•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society ofLincoln Center Volume 22, Number 5 September-October 1986 Amazon Grace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Company Man .... . . . . . . . . . . . .16 In the mid-Eighties, the trend F. Murray Abraham has played is clear: Major filmmakers it risky by playing a company have taken to the Bush in of men who play it safe. The search of more than loin cloth Inquisitor in The Name of The liberation. Harlan Kennedy Rose, Abraham is given the considers Roland Joffe's The third degree by Gideon Bach- Mission in light of a dozen mann. films that have articulated the West's search for meaning. A new generation of film- ~. . ._ .....~~ AAa-Eee-AAa! makers have started hitting their stride with films about Two Frenchmen ... lovers and laws. David Lynch knocks over the rock of a small Bertrand Blier has been at the American town in Blue Velvet, front lobbing shells in the war and David Chute got him to between the sexes for a dec- sexpound in a Bob's Big Boy ade. Now, Blier tells Dan (page 32). Alex Cox charts the Yakir that \"The war is over. downward slide of Sid and Nobody knows who won.\" In his new film Menage, Blier Nancy from nowhere to obliv- r manhandles men, women, and movie making. And Wil- ion, to Todd McCarthy (page \" /' liam Hackman observes 35). What do men want? Ask Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Dorris Dorrie, who told all Midnight as one more example about Men to Marcia Pally of how the French have always (page 42). Spike Lee blisters understood American artists the black (and white) screen in better than we, and all that jazz She's Gotta Have It, and Mar- (page 23.) laine Glicksman was all ears (page 46). And Hanif Kurei- shi reads Marcia Pally writer's riot act (page 51). Also in this issue: for the way of all flesh films. David Orbits: Vincente Minnelli ......70 Chute listened in. A sensualist of the camera, Vincente Journals ....................2 Minnelli seemed to play by all the rules. The one thing no one can agree on is Heart Byrne Mall ............62 Or did he? Stephen Harvey eulogizes. how to spell Muammar Qadaffi's name. David Byrne is one smart Talking This is how we spell it in the table of Head. In True Stories, Byrne offers a Letters: Rate Debate ..........72 contents. Harlan Kennedy went to the vision of life in the shopping mall of Our Tipper Gore, Jack Valenti, Alan Reit- Taormina festival, Mary Corliss went to Town. Bill Wyman appreciates . man, and more rate Lois P. Sheinfeld's Cannes, and nobody learned how to X-ray of the Ratings System in our June spell whatshisname. So they watched TV: Divorce Court ...........65 issue. She gets four X's and an A (for movies and waited for Godot. Or One session of Judge Keene's court of Aces) . Godeaux. Or Gohdoh. banana splits, and you'll stop answering the Personals. Jack Barth chronicles the Back page: .................80 Sultan ofSweat, II ............56 docket of folks who once said \"I do,\" but You loved him last issue, in Part I. Now, now say \"Oh, (rhymes with docket.)\" Cover photo courtesy Island Pictures. David F. Friedman, the Ruth of babes, concludes his tale of tails with a lament Co-Edirors: Harlan Jacobson , Richard Corliss. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impavido . Art Director and Cover Design : Elliot Schulman. Assistant Ediror: Marlaine Glicksman. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Ediror: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Hornilla, Jr. Edirorial Intern: Robert Jacklosky. Executive Direcror, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch . Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1986 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved . The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. FILM COMMENT (ISSNOOI5-119X). 140 West 65th Street, New York, N.Y. 10023, U.S.A., is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers , $22 for twelve numbers . Elsewhere $18 for six numbers , $34 for twelve numbers , payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News, Sandusky, OH 44870. Postmaster: send address changes ro FILM COMMENT, 140 West Sixty-Fifth Street, New York, N.Y. 10023, U.S.A.
Two JVho Dared the Colonel TAORMINA OF BABEL Taormina, Sicily, seemed a place for .' --- the brave or foolish to visit this year. To the south, a certain The jury at Taormina. about Third World movies whose visuals Libyan colonel known affectionately as resemble old dishcloths can only marvel \"cane insano \" had us within easy missile Every year at least one masterpiece at the images here. Many exteriors have a range . To the west, in Palermo, the co mes out of left field; and this year it was hothouse surreality, as if shot on a biggest Mafia trial in hi story was in Almacita di Desolato from the Dutch soundstage. There are painted, expres- progress, with more than 400 concrete- Antilles. sionist skydrops and an elasticity of shoe manufacturers facing the music. perspective between high-focus fore- And all around Taormina itself, the hills Clean yo ur spectacles for this one: [he grounds and lyrically diffused back- were alive with the sound of Michael visuals are asto nishing. Fauve-edged Car- grounds. (Many scenes seem to be in 3- Cimino shooting The Sicilian. The ibbean primitivism meets fuzzed lumi- D) . Throughout, the colors glow and sou nd? Well, the deafening silence actu- twist as if painted with watercolors that ally. Closed-set strictures made the anosity la David Watkin as we whirl are still in flux. Director Felix De Rooy, production as elusive as its hero , the an ex-art student, also production- Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, cele- through a story of magic, witchcraft, designed the movie, and on this evidence brated in the famous song: \"They seek he's the most excitingly developed new him here! They seek him there! They flight, murder and childbirth. In old eye to have emerged in world cinema. finally give up and go to have a pizza.\" Curacao at [he turn of the century, a Around the splendors of this colos- Mount Etna, the world's finest volcano young priestess (Mariane Rolle) sworn to sal oddity, the lone and level also- was sulky, moody, and dormant - far chastity falls in love with a spirit man from rans stretch far away. Charles from the bubbling scarlet pimple, or the underworld and bears his child. Gormley's Heavenly Pursuits is a gentle thrower-up of ill-considered lava, we all Pursued by her village's wrath, she tale of miracles in a Scottish school. Self- knew and loved in 1984. But even Etna hightails across [he landscapes and in and deprecating teacher Tom Conti insists looked down on a troubled Mediterra- out of a Glauber Rocha-style movie also that the humdrum , everyday 'miracles' he nean. Among the yachts , a warship boasting song, dance, pageantry, and full- works with backward kids are more swung at anchor in full view of journalists frontal symbolism. Meanwhile, her child important [han the wacko series of and guests guzzling lunch by the hotel dies and enters the mystic realm of the happenings-his own survival of a 50- pool down in Capotaormina. Helicopters unborn , and the audience's preconcep- foot fall, a crippled girl who walks again- frequently buzzed overhead. Many sus- tions of Caribbean cinema die and enter which are being cried up as God-given by pected that the hardware had been lined the 'realm of the hitherto unconceived . up by the festival, to force us to go to the films. Some journalists have been known The film blends the religious with the everyday, the sensual with the spiritual, to be reluctant to do this. In late as if we're in an undivided evolutionary dawn where the schism between man the afternoon, after a vinous lunch , they lie animal and man [he angel has not yet marinaded and barbecued a[ pools ide , in been born. grave danger of being ' skewered by nearsighted waiters who mistake them for Filmgoers brought up to be polite kebab meat. I myself was once served a shish kebab that bore a suspicious resemblance to Roger Ebert. Having an appetite in no way sufficient to [he occasion, I jokingly asked the waiter to exchange it for Gene Siskel. I was then brought a shish kebab that bore an alarming resemblance to Gene Siskel. Since than I have kept to fish. The films in Taormina are no hardship , since festival director, however Gug- lielmo Biraghi always gets the mix right. 2
It's back. Oh, is it ever back! Glamour spots with gIomour people come on, wen 00 going out with the stars! Remember Hollywood? That's the town where the world's most beautiful women and the world's handsomest men used to live. By day they made pictures. At night they made whoopee - at the world's most glamorous night spots, naturally. You remember. You couldn't pick up a newspaper or a movie magazine, or Life, or Look, without seeing Ty or Bob or Cary with his flame of the moment. They took them to places that became household names, as famous as the Empire State Building and the White House. The Trocadero. Earl Carroll's. The Brown Derby. The Cocoanut Grove. Oh, to be even a waiter or a cigarette girl at one of those magical places! Now you can do better. You can go there in style. Jim Heimann is your host, in the sparkling pages of. .. '0~ The Glamour-and-Fun-and-Gossip ~~ Book of the Year o Almost 100 photos in radiant color - from delightful miniatures of collectible matchbooks to larger-than-fu II-page spectacu lars 0 250 handsome black-and-white photos - in- cluding dozens that are full-page or larger o Printed thruout on gleaming 100-pound stock for superb reproduction and that luxurious \"feel\" o Oversized 10 x 10 ------------------------------------------- How the Oub Works • •Yl~/~.I~.IAI• •~.I Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you get a Free copy of the Oub bulletin, PREVIEWS, ..eeac..... which offers the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Alternates: books on films, TV, 15 Oakland Avenue· Harrison, N.V 10528 *music, occasionally records and videocassettes. If you want the Featured Selection, do *nothing. It will come automatically. If you don't want the Featured Seleaion or you do Please accept my membership in the MovielEntertainment want an Alternate, indicate your wishes on the handy card enclosed and return it by the Book Club and send me, FREE and postpaid, the beautiful *deadline date. The majority of Oub books are offered at 2().30% discounts, plus a $39.95 volume, Out with the Stars by Jim Heimann . I agree *charge for shipping and handling. As soon as you buy and pay for 4 books, records or to buy 4 additional books, records or videocassettes at videocassettes at regular Oub prices, your membership may be ended at any time, either by regular Club prices over the next 2 years . I also agree to the *you or by the Oub. If you ever receive a Featured Seleaion without having had 10 days *to decide if you want it, you may return it at Oub expense for full credit. For every Club rules spelled out in this coupon. FC-37 book, record or videocassette you buy at regular Oub price, you receive one or more Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ Bonus Book Certificates. These entitle you to buy many Oub books at deep discounts, Address *usually (i).8()li7o off. These Bonus Books do not count toward fulfilling your Oub obliga- City_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _State _ _ _Zip _ __ tion but do enable you to buy fine books at giveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news about members and their hobbies. You are welcome to send·in similar items. The *Oub will publish any such item it deems suitable, FREE. This is a real CLUB! Good *service. No computers! Only one membership per household.
the media. Colleague Helen Mirren singer Billy Steel. Place: Paris, France. Wandering into the byways and supports him. Gormley's pic, likable and Was Billy murdered? Was he gay? And faubourgs of the festival, the invertebrate, has plenty of irony but too most intriguing oddity outside little iron. what is the secret of Anna Karina's the competition was God Slot, a video participation, who coscripted the movie documentary assembling off-air footage Its companion movie from the British and wrote herself a kamikaze comeback of sundry American TV evangelists. The isles, Ireland's Eat The Peach, is about a role as a French chanteuse? She cannot film's maker, a young woman who wished stunt motorcyclist (Stephen Brennan) sing (move over, Jeanne Moreau in to be identified only as 'Z: has combed who sees Elvis Presley's Roustabout on Querelle), she cannot persuade Berry to the networks for all the hot gospelers she TV and builds himself a \"wall of death\": put the camera in the right places, and could find and baked them all up in this i.e. 'a giant' centrifugal drum for racing she cannot save a movie that is shot in hilarious, horrific video pie. One of these around sideways. The film lost Sarah impenetrable murk and staggers from preacher-folk - Pat Robertson- Miles early on - her star cameo shot to one ill-dubbed mid-Atlantic dialogue announced that he was going to be a attract sponsorship ended on the cutting- scene to the next. presidential contender. Why? Because a room floor-and it clearly lost its direc- hurricane was approaching Virginia, and tion not much later. It becomes a Taormina's specialty has long been he got down on his knees and prayed that centrifugal action gimmick for the skimp- Babel-like co-productions like this, in it would go away. And it did. Lawdy ily sketched story and characters to race which two or-more countries fight over a lawdy. Since God had taken care of that around in ever-diminishing circles. Peter movie's cultural identity like cats over a hurricane, it must be a sign that he meant Ormrod directed, John Kelleher pro- fish bone. Fancy a Kuwaiti-Scottish this guy to take care of America. Etc., duced, and both cowrote. political thriller with Flemish dialogue? etc. Or a Chinese Western bankrolled in the In the please-stand-clear-we-are-com- Caymans and scripted in Sanskrit? Taor- This gave me pause for thought, and so pletely-crazy category of movies-a mina is for you. did Ms. Z's video. After three or four beloved Taormina perennial-there was minutes of mature consideration, I Tunisia's Rih Essed (Man of Ashes), At least Florian Furtwangler's popular decided it was time to fight the raging tide Belgium's Springen (Jump), and the Tommaso Blu, a German film with Italian of the Moral · Majority at the ballot box: I French-Swiss coproduction (in English), dialogue, makes up for its complex am throwing my own hat in the ring for The Last Song. pedigree with a dead simple message. the U.S. presidency. I'm concerned about Too simple for my taste, as its left-wing life on Earth, and I'm not afraid of it. I The first, written and directed by sexist fatso of a hero (Alessandro Haber) worry about the guy who wants to nuke Nouri Bouzid, has childhood rape, com- inveighs against his factory job, fucks \"Evil Empires\"-we've already got that, plusive flashbacks, cat-swinging, and anything female that moves, and ends up and it's only one small step for a man who several other things to take Aunt Edna to. becoming a dog. The message is: it's a turns back hurricanes to turning back Many lauded the bold blows struck for dog's life being a member of the incoming missiles after the button's been liberalism and tolerance, including _a oppressed proletariat, so why not behave pressed. Some of those evangelists make sympathetic role in an Arab film for an like one and/or turn into one? Woof, Reagan look like a Democrat and Star aged Jewish seer. But all in all-as its woof. Wars like yesterday's technology. tormented young hero (lmed Malaal) flits about Tunis pursued by his own and his To this bowl of marrowbone-enriched What better start for a presidential country's traumas and by a tiresomely Marxism -Italian audiences loved it, and hopeful than to oversee the spread of handheld camera-Bouzid shows that in it was the second most packed competi- American movie culture into the Euro- modern cinema you can now have not tion pic in Taormina-I prefer Pieter pean mainland? This year's American only spaghetti Westerns but couscous Verhoeffs De Droom (The Dream), a Film Week at Taormina, the festival's psychodramas. stalwart Dutch historical film with Frisian fourth, made the open-air Greco-Roman dialogue, or Federico Bruno's English- theatre-\"More stars in our sky than in an Jean-Pierre de Decker's Springen is not dubbed Black Tunnel from Italy. This was MGM photo call\"-crackle and sparkle to so much couscous, more bang-bang, as the most packed competition pic in such boxoffice big ones as Su e Giu in the sound of a film-maker repeatedly Taormina, with a cheerfully obscure Beverly Hills, Poltergeist 2, L'Atra shooting himself in the foot accompanies thriller plot pounded into vivacity by a Dimensione, and FIX-Effetto Mortale. this would-be surreal tale of an old music track including Orffs \"Carmina As ever, the U.S. movies were dubbed people's home where everyone has his Burana.\" into Italian for the audience of 20,000 so daydreams realized. The film's aspira- that, for example, the dog in Beverly tions toward poetic profundity are And a mighty burst of applause, please, Hills barked not \"Woof woof\" but \"Woof-a undone by its hectoring, symbolic sema- for Argentina's Malayunta. A free-living, woof\", with an expressive thumb-to- phore, whereby every character (the probably gay sculptor share-lets his middle-finger gesture of the right paw. general, the politican, the opera singer) apartment to a puritanical, middle-aged comes wearing or waving an existential couple-a fastidious man and his spin- At Taormina this year, there was a identity tag. sterish sister. Soon the normal tensions of marathon talk-in in the gardens of the abode-sharing escalate to bondage, tor- 15th Century Palazzo Corvaja, the festi- But fasten your seatbelts. These two ture; and murder, and the Pinteresque val's headquarters. It accompanied the pictures are as masterworks compared to Hispano-fable of interlopement has Brian De Palma retrospective and the The Last Song. With a plot trying to cross grown into a whopping parable about publication of an Italian book on De Citizen Kane and Eddie and the Cruis- power play, political cruelty, and the Palma. As the book's authors expatiated ers, French helmer Dennis Berry follows desapericidos. Directed by Jose Santiso, on in polysyllabic Italian, a tree visibly a pair of sexily disheveled lifeforms the film is tight as a glove, tough as a fist, grew taller behind them and a dog, who (Gabrielle Lazure and Scott Renderer) as and the best Argentinian movie since The they investigate the strange death of rock Official Story. 4
•••••••••••••••••••.r=~~=-~' •• 1'-;:~oL..t.. ••••••••you missed the hottest ticket in town , the New York \" •Film Festival, don't fret. You can still see the best of past • ••festivals on UPTOWN, Manhattan's Moviechannel, start- •,prUprnn,\"'r 19th. That's when UPTOWN kicks its ·•York Film Festival Tribute. It's a special ••the finest in cinema to our televi • • ••••••••••••••••••ms like STRAN R THAN . Coming this fall, UPTOWN will feature DREAMS , TOSCA'S KISS , DREAM- FROM OUTER SPACE plus special to great actors .and directors. Over 24 films come your way on UPTOWN every for only $6.95 - almost the price of one movie in New York City. And if you order UPTOWN now, you can save over 50% on your connection. Let UPTOWN be your ticket to great entertainment value year round. For more details , call Group W Cable by dialing C-A-B-L-E-T-V (222-5388). GHOLIP W CABLE UPTOWN is a premium entenainment service available exc lusive ly from Gro up W eable serving Manhattan nonh of 86th street on the eastside and nonh of 79th street on the westside .
had been listening intently from a nearby monopolized all anxieties, and who then director Roland Joffe (The Killing never showed up. Fields), and stars Robert De Niro and balcony, yawned and fell asleep. Guest Jeremy Irons. No wonder it was whis- So the U.S. contingent at Cannes was pered that, before the Festival had begun, chairperson Lynda Myles, formerly of depleted by the widespread American the jury had been urged to give the top belief that we are the chosen people, even prize to The Mission, sight unseen. the Pacific Film Archive and Edinburgh as terrorist targets. But a few of us were macho enough to endure two weeks of Sight seen, alas, is another matter. The Filmfest, sat with a smile of deep-frozen sybaritic pleasures; and a few of those film begins with Irons, as a Jesuit pleasures were movies. We could disdain assigned to penetrate the Indians' remote interest which must in the circumstances the sun's embrace for an afternoon and highlands , climbing a sheer waterfall cliff catch up on films we had missed back - thrilling indeed, unless you realize that be called heroic. home, like James Ivory's elegant and he's got to survive the ordeal or there's no affecting A Room With a View or the movie. A bit later, De Niro, as a renegade The publication at last bounced into smart little thriller Critters, which soldier who has joined the Jesuits, scales smoothly achieved the blend of satire, the same cliff while dragging a ponderous everyone's hands proved to be a handy horror, and comedy that had stuck in pack of supplies to expiate his sins of Gremlins' throat. We could patrol the belligerence and murder. It is not until filmography of the De Palma oeuvre, intimate screening rooms of the Palais much later still that we learn that this des Festivals to see oddities like Claude arduous route to the jungle was unneces- slightly shorter than the discussion Chabrol's minor but engaging Inspector sary - you can get there by boat! The Lavartin - always a treat to find Jean- Mission is full of such empty heroics. By preceding it. The book paid tribute to Claude Brialy and Bernadette Lafont the end it's a lavish snooze. But you can misbehaving in high style-or Rosa von bet crusadoes to croissants that the film's FILM COMMENT, citing three seminal Praunheim's A Virus Has No Moral, a sort success in Cannes will be echoed in of science-fiction farce about AIDS from America with a slew of Academy Award features on De Palma, by David Thom- the gay German avant garde. nominations. The burghers of Holly- wood love to reward filmmakers who son (Feb. 1981), Marcia Pally (Oct. Von Praunheim's apocalyptic satire, make scenic trips the hard way. which takes to task the political establish- 1984), and the contributors to the special ment that encourages AIDS hysteria as Politics blows through Andrei well as the medical-research establish- Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, but obliquely, Midsection debate: \"Pornography, Love, ment that profits from it, was the rare like a gust of Chernobyl acid wind over Festival reminder that there was a Northern Europe. Halfway through the or Death\" (Dec. 1984). Special attention complex and frightening world outside film, World War III may well have been the movie theaters. The few other overtly triggered - the TV says so - but the was also paid to Pauline Kael's reviews of political films were of a more decorous Chekhovian characters wandering nature, the sort design to win a prize, Tarkovsky's spare landscape have deeper, De Palma's work in The New Yorker. The Nobel if not Oscar. Margarethe von more personal complaints. Every shot in Trotta's Rosa Luxembourg, starring Bar- The Sacrifice is designed with meticu- book is Brian De Palma: Il Fantasma bara Sukowa as the Polish socialist and lous grandeur; anyone can derive an feminist who became a martyr for the austere but almost erotic pleasure from Della Cineteca by Ninni Panzera and revolution when she was killed in 1919, watching the director solve the complex had all the right motives but none of the problems he has set for himself. The Carmelo Marabello. Recommend it to all moves. It could have used some of the climactic sequence is a single shot, prosaic briskness of those Warner Bros. lasting more than six minutes, in which your friends. biopics of the Thirties. With its solem- Erland Josephson, as a mad patriarch, nity and snail's pace, Rosa seemed twice sets his house ablaze and then runs about The admirable Miss Myles was also a as long as Juarez and only half as funny. wildly to elude the family members and hospital attendants who have come to member of the eight-person jury, spear- The Festival Jury, headed this year by capture him. It is horrifyingly comic, and Sydney Pollack, gave Sukowa the Best a wondrous tour de force. But the force of headed by Nagisa Oshima, who passed Actress prize as a pat on the halo for Rosa emotion comes especially at the end, Luxembourg's good intentions. So it did when Josephson's young son waters the judgment this year on who would cop the not surprise that The Mission was tree that he and his father had planted in deemed worthy of Cannes' highest acco- the film's early shots. Behind this film's Golden Charybdis. When the white lade, the Palme d'Or. Worthy, my dear? cool eye and percolating mind, a heart full Why, it was a British epic about Jesuit of hope and continuity beats. smoke finally came out of the chimney at missionaries in 18th-century Paraguay, bringing God to the Indians and battling I n many films at Cannes this year, sexual the Sant' Andrea Hotel, the decision the venal Portuguese and Spanish politics was the order of the day. These bureaucrats . It was a vast sprawling films may have been \"smaller\" than The was-Man Of Ashes by Tunisia's Nouri fresco, and a parable to boot, about Mission or The Sacrifice, but the com- modern liberation theology. It boasted an bustion of men and women trying to Bouzid. honor's list of artists: producer David figure each other out could be just as Puttnam (Chariots ofFire), screenwriter Who says there is any justice in the Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia), world? Now you see why I am having to run for President. This year, Taormina. Two years hence, America. After that, we'll talk. HARLAN KENNEDY CLUB CANNES We went expecting boot camp, and found Club Med. Visions of Cannes as the Beirut of the Cote d'Azur were dashed on the reality of beautiful weather, -two-star food , pretty good films , and the absence of violent death. Though his country had been strafed and his infant daughter murdered in an American raid a month before the 39th International Festival of Film began, Muhmar Kaddafi declined to launch bombs toward the movie halls of the Riviera from the shores of Tripoli. Perhaps he deemed a few thousand American filmmakers, actors , and journalists unworthy of Allah's own retaliation. Or perhaps he was pleased enough to know that he had helped convince Steven Spielberg and Sylvester Stallone to stay in California, and that edgy jokes about Kaddafi's Kamikazes would spike every festival lunch chat like rancid wine. The Libyan premier was the party crasher whose expected arrival 6
man rockers who paraded their outrage, VIDEO the music-industry moguls who made and broke them, the sexual paras ites who sucked them dry, the society that both condemned and pampered them. Life stinks, in case you hadn't heard. By the end of the film , with Nancy dead of abuse and Sid applying for admission to Pizza Heaven , you may want to wash yo ur eyes out, take a shower, and run off to rent a videocassette of The Band Wagon. Now that's entertainment. So, in a bizarre way, in Bertrand Blier's Fellini direets Sotyricon Tenue de soiree , which translates as A revealing portrait of Federico Fellini directing the actors who populate the surreal world of \"evening dress\" but will be called Menage Fellini's Satyricon. Immersed in the creative process, Fellini moves through the S8t, a larger when it opens in th e U.S . this fall. The than life embodiment of his characters. relationships here are black, but black \"A fascinating documentary.\" comic; the film's pace and mood suggest - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun- Times $70 a roller-coaster ride through a fun house. Michel Blanc and Miou-Miou are, at the start, a couple who are as mired in KENNETH ANGER depression as Sid and Nancy. Then MAGICK ~~g~~ Gerard Depardieu strides in, like a guardian angel from hell , determined to \"Comes from that beautiful night from which emerge all put some pep, adventure, and sexual the true works. It touches the quick of the soul and this is ambiguity in their lives. While instructing very rare.\" - Jean Cocteau Leon Marr's Dancing in the Dark. them in the fine art of thievery, Depar- dieu makes love to Miou-Miou ; but it is cataclysmic. So the title of Denys the mousy, balding Blanc (who shared the Vol. 1: Fireworks, Rabbit's Moon, Eaux d'Artlfice Arcand's sexual chatfest, The Decline of Festival's Best Actor Award, and deserv- Vol. 2: The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome the' American Empire, was ironic and edly so) he is crazy about. Wickedly, Blier Vol. 3: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Puce Moment, Scorpio Rising Vol. 4: Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising appropriate; the rest · of the movie, keeps topping himself for about an hour Boxed set price 14 vols. with monograph & filmographyl ... $200 though entertaining, ultimately left one - one absurd or obscene situation lead- The firSf 200 sefS are signed and numbered by Anger feeling something between a big chill and ing to the next - until he gets pooped and Individual volumes, each . .. . . $50 petit maL. Another Canadian film , Leon the film falls to pieces. While the energy MAYA DEREN Marr's Dancing in the Dark, presented of farce lasts, though , Menage is inven- COLLECTED FILMS the metaphorical case history of a tive, mean-spirited , and quite funny. \"Maya Deren both evoked suburban woman so devoted to husband Of all the no-shows at Cannes, the and exemplified the Ameri- and home that she obsessively dusts most deeply missed was Orson Welles. can avant-garde .. ,and linked everywhere, including the rabbit ears on The Festival paid tribute to his accom- the movement to the older the TV set, cooks gourmet meals every plishments and his deflected promise by European avant-garde films night, allows herself no friends , and takes showing 45 minutes of scenes from the of Cocteau and Bunuel.\" - Cecile Starr, N. Y. Times only a half hour each afternoon to relax, unfinished Don Quixote, which Welles Vol. I: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS - The authorized edition listen to show tunes, and dance in the shot in the mid-Fifties and again in the of Deren's six \"chamber films,\" 1943-1959. . . $75 dark of her fantasies . Of course Perfect mid-Sixties on a tattered shoestring Vol. II: DIVINE HDRSEMEN: The living Gods of Haiti- Husband is screwing his secretary; and budget and with two different Quixotes. Maya Deren's journey into the mystical world of Voudoun... $75 the day Perfect Wife finds out, she waits (Premonitions of Bunuel's That Obscure LIVING THEATRE for him to return home , stabs him dead Object of Desire .) The clips were with a carving knife, then washes it and tantalizing: bleached images of heroic SIGNAlS FTAMES replaces it in its holder. How much more composition and ironic counterpoint; a \"Julian Be ck and Jud ith Malina define their lifelong satisfying and suitable a resolution this is choppy soundtrack with the Great Man commitment to a revolution- ary art in which politics and than Heartburn's silly pie in the face . providing most of the voices; and a theater are inseparable.\"- Vincent Canby, N.Y. Times How much more poignant and knowing modern-day coda in which the Don rides By Sheldon Rochlin & Maxine Harris . . Dancing in the Dark is about a wo men his horse through Madrid, reduced in trapped in the straitjacket of domestic stature by the billboards and neon that $75 ideali sm. have taken his 'name in commerce and in Other Living Theatre films available on video: Sid Vicious and Nancy Sprungen had vain. (Premonitions of Bunel's Simon of THE CONNECTION by Shirley Clarke . $75 no ideals, ever, and nothing to lose but the Desert.) If finished , Don Quixote THE BRIG by Jonas Mekas .. .$70 their sad, sordid lives. Alex Cox's Sid and might have been only a magnificent PARADISE NOW by Sheldon Rochlin ......$75 Nancy took the true-life amour fou of the failure , But its hints of greatness suggest OROERING INFORMATION: MasterCard and Visa are accepted, or orders may be prepaid INYS residents add 6'1.% sales taxI. Please add punk schmuck of the Sex Pistols and his that, by compariso n, most of the other $2 per tape for shipping and handling, and specify VHS or Beta format. American girl fri e nd and turned it into a films this year wo uld have looked like mystic ~IR€ Vlb€o spectacularly depressing horror show. runts. You can't blame that on Kaddafi. •24 HORATIO sr.,SUITE 3F, DEPT Fe, N.Y., N,Y, 10014 212-645-2733 This movie hates everybody: the subhu- -MARY CORLISS
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but a whole pattern of contraries. Inside Emerald Forest and The Mission, by contrast, is a forgotten Eden, in which by Harlan Kennedy the framework of historical happen- numinous natives nourish the world as it was and should have remained before stance, the movie zeitgeist becomes a whitey came along. Man was born free, and everywhere vast play of views or ideologies . Beneath this ultima Thule lies a more he is in movies. Colonization by In the Eighties, contraries thrive: ambiguous mass of tenebrous aliens: big-budget cinema has now xenophobia vs. charitable zeal; peace vs. those of the Middle East and Africa. Here reached the deepest parts of the Amazon the sword; we-can-teach-them-some- the moral barometer is less decisive, and is vertical, not horizontal, in tendency. rain forest and the African bush. The thing vs. they-can-teach-us-something. Nasty darkies cluster in the north - the power-crazed Ay-rabs of Jewel ofthe Nile noble savage, scarcely disturbed as a It's the age of Band Aid and \"Let's bomb and the Palestinian psychos of The Delta Force-while utopian natives are found mainstream utopian icon since the hey- the Libyans.\" It's the age of Mexican in the south, ~~e atavistic otherworld of the Masai and Kikuyu tribespeople in day of the Rousseaus (Jean-Jacques and Earthquake Relief and \"Let's zap Nicara- Out ofAfrica. Douanier) is reawakened by the cryogen- gua.\" And in the cinema, it's the age of The Clearly this filmic map of Third World amenability has not drawn itself up by ics of filmmaking. Eureka! Fitzcarraldo, Emerald Forest and Rambo , Out of accident. The black spots are those where the West has had more than a little Greystoke, The Emerald Forest, Out of Africa, and Jewel of the Nile. Movies in trouble with the locals: Vietnam, the Eastern Mediterranean. The Edens are Africa, and most recently, The Mission which the dark-skinned foreigner is a those places where native hands have reached out to do business, not rebellion. (and, in their different ways , Gandhi and vicious infidel or warmonger jostle with But are the blacks or Indians lucky The Color Purple). Primitive grace is in', movies in which he's a scared primitive, enough to find themselves in these movie Edens actually any better off? The black imperialism and sophistication are out. the better part of ourselves that we Blessed are the meek and multicolored, somehow left behind on the trip up the for they shall inherit much movie work in ladder of evolution. the late Eighties. Western cinema's relations with the The cinema acts in mysterious ways, non-white underdeveloped world get its work as a cultural mirror to perform. more broadly xenophobic the further No decade ever goes by in which the East they go: The Southeast Asia of anxieties of society are not reflected up Rambo is an exploding hellhole in wh ich on the movie screen; the images, how- murderous yellows are stopped only by ever, do not reflect a single slant or white American muscle and missile viewpoint on contemporary concerns , power. The South America of The 9
characters, who are strongly in the then watch him tossed down river, through rapids, and finally over the huge foreground in Karen Blixen's Out of waterfall that is the film 's scenic center- piece: centerpiece and spiritual dividing Africa, which paints them in vivid and line. Most of the white men and the urbanized Indians live below the falls. richly mixed psychological colors, recede The primitive Indians and the virtuous Christian whites live above them. It's a right into the background in Sydney geographical Genesis in which \"above the falls\" and \"below the falls\" mean \"before Pollock's movie. They become merely the Fall\" and \"after the Fall.\" part of the landscape and its mystical In their high-ground Garden of Eden, Father Jeremy Irons and his Guarani measure of man's potential for strength, Indians tend the perfect agrarian commu- nity, where free will and egalitarianism, grace, and innocence. They are a moral \"capitalism\" and \"communism\" coexist. It is a community spontaneously evolved and anthropological backdrop before and immaculately conceived in a politi- cally nondoctrinal natural world. Not which the whites conduct their gavotte of surprisingly, the men from the corrupt or corruptible white race-first Irons, the 20th-Century angst and romance. (In the new mission leader, later De Niro, the Spanish mercenary turned Jesuit - have book , the Kikuyu servants Kamante and to work hard even to reach this utopia. They must scale a whopping bluff, hard Lulu have at least 50 times more prose by the falls , which makes the cliff in The Guns of Navaronne seem like a gymna- devoted to them than the shadowy Denys sium climbing frame. As with Powers Boothe in The Emerald Forest or Klaus Finch Hatton , who flits in and out as little Kinski in Fitzcarraldo , the initially unde- serving white man must go through hell more than a double-barreled gent with a and high water, and any other hazards the movie can invent, to reach the native's fondness for huntin', shootin', and f1yin'. cradle of life and innocence. Thus instead of being the story of a But the film itself never reaches it. The Mission, like its peer pictures, once again woman who discovers the mysteries of presents the Indians as fictive devices rather than as f1esh-and-blood people. Africa and the complexity of beliefs and They sing their glowing chorales, they tend their terrestrial paradise. But they emotions that make up a primitive have no inner life: they are pawns in a parable. No animating human complex- culture, the film is about two disele- ity is allowed to stir in them, and the film takes care to stifle any hint of a mented Westerners preserving a white contradictory tension between inno- cence and barbarism . Mid-film, someone aristocracy of feeling (white-tablecloth asks, \"Why does the Guarani parent so often kill his own children?\" Comes the romance under the stars) and culture (all answer, \"So that the family can more swiftly run when attacked by the white those books and gramophone records) man.\" So by a little sleight of hand with situational ethics, even the murder of even out there in the burning Bush. Indian by Indian can be laid at the door of the white intruder. In this way, a distanced or sentimental Even if we accepted the shining vie\"\" of the \"noble\" savage can virtually goodness of the Guarani as a symbolic given, the film never resolves, though it nullify him as a living character. He The Emerald Forest briefly raises, the problem of whether becomes an inert paradigm for Paradise Christianity enhances or corrupts their moral state. When the Spanish troops on Earth, leaving the white characters to grace\" movies - an attempt to create a come to root out the mission by gun and sword, the Indians decline Father Irons' get on with their more flawed , more new vehicle for religious feeling in the urgent invitation to Christian passivity and take to arms, along with the tortured, but so much more interesting godless late 20th Century. The essential and upstaging lives. components of a religion are to offer stories about the source of life and the I n The Emerald Forest, the natives are beginnings of a people , an ethical and not wallpaper; in fact, there is a moral matrix, and a communications serious bid to grapple with their network between the finite and the culture, morality, and mystical traditions infinite by way of ritual. through the eyes of a Tarzanic white The noble savage movies provide all foster child. Director John Boorman three. The world's endangered primitive sends his only begotten son, Charly, into peoples live at the source of life. (We're the prelapsarian wilderness, where he told in a voiceover in The Emerald Forest plays not a redeemer among sinners but a that \"60 percent of the world's oxygen sinner among redeemers . His original sin comes from the Amazon rain forests.\" is being born white, Anglo-Saxon, and This is unconstruable for the layman- the son of a jungle-raping dam builder. would we all stop breathing if they The boy is washed clean in the dark disappeared? - but it is a statement river of mysticism and magic. He goes designed to have great mystical eclat). naked. And he, a sinner turned redeemer Second, the tribe's threatened survival is by the kiss of primitive innocence and the a living appeal to quasi-Christian virtues return to nature, then redeems his own of charity, mercy, and love. Third, ritual father (Powers Boothe). In short, this is thrives here as in few other communities the New Testament in reverse. The son is in the modern world. sent forth not to save the world but to be saved, and then he in turn saves the The Mission seems to sense this father. newborn neo-Christian religiosity. The movie's entire topography is It is not over-fanciful to discover in Boorman's film-and in Werner Herzog's designed according to religious symbol- Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcar- ism . The opening scene shows a cruci- raido, Hugh Hudson's Greystoke, Roland fied white man pushed out into a river on Joffe's The Mission, and other \"primitive his floating cross by Amazon Indians. We 10
BAS E DON A T RUE S TOR Y. ROBERT MERYL REDFORD STREEP ASYDNEY POLLACKFilm RICA BAS J: DON A T RUE S TOR Y. •SYDNEY POlLACKIllm OUT~O\\
reawakened military spirit of Robert De Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo. equal terms of distrustful wonderment; Niro. At this point it becomes clear that and on the river, below a crashing the function of the Indians in The Mission Emerald Forest and The Mission, the waterfall and amid whistling arrows, that is twofold. In part, they are residents of a Indian is not only the \"other\" that we are Powers Boothe rediscovers Charly Boor- clear symbolic address: Heaven on busy eradicating; he is the symbol of our man in The Emerald Forest. Earth, Amazon Rain Forest, South lost, ideal selves we want to reclaim. America; in part - and perhaps more Water is usually the white man's only important, though more covert - they are I n short, the lost world in today's jungle route into the jungle and his only escape a collective human compass needle. movies is not so much the standard from it-an ambivalent symbol. It can They register the conflict of beliefs and old ethno-topographic time warp as a represent grace, salvation, baptism, a temperaments between Irons (man of symbolic world of lost or forgott(;:n mystic initiation (the laving jungle cas- peace) and De Niro (man of war strug- human ideals. To venture into that lost cade in The Emerald Forest, the idyllic gling with his chosen cross of Jesuit world is perhaps to rediscover them, and pool abustle with flamingos, etc., in observance), and they record our own perhaps to risk a fatal impact of colliding Greystoke). But it is also the thread that swiveling sympathies between the two. creeds and cultures in doing so. pulls the invading white man through the virgin forest, tainting the environment. In both capacities, the Indians are The very landscaping of the noble The big river that is dammed up in The functions rather than characters, savage films contributes to this theme. Emerald Forest becomes the jungle's emblems rather than human beings . With dependable regularity, the geogra- despoiler. The river brings the Eden- phy in these movies divides into two main desecrating whites, with their guns and T his is true also in the films of that arenas: the rain forest itself and the river gung ho, in Greystoke. And in Aguirre founding father of modern jungle coursing through it. The rain forest is the and Fitzcarraldo, the white man uses the cinema, Werner Herzog. unconquerable otherness of Nature, river as his road to preposterous, Although in Herzog's South American where the white man can lose his unwieldy dreams: whether it be of EI dreamworld, the native's symbolic role is bearings and his identity. (In The Emer- Dorado, the kingdom of gold, or of more oneiric and less glibly schematized ald Forest, the kidnapped boy almost planting La Scala in the heart of the than in The Mission or The Emerald literally disappears into the jungle, erased Amazon. Forest, the Indians still wear the unim- from the eye as magically as the Invisible peachable noble savage garb - whether People who capture him.) The river is the It is in the river (as leitmotif) that the they work with unbowed pride and thoroughfare on which white man and religious and colonial impulses of the impassive zeal for Fitzcarraldo's native can meet or collide. It is on the jungle movie come together. For the Sisyphean dream of hauling a ship over a river that European troops stage the white man, the river is a means to mountain, or with the celestial aloofness decisive part of their battle in The conquer and be conquered. He comes to of the native guides who play their flutes Mission; on the river in Fitzcarraldo that poss(;:ss, exploit, and (wittingly or unwit- - as Aguirre's boat pushes on toward the Indians and Klaus Kinski meet on tingly) corrupt the old-new world of the destruction. jungle. But he stays to be possessed, by an environment close to the source of life To his credit, Herzog-and Hudson, and full of disarming magic - a cradle of for that matter-muddies the portrait innocence, ritual, and mystic wonder. with token ambivalence. The Indian'sar- istocracy of nature is limned by its eerie Hidden inside this picture of natives as unpredictable violence: there is a zeal for the guardians of a lost, priceless, primi- camouflaged murder that has arrows tive culture, there is also the symbolic whistling out of the riverbanks in notion of the North American Indians' Aguirre, and a devouring superstitious- diaspora: rescued from long decades of ness that cuts loose Fitzcarraldo's ship being shot by John Wayne or, worse, toward a near-fatal whirlpool. sympathetically anthropologized by Ralph Nelson (Soldier Blue) or Arthur But in the end, Herzog's Indians fall Penn (Little Big Man), the Red Indian' into much the same radical-romantic trap has fled south and become, at least for as John Boorman's and Roland Joffe's. the cinema's purposes, the Amazon Even when murdering or mayheming, Indian. It is as if the movies, realizing in they are painted as more patrician than their secret heart that they have spent 50 the white man, mainly because they are years happily slaughtering th(;: redskin incomprehensible - to the white audi- and then ten years (in the liberal-backlash ence back home. Because, Herzog Sixties) essaying a token contrition, have suggests, we do not understand the way now dismantled the Western altogeth(;:r the Indian thinks and feels, we cannot and established a Mission for Distressed pillory him (as we can the white man) for Indians, down South America way. shallow or vicious thoughts and feelings. And in an age of Western self-doubt or How convenient for the paleface, after self-contempt, the lacuna in our under- all, if the red man and his whole standing of another race becomes the conscience-vexing race could be swept vessel into which we pour all our own off the known map and down into the missing virtues and ideals. Bad con- unknown: much like the inconvenient science rules the dramaturgy. In movies characters in today's TV soaps. For Dallas like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or The and Dynasty, South America is the great write-out: \"that bourne from which no 12
The Brooklyn Bridge The Old Quabbin Valley: Politics and Conflict in Water Distribution Academy Award Nomination 1981 Best Documentary Feature Blue Ribbon Winner 1982 American Film Festival THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE is a visually brilliant , intellectually stimu- lating documentary about America 's best-loved landmark. Th e bridge THE OLD QUABBIN VALLEY raises a range of moral and political was a technical achievement of unparalleled scope . questions about the use of America 's water resources . This fi lm A film by Ken Burns traces the history of Boston's water supply , the construction of the 58 minutes 16mm Sale $895/Rental $85 '12\" Video Sale $250 Quabbin Reservoir, and the nationwide debate over urban use of 39-minute Classroom Version 16mm Sale $595 '12\" Video Sale $150 rural water supplies . A film by Lawrence R. Hott The Garden of Eden 16mm Sale $450/Rental $45 '12\" Video Sale $100 Academy Award Nomination 1985 Best Documentary Short The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God The great variety of the world 's plant and animal life must be Blue Ribbon Winner 1985 American Film Festival safeguarded if humankind is to continue to prosper. This beautiful and intelligent film makes clear the need for conservation to maintain THE SHAKERS HANDS TO WORK , HEARTS TO GOD is a vividly economic growth , scientific investigation and pharmaceutical bittersweet portrait of a truly original spiritual life. This beautiful film research . tells the Shakers' fascinating story with intelligence, compassion, and A film by Lawrence R. Hott and Roger Sherman gentle wit. 28 minutes 16mm Sale $445/Rental $45 '12\" Video Sale $200 A film by Ken Burns and Amy Stechler Burns 58 minutes 16mm Sale $895/Rental $85 '12\" Video Sale $250 Niagara Falls: The Changing Nature of a New World Symbol The Statue of Liberty Blue Ribbon Winner 1985 American Film Festival Academy Award Nomination 1986 Best Documentary Feature Th ere is only one place in the Western Hemisphere that has figured THE STATU E OF LIBERTY is a lyrical , compelling and provocative in the American imagination since its discovery - Niagara Falls. This film that explores the history of the statue and the meaning of liberty film is a fast-paced , often funny documentary that tackles the itself on the occasion of the statue's renovation . fundamental question of what a nation does with its symbols. A film by Ken Burns , co-produced by Buddy Squires 58 minutes 16mm Sale $895 I Rental $100 A film by Lawrence R. Hott and Diane Garey '12\" Video Sale $250 28 minutes 16mm Sale $535/Rental $45 '12\" Video Sale $250 37-minute Classroom Version 16mm Sale $595 /Rental $55 '12\" Video Sale $175 Florentine Films For sale , rental or preview ~' icmema @ information contact: limited Direct Cinema Limited P.O. Box 69589 Los Angeles , CA 90069 (213) 656-4700
traveller return s; a vast disposal dump for adventurism meeting the immovable of the world should embrace its own the likes of Grandpa Ewing and Baby mystery of native grace, is that main- geopolitical mess; and 3) that a movie Blaisdel. There yo u can rub characters stream Hollywood has yet to step firmly about blacks can be made without either out and the place is so inchoate and into the fray. The noble savage movies, political agitprop or sanctifying re mote th at you don't have to ask though often co-funded by American exoticism. questions la~er. \"What happened to him?\" money and endorsed by American partic- \"He \"vent to South Amerca.\" \"Ah.\" ipation (actors De Niro , Waterston, and But as in the jungle movies, there is the Boothe, and Schanberg himself as emi- vitiating sense of a hand and heart Where better to send the Red Indian, nence grise on The Killing Fields), are reaching out to a people without the brain who has given America (by which we almost all written, produced, and following as well. Spielberg tries to bring mean North, of course) a double dose of directed by Britons (give or take the odd Alice Walker's characters to life but brings guilt , first by being all but wiped out in Munich mystic). Maybe US. filmmakers them instead to Movie Life. Schematic the last century, then by being obliterated are more wary of the pitfalls and potential and sentimental , The Color Purple is all over again on the movie screen? Down oversimplifications - especially in South mixed not from the raw colors of black in the Amazon, he can either be forgotten America, which may be a dreamworld experience but from the laboratory colors about altogether or transformed into a separated by an ocean for Europe but is a of past films. It's Song ofthe South stirred noble, glittering, forest-haunting icon. Or potential nightmare of a neighbor for the in with Gone with the Wind, plus a dash of better still: he could harass or wipe out US.A. Duel in the Sun, The Southerner; Sounder the white man whenever he trespasses on ... (Spielberg is on record as having Indian territory. Geronimo! Anything Perhaps America is wrestling with directed Whoopi Goldberg's perfor- goes, without reservations. Our con- the problems and paradoxes of mance with instructions like, \"Now I sciences can be salved by mirror-writing ethnic entente in its own land . One want Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend\"). the Indian wars on the other side of the reason why Hollywood on occasion And when movie invocations run out, equator. zooms in on the black as a subject and there are popular literary ones. The neglects the North American Indian is scene of Sophie's aborted reunion with Even with filmmakers who attempt that the black demands attention. Both her children becomes an animated Dick- compassion (like Boorman) or the South Bronx and Watts permit daily ensian postcard: all smiling children's surreal complexity (like Herzog), egress. But the Red Indian has a token faces and twinkling Christmas trees, the unco nquerable problem in portraying parcel of territory that, however derisory while the mayor's wife (Dickens' bullying primitive people remains. The white man compared with his former kingdom and landlord) screams, \"Out into the snow cannot, or will not , find the key to however much a palefaces payoff, he can with you.\" transforming him from a symbol to a still call \"home .\" It also renders him human being. He remains a colonized invisible. The constantly frustrated T he white cinema's current fascina- being, victim of the white man's well- energy with which the black has fought to tion with nonwhite and primitive meaning patronage with cash or culture, become an equal citizen in the US. cultures is combined with a patho- and victim - as film crew after film crew (often needing the battering ram of the step s into the steaming tropics - of the civil rights movement) is bifurcated by Big Glass Eye Which Stands on Three the equal and opposite energy needed to Legs. The white man, even though he is rediscover who he is. One way or the racked with guilt and good intentions other, looking forward or back, he must over anything to do with the Third World find a home. - indeed because he is so racked - sees the native not as a fellow man but as a In his search, the black must parse the virtue-bearing chess piece in the game of meaning of what white Hollywood (Out reclaiming his white conscience. of Africa, The Color Purple) and TV (RoQts) shows him . Hence , in part, the This colonization by canonization is not simply confined to the Africa of bizarre geographical cross patterns of Greystoke or Out of Africa or the South modern filmmaking, whereby Europe America of Boorman , Joffe , or Herzog. It homes in on remotest South America and can even penetrate the Far East, where shows scant interest in its nearer neigh- the more usual noises are those of Sly bor Africa, while America is more Stallone grenading or machine-gunning interested in far-flung Africa than in the landmass to the south. whole villages. In the Cambodia of Joffe's The Killing Fields , we have an almost As for the success with which the white man follows the black man in his search definitive play-off between the saintly for old roots and new homes , that is native and the exploitative white man: another matter. Or rather, it is the same Dith Pran (Haing Ngor), all stoicism, matter all over again as with the noble selflessness, and wan, big-hearted savage films. Steven Spielberg's The smiles, and Sidney Schanberg (Sam Color Purple is a whopping attempt at Waterston), intrepid New York Times news hound, roiled by guilt over his top-level interracial accord. It is a chart- exploitation of Pran - is that what jour- nalists do, or merely Americans? topping filmmaker's bid to argue 1) that ultimately America is one big happy Yet the irony, amid all these tales of the family, ready to embrace the underprivi- irresistible force of American or Western leged minorities it creates; 2) that the rest 14
logical shyness of reality in the way it from slaughter or genocide at the last and the horror of seeming to be illiberal. depicts them. In any context in which a moment, struck clean between the eyes Yet together with these nay-saying racial group is depicted near to its roots as and spiritually disarmed by the native's a discrete and authentic community or nonviolent nobility. mandates - \"Thou shalt not offend,\" culture-where its members are not \"Thou shalt not misrepresent,\" \"Thou absorbed into a mainstream WASP genre Gandhi's \"passive resistance,\" born of a shalt not appear racist\"- goes a more like the cop thriller or knockabout moment in political history, becomes an positive fascination with alien cultures in comedy - the white man's screen opts for oddly prophetic phrase for future cinema. today's Western cinema. What draws the sentimentality or schematism. It pre- The Indians in India, the Indians in the white Westerner to the remoter nonwhite sents the black, the Indian, or the Amazon, the blacks in Blixen-era Kenya, peoples is the suspicion (fear, hope) that Oriental either as a symbolic token in a the poor dark folk in The CoLor PurpLe all they bear within them both the distant game of white redemption or as a martyr passively resist the probing of the white past and the not-too-distant future of the in the ethnic wars. man's camera - not least because that planet. As primitive communities, they camera probes only as far as it wants to. form a link with our oldest human Even TV's well-intentioned race-accord Then, like the British in India, it backs origins. As the Third World, they are a epic Roots reeled out its line for honesty off, feeling transcendently smug about its key to the political ecology of the next and realism but too often reeled it right abdicatory selflessness, though all it has decade and next century. Look forward back in having caught only sanctity and actually done is to withdraw the invader's or back, they are inescapable. simplification. The blacks wore halos of hand without ever having had the greater victimized nobility, while the liberal- courage of holding it out for true The ethnic explorations (however per- minded white acting fraternity gathered understanding. functory) in the noble savage movies are round to play the villains (Ed Asner as an extension of the atavistic impulse that snarling slave trader). T ahe need to be politically accept- has plunged some Eighties filmmakers able or La mode means that into prehistory. But whereas those prod- Thus the most conscientious bids at today's British movies about India ucts (Quest for Fire, Iceman) have culture reclamation on the \"other races'\" reek of present-day self-righteousness mostly died at the boxoffice due to lack of behalf end up looking like exercises in built on historical self-criticism. In a any rapprochement with modern experi- retroactive righteousness and self-flagel- similar way, the civil rights movement in ence - what are troglodytes to us, or we lation. The British screen has long been America, which began the whole process to them? - the concatenation of remote prey to this problem in its long-running of shaking the white man's conscience peoples with emissaries from a recogniz- series of Indian Raj movies and teleplays, and unshackling the black man's militant able, near-modern Western world (Out of pride, means that white cinema's depic- Africa, The EmeraLd Forest) is more sknown in the trade as A JeweL in Gandhi tion of nonwhite racial groups may long alluring. be inhibited or distorted by the pressure Passage. In these works, the saintly wog of having to toe the proper political line But there is still a missing life spark. In puts himself up for martyrdom by the the nonwhite primitive peoples depicted Britannic rotters who have overrun the by white cinema, there is no real sense of Subcontinent. And the Brits hold back human autonomy. They are cunningly jointed marionettes moved around the puppet stage of Western drama and conscience therapy. They are colonized not militarily but mimetically. And the white man controls his subject by denying him all moral or psychological complexity. The natives are either nasty subhumans fit for the flamethrower (Rambo) or they are noble savages touched with superhuman sanctity. In The EmeraLd Forest, they are both . One tribe is virtuous, magical , and pacific (the Invisible People), while the enemy tribe (the Fierce People) is greedy, brutal , and warmongeflng. No shade of life-giving ambiguity dims the Manichaean opposition. Only upon the white man is bestowed the supreme gift of a mixed , protean, fallible humanity. Perhaps in the late Eighties and Nineties cinema, with Joffe's The Mission once more probing South America and Herzog himself about to take a third plunge into the rain forests , the Third World will at last take on a third dimension. Perhaps the white man, having extended the hand of recognition , peace, and good inten- tions , will extend the gifts of complexity, spontaneity, and truth. ~ 15
F. Munay Abraham in Name of the Rose. time and not for some prevIous effort century monastery where matters have done an injustice. gotten out of hand: There are murders F. Murray Ab~aham that beg solutions, which in turn pose the interviewed by More to the point, however, Abraham questions of what we dare know and how inhabited Salieri so completely as to we dare know it. As a company man, Gideon Bachmann induce the viewer to believe that the thin Abraham's mission is to crush William of line said to exist between actor and Baskerville (Sean Connery), who stum- There may be no harder task than to character seemed drawn in disappearing bles upon the scene, dares to think take the next role after the signal ink. In fact, Abraham may too well mine originally, and ultimately symbolizes, for one of an actor's career. Antonio the coal that sits in place of too many better or worse, the shift in Western Salieri was right for F. Murray Abraham in human hearts. notions of knowledge and thought. For its confluence of truths: What better Abraham , Gui is simply an extension of moment than now to articulate the fear of Such is Abraham's follow-up to his the character investigation he left off in and frustration with mediocrity in a Salieri in Jean-Jacques Annaud's film Salieri. culture that disavows it and embraces it, realization of Umberto Eco's novel, The simultaneously? The part was well Name of the Rose, which probes the Perhaps Abraham plays too risky in timed - it participated in director Milos nature of perception, the transmission of taking on yet another part that could Forman's and producer Saul Zaentz' knowledge, and the roles of the individ- delimit him in the industry's already second sweep at the Oscars , and deliv- ual and authority in defining what \"is.\" narrow imagination . Or, perhaps he is not ered an Oscar to an actor, Abraham, who Abraham plays Bernardo Gui , the Grand playing risky at all. Perhaps he has simply deserved it for his work in this role at this Inquisitor and papal emmissary to a 14th 16
matured at the moment when our most now might not have seemed to you week: It's the same thing in human terms correct in another moment, thus there is and politically: if you take a bribe one serious artists have refined the image of no point regretting. \"Absolute truth\" time, it's a blot on your soul. It does affect always seems to be something other you ... the next bribe is much easier.\" the banality of evil and reemphasized its people have; within ourselves nothing is ever absolute. J# don't need to be motivated to ubiquity. His Malvolio in New York's destroy; its part ofour nature. \"What you've put your finger on Shakespeare in the Park festival last essentially is the center of the character I \"Although 1 am not a practicing am playing in this film, Bernardo Gui. He Quaker, I go to Quaker meetings, and summer only adds the footnote that he represents the immutability of truth. they teach that there is part of God in That is, after all, what a Grand Inquisitor every man, and in that sense, yes, 1 think can take the delusion of power and stands for. He and people like him, it's all inside us.\" everywhere in our lives and in our efficacy and also make us laugh. world-not just in the Eastern bloc or As Gui does here, do you think that other totalitarian countries-really doing things in the name of a greater The line of Abraham's arc has risen believe that truth resides in them. That it good is really an attempt at belonging to is immutable. They don't believe that it something bigger than himself? through his stage parts in Isaac Bashevis changes. To them, there is no appeal. \"I would like to think that, to think that Singer's Tiebele and her Demon (guess \"The idea that anyone thing, even the there is some thing to which we all Bible, could be interpreted in only one belong. It's true that most of the worst whom he played), Harold Pinter's The way, is absurd. In the case of Bernardo atrocities have always been committed in Gui not only is there no court of appeal, the name of something.\" Caretaker (the street presence), and but he is both the judge and execu- tioner... He is much purer than the men Bernardo Gui reminds me that I do not productions of Uncle Mmya, The Mad- and women who are in power now, who really understand why people do awful are doing precisely the same thing, but by things to each other. There is a line in the woman of Chaillot, and Little Murders, long distance, through the electronic media, through telephones, through sat- sscriptfor Pier Pasolini Salo which goes among others. And he has lurked about ellites, where they execute power over life and death , really, of millions of people. something like (God talking to man): in the emotional backdrops of such films But because it's done by long distance, \"Idiot! Why do you insist on doing good? they wash their hands of any responsibil- Can't you just copy me?\" as Scarface, Serpico, even All the ity.\" \"That's a very cynical, black view, President s Men. That is not to mention What do you think is their motivating which I don't happen to subscribe to. I force? don't think it's true at all.\" his appearance as Head Grape in a Fruit \"It begins with humanitarian purposes. The part you are playing, then, is of the Loom TV commercial for skiv- With good principles. Bernardo and blacker than you are? William, in the book, were originally very vies-where he squeezed the moment close ... in beliefs , if not personally. But \"My decision, in life, to be as good as I many politicians or people with political possibly can, as kind, as excellent, for all the evil of its banality. power, whether it's in the church or the springs, I think, from a true feeling in my state, begin-and I'm not talking only of soul that I do have a choice. I choose to When Gideon Bachmann found F. firebrands-by trying to establish social be good rather than evil. But Bernardo, justice and social good. But, in time, it the part, he is a victim of the same Murray Abraham (the \"F\" stands for becomes corrupt. People in positions mentality: every man or woman who has that place them above others lose track \"accomplished\" evil in the name of Fahrid; he is Syrian by way of EI Paso, of... why they began. They lose their something, in the name of, in this case, humanity.\" the church, is a victim of that same kind Texas), it was not in his digs at Brooklyn of corruptive power that seems to infect History always adds to the characteri- people's soul.\" College, where post-Amadeus he became zations of inquisitioners-from Gui through de Sa.de and Hitler-a personal, To talk in terms of the book, some a professor of theatre. But on Dante become William ofBaskerville and some gloating dimension of sadism. let that s become Bernardo Gui. There is some- Ferretti's hillside Rome set. -H.J. thing that makes them choose evil. usually not the case. So what is it that When you act, what do you want to pushes humanity to lose itself? Where \"People are also swayed by what they accomplish? does it begin? conceive as incarnations of evil, and have \"Acting is relating to people a crowd instinct, don't forget. Take all with love, and I don't mean either the \"In times of war, in the Inquisition, and these American tourists who changed usual adage of an actor being someone in the times we live in now, people choose their plans this summer and took vaca- who wants to be loved, nor the even more camps and are not willing even to think tions in Eastern bloc countries, because simplistic approach of saying that in order about the other side. When you commit they thought it was safer there. All these to give something to an audience you any atrocity, you sacrifice some of your people gave serious thought to the must love it. At the end of the day, I think humanity. You cannot remain the same possibility that that world was safe. And it is really something even more difficult: person after witnessing or causing tor- people who have the money to travel thus a search for someone who will agree to let ture. In acting, we say, 'If you forget the have some political clout, and if these you give them something, whether you muse for a day, she will forget you for a people start to consider that way of life as call it love or not; in other words, to find positive, as safe, then they are going to someone who needs you. bring that back with them to the West, and they were going to start looking for \"Of course, in this sense acting isn't that kind of system in America. It's different from anything else in life; my concern for the profession is part of my overall concern for the world I live in and what is happening in it and to it. One goes through life saying, 'I've done all I can for my children; the rest is in their hands; I should stop worrying about them: but of course this is an intellectual stance-in reality, I care and I do worry about them. In the same sense, one 'hopes that what one does in one's profession also expresses a larger concern.\" The texture ofthe period in which you make your decisions has a bearing on the degree of concern for others which you will find you want to express in your life and in your work; what may be correct 17
conservatism. We all know that there is a television of its day? Punishing by \"It may be the story; a good one still strong conservative surge in the West. exclusion those who will not conform, works. But I will admit that I was helped And once that kind of mentality begins to just as you do as the Grand Inquisitor in through the reading by the head of my take over, Bernardo Gui will flourish. the film. Aren't Berlusconi and Bernardo department at Brooklyn College, where I Gui the same type offigure? teach, Benito Ortolani, who speaks all of \"I think that people are tired in New the languages that Eco utilizes ... Giving York and Chicago and Detroit of not \"I think yes. And you've also put your those invented constructions the benefit being able to walk out in their gardens finger on the most interesting part of this of his interpretation helped me and after dark. And it's not just in America; it's book, this film; and that is the control of excited him. It was a tremendously all over. All over the West. I don't know information by a central agency, the fact enthusiastic rendering I received. And what it's like in the East, but enough which makes this story so topical, the fact much of the intricacy of the language is people believe that it's safer there than it that the books in the monastery's library part of the plot and isn't explained until is here because it's a police state, and they could really not be shared by all and that the end. Also, of course, there are an would like that same kind of thing to access to them was centralized. Today we awful lot of people who have the need to happen in America. are told that soon our modern libraries aspire to intellectuality...\" will be the same: they will be a central \"I recently played the part of Creon in store of electronic impulses and we will Right back to the need to belong, as did Antigone, and the parallels that we drew have access to them through our televi- Gui. His need to belong to the right in our production were to Nazism. The sion sets. Can you imagine the control church, the right group, may be the same fact is that the seeds of Nazism, the seeds this will give the bureaucrats? Even very drive as all those four million wanting to of the Inquisition, are sown in that small bureaucrats? They could control belong to the Eco-readers... But how atmosphere. Once the people believe your access to information or eradicate it. does a book like this get started? The that a police state is the safest place, They could completely change your Bernardo Gui begins to assume power. emperor snew clothes? After all, it's for the good of the state and As Antonio Salieri. the good of the people... \"I don't know, but certainly there aren't library without your knowing it. We must many people who are willing to come \"Perhaps Bernardo Gui was a victim of control our information ourselves or we right out and say that there are parts in liberalism. Perhaps his family was wiped are at their mercy. That's why I think the the book which are just plain boring. In out because of liberalism and he decided book is so current.\" one of Lily Tomlin's monologues [in The that was enough? He would put a stop to Search for Signs ofIntelligent Life in the it. It's conceivable. Perhaps Reagan really Good that so many people have read it, Universe, on Broadway,] she talked about believes that some of his policies are for then. extraterrestrial creatures who chose her the greater good. I don't believe he thinks to explain to them different aspects of life they are evil. But there are certain things \"Or say they have read it. ..\" on earth. She was a bag lady living in the which are being accomplished under his Not only that, they say, \"I've plowed streets. And she says all right, and she administration, which are absolutely hor- through it... \" But four million people pulls out a can of soup and says, \"This is rifying... People literally starve ...\" don't usually \"plow\"... they read or Campbell's soup.\" And then she pulls out don't read, but here they all feel obliged a portrait by Andy Warhol of a can of Perhaps we live in one of the to say that yes, they too had this mystic Campbell's soup and tries to explain, peculiar in-between moments when experience of reading Umberto Eco ... I \"This is art, and this is soup.\" And then liberalism is able to flourish, like must have tried mules, horses, tractors, she says, \"You got it? Art and soup.\" And when Queen Victoria enabled a safe and sheer endurance, but my plowing then she puts them behind her back. And empire for 60 years or Pericles enabled remained laborious, and much ofit bores moves her hands around as though she an Athens that brought forth Aristotle... me. How do you explain the great were mixing up the two and then says, But isn't the rule really all those other attraction of the book? Is it the story? \"All right, now, which one is which?\" The times and what they bring forth? Much of it doesn't come across accu- whole meter is the emperor's new rately in translation, certainly not the clothes. People are not willing to say \"I would like to believe that we live in an invented words. that's junk, and this is art. I can't buy that; enlightened era; that the communica- it's not art. I've never bought it as art. But tions systems we now have will allow us it's extraordinary, the money that's being to share what we have, and allow us to paid for that cartoon stuff, the museums see, firsthand, the starving people in that hang the stuff, because they're afraid many parts of the world, which we would they may be wrong. otherwise never be exposed to, and that this will change our minds and will allow \"I think it's better to aspire to intellectu- us to say, yes, I will share what I have. I ality, intellectualism, than to bum books. would like to believe this could happen, It's possible that people will say, \"I have although apparently it's not happening. this book, I read this book, therefore I am But maybe it will.\" an intellectual.\" And they'll keep it on their table for so long, and then say the It doesn't seem to me that the new hell with it- I'm going to burn it, and I'm media have a progressive effect in a going to burn every book that I have, liberal sense. Standardizing our reac- every book that there is. Maybe ulti- tions by imposing values rather closes mately that will happen. I don't think so.\" minds instead of opening them. In fact, isn't television the inquisition of our How important are books to you in days? Wasn't the Inquisition a sort of your work, when you take words from a play, or a screenplay, and revivify, 18
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recreate, and maybe even limit a feeling, an event? \"I tend to simplify things because that's how I think. In my work as an actor, my teacher, Uta Hagen, explained that if you cannot put it into words than you cannot do it, you cannot repeat it. And it's important .to be able to repeat it as an actor.\" This may be true for theater; j don't know about movies. No, no, not for movies. No, it's a different thing. That's why Brando's technique is so marvelous. He refuses to learn his lines. He simply reads them or makes them up as he goes along. But the countries. And no matter where I went, 20th anniversary of the play. And he remembered me after 17 years -I had a ideas are so clear in his mind. the play was being done. I think the film very small part. \"... What excites me is that while there is better than the play. But the play \"I said 'Harold, it's the most difficult part I have ever done in my life because I must have been a time when elitists nevertheless was enormously successful. know I'm very good, I know it's the role of the three in the play. When I come out for simply ·had validity, now the electronic I think 35 languages play it.\" my personal..: I almost cry when I think about this, because it was that hard. media and movies translate information ~re the characterization and the 'When I come out for my curtain call, the applause dips instead of increases: He into easily accessible stimuli that go decor-the wig-the same in the playas said, 'If you do this part correctly, Murray, they'll stop applauding when you come straight to the stomach , or the heart, or in the film? Or was it punked up? out: Because there is a speech at the end of the play whereby you can go for whatever. That in a sense is what Gui \"Yah, the wig was pretty much the sympathy and tears. And at the end of that play, that's what I really wanted to do, does as well. same. He was a fop, you know, Mozart. for my own release. He said, 'Don't; you must be harder. Step on those impulses, He's playing on that certainly. But the But what you said about the people who because they're cheap: essentially lazy nature ofpeople is also a put their nose to the grindstone, the \"If I'm really true to myself, Bernardo Gui will seem without charm and without factor in the power of people like lesser poets, is really very interesting. I fear. He will be absolutely deadly, he will be cold. It's very difficult, because I'm a Bernado Gui ... because they really do never considered that. But, you know, warm man, I enjoy people. And I want to be liked. But I think I'll sacrifice that, not want to think. It is difficult to think. you're right. I consider myself an artist. I because the part demands it. I'm curious what the response will be. The response But they also want security. don't know 'great artist: I always thought to Salieri has been amazing - the letters I've received from intellectuals, women, \"If you look at the last election, less of myself as a great actor, no matter what men, from young, from very old, the gi~ts I've received from all over the world. It's than 45 percent of the people who can I've been doing. It takes great material to remarkable the chord that Salieri touched. I'm not talking about the vote did. That's ridiculous. I think that's a show those colors. I wish I could write for performance, they respond to the man, Salieri. Musicians have sent me record- good indication of lack of sense of self, myself. I can't; I've tried it. ings of Salieri that they have made. It's a sense of the responsibility of self. lbu said you've. taken on the role of remarkable thing. \"Now, I'm curious about the response \"I think of Shakespeare, Hamlet.. .man Bernardo Gui because it is the absolute might be the greatest creation, the incarnation ofevil, and you want to play to this man, Gui, I'm playing as bloodless. paragon of animals, but not as he behaves it without nuance. Is that correct? I'm not even going to say evil. It's in so many parts of the world. This is not someone without a soul. How much \"Not without nuance, but without more evil can you be? A soulless man. I wonder what the response will be? I am a paragon of animals; it's a monster that charm.\" willing to gamble it will be a sexual an animal never dreamed of. 'There are That's something an actor never agrees more things in heaven and earth than to do. response.\" That would be a dreadful comment on there are dreamt of in your philosophy, \"That's one of the reasons I want to do modem society. Horatio: And he's right. And that goes for it. First of all, I'm not going to do a villain \"Yes. l'lliet you know.\" ~ the horror of the Inquisition, as well as again, not for years. I'm becoming too the beauty of Da Vinci or Mozart.\" identified with it. I think it's also back of my psyche. I used to play only comic Sometimes I have the feeling that roles. I was never regarded as anything Salieri was... very breakable more than a funny actor, and I decided to ground, that the people who are less change that, and I did. And now I've got famous in every epoch, the lesser poets, to go back to being funny again. It's very likely had their noses more to the human nature. People don't want to think grindstone than to what was actually beyond their noses; you've run up against going on. And that the lasting greats, that yourself, with your editors, I'm sure. because they speak to the generations- \"But the opportunity to playa character Mozart-don't express the horror of and not charm the audience doesn't come their time. along very often. And it takes a very I've been curious about Amadeus' strong, self-assured actor to carry that off. I tried to do it once before on stage in The great success. \"So have l. When I was making the film Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. I played the (l was doing two films simultaneously), I street man, who comes into the house. traveled between Hollywood and Prague, And I spoke with Harold, who directed and I visited a lot of Eastern European me in my first Broadway play. It was the 20
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Depardieu, Miou-Miou and Michel Blanc in Menage. by Dan Yakir majoritarian structures - the couple, the ennui of relationships, even the pat, \"France is absolutely insupporta- Bertrand Blier. commercial cinema within which he is ble-a rich, desperate country; forced to operate. \"I'm totally allergic to a mirror image of its govern- it.~ ment; Bertrand Blier told me when I first met him in 1978. \"One wants to destroy Married and living in a plush apartment all this.\" Today, the 48-year-old director, in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, Blier eternally puffing on his pipe, still aims to enjoys everything he protests. His nov- disturb. Blier insists that all his films are els, which tend to become scripts (Going comedies and that none is intended as a Places, Beau-Pere), win literary prizes. serious treatise on anything, but most Sitting at his typewriter, Blier ventures viewers believe him only when he takes into all the forbidden zones that his the trouble to coat the bitter pill he's, characters frequent. \"As I grow older, my confected. His biggest stateside hit, Get stories become more difficult for me to Out Your Handkerchiefs (Preparez Vos write. I put my characters in a certain Mouchoirs), would never have won the situation without truly understanding Oscar (1978) had it not been for the why. I write the first scene and the rest is charm that oozed from its every subver- an attempt to understand why I wrote it sive pore. and what it's all about. I must have in my head the same madness Ehat I express in Blier deconstructs the look and lan- them, but since I'm an intellectual I guage of alliances and lovers, and, as in transport it through my writing and Going Places, (Les Valseuses) finds the images-which is why I'm not in prison normal heart. Then, as in his current yet. I think my films would be good Menage (Tenue de Soiree), he rails about subject matter for a psychoanalyst. But I (Continued on page 27) 22
AParisianI•n en•ca Dexter Gordon blows be-bop in Fifties Paris in 'Round Midnight. by William Hackman no less ambivalent about American culture. Official warnings about \"Ameri- There are few relationships requir- Bertrand Tavernier can cultural imperialism,\" recent protests ing subtler analytic skills to com- against the \"Americanization\" of French prehend than that which exists television , and magazine cover stories on between France and the United States. how to defend European culture from the To fall back on the old standby, \"Iove- on-slaught of American kitsch , have done hate,\" doesn't begin to explain the variety little to cool the country's enthusiasm for and intensity of feeling that binds these Dirty Harry, JR . Ewing, and Mickey two peoples. At every conceivable level- Mouse, who will soon have a new Magic political, social, intellectual , cultural - Kingdom about 20 minutes east of Paris . they seem to be locked in some sort of permanent ritual dance, according to Moreover, it was the French who three which they intermittently fight and flirt, decades ago lent credibility to a cu lture like a pair of awkward adolescents, that American intellectuals had thereto- unsure of these strange, new feelings and fore openly disdained. For all their terrified to take the next step. maddening jargon, French critics have often revealed dimensions to American On the cultural front, Americans tend culture that we natives hadn't full y to revere the traditions of Balzac, Zola, grasped ourselves, and in so doing have and Proust; Manet, Monet, and prompted us to take more seriously Cezanne; Renoir, Truffaut, and Godard . our own, unjustly neglected cuttural We are secretly envious, but also a little treasures. resentful: okay, so we're philistines, we mutter under our breath, but at least we Consider the two most striking exam- have fun. The French have proven to be ples: jazz and film. Were it not for the interventions of French critics, countless American \"B\" movies wou ld long ago have 23
been consigned to the trash bins of portrait that emerges-both on the set another man, and left Francis with their history-or, at best , the locked vaults of and on the screen - is immensely appeal- young daughter, Berenger. As a single studio archives. Similarly, had French Ing. parent, Francis leaves a lot to be desired, audiences not clamored to see the likes of leaving the girl alone into the wee hours Bud Powell and Lester Young, a genera- It is clear from the start that Tavernier as he IQiters in the rain outside the Blue tion of black American jazz musicians continues to be a great fan of bebop and Note, a jazz club in the Saint-Germain- would have died even younger and more all that came after it. During production, des-Pres quarter of Paris, listening to destitute than it did. the director delighted in surprising his Dale Turner. Dale has recently returned musician-actors with his knowledge of to Paris from New York, where his music All of which makes 'Round Midnight , their work, and one suspects that his was unappreciated and his friends were Bertrand Tavernier's bittersweet homage decision to rely on the likes of Herbie dying. But even the warm, responsive to these legendary figures, particularly Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and, above all, audiences that crowd into the Blue Note intriguing. In paying tribute to the Dexter Gordon on camera, as well as off, night after night can't help Dale's drinking masters of bebop , Tavernier has provided was at least partially motivated by a desire problem , and he is headed for an early us with a case study of how French artists to \"play\" with his musical heroes , like a grave when Francis comes along. and intellectuals resp0nd to American talented novice who hangs out at the culture. Tavernier, now in his mid-forties , club , his horn at the ready, waiting to be By story's end, Dale returns to New was among that generation of young invited up to the bandstand. \"It's a little York , where he copes with the countless Frenchmen who found in jazz the bit intimidating working with people like species of vermin that inhabit that city in spontaneity and romance that so often Ron [Carter] and Herbie [Hancock],\" the form of club owners, drug dealers, seemed to be missing in post-war France. admits Tavernier, who will gladly name as and (we can safely assume) music critics. For them , jazz became the next great many of the jazz greats he saw in his When news of his death arrives by movement in 20th century culture , the youth as he can remember. telegram , nothing in Francis' expression torch-bearer of a European avant-gardism suggests that Dale's passing was out of that had ended up as one of the fatalities Tavernier had committed to making a the ordinary. Thanks in no small measure of the Second World War. Moreover, as jazz film before he had a story. He to Francis , Dale's last years were full of the spiritual cry of an oppressed culture, eventually took as his point of departure meaning and love, and now, like all mortal jazz could claim an authenticity and the memoirs of Francis Paudras, now a souls, he is gone. Francis, meanwhile, legitimacy free from the sins of European 51-year-old Parisian who had grown close has grown from his relationship with tradition. to several of the jazz greats who lived in Dale: he has learned just how precious Paris in the late Fifties and early Sixties . Berenger is , and in the final scenes we see Sometimes deliberately, sometimes Paudras and his wife actually had pro- father and daughter happy together, not, 'Round Midnight details the vided shelter to the pianist Bud Powell for looking at home movies Francis had truths and half-truths that character- close to two years , as the fictional Francis taken when Dale was still among them . ized the French reception of jazz. And if does for saxophonist Dale Turner in the film is not entirely successful as a 'Round Midnight. From the anecdotal Pretty thin stuff. Fortunately, there is narrative work of art, it is nonetheless material contained in Paudras' reminis- more to hold our attention here than the engaging in what it tells us about the man cences, Tavernier and screenwriter David rather facile story line. As in his most who made it. For, in ways that are not Rayfiel fashioned a script around the lives popular previous film , A Sunday in the always obvious, Tavernier has put a great of two men whose lives had gone sour in Country, Tavernier, an unabashedly deal of himself into this film, and the very different ways. humanist filmmaker, is engaged by his characters: Though it is Francis, with his Francis' wife has fallen in love with 24
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handy 16-mm movie camera, who stands character rattles off names like Coleman out as the director's obvious alter ego, Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Tavernier identifies no less with the Parker before quite gratuitously letting soulful and suffering saxophonist por- slip that he also enjoys the Big Band trayed by Dexter Gordon. The sight of sound of Claude Debussy-proof posi- the prematurely aging and infirm Gordon tive that these jazz giants really do belong re-creating a role that must hit so close to among the ranks of the great composers. home compels our attention. During a break last year on the Birdland set of the 'Round Midnight is not Tavernier's first venture into American culture: Coup de soundstage at Studio Epinay, north of Torchon was adapted from Jim Thomp- Paris, Gordon elaborated, \"Dale Turner is son's novel, Pop. 1280, and a documen- not one person. He's a composite.. .It's a tary on Mississippi blues anticipated the little painful,\" he added. \"At night some-· black music theme of the present film. Of times I think about all the people who the three, Coup de Torchon was by far the make up this character-Lester Young, most successful, precisely because Bud Powell, myself.\" Tavernier moved the setting from the American South to French colonial A mong the non-actors with sub- Dexter in Seine City. Africa. Though there is surely no moral stantial roles in 'Round Midnight distinction between French and Ameri- are the directors John Berry and Tavernier's next two projects deal with can racism, Tavernier's familiarity with Martin Scorsese, close friends of Taver- medieval France and the Hollywood the former makes his evocation of it ring nier, . who confess awe at the way, in blacklist era, respectively. If history is true. In 'Round Midnight, racism, cer- Berry's words, \"he controls the set in an written by the victors, the historical tainly a central issue in the history of jazz, unobtrusive way.\" Tavernier, observes drama is for Tavernier an occasion to lingers vaguely in the background, as if Berry, has a quality \"essential for a really restore to the vanquished their rightful Tavernier isn't quite sure what to do about fine director-the ability to make you place. He achieves this by disregarding it. want to do your best for him. When a guy the received opinion of the past and by has that, it's mysterious.\" Scorsese letting the actors speak for themselves, as Regrettably, the realities of the market- agrees, noting the contrast between did so many of the musicians in 'Round place are such that French filmmakers Tavernier's and his own approach to Midnight. have to think more about the American filmmaking: \"Bertrand never seems to get audience. Tavernier is simply the most upset, and he manages to get these If naturalism is one of 'Round Mid- distinguished French director starting to terrific performances out of people. I night's most endearing traits, however, it shoot in English. A growing preoccupa- tend to be more New York nervous.\" is also one of its key failings. Lacking a tion with American themes is sure to strong, convincing storyline, the film follow, especially to attract major pro- Amid the mayhem of a movie set that is weakens our involvement with the char- ducers like Irwin Winkler, who produced doubling as a recording studio (the music acters; the mood evoked by the gorgeous 'Round Midnight. Working in Europe is in 'Round Midnight was recorded \"live,\" sets and the understated color photogra- one way, Winkler says, for a Hollywood and Hancock and the other musicians phy dissolves into a cheap nostalgia. And producer to make quality pictures at recorded most of the additional this is one of the unintentional truths the bargain prices. To wit: 'Round Midnight soundtrack material between scenes), film reveals about the way many French came in at $470,000 less than its $3.5 Tavernier moves with astonishing calm, artists and intellectuals respond to Amer- million budget. The film can be distrib- never rushed, almost always smiling. ican culture. uted in the U.S. without the stigma of When the camera is rolling, he has a being a \"foreign film,\" and perhaps earn a tendency to look around at the army of Though drawn to the liberating, vis- respectable sum at the boxoffice without technicians and support crew behind him ceral power of, say, gangster films, having to pack every IS year-old in rather than at the action, yet nothing in a skyscrapers, and saxophones, gallic con- America into a theater three times during scene seems to escape his notice. Like noisseurs of la vie americaine frequently a week. the title character of his 1974 film, The sentimentalize it by reducing it to terms Clockmaker, Tavernier is a meticulous they understand. Thus when Francis There is good reason, then, to hope and passionate craftsman. asks Dale Turner to name the saxmen that this strategy pays off: it could provide who have most influenced him, Gordon's new support for deserving European Both this unhurried pace and his filmmakers, and mean something startling eye for detail have become besides Sly Stallone on the neighborhood virtual signatures of the Tavernier style. screen. Winkler and Tavernier are already \"Where does that come from?\" asks an looking for a story for their Hollywood admiring John Berry. Wherever, Taver- blacklist picture, which would return to nier has refined it into a visual lyricism the theme of an American in Paris, and ideally suited for the kind of period pieces may even be based on John Berry's to which he increasingly gravitates. For memoirs, The Blacklist Blues, if Berry second only to his devotion to his doesn't decide to do it himself. With characters is his fascination with mood. a strong enough story as their starting These are the elements that remain long point, and a little less fawning over these after viewing Coup de Torchon, A Sunday strange and wondrous Americans, in the Country, and 'Round Midnight, Tavernier could make a great American and it is not surprising to learn that film yet. ~ 26
Manhandler portraying gays as effeminate weirdos Aknowing appraisal (Continuedjrompage 22) when he pastes a shock ending on the of America's favorite refuse to undergo analysis- I'll probably movie, an ending that shows Monique, filmmaker and funnyman, run out of stories~ Bob , and Antoine-the latter two in aMenage is perhaps the filmmaker's drag- hustling trois on a Parisian street WOODY ALLEN most provocative film. It's a no-holds- corner? \"It's a dream ending,\" responds Illustrated with 255 photo- graphs in color and black-and- barred tale of a meek, balding loser Blier. \"It was impossible to finish the white, here is a brilliant analy- sis of the films of Woody Allen , named Antoine (Michel Blanc), whose story. Normally, Antoine would have shot written by renowned French critic - and avid Woody Allen greedy wife, Monique (Miou Miou), Bob, but I preferred to end with Monique fan - Robert Benayoun . doesn't love him. Into his life barges a speaking about her child. It's an imagi- Benayoun shows that Allen is one of the most self-aware and whirlwind named Bob (Gerard Depar- nary child, of course ... it's not a serious accomplished living directors -one who like Fellini and Berg- dieu), a con-man hunk who seduces him ending. It's a gag.\" man is always testing the limits of his medium at the same time with all the finesse of a bull in a chi'na Consider the ending of Get Out that he makes us laugh at him shop. He scores, not only getting Your Handkerchiefs. The two and at ourselves. Benayoun also Monique's allegiance by dumping freshly- men, played by Depardieu and the evaluates the character Allen stolen bills in her lap-to the point where portrays in his movies and how he has evolved. And in his stun- she urges her husband to sleep with his late Patrick Dewaere, find themselves on ning selection of stills and can- dids, Benayoun absorbs readers suitor-but also by sodomizing Antoine, a street corner and, says Blier, \"I have the in their memories of the films as he draws them into the de- who's had a change of heart and falls in impression they'll go further than that, tails of Allen's technique. love with the first person to ever desire that one will put his hand on the other's Size 9 \\/,/1 x 1 2'~ 525.00. now at your book- store, or send check or money order [Q him . Bob goes further: he turns his lover body, which would lead to self-hate and Crown Publishers. Inc. . Depr. 788.3 4 En- gelhard Ave.. Avenel. N.J. 07001. Please add into a housewife, making him cook and the destruction of their friendship.\" This S1.85 postage and handling. N.Y. and N.J . clean for him , and finally coercing him to may not be an endorsement of male love, • residents. add sales [ax. withstand the ultimate humiliation by and yet this is a man whose movies have ~..MHO ARMONY BOOKS dressing him in drag and taking him out in consistently done just that. In Going 00\" A division of Crown Publishers. Inc. the open-where he dumps him. Places, Depardieu and Dewaere have a \"It's a story I wrote five years ago, but sexual relationship (\"Whenever they're didn't dare use,\" says Blier. \"I wanted to lonely or without women, they do it\"), make something in the spirit of Going and in Blier's Femmes Fatales (Calmos, sPlaces to see if I could still disturb - this 1975) and My Best Friend Girl (La time with a more serious, more somber Femme de Mon Pote, 1982), the men story~ But the filmmaker stresses that always prefer each other's company to Menage, was not all a succes de scandale. women. Whether this leads to sex \"Scandals arise when people protest. remains the big mystery of Blier's oeuvre. Nobody protested against my film, He concedes that he was moved by the including French homosexuals. It's a male bonding that Claude Sautet cruel story, but it's objective. It isn't depicted in Cesar and Rosalie \"I find it biased against anybody. very beautiful that the two men stay \"It's not really a film about homosexual- together, alone ... 1 regretted that Romy ity,\" he continues. \"I wanted to show a Schneider returns in the end.\" man who isn't desirable suddenly being What the director feels about male desired by another man. Antoine isn't gay friendship is often revealed through his at first; he's completely in love with his women, whose characterization earned wife, but he's forced to change his Blier the title of France's prime myso- orientation when Monique sells him to gynist. His most notorious film, Femmes Bob. She believes she can manipulate Fatales, deals with his favorite subject: both men, but they simply stop needing the battle of the sexes. His recollection of her and kick her out. She's a woman who how he wrote the movie is telling: \"It's a makes a wrong move and pays for it. And story that we invented in 15 minutes , Bob is a thief who'd sell his own mother. Philippe Dumarcay and I. We were in a It's a character that was inspired by Jean house up in t~e mountains, taking long Genet's work. He respects nothing and walks and doing our own cooking, but we cheats both men and women - which didn't get any work done. One day we doesn't impede him from falling in love prepared a fantastic dinner-there was a from time to time. He thrives on huge flame in the fireplace, and the wind nightmares and pushes Antoine as far as was howling outside-and all of a sudden he can, then drops him. It's classic we said to each other, 'We don't miss rapport between men and women; it's women at all.'\" They came up with a also true in a case like this.\" scenario about two 40-ish men, a gyne- Blier maintains that there's nothing cologist Oean-Pierre Marielle) and a pimp anti-gay in Menage, which some may find Oean Rochefort) , who though fed up are difficult to accept. Isn't the film showing pursued by sexually starved females to gay love as based on exploitation, the bitter end. The film's final image is manipulation, and role playing? Isn't he that of the two shriveled men seeking 27
Patrick Dewaere and LDlitoid in Beau Pere. it. You want to tell the others, 'Look how pretty she is!' \"The reduction here elicits Depardieu, Huppert, and Dewaere in Les Va/seuses. Blier's admission that he doesn't under- stand women. He is baffled-like a boy- refuge in a giant vagina. problems existing between the sexes are at what goes on behind the mysterious, In 1978, Blier saw feminism as Stalin- even more serious today because then Sinewy curves. there was certainty about women's lib. It ism, suppressing masculine expression. was supposed to liberate them, but it \"All my films adopt a man's point of Today, he maintains that \"the war didn't. .. .In each film I try to envision view, because I still haven't been able to between men and women is over. what the love story of the year 2,000 will come up with a story that I could tell Nobody knows who won. Now it's the look like ... How will our children say T through a woman's eyes. If I were to make time for licking the wounds .... Men and love you?' That's the way I see Menage. such a film, she'd be a totally mythical women no longer know who's strong, And that's how I saw Handkerchiefs at character. If I have a masculine character, who's weak, who's feminine and who's the time~ I .put myself in his place, and since I masculine, so accidents like the one I assume I know what I'm talking about, I show in Menage happen. You think you're In that film, Depardieu offers his wife, can tell the story. It follows that in my a man and you find out you're a woman, an unhappy knitter played by Carole films I don't have feminine characters of or vice versa. This uncertainty amuses Laure, to a man he befriends (Dewaere). any real importance, except in Beau-Pere me. Not, says Blier, to get rid of her, but to (1981). I sacrifice them, leave them in the share the bounty. \"If something is background, because you can't adopt a \"Our period is interesting, because it beauriful-a woman, wine-you can't double point of view. It's either/or.\" But, compels men and women - especially he adds mischievously, \"I've seem films men-to question themselves. The enjoy it all by yourself. You want to share directed by women, such as Diane Kiirys' Entre Nous , in which the most sympa- thetic characters are the men. If a man had directed that film, he'd be called misogynistic.\" Blier admits that in Menage he submits Miou Miou's charac- ter to some really rough treatment and that he was vexed when feminists didn't protest. \"I think right now society is anesthe- sized about sex problems. Sexual frenzy is a thing of the past. Maybe excessive liberty brought about a backlash. Sex has become banal, like buying ice cream. Maybe among homosexuals, the motiva- tion is stronger. Bur I don't know. I'm too old to speak about the subject. In the movies, yes, but in life ... .I think these are questions best posed to 20-year-old boys and girls. I belong to a different generation. I try to observe and under- stand, but I don't always succeed. \"Friendship exists,\" he offers, \"but I'm amused by exploring all its manifesta- tions. In My Best Friend's Girl, the two best friends are a handsome young man [Thierry Lhermitte) and an older, fat, unattractive man [the late Coluche), who had been betrayed by love. When two guys are always together, they're not friends; they're a team, as in a tennis team. It's almost as if they're forced to be inseparable. True friends see each other once a year-people you can always come back to, out of choice. I guess I think of friendship as an intellectual thing. \"In My Best Friend's Girl, I explore the conflict between love and friendship as the subject of comedy. When a woman [Isabelle Huppert) arrives, they stop being friends. It's a picture about hypoc- risy, about false and true friendship ....\" Blier is influenced by the \"buddy- 28
buddy\" tradition of American cinema, but self, playing roles, while children are TommyUdo reshapes it to his needs. \"My characters outside of society. They are the only ones talks about are often two fools , or clochards , who who aren't injured by life. Marilyn... have nothing but their friendship. I love this tradition, because losers and anti- \"I love the way children look at things If you know who Tommy Udo is, heroes have nothing to lose and nothing and how they judge adults,\" muses B1ier. you must subscribe to Films to protect. They're available for adven- \"It's wonderful to see a child and an adult in Review. If you don't, then ture . The same tradition exists also for interact in an adult situation , especially you have to! men and women, such as Bonnie and when Ariel [in Beau-Pere] demands to be Clyde. Of course, sex interferes ... treated like an adult. She speaks like a In a recent 3-part article in fully developed woman, without being Films in Review, Richard Widmark \"I like dealing with fools . Man's greatest the nag that her mother was. When she looked back on playing opposite folly is stupidity, and I include myself in tells her stepfather, Remi (Dewaere) , she Marilyn Monroe. that category.. ..That's the only thing you loves him , and he panics-that's what I \"She was a vulnerable kid ... a movie can be sure of. Yet fools are capable of make films for. He wants to touch her so animal .. .never a professional actress moments of lucidity and extraordinary much , but is afraid ; he's perverse in his ... murder to work with. intelligence, which can be very moving. If cowardice, in hi s struggles and We thought: Marilyn isn't going you deal with very intelligent characters, excuses .. . .He's afraid of being too old to make it.\" you have heroes , and they are boring. A and ugly, of hurting her.... Maybe the man of action wouldn't have time for an real , sincere possibility of love for adults This is only one of the fabulous affair with an adolescent girl , and an is with children. Of course, such affairs career articles that appear in intellectual would resist it. Fools, like are bound to end, but exist nevertheless. Films in Review month after month, marginals , are open to things. along with biographies of legendary \"When I did Handkerchiefs, I felt that a stars of the past ... filmographies ... \"My films are funny because they show young girl and an adult man would be exclusive historic photographs ... people who think they're clever but impossible, monstrous. Then, a few reviews .. .interviews .. .the latest aren't, people who want to be brave but years later, I did it, and it wasn't video and TV news .. .noted can't help their cowardice. People who monstrous.\" Beau-Pere is Blier's most columnists and much, much more. don't understand life. And I treat men and positive film , as he puts it. It's the sole women equally in this area. The women work where , instead of ridiculing, he $2 .50 at your newsstand certainly aren't any more stupid than the extols. It's the only time he willingly ACT NOWAND SAVE 28% men. In Going Places , people thought I indulges in sentimentality. \"I wanted it to was ridiculing the character of Miou Miou be like a dream , a fable. It was meant to ----------------One year's subscription only $18.00 when she has her first orgasm with a have the sadness of blues but also the clumsy ex-con. But it's Depardieu and pleasure of that sadness .. . .1 was inspired Send me _ subscriptions to Films in Review. Dewaere, who consider themselves so by the American melodramas of the I enclose a check or money order in US dollars macho , who are funny: They're incapable Fifties. I wanted to make a film full of for~ . (Subscriptions are $18.00 each) of satisfying a woman! violins , which is why the camera always Send to : caresses the heroes, approaching them \"I'm very anguished. I try to rid myself gently. At the end, the old building is a Films in Review. Box 589, New York, NY 10021 . of anguish through film, by communicat- love nest , Walt Disney style. ing with people, expressing what I feel. FIRST NAME (please print) LAST NAME All my films are marked by aggression ; \"Cinema is a thiefs art ,\" he chuckles. someone is attacked verbally or physi- \"We steal from writers , painters, play- STREET ADDRESS APT. NO. cally. And my films are an aggression wrights, and it's okay that these be against people, against logic, against sources of inspiration. A filmmaker good sense. Life is an aggression, anyway. vulgarizes - that's for sure. I see myself both as aggressor- creating is aggressive: writing, making films-and \"I think I express myself better with victim. A love story is often an aggres- words than images, but I'd still choose sion. Like a disease. A film is a disease. cinema over literature, because it's more After it's made, you're healed . And the modern and a better means of communi- public, of course, is the doctor. ..\" cating. You can no longer tell a story that starts at point A and ends at Z. You have Despite all the contradictory signals to try for the unexpected. In Notre he enjoys sending, Blier admits Histoire , there are 30 films. Each that, cynical or not, he sides with sequence is a new film . And with each Victims. In Menage , he identifies with sequence I try to destroy the one that Antoine, \"because he's the only sincere, preceded it. You have a nice love scene? honest character, without ulterior Next you'll see it was no love scene at all; motive. He asks for nothing. He's tender it was something else. I like the quick and pure .\" But his affection is reserved succession of contradictory emotions and mostly for the children in his films, not moods and shifting of gears. I get bored because they're victims, but \"because easily and want to get out of the situations they're pure, honest, sincere. Unlike I create. It's a game I play with the adults, they aren't clowns. Being an adult audience and with myself. But often, involves wearing costumes, hiding one- when you try to destroy something, you end up improving it. ® CITY STATE ZIP
New Yorker Films 1986 Doris Dorrie's MEN . .. Solanas' TANGOS, THE EXILE OF GARDEL Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH Milos Forman's AMADEUS* Hector Babenco's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN* Also: ___________________________________________________________________ Godard's HAIL MARY, Diegues' QUILOMBO, Mowbray's A PRIVATE FUNCTION, Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE, Cox's MAN OF FLOWERS, Lerner & MacAdams' WHAT HAPPENED TO KEROUAC? *non-theatrical only For further information and a copy of our 1987 catalogue, call or write New Yorker Films. 16 West 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10023 (212) 247-6110
31
utto many Lumbertons in America. I picked it \"B by David Chute because we could get police insignias lue Velvet is not a movie for and stuff, because it was an actual town. everybody. Some people are But then it took off in my mind and we started getting lumber trucks going going to really dig it, but we've through the frame and that jingle on the radio- 'At the sound of the falling experienced some extremely negative reactions, too. We had a sneak preview in tree.... '-that all came about because of the Valley that was a disaster. People the name. thought it was disgusting and sick. And of \"There is an autobiographical level to course it is, but it has two sides. If you the movie. Kyle is dressed like me. My don't have the contrasts, then maybe. father was a research scientist for the But you can push the limits out much Department of Agriculture in Washing- wider than Blue Velvet. I believe that ton. We were in the woods all the time. I'd films should have power, the power of sorta had enough of the woods by the good and the power of darkness, so you time I left, but still, lumber and lumber- can get some thrills and shake things up. jacks, all this kinda thing, that s America And ifyou back offfrom that stuff, you're to me-like the picket fences and the shooting right down into lukewarmjunk. \" roses in the opening shot. It s so burned \"I don't know if you're a detective or a in, that image, and it makes me feel so pervert,\" remarks Sandy (Laura Oem) to happy. That was in a lot of our Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) at a crucial childhoods. \" juncture in the harrowing new David A brainy, small-town kid, MacLach- Lynch picture, Blue Velvet. We never are lan's Jeffrey finds a grisly clue in a field Blue Velvet director David Lynch. told which term really applies, although one day and dutifully hands it over to the writer-director Lynch (who created Jef- straight-arrow local constable. Later on, surface ofa small American town, but it 's frey as a look-alike alter ego) would surely partly to impress the cop's daughter, also a probe into the subconscious or a insist that he is both at once. The Oem's Sandy, a raw-boned teen angel, place where you face things that you puppyish curiosity of the eager-beaver with his own boldness, Jeffrey follows his don't normally face. One of the sound boy investigator, who gets into a sicker few skimpy clues straight into the dark mixers said it s like Norman Rockwell brand of trouble than an American small heart of a violent sexual mystery. It's as if meets Heironymous Bosch. It s a trip into town is supposed to be able to encom- the living room wall in a Frank Capra that, as close as you can get, and then a pass, may not be entirely blameless in his movie opened up to reveal an assaultive trip out. Theres an innermost point, and wide-eyed naivete. He is so amorally ritual choreographed by De Sade unfold- from then on it pulls back. awestruck by crime and horror that he ing on the other side-a ritual in which \"Jeffery has seen enough and gotten in could be accused of fraternizing with the purity is sacrificed (for love) to monstros- there enough so that the opportunity is forces of human soul-rot. ity and is irrevocably tainted by it. there and the desire is there. But it s The movie is a nightmarish coming-of- Isabella Rosselini's porcelain-skinned something he doesn't like about himself age story, a Hardy Boys thriller with Dorothy, bruised and defiled by the at all. It comes back at him pretty quick. running sores and pustules. It was made seething, wheezing, vile Frank (Dennis And that's something about life, you by, and about, a compulsive lifter of rocks Hopper in full froth), standing naked in knOw. At times, you push the limits out as who secretly adores the slimy creepy- Jeffrey's living room, in front of Sandy and far as where you think you can live with crawlies he uncovers. But the picture also Jeffrey's mother, screaming, \"He put his yourself. Even though Jeffrey could toys with the notion that happiness is a disease in me!\" is not a spectacle anybody understand it and get there, it s not his matter of confining yourself stubbornly to will enjoy. (The nudity is meticulously scene. Thats his, I dunno, his con- the sunny surface of things, of not de-eroticized.) And poor Jeffrey doesn't science. lVu can't keep doing things that probing too deeply into their wormy know how to react; he isn't sure which of you can't live with. lVu 're going to get innards . And who can deny that he has a the implications of this outburst he has to sick, or you're going to go crazy, or point? accept like a man and which he can still you're going to get arrested, or some- \"This is all the way America is to me. righteously fend off. thing's going to happen. \" There's a very innocent, naive quality to Because he is implicated. He imagines my life, and there s a horror and a that he's falling in love with Dorothy sickness as well. It's everything. F(even though the center of the story is or David Lynch, gazing in rapt \"Blue Velvet is a very American movie. fascination at diseased bodies (or Sandy's radiant sanity), and when they're souls), in Eraserhead, The Ele- The look of it was inspired by my in bed and she reflexively says, \"Hit me; childhood in Spokane, Washington. he recoils, but complies. phant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet, the Lumberton is a real name; there are \"Blue Velvet is a trip beneath the spectacle may be no more gross or 32
Kyle Maclachlan and Isabella Rossellini cut up on the set of Blue Velvet. disgusting than wriggling bacteria ishness that cuts through to perceptions mysteriously overnourished, like the glimpsed through a microscope. His ,that ordinary professionalism, valuing thick blades of grass over a cemetary. In curiosity is not tainted by irony, malice, correctness beyond everything, can't the calender-art first image of a glowing- perversity, or condescension. His studi- white picket fence and top~heavy blood- ous outlook has an almost scientific touch. red roses, the colors are psychedelically purity. He doesn't smirk, he doesn't \"I've met John Uilters, liked him, and heightened, like the blossoms on the wink, he doesn't judge. The wisps of plants in H .P. Lovecraft's The Color Out classical religious music on the Blue feel a definite kinship with his stuff. But of Space that virere raised on unearthly Velvet soundtrack are no ironic jape. there are a lot of differences. His way is fertilizer. David Lynch could be putting his most making so much fun of those banal, profound religious feelings into this absurd, polyester things. I want to come The underlying horror of Blue Ttelvet, picture, quasi though they be. This is at them sideways in a drier way, for that of course, is that there's nothing probably the most nakedly exposed he's certain kind of humor. And also so that been in a movie, and no artist as you can slip into fear. See , Ronnie unearthly or inhuman about any of this sophisticated as Lynch would take such Rocket, the film I've been trying to make stuff. It's the rampaging, devouring vital- f1agrent risks unless he felt driven to it, for five years, is very absurd but also can ity of the most noisome critters that so unless he felt he'd hate himself if he turn slightly and become very frighten- unsettles . The rot in a human monster turned tail. ing. You can't just be so camp or so like Dennis Hopper's Frank is, in this blatant. Uilters is very upfront, sorta like scheme of things, a moral abscess, and It will be observed that Blue Ttelvet has a loud saxophone, and I want to back off Hopper's performanee (as wacked-out as story problems. It probably could have into something a little different.\" it is) has a lot of pain behind it: the benefited from the services of a freelance \"thriller doctor\" like, say, Ross Thomas. The billowing blue velvet draperies anguish of a spiritual gangrene case The generic mystery story elements are under the 'opening credits have an wracked by uncanny jolts of energy. You skimpy. On the level of bare craftsman- Italianate lushness, a rotting romaticism feel he could crush brains with his bare ship, Blue Velvet sometimes feels down- that recalls Luchino Visconti. But they hands in the throes of some feverish right klutzy. It stumbles over the basics of also look like something that's alive and spasm. setting up characters, of leading us along throbbing: an engorged membrane. In step by step so that we'll always know just this movie, Lynch's trademark thumping s\"Laura Dern Sandy has to balance how to interpret everything. It \"bungles\" noises make us feel trapped inside an all those neat, businesslike devices for organism, wedged into an intestine or a out a lot of darkness. Laura looks like eliminating ambiguity. But it revels in the pulsating ventricle. Sandy should look, and she understood kind of demented, go-for-broke amateur- what she had to do , and she had All the organic elements in Blue Velvet everything that it took to do it. Sandy is exhibit a similar hectic vigor. The flowers the counterweight but she is also the look swollen with color, the greenery person who got Jeffrey into this. He would probably have walked home that 33
Dennis Hopper thinks it's a gas to bug Rossellini in Blue Velvet. first night, after talking to herfather, and movie of The TriaL Henry, the hero of them, but they live through television or forgotten all about it.\" Eraserhead, gets into Kafka s world a bit. movies or someone else to satisfy the The implications of Blue Velvet could \"Henry is very sure that something is urge. So it s one step removed and it s slightingly be reduced to a fistful of platitudes - it's a yin and yang, ego-id, happening, bt he doesn't understand it at cleaner. They don't get their hands dirty, can't-have-the-light-without-the-dark view of life. But Lynch .clings to such a all. He watches things very, very care- but they 're still there. The people watch- tough-minded version of this basic atti- tude, without a trace of romantic nature fully, because hes trying to figure them ing the soap operas are digging this sick worship, that it doesn't feel like a reduction. He's willing to construct a out. He might study the comer ofthat pie stuff so much, and they understand it- working model of the scheme of things that incorporates the vile, the revolting, container; right there by your head, just and ifthey had the chance, they would do and the monstrous - and he calls them by their right names. because it s in his line of sight, and he- the same sick stuff. Death and decay also feed a teeming might wonder why he sat where he did to \"Sex is such a fascinating thing. Its undermass of scavanging beetles and bacteria, and Lynch always seems sub- have that be there like that? Everything is sorta like you can listen to one pop song liminally aware of the odorous organic processes that are gnawing at the very new. It might not be frightening to him, just so many times, whereas jazz has so roots they fertilize. His camera keeps trying to burrow into that wriggling, but it could be a key to something. many variations. Sex should be like jazz. black, bug-infested subsoil-literally, at first , when Jeffrey's father suffers a stroke Everything should be looked at. There It can be the same tune, but there are while watering the front lawn and a chasm opens up and we can hear the clattering could be clues in it.\" many variations on it. And then when you hum of thousands of leathery black mandibles. And, like a painter schooled Some moviegoers will react to the start getting out there, it can be shocking in anatomy, his sense of what's beneath the surface affects the way he photo- brutalization of Isabella Rossellini in Blue to learn that something like that could be graphs it. Velvet with unalloyed disgust. Those sexual. It would be kind of, you know, \"The one artist that I feel could be my brother-and I almost don't like saying it ssequences could invalidate the film for strange. But it a real fact oflife just the because the reaction is always, \"~s, you and everybody else\"-is Franz Kafka. I them. It is a peculiarity of the visceral way same. Theres no real explaining in Blue really dig him a lot. Some of his things we ,respond to movies that we don't Velvet because it ssuch an abstract thing are the most thrilling combos 0/ words I necessarily assume that the disgust has inside a person.\" have ever; ever; ever read. IfKafka wrote been evoked intentionally or that the A character in John Updike's novel The a crime picture, I'd be there. I'd like to direct that, for sure. I'd like to direct a director shares this feeling. The person Witches of Eastwick (an enjoyable book who staged the action , who dreamed it that presents magic as a vestigial nature- up, often becomes the object of the religion) delivers a guest sermon at a local negative reactions it provokes. church. It's a pretty weird sermon, too, all And, in a sense, this is perfectly proper. about the emotions of the roundworm A novelist, for instance, doesn't have to nestled in your small intestine, ~when a draw anybody else into a depiction of big gobbety mess of half-digested steak depravity. He doesn't have to force or moo goo gai pan comes sloshing down anyone to walk through it. The act of to him. He's as real a creature as you and moviemaking draws close to the acts it me. He's as noble a creature, depicts or explores, because the acts designwise - really lovingly designed.\" have to be staged before they can be David Lynch shares the fascination of photographed . You can even assume that this amatuer biologist (and amatuer if a director found any human activity too minister) with the complex shapes and disturbing even to simulate, he wouldn't ingenius functions that even the grod- be able to make a film about it. diest natural processes can assume. And \"Some people may have this stuff in it's somehow even more diverting when 34
the phenomena are poisonous or stom- soon as you step one foot forward into believe things so much that you make ach-churningly ugly. that story you realize that this world has them honest. I'm really just trying to be rules, and you have to follow them or the true to those ideas, not to manipulate an \"The 'disease' Dorothy talks about is audience will sense that you're doing audience; to get in there and let the an abstract sort ofthing. It doesn't mean material talk to me, to work inside a AIDS, or anything like that. There was, in ssomething dishonest. That part ofbeing the script, even more on that theme. dream. If you just experience it, ideas true to your ideas. Some films operate so sDorothy had that done to her before much on the surface it doesn't feel like will pop and you'll be in that world, and there are any kind ofreal rules. Maybe in and she understands that thing, that those cases you can actually go further; then you're OK. If it s real, and if you sickness. People mention William Bur- here and there. roughs to me a lot, but I've never read believe it, you can say almost anything. any Burroughs. I know I should, but.... \" \"Anytime theres a little bit of power; somebody might think it was sick or (Paragraphs in italics are excerpts from As it happens, Lynch's dreamily evoca- disgusting. A lot ofthe time when you go an interview with David Lynch by David tive visual gifts are a perfectly adequete out to an extreme, you can make a fool of substitute for intellectualism and analy- yourselfor a fool ofthe film. lVu have to Chute, conducted at the Bob s Big Boy, sis. He is such a wizard at infecting us with his creepoid perceptions that he comer of Wilshire and Highland in Los really doesn't need to work through the intermediate steps of figuring out what it Angeles on Saturday, June 21,1986.) ® all means. As if entranced, he translates his intimations of toxic mortality directly Godard * Lang * Film Editing * Actors Studio into imagery. \"In a way, this is still afantasy film. It s like a dream of strange desires wrapped sinside a mystery story. It what could happen ifyou ran out offantasy.\" The in-and-out structure of Blue FRITZ LANG GODARD ON Jtelvet mirrors the \"journey into GODARD hell\" format of such recent Ameri- by Lotte H. Eisner can political epics as Missing, Under Critical Writings of Fire, and especially Salvador. The new \"No future writer on Lang will be able to ig- Jean-Luc Godard myth of discovery in these stories is a nore this book . .. Everyone interested in the Edited by Jean Narboni and journey into a dark place where very few art of the cinema will derive pleasure and Tom Milne profit from it. . .Eisner demonstrates New foreword by Annette of the (legal or natural) laws we take for thematic developments and continuities Michelson granted seem to apply any longer. over the whole of ~ang's oeuvre. The real glory of the book, however, is its combina- This collection of Godard's writings, rang- Everything is leveled by the feral, surreal tion of structural analysis with close tech- ing from his early efforts to his later savagery that bubbles up from within nical descriptions of Lang's procedures and writings for Cahiers du Cinema, covers the people when they're liberated from the effects .\" years of Breathless, La Chinoise, and Weekend, and includes his views of Hitch- social tether. The last fillip of horror - Times Literary Supplement cock, Welles, Truffaut, and many others. comes with the recognition that this 420 pp. , 50 photos/ $13.95 paper Still the basic text for understanding Godard's thought. chaos is somehow a direct consequence WHEN THE of those beliefs and of our attempts to SHOOTING STOPS ... x + 292 pp., 55 photos/ $1O.95 paper enforce them on other people. We peer THE CUTTING into the abyss of political decay and see BEGINS A METHOD TO our own faces staring back at us, slack THEIR MADNESS A Film Editor's Story jaws dappled with innocent blood. by Ralph Rosenblum The History of the In the face of the lobotomized, yuppie- and Robert Karen Actors Studio by Foster Hirsch careerist, expedient optimism that ate \"A supe~b memoir with an intriguing blend of film history and criticism, personal ex- \"The way this distinctly American style of Hollywood, the most acidulous pessi- perience, and demonstration, as well as a acting brings plays to life is still a mystery, mism can be a sign of life - an act of dash of Hollywood gossip.\" although we outsiders know more about it independent judgment. now, thanks to Hirsch.\" - Washington Post s\"I really believe it like the lJeach \"It goes a long way to demystifying the - Philadelphia Inquirer magic of the movies. It is significant.\" \"Mr. Hirsch's imagination endows this Boys said: \"Be true to your school.\" lVu history with new life .. . \" gotta be true to the ideas that you have, - James Monaco because they're even bigger than youfirst 304 pp., 22 photos/$9.95 paper -New York Times Book Review think they are. And if you're not true to x + 358 pp., 25 photosl $11.95 paper them, they'll only work part way. They're Available at bookstores or directly DA CAPO PRESS 233 Spring St. from New York, NY 10013-1578 almost like gifts, and even if you don't understand them 100 percent, if you're Call toll-free 800-221-9369 true to them, they'll ring true at different levels and have a truth at different levels. But if you alter them too much then they won't even ring. They'll just sorta clank. \"No matter how weird a story is, as 35
Alex Cox interviewed by Todd McCarthy At a time when irreverent, anarchic, and dangerous spirits are barely to be found in the international cinema, the arrival on the scene of Alex Cox could not be more welcome. Although Sid and Nancy, after Repo Man, is only his second commercial feature, it is clear that his rude, uncom- promising imagination and deep-!!eated instinct for surreal humor places him at odds with the film industry establish- ment. Despite his taste for working loosely within genres on exotic locales, Cox runs no risk of becoming the next Spielberg- Lucas clone. To the contrary, his creativ- ity takes him in unexpected directions. The most daring, and ultimately reward- ing, strategy in Sid and Nancy was the decision to place the vast majority of the final act in the couple's Chelsea Hotel room, with the two addicts degenerating into a virtually comatose state. Another director might have concentrated on the much-publicized breakup of the Sex Pistols, then milked Nancy's killing and Sid's o.d. for either sentimentality or sensationalism, but Cox chose to con- front the junky Life head-on, and at length. As Cox put it, \"It's true that there's nothing more boring than two junkies in a room watching telly, and yet ....\" Repo Man was a surprise in almost every way imaginable-an underground, hipster art film released by Universal, of all companies, which couldn't have understood the picture less but was still unable to prevent it from finding its hardcore admirers. That a native Liver- pudlian and former Oxford law student could make a film so weirdly but authentically connected to various L.A. subcultures is surprising only if one has not seen Cox's stylistically recognizable, politically paranoid, quite thoroughly muddled, 4S-minute UCLA student film, Edge City. Reportedly, Cox finished a perfectly coherent version of the picture, only to recut it at the last minute in a frenzy of creative misguidedness, to the point where its raison d 'etre is utterly unapparent. Of interest, however, is that Sid Vicious' immort.al version of \"'My Sid sings \"My Way.\" 36
Way\" backdrops the climax of Edge City. they've had enough and ride their bikes was a little bit too old to be part of the 'My Way' is why I got interested in Sid scene, really:' Vicious-it is Sid's finest hour.\" So Cox through the most scenic places in the restaged the extraordinary \"My Way\" So many people who see the filfJ! will sequence from Julien Temple's 1980 kiss- U.S.A., to Tijuana, Mexico.\" Interested, either have been there, or feel that they off to the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n' know how it really was. How has this Roll Swindle, one of the best films never Orion instructed Cox to \"make it wackier\" affected people's reactions? released in the United States. after reading the first draft, Cox said, then \"Some people get pissed off by it, Although daring in terms of subject certainly. Some people have very strong found the rewrite \"too wacky.\" If Cox waits memories of the period , because it must matter and its downer trajectory, Sid and have been a very exciting time. It was Nancy (originally, and revealingly, titled much longer, however, current events probably much more exciting to be a Love Kills) works better on the conven- punk in 1976 or 1977 in London than tional levels of dramaturgy, acting. and might catch up with him on this one, and almost anything else you could have done period recreation than Repo Man, and at the time, probably more exciting than might win him admiration from the many what seemed \"too wacky\" last year could going to school. Some of them really like mainstream critics and viewers who it. didn't quite click with his earlier film. Cox prove real next. It's happened before. may well happily blow that acceptance to • 11th smithereen~ with his next picture, a Cox was interviewed in Madrid, the • Hong Kong quickie spaghetti Western called Straight • International To Hell, shot during three weeks in week after Sid and Nancy opened in • Film Festival August on the plains of Spain for • 10-25.4.1987 $900,000. \"It's about sexual tension London to strongly divided response, among cowboys, cowgirls, and even their • Accredited by the animals. Sexual tension-no one's and a week before he headed Straight to International exempt~ Written by Cox and Dick Rude, Federation of who played the bald, teenage psychopath Hell in Almeria, where so many of his in Repo Man, it stars Sy Richardson, who • Film Producers appeared in both Cox features, and beloved spaghetti Westerns were shot 20 • Associations Courtney Love, from Sid and Nancy, and • Information: features Harry Dean Stanton, Steven years ago. - T.Me.C. Berkoff, Emilio Estevez, Rude, and the Hong Kong music world's Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, Why did you make Sid and Nancy? Elvis Costello, and The Pogues. \"I thought it was a really good • International Film Festival, love story, in the sense that love, Hong Kong Coliseum This winter, Cox hopes to begin his in my humble experience of it, isn't like it Annex Building, long-planned epic about the man William is in Flashdance, where the only prob- Parking Deck Floor, Walker, who seized Nicaragua In 1853 lems are external, or even Letter To with a mercenary army on bebalf of Brezhnev, where love is momentarily in • KCR Kowloon Station, shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. doubt when you think that the guy might 8 Cheong Wan Road, Walker, who Cox maifltains \"was a very be married. But in love there is so much complicated man,\" remained in power for of tripping your partner out, laying traps • Kowloon, Hong Kong. two years until deposed by a militia raised for them, and putting them in difficult Telex: 38484 USDHK HX by various Central American countries. situations to test them . There's an awful Cox has spent considerable time in lot of very strange and insane stuff • Cable: FESTUSDHK Nicaragua preparing the picture (Rudy attendant to being in love that normally •• ~Telephone: 3-642217 Wurlitzer of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid doesn't get dealt with in films~ • Presented by wrote the script), which will be shot there and in Mexico, and can cite chapter and This film stands apart from the Holly- the Urban Council verse about the wrongs of Reagan wood films in which ill-fated lovers are Hong Kong Administration policy in the area. Never- doomed by society. theless, he surprises once again by terming the film a comedy. \"I hope that, \"That's true. Even though they are by the time we've finished it, it will be like products of society, as are we all, there are a historical version of Airplane!' many people from similar circumstances as Sid and Nancy who don't become One more project (which he almost did junkies and don't end up the way they last year) Cox hopes to realize is War did.\" Babies. To be produced by Jon Davison, enterprising force behind both Airplane! The film has an extremely vivid social and White Dog, this one is \"a biker movie\" backdrop, a very recent and memorable which \"takes place in 1988 on the eve of period of pop-culture, but it doesn't an election in which an incumbent determine the characters'fates. President stands for a third term, and the Democrats field Ed McMahon against \"Not really, because I don't think they him. These two guys in Detroit decide were representative punks. Some people say all punks were like that, which isn't really true, because there are an awful lot of guys from that period who are still around and are still productive. But Sid has been such a famous burnout for going down in flames so radically, that he's remembered. Doing that sort of thing gives you a status in society in a funny way. It's like James Dean, who may not have been considered such a great actor if he had made ten films~ were you part of the London or New York punk scenes? \"No, I was in Los Angeles getting sun- tanned. I used to go to shows a lot, but I 37
I v l, V L.. 1'- self-indulgence.\" MiND Did you want to use the actuaL Sex THe PistoLs recordings, or did you always OMiT intend to recreate the music? tJeJ \"We heard about the recordings that I, 1 never got on record, and we tried to get Gary Oldman as Sex Pistol Sid. hold of them in case they were of good What pisses them off? quality. But it wouldn't have been right to \"They were there, and things aren't depicted the way they remember them. use the original recordings off 'Never Because it is a film, it takes liberties. The original Sex Pistols riot on the boat was Mind The Bollocks' because those are nowhere near as exciting or as violent as what we depict. But given the opportu- the official studio versions of those songs, nity to do a slavish documentary recrea- tion with a bit of kicking, shoving, and and if you went to see them at a show, pushing at the band, or a full-out riot with billy clubs swinging and motorcycles and they wouldn't sound like that. Glen screams ... I mean, girls were dragged by their hair by the police, tnat's fact. Maybe Matlock, the original bass player in the not as many of them were dragged by their hair, and maybe there weren't quite Sex Pistols, did supervise the rerecording as many acts of punk retaliation against the evil forces of authority occured as we and played bass on it and arranged it. depict. I wasn't there, so 1 can't say for a fact that it's correct, although 1 hope that Gary and Drew (Schofield, as Johnny the spirit of it is correct more than the Rotten) both sang, which was good for detail~ the integrity of the thing, to have them Did you consuLt with the family and friends ofSid and Nancy? singing and not just the actors miming to \"A lot of friends, not much family. It somebody else's voice.\" was really Abbe Wool who imposed a discipline upon the mass of informacion J#zsn 't there a competing fiLm in that 1 acquired through interviewing people, because I spoke to a lot of people addiCTLOn since Burroughs' 'Junky: preparation at the same time? who were their contemporaries in Britain and in New York, and then it was really in \"Whoa! Well, thank you very much for \"Yeah, a producer named Andy Brauns- collaboration with her that we imposed a structure. We both met Sid's mum, but saying that. That's very good, because berg was trying to get a project together only after we'd written the script. Nancy's mother wrote a book, which really that was, of course, a major source in with Rupert Everett and Madonna that seemed to provide all the information about Nancy's mother that you'd ever Gary Oldman's and Chloe Webb's prepa- was to be financed by Atlantic Releasing. wish to know. The original screenplay ration for the roles.\" I don't think they ever had a director for contained a lot more biographical infor- mation, which we gleaned from the book Addiction is an extraordinary demand it. The script was going to be based on a and people who were Nancy's friends.\" to play without getting into it. How did play called Vicious by Denis Spedaliere The fiLm has one of the most unblink- ing, matter-of-fact presentations of drug they rehearse it? that was performed onstage in Los \"I don't think they were really inter- Angeles. But they never got it together~ ested in getting into it. They watched an How did your project get off the awful lot of terribly depressing films of ground? people jacking up in bathrooms. Gary \"It didn't seem we could get it financed went and hung around with some guys in the States, even if they liked the script. that were on a program in London, and But back in England, enough time has Chloe had a roommate who, I think, died gone by that punk has been assimilated of drug addiction. 1 didn't know that at into the popular culture. Postcards of the time, but 1 read that in an interview punks with great big mohawks actually she did the other day in a sensational outsell postcards of the royal family. The tabloid. 'I Tried To Save Her But It Was punks who hang around Kings Road, 1 Too Late; was the headline. suspect, are paid by the tourist board to \"With Sid, there was a conflict with hang around there and have their photos what he was supposed to represent and taken. what he really was. Gary understood that \"I met Eric Fellner. He had never done very clearly. When we were in New York, a feature at the time. He had done a lot of guys would try to get Gary. There are promos. He's the guy who's to blame for pathetic junky wankers staggering around the success of Duran Duran, because he New York with 'Sid's Kids' written on took them to Sri Lanka about five or six their backs in studs, and they follow the years ago and did three promos back-to- life of the maestro to the letter, which . back for £50,000 all told, and Duran completely misses the point. Sid became Duran, not being, shall we say, a very exactly what he started out rebelling talented bunch of individuals, got some against-aloof and junky rockers who extremely glossy promos. So Sid and can't perform. Nancy was his way of atoning for those \"I read in that book about John Belushi, awful promos. He took it to Zenith in Wired, that he and a very famous actor London, who took it, thanks mainly to had a conversation about how, 'Oh, yeah, Margaret Matheson and Scott Meek.... if 1 were getting ready to make a film Eventually, half of the money came from about junk, I'd do it: That strikes me as the States, from Embassy Home Enter- not very sensible. That would be a tainment.\" strange side alley to take, and it would Should \"Sid and Nancy\" be considered have nothing to do with acting. That's as part of the resurgence of English 38
cinema, and do you consider yourselfan unless they have to . If they're ambitious CINEMONDE English or an American director? and they want to work in the media, they THE DEFINITIVE POSTER CATALOG \"Oh, gee, uhh, ha-ha-ha ... 1 think it's go to London, and it's a shame in a way, The country's paramount col- more an English film than American; it because these features have been so rich. lection of original movie pos- ters - rare, classic, contem- has this sort of foreign eye. Even though There's a certain sentimentality and a porary - such as \"Maltese Fal- con,\" \"Snow White,\" \"Jezebel.\" I've lived in the States for a while now- certain warmth about the north of Comprehensive catalogue with over 350 prime lithos . Your Venice, California-I don't know if I'd like England, about Wales afld Scotland, that chance nowto acquire previously inaccessible graphics, $6.00 to be thought of as an American director, just doesn't exist to such an extent in CINEMONDE actually. I'm a bit disappointed in the London.\" MODERATOR United States, to tell the truth. I can't By contrast, you've had some frustrat- HARRIET LEVE: Producer stand to see such terrible things done on ing experiences in Hollywood. THE NORMAL HEART SPEAKERS my behalf.\" \"I still go through the motions of going TONY BILL: Director/Producer to various studios or large production MY BODYGUARD/ THE STING DAVID BROWN: Producer houses in Los Angeles to ask them for THE VERDICT/COCOON And yet, many English filmmakers money to make a film, but often I just feel ARLENE DONOVAN: Agent/Producer are so upset with the English like it's just a courtesy visit, that I'm going industry that they're very ready to by because I'm seeing somebody who's a ICM/PLACES IN THE HEART come over and lash out at the short- nice person, or I'm doing it to please the LINDSAY LAW: Executive Producer sightedness ofthe English industry. producer, because he thinks that the AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE ARNOLD MARGOLIN Writer/Producer ~Oh, they only do that when they're in money is there. But in my heart and soul 1 GROWING PAINS/ONE BIG FAMILY the doghouse. That's like Hugh Hudson honestly feel that it's a waste of time going CHRIS SIEVERNICH: Producer PARIS, TEXAS going around the world screaming about to Burbank. If anybody's got an office in 39 how there is no British film industry. He Burbank, I mean ...why, why? You know, says things like that, but he's a fool, he's 1 say this to Ed Pressman, 'Ed, move to just like a running dog of Puttnam. Of the beach. You're the only guy out here in course there's a British industry. 1 think this valley who's making interesting the problem is that certain British people movies; and it's true. have sought to emulate the crassest \"The situation in Hollywood seems excess of the commercial American much less optimistic than in Spain or cinema. The great thing about American England. It looks like all the Big studios films has always been the B films. You are interested in is remaking each other's don't remember the A movies of the films, whether or not they are substantial, Fifties anymore. But you remember whether or not they stay for six months or things like Kiss Me Deadly and science- a week, it doesn't really matter, because fiction movies, and the B Westerns and sooner or later they're 'going to make High Noon. The American cinema's their money back from video , from the greatest virtue is its cheap films, and for television sale; you know. The product is some Limey guy to go over to the States always the same. It- is product, it's like a and be given, like, $20 million to go and production line of sausages. make garbage ... \"Also, there is that very, very frighten- \"I think those guys lose their souls, 1 ing right wing thing that's happening in think that's why they adopt this negative ,the studios. 1 mean Kissinger, Ford, Haig attitude towards the British film industry, have all been on the boards of directors of because it is happening. It's harder in major motion picture studios, and I think Britain to make a very cheap, indepen- it's not accidental that John Milius can get dent film, but it's not impossible. To wit, a very large amouFlt of money to make a Letter To Brezhnev and My Beautiful completely nonsensical piece of clap- Laundrette, and the films of Peter trap-a very entertaining piece of clap- Greenaway and Derek Jarman. There trap as well, mind you-called Red aren't so many independent films made in Dawn. If they're on movie boards, they're Britain as there are in the States, but not going to give a very sympathetic there aren't so many full-on, expensive hearing to Gillo Pontecorvo or Derek pictures made either. Jarman. But they are going to give a \"I feel very optimistic about the British sympathetic hearing to some cocaine- film industry, 1 think it will continue. It addled little fascist that walks in with won't continue thanks to people who go .Rambo IX. off to the Sta~es and make Rambo III, but \"The tragedy is that this is the stuff that it will continue, especially the regional is given a really hard sell to a population cinema. The idea that films can get made that's not very knowledgeable about in Scotland and Liverpool is marvelous. world affairs. The film industry, rather Britain is so centralized around London, like TV, has been co-opted by the right it's this magnet that draws everybody, it wing and is being used to prepare people draws all the talent and all the money, and for a helicopter war against indigenous very few people stay out in the sticks people from the Third World.\" ~
Play every role you've ever imagined. E·. crge¥ ~ Octette Bndge +.Club by P.J. Barry 7815 0398 Take any 4 books for $1 ~~~berShiP' PACK GREAT f()VR rLAYS BY SiEREJ+ABlN& I OF LIES THEATRICAL ,!I)1t\"l1 chckh\"\" bEJl1lE~ DISASTERS Hugh Whitemore (;, I . ~;,o ltIL\\!IoII1C~:r1 1 ~ ~ 4077 ~.,.Lh'',.;:::::\" \\ . The SeaGull wasil BY THORNTON UnclcVanya b, BAM BHEPARD WILDER The Three Sislers L-...-~=0....1 \"\"'T_ The Che\"JI O\"haRl 4846 n., StM qf Our T~dI Respect For 1M ,~ Acting 8011 by Uta Hagen 6957 8003
~lijeand ~ntuI~ Ni~hol~ Nickleqy \"d~pt \"\" OfI'\" S t.I~D,' D. \"d [ dl.' t,omtll.novrlD,'C\"',lu D>c:krn, The CAINE TliE MUTINY COURT- Diary of MARTIAL Anne Frank by Herman Wouk 6V FR ....NCES GOODR ICH AND ALBERT H ACKETT 2931 seven playS by GAlolle IEIIII tlJ.es IBIEn by Lawrence } Roman A ml name is Alice 5264 2147 by David Hare Not Available in Canada * 7138 . Not Available In Canada * Warning: Subject matter or language may be ottenslve to some. How the Club Plan works: You 'll get your choice of ANY 4 BOOKS FOR $1 (plus shipping and handling) r Fir~ideThe;tr-;Bo~ci;b® -, and your FREE TaTE BAG when accepted as a member. We reserve the right to reject any application . I IDept. BS-435, Garden City, NY 11535 However, once accepted, if you are not fully satisfied with your introductory books, return them within IPlease accept me as a member of the Fireside Theatre Book Club, and send me 10 days at our expense. Your membership will be cancelled and you will owe nothing . The FREE TaTE BAG is yours to keep in any case. the 4 books I've numbered in the boxes below, plus my FREE TOTE BAG . Bill me Attractive selection: As a Club member, you'll have dozens of titles to choose from : the best of every I just $1 plus shipping and handling lor the 4 books. I agree to the Club plan as theatre season, Broadway and Off-Broadway successes, practical guides to performance and production Idescribed in this ad , will take 4 more books at regular low Club prices during techniques, and other volumes-many not available in any store at any price. How you save money: The Club offers its own complete hardbound editions I the coming year, and may resign any time thereafter. The FREE TOTE BAG is (sometimes altered in size to fit special presses) . CLUB EDITIONS SAVE YOU I :: m\"o ro .\" ~\" \" '\"\"\" om.\" • mom\"\" UP TO 40% OFF PUBLISHERS' HARDCCNER EDITION PRICES. A shipping and handling charge is added to each shipment. ' Club bulletin: Enjoy the convenience of at-home sho~ping with your free Club 1 M, , __ _ ____ _ _ ____ _ __~~~~---------------- I bulletin, Curtain Time. About every 4 weeks (14 times a year) you 'll receive the Ms bulletin describing coming Selection(s) . In addition , up to 4 times a year, you may receive offers of special Selections, always at disc0unts off publishers' I Address ~- Apt. # _______ I prices. If you want the featured Selection(s), do nothing-shipment will be I City Zip I State made automatically. If you prefer an Alternate-or no book at all-indicate this on the order form and return it by the date specified . You 'll have at least 10 days to decide. If you have less than 10 days, and receive an unwanted Selec- tion , you may return it at our expense and owe nothing . I IThe choice is always yours: Your only obligation is to take just 4 books at ..JFREE TOTEregular low Club prices within one year. You may resign any time after purchas- L - - - - - - - - - - - -ing your 4 books, or continue to enjoy Club membership for as long as you like. with membership If under 18, parent must sign Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Offer slightly different in canada . 34-FT97
by Marcia Pally not working. Paula gets bored with Stefan, now a Julius lookalike, and leaves T he first ten hours Men opened in him. Julius resumes his place at home. New York, it took in $10,353 playing in a 420-seat theater on a Dorrie insists that her research on Men day when it rained so hard y~u were crazy is anthropological field work. Since no native would reveal The Sacred Texts on to go out. The second day it garnered women and money, she sat herself down \"firmly in the middle of the jungle and $10,700 and change. The first six pretended to be reading a book~ The dialogue between Julius and Stefan is months it played in Germany, theater based on \"scientifically\" recorded conver- sations. Here's what I learned about the owners counted six million admissions in tribe: When men say idiotic things about women (like \"women are the enemy of a country of 60 million where 120,000 art\"), they know they're hanging out their insecurities, but none comments on admissions is considered a commercial another's laundry because each knows next time it could be his pants that are success. That means ten percent of the down. Men do have feelings, but that doesn't make them interesting; their population - which would be 23 million insight, knowledge, and humor do, if they have any - which, by the way, is also people here - saw the film in half a year's the case for women. Men's feelings do not necessarily make them attentive to time. Writer and director Dorris Dorrie the feelings of others, neither do they stand in money's way. Ever. Men are more said her greatest moment came when likely to come through emotionally in a crisis than mind the housekeeping. And Men, a comedy of mores and manners, no man, except perhaps the late Julian Beck, is a hippie anymore. pushed Rambo out of German theaters. It also out-grossed Rambo, which had Doris Dorrie Born in 1955, Dorrie grew up in Hanover, the oldest of four daugh- been Germany's most popular entertain- Julius's snoring. Perhaps this is because I ters. She wanted to be an actress. ment. But what's really impressive is that am a feminist who enjoys a good hanging. In 1968, when she was 13, riots broke out. She stopped reading novels and the Germans don't even like comedy. Much as I may like Men isn't going to started brushing up on concentration camps and torture in Greece. Her This is not the 31-year-old director's give me the rope. It shares less with parents, both doctors, always stressed the importance of history. Dorrie con- only success. Her first film, Straight Margarette von Trone's didactic theater siders herself lucky that her father Through the Heart, earned Dorrie Opera (Sheer Madness, Marianne and opposed the Third Reich. Prima credentials at the 1984 Venice Julianne) and more with Diane Kurys' In the early Seventies, an improvisa- tional theater group from the University Film Festival, and her second feature, In affectionate Entre Nous. Though the plot of the Pacific in Stockton, California, came to town. Dorrie was hooked. the Belly of the Whale, played in New is hilariously contrived, Julius and Stefan Thinking that only in America could she study their radical, nonclassical tech- York's New Directors New Films series are believable, and Dorrie likes them. nique, she begged her parents to let her attend college there. She stayed in last spring. Dorrie is in demand. She has Men is only a slight shift in focus for the Stockton for eight months, learned to talk like a Valley Girl, and followed a guy already finished shooting a fourth film director. In her first three films, she to New York, where she decided her talents lay behind the camera. She about a man, his wife, and his lover, who explored the effects men have on women. would've liked to have gone to NYU film school but couldn't afford it. While do terrible things to each other in the Here she examines the men themselves name of true love. Dorrie chose its - if ,from her own, necessarily female, cheeky title, Land of Milk and Honey, point of view. because \"true love,\" she says, \"is neither.\" When Julius, a design director for a After editing Milk and Honey, she'll go to packaging company, learns that his wife is Japan to direct a satire about the cliches having an affair, he behaves like a man East and West nurture about each other. with a lance in his heart - though he Chris Sievernich, executive producer of humps his secretary in the afternoons-and Paris, Texas, is arranging for her to make has had a few flings even his wife knows a film here in 1987. \"It's based on a novel about. This, he declares, is different. And and takes place in a beauty parlor.\" That's he's right. He merely tricks; wife Paula all Dorrie is willing to say. (Ulrike Kriener) cares about her bohe- Dorrie calls the men in Men her mian Stefan. Julius storms out of the \"Marilyn Monroes\" - creatures created house, follows Stefan around, and, dis- by Pygmalions of the opposite sex, guising his identity, answers Stefan's fantastic yet somehow accurate and Roommate Wanted ad. Betting his mari- authentic. I find her men much more tal bed on an iffy ploy, Julius slowly whets credible than Marilyn, whose talent, I Stefan's appetite for gelt. As mindless as thought, was outrageous exaggeration. Midas, Stefan lets Julius groom him for a Nothing about Julius (Heiner Lauter- corporate job, takes it (loving every bach) or Stefan (Uwe Ochsenknecht) paycheck), and soon becomes just like seems overblown to me, except maybe Julius, who's a warm, funny guy when he's 42
working as a projectionist at Goethe House, she took courses in philosophy and semiotics at the New School. Heidegger, she claims, is comprehensi- ble only in English. Returning to Germany in 1975, Dorrie attended the government-supported Academy for Film and Television in Munich. Her thesis film, The First Waltz, was shown at the Hof, Lubeck, and Berlin film festivals and aired on Bavarian television. She got a job making docu- mentaries for German TV in 1978, but disliked exploiting and exposing her subjects' private lives. She also wanted the control over plot only fiction affords. Her first telefilm, In Between, is the story of a teenage girl juggling her parents' divorce and her new feelings of attach- ment to a boy. Its strong ratings (only because no soccer game was on that night, Dorrie says) encouraged West German television to back her theatrical film, Straight Through the Heart. Austere and laconic, Heart tells the story of disaffected, 20-year-old Anna Blume who is hired by an emotionally stunted dentist merely to live in his house. She becomes obsessed with trying to elicit some compassion from him. The effort seems both inexplicable and classic - yet another woman, no matter how rebel- lious or untraditional, battling the big chill. Dorrie's next film, In the Belly a/the Whale, is also about a young woman's struggle with an older man, this time literally her father, a sexually repressed cop who beats her. Though she runs away, those knotty ties bind in the end. She defends him after he kills her mother. Dorrie's heroines are willing to endure anything except separation from Father, indomitable and incommunicative as he may be. In Men, father is snipped to size, as the women - behind the camera as well as in front - gain some standing of their own. Dorrie met me at her Mayflower Hotel suite in a chartreuse blouse that flowed down to her knees, heavy silver earrings, and brief blue skirt. She has none of Hollywood's glitz or New York's tweedy tailoring. Her cropped blond hair is too soft to be punk. She looks like the director of a breezy, adult satire but not at all like the person who'd made the gritty, earlier work about troubled teenage girls. \"'The characters in my films get older as I get older,\" Dorrie says. \"I did In Between when I was 21; I couldn't possibly have done a film about 'old' people, say 30- year-olds. And young people, including
young directors, take things so seriously. Heiner Lauterbach spies on Ulrike Kriener and Uwe Ochsenknecht in Men. You have to grow up a bit before you know that the political situation is more The IS-and 16-year-olds are the true are all surface. He doesn't believe them important than breaking up with your yuppies. At the discos, they wear smart anymore. He dreams about Porsches. I boyfriend - before you can write a com- ou~fits and borrow their fathers' was surprised that the left press in Mercedes. The ones that don't have the Germany didn't come down on Men. edyaboutbreakingup~ money buy second-hand Benetton They seemed relieved that Stefan admits clothes. Punks are fading away. he likes fancy cars. They were Some German filmmakers, I venture, enchanted .\" get quite grown up and never makes \"Opportunism is the thing now. With comedies. \"That's the German character; the economy getting worse and worse,\" I ask Dorrie how she got the idea for observes Dorrie. \"We follow ideas more Dorrie says, \"young people have to her plot. \"I once shared a flat with five than reality. This is one reason why the decide early how to make money. They men. In Munich everyone shared a flat Third Reich succeeded. Germans can't play around. Older people too. I because it's too expensive to have one of believe in authority and Big Ideas. Look know a lot of guys who cling to their your own. We said we lived together at Werner Herzog's films. His heroes are counterculture pasts only because they because of our ideologies - we were always following some myth or quest. don't know what else to do. But everyone Marxists or artists. No one admitted the now has to decide if they really want to financial reasons. All of the guys would \"There are a lot of historical reasons stay marginal or adapt to the times. have their friends over for chess or behind this ,\" she continues. \"Germany soccer; I was the only woman around. I never had an identity; it was just a bunch \"This shows up in relationships- cooked dinner, took care of their kids a disconnected states . Germans aren't between Julius and Paula, for example, or when they came to visit. Sometimes I felt sure of themselves, so they always look Julius and Stefan. The private level taken advantage of, but I was a wandering for someone or something to tell them always reflects the political situation, young woman and when [ got tired of it, I what to do. It's impossible for them to that's why I'm interested in it. Stefan is a just packed my plastic bag and left. I have a sense of humor. They're too rigid, leftover hippie, but it's easy for Julius to moved 13 times in :ive years during my too concerned with doing things right. change him because Stefan's leftist ideas Spaniards or Italians have strong identi- ties; they can laugh at themselves. They're not bothered by contradictions or ambivalence. I know people in the Italian Communist party, which is offi- cially atheist , who go to mass every Sunday. When I ask them to explain, they say, 'You never know what it'll be good for: A German could never be so uncon- cerned. \"Americans are a little like Italians- except for the bottom-line myth: you can make it if you want to. I hear that in every American film . But outside of that, America allows a lot of variety. There are so many ways to live. There are so many stories in the air. Germans keep every- thing hidden; they're too afraid to let anything show. When I came to Califor- nia, people would pass by me and sa)\" 'Hi, how are you?' In Germany, you'd want to give a careful answer. So I'd stop and think: How am I? \"You see how serious I was then. I wanted to make art, and comedy is not considered art in Germany. The critics try to be as intellectual as possible, not like American critics,\" she says. Ameri- cans, I ask her, aren't intellectual? \"But don't worry,\" she replies. \"German film writers aren't intellectual, either. It's a lot dry, uptight bullshit.\" I wonder if I've been slighted. \"In Germany, the filmmaker has to try to be intellectual, too. Which I'm not.\" Oh. \"When I made In Between and Heart, young people were serious about ways of living, psychology, politics,\" she says. \"Now they're so straight they're interested only in money and Benetton clothes. 44
twenties. 1 overheard so many conversa- But they keep going longer. Theres a DON'T READ THIS... tions between men that when I wrote the difference.\" script, I just leaned back and listened to unless you want videocassettes you the characters talk. Paul Cox's film about divorce, My First can afford! Wife, comes up, as well as his elegant \"It's my experience that if the Stefans of treatment of sexual awakening in Man of Our used videocassettes are in excellent the world are dreaming about Porsches, Flowers. Dorrie says Cox is unusually condition, and $39.95 is our HIGHEST they should go ahead and make money attentive to what goes on in the world and price! Enclose SASE with your want list and get them. The Juliuses should learn to the aspirations of young filmmakers. for a prompt reply, or simply send for not to take money so seriously. But my film isn't going to persuade them. Movies A photographer from The L.A. Times [ jour FREE information: don't affect people that much. If a few arrives to take a few rolls of Dorrie in a Pengl;lin people like Julius begin to think about men's john. Delighted to be there, Dorrie homeVideo opportunism, I'll have accomplished a says, \"I always got the feeling this was 86 Tomlinson Road , where Big Business was conducted.\" I like Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006, lot~ the shot of her squatting between urinals. MOVIE What about women? \"It's not our story,\" \"You can't simply blame people for the STAR Dorrie states. \"Paula is just a trigger for way they behave,\" she says when we get PHOTOS male activity. When Julius and Stefan talk back to talking. \"Relations between men about her, it's a fantasy. We never get to and women are a symptom; Western One of the wo rld's largest collectio ns of film know the real Paula. Men's fantasies values are the disease. They're so perso nality photographs , with emph as is o n about women are bigger than their unhelpful. They don't teach us how to rare ca ndids and European m aterial. Send a curiosity about us. deal with sorrow or loneliness, disap- S.A.S.E. with wa nt-list to: pointment or death. In Japan a man said \"Women have fantasies about men, to me, 'Westerners all look like children Milton T. Moore, Jr, too, but we're not as uncurious. For to me. You never realize you have to deal Dept. Fe centuries weve been obsessed with with bad and good, that they come them. It's been our field for so long weve together: We have no way of coping with P,O. Box 140280 become terrific analysts of their feelings. the bad - and there's plenty of it - and no Dallas, Texas 7521 4-0280 Men, on the other hand, get bored when way to deal with those we love when were women talk about feelings. When women in tough situations. ThefirstcoUection leave them, they're surprised because ofthe best screenplays they hadn't even realized something was \"We're trained only to produce a wrong.\" surplus. To get us going, were fed the in our time. dream of money - or the dream of self- Is this why men and women are out of expression. Then we produce and pro- Includes 12 complete Screenplays: sync; is this why they fight? \"Women duce; it's never enough. We deal with our among them Arth ur: Bu tch Cassidy always have to deal with the garbage. emotions the same way. It's not a matter and th e Sundance Kid , On Gold en Thais why they fight. Even when women of what we can give but what were going Pond , Th e Graduate, All Quietonthe are feminists, their marriages don't work to get. How can we help it - our whole out all that differently. My friends who world is structured that way. Women have Wes tern Fro nt, Rebel With o ut a had perfect boyfriends, the ones who said started asking what they're going to get they'd take care of the children, are now for raising the kids, which is the right Cause and six more! all sitting at home alone with the babies. question after all these years . But once But women have one big advantage over we get careers, we're playing in the same Edited and with an introduction by men - I don't know why I defend them - game.\" Julius says it in my film: a man is what he SAM THOMAS does, a woman is what she is. It sounds Is there an alternative? \"None that are sexist, but maybe it's not. appealing,\" she laments. \"You can be a Foreword by Frank Capra terrorist and throw bombs. But I think Over 500 pages. $24 .95, now at your bookstore , or \" M e n fall apart when their work that will only make things worse. You can is disturbed, when they can't drop out and go to Asia, but that's just use coupon to order. define themselves through running away and inflicting your prob- lems on another society. Why should - - - IClQ£&!1i!lL!SBER5lJlj - - - the social framework. Their self-esteem they take car~ of freaked-out Westerners? comes from their position in society. If I don't have an answer~ CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc., Dept. 744 they're not working, they don't know who 34 Engelhard Ave., Avenel, N.J . 07001 they are. A friend of mine, a Hungarian How about a simpler question: Why Please send me BEST AMERICAN SCREENPLAYS. filmmaker, killed himself because he did you switch from acting to directing? \"I I enclose mycheck or money order lor $24.95 plus $1 .50 couldn't get his next project off the realized I'd never be a good actor. I can't postage and handling .l0·day money·back guarantee. ground. He had a wife and four kids; his take orders; I have no desire to be anyone Name_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ suicide was so selfish. His wife is a but myself. I hated to put on makeup or Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ professor of philosophy. I cannot imagine wigs. But I've always invented stories. I City State_ _ Zip _ _ her - or myself or any other woman- made my sisters act them out on a stage N.Y. and N.J . reSidents , add sales tax. killing herself if her professional life we built in the living room. I've always collapsed. Theres something inside that been a tyrant. Reproducing the world is prevents us from becoming too depen- my way of coping, my way of trying to dent on social recognition. Of course understand it. Filmmaking is such a women get depressed; they take Valium. legitimate form of tyranny~ ® 45
Greer, Mars, and Jamie: Nola's men. by Marlaine Glicksman those men and women who long to see shot if you don't use them.\") This is the into and possess them. It is a comedic third film that his well-known jazz ,'you so fine, I drink a tub of your commentary on the frazzled rules of cat- musician father, Bill Lee, has scored. His bathwater.\" \"You need a man and-mouse, with Nola as the mouse who sister, Joie, plays Clorinda Bradford, like me.... What's your num- scores. Nola's ex-roommate. And his brother, ber?\" \"I love you ....\" \"Please baby, please David, acted as still photographer on the baby, please baby, please.\" \"You know the Set entirely in Brooklyn, the film is, shoot. His straightforward, grainy stills minute you get fat, I'm leaving you.\" like the borough's namesake bridge, laced are interspersed throughout the film, with the tangles and crossed wires of love contrasting their sense of vanishing time So cajole, plead, woo, and threaten the and its accompanying emotions, as well and place with the film's sassy tone, as men - the decent ones and the dogs - in as a warm and generous sense of humor. well as setting the scene for the story. 29-year-old filmmaker Spike Lee's first Black and white and in the confession Spike himself plays one of Nola's three feature film, She's Gotta Have It. The style of Akira Kurosawa's Rashoman, main men, the aptly named Mars focus of their attention is Nola Darling. She's Gotta Have It, was shot in 12 days Blackmon, the four-eyed, hiphopper B- Nola possesses what we have come to with a New York State Council of the Arts boy who hilariously woos Nola and wars know as a man's desire, but is cursed (in grant of $18,000. Lee worked closely with her other suitors: Jamie Overstreet society's eyes) with a woman's body. with Ernest Dickerson (\"my ace camera- as Nola's serious and stable suitor, who \"Some people would call me a freak,\" she man\") as well as a cast and crew with sees himself as Nola's soulmate; Greer explains at the film's beginning, meaning whom he has worked on past films, some Childs as her self-possessed Buppie she's a woman who likes to get down. The whom he has known since undergraduate beau; and finally the seductive Opal story unfolds through Nola's eyes and days at Morehouse College, where he Gilstrap as Nola's lesbian admirer. through the multiple perspectives of first began \"dibbing and dabbing\" in film. All of the characters in the film are Lee also involved almost his whole black. Unlike Steven Spielberg's The family in the production. (\"If you have a CoLor PurpLe, She's Gotta Have It neither talented family,\" he says, \"you should be 46
needs white context nor white audiences between the sexes but also in the typical roles, and they don't know what to to-which-blacks-have-been-invited. This judgments rendered by society. Ironi- do with blacks in films. They never have time, black women talk to black men, cally, the film's willingness to investigate any love interests. Nick Nolte is the one and whites are invited-to learn some- the hot spot where love meets sex landed who has a relationship in 48 Hours. And thing about blacks, and also about it in hot water. The MPAA thrice gave the when it comes to black sexuality, they themselves. film an X rating. Since the film features a especially don't know how to deal with it. woman and her three lovers, naturally They feel uncomfortable. There are films Nola shares her birthday with Malcolm there are sex scenes. But there is no more with more gratuitous sex and even X and paints a commemorative mural, to be seen than the breasts and butts that violence. 9'/2 ~eks got an R. And look at pasted with headlines such as \"Honor grace the lovemaking of white maint- Body Double. \" Student Shot by Cop.\" Mars wears hi-top stream R-rated films. Spike had to recut sneakers (even when making love to his film three times , plus cut in half an Why did you set and film She's Gotta Nola) sports an extra-large I8-karat gold overhead shot of Greer and Nola in bed, Have It in Brooklyn-because you're nameplate around his neck, and street- to get down to the R rating dictated by his from there? talks and jives, repeating himself inces- Island Pictures contract for its domestic santly. Greer is a GQ model who plays release. \"It'll be shown the real way in \"I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but I've scrabble with a dictionary. Jamie is, well, Europe and on tape,\" Spike said. lived in Brooklyn all my life. When you always decent and stable, very predicta- are doing independent filmmaking, you ble. When Nola invites all three to Spike is no stranger to trouble. Out- don't have the means to go anywhere Thanksgiving dinner, the feathers fly. spoken, he was almost not asked back else. She's Gatta Have It was really shot \"Chain snatcher,\" Greer sniffs at Mars. after his probational first year at NYU in a one-mile radius , the whole film, in \"Pseudo black man,\" Mars retorts. When graduate film school when he submitted the neighborhood where I lived. That's Jamie attempts to quiet the ruckus, Greer The Answer. The 20-minute short por- the only way we could shoot a film in 12 cuts, \"What are you? Henry Kissinger?\" In trayed a young black screenwriter hired to days, only if locations are within a block another scene, Nola and Mars share a do a rewrite on a $50 million remake of from each other~ nice moment after lovemaking and she Birth ofa Nation. Lee eventually gradu- greases his hair. The film's final credits ated with a Student Academy Award for How did the film come about? include the statement \"This film contains Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: ~ Cut \"In the summer of 1984, I attempted to no jerri curls and no drugs.\" These Heads , about a numbers-running barber- do a film called Messenger. We were in characters are well-grounded in a largely shop in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section pre-production for eight weeks, but I had black neighborhood and, unlike black of Brooklyn. This film also earned him a to pull the plug because it just never really characters in most other films, speak screening in the New Directors/New came together with all the money and black dialect intelligently. The blacks in Films festival at the Museum of Modern stuff. So out of that devastation and Lee's film are real people. And as real Art in 1983. disaster, we came up with the idea, out of people, they speak to us all. desperation , to do She's Gatta Have It. I It is no surprise, then, that She's Gatta was determined do another film the next Each lover offers a lover's reason why Rave It this year achieved a spot in the summer for as little money as possible. he isn't Nola Darling's number one man. director's fortnight at Cannes, as well as Small cast, small crew. I had a grant from \"To Nola,\" says Jamie, \"we're all inter- the Prix de Jeunesse. (We got robbed of NYSCA [the N.V. State Council on the changeable.\" Accuses Greer, \"I think you the Camera d'Or,\" Lee says, \"but I'm not Arts) for $18,000 for Messenger. NYSCA are sick. I'm not saying you're a nympho, complaining.\") Still, it is often the com- was kind enough to let me move that slut, or whore, but I do think you are a sex ments on the long line to the ladies room money to She's Gatta Have It. I also got a addict.\" When bike-conjoined Mars which serve final judgment on the grant from American Film Institute for encounters Jamie on a parkbench he success of a film, and in the case of this $20,000, but those mother fuckers took opines , \"Nola is about as dependable as a film, perhaps one of the most appropos the money back. They wouldn't let me ripped diaphragm.\" But soon the discus- places to listen. \"I want three men, too ,\" move the money. Print that too .\" sion veers off into sports-stopped dead said one line-stander. \"Yeah but I want You had no private funding? by a female passerby-before the two 'em all at the same time,\" said another. When we started out, there wasn't. But return to their thoughts about Nola, Perhaps. Mars was wrong; perhaps it is the whole game plan was to raise the providing yet another universal observa- Spike Lee who has created the mon- money stage by stage. The next stage was tion on the ways men and women ster. -M.G. to get the film out of the lab . I had the navigate and collide. It is Mars who confidence that if we could get it shot, finally figures it out, that all three men The MPAA originally gave She's cut, and show it to people, I would be comprise an integrated whole for Nola, Gotta Have It an X rating. able to raise enough money.\" that it was the men who were really at The MPAA said it was filled with Was the $18,000 to shoot enough? fault. \"We let her create a three-headed, .gratuitous sex, that it was-and this is an \"No. Monty Ross, the lead actor in six-armed, six-legged, three-penis mon- actual quote - 'Saturated with sex: I Joe's Bed-Stuy Barber Shop, who I went ster.\" In the end, Nola ditches them all edited the film three times and each time to school with at Morehouse, was and, content to be alone in her bed, they said it was better. But it was still production supervisor on this film . After reveals the decisive verdict, \"It's about given an X rating. The film will be we would shoot, everyday, Monty would control. My body. My mind. Whose released unrated in New York, but I have come home, get on the phone, and call gonna own it, them or me?\" to cut an R rated film for me to get money, and write everybody we knew in the because that is in my contract. world asking them to please, please, She's Gatta Have It uniquely tackles please help us out, to please, please, an age-old controversial topic, the I don't think it's out-and-out racist, but please send money, their hundreds, discrepencies that exist not only the film portrays blacks outside stereo- fifties, whatever. So we raised the money at the same time we were shooting. I 47
remember a number of times while especially in Brooklyn, a lot of young But we have to create our own jobs and [ Monty, during the shoot, would leave the black youths, and they don't have such a make our own films. That is why it is set and 1 would fill out the deposit slip good reputation. Look at the Bernard important to find close working associ- and he would run to the bank and deposit Goetz situation. That's why I had stuff ates that have the same goals and th¢ checks. So that's the kind of duress like Greer calling him a \"chain snatcher.\" I aspirations that you do.\" we made this film under. But I'm not knew I couldn't attempt to clear their complaining. That's the only way that this reputation, but 1 could portray them Is this film about blacks or men and film could be done.\" more positively.~ women? It's 'wonderful that you had the confi- Was it difficult for you to shoot and \"I think my love of women is reflected dence to go ahead and do the film. direct the sex scenes? in the work. But 1 think this film should be the antidote to how the black male is \"Well, I've never lacked confidence \"That is why I used Tracy as an actress. perceived in The Color Purple. See, [laughs). It's just money. And I've been 1 could have had a known actress, but it nobody is saying that black men haven't fortunate that I've had people around me was important that I use somebody who done some terrible things, and what like Ernest Dickerson and Pam Jackson, was comfortable with the love scenes, Jamie does to Nola at the end of the film who went to school with Monty and me. someone at ease, because her ease would is a horrible act. But Jamie is a full-bodied She was associate producer of the film.\" r1\\ake the audience more at ease.\" character, unlike Mister in The Color Purple and the rest of that film's black You shot the film on a very small ratio. The script was written remarkably men, who are just one-dimensional \"It's just my style. There's really no from a woman's point ofview. animals. I'm not going to blame it all need to take eight million takes of entirely on Steven Spielberg, because if everything. We were well-rehearsed. And \"I'm a good listener. And I think I really you read Alice Walker's work, that's the we try to just get it within the first or try to be honest. And if you really try to way she feels about black men. She really second take, move it on to the next shot.\" go about the truth and honesty in your has problems with them. I think people Why did you decide to shoot the film in work, then you can hurdle my not being a should really analyze why The Color black and white? woman. But you have to understand, I Purple this film was made.\" \"Well, the images came to me in black have not attempted to make a feminist and white. This had nothing to do with film. For me, it is about a woman who has Why? the budget. I just felt that the subject was three lovers. My friends are always \"Within recent years, the quickest way a black and white movie.\" boasting and bragging about how many for a black playwright, novelist, or poet to lVu used colorfor the birthday scene. women they have. But when word gets get published has been to say that black \"Well, we wanted to make that scene, back to them that one of the women in men are shit. If you say that, then you are which is a present that Jamie is giving to their stable is even thinking about seeing definitely going to get media, your book Nola, a very imaginable scene, to make it somebody else, they go berserk. That's published, your play done-Ntozake different. A little homage to The Wizard insane, that double standard. So I Shange, Alice Walker.\" of Oz. .. Jamie says to her, 'Close your decided, let's make a film about a woman Do you feel the same way about black eyes and repeat after me; There's no who is actually living her life as a man.\" male playwrights? place like home, there's no place like \"To me, Toni Morrison could write home: And she says, 'There's no place HOW did \"black\"figure into it? motherfuckin' rings around Alice Walker. like home, there's no place like home; \"Another reason I did this film If you look at Toni Morrison's body of and you cut to the close-up of her clicking was because there are hardly any work-Sula, The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, her heels.\" films about black people. When you do Song of Solomon-Song of Solomon, I What is it like to act in your ownfilm? see films about black people, they're mean, I would like to do that one day. I never acted before. Well, halfway either musicals or comedies. You know, That's going to make a great movie. But through writing this film, I decided, hey, I ha-ha, chi-chi, and dancing. Eddie Mur- still, till today, not one of Toni Morrison's should play this role. It was hard. The phy and Richard Pryor, don't even kiss or works has been made into film. Why first day, it was horrible because I was have any romantic interests in their films. hasn't she won a Pulitzer prize? That's trying to direct and act, and Michael why they put Alice Walker out there. Hunter, who was the gaffer, says to me, \"They don't have a home, no wife, no That's why she won the Pulitzer Prize. 'When you're in front of the camera, let lovers. And I knew that black people That's why Hollywood leaped the pond Ernest be the director; because 1was still would kill to go into the movie theater to seize this book and had it made. To saying 'Everybody ready, roll sQund, and see black people hugging and kissing me, it's justifying everything they say action; all that, and then I'd try to go and and, you know, loving each other. about black people and black men in act. You can't do that. So when I was in general: that we ain't shit, that we're front of the camera, Ernest assumed the \"There is so much catching up to do, I animals. That's why this film was made. reins of the director as far as getting the know I'm not going to have any problems, Of all the black novels, it's not just crew ready, the action, cut, that stuff.\" for the next three or four films, just coincidence that this was the one that Did you ever take acting lessons? dealing with stuff within a black genre. they chose. And then they turn around \"I'm really not an opponent of those This film has shown a lot of people, and get some Dutch guy to write the acting schools. My sister has never acted especially at Cannes, that black people script and get Spielberg to direct it. He before either and I think that she's very are just as diversified as any other race. knows nothing about black people. natural. That stuff-Mars repeating People have been shocked by just how \"And Whoopi Goldberg-you've got to everything-that wasn't scripted.\" universal this film is, by how they had print this - I've seen her on Phil Donahue Why do you feel a particular affinity never seen black people portrayed like and she was getting all defensive about toward the character ofMars? this before. I guess all their experiences the flak that she's getting about Color \"There are a lot of them out there, have been with Hollywood films.\" Purple, telling black men that if they can't Is it harder for blacks to work in the industry? \"It is harder for blacks in the industry. 48
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