, then trot out the enter- saw the film and got on the phone to ativity (anti-authority) instead of disci- tainments. So we are led to the lair of Lockheed, or McDonnell-Douglas, or pline as the fulcrum of morale. It's alto- Jabba the Hutt, a mountainous frog with the Pentagon , and said \" I'll take a hun- a rubber tongue (in Yiddish, tshabba dred dozen of those.\" means frog). Jabba delights in dropping living appetizers into a pit for the culi- To that extent, Star Wars has made it nary benefit of one of Godzilla's cousins. that much easier for the military estab- After Luke kills this thing, we move on lishment to make its requests for a big- to the predictable ho-hum storyline con- ger share of the budgetary pie. Woe to frontation between Luke and Darth , most Congressmen who stand in the with melodramatic stops along the way. way of the munitions works on which half the export economy rests, which has But the entire enterp(ise is so unsur- the approval of the voters, and which prising, Jedi requires another shot of di- spills over onto the dashboards of their gestive revulsion to revive attention. Japanese-made cars. Lucas has , in ef- The human cast is dispatched to the fect, made armaments fun , and he's ad- desert,' out to some hyb rid between a vertised our wares in a way that no bro- mouth and an anus. It \"takes 1,000 chure, slide show, or bikini-sruffed yea rs\" to digest whoever is so con- parade at a munitions convention ever signed, but the horror of the image is could. And where the buck comes from mitigated by the knowledge that no one is where foreign policy must logically go. has lived 1,000 years since Moses, and therefore one is likely to die pretty • quick, probably from a terminal case of vagina dentata fright. Star Wars fit into, or perhaps reigni- ted, the romanticization of the military There were other elements of Jedi 10
r-- •! iii iIi iii ~ i! UIIIBJI .. H\"f ' Murray in Stripes. gether di nt to make a pro-cult film. Mel Gibson did in Road Warrior. That terror, all of it, if you'll just all love each \"Hey, what wacky good times ev- eryone has hustling dimes for Rev. Kojak gave way to Hill St . Blues reflects other. • Moon!\" The most ludicrous misunder- more than the fizzled lifespan of a TV standing of the marketplace was Moon's, when he produced his Inchon series; it expresses the underlying long- It was Lionel Trilling who said some- homage to Douglas MacArthur, simply because the word was out that Moon had ing for a democratic institution-one thing to the effect that Liberals love produced it. The saving grace to Holly- wood may be that it tries to be market- that will take anybody, as long as they their mothers, Conservatives love their sensitive and produces films that don't want to steal your children, just borrow have a nice smile-to bottle up all the fathers. If that's true, the romanticiza- them for a couple of hours. Of course, what angers parents is that the film is anti-social forces and fears that have tion of the service-which made sense meant to wean the kid from their author- ity-how else get a kid through the the- been let loose. in vintage World War II films , because ater door? What else is Superman, I, II, or III but the concept of Cincinnatus, of defen se, While the prevailing right-wing ethic is Frank Sinatra's \"I did it my way,\" the Super-Cop? True, David and Leslie was still valid-is a disservice to its audi- appeal of An Officer and a Gentleman more nearly speaks the Right's truth: Newman's III script means to poke fun ence. \"You better do it their way.\" That the film corralled some $100 million at the at this Super-ego, but where-except in That's where WarGames steps in , be- boxoffice meant that, at some level , it fulfilled a lot of wiShes. The most ob- the original source material-is it writ- cause it stans from the premise that An vious was a secret female wish to be swept out of coaltown by a man in white ten that Superman's only mission is to Officer and A Gentleman is a joke. Be- and be taken care of-the audacity of which was a bit surprising in the fight criminals, either of a street nature lieving in the military fighting unit re- Eighties. While that was good for some conversational \"who'da thunk its,\" the (which seems a waste of time and en- quires some greater cynicism now than it idea was simply accepted that Richard Gere needed the army to transform him- ergy) or of a global nature? He could use used to. We might need to drop in a self from ragamuffin to man. Bring back Shane in the form of George Miller's his super powers to cure cancer or, at the platoon now and then to serve our inter- Australian film , The Road Warrior, which is basically a film of military anarchy, and very least, stop the common cold. He ests or save an embassy, but our defense Warner Bros. made the market judg- ment to lay low. could use his super authority to mandate strategy is predicated upon nothing re- The romance of the unit, of belong- world peace, not unlike the proposition sembling individual mettle or heroi sm. ing, is more than simply the avoidance of having to take a stand, to stand out, as put forth in The Day the Earth Stood Still. WarGames lays it out pretty clearly: we No, Superman has bought the farm; he's are defending ourselves electronically one alien who likes things just as they with a hundred people sitting out in a are. To that extent his attitudes are a lot steel vault buried inside a mountain in like other successful immigrants'- Colorado. We are listening for the igni- don't let anybody else in, and be conser- tion switches on a thousand Soviet mis- vative. siles, and they are listening for ours. Where Lucas differed from other sci- Open up The New York Times , and fi filmmakers is that he transported us there on the front page are side-by-side out to the alien's world, where they' re articles worrying about the very accident just as normal as we are. However, all that Walter Parkes and Lawrence too often they rule according to the Lasker scripted and John Badham di- whims of monarchy, and therefore de- rected in WarGames: serve their destruction at the hands of \"Some policy makers and military Luke, et al. Only Steven Spielberg im- thinkers speak warily but with disturb- ports aliens, nice friendl y little fellows in ing frequenc y, of the poss ibility of both his Close Encounters of the Third launching American nuclear missiles on Kind and E .T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the sole basis of electronic warning that which basically transmit the humanist an enemy missile attack has begun ... \" message of the Left: you can stop the (continued on page 74) 11 $
by Harlan Kennedy small screen as John Le Carre's long- vainglory shining from his pigeon running George Smiley. Guinness: chest, the voice adenoidal and u ,'- The face is lean, ascetic and high- \"One became an actor in order to es- phatic like a drunken pedant's, [he boned. The eyes seldom smile. The cape from oneself. \" walk (after a session in hothouse soli- body is compact and erect. And the tary) a sheer-will effort of the knees. voice is drawn up from the deeps , a And so the incredible shrinking pres- There was Guinness as Fagin, where nasal burr basted with eternity and as ence was born. \"Guinlessness,\" a new the heavy dark-eyebrowed face always sweetly lethargic as a hypnotist's. British ad-campaign word to denote the sought a lower plane than the airward state-of-distress of those out of the dark gesturing arms. And Guinness was a Sir Alec Guinness has been variously ale, keynotes Guinness the actor. stubble-bearded shambles as painter dubbed \"The Invisible Man\" and When the glass is empty, it seems a Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth \"The Celestial Absence\". Kenneth perplexing sight. As Wormold in Our (which he scripted himself). It remains Tynan once pondered the total ano- Man In Havana Guinness prompted the perhaps the best sketch of artist-as-Bo- nymity of the face: \"The number of question, \"How still should a still cen- hem ian in all cinema: neither Titan false arrests following the circulation of ter be?\" Noel Coward, Ralph Richard- (Heston as Michelangelo), nor martyr his description would break all rec- son and Ernie Kovacs ' all rotated (Douglas as Van Gogh), but a human ords.\" Guinness has disappeared ego- through the movie like mad magnifi- bag of bones on comic-visionary over- first into such roles as a man in a white cent satellites. Guinness crouched, a drive. suit, a vacuum salesman, an invisible vacuum cleaner salesman, deep in his wizard, and the ghost of Freud . And own vacuum. Every five minutes an All the more bizarre that Guinness owing to a lost birth certificate there is eyebrow would bob. Every ten, the spent his childhood being told by ev- no bureaucratic record of his arrival in- voice would rouse itself to a new high- eryone that he'd never be an actor. He the world (in Marylebone, West Lon- say middle G. lost his father, a bank director, early. (\"I don, April 2, 1914). So officially, with only saw him four of five times.\") He an irony that would have delighted Ea- • spent his formative years being toted ling Comedy, Alec Guinness does not from one resort to another along the exist. But like a chameleon, moments of English Channel coast by his house- unbelievable inertia in Guinness alter- moving mother. Erupting into showbiz Yet here he is in 1983, aged 69, alive nate with equally unbelievable trans- as a messenger in Macbeth at his first and palpable, scooping in fame and figurations. The colors change, the eye hoarding school, Pembroke College, greenback from the Star Wars series- flickers , a new challenge is scented and Guinness had to arrive on stage breath- can two percent ever have seemed so the tongue-snap! crunch!-darts out. less after a lap round the football field little and proved so much?-and bag- (it's unclear if this was the shortest ging equal quantities of kudos on the In The Bridge on the River Kwai Guin- ness won the best deserved Oscar of the 1950s as Colonel Nicholson, a potty 12
route or a Stanislavskian warm-up} and one night in his dressing room by this chard II struck CrItiCS as honest and then couldn't sputter out more than one broken syllable per breath. \"You'll nude-footed supplicant, offered him a lucid if a touch underwhelming). And never make an actor, Guinness,\" said £25 loan. Guinness, too proud to take there is Guinness the Master of Dis- his headmaster. Decades later London reviewers said it, turned and left. guise. (His Fool was praised for its nov- much the same of his Macbeth at the Cut to the glittering lights of 1936 elty and vitality, and his Pocket, known Royal Court Theater. Red-bearded like a man in a bear suit, Guinness London at night. Guinness' steps take to us from David Lean's film, is a ooh'd and aye'd with spirited but doomed vigor opposite Simone him past a theater. He turns back and quiffed and shiny-faced dandy of radi- Signoret's equally eccentric Lady M, who looked and sounded as if she'd goes in. He asks for work at the box ant alertness). arrived in Dunsinane after a bad night on the ferry from Cherbourg. office. Bemusement of box-office lady. Today Guinness the Saintly Tran- It was John Gielgud who first had The manager enters and gives him an sparence appears as Obi Wan Kenobi confidence in Guinness' thespian po- tential. The year was 1932. He rescued on-the-spot audition. He is rewarded and George Smiley: both sages, one the 18-year-old from his slough of de- spondency as an ad-writer in London, with three small roles: a Chinese coolie, dark who knows of light, one light who earning £1 (then $3.50) per week in his first job. \"Get thee to Martita Hunt, \" a French pirate, a British sailor. Guin- knows of dark. Gielgud seems to have cried, and Guin- ness went to the famed Martita for ness the chameleon is born. Three This pedestalled virtuousness has its coaching. Shortly, he heard from her the familiar litany: \"You'll never make months later he is playing Osric to admirers. Star Wars fans, especially, an actor, Mr. Guinness.\" Gielgud's Hamlet. In 1938, aged 24, he have written to Guinness by the hun- No one casting an eye today at Sir A's basilisk immaculacy-the polished is playing Hamlet, at the Old Vic under dreds . Many of them are lured , admit- dome, the 24-hour suit and tie, the air of a benevolent and well-bred clubman Tyrone Guthrie's direction . (Gielgud is tedly, by the attraction of an actor who -would credit the greenhorn Guin- ness. He tramped from audition to au- somewhere seething). owns two percent of the wealth of dition in the early 1930s, getting much the same treatment as Dustin Hoffman Croesus (aka George Lucas). He gets in Tootsie. \"We're looking for someone taller. . . \" \"We're looking for someone begging letters by the sackful. But older. .. \" \"We're looking for someone else! \" there are also bug-eyed and eccentric In 1934 he was perfunctorily bap- devotional correspondents. \"Before tized in the cinema. Guinness' first movie immersion-and the only one Star Wars we didn't believe in any- prior to his starring role in Great Expec- tations twelve years later-was in a mu- thing, \" said one letter-writer. \"Now we sical directed by Victor Saville and star- ring Evelyn Laye, Evensong . He was an believe there is something called a extra and the pay was minimal. But the producer, prophetically, was Michael force for good, and you represent it, and Balcon, later to be production chief at Guinness' great postwar aLma mater, could you please come to America and Ealing Studios. stay with us.\" Even the winning of a two-year scholarship to the Fay Compton Studio Guinness' totally credible self-ef- of Dramatic Art in 1934 failed to open any professional sesames on the stage. facement makes him probably the only Guinness relates how, through zeal for his craft, he would tail pedestrians to British actor-knight who could get away and fro across London, mimicking their gait and gestures and no doubt alarming with a role like Kenobi. Olivier would passing policemen. He was soon doing this barefoot, furthermore, to save shoe bray it brass-lunged to the moon, or leather. His daily diet, refined by pov- erty, was \"a green apple, a glass of milk give us his late-favored, high-treble and a bun.\" John Gielgud, embarrassed wheedling mode (cf. The Boys From Brazil, The Jazz Singer, the TV Lear). Gielgud would turn the speeches into cantabiles for the vocal cords. And Ri- chardson would be a potty prophet sur- On the Jedi set. prised somewhere between Mount Olympus and a P.G. Wodehouse novel. In the same year he married actress Guinness inhabits wisdom and good- Merula Salaman, wooed and won amid ness with lean authority, ambrosial the paint-and-canvas floods of a pro- voice, and no fuss . duction of Noah . He entered the Navy But Guinness drunk straight in Star as an ordinary seaman in 1941 , was Wars or Smiley's PeopLe still doesn't commissioned within a year, super- have the same kick or tingle as Guin- vised the shipping of butter and hay to ness spiked with character interest. the Yugoslav partisans and became the And the actor himself may have sensed first Allied serviceman to land in Sicily this early on in his move into movies: (by accident: the Admiral had mis- he challenged an incredulous David timed his disembarkation). After the Lean to give him the role of Fagin in wars he returned to stomp the boards. OLiver Twist , only Guinness' third film. Guinness' stage performances-he Almost alone among film actors, Guin- played Richard II, a much praised Fool ness can assume the paraphernalia of to Olivier's King Lear and the part that make-up and funny voices and eccen- inadvertently hurled him into cinema, tric walks without losing a molecule of Herbert Pocket in his own dramatiza- credibility. He never allows the weight tion of Great Expectations-were al- of disguise to panic him into a matching ready sorting him into the two-tone ac- hyperbole of voice and gesture. Guin- tor we know today from cinema and ness' Fagin is more superfine than TV. There is Guinness the Saintly Dickens'. He makes evil seem a prod- Transparence. (Both Hamlet and Ri- IUCt of deep and cankerous melancholy. 13
Darken his eyes, stoop his head, and An Octet of d' Ascoygnes in Kind Hearts and Coronets: contort the voice (as also in The Ladyldl- lers, where he played a dark-side-of- diffident bank clerk and his pal (Guin- Ross (shortly before playing Prince the-moon spoof on Alastair Sim), and ness and Stanley Holloway) going crim- Faisal to O'Toole's Lawrence on the void of the Guinness persona sud- inal and giving a beneficent cautionary screen), the combination of introverted denly fills with something magical: not tweak to the strong arm of the law in hero and introverted actor made Guin- a box of tricks but a true alchemy of The Lavender Hill Mob. ness an alarming and almost total vac- personality, both funny and saturnine. uum. Somewhere down there on stage, As with any major movie star, the there was a burnoose making noises. Rogues, vagabonds, dotty aristocrats kind of roles that began to tumble into and all-sorts of eccentrics duly came Guinness' lap-especially in his golden Likewise in the early 1970s, Guin- Guinness' way. He played eight of decade, the 1950s-helped define, by ness hopped on board the role of the them in one film in Kind Hearts and the market force principle, the special blind barrister Dad in John Mortimer's Coronets, where the actor's quite aston- chemistry and tensions of his personal- autobiographical play A Voyage Round ishing refusal to mug and vamp re- ity. It's English reticence that breeds My Father. Plant on stage an actor sulted in comic cameos as subtle and England's greatest actors. Like the shy whose technique is tuned to the micro- rich as a vintage wine tasting. It's this child who searches delightedly in the processes of cinema, and you may end asceticism, even in the midst of naked dressing-up trunk and finds a voice and up with something semi-invisible wired vaudeville, that seems superhuman to an outgoing personality as soon as he for sound. The only great film actor I onlookers, and that lands Guinness the puts on a costume, English repression have known to disappear more com- roles like Kenobi, Smiley , the Pope (in is the tinder to great English acting. pletely than Guinness on stage was Pe- Brother Sun, Sister Moon), or the heroic (Even Olivier, the extrovert of the ter Finch. In Tony Richardson's pro- Cardinal in The Prisoner. And it would pack, is notoriously interview-shy and duction of The Seagull in the 60s Finch have landed him, if fate had fallen a protective of his private tife.) played Trigorin; and you couldn't be- different way, with Gandhi. He was lieve, as these empty sounds and ges- offered the role in 1952 by producer-di- Guinness' unassuming, genial, and tures sailed from beneath a straw rector Gabriel Pascal, but thought the bleakly ironic natural persona (irony is boater, that an actor so dense-packed part unplayable and the film unmake- another protection for the shy) makes with tiny idioms and mannerist life- able. Thirty years later Gandhi has him an English version of mild-man- forms on screen could be so uninhab- landed heavily in our laps, and despite nered Clark Kent. And just as reticence ited, like a hollow drum, on stage. the Oscars there are some (not a million in an actor's life fires dreams of flam- miles from this typewriter) who still boyance, so in Guinness' films his After the death of Ealing Studios at agree with Guinness. Clark Kent variations were often the the end of the 1950s-an organization launching-pad to explosions of oddball that had spent ten years custom-build- In the 1950s, whenever British cin- genius, courage, determination or ing comic roles for its greatest star- ema gave Guinness a furlough from sheer eccentricity. Is it a wimp? Is it a Guinness became that endangered spe- false moustaches and weirdly barbered boffin? No, it's Super-Everyman! cies, a freelance actor. The screen accents, they shunted him into Little career has been notably directionless Big Man roles. He was the lowly labora- His protean invisibility needs the ever since, with the consolation that it tory assistant with the great idea in The microscopic eye of cinema (or TV) to has also at times been wildly unpredict- Man in the White Suit. He was the meek follow it. The progress must be charted able. and mild detective genius in Father from the first rebellious eyeblink to the Brown. He was a naval nitwit who rose final crazed apocalypse. (As it is bril- He sported rousing red whiskers and to the occasion in Barnacle Bill. And in liantly in Mackendrick's The Man in the a chortle of a Scottish accent as the The Bridge on the River Kwai , he was a White Suit, with the escalating shadow- hellraising Colonel in Tunes of Glory dotty martinet who turned hero. And play Expressionism of its visuals match- (1960). He unmothballed his naval uni- then back into a dotty martinet. ing Guinness' upward arc of boldness form yet again (cf. The Captain's Para- and desperation). On stage Guinness' dise, Barnacle Bill) for HMS Defiant For Ealing Studios, who he served miniaturist style is often simply swal- (1961). He was an Arab prince in for a decade from 1948 to 1957, Guin- lowed up in the maws of the prosce- brownface in Lawrence of Arabia ness was the Everyman of Little Eng- nium. When he played Lawrence of (1962), a Roman Emperor in Sam Bron- land. Or rather Super-Everyman. For Arabia in Terence Rattigan'S 1959 play ston's The Fall Of The Roman Empire not only could he play anything and everything that came on two feet, but he was also, if one pinpointed a spe- cialty, the common man with the un- common touch and thus a paradigm for post-imperial Britain itself. Littleness was glorified in Eating comedy as the brave and resilient David to whatever Goliath happened to be around. The tiny community versus government bu- reaucracy (Passport to Pimlico, The Tit- field Thunderbolt); the lone genius versus the might of scientific conserva- tism (The Man in the White Suit); and even, on the far side of the law, the 14
Tippler, snob, sea captain, suffragette, banker, bully, prelate, and the other one. (1963), a Russian father in Doctor Viennese accent) through a king-size Zhivago (1965), a charlatan Major in Pe- ter Glenville's Bermuda (alias Graham cheroot as Freud's ghost in Lovesick. Greene's Haiti) in The Comedians (1967). He was King Charles in Almost as intriguing as the screen Too true. Sometimes Guinness' per- Cromwell (1970), the ghost of Jacob Marley in Scrooge (1970), the Pope in roles Guinness accepted over the years formances seem pared down to the Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), a rau- cous, pop-eyed and robotic Fuhrer in are the ones he turned down or just bone marrow, and flourishes are exactly Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), and a blind butler in Murder by Death (1974). missed. Not only Gandhi, but Hitch- what his bleached ascetic presence Apart perhaps from a deaf Puerto RiqlO nuclear scientist, was there any role left cock's I Confess (he was too busy with could do with. In front of the Le Carre for Guinness to essay? Ealing at the time) and Bryan Forbes's television turn, one shakes in appalled Well, there was Star Wars. Midway through blind butler duty on the Neil Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which at one wonder at that subtly exophthalmic Simon whodunnit, Sir Alec felt his way back to his trailer in Hollywood and script stage was fashioned as a story of face: the hornrimmed spectacles, discovered a script. He picked it up quizzically, knowing George Lucas by two homosexual lovers, specially de- lenses catching the light, are often the reputation and by American Graffiti. And then, \"I saw it was science fiction signed for Guinness and Tom Courte- liveliest features. Is Guinness' per- and I thought, 'Oh God'.\" But a read- through and a later meeting with Lucas nay. Guinness declined. formance as George Smiley acting or cast a cheery glow over the project for him, and he was soon donning the floor- Guinness's instinct for self-protec- non-acting? Is it l' etre or neant? length Kenobi robes and the white beard indispensable to ageless seers, tion shows in other ways. He has fa- Guinness resolutely denies that he and was putting pen to paper for that historic two percent of the producer's vored certain directors and worked with ever merely sits back and plays \"Alec profits. them again and again: Robert Hamer Guinness\" in a stage or screen role. (Of Since Star Wars, Guinness has been sparing of big-screen appearances: (four times), David Lean (five times), Our Man in Havana: \"Some critics said I partly because the small screen has si- phoned him off in two marathon stints Ronald Neame (four times) and Peter was simply playing myself. How could in John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People, and partly be- Glenville (three times). Only in Glen- that be? I am not a vacuum-cleaner cause medical problems with his left eye, following a hemorrhage of the ret- ville's case has the loyalty seemed dras- salesman\"). Yet if there's an Achilles ina, have forced him under doctor's or- ders to minimize his exposure to spot- tically misplaced. The Prisoner, in heel in his work, it's the odor of safety lights. which sou tined Cardinal Guinness bat- and sanctity which seems to say, de- Nonetheless, Guinness notched up a vigorous scene-stealing tug of war with tled eyeball to eyeball with Communist spite all the dizzying changes of role, \"I Ricky Schroder in Little Lord Fauntle- roy; lent momentary buoyancy to Raise police chief Jack Hawkins, was at least won't allow myself to look foolish; I the Titanic; and quipped away (viz ze a success d' estime. But Hotel Paradiso won't leap further than I have to; I and The Comedians wowed neither won't risk a broken bone or a belly-flop press nor public and punched big tor- or a false note.\" In this he's the oppo- pedo-holes in Guinness's mid-60s ca- site of Olivier, the Olympian risk-taker. reer. And he doesn't have in compensation Nonetheless an actor festooned with the glorious innate eccentricity of Ri- honors can't complain if he finds him- chardson or the lyrical sumptuousness self limping into port now and then for of Gielgud. repairs. Knighthood came Guinness' What he does have is sly wisdom and way in 1959 (\"Down on your knees, Mr a possibly unique flair for catching sub- Guinness; Arise, Sir Alec\"). Two years tle colors and tints that can turn charac- earlier he had won the Best Actor Oscar ter roles into living, breathing, center- for Kwai. And in 1980 he received a stage personalities. He knows that special Academy Award for \"advancing characterization should never sell out to the art of screen acting through a host of caricature. And he also knows that in memorable and distinguished perform- cinema, as in other walks of life, souls ances. \" shouldn't be ·cheaply sold for shekels. \"I suppose for an actor,\" Guinness He said in December 1977, after the has said, \"the only benefit in growing opening of Star Wars: \"My only worry old is learning to pare down one's per- with Lucas is that the cinema system formance: learning to cut out the flour- will force him into a series offollow-ups ishes. That's what I'm trying to do. to Star Wars. He should resist that.\" ® 15
Jean-Jacques Beineix was stolen, because it didn' t have their utes after it started-a record of sorts- interviewed by Dan Yakir seal of approval. It was made against and some left the theater before they them, an attempt at a new kind of cin- even entered. Maybe some people At 37, Jean-Jacques Beineix has be- ema, while they wanted to re-establish hoped to see me fail also because my come a cineaste de scandale in France. the 'old order.' They were angry be- budget (23 million francs, a little over $3 Critical responses to his second film , The cause it was problematic for them , and it million) was a large one for France. But Moon in the Gutter (La lune dans Ie cani- forced them to find different words and this is still peanuts compared to Cimino. veau) , which premiered at the 1983 another way of looking at things. A good I haven ' t really gained the right to enter Cannes festival , were shriveling. The artist should have doubts, then over- heaven ... \" casual spectator who emerged from the come them, but they make it very diffi- new Palais des Festivals compared the cult for me . I had the same doubts with • film to Heaven's Gate, while the press Diva when it was first released in made delicacies out of the picture's title. France; nobody was there and the re- The Moon in the Gutter has been at- The star of the movie, Gerard Depar- views were all bad . They have forgotten tacked/or not having a story,for betraying dieu, certainly didn't help: \" It's the film that. If Diva became a hit, it was because David Goodis, on whose novel it is based. that's in the gutter,\" said Depardieu. the public supported it. The Cesar for What was it that appealed to you in the The most eagerly anticipated festival the film came a full one year after it had novel to begin with? entry, hyped by enthusiastic industry ru- been working slowly, and the sudden mors, turned out to be a bust. recognition made a fire out of the em- It describes, even if it was written 30 bers. years ago, a real state of crisis with which The slightly built, shy filmmaker, I can identify and it is about the society whose previous effort, Diva , brought \"We recently sneaked The Moon in the in which I live. It is about a man (Gerard him international success, didn't take Gutter in Paris and Toulouse and people Depardieu) who is at a dead end, both the beating humbly. \"There are French loved it! So I can only assume that some literally and metaphorically. It's a story critics who thought that Diva's success critics went to Cannes expecting not to of night with an extremely powerful at- like it. Some walked out on it 15 min- mosphere which explores the interior of a character and his guilty, incestuous re- lationship with his sister. .. It's a mor- 16
bid, flamboyantly baroque vision that's land . sister. The symbolism of the sister is in also tragic. I saw it as an allegory, a meta- There are people who accept certain represe nting a sexual taboo . Goodis had phor about life. Since I could never tell a sense of sin, of what's forbidden , things directly, since I love symbol s and things in Goodis, but refuse them in the which is very Christian. I think he was always prefer to make a detour, I film. I was especially astonished by a afraid of women, and at the same time couldn't help loving it. I also saw it as an critic's statement, \" Beineix assassinated he couldn't love them if th ey weren't encounter with the subconscious, which Goodis!\" He had already been killed sufficiently violent. I also think he had may explain why some people rej ected several times. And, he's greater dead an incestuou s relation ship with hi s sis- it so harshly. They must have a similar than alive. I don't think these critics ter. It's all so ambiguous and double- problem with psychoanalysis: they really know Goodis. Fifty percent of the edged, which , once agai n, is why there refuse to let go and accept that inside of dialogue in Moon is made of Goodis' is no story. It's symboli sm. When Kinski them there's a mechanism that functions very own words. Goodis was someone comes to photograph him and make a independently of themselves. who wanted to love, but realized the declaration of love, she is, in fact, steal- fragility of things and expressed it via a ing his image. The painter, w ho draws Andre Malraux said once that \"Cin- kind of polite despair. It's all in the film , the sister, also has to do with the \"im- ema, unlike literature, hasn't yet de- this sense of derision. His novel has no age.\" We're talking about identity here. picted the subcon sc iou s, the inner more story than my film . And it's not the The Moon is a film about a man in sea rch world.\" I thought about thi s for a long story that's interesting anyway, but the of his identity. time and saw it as a challenge. I wanted penetration of man's subconscious. We to make the subconscious materialize on know it reconstructs things on the basis And does he find himself? the screen. I didn't want to be in the of their symbolic significance, on the He finds madness. I think that service of logic, of reality. Cinema for a basis of our desires and fears. The logic frightens people too. long time was in the service of stories, of the subconscious isn' t at all that of the You work in colors and images. How did but I wondered if an image didn't have awakened spirit, where things have an you construct the color schemes of The another role to play. It's that role I order, a reason. Moon and Diva? The Moon is very som- wanted to explore. If you take the reality ber... of various elements and project them on Maybe some ofyour notions became too It was in Goodis. Color is a vibration the screen as matter, as yo u would in abstract on the screen . .. that stems from our subconscious. Van painting and scu lpture, yo u would no Gogh had blue and yellow periods. Pi- longer need a stoty. Are there reall y any I worked on symbols and in the film casso worked in blue and pink. Color is stories in the films of Fellini? Or Ku- some symbols actually suggested others. the universe of the filmmaker-he is brick? 200J-A Space Odyssey is about a In Baudelaire and Rimbaud , you have painter, musician, architect. I associate man and a machine , a situation. The an alchemy of words. Rimbaud's phrase red with a warning signal. The night is Moon in the Gutter is about a man in \"a heart of fire in a block of ice\" juxta- the absence of color, what we don ' t see. crisis, who doubts himself. poses elements that by their clash It's disquieting because we don't control produce a chemical reaction. When it; it's a world that dominates us, from The character of the docker (Depar- Kinski , the femme fatale, arrives, she's within. dieu) is the moti vating force of the story in her red Ferrari. It's not accidental that Moon is the second time you've worked and it's his inner reality that fill s the it's red. It's the color of blood that the with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. screen while the others are a projection hero sees everywhere in that dead end. He's the man oflighting, and light is a of his fantasies. The two women with She has red lips and a red dress and she character in The Moon , just the way its whom he finds himself in volved are a arrives like an echo of the blood of his absence is. The absence of light is also projection of his feminine ideal , his idea light. The light in the film is blocking, of Woman. Baudelaire said that there Luu and Andrei in Diva. disagreeable-you have to be a brave were always two kind s of women: the cinematographer to help the filmmaker blonde,se nsual sinner(played in the film destroy reality, instead of being tempted by Victoria Abril) and the dark, pure, to recreate it. The Moon is a film in inaccess ible one (Nastassia Kin ski) . green, while Diva is in blue, because They repre se nt the two poles of our in- blue is the color of dreams, between day terior vision of things. These women are and night, the color of the twilight zone. surreal ; they don't reall y exist-they're The idea of the film started with the myths, not characters rooted in realitv. moon- the emblem of night, of femi- The character of the brother stand s f~r ninity. It's dangerous yet attractive. The the idea of a brother, and that of the sun burns, but the moon makes one father for Father, rather than his own mad . Moonlight is atonal , devoid of parent. Goodis' sto ry was Oedipal; it had color. It's either green, gray, or blue. We the triangle of the mother, father, and chose green. We recreated the port of boy in-between. Marseille, but you won't recognize it. The boats for me were walls of metal, It's a film that talks about institutions, beautiful modern pieces of sculpture; about the rich and the poor, without they were like razo rs slashing the sky. In being interested in either wealth or pov- Quai des briimes, the Prevert-Carne erty. It shows the existential suffering of film, a painter tells Jean Gabin th at he two human beings (Depardieu and paints \"the things behind the things.\" I Kinski) which comes out of the gap be- do the sa me thing but with a modern tween them-he, who lives in the gut- ter, and she, who comes from fantasy- 17
sensibility. I create a representation of mantic drama and dreams . . .In what way echo its hopelessness. The established reality based on the representation of paintings that in itself represents other did you attempt to subvert the noir genre ? order refuses it; the merchants buy and paintings ... It's a perpetual game of mirrors, where things appear out of each How did you mean to update it? sell, in defiance of love; the underworld other. It's an experimental film that tries to wants to steal in defiance of love; the Hilton McConnico, the set designer, and myself made a storyboard, but I do something with the language of media use people in defiance of love . . . tried to visualize each scene not in its details but rather in its philosophy. We signs. Film noir was for a long time re- There is much in you about the struggle constructed a decor that looked like a cross-it's the crossroads of life. One garded as second class cinema. Film his- ofthe individual against the giant, oppres- branch is the dead end; another the port with the horizon; then there's the street torians, who are always behind the time, sive system . .. with the small cafe; and finally the road that leads to the big city. You can' t see considered it a vulgar, minor genre. To- Every system breeds its own counter- the cafe from the dead-end street-we cheat here, but it's a way of not being \"in day, however, they canonize it, and now system, which is why nobody is ever line\" ; it's a labyrinthine decor that some of the \"keepers of the castle\" want safe. blocks out parts that should have been visible. It's out of my desire to discover to crucify me in its name. Obviously, you are telling your own things, not take them for granted or hand them on a silver platter, but unveil I did indeed make a film noir, but a personal story. What is it you hope to find them, slowly. The entire film is an at- tempt to stop time. Man is an eternal derisive one: I allowed for a confronta- at the end ofthis struggle? moment in time , and the way one expe- riences the intensity of life makes time tion of its elements with our time-the Peace and quiet. It's not impossible. pass either quickly or slowly. This is what an artist does-freezes a moment idea of relativity, the myth of the film I'll find it when I have found the real in time and explores it. noir juxtaposed with the rapidity of our values , which go beyond the system and By asking questions about color and rhythm, McConnico and I wanted to time. Dogmas break, and I speak of all which have to do with a certain attitude create a nowhere-kind-of-place be- tween the artificial and the real. The this with the spirit of a man who knows to life and which my films are an attempt woman found in the gutter with a cut throat is based on a police photo, but my that he constructs things out of sand, out to discover. aesthetic here was my defense against the reality and violence of the image. of transparent plastic. So, maybe I'm Diva's charm stems from its tongue-in- In Diva, for example, the cars in the reproached for expressing the times. I'd cheek playfulness, while The Moon is loft were a means to inject elements of reality to the decor. The decor of our like to believe in the eternal hero , in the perhaps too somber. .. It takes itself too lives is taken from advertising, such as cars or movie posters ... The loft didn't great sublime love stories, but I can't. seriously. interest me per se. It was a cavern , all black, a dark room for the boy (Frederic The world we live in is one of publicity, But it is also full of little jokes! It's Andrei) , who takes photographs, namely the filmmaker. With all the which is why I end the film with a poster derision rather than humor. It's more small images he takes, he creates a mon- tage and constructs a puzzle. When the that says, \"Try another world.\" It refers, desperate. When Depardieu finds out puzzle is completed, we notice that it represents the dynamics of the entire among other things, to the search for he's lost his job, he says, \"Life isn't a story-the wave. In the midst of the wave, there's a bird. That's the idea of love, which is the sole constant factor picnic.\" When he's in the kitchen with innocence recovered . In The Moon in the Gutter, when Depardieu and Kinski over the ages. Victoria Abril, and she asks him what he meet by the sea and kiss , swearing eter- nal love, I'm making a comment about Those who say I should have made and Kinski intend to do, he responds, romanticism and lyricism. In my film, the filmmaker reflects on his own art. the film on a small screen , in black-and- \"Why don ' t you put on a coat?\" It's hu- Godard showed us the way. Art isn't art for all time. We carve our own defini- white, are trying to conserve rather than mor-cutting and desperate and VI- tions of it. innovate. You have to love the works of cious, but humor nevertheless. In The Moon in the Gutter, you juxta- pose elements offUm noir with grand ro- your time, to accept the fact that things How do you work with actors? change. Had I copied what had already I don 't like to analyze too much. One been done, I would have been a printer, great actress asked a director what she not a filmmaker. The same goes for the should think about in a given scene, and people who criticize the new Cannes he said, \"Think of going from point A to palais-it's new , and it's there, and point B.\" Or better still, think about the that's what counts. You 've got to accept paycheck ... It's a paradox. What inter- the forces of evolution. I am, as you can ests me most about actors is to bring see, a modernist. I don't have respect for them to reveal themselves, to get out of things-I have love. I refuse to just themselves things they have but aren't watch in awe. I take and nourish myself, aware of. It's work on their own person I delve into this universe to emerge later rather than their cinematic characters. with my own. I think that with Shoot the You do that by listening to people and by Piano Player, Truffaut made a much provoking them-by love and sweet- more literary, faithful adaptation of ness, but also violence. Not physical Goodis, by also transforming him to a violence, unless the actor needs it. French reality. It's the only successful You don't seem to like actors too much adaptation of Goodis in France (others include Pierre Chenal's Section des dis- I'm learning to. parus; Henri Verneuil's Le casse; Rene Nastassia Kinski sang your praises Clement's La course du lievre a travers while Depardieu didn 't. les champs), and it's 23 years old! I prefer Nastassia has an enormous fire inside, the American adaptations, such as Dark a great generosity, and maybe too much Passage by Delmer Daves. naivete. She still doesn't have enough of Both your films are tales of impossible a distance from what she does. She love. strives for perfection , but may push it to True. Diva is a love story between a the point of self-destruction. I wasn't too black woman and a white man, between impressed with her in Tess , but I was a little guy and a star. The protagonists amazed by how far she went in One in the film mirror this love story and From the Heart . I wanted her for The 18
Kinski and Depardieu in Beineix's surrealist Moon in the Gutter. Moon right away. She usually gets a always meant homework, and I wanted enough to put a camera in front of some- thing and film it. The decor and the scene right early on, but wants to im- to postpone it. people is, however, very complicated. But at the time I was silly. I only under- prove it anyway, and hence the danger. Ironically, cinema was the only win- stood that the coffee had to be brought and that the costumes had to be ready ... It was stimulating to work with her. dow to real life I had. I experienced life I also worked as assistant to Rene Depardieu has an enormous power as through the cinema rather than through Clement, by whom I was especially in- fluenced. I worked on The House Under an actor, and yet he's tired and has to be reality. Cinema was the landscape of my the Trees and La course du lievre. I was also assistant to Marc Simenon, Jean helped to get out of his routine. I think real environment. I first fell in love with Louis Trintignant, Nadine Trintignant, Claude Berri, Claude Zidi , Willard in Moon he gave a great performance, a woman on the screen-it was theJapa- Huyck (on French Postcards), until in 1977 I made a short film, Le chien de perhaps his best ever. In the beginning, nese actress Keiko Kishi in Typhoon over Monsieur Michel, which won first prize at the Trouville festival for young direc- he can be very professional and in- Nagasaki. I also loved My Geisha, with tors. Three years later, I made Diva. Producer Irene Silberman saw my short volved, and later he's simply not there. Yves Montand and Shirley MacLaine. and decided to have me do a detective story. The Silbermans produced La It happened to him on other films as Film for me then was a representation of course du lievre , so they knew me. She had confidence in me, but the project well. I didn' t mind that he didn't help the truth. Otherthan that, my childhood collapsed. It took a year of hesitation and I had to force her hand a bit before she publicize the film-it was selling well in Paris shares the same pathology of all let me do Diva. without him, which may have brought artists: the desire to escape, to dream , to What do you plan next? about his aloofness. invent another world, because the one In September, I intend to cross the ocean aboard my new boat \"Diva\" and He complained in print that you re- they live in isn' t what they want. I was make a film in the U.S. It's a mad vam- pire story, with elements of burlesque, buffed his attempts to consult with you. unhappy, but I don't know why. of chase ... It's not at all like the Po- lanski film. That was too perfect for me Who would believe that? Look at his I actually got to the cinema via the to even tread in its footsteps. It's vampir- ism confronted by the tough realities of physique and strength-and look at me. circus, puppet shows, the guignol, magi- modern life: how to be a vampire today and survive? How can yo u afford a It's unfair. I have changed the script for cians, the music hall, and then via the haunted castle when you're an impover- ished vampire? It's an American produc- him, but nobody mentions it. He him- books my grandparents used to read to tion with American, French, and Ger- man actors. I can't wait for it to start. @ self has forgotten what he said about the me. They read me stories and I imag- movie during the shoot, in front of wit- ined them. As Bruno Bettelheim ex- nesses-that it was wonderful, that his plained, children project their own director was great, that we had a perfect dramaturgy on the characters of these understanding ... I think he's trying to tales. Children care about the story only find himself within a life that's simply in order to do the mise-en-scene of their too speedy... Burl consider his violence own fantasy. As a director, I too use the a manifestation of love. story for such a purpose. When did you first become aware that I hated school. I was thrown out of you wanted to make films? several of them . I studied medicine for It started, like everything else, in some time but didn't finish. I never childhood. It's probably a way of escap- went to film school, but I read books ing adulthood. It's a way of applying my about the cinema, which I didn't always own vision to things instead of confront- understand, but kept reading anyway. ing them as they are. I was greatly at- . In 1969, as a student job, I became as- tracted to the pleasure of games-any sistant to Jean Becker on the TV series game that had mystery, a search for a \" Les saintes cheries.\" It taught me a lot. treasure, a chase, everything that meant I had no idea how a film was made. I getting away from reality. The curse didn't know it was both so simple and so brought about by the hands of the clock complicated: simple, because it's 19
/ eltyPleasures around and scowl right in your face if Maniac starring Johnny Cash, and then by John Waters they think your laugh is inappropriate. rush to the opening day matinee of The Exterminating Angel. After gobbling Being a Catholic, guilt comes natu- Like every good film snob, I 'm ap- down a sandwich, I'd catch an evening rally. Except mine is reversed. I blab on palled if the films have been dubbed. screening of Mai Zetterling's Dr. Glas at ad nauseam about how much I love films Even though I can only speak English, the most obscurely interesting art the- like Dr. Butcher, M.D. or Airport '79: The dialogue in a foreign language always ater in town, the now defunct 7-East, Concorde, but what really shames me is sounds more important to me. I pretend and then top it off with a late night that I'm also secretly a fan of what is that somehow seeing those films will showing of something like Angel, Angel, dreadedly known as the \"art film.\" Be- teach me a new language, but I guess I'll Down We Go. fore writing this sentence, I don't think have to be truthful and admit that the I've ever uttered the word \"art\" unless only foreign expression I've mastered in Since my influences were so confus- referring to Mr. Linkletter. But under- twenty years of watching foreign films is ing, I ended up making exploitation neath all my posing as a trash film enthu- Das Boot. So much for internationalism. films for art theaters, but I only owned siast, a little known fact is that I actually up to the trashy ones as a contributing sneak off in disguise (and hope to God The one thing I do hate about arty factor. I guess it is time to come out of I'm not recognized) to arty films in the theaters is the trailers which never fea- the art closet and admit that the follow- same way business men rush in to see ture the best scenes but concentrate on ing ten films influenced me as much as Pussy Talk on their lunch hour. I'm really high-brow quotes such as, \"A master- all the garbage I've so lovingly con- embarrassed. piece of cinema-Archer Winsten, New sumed in theaters all my life. It's like York Post\" or ''I'm in love with Laura going to cinema confession and I'm sure Give me black and white, subtitles, Antonelli-Rex Reed, N. Y. Daily my penance would be to make a good and a tiny budget, and I'm impressed. I News.\" Even the deadly serious act of contrition and see Ilsa She-Wolf of really like snotty, high-brow theaters in cinephiles get a howl out of this, and I the S.S. ten times. Only I wouldn't be New York like Cinema II (my favorite think arty coming attractions actually heartily sorry, just eternally ashamed. because it's so comfortable and the lose ticket buyers in t~e long run. ticket price is always expensive), or the What's the matter with a little hype in • Paris where if you ask for popcorn they these situations? Wouldn't it intelest look at you as if you're a leper asking for moviegoers more to stick to the tried- Interiors (1978, Woody Allen). Yes, heroin and sneer, \"Really! We don ' t and-true formula here? How about, Interiors. I know readers will think I'm have refreshments.\" I'm so used to audi- \"SEE BIBI ANDERSSON SLIT HER being purposely perverse, but I think ences yelling back to the screen in grind WRISTS!\" or \"WATCH AS BRESSON DI- this film is a masterpiece, even though houses that it's a real break to sit with a RECTS AN E TIRE FILM WHERE my face turns scarlet as I write. I even well-behaved audience. I never eaves- NOTHING HAPPENS\" or \"AT LASn A went back to see it for a second time last drop in these theaters because the con- FILM THAT IS BLACK AND WHITE , FOUR week because I didn't trust my initial versations are generally maddeningly HOURS LONG AND WITH SUBTITLES- rave reactions, but now I know I'm pretentious. It's also a problem to laugh THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE- right. You name it, Interiors has it-an- out loud at something only you may find COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR guish, divorce, suicide attempts, reli- funny (especially ifit's a German film- YOU!\" gion, sibling rivalry, inability to commu- Germany is not ever funny to these audi- nicate-all my favorite topics for a ences). These cinema buffs are very As a Baltimore teenager, my filmgo- \"serious\" film. touchy about humor and will turn ing habits were completely schizo- phrenic. I'd see four films in one day- The performances are brilliant. Espe- maybe start off with Door to Door cially Geraldine Page. Just watching her facial expression as she's internally torn 20
apart is alone worth the price of admis- laughing and let me in for free. The film Marriage , I still love Bergman (even The sion. No wonder she's crazy, with screen is nearly perfect, if perfection is accom- children that intensely pretentious. Two plishing what you set out to do no matter Serpent's Egg) . But Brink Of Life is my favorite scenes: E.G. Marshall telling how absurd or affected the goal is. The Geraldine Page in church that he wants film is so posed , so formal and so glam- personal favorite. Three pregnant to re-marry as she loses control, knocks orous that it almost isn ' t a movie at all- over religious candles, and storms out of it's like watching a chic performance women locked in a maternity ward going pIece. the church in a tracking shot that really through all sorts of agony over mi scar- rips you apart; and the suicide attempt Afterward, Miss Duras grouchily ap- scene that begins with close-ups of black peared to \" discuss\" the film. She was riage , abortion, sexual frigidity, fear, un- masking tape angrily being ripped off better than my wildest dreams could the roll with ear splitting sound to seal imagine, since she has become a carica- wanted children, and all other neuroses up every window and door before turn- ture of herself, which is something ev- ing on the gas. Even Bergman would be erybody should do if they' re even the that seem to be to Sweden what tulips jealous. slightest bit famous. To start off she re- fused to speak English and had a transla- are to Holland . Revival houses almost Woody Allen should always direct se- tor who couldn't or, as I suspected, rious films and never star himself in his wouldn't either unless the audience neverdig this one out of the vaults, and I own productions. If Interiors was filmed in Swedish with subtitles and directed Waters' Desperate Living. wish they would. Come on Ingmar, how under a nom de plume, it would have received the rave reviews it deserved , started yelling. The few comments I did about Brink OfLife II? but instead critics seemed scandalized manage to get were hysterical: \"I don ' t that Woody Allen didn't try to be funn y really care if anyone sees my films, \" \"I • and ended up treating it as if Russ have made two new films but haven't Meyer had starred Twiggy in a film in- decided if I will ever let anybody see Night Games (1966, Mai Zetter- stead of one of his buxom beau tie . them,\" and my favorite, \"The way I prefer audiences to see my work is all ling). A real shocker when it was first • the films one after another because it would be more difficult.\" I want to meet released , Night Games was my all-time The Films of Marguerite Duras. the people who give her the money to Miss Duras makes the kind of films that make these fabulous movies. They favorite film for many years. It so of- get you punched in the mouth for rec- must be very, very rich or very, very ommending them to even your closest Insane. fended juror Shirley Temple Black that friends . If there is such a thing as good avant-garde cinema, this is it. Even • she quit the San Francisco Film Festival though I believe pretention is the ulti- mate sin, Marguerite Duras has taken Brink of Life (1958, Ingmar when the programmers refused to re- pretention one level ahead of itself and Bergman). In high school I used to turned it into a style. She is the ultimate sneak to a local college for a complete move it from the schedule. Zetterling eccentric. Her films are maddeningly retrospective of the films of Ingmar boring but really quite beautiful. After Bergman. Except for Scenes From A directs with a ludicrously melodramatic, seeing her work, I think I know what it must feel like to be hypnotized. overly gothic sledge hammer to deal Perhaps her most impossible opus to with this story of impotence, child mas- date is The Truck. The entire film con- sists of the director sitting in a nonde- turbation , cross-dressing, porno flicks script room with Gerard Depardieu as they read the script of the film while and vomiting. every ten minutes or so the monotony is replaced by yet another monotonous Favorite scene: Ingrid Thulin giving shot of a blue truck, endlessly but se- renely driving through the French coun- birth to a dead child in the middle of a tryside. If Warhol did it for the Empire State Building, why can't Marguerite degenerate party as someone reads Duras do it for French trucks? All I know is that on my first trip to Cannes, in the aloud \"The Birth of Christ. \" Students of cab from the Nice airport, I saw Margue- rite's \"trucks\" a hundred times on the Regurgitation Throughout Cinema highway and felt hypnotized all over again. That's more than I can say for The should note this was one of the first Car or Car Wash. Swedish films to feature incredibly real- Even better than seeing The Truck was seeing Marguerite Duras in person at istic vomiting. Another real masterpiece The Carnegie Hall Cinema with the premiere of India Song. As I waited in that for some reason is almost never re- line, the management saw me, started vived, along with her other two great ! films , Loving Couples and Dr. Glas . I hear Mai Zetterling is now in England directing a new feature. I can ' t wait to see it. With technology advances, just think what her vomiting scenes would be like today! • Teorema (1968). Pier Paolo Paso lini's most erotically Catholic film. God visits a bourgeois Italian famil y in the form of Terence Stamp, who never looked bet- ter before or after this role . Incidentally, Terence Stamp's portrayal of God fea- tured the first glimpses of frontal male nudity shown in international cinema and caused quite a storm. After seducing the entire family-businessman father, glamorous mother, frumpy daughter, nervous son (in baggy jockey shorts), and pious female servant-God van- ishes and the whole famil y goes nuts. Father gives away his factory and strips naked in public, Mother picks up and seduces rough trade in her automobile. But the best is the finale , where the spookily religious servant levitates and then holy water gushes from her grave. 21
8alo (1977). Pasolini's last film before ought to make Pasolini an official saint. neighbors' houses, all in the name of his rather legendary, if not Hollywood sexual gratification. But the village Babylon-y death. Salo is a film people • blames the new stud in town for all her wouldn't expect me to feel guilty about mayhem , so Jeanne springs into action. liking. After all, it features shit-eating, A Cold Wind in August (1961, Al- She lures him into a field and, in what is eyeball gouging, scalping, and female exander Singer). The very first cult film easily ' the most startling scene in the impersonations-subjects I' ve used in I remember, A Cold Wind in August may film, seduces him by crawling on all my own films and enjoyed in others: in not have been a cult film anywhere else fours like a dog and licking his hands and short, the staples of modern entertain- in the United States, but it played for- boots. That accomplished, Jeanne im- ment. But I think Salo is anything but ever in Baltimore. Every time an art mediately cries rape and the villagers exploitation. Gulp, here's that word house would book a flop , they' d tank it stone him to death. A heroine only Jean again, rearing its ugly head-ART. and bring back Cold Wind much in the Genet could have imagined in this mid- same way Harold And Maude is used night movie way before its time. Salo is a beautiful film with a very today. moral message: there is such a thing as • being too powerful or too kinky, and it Since I saw the film more than 20 can produce nothing but despair. Italian years ago and never again, my memory Lancelot du lac (1974, Robert Bres- youth (many with pimples-Pasolini's of it is quite hazy. Lola Albright (in a son). Another maddening art film that favorite) are kidnaped , tortured, humili- smashing performance) plays an over- really impressed me. Bresson meets the ated, sexually abused, and finally mur- the-hill stripper who seduces a teenage Knights of the Round Table, sort of, dered by a group of Fascists. It's a har- boy-a sort of poor man's Marlon since this film is told almost entirely in rowing film that features the most Brando, played by Scott Marlowe (what close-ups or medium shots of armor, hel- incredibly handsome sets and some of a great name). Lola really gets turned mets, boots, horses' hooves, and very, the best sound effects in screen history, on. Natch, he eventually leaves her for very few human faces. In fact, although especially the unnerving roar of bomber girls his own age and poor Lola becomes it seems like a cast of thousands, it is planes in the distance accentuating the ali anxiety-ridden chickenqueen. It's a actually only a handful playing many dif- horror taking place in the isolated villa. very method-actor type film, but what I ferent roles. Since you are introduced to The villains in the film are even scarier remember most are Lola Albright's gold a character from a rear view or by their than the Wicked Witch in The Wizard Of lame Spring-o-Iater high heels which I footwear, Bresson could really save Oz. copied and stole for Divine to wear in money by having one actor play twenty many of my films. different parts. The ending of Salo actually made me misty-eyed, something that almost • If there ever was an anti-star movie, never happens unless it's from laughing. this is it. Students of film budgets ought After all the victims and torturers are Mademoiselle (1966, Tony Richard- to watch this great screen economy at dead from rape, suicide or murder, two son). The wildest screenplay I can re- work and marvel at what the Screen Ac- Fascist guards are left to themselves. member written by none other than tor s Guild might think. I saw this film Looking somehow still innocent, but Saint Jean Genet himself. In a remote opening night of the Baltimore Film terminally bored, one asks the other to French farming village lives a frustrated Festival, at which Mayor William dance, and the film ends with the bewil- school mistress (Jeanne Moreau) whose Donald Schaefer was in attendance. I'll dered soldiers optimistically dancing a suppressed sexual desires explode into never forget his face at the end of the clumsy fox trot. The Catholic Church secret wanton acts of violence. She de- screening as he hurriedly left the theater lights in smashing birds' nests, poison- when asked his opinion of the film- ing the farm animals' drinking water, drowning pigs, and setting fire to her 22
alii Marguerite Duras in The Truck. Fassbinder's Petra Von Kant. A scene from Katzelmacher. \"Oh ... well .. . it was okay ... really not Fun and games in Pasolin;'s Salo. my kind of picture. I liked Patton.\" Thirteen Moons. Lancelot du lac. • Anything by Fassbinder. Without a doubt (to me , at least) Fassbinder was the most talented director of hi s day. Anybody who idolizes Douglas Sirk is A-Okay in my book. I've seen about twenty-five of his films and love all but one, Effi Briest (made for television , which mi ght explain its boredom). His best are the ones he also wrote: Katzelmacher, with most of the early Fassbinder group sitting on a wall and bitching about foreigners; Why Does Herr R Run Amok?, a film that gives new meaning to how awful everyday normal famil y life must be; Beware the Holy Whore, the thinly disguised story of the hell of making any movie that Fassbin- der directs; The Bitter Tears OfPetra Von Karu, mean lesbians taunt one another while ending a neurotic affair; Fox And His Friends, chic homosexual falls in love with carnival worker and tries to teach him manners; and his best film of all, InA Year Of /3 Moons , a relentlessly despairing view of the life and times of a married male who gets a sex-change op- eration for no other reason than because someone he admires told him, \"You 'd be okay if you were a broad. \" Fassbinder had the reputation of be- ing quite difficult to deal with in real life, but anyone who made as many film s as his years on earth (especially if they' re all good) deserves the privilege of being a true monster. If Fassbinder '*ever got any sleep, maybe his genius would have evaporated. 23
Today's movies leave their characters alone with the camera. Are directors under the influence ofdrugs? Or just modernism? by David Thomson inviolable retreat for modern glory, a mious, but quietly elevated by an idea or way of being precious in crowded times. an obsession. Did Hitchcock take drugs, Drugs and the film world are a secret It relies on secret attributes, rumors that or was fear enough? society. Like Hollywood, or like make the ears prick up. Drugs are only movies, the essentially vague link at- one of them, yet all of them are like There are druggies in Hollywood, tracts and frightens onlookers. Inside drugs. Glamour is the purest moneyed just as there were Communists once. I the cult, no one wants to be named as a aphrodisiac. No wonder that film, the cannot say who they are, and it is their member, but few urge that the stealthy art of visibility, leans toward the rarer exhilaration to go in fear of being identi- possibility be cleaned up. The damage myths of being unseen. The most fied. But hundreds of Reds did not alter is a freedom. Just as American pictures drugged situation, at the heart of the political coloring of Hollywood pic- work as seductions-rather than mar- movies, is the last edge of the seen, the tures. Those cheerful works stayed as riages or conversations-so their mo- moment before disappearance: a person rock-hard conservative and as liberal as mentum carries us to the brink of taboos alone with the camera, total scrutiny tissue paper. Equally, it is wishful sensa- (like sex and violence), and is then too hanging on privacy. That pact between tionalism to see drug stains in modern breathless with anticipation to say yes or exhibitionism and voyeurism has always American pictures when revery, digres- no. Whatever movies advise about drugs been the elixir. sion, contemplation, free association, or (whether in Easy Rider or in Robert spaciousness are the last things the busi- Evans' community make-up, the TV \"Do movie-makers take drugs?\" It's a ness tolerates. It's easier to believe in \"Get High on Yourself\"), nothing resists crude question, certainly when com- Coca-Cola making our movies than co- the suggestive pressure in the medium pared with the way drugginess conspires came. toward some illicit fix. After all, films with the romantic imagination. No one and drugs have often reckoned to do the has yet offered a reliable test for detect- I wish there was a more contempla- same thing: put an easeful shine of es- ing drugs in the bloodstream of a film; tive sensibility in American pictures, cape on lives of quiet desperation. we are not even sure that all films have and I honor those who pursue it. But as I such vital signs. Any definition of the tried to think of how to approach this No zeal for naming names will ever condition would soon find a likely exam- subject, the fLX of movies, I gave up on demystify Hollywood. Stardom is the ple in a director known to be abste- pinning down miscreants. I have never seen a filmmaker take a drug, or known 24
her image goes still. A kind of antiquity ways a good one. Her insolent inno- cence puts all the blame on the director. intrudes on the flirtation; her Guinea There's only this one scene in Ex- alertness has become Etruscan . posed where Toback lets her go, or lets her jut out of the film like a needle for It reminds me of another face, near which our veins might turn into hands to do the job. In New York, her character the end of Marker's La Jetee, emerging becomes a world-famous model. It hap- pens in a flash, but she is not satisfied . from the past and the future, a few One day, alone in her apartment, to end her calisthenics session , she dances to seconds of undramatized liveliness, pop music. The scene has no narrative function. But it has never been Toback's presence as opposed to record, with skill to tell a story, or in his nature to want one. His films are staked on psy- mere breathing stirring the sea of stills. chic penetration. They know a way to the shambles in a creature that can make In La Jetee and Sunless, the two faces a story seem like foolish wreckage. It's like looking at life, still alive but dying, are piercing; they put us back in touch after a holocaust. What a character is going to do next then is not worth know- with the insight of film , the glance of ing. But what she is, in her burnt root, can blind the disaster. intimacy that defines passing time but It is the difference between chronol- wants to defy it. Alone with the camera. ogy and desire, and even if Exposed is a bad film this sequence reminds you that We feel its look flow into our veins, for- the movies are as averse to healthy im- provement as a fix. Sensation wants to giving all our darkened staring. Why dominate explanation in a film ; being tries to keep its essence safe against be- shouldn't people look at the camera? It coming; and the bes~ films might go on forever. Howard Hawks is the outstand- is a kindness to viewers , to notice us. I ing American exponent of discarding timed stories and breaking into a new knew you were there all the time. It is state of duration. In Rio Bravo, the jail- house siege should never end. Like the like the point in a book where you can- house in Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, it could become an not tell reading from writing. enduringly tense and fruitful location . Some films aspire to a circular form , a • shape in time to mirror the continuity of the screened figure and the viewer. It is And now a scene from James Toback's ecstasy confronting mortality. If onl y Kane could go on smashing Susan's Exposed, so sharp that it cuts up the room forever, and not find Rosebud. carcass of the rest of the film. It is irrele- Just like the girl on the ferry to Jersey, noticed by Kane's associate Bernstein in vant to call it \"a good scene.\" In To- 1896, Kinski slips into perpetuity in thi s scene. She wears a loose sweat suit, like back's Fingers, it would be more natural another skin. Her room is bare , large, with wooden floors, a pillar, an Exercy- and more than good. There, its naked c1e, and a free-standing mirror. Toback films the dance in long shot: a white and gesture and the compulsive mutuality in auburn figure writhing in airy space. It's the poignant distance Renoir preferred seeing and being seen would fit a vis- to keep between the scene and its eye. But one can' t realize its eloquence with- ceral and rapturous film. But the one out noting the torture to voyeurism in being farther away from it than conven- streak of passion is so cruel to Exposed it tional clarity might elect. It's because story has faded that the camera can be so is giving up the ghost to include it. A removed; seeing comes into its own as the force of a film when there is less to more circumspect or less talented direc- follow. tor might have kept it for another day; but a lesser man would not have shot it. Watching the scene is like watching someone shoot up. It entails surrepti- one who traveled without medicines. tiousness , anticipation, gratification, re- Hypochondria is a spiritual condition, lief, self-destruction, dread, humilia- the nerviness of creative uncertainty. tion, and helplessness. We ought to in- But I think some directors regard their tervene; the life on the screen is so medium in the way drug-takers are ad- pressing it demands our presence. If I dicted. Obsession has supplanted pro- knew you were there all the time, can't fessionalism. The metaphor of drugs is you help me now? as useful in describing the tone of some In Exposed, Nastassia Kinski drops pictures as it is in assessing the state of out of college and goes to New York. Her watching in the dark. Film is a drug, a fix home is in Wisconsin, and ifher parents, we give ourselves, alone with the pic- Ron Randell and Bibi Andersson , are ture. less inspired a mismatch than Michael V. Gazzo and Marian Seldes (from Fin- • \"Why shouldn't people look at the gers), still they make a hostile, cold camera?\" asks the narration in Chris house. At school, she dreams in a class Marker's Sunless. Where better to look? that yokes Touch ofEvil and The Sorrows And so he shuffles a few telephoto faces of Young Werther, and beats off the love of women on the street in Guinea-Bis- plays of her professor. She wears pink in sau; these are people supposed not to be the classroom, and the script presents seen, but so eager to look. He catches her as a yearning romantic. Granted the one young face, slanted away in avid · insidious shyness with which Kinski modesty, trying not to smile. But it sucks up being seen, that provocation softens. The lemon eyes squeeze us in bodes well for the film. It's hard to think the dark, and a snake of pleasure crosses of anyone available today whose oasis her mouth. Just for you, Mr. Camera-I eyes have a lusher level of excess. Nas- knew you were there, all the time. Then tassia Kinski is a movie , though not al-
- The camera makes a triangle out of Kinski and Nureyev are attracted in Exposed. the room , a V of desire, ready to inhale Kinski, her sparse clutter, and the en- a kind of swoon, like holding poison in something happens to confound the pre- closing air. But it also denies that urge, the mouth , or like the image whispering text. In Silk Stockings. only solemn and lets everything stay where it is. It's over its shoulder: yes, I know, you're seekers after political subtext attend to like holding a primed needle and drag- watching. Kinski's dream-tight eyes the plot. But when Cyd Charisse's So- ging out the instant before using it; there close. Her rapture is the telepathic gift viet commissar puts on non-Stalinist un- can't be much as delicious or terrible. of a beast in its rampage, alone with the derclothes-a new filmy skin-the pic- Shouldn't all of cinema be perched on camera, a body sure that we respond to ture.wraps itself in the luxury of self. that awful moment, a wave length with- its drug. out end, tracking in but zooming out, in We are supposed to be wondering motion but never arriving? • whether Astaire can keep this woman The hole that Exposed punches in it- out of Russia. But he's too decorous to Kinski doesn' t look like a trained or self lets us see the plastic intensification cope with the revelation of her need . graceful dancer. There is a private aban- of a musical. Kinski breaks into melody Astaire would be shocked by what we don in her movements that the character when straight talk has proved restrictive. see. Suddenly, Silk Stockings becomes a would abruptly cease if anyone walked But her \"song\" is a more bitter draft than meditation on self-caressing. It goes in on her. The arranged air of so much \"the musical\" was ever permitted. That sensual, morbid, and hypnotic; a woman screen acting burns off. Instead of work- genre had to stay cheerful and stagy; it has awakened to herself, and acknowl- ing to keep our eyes on someone who never got at the meat of the medium, edged the solitude it brings. There are bores us, we get that unfair advantage of which is melancholy and mendacious. no politics in the face of this grave plea- seeing someone give herself away. So it remained a genre of happiness , sure, and no discourse to match her self- devoid of intimacy. Maybe that fore- awareness. Freedom in the American The script has summoned up a young closed on it more effectively than shifts film is the power to be alone with the woman of deep feelings and vague dis- in public taste, the wearying of Arthur primitive engorgement of the medium content-vague because the lounging, Freed, or the arthritics of Fred Astaire itself. The frozen persona of Charisse, gloomy Kinski shrugs off every flagrant and Gene Kelly. so much more interesting than the line she has to utter. Ostensibly, her The musical always threatened the scripted severity of her character, has dance is part of the professional need to common sense of narrative progress with melted in the CinemaScope boudoir of keep in condition, yet it bares her ama- interludes, pools of duration , and emo- her perceived solitude. teur desperation to go out of control. A tionaI solo. Literary film fans scorn it beast dances: it is not as ladylike as because of that. They smile when action The picture goes on; there are other Eleanor Powell, but blunt and unhin- holds its breath and sinks into routine. enjoyable routines. But the rest is like a dered. Kinski's dreadnought hips knock Yet a worse moment comes when it superimposition. We stay haunted by air out of the way, and her body goes as lurches back into the habit of plot. We the introspective voluptuousness of rubbery as her mouth. In a few seconds, can thank Vincente Minnelli for the fi- Charisse. The intimacy, and its rapport we see how far the script has been muf- nale to An American In Paris. but appre- with the spying of the medium, make an fling her emotional need. ciate the medium when Jacques Demy eternity out of her dressing. It is in the and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg know that musical that we can feel animallocomo- As I recall, there are three shots, or the music need never stop. tion as sufficient subject-something fragments of the improvised exercise. The movie musical was a slave to central to Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefen- The three passages are rapidly dissolved Broadway's scheme of a superficial but stahl, Andy Warhol, and Robert into one. She dances in the open; she placid story, periodically illustrated by Towne's Personal Best. tries to woo the pillar; and she subsides numbers. The makers and the audience in despair against the mirror. Physical abided by the \"book\" so that they could It is part of the optimistic blast of excellence wilts; her assurance turns enjoy the numbers. But once in a while, musicals that the routines are invariably into self-hatred as the dance fails to fuck ensembles, or duets. The lewdness in her. For if we are in suspension, so is Busby Berkeley numbers is restrained she. Whatever farfetched webs of terror- ism the movie spins, this woman wants an orgasm. There's not another actress who can be so direct about that; or an- other director who comes so close to having a film be about nothing except that. The plot and its dialogue will start up again, the more forlorn now that we've glimpsed her capacity. But the film shakes for a while afterward, like the mirror that takes a shudder from her trembling back. The glass is not just the cold and lonely place for a model's emo- tional collapse, but the barrier between desire and fulfillment. A lot of film com- mentary (on Douglas Sirk, say) treats the mirror as a measure of critical irony on the action. It seems to me more often 26
because so many girls are involved. Of waits for Lauren Bacall to make her odd, tion (both from commercials), need not course, the design needs quantity; that half-brazen, half-timid slide toward Bo- dislodge viewers from the stream ; the is how it leans toward fascism. The cho- gart. That was an era when Hawks could developing opinion that movies re- ral effect erases personality and privacy. let a \"thriller\" wait as successive genera- sembled dreams, so why not act a little Anyone woman doing what she is doing tions in a dream family tried to deal with more according to that nature ? the ex- in those numbers alone-especially in an impertinent police call. ample set by cinerlUJ verite, that all things the Thirties-would have been danger- seen , no matter if the seeing is passive ously arousing. The force of the scene in The moment in Queen Christina and the action minimal, have a signifi- Silk Stockings is as a number for one and hinges on plot; drop it and the story cance; the rediscovery of Jean Renoir, a discovery of individualism. Astaire has doesn't quite work. But lose the stock- F.W. Murnau , Kenzi Mizoguchi , Max solos himself in some other films. But ings from Silk Stockings or the dance Ophuls, and the aesthetic th at inciden- his aloneness is another setting for the from Exposed and those pictures never tal behavior traced by a moving camera elegance that tolerates partners. He trip. They are just not as interesting. is of the essence of film ; the anti-dra- finds the same amused togetherness Most American pictures show character, matic impact of Warhol 's films , and their with a hat-stand or with Ginger. His per- mood, feeling-all those inner re- bewitching appreciation of uneventful fectionism surveys his ladies and glosses sources-on the run. That's why time time being suited to the snake of con- over his own narcissism. Precisely be- feels strained in American films, all sus- gealed duration , celluloid, going cause Charisse is so bitten-back a screen pense and so little reflection. It would through the machinery; and the inspira- presence in groups , she flowers when be injurious to audience attention, or an tion of the old avant-garde and of New alone. indecent admission of the medium's Waves that movies had as much right to time-killing prurience, to stop, to let be beautiful as they had a duty to tell Just as drugs hint at a solitary revela- time pass by and allow the audience to stories. tion greater than community, so movie look into the soul. It would require a introspection intimidates plot. 0 other soul. Some complained as early as the Fif- genre would have found a way to linger ties that American films were only los- over lingerie. The delay would be an • ing, or rejecting, the craft skills that told insurrection against plot and industry. stories swiftly, and which assumed that Dead time. Slack. And yet. .. at this re- In the late Fifties and early Sixties, pictures never wasted time. Neverthe- move, would you rather have one more there was a tendency-American as less , filling every moment (High Noon) is hitherto unknown Margaret Sullavan well as foreign-toward a looser view of not the only way of using time. Rio picture, or 90 unedited minutes of the the person in time and inconsequence. Bravo scorned High Noon's civic duty, actress at home alone, on a July after- In Arthur Penn's Mickey One, for in- and it threw out all those clocks. noon, reading a magazine, brushing her stance, a brave film of strenuous faults, hair, cutting open and eating a lime, there dawns an intriguing new light: that Most American directors turning to- dozing and waiting? the Warren Beatty character is not no- day to the scripts of His Girl Friday, ticed by his imagined enemies and is the Casablanca, Laura, or Notorious would Greta Garbo does walk around the source of his own frenzy. He, too, is likely make films 30 to 45 minutes room in Queen Christina, stocking up on alone with the camera, slowly learning memory. In The Big Sleep, as Humphrey calm. longer than the originals-even as An Bogart'S investigation goes nowhere in particular, we are forever watching him Several things influenced that new Affair to Remember, Leo McCarey's 1957 advance across rooms. His grace is dap- looseness: the discovery of the Fifties remake of his 1939 Love Affair, and using per and endearing; and at the end of To that popular entertainment could be the same script, was a half-hour longer Have and Have Not, a film that has be- better handled by television, so that than the original. But there are implausi- seeched her to take longer, everything movies might be more adventurous; the bilities and cliches from the Forties that lesson from television, that radical struc- have to be hurried over. The one thing tural interruption, and surreal juxtaposi- Rosalind Russell might do in His Girl Friday to attack the control of Cary Cyd Charisse and those stockings. Grant is not answer him back. But she is too obedient to the film's ethos (mir- rored in deadline journalism) to assert another pace. Moreover, it's hard to see slowing as anything but a loss if so many modern films feel plodding and do not understand the extra screen time that ineptness has provided. • A negative capability began to grow in films in the Fifties: a predilection in actors for watching rather than acting. It was as if a new generation entered pic- tures , trained by a life of watching them. The drive of American movies faltered; neurosis and suspicion glowered from the screen. It became possible to make films about troubled or subdued people, about Actors' Studio actors, not just characters running for stardom and wor- 27
NOW YOU HAVE 3 DIFFERENT WAYS ~ TO SEE MeA'S GREATEST HITS.
© 1983 MCAHOmeVideo, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
thy of its high state. tion. Dean is always murmuring \"to be comes on to Kim Novak. Having put or not to be,\" and this is a worry the herself on display so much, she never Once, stars had hogged the light and camera understands. Before then , only thinks to get out of her criminal pact and the screen; stories were shaped to their Cary Grant had such a silent grasp of the into love. When she tries that, too late, images and reputations. But stories personality of movies. Both actors made her own guilt is confirmed by Stewart's rarely waited for them. Today, stars are films about intelligence, the hardest vengeful need to condemn. In Rear Win- given time as well as the screen . There subject to deliver in the fantasia of dow, such anguish is less damaging but are dangers of picturesque rumination in American movies. more lucidly diagrammed. The photog- this. One Eyed lacks is a star going naked rapher there would rather have appear- with indecision. But Missouri Breaks • ance-that renewable drug-than a turns doubt into whimsical variety, wife. (It is the killing of a wife that his transforming another Western confron- Dean's revelatory career falls neatly eager fancy believes it has half-seen, just tation into something like a movie in between two films that are structural en- missed.) Grace Kelly creeps into the cor- rehearsal. If the star is interesting actments of his instinct: Rear Window ner of the camera's eye, a soft and oblig- enough , and the context responsive, and Vertigo , films about entrapment in ing conquest. But the eye goes off into then stardom can tease acting where which a supposedly removed spectacle the distance, where there is no sex ob- once it put audiences in touch with a exerts its power on a viewer. It is a mea- ject except the thing seen. In movies, bogus, life-like certainty. sure of Hitchcock's own fear of the me- spectacle has no erotic rival. It is our dium that their tone is so baleful. They concession to romance that so often we The greatest influence of James have no inkling of pleasure in the furtive let it be a man or a woman. Dean's films was that his directors gave process; no director ever showed things him time and let him use it to establish a with a greater burden of guilt. They are Stewart's aloneness with the camera sly, hesitant mastery. Pondering and tortured imaginings of what happens loneliness had been recognized as valid when a character is alone with a movie. Stewart in Rear Window. states likely to foster intelligence. In East ofEden, he knows where mother is. In both films, James Stewart is a sy- equals curiosity in Rear Window and the He carries that family secret, and it does ringe filled from the world of appear- longing to fall in love in Vertigo. To- not unbalance him as it will his brother ance, and then slowly turned around gether they comprise a hinge in film Aaron. In Rebel Without a Cause , his (like the gun at the end ofSpellbound) so history, opening up larger, more omi- mind registers the wasteland of Califor- that the contents can be shot into our nous prospects of film's nature. So little nian suburbia. In Giant, his hunched eye. The process is as aggressive, as the artist, but so dedicated a genius of vitality shows up those stuffed nonenti- neurotic, and as premeditated as most the system, Hitchcock is an inventor ties , the Benedicts. That film has to drug-taking. Alone-with-the-camera without poetry, like someone discover- drop him from its story, has to have him here becomes a model for looking and ing and refining the Bomb but not ap- slam a tethered Rock Hudson in the seeing. The films are warnings about preciating the life it endangers. Up to stomach , to stop his subtle appropriation treacherous evidence and mistaken the moment where Vertigo gives its end- of the center ground. identification. They force their protago- ing away, the two films are ideal achieve- nists into a more thorough isolation than ments of suspense and story-telling, em- Dean had key scenes in his films aloneness-it's dangerous to look and bodiments of unutterable distress and alone with the camera that make him risk \"seeing\" in error. fascination, without surplus or fresh air. their basis of feeling. In East ofEden, he They are machines that could blow up is the slouching figure hoping to merge In Rear Window, an anchored James the entire system, fulminating proofs of with the mist in Monterey as he tails his Stewart (playing a photographer) in- their own limits. After all, how can we mother. You can feel Elia Kazan letting spects a night sky full of small screens both destroy our bombs and forget how that sequence expand as he learned the until his own ferment of plot shines one to make more, but with the biggest complicity that Dean's shyness set up of them large and inviting. He sends an bomb of all sneezing us into oblivion? with the camera. In Rebel, Dean is innocent envoy there , and she is nearly nearly always alone: on the sidewalk trapped. Then at last, the creature from It took several years for the \"secret\" with his toy animal, arriving at school , that screen comes into his dark safety, entering his home at night, and as sepa- not just with an answer for his melo- rate as a judge. He surveys Plato and drama, but with an agonized question: Judy as well as the older generation and \"What do you want of me?\" the other kids. He has become know- ledge; we receive the film through his In Vertigo, Stewart is a \"private eye\" impressions. And in Giant, Dean has his hired to follow a lovely but nearly un- little-boy's dream , pacing out his plot of conscious woman. She seems like a land , being there when his desire makes sleepwalker, as oblivious of his pursuit it burst with oil-one of the greatest wet as -actresses are of the camera. He is not dreams ever put on the screen. tracking reality, but reality as a flat pho- tographic illusion, a projection; he is Dean's superiority was matched only akin to us. But then he has to jump into by his reticence. He was a romantic fig- San Francisco bay. Real space sets in; or ure but also a voyeur, the hero and the has he just gone into that other screen? devil. Without him there is no Travis When he escapes it, his urge to venture Bickle, no Michael Corleone, no Jack has been permanently inhibited. Nicholson. He is a new rhythm, reflex- iveness in a picture-not just action, but The two films scream with frustra- action weighed on by its own delibera- tion . So fully engaged in the erotics of looking, they tell us that no actual fuck- ing could compete with the way the lens 30
testament of these Hitchcock films to but lacked the courage to advance. Just in a flux of courage and di smay, theater sink in. No one expected the industry to when directors won recognition as peo- and \"what time do we wrap?\", in love explain itself in the mid-Fifties. Ameri- ple in charge, the medium turned cow- with sentiment but suspecting it is gone, can film will always look to a new craze ardly; it does , after all, take company stamped out by fifty years of film, the and avoid self-analysis; its dourness and Companies to make American medium that reassessed feeling as varie- seems to threaten instinct and sponta- films . Auteurism has been a way of ties of acting, leaving the pale face alone neity. Nor do I think Hitchcock meant claiming power, points, and glamour. with the camera, looking so long you his films as lessons. Vertigo was heanfelt But is has covered a self-pity that feels feel that consciousness must crack. but sub-conscious. The unrecognized itself in command yet incapable of mak- violence against the self is what makes it ing \"modern\" movies. So the movies Godard resembled Dean; perhaps all so disturbing. A natural (even helpless) have made a panorama of self-mocking, directors now disclose an affinity with filmmaker had owned up to the exhaus- guilt-ridden nostalgia. Coy films re-run some star or other. He was torn between tion and hysteria in movie stories. But defunct genres, trying to live up to old emotion and manipulation. Only Anna he could not quite go forward to more lies. Films became pretexts for toys and Karina tempted him into the narrative demanding material. Psycho is an exam- T-shirts. The danger had gone. The flow of the medium, which has very lit- ple of the anthropology of plots: less a drug was as automatic and fatuous as a tle to do with composition or pictorial story than a film about movie narrative placebo. The medium can no longer beauty, and so much more with the se- and its gossipy culture of expectation. pretend honestly. But it stays fiercely rene passage of time . That is what But it is too fearful to be enlightening. resistant to fresh ways of getting at the makes Vivre Sa Vie an enhancement of Still, it was as much an influence as truth. watching life, despite its bitter twist of a Sunset Boulevard because it signaled a Sam Fuller ending. No one is as helpful as Jean-Luc Go- Far more preoccupied with beauty Stewart pursues Novak in Vertigo. was Michelangelo Antonioni. L'Avven- tura is a film of transition, away from the sadistic escape from the failure to find dard in showing the idleness of making complex beach intrigues of Le Amiche towards the desert contemplation of Za- fresh forms. Hollywood pictures once you can make briskie Point. In L'Avventura, Antonioni But ten years after Vertigo , the climate commentaries upon them. No one else has a character disappear. Everyone sup- had changed. There were books on Hit- knows how swiftly and casually the poses she is hiding somewhere on the island, or kidnapped , or dead ; in pic- chcock. His clinical methods had been wreck of story could be hinted at so that, tures, when people vanish they beg to be sought out. Yet the nearest hiding diagnosed, and they became as camp as in Band of Outsiders, the trio have time place for anyone in a film is not over the horizon, it is in the camera. From that the talk in Casablanca and the honor in to do the Madison and think about haven , the escapee can watch the search. She can even preside over the old Westerns. Several American films things in a Parisian cafe. The effortless sad but human way in which she is grad- ually forgotten. began to dissect the codified sales-lines but confessed merger of actors and roles In La Notte, there is a similar experi- for unreality in Hollywood-Some Like carries film into its richest dialectics. ment, when Jeanne Moreau wanders It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder, Rio Bravo, Godard regularly shows people alone: away from the story to observe life. On much of her stroll she sees the material The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , What much of A Married Woman; Breathless, of her despondency. But there is an em- erging openness to the unexpected and Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , The Nutty which begins with Belmondo aligning the irrelevant-as if, within one fluid shot, a film can notice things as disparate Professor-all with an urge to turn the himself in hopeless awe with a picture of and \" unfitting\" as whatever a random cut might juxtapose with Ivan charade inside out. And yet those films the dead Bogart; in Vivre Sa Vie , a musi- Mozhukhin's face in the Kuleshov ex- periment. But where the cut makes us compromise with \"real\" story, the com- cal reclaimed as Anna Karina whirled mend the break with connection, differ- ent things in one stretch of time and mercial lie that viewers have been . round a pool table. There, in grainy space may live as unconnected neigh- bors, the atomic structure to a new way brought up to cherish. black-and-white, in an aimless but scru- of seeing. American films began to die when pulously numbered tragedy, the film Moreau's promenade begins to back off into the camera, merging with the they realized the need to step into a new found unalloyed happiness as exhilara- sensibility that watches. And at the end of Eclipse , when characters do not turn mode-one that addressed the specta- tion occupied a moment. Godard's peo- up for an appointment-do not even exist-the film persists in a coda that tor as the person holding the needle- ple turn their blank faces to the camera acknowledges how extensive a world there has always been beyond the small, dark story. Blowup is the culmination of these 31
experiments, and the complete shrug- achieved. The romanticism of the made. But in McCabe there is the face of ging off of romantic or social pessimism American movie has not been outgrown, Julie Christie, a close up, 100 years of in Antonioni's work. It is also Rear Win- or set aside for humor or an essayist's solitude away, gazing through the cam- dow and Vertigo taken up again in a spirit excursions. Instead, it has shown a black era at the opium at the end of McCabe . of play. Blowup is a new comedy, light on dread . The director is proud to In The Long Goodbye there is Elliott rivetingly erotic in its dark-room , but so make an acting appearance in the film as Gould's Philip Marlowe interrupted in much closer to Jorge Luis Borges than to the victim of his own obsession, an ad- his happy soliloquy to a cat and a cam- Hitchcock. Looking no longer implies dict counting off the burnt-out brain era, while nymphs make candles out- guilt; the snapper-up of sly pictures in cells. side, amazing, but a screen passed by in the park falls into the pit of his own the night. Marlowe is always saying it's suspiciou sness, but nothing takes away But not quite always . Robert Alt- all right with him , and Altman wants to from or settles the enigma of the park as be tranquil so that his camera can absorb a cinematic event, musical with wind DeNiro in Taxi Driver. the light and the space. He never de- and emotional in its distinct perspec- man's film s have preferred activity and ludes himself into believing the story is tives. The key view of the park, long duration to all those old compulsive fa- urgent. It's just one of those Raymond and far away, is like looking towards a vorites: love, sex, macho, myth , guilt, Chandler scams, a movie, with images vigil through the fold s of a brain. paranoia. They are the closest that always floating on the glassy surfaces. America has yet come to casualness in its • films . How hard to be casual at $ 14 mil- If being alone with the camera is a lion a shot. The rather blowsy attractive- metaphor for death, then too many In Blowup, paranoia is caught in the ness of Altman's people is not hypnotic American films are alarmed by the air and tossed from hand to hand until it or domineering but part of the collage of shadow. Altman isn' t clinging on to disappears. The fi x is sweet, gentle; it relaxed frame s. He tries to make the time , anxious to snare it or be impaled kids itself. The threat in film , the over- visual track as fluent as the sound. His by it. He lets it slip through his films like hang and the overlook, its tyrannous films drift as his zooms ooze in and out; a water eddying through weed. And his sway in the dark , have been smiled merciful imprecision takes over from the people are as soft, fuzzy, and aromatic as away. There is a scattered genre of film harshness of so much exactly angled cin- Monet's lilies-whereas, for Scorsese, lumiere in movie history that would in- ema. Hi s light is de-dramatized . It fall s characters are the prickly, burning sun- clude Antonioni, Renoir, Rivette, Ro- indiscriminately on all skin s with a flowers of Van Gogh, the dominators of bert Altman, directors for whom light is vague, soft-edged lustre . Features and their frames, demanding to be suffered. a benign constancy, not a threatened egos blur in its wash. The \"lines,\" the sta te . talk, float in and out of off-screen noise. Lightness in films (light seen and lightness of attitude) has been most elu- That's easier to appreciate if you put There is a contemplative in Altman, sive in America, where the medium has Blowup next to Francis Ford Coppola's most engaged by filling time (Nashville, been body-pressed by stars, stories and The Conversation , where Gene Hack- A Wedding , the movie as a party) or in drama-objects so momentous that it is man is wedged between his cunning muttering to himself over the drowsy harder to recognize that the medium de- tape machine and the camera, reli- hulk of a foolish , fraudulent genre (Mc- pends on seeing everything. Storyness is giously alone, and the film is about noth- Cabe and Mrs . Miller, The Long Good- a rigid , repetitive habit when set against ing less than American Alienation. For bye). His people have larger lives oftheir the variety of sight. But American films Coppola, the stealth of the medium own. There is little tension in Altman seem blocked from rendering the story bears out intimations of conspiracy ev- film s, no melodrama, no anxiety, no as gaze, like Rivette in Celine and Julie erywhere else. The man alone with the se lf-righteou sness. The movies live Go Boating, a film that watches over the camera in so many American films (Mi- close to chaos, and several tumble in , need for fiction so much more wisely chael Corleone in The Godfather, or amazed that big money let them get than anyone exclusive plot could man- David Staebler at the start of The King of age. It does not attempt the ranging in- Marvin Gardens) is somewhere between telligence of a Chris Marker in Sunless, isolation and an in stitution. It is a dark, in which the solitude of the filmmaker is sickly place, where the light is tired and challenged by the world he insists on depressed ; it is a ve rsion of the movie- noticing. But it is a picture that says, yes, goer's sunless life, and Travis Bickle is you are watching, and we are playing. the lurid sai nt of that gloom, so deter- Never fear the outcome. mined to be the only one in his there that he dares us to talk to him , across the And although its star is American, no impossible moat between the screen American could yet dream of making and the auditorium. Antonioni's The Passenger, which ends with the camera sitting patiently by the Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is slick bedside of dying aloneness and, when it and exultant in its thrust that to make is all gone, getting up and going out into movies is to be alone with the camera, the world and the dusty, evening court- locked into the medium and your own yard of the Hotel de la Gloria where obsessions. It gives up the world at large intrigue fades into inconsequence, in for the tricky endgame of Travis scour- what is the most moving observation of ing the mirror and catching us watching passing in time that the medium has yet him . Who wants to eyeball that killer? managed and which seems to see the So afraid of the world, the movie seeks large world itself, alone with the process to intimidate us. Claustrophobia is all that the hard-won first-person mode has of being seen. €-;, 32
ection Tony-winner Michael Peters , Clio-winner Bob Giraldi, and Grammy-winner Michael Jackson on the set ofBeat It. 33
The Medium Is The Maximum Neil Armstrong hippety-hops in slomo across the surface of the moon to a flag bearing the legend: \"MTV Music Television.\" This non-stop rock video system has the goods-the new right stuff. The television of today from the world of the future for kids who were maybejustbornonJuly20, 1969. MTV occupies a lunar landscape of strobo- scopic images: an albino-blond man paints his bod y red; a silver bullet whizzes through a playing card; young women with lawnmower hairdos and punk-elegant cheekbones prowl toward the screen, rotorized by sexual taunt. Do you, poor anachronistic early-mid- dle-ager, want to live in this world? Doesn't matter, it's here. MTV is a time capsule containing the evidence that , in 1963, everyone went to the moon. The most pervasive and disturbing aspect of MTV's audio-video mix is that it doesn't quit. Anyone who grew up in the Fifties or Sixties, ear soldered to AM radio, got used to the systole-diastole of Top 40 programming. Fast song, slow song, raver, ballad , uptempo, down mood, the Isley Brothers, the Five Satins. It was like breathing, like life: musical melodrama followed by doo- wop romance. Old movie directors, even the shock masters, worked on the same premise; they knew that a climax had to come from somewhere, from the measured intake of narrative breath. MTV has a different life, a different Michael Jackson on the set o/Beat It. rhythm. Each MTVideo says: I got three, four minutes , and in that time my educational and entertainment pro- making hot shots. Can we take solace sights and sounds are gonna blitz your grams were extending those wham-bam from this? Perhaps. Whatever the sins of brain. The next video says the same commercial effects to 60 minutes MTVideacs, they are sins of commis- thing, and the next and the next. MTV (Laugh-In, Sesame Street) . Is it causal, or sion, not hackwork lethargy. And the doesn't exhale, doesn' t allow for relaxa- only coincidental, that soon ,after Broad- form can be seen as an adolescent rum- tion. It's like a 24-hour dance marathon way shows started advertising on TV in ble, a chance to purge the spirit of excess where no one's allowed to drop out. 1975 they turned into machines of per- before the advent of artistic maturity and What MTV does is to mirror and echo petual energy, light shows of Manhattan its dominatrix of choice, restraint, disci- the currents of pop culture in the past aggression for the tourist trade? Pippin, A pline, the knowledge of when to say no decade. Movies, especially those made Chorus Line, Dancin', Dreamgirls, Cats to oneself. by the British TV-commercials gradu- haven ' t been made into movies; it Rock video is but a few years old, an ates who seem the exemplars of MTVi- would be redundant. They have co- infant art form. Even so sophisticated a deos, have become image assaults fea- opted the relentless vigor of the film-art- \"video\" as Golden Earring's TwiLight turing outre folks whose deathly fear is photography-TV-commercial medium . Zone (not the movie) is the MTVequiva- of stasis. When modern art and photog- So MTV continues the trend. It is all lent of D .W. Griffith's early one-reelers. raphy deserted academe to enter the about the death of context; it is the shot- Is a rock Intolerance in MTV's future? Or pages of fashion magazines, they easily gun annulment of character from narra- just The StruggLe? Will the medium age assumed the glamour of decadence on a tive , the anaesthetizing of violence decently, or die of rock-star exhaustion? fast-moving treadmill. TV commercials, through chic, the erasing of the past and The kids who live with MTV may not of course, have been compressing con- the triumph of the new. It is also (apoca- care. Why reach for the stars, one can flict and resolution into 30-second spots lyptic masticating to the side for one hear them saying, when we already walk since the Sixties; and soon after that, moment) a school for tomorrow's film- on the moon? -RICHARD CORLISS 34
Video Ru.'-I.oIJlI~~~ Uiomatie js tfie Pll::lrc:nc:c; .tI'''':';1~ \" ir_~\"\"~o~~JacJ~l's non..;ruma- funner that Bauce Spldn.g_~'sAd.iif At least as far as the ~ has become a CGlI8e cele\"\"'~ BY one of the hits of re- fusing to appear in his own Video, centYeal1l, Barron beps losing the beat is concerned, MTV-24-hQ'Wr41G1,V Springsrcen set himSelfup, in e.ft'ect, as In a welter of.fussy effects. It's a profli- visual radio targeted at white ~lll1Uttan· anon-representational anist. gac:y no television commercial could af- males-is the greatest thing Vet,W lIlDl:J- When not straight rookumentary, ford. ble out of the cable TV corn'l,ll(Qpcia. videos attempt to reinforoe pi6dui:t fa- Despite their exceptionally well-at- Just last month, Daily Variety re.tl~ea miliarity with shtick, be it ~t(Ve ~35-year history, old TV commer- survey demonstrating that mini-melodrama or the WOIst didies of cials survive-ifat aU-in the collective viewers are more influenced by popsurrealism(albumattcometoturgid unconscious (and perhaps chromo- ble music video channel than by life). In either case, the video aesthetic swnes) of habitual TV warchem. Ocat- concerts or commercial TV when is closely related to that ofthe television sional apologists not withstanding, the buy records.\" Even better, \"they commereial. But, encoumged by ~tc:1 nakedcapitalist realism ofthe rclevision more records than they did before relative length, video tends more m.. COlnDi~QOlltinues to nauseate ideo- had the channel.\" It would be .\"Oh$.wards Dionysian self-indulgence thaii lopes and aesthetes of all politiCal per- tuous to suggest that rock- ~)()lIlt)nulD mind-oontroL Last winreit'-s No o~ bas yet bec:n tempted existed in the nascent state of movies- IJV,.&JU'''& jeans commercial offers less to p~ even the most rudimentary before-AI Jolson. But the evidence sug- enrcrtainment than almostcvc'Y- organWng history along the lines ofThe gests that the video tail is learning to wag on MTv. ~ Cinema or The American Vein. the rock ' n roll dog. BiUie Jean, the most MTV videos hardly seem destined for Your typical MTV promo is a four- critically gll~1ar.lde:d of current MTV similar obscurity; the cult of personality minute hash of film and video that videos, is a SklO-lIDW as disco, as they purvey precludes such cathedral- blithely blurs the conventional distinc- overweeningly ~~,.......__ as Blade Run- worker anonymity. Already, the aUfCUr tions made between the two technolo- ner or Jean-Jacques debate-performer or director?-has gies. The promos are generically called in the Gutter and featuring and begun. As one of MTV's eerily. disaf- \"videos,\" although many are shot (and Michael Jackson as some sort of trans- ~..-,.,_....nI femme veejay, l.1CIIlatked the even edited) on film. Because the forming angel: the only black in a white ''\\VC all wanna be StarS promo form is intensely teleological- world. (Like the world of MTY.) After designed, more or less, to display some an effective opening montage, the video has persistendy been band or performer in action-close to goes wrong when it sacrifices tempo charged with misogyny. half of MTV's videos are routine sub- with a wasted shot of Jackson pulling a (Jackson is one of the artistsv......,_,_ Woodstock rockumentary recordings. So cloth from his pocket to shine his shoes; the station will broadcast.) head MUSIC TELEVISION 35
sors like Vivienne Dick and Dara Birn- baum, as well as feature filmmakers as disparate as Dennis Hopper, Floyd Mu- trux, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Gothar have all taken their rock as found mate- rial in the healthy spirit of democratic feedback. If MTV is based in New York, it seems only because the city is the main pit-stop between London and L.A. (Too bad , for the assorted New York rappers , scratchers, breakers, and graffiti-writers of Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style could un- doubtedly show the world a thing or two .) English directors , trained in the tradition of quality commercials, domi- nate the video scene with highly theatri- cal post-Ken Russell extravaganzas. The L.A. style is somewhat more inter- Flock ofSeagulls. esting, being lighter-kicky rather than kinky-and more attentive to the qual- programmer Robert Pittman's demo- must Pittman employ to keep Neil Dia- ity of the video image. As provocatively graphic bias it could hardly be other- mond off the air? wise. (In time, the exclusionary \" nar- whitebread as early Bing Crosby, Sparks rowcasting\" epitomized by MTV may Far more meretricious than any indi- make us nostalgic for the old-fashioned, vidual tape is MTV's overall program- and Jane Wiedlin's current Cool Places is democratic, Americanistic, everything- ming philosophy-a paradigm of indus- for-everybody repressive desublimation trial standardization compared to which far superior to the visual sturm und drang of network TV.) The libidinal economy even the lamest club video begins to of Pittman's \"psychographic\" approach seem like the Cinematheque Fran<;aise. produced for even \"avant-garde\" British most closely resembles that of comic Although MTV will intermittantly books and pulp fiction. The bulk of screen an old concert movie , it is always bands like Adam and the Ants or Or- MTV programming foregrounds macho in a carefully segregated slot. There can display or female otherness. Although never be a segue from D avid Bowie, for chestral Manoevers in the Dark. A sort ideologically coherent, MTV is not en- example, to Bo Diddley. History-that tirely monolithic. It's touching, as well is, the entire history of rock' n' roll on of stringent Forbidden Zone, Cool Places as ludicrous, to find an aging suburban film prior to the invention of MTV-is white boy like Billy Joel taking it upon never permitted to make even the small- tempers its bubble gum arrogance with himself to provide MTV with depth by est dialectical incursion into the eterna I offering soulful dirges on Vietnam now of current videos. Because old Cal Arts sight-gags (mainly a backdrop or unemployment (Allentown), or songs are seldom revived in the new even (in Pressure) a $200,000 psycho- video format, MTV thus deprives itself composed of tinkertoy Americana) dramatic representation of his own of the richest strategy of illustrating pop angst. What team of wild elephants music. Pioneers like Bruce Conner and while offering the added pleasurable Kenneth Anger, underground succes- spectacle of two humans dancing to- gether. At the very least, MTV is providing work opportunities for film and video makers , technicians, and independent media entrepreneurs in a chronically de- pressed economy. Moreover, it is bound to have a salutory effect on what passes for rock ' n roll movies where-despite the successful precedents of rock operas (Tommy) and operettas (Help!, The Rocky Horror Picture Showy-the stale rock- umentary form continues to hold sway. MTV is said to have a stockpile of a thousand promo tapes. Twenty-two of the best of them , spl iced end to end , would surely be as epochal as The TAMJ Show. However, it would be a pitiful reflec- tion on the supposed vitality of capitalist culture if MTV, as we know it, were to constitute the grand fusion of television and rock'n'roll. The point is not to inter- pret MTV but to change it. Under so- cialism, a hip commissar of culture could invite Andrzej Wajda , Yilmaz Guney, Robert Bresson, and everyone else to compete in the composition of three- MUSIC TELEVISION minute video interpretations of Hungry Heart. Or better yet: The Ramones's J Wanna Be Well. -J. HOBERMAN 36
The beginning of the Rolling Stones' pressed with his own performance, he Going to a Go-Go video consists of con- must impress us with the seriousness of cert footage even worse than that found the distance betwen his stage persona in Hal Ashby's Lets Spend the Night To- and the \"real\" Jagger and Ferry. Second: gether. Jagger struts his ambisexual, am- rather than identifying with the camera, biracial body about the perimeter of an as when watching a movie, the audience pressed so extended stage in a large, open arena. identifies with the star watching him- rock has The camera dwells on his performance, self. We become Jagger watching Jag- form of with only a few of those occasional ger, Ferry watching Ferryj that is, we cape and as glimpses we have come to savor of the don' t identify with the performance or active dissati very bored Bilt Wyman and Charlie the performer. Watts (who in the Start Me Up vid look On the other hand, I think the most effective performance you'll find on MTV is Prince's straightforward rendi- The myth of tion of \"Little Red Corvette,\" a power- although long ful, economical synopsis ofthe most dis- all but the most tinctive elements ofPrince's performing fans , is laid to repertoire. The febrile young black lip- the rise of synchs a pretty good rock ditty with self- procity that was assured conviction of his place in a rock tween audience pantheon that, on radio and especially orated , or at even more weary ofthe whole charade, if on MTv, is reserved almost exclusively that is possible). The concert footage is for white performers. Prince uses no par- intercut with shots of a young woman's ticularly fancy stage design, symbolic legs entering a house aglow with golden imagery, or narrative crutch (this ain't no mon denom ' light. Then Jagger, rather menacingly, \"concept\" video , yet manages to lost the \"struggle. enters the house and ends up in a equate himself with such as Jagger and tions expressed screening room where the continuing Ferry. cern the inability concert footage, still mainly of him, is Other than Prince,. the most \" genu- or individual being projected. He observes himself ine,\" least assuming acts on M1V are on Mick Jagger's with obvious enjoyment, a pleasure en- the numerous heavy metal groups (Def if the Rolling Sto hanced by the presence of others in the Lepard, the Scorpions, Blackfoot, April dication. And the room participating in an orgy. Wine) that populate the network. These acts usually align themselves with their audience on the levels of sexuality, careenng as a power, and aggression, manifesting a dimensional showcase. brute force that would be nowhere as The increasing influ seductive if it were merely tethered to marketing tool and representational imagery. well be compared to the The rest of rock-vid land consists of cinema supplanted theater as a subtler come-ons, designed to tart up popular entertainment in the early the music with imagery calculated to of this century. Cinema did i evoke the appropriate emotions. Apart change the way audiences perceived The cooler, suaver Brian Ferry, how- from \"rockumentaries\" (in which. we themselves in relation to entertainers: watches himself with no move- the direct communality between per- whatsoever in Roxy Music's video note. audiences are hardly ever shown), former and audience was replaced in the Main Thing. The relationship of cinema by a different form of commu- MTV segments are either narrative nality (most film s are still watched in L\"\"-F;IUL,'\" is different with Roxy Mu- crowded rooms). Now comes a new, core trio (Ferry, guitarist \"concepts,n free-form potpounis of ma- more crucial change. MTV is not only altering relationships between specta- Phil Manza ,and x\"0l'h ~ dy nipulated imagery, or straight in-studio tors and musicians in live performances, Mackay) is all that remains of the gro ' it is also changing the way in which we original, six-man line-up in this video. performances. hear records and radio. This may be misleading, but it's eco- nomical. In The Main Thing the trio per- Concept videos-sung stories-con- MTV is a self-reflecting medium for forms in front of a colorful , hazy back- narci ss ists of a limited age bracket ground; then the camera pulls back to sist of one of more members of a group (twelve to 34-year olds). The symbi- reveal Ferry, arm draped across a chair, in a screening room , again watching his singing and playing as part of, or exterior otic relationship that exists between au-' own performance. dience and performer (he's one of us, , a narrative that is attached to the with our desires and frustrations) with These two MTVideos epitomize the MTV becomes one-sided. Every image drift toward absolute self-consciousness so g. The l'lllmltive is rarely unadulmr- is directed , specifically and utterly, at by the star; the viewer is left only with a the viewer. means of connecting to an elaborate self- at ; tilat is, there are alrilost always obsession. First: the rock star is so im- mo ents in the three-minute fmlllSy whe the band just ~~ (lips~hS). Thest may ormay nothaveanYthing to do wit e SQilg'slync co~t; t i 't. What·. ~... deed , it usua tant is the image • d • tfie group, the image the me ers wish to project. Greg Kihn's Jeopardy, Joe Jack- son's Steppin' Out, Rick Springfield's An 37
38
Affair of the Heart, ZZ Top's Gimme All women), even though it lacks the sur- radio listener to imagine the mu sic as Your Lovin', and many others spin a real , high-gloss sheen of such videos as playing some indirect part of his life. small tale that has little if anything to do Joe Jackson's. One video maker (Ri- Michael Jackson's song \"Billie Jean ,\" for with content. chard Casey) claims that the haste and example, tells the story of a woman who informality of production prevents is accusing the singer of paternity. The What these videos do is to transform a videos from being compared with com- Billie Jean video features a magical , god- musician into a fictional character. The mercials. I'd argue the opposite: that like Jackson being followed by a detec- musical careers of Elvis Presley, Frank because videos are relatively sponta- tive in scenes that refer to Jackson rather Sinatra, and the Beatles all changed radi- neous reflections of what's on the mind than the song. Another kind of disconti- cally once they became film stars. The of the performer-of how he wishes to nuity, dishonest as to means of produc- Monkees, on the other hand, were cre- be represented-they display a reveal- tion, is found in Prince's videos in which ated for television and were always per- ing free-association of the way the per- he is seen performing with a band. The ceived in that context. former perceives himself, his audience, music that is heard , however, was re- and the relationship between the two. corded by Prince alone. • David Bowie's Let's Dance, which he The imagery of the typical rock-vid is An example of the way image is added co-directed, was made more or less dur- usually generated by a single word or to music is found in Kihn's popular Jeop- ing the course of a single day in Austra- phrase: Bowie's Let's Dance centers ardyvideo. Kihn himself is an unimpres- lia. The rapidity of its production may around the aborigine couple's relation- sive musician and actor, but this video is therefore account for the manner in ship to a symbolic pair of red shoes, loaded with imagery guaranteed to which it resembles a synthesis of Roeg's stemming from the lyric \"Put on your touch the quivering adolescent heart of Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to red shoes and dance the blues.\" In Billie any man associating marriage with a cas- Earth , both in look and content. Once Jean the word \"eyes\" in the song signals trating loss of liberty, or, for that matter, again, the video's concept (a comment a cut to-what else?-Michael Jack- with the inevitable tragedy of growing on discrimination against aborigines) has son's eyes. And in Blue Oyster Cult's up. Kihn plays a reluctant groom who nothing to do with the song's lyrics Burnin' for You vid, the group performs develops cold feet at the altar and hallu- (Bowie wants us to dance) , and neither the song while a car burns in the back- cinates thatthe entire bridal party, fian- has anything to do with the subject of ground. Such abject literalness makes cee included, has turned into Night ofthe the video (Bowie relaying his healthy the music and imagery swerve even fur- Living Dead ghouls anxious to add him to Aryan '-liberality). ther apart, once again signaling through their ranks by way of holy matrimony. a form of free-association the simplicity Bowie at least makes a stab at invest- of the intentions of all concerned. Mar- Kihn is a clean-looking, ordinary Joe ing more than adolescent angst into his tin Fry of ABC sings \" I hope and I pray who suffers the smug blandishments of work. Since videos are now more or less that maybe someday you'll walk in the his future in-laws and the mocking of his obligatory for success in the market- room with my heart,\" evoking nothing pals on the way to the altar. While taking place, what we are now seeing is the more from the director than a cut to a his vows he imagines that the older mar- strategy of the refined sell-out. MTV is, woman holding a little plastic heart. At ried couples in attendance are shackled after all, jointly owned by Warner Com- moments like these one realizes how together by both handcuffs (playing on munications and American Express, and guarded reasonably intelligent artists can teenagers' fear of police) and flesh. it's amusing to see such one-time would- be when forced to generate imagery Once the ring is placed on the bride's be iconoclasts as Pete Townsend and through this medium and how lame finger, she turns into a rotting corpse and Kevin Rowland shuckin' and jivin' for their concessions turn out. the wedding members become ghouls. the network. In fact, some viewers have As Kihn escapes from the chapel, he's reported a diminished respect for a few It sometimes appears on MTV that drapped back by a tinfoil monster (the of their favorite artists after having ob- each group is handed a menu of images \"ironic\" low-budget touch) and pre- served the manner in which they've and is then told to pick five to be used in tends to play guitar using a piece of pew seen fit to despoil themselves. Dexy's their video. The list includes beautiful with which he has killed the tinfoil (the Midnight Runners, ABC, Bowie, and Caucasian women, cars, high-heeled obligatory connection with perform- the Clash come to mind . shoes, hotel rooms, fog, leather, snow, ance). His escape from the chapel dis- solves into a home-movie of the \"real\" • I exit of bride and groom being shown in a room inhabited by the decayed corpses If anyone trope sums up the rhetoric 1/\" of the young marrieds. The video cuts of rock video, it's that of discontinuity back to the groom dressing for the wed- and disjunction. Gestures, actions, and • ding (this has been a fantasy), who then intentions are nearly always divorced grabs a champagne bottle and vamooses from a systematic context, which is why out the church's back door. As he jumps so many rock-vids look as if they were into his car, the bride-not-to-be runs made in homage to Jean Cocteau. In the down the church steps and joins him in previous history of music on film, from redemptive freedom from the ritual Cab Calloway shorts through Richard transformation into adulthood. David Lester's Ring a Ding Rhythm (1962; Cronenberg Meets The Graduate. a.k.a. It's Trad Dad) and up to and in- cluding Flashdance, music was always Imbedded in this one mundane video comfortably framed by a story. MTV is a are numerous elements that can be re- context that seems to abolish context, peatedly observed in dozens of others removing the freedom of the record lis- (death, fear of the loss of freedom, pur- tener to edit his or her experience, or the suit by authority figures, beautiful 39
detectives, and beautiful Oriental tive struggle, but merely a diversion. continuous. The combination of sound J women-the comic-book fantasies of Another variety of rock video consists and image is meticulously and expen- adolescent males and James Bond fans. sively calculated to subliminally seduce .J Many of the same elements are found in of a continuous stream-of-self-con- the consumer into purchasing action. film noir; rock-vids, like film noir's sciousness imagery that accompanies Rock-vids, on the other hand , are only } femmes fatales, are literally eye-catchers. the music without benefit of narrative subconsciously calculating, are rela- They seduce the gaze as if to fill a lack in concept. Two examples from this phy- tively inexpensive, and probably don't the viewer, his unspoken desires. They lum are Bow Wow Wow's Do You Wanna do nearly as effective a job. What is true, play to , and play with, his isolation, frus- Hold Me? and Wall of Voodoo's Mexican however, is that the same kind of im- tration , and loneliness. Radio. Both of these employ a grabbag agery used to sell a man a car is also of backdrops, costumes, multi-tracked frequently employed to sell a teenager a Always heavily cosmeticized, the imagery, and auxiliary watchables to record: speed, power, girls, and wealth. MTV women are made, not born, in the beefup the song. Both Budweiser and Miller beers cur- image of rock 'n' roll men . In Eddie rently run commercials on MTV that in Money's Think I'm in Love, the woman While both of these look as if they almost every way resemble rock videos. turns against Money, who is portrayed as might have been cranked out during the a vampire: she is herself one. Men are course of an afternoon, the former dis- As with most television, MTV usually constantly being deserted by women on plays rather more respect for the audi- serves as electronic wallpaper. MTV MTV, which makes Daryl Hall lonely ence than the latter. Bow Wow Wow stands for Music Television, but in actual and miserable in Hall and Oates's One on takes its visual cues from a couple of practice it often becomes the opposite One video, and leaves other men with lines in the song about hanging out in when the sound is turned down and it's the blues in the Scorpions' No One Like California, \"Where Mickey Mouse is as just a moving painting in the corner of a You and Dave Edmunds's Slippin' Away. big as a house.\" Lead singer Annabella room, saying nothing until a song comes But who cares? Three minutes of angst Lwin is costumed in various versions of on that the viewer cares for. When the will pass and then we're on to something Disneylandia (Peter Pan, Pinocchio, a picture is erased from MTV, what re- else. The song existed before the video; Mouseketeer), and the other band mains is an AOR radio station complete the emotion is already cold and once members wear furin y clothes, too. Car- with commercials and intermittent mu- more removed. Any emotional Sympa- toon images creep across close-ups of sic news from deejays operating at a low thy the listener might experience from the musicians cramming junk food into level of commitment. hearing the music over the radio is dissi- their mouths, and the whole thing is pated by the spurious imagery that is punctuated by insert shots of equally We refer to most TV as \"commercial\" made to represent the song's meaning. unappetizing food products. It's about televisi'on; actually only MTV can lay Consumption, get it? The viewer can claim to that title because that is pre- Jean-Pierre Oudart once wrote of the decide for his or her self which is worse, cisely what it is: ersatz commercials \"suturing\" of viewer to narrative that consumption as portrayed here or the punctuated with \"real\" ones. Not only is takes place as the camera cuts from face consumption of this video and the rec- it changing the way we listen to music, it to face in a filmed conversation. In this ord it advertises. is also beginning to change the way we way the spectator is lured into the story, perceive movies; the musical numbers identifies with the camera, and partici- Wall of Voodoo also uses the notion of from both Flashdance and the upcoming pates in the cinematic web. No such food spoiling in Mexican Radio. Here the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Stayin' intercutting takes place in rock videos, group ridicules Mexico with stereotypi- Alive, were both filmed with the transla- because there is no narrative as such cally (hip) racist imagery that includes tion of musical numbers to MTV in within which the viewer can \"find\" him- bullfights, body shops, and Mexican mind. See the video, buy the album, see self. The suturing of a rock-vid stitches food, all of which are not dwelled upon, the movie-first in fragmented form, the evocative imagery first to the per- bu't subliminally make their appearance then as a whole. former, then to the song being per- through rapid insertions. formed and to the album from which the There's nothing inherently evil in song is derived , next to the record com- • MTV; it's no better or worse than any pany that produces and markets the rec- aspect of the record industry has ever ord, and finally to the world of entertain- Although rapid cutting and a host of been. Nor is it without interest; it is ment and leisure activity as a whole. As other camera and editing techniques are simply being used to hype vinyl and the identity of the performer is trans- used during the relatively short length of little else. In its almost three years of ferred from acto r to musician , he or she time the average rock-vid lasts (usually existence, it is only just solidifying into a is ultimately revealed as pure commod- about three minutes), they' re not as sim- commercial force to be reckoned with. ity, no longer as a participant in a collec- ilar to commercials (although that is in One of the more unfortunate conse- fact what they are) as yo u might expect. quences will be that a performer's suc- First, commercials are anything but dis- cess will probably depend on his or her appearance and acting ability more than ever before. On the other hand, we can only hope that the struggle against rock's corruption that has always been waged by a nervy handful will continue on this front, and that MTV will be considered a challenge to be subverted if it is not to remain a few hazy images, a fashion show, a synthesized beat. -RICHARD GEHR 40
Pre-MTV so ulfull y crooning \"Le Jour Ie Plus parallels between what Berkeley does in Longue\"), the form quickly became these numbers and the sig hts and canonized as Camp; you' ll find it high so und s in some of the more ambitious As anyone who has spent time before on Susan Sontag's famou s list, right be- rock-vids, like Fleetwood Mac's Gypsy. the tube frying his brains on MTV tween Tiffany lamps and the Brown Repetition and circularity of action as a knows , the coming of rock video can Derby restaurant. Rock video isn't camp signifier of closure-another feature of scarcely be attributed to a sudden out- - yet. Berkele y's grand syntagmatiques-are burst of creativity on the part of the rec- • similarly a rock-vid obsession (Billy ord industry. Shallow, derivative, gim- BUSBY BERKELEY. It's possible to Joel's Allentown, Tom Petty's I Got mick-laden, these three-minute clumps find traces of the influence of all sorts of Lucky) . Of course, no rock-vid can touch of visual noise sport precedents stretch- musical production numbers in rock Berkeley's grasp of the geometric, nor ing across the first seven decades of this videos, but it's with Berkeley's extrava- his neo-constructivist se nse of design, cinema century. But getting a grip on ganzas of the Thirties that the basic nor ... • the evolution of a cultural form (how- structure of the rock-vid form can best RICHARD LESTER. Even you r ever debased) requires something more be seen. In most musicals, songs and Aunt Minnie in Pocatello (who thinks than the knee-jerk historicity that would dances related directly to some element Christian Metz is a religious fundamen- casually flip back to a fixed date and in the surrounding story. Berkeley'S rou- talist) knows that Richard Lester's Bea- then proceed forward in a straight line of tines stood by themselves in sublime ties films had a seminal influence on comprehensional clarity. self-enclosure. While stories were often rock-vid. But though the \"Can't Buy Zig-zagging is the only method capa- told within them (as in the \"Shanghai Me Love\" number in AHard Day's Night ble of dealing with what rock-vid por- Lil\" number in Footlight Parade or or \"Ticket to Ride\" in Help! retains its tends. In the words of Michel Foucault: \"Lullaby of Broadway\" in Gold Diggers brilliance, it's with his earlier film, It's \"The problem is now to constitute se- of /935), Berkeley's primary mode was Trad Dad (1962), that Lester's technique ries: to define the elements proper to pure abstract son et lumiere. \"By a Wa- can be best comprehended. While most each series, to fix its boundaries, to re- terfall\" in Footlight Parade, and \"I Only of the numbers in this cheerful jukebox veal its own specific type of relations, to Have Eyes For You\" in Dames are basi- musical are just a cut above average, the formulate its laws, and, beyond this , to cally processions of women in shifting Temperance Seven sequence is a bit describe the relations between different mathematical arrangements against more than that. Taking his cue from series, thus constituting series of series, fluid non-spacial , temporally specific fashion layo uts and certain avant-garde or 'tables': hence the ever increasing backdrops. Ah, but what processions! films , Lester moves the members of this J number of strata needed to distinguish Putting questions relating to quality musical group about in a way that sug- them.\" Duran Duran couldn't have said to one side (jar to one side), we can draw gests, but never quite becomes, dance. it better. • I SCOPITONE. These jukeboxes with miniature movie attachments on top were all the rage in France in the early Sixties, providing fans of Ie ye-ye with the sight as well as the sound of their idols. In the late Forties in the U.S. a visual jukebox designed along similar lines known as the \"Panoram Soundie\" had a brief vogue. But there's all the difference in the world between a ma- chine dispensing the likes of such jazz greats as Duke Ellington and Count Ba- sie (as the \"Soundies\" did) and Scopi- tone's offerings: Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday, Francoise Hardy, et al. The historical significance of Scopi- tone lies not just in its content. The device was a frank acknowledgment of pop music's weakness: it needed the projected \"personality\" of the performer to prop it up better before the consumer. Claude Lelouch began his career churn- 1 ing out these gaudy baubles of audio- visual zip-zap-and-zoom-developing I what would later serve as his fundamen- tal filmmaking style in the process. As the juxtaposition of the performer and background in Scopitone was often in- advertently grotesque (e.g., the svelte Dalida sashaying across a battlefield 41
Video Auteurs From Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. Disorienting images flash by your eyes, of dark, smoky rooms, dancing Bruce Conner's A Movie. girls in leather and pretty boys with pouts, accompanied by TV-muted lyrics At the time , it was a novelty-intercut- opus Breakilway? That brief bit of sound about lost love and betrayal. Suddenly ting static compositions in a single set- it's over-as illogically as it began-and ting to create the illusion of movement. and fury featured the voice and image of the last frame freezes in front of you. Fifty zillion rock-v ids later, the tech- MTV credits the band, song, record and nique has lost its power. a young dancer then known as Antonia record company, but no director. Auteurism is in disrepute, but isn't this • Christina Basilotta. Fifteen years later going a bit far? After all, successful vis- ualization of music has changed the face THE AVANT GARDE. We have ar- she was to return with a more abbrevi- of the music scene. Credit to promo di- rived at the final sedimental layer, the rectors is long overdue. mother lode, the Ali Baba's cave of im- ated moniker-Toni Basil-singing and ages and ideas plundered on so many Video directors are an Anglo-Ameri- occasions as to now resemble the after- dancing to Number One with Micky. Ou can gang that's mostly male, very young, math of a department store sale in a and soooo hip. Contrary to popular be- Tashlin comedy. There's hardly a rock- sont les go-go danseurs d' anton? lief-and visual evidence-very few of vid made that doesn't owe something to them come out of an advertising back- either Un Chien Andalou or Blood of a • ground. Like the musicians they accom- Poet. How many tortured faces staring pany, these boys carry rock and roll's out of windows into city streets where HARRUMPH! The basic problem has banner. The best of them got their edu- doubles walk aimlessly about (e.g., Kim cation in the intensive mid-Seventies, Carnes' Voyeur)? How many trips down less to do with technique than with tal- New Wave music scene. Some were hallways with pit stops to stare at sup- deejays at influential clubs, others were posedly outre images of fear and desire ent. All the precedents. cited above, filmmaking fans who wanted to work (e.g., Billy Joel's Pressure)? Kenneth with the bands-and use video promos Anger's Scorpio Rising and Bruce Con- with the exception of Scopitone, were as a quick training route to their real goal ner's A Movie have likewise served as of directing feature films. iceboxes raided at midnight by sensibili- designed to carry a certain weight and ties far simpler than theirs. The directors' love of music-and density, to produce a specific emotional- their ambitions-make it necessary for The avant garde probably shouldn't one top producer, Siovhan Barron, to complain. After all, wasn't Conner a intellectual effect. Rock-vid images keep reminding them that \"promos are chief architect of the form in his 1967 advertisements, not personal films .\" don't. Each image is seen as being inter- But many current promo directors need an ulterior motive: there just isn' t that changeable-one's as good as the next, much money be be made. Most promos cost about $30,000, and with film ex- if you didn't like that, how about this? penses being what they are-and no hope for cash from other markets- When nothing precise is intended-or there isn 't much left over for video crea- tors. It's kind of a trade off: the record even stated, in some cases-no impact companies, at first, couldn't command top advertising talent, so they hired rela- can be made. Consequently, it's not pos- tively inexperienced directors who were overworked and underpaid. The direc- sible to speculate on the future of rock tors, in turn, got a chance to build a reel. As top animator Annabel Jankel asserts, video, locked as it is in a frozen visual \"we were exploited, but it was a labor of love.\" rhetoric of posture and display. No fu- Last December, MTV's new urban ture here, just a permanent present exposure made it clear that promos in- creased record sales. For promo direc- forged from a condensed and simplified tors, this market research finding was \"a shot of amphetamine straight into the verSIOn of stylistic mannerisms of the jugular that increased budgets and pres- tige,\" according to Graeme Whifler, a past. -DAVID EHRENSTEIN seasoned and much-copied video direc- tor. Consequently, budgets of $150,000 for superstars are becoming common- place, and top admen number among 42
promo di Lester in his Sixties Bearles movies. uctoften s Unlike America's second-best atti- tude toWards televised music, Britain's music television programming-\"Top overly choreogra of the Pops,\" ''The Kenny Everett chael Jackson's 'Be:~~Jt.·~~~);l_ _ :~~~iJc;l~~~~~'\" with dancing punks th <ii\\JM~s~rat,w',. J~aq~~,~i~@i.;bilPl~linjgr.c~LY. Show\"-guaranteed an audience (and record sales) to a band with agood tape. street culture but is British directors, most of whom wanted West Side Story-pales ag::li~'f-;\"~I1t::: .~~~#l1~J~~~tClQPlRjJSl~~I¢\" to break into feature films, developed video's most popular style: the mini- promo director Steve visualization of Jackson's Barron's considerably less ($60,000) tape, the audience- Jackson playing a detective shadowing a purported illegitimate father-is forced to wonder whether the singer is real or a figment of the detective's seedy imagi- nation. Directors with track records, like Bar- ron, are often approached by established bands and asked to do the visuals. Most new bands are assigned directors by rec- ord companies. The record companies choose directors, for the most part, by the kind of look they want for a band- some directors are known for their abil- ity to make a mediocre band appear hot, even if their music is dead-and by how much the company wants to pay. Better known directors average budgets be- tween $50-80,000. Once a director is chosen, an adrena- lin-laced production schedule is fol- lowed. Working like comic characters in speeded-up silent films, video directors complete most tapes in a week: concep- tualize the first day, shoot the next two, and edit the last two. Twelve to eigh- teen-hour work days are not unusual, but most directors don't seem to mind' they like being right on the edge of things, helping create a band's visual style. And they understand that high speed production is not only a result of their relatively low budgets, it's necessi- tated by the record industry itself. The charts turn over so quickly that a top hit one week could be forgotten the next. Vid directors Ken Walz ... Video promos must be available as the song breaks. Given the importance of promos in a band's marketing, it's sometimes hard to remember that not long ago Americans saw watching bands on TV as a poor substitute for the real thing. As rock critic Richard Meltzer put it, \"Time was (properly) all TV was good for vis-a-vis actual ongoing (musical) culture was oc- casionally certifying it as a public fact.\" Our first video directors were docu- mentarians who recorded a band's live performance as much for posterity as for the present. However, acts taped for Graeme Whijler. record industry conventions, not docu- 43
movie. (The current video superstar, changing momentary flow of images. As Russell Mulcahey, even frames the im- a result, video messages tend to get a bit age in black to make its aspect ratio more confused. The images in Mulcahey's closely approximate that of 35mm film.) tape for Billy Joel 's Allentown echo the Shamelessly borrowing ideas from fea- song's concern for unemployed steel- tures , they create promos more like workers in scenes set in a factory shower speeding memories of movies than the that also reflect the filmmaker's un- real thing. In low-rent three and a half abashed admiration of the male phy- minute epics, connectives are gone, as sique. Can these well-modelled bods, are all subtleties of dialogue and mean- the picture of health and male beauty, ing. What's left is a sense of story, really be suffering in Allentown? clipped and associative, like the accom- panying lyrics. \"After the frustrating attempt to tell a story in four minutes, the subtleties of \"My idea of a promo is to accentuate dialogue seem fascinating,\" claims the music,\" claims Dick Mass, director Jankel. Luckily, many rock promo su- of Twilight Zone, a mini-movie that visu- perstars are seeing their dreams come alizes Golden Earring's hit song about a true: they are being offered feature secret agent caught in a tight spot. Star- films. Mulcahey, Barron and several ring a hunky lead singer who is bound, others are currently directing or in nego- shot at, and taunted by dangerous, sexy tiations for teen-oriented feature films dancing women clad in black leather, -horror flicks , rock ' n' roll stories and Mass's engrossing video captures visual the like. Producers reason that teens- styles ranging fromjilm nair to F osse-fu- ploitation flicks command a good part of eled musical. today's filmgoing audience. Few have a better sense of teen aesthetics than Though the tape appears to be the rock'n'roll directors. If the films make it work of a Russel Mulcahey protege, at the box office, video may prove the Mass is a film director who accidently feature film training ground of the entered the video music arena: he was Eighties. Why not? King Vidor made it asked to make a tape by Golden Ear- by directing two-reelers, and many of ring's drummer, Cesar Zuiderwijk, a fan today's reigning directors-Sidney Lu- of Mass's televised shorts. Since Mass met, John Frankenheimer, Arthur dislikes most promos, as relying too Penn, George Roy Hill , to name just a heavily on \"video trickery\" , he decided few-got their start in that \"debased\" to create a very condensed feature film art form known as Fifties television. in which lyrics substitute for a full- fleshed script. Appreciative viewers- With the top boys going over to fea- including Michael Jackson and Fleet- ture films , we're likely to see more wood Mac-of the riveting end product Americans in video music's second gen- are amazed to find that Twilight Zone is eration; young American film and rock Mass's first promo effort, and that pro- fans have become hip to video potential. duction was budgeted at an amazingly And, true to form, this next generation is low $16,000. The tape was such a suc- already reacting against the dominant cess in Mass's native Holland that it is mini-movie style. Yuri Siwolop, a 22- shown before Pink Floyd's feature The year-old director who just completed a Wall, and his just wrapped horror flick tape for Modem English claims, ''I'm about a murderous elevator will be dis- sick of motion picture looks. I'm influ- tributed by Warner Brothers. enced by TV, by interpreting alot of info. You can't organize information in a Too many mini-movies offer misogy- cinematic, narrative style and expect nistic visions of women shaking asses people to watch.\" (The influence of TV and being props. Racist visions are all is evident in the work of director David too common as well, as in Hot Coffee in Mallet, responsible for the seminal Bed, where the coffee of note is a black David Bowie video work, but it's not a woman. British director Don Letts was prevalent aesthetic.) We're also likely to inspired to proclaim, \"You can pollute see more musicians taking a strong role the airwaves, just like you can pollute in developing promo concepts and feel- the air.\" Other directors don't care about ing the pressure to incorporate audi- the content's implications, they just ence-pleasing visuals in their live acts. want the record to sell so they' ll get ' Following the lead of David Byrne and more gigs. Unfortunately, rock's biker Thomas Dolby, many musicians will mentality, perpetuated in racist and sex- create their own tapes. Directors may ist clips, sells records. very well find themselves overseeing true musical theater productions. Whatever the ideological content, video directors agree that it's just plain -ARLENE ZEICHNER hard to tell a story through a constantly
Encyclo-Video MGMM began in 1980 with Lexi Godfried producing, David Mallet and Russell Mulcahey directing. In 1982, Godfried departed and two new partners came in, directors Brian Grant and pro- ducer Scott Millaney. MGMM has pro- duced over 400 videos to date, more than eighty last year alone. BRIAN GRANT Age: Early 30s Home Base: London Tapes: Olivia Newton John, Ph'\\J.fi{~al;f Stevie Nicks, Stand Back; Peter Shock the Monkey. Background: Began as lighting eraman. Opened video music in Los Angeles with producer Sco t Mil- lany in 1979. Aesthetic: Spans the briage between the documentary ,an fabulistic. He likes \"film neir, dark films , black things.\" His favorite tape, Shock the MonKey, a riveting ritualistic examina- Paul Justman on J . Geils set. !'ion of Peter Gabriel in several reincar- his native Australia to make rock 1979 started video music production nations , \"has to do with man losing pri- promos. Went to London for a few company that eventually turned into meva l instincts; it's a ty pe of weeks in 1978 to make a film of a rock Limelight. nigbtmare. \" band and never left. Freelance directed Aesthetic: Barron's tapes are whimsi- Future plans: Feature films. Currently for John Roseman productions until he cal, slightly surreal mini-movies: \"I like in nego ~iation to make \"a complex co-founded MGMM. things that don't look quite real , but the thriller\" fo r a major studio. Aesthetic: The mini-movie, almost al- images need to tell a story.\" Signature: DAVID MALLET ways characterized by pretty boys, blow- the crane shot. Age: mid3Qs Home Base: London ing curtains, water and flowers . Future plans: Will direct Spider Hive, a Tapes: All David Bowie tapes ; Boom- town Rats, I Don't Like Mondays; Joan Future plans: Completing a horror sixties melodrama, kids-against-adults Jen, Crimson and Clover. film about pigs called Razorback, pro- story funded by the bankroller of Hal- Background: ne of the first to make duced by English direcor David Put- loween, Moustapha Akkad. promos in England. Worked on Shindig with Jack Goode and then at the BBC tnam and set in Australia. THOMAS DOLBY for Juke Box Jury a d Top of the Pops. Age: 24 Worked for John Roseman productions • before co-founding M6MM. In 1982, London based Limelight Aesthetic: Tends to work best with artist participants. Has a TV style. Productions approached Simon Fields Home Base: London Future plans: More romos, more of Gowers, Field, and Flaherty in Los Tapes : Blinded by Science. commercials. Not interested into feature films. Angeles to act as Limelight's representa- Background: Musician tives in the U.S. Flaherty decamped Aesthetic: \"I think that visuals are very early this year and GFF merged into important, and that more artists are go- Limelight. The Limelight directors are ing to emerge through stimulating their responsible for most of the outfit's audience in a visual-dramatic way promo product, Gowers and Fields for rather than simply making music.\" special projects such as live in-concert Future plans: Making more music, 'n sentations. Limelight has produced creating musical theater, making some 200 tapes to date, averaging four per tapes for bands. RUSSELL MULCAHEY week. Age: 28 Home Base: London DON LETTS Tapes: Billy Joel, Allentown. Pressure; Spandu Ballet, She Loved Like Diamond; TEVEBARRON Age: 26 The Motels, Only The Lonely; Billy Idol, White Wedding. Age: 26 Home Base: London Background: Began as independent Home Base: London Tapes: Clash, London Calling, Rock the film editor on documentaries and short Top Tapes: Fleetwl>Od ac, Hold Me; films. Started a production company in Joe Jackson, Stepping Out; Michaellack- Casbah; Pretenders, Chain Gang; Musi- son, Billie Jean; OMD. Maid ofOrleans. cal \\I uth , Pass the Dutchie. Background: Began as cameraman on feature films; assisted on Superman. In Bacli8rou : Used t deejay at the eRoxy, club where groups lilt tfie a h had their start. Turned to Super 8 re- 46
cordings of the bands. When they got ested in \"trying to entertain and have a KENWALZ big, they hired him to do the promos. little humor in a world that can be hu- Age: 41 morless and fierce.\" Home Base: New York Aesthetic: Humourous tapes owing a Tapes: Dr. Hook, Baby Makes Her debt to Richard Lester and his American Future plans: He is completing a fea- Blue Jeans Talk; John Butcher, Axis; fans-Chuck Statler, Captain ture, Rock and Roll Hotel, about three Waitresses, I Know What Boys Like. Beefheart, etc. He likes \"spunky, kids who want to be rock stars. Will Background: Originally an advertising threatening music\" and \"bands that are continue making rock promos. account executive, he switched to the bands, not a bunch of actors.\" Future plans: \"The next step is to get STEVE KAHN music field in 1972 with concert footage out of the restrictions of pop promos. I'd of Robert Flack and Donny Hathaway. Age: 40 like to make a feature film, one that is Home Base: New York Has since worked as a freelance creator musically orientated.\" Tapes: Lou Reed, I Like Women; War, of convention films and promos. • You Got the Power; Village People; Bow Aesthetic: Another proponent of the Independents: Wow Wow , I Want Candy. mini-movie style, Walz likes \"to tell sto- Background: Began making video at ries with a minimum of visual effects,a ANNABELJANKEL RCA in 1971. Produced sales conven- maximum of good clear story lines.\" Age: 28 tions, multi-media events. Recently left Future plans: He's working on a fea- Home Base: London RCA to act as independent. Has made ture film and is in negotiation with pay Tapes: Tom Tom Club, Genius of more than 60 videos. cable for long-form music projects. Love; Donald Fagen, New Frontier; Aesthetic: \"I don't go for art and Elvis Costello, Accidents Will Happen. shock. I go for entertainment. I want GRAEME WHIFLER Background: Studied at film school. them to sit back and enjoy the record.\" Age: 31 Joined Cucumber Studios of 1978. In Future plans: More music work, In- Home Base: San Francisco addition to doing promo work, with her cluding straight concerts. Tapes : The Residents , One Minute partner Rocky Morton she is responsible Moves; Sparks, Cool Places. for numerous commercials and TV spe- John Sanborn. Background: Went to film school. From 1979-83, worked on Ralph Rec- cials. ords as the in-house video director. Aesthetic: Jankel's work is character- Opened own shop in 1983. Aesthetic: Though not well known to ized by charming animation combined the video music public, Whifler is prob- with live action footage. She feels that ably the most quoted video music \"animation is an experimental form of maker. \"I'm starting to enjoy TV. I like filmmaking [that] promos should have a the TV aesthetic and enjoy shooting for sense of experimentation. [the visuals] it. Like the big images that flash by can be abstract, like the music. \" quickly, the tight editing. TV is impres- sive, you can't extend a thought or an Future plans: Wants to do feature idea very long. You don' t have to be as films. \"It's inevitable. After the frustrat- concerned about detail.\" ing attempt to tell a story in four min- utes, the subtleties of dialogue seem fascinating. \" PAUL JUSTMAN JOHN SANBORN Future plans: More promos, a feature film. Age: 33 Age: 28 Home Base: Los Angeles Home Base: New York Tapes: J. Geils, Centerfold, Freeze- Tapes: Jim Capaldi, That's Love; King Also of Note: Tapes of: frame, Angel In Blue; Rick Springfield, Crimson, Heartbeat. Louis Aria .... . ......... Ric Ocasek Don't Talk to Strangers. Background: Sanborn studied film Derek Burbridge .. George Thorogood Background: A philosophy major in production in college and turned to Joe Dea ................ Greg Kihn college, he turned to independent film- video in 1976. With his former partner, Glow Productions .... Altered Images, making. Was co-editor of Robert Frank's KitFitzgerald, he became known as vid- Psychedelic Furs rockdoc about the Rolling Stones, Cock- eo art's sassiest and savviest proponent. Godley and Creme .... Duran, Duran, sucker Blues . Also worked on several in- Aesthetic: Sanborn's tapes never show Police dependent documentaries. Brother of the group, almost always have words rac- Keefco ............. . ....... Junior Seth Justman, J. Geils band keyboar- ing across the screen and are so quickly Bananarama dist. edited, all of the images cannot be read Paul Morrisey. ..... . .... Kim Larsen Aesthetic: Justman's ligh thearted at the first viewing. He sees video Dave Robinsn ......... Lene Lovich tapes skillfully incorporate lessons promos as a natural extension of his Robert Palmer learned from independent film. \"Ken- avant-garde work, Video shorts are Chuck Statler. .......... . .... Devo neth Anger probably did the best rock .\"rhythmic things without a complex with Jerry Casale videos ever. Anger's stuff is artistically plot, with no recognizable story line but Ed Steinberg.............. Polyrock honest, not what like goes down now.\" with visual logic. ' Taylor-Haggerty ... . .... The GoGos, Though he's been criticized for the nu- Future: Sanborn is currently working Hall and Oates bile sexism of Centerfold, in which on two tapes with composer Philip Julian Temple . . .......... Stray Cats night-gown clad teens jump in front of Glass, He plans to continue juggling art (Limelight) The Kinks the band's lead singer, he's most inter- and promo careers. -ARLENE ZEICHNER 47
Name: Bob Giraldi MTV's Super Market it touted as an \"extensive cross-market- Age: 42 ing campaign\" to promote the release of Home Base: New York It seems that old adage-you'll never look Dan Aykroyd's recent film , Doctor De- at music the same way again-is coming troit. In addition to an extensive adver- Tape: Michael Jackson, Beat It. Filmed true in Tulsa . -Tulsa, One Year Later tising buy, MTV played a video clip in the Watts section of Los Angeles and from the film, intercut with DEVO sing- choreographed by Tony-winner Mi- MTV: Music Television Research ing the theme song. (DEVO, inciden- chael Peters (Dreariigirls) . The extras tally, did not appear in the film.) Other were from a local street gang called The MTV is currently in the process of MTV-Doctor Detroit tie-ins included Crips, named for their habit of crippling extending its programming mandate to Aykroyd's appearance as a guest VeeJay their victims. Within a month of its reinterpret and transform one artimedia on the network. The star hosted twenty MTV premiere, Beat It was the most form to another. The rock-around-the- Aykroyd act-alikes. Universal also had a requested and aired rockvid in the U.S. clock network is introducing another drawing on MTV for a $25,000 limo that component to its mix: movies. MTV's appeared in the film. Upcoming films Background: Advertising, first at movie offerings-Flashdance and Doc- slated for videos from Universal include Young and Rubican, then as head of TV tor Detroit have already been added to Streets of Fire (\"The Blasters do the production for DellaFemina, Travisano the playlist-are not coming attractions, soundtrack\") and Capital Cab (\" heavy & Partners; he was a founding partner talk-show clips, or necessarily commer- metal music\"). of Amp~rsand Productions . In 1973 he cials. Added to the rotation are several founded Bob Giraldi Productions, select minutes of film footage , no voice- Movie company executives are confi- where he produces and directs an as- overs please, accompanied by MTV- dent that MTV will lure teens away tounding 125 commercials a year, sanctioned music from the pic. from video game arcades and back to among them the Miller Lite spots. He theaters, even as the record industry has has won more than 300 advertising Movie studios produce and provide been rejuvenated by MTV play. Teen- these videos (as do the record com- agers are not only watching MTV, awards . His rockvid work seems an out- panies) to reach their young adult mar- they' re buying albums recorded by ap- growth of his ground breaking work di- ket. Movies, radio, TV, records-MTV pearing groups. Once content to play recting commercials for Broadway is growing into a one-stop entertainment tried-and-true recording stars, radio sta- shows (Pippin , Evita, A Chorus Line, center for teens , in which a movie with a tions have opened up their rotation lists. Sophisticated Ladies, Dreamgirls). youth oriented soundtrack such as And with at-home taping costing the Flashdance can benefit from what a Par- Aesthetics: Giraldi wants his rock amount marketing executive calls \"cross record industry an estimated $1 billion promos to be mini-musicals, a genre pollination.\" See the MTV video, see in sales annually, MTV makes record extended in his second rockvid , Diana the movie, buy the record. company executives think they've died Ross' Pieces oflee, shot in New York in and gone to teen heaven. June on a generous budget. Rockvids Flashdance director Adrian Lyne ed- give Giraldi the chance to express and ited four videos for MTV play-but the Cross-pollination is fertile ground for expand on his filmmaking craft. From Irene Cara hit single video What A Feel- the six major record companies- commercials he learned how to convey ing was a paid advertisement, as the Warner Bros., Columbia (CBS) Rec- the story lines of song lyrics succinctly song was considered too disco for MTV's ords, A&M, EMI, Capitol, and Poly- and visually; in his videos he can write, strict rock programming format. Para- Gram-and that's good for MTV So far direct, and \"style.\" Giraldi: \"I can tell a mount considers it money well-spent. record companies have provided gratis story as I see it. I can call all the shots!\" \"The reviews, \" freely admitted one ex- to the network tapes of their (frequently ecutive, \"were rotten. The MTV tape unknown) artists and MTV has had a Future Plans: Having established triggered people to see it. And it got never-ending free supply of pre-fab pro- himself in the top end of the market terrific word of mouth. \" Paramount esti- gramming; that could change. MTV is with his two promos, Giraldi is playing mates Flashdance with a near $50-mil- currently available in 12.5 million cable the future by ear, while continuing to lion boxoffice by the end of June , the homes. The average young-adult MTV- work full-steam in film advertising. film's third month in release. er (12-34) watches 4.4 days a week, sixty-three minutes a day-except on -ELLIOT SCHULMAN MTV-movie videos won't become an weekends, where the MTV dosage industry standard for every movie-the jumps to ninety-one minutes. Fully 81 cable network flatly rejected the Joe percent of MTV viewers first heard of an Cocker-Jennifer Warnes Up Where We artist while watching MTV; 63 percent Belong from An Officer and a Gentlemen bought or plan to buy an album by artists -but with the majority of films targeted seen on MTV These A.C. Nielsen for young, moviegoing audiences , many studies were commissioned by the net- will. Paramount has several MTV tapes work to keep the programming coming. ready for this month's Stayin' Alive, the Nielsen's policy of not doing surveys un- Saturday Night Fever sequel starring til the universe of U.S. television homes John Travolta and directed by Sylvester reaches 15 percent has put some poten- Stallone. Rather than edit the tapes after the movie has completed production, Uni- versal has set up a special video unit to produce MTVideos while the film is be- ing shot. The studio embarked on what 4H
Search
