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•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society ofLincoln Center Volume 24, Number 6 November-December 1988 Willing Sinner .................. 13 Midsection: Tunestruck .......... 31 With his mainstream hit , In the convergence of movies Women On the Verge ofa Ner- and musi c a range of musical vous Breakdown, Pedro subjects is emerging. Almod6var is the jack that's Armond White embraces popped out of Spain's post- the new Holl ywoo d musi- Franco box. Not one but two cal-the concert film (page friendl y chats with this direc- 32) but hums and hahs about tor on the verge of Intema- U2's Rattle and Hum (36). tional Breakthrough , Spanish Esteemed rockumentarist cinema's foremost purveyor D.A. Pennebaker hits the of sacrilege, sexual outrage, road with Depeche Mode that sort of thing. Vito (such nice boys) and explains Russo captures the essence pop's union of business and of Pedro, psycho-socially pleasure to Lauren Low- speaking (13) and Marcia enthal Swift (44). Ken Pally has an idea-driven talk Spence investigates how with the Camp Director(18). Holl ywood tamed jazz by jumping on the bandwagon 'Burning' Sensation ............. 21 (38) while Marlaine Glicksman likewise eluci- Gene Hackman may be the dates the taming of composer hardest working man in Dmitri Shostakovich by Joe movies. Beverly Walker's Stalin in Tony Palmer's Testi- interview with the star of mony (50). And there are Alan Parker's Mississippi layers upon lairs for the long- Burning finds Popeye Doyle hairs in Uncle Ken Russell's midst his second wind as The new film . Karen Jaehne Last Angry Sensitive Man. reports (51). And Gavin Smith reflects on Parker's film-is it a return to a Stanley Kramer- style civil rights film? Or just 48 HRS?Well , it's Hollywood with a genre blender. (26). Also in this issue: Festival Fallout .............. 56 Books: Bio Logical Surefire ... 76 Yes, it's that time of yea r. We refer, of A misunderstood hedonist and an Journals ..................... 2 course , to our annual coverage of the exhaustively analized ascetic-Clara Papal hostility to The Last Temptation New York Film Festival (26th edition , Bow and In gmar Bergman-unlikely of Christ threatens filmgoers with and alive and kicking). We turned bedfellows (but a gargoyle can dream) Death in Venice (The Festival). Our Stephen Harvey and Elliott Stein Fabiano Canosa reviews the bio of religious war correspondant Harlan loose to terminate with extreme prej- the 'It' girl , and Richard Corliss Kennedy reports from the frontline udice-and one sang and the other delves into the introspective Swede's where it's all quiet, and then hops over didn' t. In a generally northern direc- chary reminiscences. to the Edinburgh film fest to get a tion , David Chute (To Kill) sin- dose of semiotics-hope it's not glehandedly comes to praise , not bury Back Page: Quiz #34 ......... 80 contagious. Toronto's 13th Festival of Festivals. Cover photo: courtesy of Onyx. Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Associare Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. Arr Directorand Cover Design: E llior Sc hulman . Adverri sing and Circularion Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Doris Fellerman. Producrion: Deborah Dichrer Edmond s. Wesr Coas r Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Resea rch Consulranr: Mary Corli ss. Con rroller: Domingo Homilla , Jr. Editorial Ass isra nr: Gavin Smirh. Execurive Director, Film Sociery of Lincoln Cenrer: Joanne Koch. Copyrighr © 1988 by rhe Film Sociery of Lincoln Ce nrer. All ri ghrs reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMME NT do nor represenr Film Sociery of Lincoln Cenrer policy. Publicarion is made possible in part by supporr from rhe New York Srare Council on rhe Arrs and rhe Nariona l Endowmenr for rhe Arrs. This publicarion is full y prorecred by domes ric and inre rn ariona l copyright. Subscriprion rares in rhe Unired Srares: $ 14. 95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbe rs. Elsewhere , $37 for 6 numbers , $70 for 12 numbers , payab le in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include rheir occuparions and zip codes . Disrribured by Easrern News Disrributors, Sand usky OH 44870. FILM COMME NT (ISSN 0015-119X) is published bimonrhly by rhe Film Sociery of Lincoln Cenrer, 140 W. 65rh St. , New York NY 10023. Second- class postage paid ar New York NY and addirional mailing offices. Postmaster: send add ress changes to FIL~I COMMENT, PO. Box 3000, Denville , N J 07834-9925
s Our Man in Venice, Our Man also in Edinburgh MUDDY WATERS N othing like it has been seen Isabelle Huppert expresses everything when seeming to express nothing. . since the heyday of the Bor- gias. The Venice Film Festi- a global language. Venice's filmmakers' pigs, the local abattoir slinging its val , which can be as peaceful as its seem more than ever trying to make knives, the local gentry genteelly leafy, wave-washed setting on the Lido , pictures speak louder than wo rd s: dining. this year came on like gangbusters. showing language dissolving in the existential void (Ange lopou los' Land- The Conspiracy of Consumption, Act 1. (buildup to the festival). Fest scape ofMist), throwing dialogue in the satirized as a minuet of whirling sub- Chief Guglielmo Biraghi-you can rec- air like clay pigeons , only to be shot plots in Favorites of the Moon, here ognize him by the knives sticking out down by the truer aim of telltale looks embraces everyone from monks to of his back-gets re-elected by the skin or gestures (Mike Leigh's High Hopes , meat-hackers to Lords of the Manor. of his teeth. The bloody opposition is David Mamet's Things Change), or dis- But nothing is overtly condemned by led by Christian Democrats on the carding dialogue and commentary alto- the movie. Ioseliani lets the images Venice committee, including our old gether, as in Otar Ioseliani's 50-minute speak for themselves. The simplicity friend Gian Luigi Rondi (former festi- documentary, A Little Monastery in may be disingenuous-we know what va l capo). As 1988 progresses , every Tuscany. the Russian director is up to; as in name you can think of is thrown for- Favorites he's knocking the consumer- ward to replace Signor Biraghi. Fina ll y This was the best film at Venice. The ist West. But he does it with the Biraghi gets the nod and a four-year Russian-Georgian helmer whose last geniality of a chi ld pretending com- contract, proving only what everyone pic Favorites of the Moon was the toast plete innocence. knew: He was the right man for the job. of Venice, '84, once more scatters a 'structureless' series of images and The 'silent cinema' of Theo Act 2 . The Last Temptation ofChrist. anecdotes across the screen . It is silent Ange lopou los is much noisier. This is Martin Scorsese's hot gospel is selected cinema with incidental sounds. (Dogs muteness as a multi-megaton weapon. for the festival. Catholics are shocked. barking, bells tolling, psalms chanting, His new movie Landscape of Mist, like Cardinals go berserk. The Vatican scraps of semi-audible conversation). his last The Beekeeper, is a journey film. sends smoke through its roof. Franco Five white-robed monks hew out their Two kids , a S-year-old boy and an 11- (Jesus of Nazareth) Zeffirelli is so out- days of prayer and devotion, punctuated year-old girl, run away from home to raged by Scorsese's film that he hasn't with farm-working, wine-making, seek Dad in Germany but never get seen it. Even so, he threatens to with- meals , and walks through the town, there. Instead these orphans of the draw his own Venice entry, Young scored for Ciaos and Buon giornos. We existential storm gloom through a Toscanini, a.k.a. The Last Temptation also glimpse the local peasants gather- Greece ridden with ghastly weather of Liz Taylor. The brouhaha runs right ing olives, the local hunters killing wild and endure rape, despair, and a few up to the movie's showing. limited snatches of conversation. Once Act 3. The movies, thank heaven , are on the up-and-up at Venice. Under the former director what's-h is-name, the average Mostra lineup resembled less a dish to set before a Golden Lion than something dragged in by the moggy. Biraghi has changed much, including the old mandatory attempt at international evenhandedness. This meant that a good third-choice Ameri- can film had to give way to , say, a clinker from Brunei that was its coun- try's first choice . And to discourage nationalist tokenism, the competition films were not country by country, but by director. Hallelujah. At last a long- awaited breach in the wall of filmfest jingoism. The whole point of these events, surely, is to showcase cinema's power as 2
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e e e e e e ee .eeeeeeeeeeeeee \"So the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum .\" Metro Pictures president Richard Rowland spoke these words when he heard about the formation of United Artists. Mary Pickford , Doug Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin , William S . Hart and D. W. Griffith saw it differently. So UA was born. And , 68 years later, is still turning out major films . Though UA has never enjoyed the public recognition of A treasure haJse if facts and plwtos - Metro or Warner or Paramount, the industry knows it as the studio that turned out the three most successful series everythingyou expectfrom aCrown studio history in film history. A few of the great pictures that bear the UA logo : -1,581 films: EVERY full·length feature - Paramount productions distributed by UA by special arrangement, 1942-44: * * *High Noon Some Like It Hot Things to Come released by United Artists in the U.S. brief plot, major cast, director, pro- * *Wuthering Heights The Apartment Pollyanna ducer (except for Harry Sherman action * *(1920) Witness for the Prosecution A Hard Day's from 1919 thru 1985 . specials) * * * *Night Red River Algiers I Want to Live! The * *Barefoot Contessa Around the World in 80 Days -Over 1,100 photos - Hopalong Cassidy and Cisco Kid * * *Dodsworth The Outlaw Elmer Gantry Annie Hall serials, Hal Roach Streamliners, Comet * * * *Scarface (1932) D.O.A. Limelight The Alamo - Major entries for most films: plot, Streamliners distributed by UA: stars, * The African Queen major cast and credits, independent producer, director (for Roach and Comet) Here is UA , from 1919 until today. The WHOLE story. production company - ALL UA Academy Award winners The COMPLETE record. - Minor entries for the remaining films: AND nominees - including special and brief plot, major cast and credits, in· honorary awards dependent production company - Convenient year·by·year listing - Studio history, by decade - British films distributed here by UA: -I ndex of films Vse COUpon to brief plot, major cast and credits, pro- -I ndex of personnel - over 9,500 get this lavish duction company names! $35 giant - Documentaries: brief description, direc· - Printed thruout on fine g1\\lSsy stock tor, production company - HUGE - 352 giant 9 x 12 Y, pages ~------------------------------------------------------ FREE How the Oub Works • •Yl~/~II~.IAII.~II Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you get a free copy of the Oub bulletin, PREVIEWS, which offers the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Alternates: books on films, TV, • • •l I e L• • *music, occasionally records and videocassettes. If you want the Featured Selection, do 15 Oakland Avenue - Harrison, N.Y. 10528 *nothing. It will come automatically. If you don't want the Featured Selection or you do Please accept my membership in the Movie/ Entertainment 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 lavish $35 *deadline date. The majority of Oub books are offered at 2(}.300/0 discounts, plus a *charge for shipping and handling. As soon as you buyand pay for 4 books, records or volume, The United Artists Story by Ronald Bergan. I agree videocassettes at regular Oub prices, your membership may be ended at any time, either by to buy 4 additional books, records or videocassettes at *you or by the Oub. If you ever receive a Featured Selection without having had 10 days regular Club prices over the next 2 years. 1 also agree to the *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. Fe - 50 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, *usually ro.8OllJo off. These Bonus Books do not count toward fulfilling your Oub obliga· tion but do enable you to buy fine books at gjveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news about members and their hobbies. You are welcome to send in similar items. The Address City_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ S, tate ____Zip _ __ *Club will publish any such item it deems suitable, FREE. This is a real CLUB! Good *I service. No computers! Only one membership per household. -I ----------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------~
more Angelopoulos puts up the odd with movie hokum: The mixture's vari- Don Ameche in Things Change. stunning image and uniquely cele- able but lively. brates Greece as a land of gray, mia- groping, well-meaning banalities of smic, sodden majesty. But the movie's The bad news comes from old pal their dialogue. minimalist deliberateness is finally Ermanno Olmi. His latest film The more wearing than winning. So are the Legend of the Holy Drinker is a typical As it happens, the festival itself was clunking Greek-myth parallels just Olmi tale of the kiss of the sanctity becoming radioactive at this point. An beneath the surface. The young man bestowed on the common man. But the Australian movie arrived, crackling from a traveling theater who befriends interweaving of the miraculous mysteriously, that proved the explosive the two children and rescues them from everyday-which gave a glow to The revelation of the mostra. danger is called Orest. Back in the days Tree of Wooden Clogs and Cammina of The Travelling Players, Cammina-is here reiterated as if by John Hillcoat's Ghosts... of the Civil rote. Deep in co-production Paris, Dead is a prison pic set in an Awful Angelopoulos had a fluid epic vision where mismatched accents clash by day Warning near-future. Stoked by the that convincingly commanded both and by night, dwells boozy hobo authorities-who want to trigger police- modern Greek reality and ancient Rutger Hauer. One day he receives a state powers-unrest grows in a high- Greek myth. Today the vision has ZOO-franc handout from mystery phi- security desert penitentiary. Hillcoat become fogged with cliches of aliena- lanthropist Anthony Quayle with only stages this tale of crescent anarchy less tion and anomie, post-deluge one condition: Pay the money back by like a down-under Riot in Cell Block 11 Antonioni. giving it to a certain church as soon as than a mock documentary with touches possible after Sunday mass. of Kubrick and Genet. (How's that for a T he strongest movies-and stron- twosome?) The multi-view narrative, gest moments in weaker movies- Of course Hauer, deep into Paris' hi-tech images, and eerily disem- were nearly always those where an elo- latest Beaujolais consignment and dis- bodied sounds-while watching events quent camera stole the attention from a tracted by other matters (a mistress, a in one part of the jail we hear conver- stammering script. sponging friend), keeps missing the sations from another-half suggest a appointment. The film drags on like 2001 of the penal system. The shock- Geza Belemenyi's Eldorado, a twO- some demented Guy de Maupassant proof candor and grim surreal hour trawl through post-war Hungarian story, pouring out its non-vintage history, has a couple of brilliant scenes ironies as if no one can say 'when' and where the serpentine questings of a putting its post-dubbed English dia- Steadycam catch the queasy flow of logue through the mangler of diverse political volatility. In Chabrol's Une accents: English, Dutch, Italian, Affaire de Femmes, with Isabelle Hup- French. pert as a housewife in occupied France who gets rich by performing illegal Holy Drinker is Olmi's visually dull- abortions (and ends up on the guillo- est film in decades: directed in the tine), yards of verbal character-exposi- plonk-plonk style ofTY drama. Its por- tion alternate with-and are suddenly trait of Hauer as a manque saint-a man mocked by-an inspiringly sly, ambiva- called to holiness but reaching out with lent closeup of La Huppert. (No actress ever-missing fingers-never has the is better at expressing everything when images or performances to convince. seeming to express nothing). And from Olmi uses professional actors for the Italy, Pasquale Squittieri's Gli Invisi- first time since A Man Called John, and bili-Red Brigade radicalism and prison it shows. It's his most synthetic film riots-has major verbosity problems SInce. except when the hand-held camera swings into action and creates a brilliant N either David Mamet's Things tour de force of an SAS-style prison Change nor Mike Leigh's High storming. Hopes have soaring visuals. But both use images brilliantly as boobytraps for Elsewhere from Italian cinema: Pier truth, ambushing the vanities or follies Paolo Pasolini's massive achievement of human speech. In Don Ameche's was honored in a retrospective titled performance, Mamet's shoeshine hero Una Cinema di Poesia, restoring several hijacked by the Mafia has a whole cut or dropped episodes from his story- armory of gestures and facial cycle trilogy. It presaged modern Italy's responses-from basset hound bewil- hit-and-miss flair for the cinema of actuality. Not just Gli Invisibili but derment to sly-stirring guile-that play Marco Giordano's Appuntamento a Liv- against the gnomic plainsong of erpool. In this fictional story, a girl who Mamet's dialogue. (The spoken Italian has lost her dad in Belgium's Heyssel is all cod-Italian, except for one tiny Stadium disaster-when English foot- gangster who speaks bona fide ball fans ran amok and caused 39 Sicilian). And Mike Leigh's film, a deaths, mostly Italian-eharges off to prankish paper dart sent buzzing Liverpool to track down the hooligan around Thatcher's Britain, uses its char- responsible. Headline realism exists acters' faces and often manic body lan- guage as satiric comment on the 4
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humor of the movie's picture of drug and then a single word nposte, Italian clergy was waiting. Only a abuse, sex, and prisoner-to-prisoner \"Bullocks. \" month before, at a meet-the-foreign- violence suggest the shade of Genet press party at his Castel Gandolfo sum- hovering over the outback. Combining F ranco Zeffirelli's Young Toscanini, mer retreat, the Pope , replying to a structural daring with thumping emo- however, beats the field . The self- question about Poland, had used the tional power, this film is the best news appointed Scorsese-chastiser makes a phrase \"Lead me not into temptation. \" from Australian cinema since the hey- tenfold fool of himself with this prodi- Decoders of papal ambiguity, to whom day of the Aussie New Wave. gious piece of tosh. What do you do but a nod is as good as an encyclical, rushed goggle in disbelief-Or giggle with illicit straight to the telephones. \"He's gun- Also raining welcome fallout over pleasure-at a movie that has the great ning for the Scorsese,\" they barked into Venice were two Spanish-language Italian baton-waver (C. Thomas How- the mouthpieces. comedies. Pedro Almodovar's Women ell) caught in a monsoon of bio-pic on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown fatuities ? Actually, after all the buildup, there won friends , influenced people, and was only anti-climax. A brief demo in revised recipes for gazpacho soup. This When rain-swept Arturo is not con- St. Mark's Square, a score of mounted Spanish film also copped Best Script ducting a storm at sea to the imaginary cops armed for trouble outside the Pal- prize at about the same time it opened strains of Wagner's Liebestod , he's lob- azzo Del Cinema, and that was it. No the New York Filmfest. And from bing Great Ideas about art and politics trouble, nothing. Weeks of threats and Cuba, Fernando Birri's Gabriel Garcia in the general direction of Elizabeth thunderings from the kamikaze Chris- Marquez adaptation, The Old Man with Taylor (as soprano Nadina Bulichova). tians vowing to hurl themselves flam- Enormous Wings , rejoiced in images of Miss Taylor, when not coping with ing into the fracas (\"Our motto: crazy poetry, notabl y in a fantas y Arturo's Great Ideas-her comeback at Apocalypse Now\") ended only in a sequence designed by painter Manuel one point is as good as Byron's: ''Aw Church pronouncement that Catholics Mendive. shuttt uppp\"-dons brownface and a shouldn't see the film. This puts Marty ten gallon Afro wig to sing Aida. (Big on a par with James Joyce and is tanta- N or did the Venice Lion's roarings improvement in your voice since A Lit- mount to secular canonization. stop here. First of all there was tle Night Music, Liz). Wacky Weekend, which centered Still, it all provided yards of free around three films by semi-distin- Yet the evening's loudest hoot from a international publicity for Venice and guished directors, each nuttier than the Venice audience increasingly surren- much exci ting cloak-and-dagger last and showing you don ' t need a dering to mirth comes when La Taylor shadow play up to and into the fest. If writers' strike to produce airheaded stops the opera in mid-Triumph scene Guglielmo Biraghi can survive this, he scripts. Monte Hellman 's Iguana has to make a speech. We're in slave-own- can survive anything: even the last-day Everett McGill as the lizard-faced lord ing Brazil in 1886, and what should our surprise of a Golden Lion to the Olmi of a deserted Pacific island , who speaks lady of the high Cs do but have a crisis film . (Jury-get thee into the lagoon). with the oddest cockney accent since of conscience right there on stage. Yes, Let's hope Biraghi does survive. For Archie Leach. Did we say 'deserted' folks. After thinking about it a bit dur- now-Ciao, buon giorno, arriverderci, Island ? Actually, every ship in the hemi- ing the trumpet music (you can tell and my gosh, there's a Vatican hit man sphere seems to pass by, coughing up from her brow-furrowed closeups), she trying to sink my gondola. castaways for McGill's cruel kingdom- suddenly rises and advances to stage beheadings and amputations a spe- front. Dragging with her a pair of aston- -HARLAN KENNEDY cialty. Only the newly washed-up Car- ished-looking extras dressed as Ethio- men (Maru Valdivielso) can come pian prisoners, she delivers a A CHILL IN THE AIR between old reptile-faced and his thirst thoughtful , impassioned \"Free the for blood. But even she has to listen to slaves\" speech to the Rio audience and E dinburgh is still the best place orders like \"Suck me till I cum all over the imperial box, containing one Phi- in the world for wondering if your beautiful dress.\" Since the com- lippe Noiret. Emperor Phil looks on you' re actually there. This year pletion of this film, Igu.ana Island has agnast, like the rest of us. Then he evidence points to the fact that I was been dropped from many package holi- walks out in the nearest state he can trapped for several micro-seconds, day brochures. find, under stress, to high dudgeon. though I thought I was in Edinburgh, But Liz, God bless her, carries on. So in the \"Semiotics Zone,\" a twiligh t Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer is Ken does the film, into higher flights of dimension where the mind limbers up Russell's Gothic revisited in the sober certifiable lunacy. The slaves were for what is to come during your journey light of Cannon Pic platitude. Here are freed two years later. And you'd think north. Spend too long mulling over the Byron , Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire from this slice of history-as-bunk that filmfest brochure on the plane or train Clairemont, and Doctor Polidori gath- we owed it all to Toscanini-Taylor. This and-abracadabra!-you find yourself ered round Lake Geneva to spout epi- movie should secure Zeffirelli a sound free-falling into film criticism's answer grams and swap sex partners . Never place in immortality. It's the first film to Brigadoon. mind about the writing of poetry or the that an audience has both laughed at creation of Frankenstein and The Vam- and booed , an accomplishment of sorts. Here you can see all the Edinburgh pyre. Lewis John Carlino's script cer- movies ever shown, attend all the Edin- tainly doesn ' t. But there are After Wacky Weekend, anything burgh seminars ever staged, and be memorable moments. Best one: a high- went at Venice. Preceded by an ministered to by leprechauns who flying, finely tooled speech about art advance guard of re-titled Hollywood claim they are festival director Jim and beauty by Shelley (Eric Stoltz), biggies-including Buon Giorno Viet- Hickey. which receives a long stare from Byron nam and Qui Ha Incastrato Roger Rab- bit-the Scorsese outrage arrived. The No wonder the festival opened with Beetlejuice: that mind-boggling, sporran-whirring fantasy-reality teaser. 6
And no wonder there were so many SCHOOL OF THE ARTS movies in Edinburgh , or in Brigadoon , in which people spoke their lines in a Film scholarship demands strange, stylized recitative as if coming the finest resources. from the post-Terrestrial School for Bressonian Utterance. We provide them. This is becoming a trope- nay, a The Department of Cinema Studies at fully paid-up c1iche-Of modern cin- the Tisch School of the Arts, New York ema: emotionlessness as high integrity. University, offers graduate students the What's more, it seems worldwide. From resources essential to the scholarly study the gnomic epigrams of Peter Greena- of film. Our MA. and Ph.D. programs in way's Drowning by Numbers- where cinema studies provide: the dialogue sounds like people reading • Rigorous study of history, criticism, messages in bottles-to Omer Kavur's and aesthetics Motherland Hotel from Turkey-a sort • Exposure to new methodologies- of Psycho for anomies- to Harun Far- semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, ocki's West German documentary and post·structuralism Images o/the World and the Inscription • Personal viewing/study facilities- o/War. Explicit emotion is out. flatbeds, analytic projector, and video equipment Farocki's film especially raises dis- • Access to materials-the depart- passion to a high art. Despite-or ment's own holdings; rare material from because of-its incendiary subject mat- the William Everson Collection, the ter (from air raids to Auschwitz), this Museum of Modern Art, and New York disquisition on aerial photograph y City's many cinemas, libraries, and chooses the flattest of styles . Matter-of- archives. fact editing; monotone commentary by a woman who seems to have been Our faculty includes Antonia Lant, trained as a Dalek. Annette Michelson, William K. Everson, Robert Sklar, William Simon, and Robert Farcoki lifts the curtain on some Starn. frightening facts, like the apparent sup- pression of aerial evidence of Auschwitz For information, return the coupon or gathered-inadvertently-in 1944 dur- call (212) 998-1600. ing an Allied bombing raid. But the Tisch School of the Arts Please send me information on the Cinema Studies film's determination to avoid emotion in New York University its historical recall , and thereby avoid 721 Broadway; 7th Floor Program. 0 Junior Year in New York what it condemns as the kitsch of New York, N.Y. 10003 (melo) dramatized history (Holocaust is o Graduate Attn.: Dr. Roberta Cooper o Undergraduate singled out for special stigma), results 0 Summer Sessions in a kind of kitsch of its own. This is New York University is an alIInnative action/equal Minimalism as Mannerism. Kept up for opportunity institution. Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ an unrelenting 75 minutes, the posture FC 11/88 of \"no emotion\" seems just as strained Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ and inauthentic as emotional hyperbole. City _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ One sees the kind of movie Farocki State/ZipCode _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ and Greenaway and Kavur are reacting against. The current epicenter Telephone _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ for overemphasis, well represented at Edinburgh , is Australia. The filmfest's consignment of Down Under pix shows that the Aussie New Wave has now retreated, leaving the beach free for a raucous crowd of grotty melodramas . Can the land of Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi really have fallen in the hands of movies like Steve Jodrell 's Shame (rape, injustice, and overacting in a backwoods small town) or John Ding- wall's Phobia , a psychodrama-by- numbers, complete with seemingly- nutty-but-actually-sane heroine and seem ingly-sa ne- bu t-actua ll y- nutty husband , plus the usual PFA (post-Fatal 7
Attraction) assortment of kitchen Sexual ennui in Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing. seen on screen (special FX by Pizza knives and murdered pets. Express)-into necrophilia. But there is ther lowered by being juxtaposed with no Sturm und Drang. No Gothic weav- Just to show that the British New \"random\" TV footage , mostly from ings and wailings. It's all as quiet and Wave needn ' t be complacent either, nature programs. The earnest, bur- reposeful and ironic as-well, as death. this year's brilliant U. K. masterpiece, bling narrators of these shows (\"Man Dominique Deruddere: keep watching Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still alone can contemplate his past and plan the name. Lives was balanced by the likes of Bob for his future .... \") put humanity in an Hoskins' The Raggedy Rawney and anthropological omnium-gatherum M any of the best films on the Edin- Nicolas Roeg's Track 29. Yes, Britain along with bears and buzzards. And so burgh program were (and not for too , can get it all wrong-mismatching does director Egoyan. Family Viewing the first time) the documentaries. plot and overcooking emotions-when is Cinema of Behaviorism. Cine-semi- America's Robert Frank and East Ger- she puts her mind to it. ological explorers can have a field day many's Jurgen Bottcher kept the non- with a movie like this, which is all signs fiction flag flying proudly in the Special Writing, directing, and acting, Hos- without overt emotional meaning, just Event section each with a mini-retro. kins makes a right cock-up of his fan- as Images ofthe World is all signs from a And Bill Couturie's Dear America: Let- tasy about gypsies in war. Set \"in an god's eye distance to which you must ters Home From Vietnam homed unspecified period somewhere in render your own. straight in on our heartstrings, a har- Europe (the vagueness is awesome) rowing anthology ofletters from soldiers Hoskins' film has Bob himself as gypsy Here in Brigadoon Egoyan's teasing, serving the Mother Country (some who leader Dexter Fletcher, a young army elusive style went down a treat. There later returned, some not) read, without deserter with magical powers, and a were demands for re-screenings and histrionics and over war footage , by plot involving pregnancy, transvestism , even a seminar on Dispassion as Cine- Robert De Niro, Michael j. Fox, Mar- and God knows what else. Scenes of mati~ Style, moderated by Cyd Char- tin Sheen, Willem Dafoe and others. rea lity and scenes of illusion merge isse. Belgian Dominique Deruddere's Unpredictably, at this year's Locarno with all the subtlety of a freeway pileup. Love is a Dog From Hell, Spanish Pedro Film Festival in tranquil Switzerland, Says Hoskins , \"The idea was to show Almod6var's Law of Desire , and Japa- the film provoked a demonstration in that the enemy is war-on whatever nese Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman were the Piazza Grande because it dealt only soil, whoever the adversaries.\" Ah. also shown and discussed in Edin- with America's tragedy and not with That was the idea . burgh/Brigadoon, and all three were that of the Vietnamese. Well, that's considered synergetic with Family Switzerland. Anyone for cuckoo clocks? Roeg's Track 29, the Oedipal black Viewing: poker-faced, ironising comedy from a Dennis Potter script is accounts of human passion and/or From Down Under the third and likewise inchoate. Theresa Russell human greed. springiest documentary, Cane Toads. (Carolina housewife), Christopher Mark Lewis's 46-minute pic about the Lloyd (her toy-train-obsessed hus- The Almod6var and Itami movies amphibian shock troops currently over- band), and Gary Oldman (fantasy son have already had hats off at other festi- running Northern Australia is a delight. from England) ham it up no end in an vals. Just when you thought you had The cane toad was imported from America seemingly viewed-through enough of Charles Bukowski, Love is a Hawaii to Australia in 1935 to combat xenophobic Brit binoculars-as a giant Dog from Hell combines three of his crop-destroying cane beetles. But no stories to produce a cautionary tale. A combat. The cane toads couldn't catch playground for retards. young man (Josse De Pauw) is pro- N o wonder Family Viewing, the pelled by a traumatic adolescence- low-budget hit movie of this including the worst case of acne ever year's fest circuit, seems as good as it does. Atom Egoyan's film and video pic from Canada parlays the high-style emotionlessness of post-Bresson Mod ernism into a sort of tragicomic soap. The control is brilliant, the tone is per- fect. Family Viewing has a potty plot about a teenage boy (Aidan Tierney) drjven by unhappiness at home (his neglectful , patronizing father and young stepmother are none too discreet in their \"private\" S/M sex games) to an emotional liaison with his granny, whom he kidnaps from an old-people's home. As in Images of the World, we are remote from immediate emotions. Though this time there is no sense of strain in the stylized reticence-the movie is played as a choked comedy of family manners. Dialogue is in clipped, toneless stichomythia, and the charac- ters' predicaments have their heat fur- 8
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Passing time with playmate Dairy Queen the cane toad. Yang Lin as Shao Yang in Hou Hsiao-hsien's Daughter of the Nile. the cane' beetles-the beetles could fly, ulation of the city gazed skyward daily favorite from all the movies shown in the frogs couldn ' t-and so the toads to see if C lint Eastwood-who had said Scotland, I would elect Chris Gal- focused their energies on reproduction. he might-was going to descend from lagher's Undivided Attention. This And why not? Result: Hundreds of the heavens to bless Edinburgh. experimental Canadian feature won the thousands of the brown bloated things prize in the Semiotics Zone because, as poured over main roads, through shop- As for the Eastern movies at Edin- Van Johnson pointed out, its pixilated ping streets and gardens and houses, burgh , festgoers were treated to a major discourse deconstructs conventional and are moving toward Sydney even as retrospective of the films of Seijun Suz- narrativity and problematizes the rela- we speak and you read. uki. Suzuki is a veteran Japanese action tionship between signifier and director, with crime and yakuza movies signified . This would be tragic if it weren't a specialty, whose oeuvre contains funny. Scientists flounder, parents fret, films like Tokyo Drifter, Wild Youth, Oh, Van . and one town counselor blesses the Kageroza, and Detective Bureau 23- Though, the film is fun. Gallagher, toad as a boon to tourism. (Is he nuts? I Go To Hell, Bastard (sic). Suzuki's his own narrator-protagonist, takes us for one have just torn up my Bicenten- high-style thrillers were eaten up in on a road movie through Canada, which nial super-flight ticket). Director Lewis Edinburgh and then bicycled over to keeps stopping offfor more urgent jour- adopts the appropriate po face but is not Brigadoon. neys: journeys into the mind, into cine- above the odd leg-pull, like a spoof aesthetics, into motion as emotion. Two shower-menace scene with the toads as Also from the East were Hou Hsiao- standout sequences involve the strap- Anthony Perkins. Cane Toads is a little hsien's Daughter of the Nile (etiolated ping of a camera to ordinary household masterpiece. It's a film New Yorker but touching), Chen Kaige's King ofthe tools: a snow shovel and a paintbrush. Errol Morris must wish he had made if Children (great landscapes, dull school- The resulting disorientation-Or re-ori- he'd been born Austra li an. room scenes), and the magnificent Red entation-is revelatory. Suddenly we're Sorghum, still bearing the claw marks in a zero-gravity world where snow flies While catering to the world's North- of the Berlin Golden Bear. Most Prom- upward of its own free will or where ern and Southern extremes, Edinburgh ising Newcomer award goes to Taiwan's paint strokes carve a course as thrilling was also at fu II strength this year on the Freq Tan, writer-d irector of Rouge of and vertiginous as a mountain road. Eastern and Western fronts. Holly- the North, a dynastic saga whose formi- Undivided Attention is about the wood, hypnotized by the ghostly sound dable heroine grows from tearful child filmmaker as mapmaker, mapping new of bagpipes stealing over Sunset Strip bride to acerbic matriarch in a mere 107 towns in our psyche, matte-ing new from Au ld Reekie , sent a bunch of minutes. Magnificently played by Hsia landmarks in our perception, and chart- crack mainstream movies : Beetlejuice, Wen-shi, you get her measure in the in g new ways to travel to them. Give Biloxi Blues , Bird, The Milagro Bean- film's tart dialogue scenes: Maid- Gallagher enough time and he may field War , Midnight Run. Alan \"What shall I get the master for break- even find and map Brigadoon. Rudolph's The Moderns and Michael fast?\" Wen Shi-\"Warm up the dried Cimino's The Sicilian also made sur- swallow's nest.\" -HARLAN KENNEDY prise appearances. And the entire pop- But if I were to pick an oddball 10
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affair. When they are found dead by the tieth Century. It stars the by-now-famil- Fifties for a Catholic in any country included scanning the \"condemned\" police, an officer says, \"I've never seen iar Almod6var stock compan y, list and listening to that flaming queen Cardinal Spellman ban Baby Doll from such happiness. \" It is Almodovar's only including the superbly gifted Carmen the pUlpit of St. Patrick's cathedral without even having seen it-much like flop in Spain , where casting aspersions Maura. It's a terrific hit in Spain; The the zealots stationed outside the Zieg- feld more than 25 years later carrying on on bullfighting is like spitting on God . word 'Almod6varian' has come to mean about The Last Temptation of Christ. It was the era of the \"bad girl\" movie \"when things get just a little bit too starring Cleo Moore and Beverly Mic- haels, melodramas that took a page H is career reads like a simple case crazy. \" from Cecil B. De Mille and that graph- of overnight sensationalism. He's Almod6var has a joyous stance ically spelled out the excesses they a child of the Fifties who fled the small toward his films . He's Woody Allen condemned . village of Calzada de Calatrava to without the angst and Martin Scorsese These were the films of Almod6var's youth. \" Inevitably you fashion your become a telephone operator in Mad- without guilt. From the beginning he own world from the past,\" he says. \" I like big melodramas, but I can't actu- rid. When a reporter recently asked one has said repeatedly that his work and ally make a big melodrama because my point of view is amoral. I can' t take of his idols, Lily Tomlin, when she his films are meant to \"deny even the those stories and believe the underlying morality, which is the basis for melo- decided to leave her hometown of memory of Franco\" by creating a world drama. I have different morals from that period. Bad-girl movies are very moral. Detroit, she replied, ''As soon as I real- in which the disenfranchised are able to Almod6var has a ized where I was .\" Almodovar howls at be the masters and (especially) mis- joyous stance toward hisfllms. He's Woody this: In La Mancha he felt \" like an tresses of their own destiny. Any dis- Allen without the angst and Scorsese without astronaut at King Arthur's court.\" So at cussion of Women on the Verge of a guilt. 16 (like Tomlin's Ernestine) he went to Nervous Breakdown necessarily begins They invest themselves in a collective work for the telephone company in with the way the film looks, a result of belief that there is good and bad behav- ior. This is a rule of the genre. So I Madrid , moving from telephone opera- Almodovar's cinematic education. cannot really make those films again. I can re spect the rules of the genre, tor to pop star to household word in a \"The aesthetics of the film are which I love , but my sensibility is something which I think belongs to the hot decade. Now he makes a film a purely Frank Tashlin, \" he says, \"but at Eighties. You can't be so innocent. You can' t be so naive any longer, even if you year. the same time it's my vision of what I like that genre. \" I hope I can keep up the rhythm, \" loved about those films 20 years later.\" \" In my films bad girls are not bad. They have the classic look so you can he says, settling onto a sofa with a touch So it's not a copy, and it's not an enjoy it, but there is no judgment. I love Douglas Sirk, but I can't make a of exhaustion. \"This is all very nice and homage. It's more that in a very real Sirk film because I'm not so upset over those old issues of morality. I just use exciting, but it's difficult for me to write sense he's incorporated into his work them . Latin people know that there is a period of the early Sixties in American and to work, because I'm traveling all what the movies of his adolescence movies that belongs completely to America, and they can see it in Women the time. I need very much to go back looked like. on the Verge. Many American comedies were inspired by French authors , a sen- to work now. The more success you \"The films I saw have a huge and sibility also present in my film. Women looks like a farce, like Cactus Flower, achieve , the less time you have , and deep relationship with me and with my but it's about female loneliness in a that is a pity.\" He smiles broadly. \"I education. I had a very dark and awful absolutely promise you to make a film education by priests. But at the same every year. \" time I went to the cinema and the The film that has brought him to the movies starring Natalie Wood and Eliz- festival this year is his most colorful, abeth Taylor. But especially the films most accessible, and funniest film to made from Tennessee Williams were date. It's exclusively about women and my second education-which was stron- their willingness to express dangerous ger and more powerful than the priests'. emotion, illustrating hi s firm conviction You know, at that moment, watching that \"men cry, but I think women cry those films , Ifelt like a sinner. I was 12 better.\" On the face of it, Women on the or 13, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof abso- Verge is about an actress whose boy- lutely corrupted me . I felt at that friend has taken a powder. She keeps mOfllent... I recognized that I belonged meaning to jump out the window or to the world of this film in which there take sleeping pills, but her spirit is so were sinners and not to the world of the strong that she and everyone else in the priests . So the movies were a kind of film end up swooping around on intimate and private education for me . broomsticks to the delightful tunes of \"I remember Frank Tashlin movies La Lupe. with a certain kind of housewife, who I It's a movie about earrings and burn- didn ' t know if she actually existed, but ing beds and people who throw the was a kind of artificial and false image telephone out the window when their that has a powerful truth for me, which lovers leave. It's based on Jean Coc- I can't explain. I look at it with humor, teau's The Human Voice the way \"Mack . but it very much belongs to my sensi- the Knife\" is about Hitler. In fact it bility. They don't belong to my fanta- owes more to Jean Louis than Jean sies, those movies, they belong very Cocteau . It's a film that probably much to my reality.\" couldn' t have been made by a director Twho happens to be heterosexual. The he trashy movies of the Fifties con- opening credits bring back Funny Face . demned by the Catholic church The decor and fashions echo Frank were actually blatant lessons in the pre- Tashlin. The performances recall Twen- vailing morality. The world of the 14
penthouse . These women are aban- beckons me into my office and presents impressed by Carmen's sce ne in Law of doned , alone, sad; they are very fragile, me with the screenplay for hi s next film Desire, and I wanted to continue this and you have to see thi s, too , in a very and a snapshot of his boyfriend in Mad- play in a different context, in a progres- serious way. \" rid . \" I wanted you to have somethin g sion. Carmen, in both film s, is a very that is very me. These are the two painful figure . In Desire she is an aban- P ublicist Marcie Bloom is figu- obsessions of my life at this moment. \" doned son who becomes a woman, and rati ve ly and goo d-naturedly tap- in Women she is also abandoned , but ping her foot in the next room because We've got an hour before Epperson's she doesn ' t suffer so much . She find s a this is film festi val week and at any I Could Go On Lip-Synching starts at lot of strength. She mixes a gazpacho given moment it's always time for the midnight. Since we're all in a fun with sleeping pills but forgets to drink director of the minute to move on to the mood , I broach the subject of how rude it. There is hope here. \" next cri tic of the eternal. Since, after 25 Women on the Verge isn't compared to years, the New York Film Festi va l has his previous work. The crowd in the One of the funniest bits in Women is living room is gaga over a tape of Bette an old white-haired lady reading the news on TV. Turns out she's Pedro's mother. \" I brought her from the country to do this one scene,\" he laughs. \"This belongs to my theory of the movie that everything is the way we want it to be- in my film an old lady can be a news- caster. Which of course will never hap- pen in real life.\" Speaking of real life, I mention that I recently saw a print of Valley of the Dolls in a gay bar on Fire Island. What was so funn y about it was how serious it was originally meant to be. \"Yes, of course,\" says Almodovar. \"That was the kind of innocence I was talking about before. We can't do exactly that ever again, but we are the perfect audi- ence ' for that film , and it gets better with time. Gay men understand certain things about emotions, which are usu- ally designated as feminine . The ste- reotype is that gay men are , therefore, 'like' women. This, of course, is rub- bish. We keep on being what they call masculine in behavior while stayi ng in touch with a different side of human emotions . \" Almodovar. Costumed in irony. Midler on the United Jewish Appeal A lmodovar's cultural background telethon. and education dictate, however, still not seen fit to create a hospitality that there are certain things labeled suite, we do the next best thing. We \" It's not rude at all,\" he says. \" But masculine that will not be di sposed of decide that what we really need to do is I'm very glad of that because after Law so easily. The opening scene of Law of go out and continue this di scussion over of Desire I wanted to make something Desire is a case in point. It shows a man a terrific drag act-John Epperson as more optimistic and fun because I being directed in an erotic film Lypsinka, mistress of the film-fatale needed it. I make movies for my needs. sequence to say to another man , \" Fuck send-up. The following Saturday night My goal has never, never, never been to me , fuck me.\" For Almodovar, this was Almodovar, four critics, two publicists, make shocking movies . nearly impossible to get through . and a distributor preconve ne at my house. Everyone is watching a video of \" Women on the Verge is like a daugh- \"I don ' t know if I told you,\" he says The Day the World Ended. Adele Jer- ter of Law of Desire because it's quite seriously, \" but I was really uneasy gens plays the last striptease artist left inspired by The Human Voice , which I during the shooting of that scene-me, on Earth after a nuclear war. Almodovar used in that film. I was very excited and Pedro Almodovar, personally. Much more uneasy than the actors. I even told them that I could never do that scene if I were an actor. The actors weren't gay in that scene, and I think it's easier if you're not gay. It is very difficult for men , straight or gay, to overcome our education. The scene is almost like a horror movie for some people in the degree of di scomfort it causes audi- 15
Carmen Maura sets her bed and the screen on fire in Women on the Verge. ening and dangerous. Like when the Pope-who is really crazy- tells people ences. They wanted me to cut it in education. I don ' t like to think about that AIDS is a judgment of God. I think England . Originally, all I wanted was the truth of that.\" we have to be very radical right now on one naked body in front of the camera these issues. It seems to me that all the and the voice of the director telling him At the New Director's screening of freedoms we have won can disappear what to do , but I just couldn't bear it; it Law of Desire at the Museum of Mod- very quickly. I feel I have a personal was too intense, and in the end I added ern Art, the film was immediately crit- duty right now to be very radical in cutaway shots to the director and his icized by a well-known cinemato- defending individuality above all. assistant just to relieve some of the grapher as shocking for \"promoting tension. I couldn't even say the words homosexuality in this day and age,\" an \"Law ofDesire is a film about a man 'fuck me' in direction. This machismo obvious reference to the AIDS crisis. so obsessed with possessing the soul of education is never going to go away. someone he loves that he is willing to And I'll tell you something, I'm afraid \"What can I say about this prob- lose his life in exchange for one hour of knowing that. I'm afraid of being lem?\" he sighs wearily. \"One must con- alone with him. This isn't a tragedy. It conscious of that. It frightens me to tinue to explore romanticism and would have peen a tragedy if he know that I will never get rid of that sexuality on the screen. There is a kind couldn't have had that one hour. I never of awful conservative morality that has make obvious political statements in developed since AIDS which is fright- my films , but I think it is very clear what I think about the world in which I Veronica Forque (I.) and Carmen Maura (r.) in What Have I Done to Deserve This? live. And aside from The Battle of Algiers, there aren' t very many good overtly political films. But when I talk about the crazy life of a housewife in What Have I Done it's political, and I prefer to do it like that. \"What Have I Done is absolutely a The word 'Almod6varian' has come to mean 'When things get just a little bit too crazy.' Socialist film. This is something a Communist has to do... to tell a story like that today in Spain. The films of [Pier Paolo1Pasolini were exceptionally political in that way. All of his ideas about class and society are in his films. Look at Mamma Roma. My films are political in the sense that I always defend the autonomy and absolute freedom of the individual-which is very dangerous to some people.\" It's almost midnight, and everybody moves to the Provincetown Playhouse in the Village where more critics from the festival are piling into their seats to see Epperson conjure Lypsinka, who recreates the fun-house mirror essence of some obscure performers of the For- ties and Fifties and what they meant to us. We're not talking Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe here. This is Nanette Fabray singing \"Louisiana Hayride.\" Almod6var loves it. \"It is so cine- matic,\" he tells Epperson backstage. \"Come to Spain, and I will find the theater. The language of this show is 16
univer sa l because everyone know s ..~ ~'.I~'~. . Connie Francis ~nd Vikki Carr.\" Carmen Maura consults with Veronica Forque (r.) as she turns atrick for Jaime Chavarri in What Have I Done? \"Eve rything has changed in thi s decade ,\" says Almod6var. \"Every- next past in my own movies. The dif- success has come to me when I am thin g. You ca'n't trust an y ideology in ference between the dark past and now mature enough to know better what I the same way that you did once. After is that I am able to create a future of my want. I'm glad to make what I want to the militancy of the Sixties , the super- own construction on film. It's a future make in my own country. If I ever come ficiality of the Eighties generation is that I decide to have.\" here to make movies, the time will be actually a very active political gesture. right or not at all.\" You have to be conscious of it.\" P edro has to go back to Spain. He is returnin g to New York for the As he gets into the car we fini sh up We pass an ad for Matador, and it opening of Women on the Verge and has the last important piece of business . In says simply, ''A New Film By Almo- a dinner date then with Lily Tomlin Women on the Verge Carmen Maura d6var. \" I ask how it feels to have onl y with whom he 'd love to work. \"A few wears a spectacular pair of earrings- one name like Hitchcock and Garbo. yea rs ago I might have jumped at the two espresso coffeepots dan gling half- chance to work here because I wasn't way to her shoulders. Everyone in ew \"You were right from the very begin- sure of what I wanted. Now I think York wants to know where he found ning,\" he chuckles wickedly. \" You dis- them . \" I had them made for the film . If covered me , and you were absolutely I can find them , I'll send them to you .\" right! But I don't feel it or think about it. l'vly problems are the same: always rr the next script, always the difficulties in writing it. I think it's more spectacu- r lar if you look at me from the outside and see onl y 'Almod6var' in print. Now r the Spanish press says, 'This is an Almod6varian situation' or 'a n Almod6- Antonio Banderas (I.) goes for Maria Barranco. (r.) while his fiancee sleeps in Women on the Verge. varian person' , but I don ' t like it. When I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movles. they say that , I feel mi sunderstood. \"What's wonderful is to notice that people want to see my movies. And that by the miracle of communication I am able to put my obsessions, my prob- lem s, my life on the screen and have them reach an audience. That impresses me tremendously. But curi- ously it doesn't make me feel more sure of myself as an artist. Each time I start a new movie I know that I want to make that movie, but I don ' t know if I will know how to do it. \"I feel very sad that I'm becoming like a moral example. I was the guy working very hard at the telephone company, struggling to make my movies, and now in the same town I have two films playing. It's like a melo- drama. I find it funn y, but at the same time there's something sad about it. \"I want to think that I am now con- structing my next past-you under- stand? When I was a child , my past was what I saw on the screen, and now I'm constructing what will represent m y 17
Picador, Any Door political inconsistencies. \" I don't like any kind of militancy, and I don't like telephones. Passion has its own irra- tional rules, and like indifference, it can drive people to sublime or dangerous extremes. Society is preoccupied with controlling passion because it's a dis- equilibrium, but for the individual it is undeniably the only motor that gives sense to life.\" Pedro Almodovar on the set of Women on the Verge . on the verge of nervous breakdowns of A lmod6var feels the confusion be- their own, squealing and squeezing one tween desire and public or politi- by Marcia Pally another's hands in giggly excitement. It cal policy is greater here in the U.S. was, as Noel Coward purred, than at home. \"Not that Spain is so M y first glimpse of Pedro refreshing. wonderful, but even the people on the Almod6var's troupe from right are closer to human weakness, Women on the Verge of a Ner- Almod6var's humor was sardonic. He temptation , error. They understand it's vous Breakdown was the black, quilted, talked about The Last Ostentation of··, part of life, it's all mixed up together, free-form sc ulpture actress Rossy de and asked what prize he would like he and that's the way people really are. Palma had taken as a hat at the Venice replied, \" First prize for me [Women on Here you pretend people don't have Film Festival. An expressionist answer the Verge] would be having the culture desires or you talk about it with such to the mantilla , it floated above the ministers ban it.\" It won the award for violent curiosity, like you've never seen crush like a levitating bonsai tree and best screenplay. Free from world opin- it before, like you have no experience let you know where the girl-gang that ion,. the bureaucrats might've nixed it with yourselves. Passion is what moves comprised the cast was hanging out. since Almod6var's seven feature-length you, you can't avoid it.\" Women on the Verge is to formula film- films are anti-clerical to a frame and making and canned emotion what Andy dismiss dogma of every sort-priestly, Almod6var looks to the overblown Warhol's soup can was to processed feminist , fascist, gay lib-like a queen theatrics of studio-era films and TV food-a camp satire of every breakup in Bette Davis drag banishing dullards melodramas where desire, betrayal, that ever left a woman so bbing in a from the bar. Political thinking is too and forgiveness expose themselves melodrama and a send-up of every kind crude, literal , and neat to explain our with leisure. Re-worked through his of TV soap, including laund ry detergent passions. Almod6var fears government sense of camp, they become a coming- commercials. The plot is a perfect web and church repression, Franco and the out party for obsession set on the stage of cliches, the sets a parade of posters of Ophus Dei (a right-wing Catholic cult of grand illusion, and everyone comes great film oldies, and it easily stole the popular in Spain and Italy), but also dressed to kill. His characters-nuns, show from Martin Scorsese's The Last any group-think from sex roles to man- cads, battle-axes, jilted women and Temptation of Christ-which was sup- ners to well-meaning radicals who innocent youths-are costumed in posed to be the Big Deal at Venice but would overthrow both. As he told the irony. Their emotions are archetypical which the mini sters of culture let crowd in Venice, \" It's important to and played with effortless sarcasm. through without a fuss and which failed know who your enemies are.\" Almod6var has done for film what cho- to inspire the riot that Catholics had reographer Mark Morris did for dance. been promising us for weeks. Pedro's He put it with more characteristic He took the sardonic attitude born in women were the rage , and they seemed tone to a woman at the New York Film the gay ghetto-like Jewish humor, as a smart-ass way to survive society's hate- Festival who complained about his and made it into a sensibility to look at the world. In Verge women are dumped and left to Cope. In the 1986 Law of Desire a gay man forgives the boy he loves, even for his murderous homophobic ram- pages, and the sanest character is a post-op transsexual who, Freudianly enough, had an affair with her father when she was a boy. Her \"confession\" of her past reads as the encyclopedia of the crises of daytime TV. In Matador (also 1986), Almod6var 18
castrates machismo and its union of sex Privately he said, \"When you begin \"and there are really only two women and power, while insisting that the trig- to dream about being a director you directors in Spain. It's also a country of great actresses not actors. Men are too gers to arousal-boots, stilettos, a dream about actors, not directqrs. inflexible; they are condemned to play their Spanish macho role. \" matador's cape-are misunderstood by Awareness of directors comes later. My So your interest in women is not religious fury and liberal concern. Call- dream was Bette Davis-I adore the because you're gay but because you're \"spontaneous?\" ing it his most difficult work, violence in her character, her auton- \"Yes . .. well.\" Almodovar is often Almodovar made the film unavoidably omY--Or Kate Hepburn and Marilyn impulsive and childishly excitable, but erotic-in one scene holding the camera Monroe. Contemporary actors don't this was the first time I saw him blush. close to a kiss while, off-camera, strip- give this kind of impression. It was a ping the actors below the waist. In the part of the studio system, which was \"We can find a lot of bitchy women 1983 Dark Habits, a convent rigs up awful for the people who worked in it in movies who have the masculine phony miracles to milk money out of but created actors with an extraordinary impulse behind them, but my women are not men disguised as women. I only believers and support the sisters' reli- capacity to be larger than life. did something like that once, in \"The race of actors has changed now, Matador. The relationship between the gious experience with cocaine. lovers is a bullfight, and she is the \"Camp makes you look at our even physically. Actors are like normal bullfighter. A woman needs a huge will and autonomy to do that, to become human situation with irony,\" people, but a normal person wasn't a male simply because she wants it.\" Almodovar says. \"It's much more inter- Rita Hayworth. In a film like Matador, But Matador is so thoroughly critical esting to take camp out of a gay context which is a fable, fantastic, I want grand of masculinity. and use it to talk about anything, every- actors from the pedestal. For leading \"I hope so. There's something des- thing, but to do that you must show how lady I would've cast the young Ava perate in her imitation of men, a des- much you love it, how much you enjoy Gardner. peration to be male that comes from the camp. Otherwise you look like you're \"I wanted to do a woman in an emo- society, the machismo she lives in. \" just making fun. In camp you sympa- thize with lack of power, like the pathos tionally extreme situation,\" Almodovar The desperation the heroine feels in Verge is much more commonly female. said, explaining how Verge got started. \"Men don't know how to leave women, of sentimental songs. This is kitsch, and you are conscious that it is, but that Asked at Verge's first consciousness is full of irony, never crit- icism. You cannot take camp out of its New York screening if original context if you feel like an intel- lectual using this... this ... element of hefelt any kinship with theirs. To use it outside, you have to so they say they love them while they're really running away. This hypocrisy Fassbinder, he replied,celebrate it, to make an orgy of camp. Anyway, it's a sensibility. Either you \"0h yes, we like the leaves women with so much frustrated have it or you don't. \" same kinds ofbodies, confusion. During a relationship, cocaine, and we're both women have more resilience and will A lmodovar's mentors, Alfred endure much more pain than men. But Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and when it's time to break up, women will Luis Bufiuel-his Trinity, as he calls fat.\" face it. They have more common sense, them-are not known for their camp, men are lazier; 80 percent of the peti- but they taught him how to overlay tions for divorce in Spain are filed by opposites, to make absurd juxtaposi- (What else is new?) \"So I thought of the women.\" tions work, which always serves an short Cocteau piece The Human Voice, Why? ironic stance. Hitchcock made \"high just a woman by a phone, waiting. \"You tell me. I think it's because art\" images understandable to a popu- Then I start to write, and my own life women are practical. This is universal, lar audience and \"made the unbeliev- gets mixed in. I remember sitting by but it's particularly Spanish for men not able believable.\" Wilder told painful, the phone one day, waiting for a certain to be honest with women. It's the realistic stories as comedies. Bufiuel person to call, ready to throw myself heredity of the Latin lover. A man can came closest to camp, especially his out the window.. . .\" never say anything disagreeable to a Mexican period, when he transformed woman, so they lie.\" Woutrageously bad plays and actors with hy make the hero a woman, Is it different for gay couples? then? Is this part of a gay sensi- \"In the gay relationships I know they the subtlety of tarts into biting cinema. He also dropped dreams and surrealist bility, of camp? don't play male and female roles. Some- fantasies into workaday scenes \"with- \"Not because I'm gay. I am much times gay couples can be more sincere out,\" Almodovar noted, \"even chang- more curious 'about women. I always because there's nothing holding them ing the lighting.\" Almodovar was also listen to their conversations in buses together but their feelings-no con- influenced by Tennessee Williams' and subways. I'm becoming a special- tract, no family, usually less economic melodramas with Elizabeth Taylor and ist. Bergman [the inveterate heterosex- dependence. But you know you can't Natalie Wood, Peyton Place, Jean ual] also knows how to talk to women, generalize. Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini. Asked to show them. Women are more sponta- \"Breaking up is pathetic no matter at Verge's first New York screening ifhe neous and more surprising as dramatic what or who, because it obliges you to felt any kinship with Rainer Werner subjects, and my spontaneity is easier begin a new life, and we're all fragile Fassbinder, he replied, \"Oh, yes, we to conduct through them.\" No other and weak. There's no point in the mid- like the same kinds of bodies, cocaine, male Spanish directors talk about the dle when you think you'll drive yourself and we're both fat.\" \"female universe,\" said Almodovar, crazy, but... wait awhile.\" ~ 19
* * * * * * ** from the director of 'Women On The Verge..:' lKE CR\\l\\CS RA\"E ... WHAT HAVE IDONE \"THIS WILD MAN has atrue talent!\" TO DESERVE THIS!1 -Pauline Kael The New Yorker (i. Que he hecho yo para \"THE HAPPIEST, most entertaining hedonist in film merecer esto!?) today!\" -Enrique Fernandez, Village Voice Spain 1985-Comedy 100 min. Color VHS/Beta \"NOT SINCE BUNUEL has atalent been seen like that $79.95 Spanish w/subtitles Starring: Carmen Maura. of Almodovar!\" -Archer Winston, New YorkPost Chus lampreave. Juan Martinez. \"THE FASSBINDER for the '80s, Almodovar has the You're not likely to find this pan of Spain in a guidebook same daring, virtuoso command of the medium!\" for tourists. Gloria, avery resourceful working class housewife, is atrue feminist heroine who's on the go -Kevin Thomas, los Angeles Times 1Bhours a day.trying to keep her outrageously wacky family afloat. Comedy and tragedy blend to ponray a LAW OF DESIRE surreal and perverse fable of contemporary life. ( La Ley de! Deseo1 \"An absolutely wonderful black comedy. It is quite simply a small masterpiece'\" Spain 1986-Comedy 100 min. ColorVHS/ Beta -RichardGrenier. The New York Times $79.95 Spanish w/subtitles \"Asuperb, absolutely mad film!\" -los Angeles Weekly Written and directed by \"A totally wacked out laugh riot. Almodovar's a Pedro Almodovar. With deranged, demented and comic filmmaking genius'\" Carmen Maura. Eusebio Poncela. Antonio Banderas. -Miami News Set against the backdrop of a mad. mad. Madrid.thisfilm DARK HABITS swirls around an outrageous cast of characters. Our hero is absorbed in a cat and mouse game with an obsessive (Entre Tinieblas) love which before long entangles his transsexual brother/ sister. afather/ son detective team and a mother who Spain 1984-Comedy makes the Spider Woman look tame. 116 min. ColorVHS/Beta $79.95 Spanish w/subtitles Almodovar brilliantly examinesthe idea and the attractions of absolute desire in this hilarious and tragic film. Starring: Christina Pascual. Julieta Serrano. Marisa Paredes. Carmen Maura. Chus lampreave •~=:-.=- .w..o\"\",\"~f,,*,lkl ....... \"A lively cast! Aturbulent plot... an entertaining Yolanda. a nightclub singer who goes on the lam aher her lover dies of adrug overdose,takes refuge inthe Convent jumble!\" -Janet Maslin. The New York Times of the Humble Redeemers. The eccentric nuns. who greet her with open arms. have their own problems.with the \"Surreal Humor' Clearly an original talent'\" Church,with the law and with their benefactor. In the end. it's hard to say who is redeemed. if anyone. -leo Seligsohn. N.Y. Newsday \"Hilarious. irreverent fun!\" \"Joyously sleazy! Almodovar is the -VA. Musetta. The New Yo'* Post happiest. most enter- taining hedonist \"Keeps you smiling '\" -Goodman. The New York Times in film today:' \"Carmen Maura at her bongos is a shiny faced -Fernandez. Village Voice imp, a dadist clown, which, of course. is what Almodovar himself is!\" -PaulineKael. The New Yorker CINEVISTA Distributed by V IDE 0 - &~\"\\:'1l0N,,\\.1\\\\:f\"\" 353 West 39th Street 110 Cohassat StaueRoad. Chico. California 9'5926 New York. t/.Y. 10018 1916)695 · 3429 Tel 1212) 947·4373 Call Toll Free for Orders:(1-800) 356-3577 Telax 288182 CINEV Inside California call collect Fax 1212)947·0644
The Last Honest Man in America by Beverly Walker I f recent films are an indication, Gene Hackman is entering a whole new phase of his already remark- able career-as a late-blooming roma n- tic leading man. The most riveting sce nes in three of his upcomin g films are with women- even in such an unlikely ve hicle as Mississippi Burning, the sea ring drama directed by Alan Parker in which he and Willem Dafoe play FBI agents inves tigating the murder of three civil ri ghts workers in 1964. Hackman's ga l- lant approach to Frances McDormand, who, as wife to the deputy sheriff, knows, literall y, where the bodies are buried , is something to behold-ten- der, warm, and subtl y sexual. In Full Moon in Blue Water he plays a moping widower who is simpl y lost without a woman by hi s side, and in Woody Allen's Another Woman, oppo- site Gena Rowland s, hi s juicy, mas- culine charm is palpable. The surest sign we're given of Rowland s' charac- ter's misguided life is her rejection of H ackman. No other American actor is doing this kind of work. Indeed , civi lized rela- tions between the sexes have been largely absent from our films for 15 yea rs-lost to the youth craze, buddy movies , and confusions brought on by women's emergence from the kitchen and into society at large. All the more remarkable, then , to find need, caring, and delicate sensu- ality embodied in an actor who in 1971 became a veritable icon of blue-collar machismo with his Oscar-winning por- trayal of the obsessed narcotics cop, Popeye Doyle, in The French Connec- tion. Not that Hackman has been totall y confined to working-class trenches. He was a surveillance expert in The Con versation, a skydiver in Gypsy Moths , and a labor organizer in 21
Reds. He did brilliant comic turns in E ugene Alden Hackman was born Clyde. It was the first of three films he Young Frankenstein and the Superman January 30, 1931 in San Bernar- has made for Penn (Night Moves, and movies, and in the Eighties has risen to dino, California. His father, a news- Target in 1985), and earned him his first white-collar ranks, playing an arrogant paper pressman, moved the family to Oscar nomination in the supporting cat- defense secretary in No Way Out, a Danville, IIlinois-abandoning them egory. The second came two years later ruthlessly effective campaign manager when Hackman was just 13. At 16, he for I Never Sang For My Father, and two in the underrated-and prescient- lied about his age and joined the years later came The French Power, and a confident, privileged for- Marines, serving in China, Japan, and Connection. eign correspondent in Under Fire. In Hawaii. He got his first taste of show Nicolas Roeg's Eureka, he combined business in Armed Forces Radio, as a Altogether, Hackman has made an marginal man with tycoon, as a gold deejay and newscaster. even 50 films, and though many have prospector who strikes it rich and been routine, his contribution has becomes a megalomaniacal island He briefly studied journalism at the always been of the highest order. \"He is potentate. University of Illinois (his grandfather incapable of bad work,\" says his Missis- had been a veteran journalist) and then sippi Burning director, Alan Parker. But all of these films required Hack- hitchhiked to New York to attend the \"Every director has a short list of actors man to play the quintessential man's School of Radio Technique under the he'd die to work with, and I'll bet man for whom women were mostly a GI Bill. He worked in radio stations Gene's on every one.\" diversion·-often a troublesome one-if around the country for a few years and they were even around at all. then returned to his birth state to study \"He is an extraordinarily truthful acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Fel- actor,\" comments Arthur Penn, \"and Director Arthur Penn thinks the low classmates included Dustin Hoff- he has the skill to tap into hidden emo- roots of this metamorphosis may be man and Ruth Buzzi. tions that many of us cover over or seen in Night Moves, the 1975 thriller hide-and it's not just skill but they made together where Hackman Returning to New York in 1956, he courage.\" has tough, sexy scenes with Jennifer got work relatively quickly in summer Warren. Perhaps. Certainly by the time stock, off-Broadway, and live televi- The range of raw emotion, feeling, of Under Fire (1983) in which he sion. A turning point came in 1963 states of being and conflict Hackman endures humiliation rather than relin- when he won the Clarence Derwent can convey is remarkable. His face is a quish a woman he loves to another man; Award for Irwin Shaw's Children at great instrument. His body still as a Twice in a Lifetime (1985) where his Their Games, a production which lasted statue, we watch his face, the interplay steelworker agonizingly terminates a all of one night. between his mouth and eyes. He allows 30-year marriage for a woman of his us inside; we are really with him, we wife's generation (Ellen Burstyn and The hit comedy Any Wednesday, in see the decision process and thus are Ann-Margret co-starred); Hoosiers which he co-starred opposite Sandy prepared for the final thrust of his (1986) and his ardent wooing of Barbara Dennis in 1964, established his Broad- action. Hershey; and even in No Way Out way reputation. Shortly thereafter, he where carnality and male pride lead to won his first substantial film role, in This great gift is of particular impor- murder, it was obvious that something Lilith, which starred Warren Beatty, tance when he acts with women, fresh and potent was emerging. who was responsible for Hackman's because often the action there is inter- being cast as his brother in Bonnie and nal rather than external, which is why he has been tapped for some of these With Teri Garr in The Conversation. Garr and Hackman in Full Moon In Blue Water. As Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. 22
recent roles. \"American movies have always had certain kinds of self-styled actors who shouldn't be stars but are,\" notes Penn, \"and Gene is in the company of Bogart, Tracy, and Cagney.\" The director agrees that Hackman is more than ready to bust loose of his average-Joe trappings and do something on a grand scale-a modern-day Coriolanus or Lear. Two projects are already set for next year. In The Package, directed by Andy Davis for Orion Pictures, he plays a career master sergeant inadvertently implicated in a conspiracy. Then Hack- man makes his directorial debut with Thomas Harris' best-selling novel, The Silence ofthe Lambs, also for Orion. There is an ageless quality to Hack- man; he has changed little in 15 years and is more at ease with himself than ever. He attributes the new dimensions of his artistry to conscious acting choices rather than to an altered state as a person. \"In a way, something is just beginning for him,\" says Penn. T his is an exceptionally active periodfor you as an actor, and you have lots of choice. Why Mississippi Burning? I suppose I see myself as a serious artist, and it felt right to do something of historical import. It was an extremely intense experience, both the content of the film and the making of it in Missis- sippi. I was dubious about shooting it there, but Alan thought it would be a cop-out not to, and he kept an edge on the project that was very valuable. As it turned out, we didn't have much trou- ble, but there is, of course, still sensi tivity. Didn't the original script center almost totally on the relationship bet- ween the two FBI agents? Yes, and I had some initial reserva- tions, fearing an exploitation of the inci- dent. Before I accepted the project, much of that was fixed. It's really the story of how two guys from totally dif- ferent backgrounds work out their rela- tionship in the process of solving a problem-in this instance the violation of civil rights, and murder. I suppose it's the difference between a right-wing Republican and a fairly liberal Demo- crat-though we never discussed poli- tics. My character is a former sheriff from Mississippi and Dafoe's is more Northeastern oriented and academic. It's possible to see your character two ways-with racist tinges, or as
someone who has risen above it but who in the end made a decision to just let certain physicality and energy. understands and has compassion for her be , not to complicate her life It's interesting she would say that these people and the problems of the further. region. because I think it is one of the most How do you play what I'll caLL a crucially important things to know The FBI man in charge of the actual double action like that? You're sweet- about yourself. But most actors don't case was from Mississippi, which may talking this woman, and though you want to deal with that-it's too out front . have provided the movie parallel. My may like her, you're really there to solicit They feel they should deal with what's character did understand the regional information. There's something similar inside. That the intellectual side of attitudes , but he was definitely not a in The French Connection, when you acting shouldn't exist, that it should all raci st. publicly rough up a black guy who is be right-brain function. But I'm a great actually your informant. believer in using both sides of the brain How mu ch of the character's back- in approaching any art. .. painting or ground was in the script, and how much You cannot playa lie. You must play music... because the left brain gives you did you create for yourself? some kind of truth , and if you make the the classical sense. right choice, the audience will read it There are just a few biographical- right. Referring to your beginnings at the type lines. One builds the rest along Pasadena Playhouse, it is preposterous with the director. As an actor, you hope 'f:1n actor has to have a that you and Dustin Hoffman were con- that you make the character come to terrible toughness and sidered \"least likely to succeed.\" It life and understandable, without must've had something to do with your resorting to a lot of exposition, which sensitivity side by unconventional looks rather than with can be borin g. side.\" any lack ofability. I read everything I could get my You mean you count on the film's I think it did. Dustin was thought of hand s on about that period and the montage to give the right information ? as amusing and strange. He was called a incident, including the book Three \" beatnik\" because he wore a leather Livesfor Mississippi. In a curious way, I Yes . vest and sandals, which was outrageous got a lot of insight from a book called That takes a lot of single-minded- then. I'd been in the Marine Corps for The Selling of Marcus Dupree , which ness, doesn ' t it ? five years and was married-an equally paralleled the life of a black football That's right, and trust. That's why it unlikely candidate for movie stardom. I player born on or near the day of the takes most actors at least ten years to think that's what drew us together. We murders . It was done in such a way as to have a maturity about what they do. You became very close, and he lived with imply that the civil rights workers' have to keep separating the wheat from my wife and me for a while after coming death s were not in vain: They died so the chaff, so to speak, to know what's to New York. that he could live. important and what isn ' t, to understand Neither Dustin nor myself looked There was a woman there who I n the first session ofher Master Scene like the leading men of that era , espe- fought for years to get the case before Study Class, Stella Adler urges the cially Dusty because he wasn't tall. We the proper authorities, and she ended young actors to know their assets. What were constantly told by acting teachers up losing most of what she owned. do you think are your assets ? and casting directors that we were They froze her ou t. E veryth ing I \"character\" actors. The word \"charac- learned helped me shape the character A kind of honesty and a basic homeli- ter\" denotes something less than attrac- in small and subtle ways. I didn't spend ness. I don't mean homeliness in a tive . This was drummed into us. I much time on the accent because I did negative way but that people see in me accepted the limitation , of always being not want it too strong-eountry rather an uncle or a brother. And I have a the third or fourth guy down , and my than Southern. Otherwise it would get goals were tiny. But I still wanted to be in the way. an actor. There's a certain ambiguity in your It took guts to move forward toward relationship with the deputy sheriffs wife (actress Frances McDormand) . an acting career at age 3D-plus, with a Was your character coming on to her wife but without encouragement. You just to get information , or was he must've had some kind of inner confi- dence or perhaps inner need that over- attracted as well? whelmed everything-your ownfear and Originally, Alan wanted me to make the stereotyping ofothers. love to her right then, on the floor of her I had a little of both. Once I met the house. I felt that was excessive and acting teacher I got the most from , would distract from her as a human George Morrison, and I started working being and from her courage in terms of twice a week with him on scene study, I what she has just revealed. She didn't got over a certain kind of terror. I star- do it because she wanted to make love ted realizing that what I was saying to to me but because she thought it was the other actor was very important, not only to them but to me as well. I don't right. mean that I personally felt important. We finally agreed that the lovemak- But at that moment of interaction there was a very concentrated sense of ing would be left out, but perhaps the energy, and of connection, that felt ambiguity comes from Parker's wanting some of that feeling to remain. I never Continued on page 7D quite resolved the conflict in my own head. I felt he did care for her a lot, and 24
'Mississippi'Gambler Alan Parker Rides Again \"Critics see the picture for two hours This story can go two ways: It can and oppressive, risk-taki ng and yet and spend, if you're lucky, two hours celebrate Mississippi Burning for what deja vu. They all have moments of writing about it . They make the wildest it is-a gripping political investigative breathtaking heavy-handedness that assumptions, the most sickening sim- thriller-Or it can criticize it for what it are immediately offset by an exhilarat- plifications, and then wonder why peo- isn't. At the end of the day, it's not ing sense of formal control. ple like me can get so upset.\" about perfection. It's about film's posi- tion in culture-in this case, astride the With its excess of texture and visual -Alan Parker quoted in Blitz, 1987 overkill and its sheer visceral convic- faultline between an \"apolitical\" cin- tion, Midnight Express showed the Par- by Gavin Smith ema (Hollywood) and a politicized nar- ker style in full bloom. Its images were rative cinema sensibility (British). as unchallengeably angry and A lan Parker's FBI vs. the Ku Alan Parker: surveying the terrain of racism. Klux Klan racism thriller, Mississippi Burning, is an A lan Parker sits behi.nd his desk at inves tigative thriller set in 1964 at the . hiS temporary office at Warner height of the Civil Rights move ment. Holl ywoo d studios, surrounded by By pitting against each other two FBI crew and production memorabilia. Par- agents-one a gung-ho Kennedy liberal ker is what the English call \"a good from the Ju stice Department (Willem bloke. \" Down-to-earth, no bullshit. Dafoe), the other a politically laissez- Even the critics and intellectuals he faire former Mississippi sheriff (Gene periodically baits in the British film Hackman)-and letting them loose in industry, as he did in his one-hour Tur- Mississippi, the film becomes a way of niphead's Guide to Cinema, like him America taking up the conversation really. He 's outspoken, opinionated, about who gets what, left off when funn y, and doesn ' t take himself too Vietnam and the conservative agenda seriously. A good bloke. intervened . Parker knows how to make realfilms, It is the di sappearance and eventual though not always exactly likable ones, murder of three young civil rights activ- and certainly not ones that owe much to ists (killed in the opening sequence on the classical aesthetic certainties of a backwood s road) that recalls that the Hollywood pre-1969. Midnight murders of Andrew Goodman, James Express , Fame, and Pink Floyd-The Chaney, and Michael Schwerner on Wall are experiences at once cinematic Jul y 21, 1964 near Philadelphia, Missis- sippi engendered the climax of the civil ri g hts confrontation between the machinery of the state and federal gov- ernment that began in the late Fifties . Like such widely differing victims of more-Liberal-than-thou condescension and dismi ssa l as Walker; Running on Empt y, and Betrayed-films that are concerned less with the politics and received opinion of a film culture elite, and more with political and moral prov- ocation-Mississippi Burning is a mov- ing target for political controversy. True, its version of the civil rights strug- gle is circumscribed by the parameters of Holl ywood genre. But as an honest intentioned and brilliantl y acted film of authentic political commitment, it deserves recognition for not shrinking from engaging with the socio-political tensions, contradictions, and lesions that exist in society. (Unbelievably, Patty Hearst is the mutant exception.) 26
- anguished as its vision was philosophi- Seventies with the fullest emotional pyrotechnics you've got hand y at the cally undernourished. Billy Hayes' au thentici ty. side of the camera. There was a ten- (Brad Davis) predicament was a harrow- dency in some of my earlier films to ing wallow in an aestheticized hell, as Despite this, he remains dismissed grab the audience by the lapels and sensual as it was senseless. Parker's by some as an image maker whose sen- drag them through the film for two contribution to the modernist hyper- sibility is caught in the flux between hours without their feet touching realism that has become Hollywood's strong impulses toward stylistic exhibi- ground and then just slinging them out dominant aesthetic has always been tionism and a longing for stories of of the movie theater at the end. As 1 get characterized by bold stylistic interven- import and substance. He has been older 1 realize that is not necessary. You tion and unconventional choices-as in called an \"aesthetic fascist,\" whatever don ' t have to keep shouting, you can Birdy and Angel Heart-although at that means. What has Parker learned whisper now and again.\" times you find yourself asking, \"But from his past films? \"Patience, really,\" what does it mean?\" M iSSiSSippi Burning tries to he replies. address racism by going to its His breakthrough film is still Sho9t \"I realized that you don't have to geographical and historical epicenter the Moon, which captured and fully both figuratively and literally. It rendered the state of love and war bet- punch 'em in the nose every 45 sec- chooses the structure and elements of ween men and women at the end of the onds. You must have the courage to stay with what you're trying to say rather than resort to that little bag of
the detective story to investigate and tion of the action. Once Hackman and may not buy and which didn't really map the relationship between racism, Dafoe function in sync, they are forced happen in the actual case: In Parker's authority, and social order. This is into unorthodox methods by the locals film, the Klansmen are conned using worked through at a dramatic level, not who are blocking the normal channels methods that anticipate the You've Won an analytical one. of justice. Meaning, in ironic homage Free Tickets To A Kenny Loggins Con- to Dirty Harry's methods but in contra- cert law enforcement technique. The struggle in the late Fifties and distinction to his politic, you have to early Sixties between the state and fed- play these people at thei r own game and In some respects, Mississippi Burn- eral governments over segregation fight dirty. ing adheres very closely to the circum- versus integration (a textbook example of the internecine conflicts that are C hris Gerolmo, the film's 3S-year- stances of the murder of Goodman, characteristic of the modern state and old screenwriter who also wrote Chaney, and Schwerner, at the begin- which belie the notion of a monolithic, Miles from Home, says that Mississippi ning of Freedom Summer in '64 and the omnipotent governmental state appa- Burning's story represents a point of initial FBI investigation. (Freedom ratus) is synthesized in the film in the transition in law enforcement between Summer was the civil rights move- relationship between the FBI men and \"the FBI of the Thirties and Forties that ment's community-activist response to the townspeople and authorities. This thought nothing of taking someone out the Klan's White Citizens Council's is one of Mississippi Burning's political political stranglehold on Mississippi subtexts, operating as it does at a dra- politics.) But, in fact, their killers were matic level and raising the stakes for suspense. FBI ag~nt Ward (Willem Dafoe) finds avictim of Klan violence. Faced with a closed society that for a ride and roughing them up to get a convicted in federal court only of won't talk (Dafoe: \"This can of worms lead, and the FBI of the press confer- depriving them of their civil rights. only opens from the inside\"), Hack- ence era,\" with its more procedurally Had they been indicted for murder, man and Dafoe fight over procedure. In regulated methods. While the film they would have been tried in Missis- a neat reversal of standard cop-partner offers a fairly credible portrait of the sippi by a jury of their peers, and you dynamics, the younger Dafoe is the gradual collapse of the by-the-book know the rest. senior agent. Dafoe's idealistically approach, the reading that this invites inflexible, almost repressed, and yet goes back to Gerolmo's initial premise: Parker foreshadows this in a court- self-righteous character is so literal \"What I had in mind was more iconie- room scene where a young black eye- you'd think he was psychotic, but his if you imagine, say, Clint Eastwood and witness to a Klan attack identifies the problem is that he's trying to apply Bill Hurt in those roles and what they attackers only to see them convicted untested theoretical beliefs (about represent. The idea was a working- and given suspended sentences by the racial equality and cooperation with through of a Western-type conflict like state judge. Parker does not indicate authority) in a racial war zone. His ide- The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, that the Goodman, Chaney, and alism reduces his usefulness while it where the rule of law needs the rule of Schwerner's killers (a grand wizard allows him to say things like, \"Some force. \" among them) were equally untouch- things are worth dying for\" and not able, and it is only implicit that their blink. What this amounts to is the classic eventual sentencing broke the Klan in movie-world sting setup, which you Mississippi. The FBI investigation and The more ambivalent realist, Hack- man's ex-sheriff has seen all this before and knows how these people think. His loose, informal methods and under- standing of the local psychology crack the case: He sweet-talks the wife of the guilty deputy sheriff into revealing where the bodies are, consequently nullifying her husband's alibi-but with stunning disregard for the conse- quences to her, since Hackman has to know the locals will beat her to a pulp for it, which they duly do. The result is the screenwriting set-up payoff: It pro- vides the motivation for Hackman finally to explode with the They've Pushed Me Too Far Bit. In the rough cut I saw, Hackman's explosion seems unsatisfying, struc- turally mistimed-it doesn't get prop- erly under way. It should have sent emotional shock waves through the last act, which lacked a forceful throughline and consequently did not deliver either catharsis or outrage. This structural dramatic problem feeds into the resolu- 28
media scrutiny captured the attention made the film , I moved it farther away of the nation and the world; but its in order to make it a film. And that's traumatic-and for many, politicizing- what this is-a movie. But you make it impact was offset by the canny observa- in a realistic way, and the heart of it tion that it took the death of two white always has to have a truthful ring to it.\" boys, and not the black Chaney, to get In which case, if you start down the road of invention, go all the way and things moving. stick it to 'em. T o gain an edge, Parker introduces a A n effort like Mississippi Burning I.V. MAGAZINE series of fictitious quasi-documen- warrants splicing together the vis- tary newsreel clips (of the ongoing ceral and the analytical-to produce an The perfect alternative to the search for the murder victims and of emotionally cathartic analysis of the white bread blandness of interviews with locals on the racial world . The film's final image attempts network T.V. magazines. question), which locate racism and to resolve by symbolic means what the social conflict \"in the present\" of 1964 film has not quite been able to recover Anupbeat amalgam ofinterviews, satire but which resonate \"historically.\" It's a by dramatic ones-which is what films and music, LV. MAGAZINE reveals the smart idea, explained by Parker as a are supposed to do with life's problems irony and absurdity of modem life with device to \"get you back to real- and contradictions. humor powered by kinetic tension. ity... bring things a little closer to truth.\" As an exhibition of attitudes it We're left with a racially mixed -Arts & Entertainment has the literalness and crassness of ordi- group of worshipers singing a hymn at a nary people talking about the unex- blacks-only cemetery as the camera Now available for your home viewing. amined assumptions they live by. tracks over to Chaney's newly dese- VHS • Beta • Video 8 crated gravestone (he's never named in The use of this kind of tele-interven- the film for legal reasons), which has I.V. Studios 985 Regal Rd. tion seems to require suspension of been broken so that the only legible Berkeley, CA 94708 one's preconceptions about film sto- words are \"1964 Not Forgotten.\" It's a rytelling in order to engage with ideas. nice thought, if only because the film Call or write for a catalog As it turns out, the film's form is writing may reach an audience too young to (415) 841-4466 checks that its screenplay can't cash. know what was going on then. And the political space that is opened up within the film by these newsreel Altogether the film benefits from an non-narrative breaks not only remains effectively volatile rendering of the unoccupied but quickly begins to draw socio-political backdrop. There's a real attention to the film's contradictions, sense of historical authenticity in the gaps, and, most crucially, absences. film's grasp of milieu, detail, and psy- chology that really goes over the top For instance: a film about racism only at times like the scene when Brad without a central black character? Dourifs bug-eyed racist deputy sheriff, Without articulating black experience observing his wife cradling a black beyond the depiction of KKK-instigated maid's baby, comments, \"Funny how racial violence and intimidation? That cute they are when they're young.\" absence is a deafening silence. Is it the natural result of Hollywood pre-edi- But the gravestone image doesn't ting: trying to identify in advance what resonate fully through the film how- some theoretical audience won't want ever, because the film is not \"about\" to see? In this case, not quite. 1964 or the civil rights movement. Screenwriter Gerolmo objects that in Its action centers on the tempera- reality there was no central black figure mental/political dynamics set up bet- involved in the case. But why then ween Dafoe and Hackman. And it's would the makers of Mississippi Burn- here that the Hollywood storytelling ing admit that the film is not faithful to starts to dissolve the political stance. the real events? The dramatic contlict between them is \"I'm not going to put on the front of the engine room of the film. But of its the film-like I did with Midnight nature it eclipses the conflict going on Express-based on a true story,\" Parker in society a~ large (over civil rights)- says, \"because that got me into far too without even remotely mirroring it. much trouble. Midnight Express moved To do that, you'd have to replace from truth and reality into fiction just Dafoe with, well, how many young by virtue of Billy Hayes writing the black actors can you name? Forrest book. One's memory of things is always Whitaker. Danny Glover. Mario Van very different from what actually hap- Peebles . Denzel Washington. Keith pened-so the book already moved David. Larry Fishburne. But who'd away from the truth. Oliver Stone wrote believe the FBI would send a black the screenplay, and he certainly moved agent down there? Well, who'd believe it away from the truth, and when I they'd send a Kennedy liberal either? 29
In the real case, they sent a Mississippi filled with hate he didn't realize that it executive who just gets in your BMW man-ane of their own. Using the FBI as was being poor that was killing him,' and drives from your house in Beverly the point of view in this story is like and Dafoe says, 'Where does that leave Hills to a film studio every day, you making the CIA the heroes of a Vietnam you?' The aim is to answer the imposs- don't come into contact with any form film about an investigation into war ible, which is 'Where does racism come oflife, let alone racism.\" atrocities. Parker responds, \"I agree from?' I wanted to point out that it is that this is not the only film to be made economic, that what was invented was Parker clearly relishes controversy- about the FBI in that situation. \"The an underclass which happens to be he's demonstrated that for years in irony of the film is not so much that it black. \" the U. K. with his playful broadsides posits the FBI as the heroes in the cru- against \"the academic spiv,\" i.e. pre- sade against segregation but that, As Hackman quotes his father earlier tentious critics, filmmakers (Derek Jar- through its central character relation- on in that speech, \"If you ain't better man) and British Film Institute ship, it suggests that the real conflict than a nigger, who are you better semiologists from Tony Smith on down. going on in society in the early Sixties than?\" The same would seem to apply to Mis- was between white liberals and conser- sissippi Burning. \"When you set out, vatives. Well, in a way it was-the North So it would seem that Parker's contri- you don't think, 'This is going to be vs. the South. But think again: What's bution to the screenplay was a sharpen- difficult for a lot of people to take.' On at stake? This is clearly a false ing of its political teeth. As he puts it, the other hand, you do feel your work proposition. should be confrontational in some way.\" Nobody's suggesting that the film's · To what extent was the making of the ideological/historical project is as bla- film a confrontation with Parker's own tantly revisionist as this, but it's a classic preconceptions about racism? \"Willem case of a film not being what it should [originally]had a longer speech at the be, i.e. what happens in life. end that I trimmed down because I thought it was too preachy. Now he just For Parker this is the price that's paid says, 'The mayor [who commits sui- for accessibility-really, the repressed cide] is guilty, maybe we all are. ' term underlying the whole discussion: \"From the point of view of acces- \"I remember coming back from the sibility,\" says Parker, \"those things are U.S. after Fame in '78, and the whole necessary. It's not the definitive story of National Front [British racist political the civil rights movement or of the FBI's party] thing was very scary and very involvement in it. It's one story, our ugly. It was a right-wing, working-class story, and very obviously fiction.\" movement. On Pink Floyd-The Wall, we had 20 of the toughest skinheads William Burroughs said language is Parker directs Hackman. with me every day, and I speak the a virus. Well , Hollywood is a same language they do-the sense of germ warfare experiment. Hollywood the original screenplay \"was much more humor is very similar-and then sud- modes of discourse infiltrate the good of a movie as such. \" But can film- denly you'd hear them say the most political instincts of writers and direc- makers challenge Hollywood's informal obscene, racist remarks. It was scary tors. To make a film about racism, Hol- cultural apartheid from within? Parker because these are my people. \" lywood uses the buddy movie genre. acknowledges the chasm that separates But who is the master, the speaker or Hollywood's decision-making appa- If Mississippi Burning's central char- the spoken? ratus from its potential subject matter. acters were black, would Orion have It is the institutional reason why social wanted to make the film? \"The buddy movie was sup- conscience has become disconnected pressed,\" Parker responds, \"though it from mainstream filmmaking and \"I think you cannot pretend that it might well have been how it started out screenwriting. wouldn't have been more difficult to in life. Almost every facet of the story- make within the climate of the Ameri- other than that it was about racism-was \"The people signing the checks can commercial cinema ,\" Parker says. irrelevant. It was what the film could be don't come into contact with racism,\" \"But that's not to say that [black stories] rather than what it was.\" Parker says, \"because they live in a can't still be made or will not be made. vacuum. If you' re a filmmaker or studio It's a little at a time really. Parker's revisions of the script were intended \"to give it a more realistic, \"I wouldn't pretend that Mississippi truthful, and political backbone that Burning is the definitive story of the was more faithful to the times and civil rights movement the way that Pla- events than the original screenplay. toon or Apocalypse Now were meant to And out of that came a much richer be definitive stories about the Vietnam screenplay. \" War. One film allows other films to be made. Each time you hope you push Coming from a working-class Lon- cinema a little bit farther, while the don family, from a country collapsing commercial pressures of other movies under the contradictions of class in the bring it back. Also, it's not just film- post-industrial era, Parker zeroed in on makers who make things change, audi- the class component in racism: \"Hack- ences make things change. And as the man makes a speech about his father sensibility in the audience changes, where he says, 'The old man was so then obviously the films will.\" ® 30
ection •
by Armond White \"I never said my movies had anything to do with rock and roLL.\" -Elvis Presley in the fantasy Heart- break Hotel. F ools keep reviving the Western, smart filmmakers don't even think about reviving the musi- cal. It's that lack of pretension about imitating the past that made a concert film the best musical movie of the past few years, Prince's Sign O'The Times. Though technically a document of Prince's 1987 European tour, Sign 0' The Times becomes a movie musical by accepting the changes in popular music's social funCtion that the classic structure of the movie musical precluded. The recent rock-versus-the-main- stream battle was actually a matter of an art form that expressed personal, sub- cult fragmented desires seeking the culture's center, movies. The new U2 film Rattle and Hum is part of this, as were the fictions Phantom of the Para- dise, Nashville, Sparkle, the '76 A Star is Born, Streets of Fire, Dogs in Space, and such diverse bio-pics as Coal Miner's Daughter, Sid and Nancy, The Buddy Holly Story, Sweet Dreams, Hail, Hail Rock and Roll, Imagine: John middle-brow orderings of social and musical rhythms and verbal content had obviously determined their struc- Lennon , and Bird, which place new sexual experience in old Hollywood ture. Instead of the disappointment of watching Elvis Costello tossed into the emphasis on the performance of song in musicals that ring false. And the songs middle of Americathon or listening to New Order's \"Touched By the Hand of concert rather than in \"naturalistic\" cir- that were written for them are like soda God\" outclass the film that contains it (the bland satire Salvation!), these cumstances . Sign O'The Times certi- pop-they go flat fast until they take on movies matched the aesthetics of the songs that inspired them. fied the implicit changes in movie peculiar fascination, usually decades Tougher Than Leather gave a brash, musicals by frankly flouting the rules later, as camp. shambling account of male bonding within a criminal racist social system in that Hollywood spoiled us with . Prince Pop music's redefined social function a style part Andy Warhol, part Superfly. It Couldn't Happen Here sent two reti- offered something stranger, hotter, and helped put its visualization (\"Moods for cent figures through a hyperbolic world of their darkest fears and colorful but more idiosyncratic. Moderns,\" Elvis Costello called it) into frankly hollow dreams--:-imagine a Ken Russell movie with intelligent counter- Musicals that once coded the loftiest the hands of the musicians who first point gracefully chanted on the sound track. In these films two distinctive, romantic fantasies in dreamy settings creaved it. Run DMC's Tougher Than challenging musical forms were given perfect visualization-almost. and lush colors now seem dinosauric. Leather and The Pet Shop Boys' It The camp transfer of emotion from The form itself is nostalgic because the Couldn't Happen Here, two of the most experience to style, what old musicals depended on, had acquired so many emotional values that Hollywood musi- authentic musical movies, never made layers of artifice-fatuous performers, formulaic songs, inane story lines-that cals were based on-romantic symmetry the charts due to independent financ- the should-be magical process became embarrassing to most people. There is and promise, traditional sex roles, the ing and minimal publicity from small old, conventional sexual styles-belong distributors. Their commercial failure to other eras. The popular audience cost film culture precious understand- could put those musicals aside, like ing of the imaginative power in rap ad antique Faberge eggs, because their dance music. These self-produced sensibilities came to appreciate a more films are superb cultural evocations- complex, ambivalent expression of Tougher Than Leather, of the urban romance by rock-era songwriters. Our American teen's fantasy world, humor- general movie culture might be health- ously derived from the macho trash ier, and better, if filmmakers had some of blaxploitation movies; It knowledge of the way Elvis Costello, Couldn't Happen Here, of a pop duo's The Smiths, Public Enemy or August consumerist delirium amid today's tra- Darnell challenge romantic and politi- dition-choked England. Both films cal orthodoxy. It's the middle-class and were exciting to watch because their 32
still an audience for such musical and and young people ignored. trompe l'oeil to conventional screen emotional simulacra (see Broadway), space: Ashby making super-poster art bu tit's an aud ience that no longer wants B y then the best musical sequences of the rock spectacle, and Anderson its emotional life or fantasies directly, in movies suggested a new tradi- breaking down the distance bt<tween vigorously expressed. The rhythm- tion: Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix in audiences and performer to query send/ and-blues revolution that took over Monterey Pop, Sly Stone in Woodstock, receive logic. mainstream popular music in the Tina Turner in Gimme Shelter, Rufus (dis)guise of rock and roll changed all Thomas in Wattstax , Roberta Flack in In place of the programmatic tradi- that. Rock, itself a brash new style, Soul to Soul, Janis Joplin in Janis. Other tion of musical theater ribbon-tied nar- suffused the embarrassing elements of extraordinary concert films/documen- ratives, concert movies featured camp with liberating energy. Part of the taries like The Las~ Waltz, The Unheard extended sets as seen in Jim Holland's reason Broadway and Hollywood could Music, the underrated Let's Spend the current film of Dizzy Gillespie in never catch the knack was that in rock Night Together, the overrated Stop Cuba, A Night in Havana , which cap- feelings didn't have to be led up to , just Making Sense, even the gospel films tures the same hypnotic musical impro- expressed-blurted, shouted, or Say Amen, Somebody and The Gospel visation that Bert Stern pioneered in the demanded. The dramatic contrivance According to Al Green all provided 1960 Jazz on a Summer's Day. On film, of a filmmaker like Vincente Minnelli, more immediate pleasure and assorted the intensity of a live performance who mastered bandbox visualization, performers than contemporary show- could be as riveting as the legendary could no longer define a form whose biz-as-usual films like Grease, The Wiz, James Brown and Marvin Gaye sets in essence was a refusal to be tamed or co- Fame, Annie, A Chorus Line or Little The T.A.M.J . Show (That Was Rock and opted by luxe. (What Minnelli compo- Shop ofHorrors. Roll) or as unbearable as Tom Waits's sition could contain a Little Richard or a rant throughout the lousy Big Time- Bob Dylan?) As Minnelli's talents capit- Starting with Woodstock and Martin actually a record label/home video ulated, the institutions of the Broadway Scorsese's The Last Waltz, concert films cash-in rather than a concert movie. Big musical and its twin monolith, the Hol- were upgraded with sound design as Time's deliberate primitivism barbar- lywood musical, collapsed-fitfully, clear and meticulous as record albums izes and misrepresents the raw expres- with after-death rumblings like West and with an imaginative expansion of siveness possible in concert movies. Side Story, The Sound ofMusic, Oliver, the usual documentary povs. Hal Sign O'The Times proved how a film- Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roofthat Ashby's Rolling Stones film Let's Spend maker's creative interpretation of the some people mistook for regeneration the Night Together and Laurie Ander- music can stand up to or surpass old son's own Home of the Brave brought Hollywood's most stylish peaks. \"I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,\" one of the song-sketches in Sign, had a ballet's minimal ism totally unlike the overelaborate dance finales in The Band Wagon and An American in Paris. Rather than stuffing our eyes with ersatz high culture, Prince (as the credited writer and director) stream- lined the presentation through Day-Glo pantomime so that the song's slice-of- life moral about lust and fidelity remained clear and snappy, yet pointed. In a more ironic mode, his performance of \"If I Was Your Girl- friend\" (one of the smartest songs ever written about sexual jealousy and per- haps the first about vagina-envy) dis- tilled the song's androgynous context. Prince's rhythmic moves, dressed in a windblown fake fur jacket, emphasized the song's tricky lyrics and insinuated their most teasing implications. For \"It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,\" the film's penultimate showstopper, smart lighting and the band's visceral charge took the place of a chorus line and ostentatious sets to provoke more appro- priate musical exhilaration. When the song's bridge turned into a brief \"Take the A Train\" medley, followed by a James Brown bass riff, Prince made movie history. His own Napoleonic tri- umph (the little man with Europe and here, movie audiences, in thrall) also 33
carried the legacy of all the non-white the neo-show-biz of music video tech- son, and the radiant Ethel Waters. Con- musical movements Hollywood nique to find his own expressive form. sider Prince's use of the remarkable ignored. The inclusion of David Hogan'S heady dancer Cat Glover: The manipulative \" U Got the Look\" video (alas, in a poor relationship recalls nothing so much as B y these gestures Sign made the video transfer) serves as the paradigm the original marionette logo for My Fair difference that Jonathan Demme for the movie's whirling, fragmented Lady, except that it's now Prince who and Talking Heads sidestepped when editing style . The jumpiness that pulls the strings in American musical presenting Stop Making Sense as an seems to be part of the promiscuous fantasy. oddball intro to Eighties avant-gard- kineticism of music video (prefigured ism. Prince's uncanny sense of show in Bob Fosse's TV concert movie Liza T he history of the Hollywood musi- business beguiles an audience where With a Z) actually works here, giving cal does not represent the history Stop Making Sense kept happening to the film a turntable momentum and a of popular music but of Broadway and its viewers. The cold precision of its dancer's frenzy. These are the cine- Hollywood as the conjoined, segre- static rhythms and the shrill despera- matic potentialities of rock and funk gated forces of mainstream entertain- tion of David Byrne and company's per- that orthodox filmmakers and musi- ment culture. It was a genre doomed to formance froze any imaginative cians-oralumni ofMGM's Freed Unit- obsolescence as long as it was limited to response. Rock historians have lacked could never understand. To watch a single cultural form and style. It the confidence to admit that Demme, Prince perform, then shrewdly cast his needed to pluralize. In the recent boho's ambassador to the mainstream, eye on the audience proves a masterful dance series at New York's Film Forum, unfortunately captured a once excellent knowledge of artistic process and show- disparate, astonishing clips of the band at the point of decline (also its biz effect. And Prince puts his sensi- Nicholas Brothers and John Bubbles highest point of yup popularity). The bility on-screen more felicitously than gave the strong impression that Fred film revealed Talking Heads denying Astaire and Gene Kelly were not the the most profound Pan African , under- Run DMC in Tougher Than Leather. best or most original dancers to work in ground implications of its music. Like any composer ever has. Hollywood , merely the only ones Byrne's condescending True Stories , allowed to dominate and use its Stop Making Sense sacrifices esoteric One of the lost opportunities of this platform. wonderment for egregious popular decade has been the inability of August appeal-a New Wave minstrel show Darnell to transfer his Kid Creole and Hollywood's awkward response to complete with happy darki.es. Stop the Coconuts extravaganza-a vivid rhythm and blues and rock culture has- Making Sense was art-rock-as-enter- delight on an album like Don't Take My tened the demise of the movie-musical tainment-as-regression. Sign O'The Coconuts-to a mass audience. Darnell form. The need to see popular musical Times showed Prince cleverly shifting writes and arranges to evoke a myth- performers, which increased exponen- gears after having made the era's most ological silver screen-a syncopated tially through the mass media of televi- authentic rock melodramas, Purple Busby Berkeley revue that revises old sion and the recordltape boom, was Rain and the failed experiment Under racial and sexual stereotypes. From the never understood by Hollywood. the Cherry Moon. Prince's new notions cautionary title song to the raunchy There 's little difference between New of entertainment were traditional only \"Hot Thing,\" however, Sign O'The Orleans (1946) featuring Billie Holiday in the sense of satisfying one's taste for Times apprehends the myth of sub- as a maid, and The Blues Brothers color, movement, and sex. Songs from cultural jiviness and articulates the (1980), featuring Aretha Franklin as a his solo album Sign O'The Times erotic, religious , sociological subtext. foulmouthed waitress. The movie- addressed these issues , and the Prince objectifies a specific pace and musical tradition became one of medi- improved performance, energy, and quality of black expression-rhythm as ocrity as important voices were subju- sound of his new band brought them a conscious, lyrical mode of behavior gated (Elvis Presley) or denied (Pat alive. and self-representation. He commands Boone and Mitzi Gaynor instead ofSam the style that Hollywood once used to Cooke or Dinah Washington or Eartha It took a ribald scenemaker-songwri- imprison Lena Horne, Eddie Ander- Kitt). In the Sixties Berry Gordy ran ter-performer like Prince to show the Motown Records after the example of nerve and pride necessary for an Hollywood moguls but could never unapologetic rock song-sequence make a connection with Hollywood movie. Instead of sneaking songs in one while Motown was still a thriving cre- by one like Stop Making Sense or faking ative entity. The chance to usher in a opera like Tommy, Sign O'The Times new era of musical innovation and proclaims the value and integrity of pop infuse the depleted studio system with music. The between-song playlets the kind offresh blood it once took from were later filmed at Prince's Min- Broadway in the Thirties and Forties neapolis soundstage and added to the was lost-ironically during the era when concert's structure. The movie suggests its integration was the topic of the day. what Duke Ellington, Louis Arm- By the time Motown financed Lady strong, or Cab Callaway might have Sings the Blues in 1972, inspiration was done in the Thirties or Forties if they replaced by a rank imitation of Fifties could have commanded the means and musical melodramas like The Helen opportunity to film a documentation of Morgan Story or I'll Cry Tomorrow their musical performance and a visual rather than such innovative musicals as extrapolation of its ethos. Prince uses Love Me Tonight, Hallelujah, I'm a 34
Bum, Swing Time, or Top Hat. A ll these possibilities and regrets became clear in the mini-revolu- tion of music video which demystified the magic of movie iconography while making it accessible to an inexhaustible number of performers, songs, and styles. Those three-minute spots could quote and redefine Hollywood arche- type from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Material Girl) to Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Parents Just Don't Understand). Even Prince's ecstatic Kiss reworked and eroticized the fantasies of both Judy Garland's \"Get Happy\" number from Summer Stock and the Crazy Veil sequence from Singin' in the Rain . Both the central and aberrant figure of Eighties pop music, Prince used video to explore the fantasies that touched his audience. (His opposite, Bruce Spring- Cat (I.) and Sheila f. in Prince Sign \"0\" the Times. steen, made mostly solemn, dire work- ingman's videos.) Prince further played with the inherited mythology of pop by extending the animated tricks of Yellow Submarine into the Toon Town live action dance party of his Raspberry Beret video. In this way pop music was forced to develop its iconic styles independent of Hollywood-Sign O' The Times, Purple Rain, even Rattle and Hum were all financed by record-company money. For concert films this meant borrowing the forms of television and documen- tary as a necessity and eventually as an aesthetic. Performance for perfor- mance's sake defied the insipid choral singing, pompous orchestrations, and glitzy upholstery of Hollywood musi- cals. The happy, urgent concert scenes in A Hard Day's Night (1964) offered something new, and the grand, doomy
Orwellian concerts in Privilege (1967) always annoyed literal-minded people counts \"Papa Can You Hear Me?\" an improvement over \"Tommy Can You offered a critique of all show-business for the understandable reason that they Hear Me?\" ritual, including a skeptical view of resented the transparently unctuous, Herbert Ross and Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven caught the ten- rock itself. escapist purpose. In the rock era the sion between modern consciousness, the pop song phenomenon, and the Woodstock and Let it Be, both 1970, pop songwriting tradition differs from Hollywood musical ; Terence Davies's fine Distant Voices, Still Lives does the announced the end of Broadway's pri- the show-tune tradition, forcing an same as an introverted complement. But both films use the pop song iron- macy as a movie musical source. The unusual listener relationship: Lyrical ically to comment on characters' neu- roses. They're cognitive musicals, social current that pop musicians meaning is based on the force of a looking back to periods of pop's psy- chological domination before the aver- always expressed, mixing unease and singer-songwriter's personality and tal- age kid could join the game. Even the euphoric Pennies notably avoids show- ecstasy, was no longer submerged by ent. Elvis Presley never understood the ing a musical catharsis in this life. The alienation in these films is not just \"official\" culture. Even Richard Leac- need to affirm this by making the metaphysical, it's a matter of tempera- ment and taste-the expression of ock's television film of Stephen movie musical conform to himself, and artists who suffer wallflower disengage- ment from the vitality of current pop. Sondheim's Company scooped Holly- so his films and their music grew Ross's inauthentic Footloose couldn't muster the thrill of contemporary dance wood by documenting the recording of increasingly banal, synthetic , awful. music comparable to Saturday Night Fever. Instead it feigned a feel for pop the original cast album-an inside look Barbra Streisand, the last major pop with mostly fake pop-the main- stream's typical tactic. at creative process and a preservation of music figure Hollywood adopted, It's concert films that free the con- fine-tooled emotional performances immediately gave up her once-radical temporary pop song of sentimental nar- rative or possibly bogus contexts. They that discarded the show's hackneyed reinterpretation of show-tunes to join bring performers closer to mass audi- ences that couldn' t fit into a stadium, book-and who today would have it Hollywood tradition. She never sought and the allure of the movies confers majesty upon the culture of a genera- otherwise? a way to translate her modernist cabaret tion that memorized albums like Rub- ber Soul, Talking Book, Blue and Songs lost their distinction as the style to film, and she was the main- Imperial Bedroom more ardently than previous generations memorized My expression of an individual artist or stream's last hope for rejuvenating the Fair Lady, Oklahoma, or West Side Story. Robert Zemeckis ingeniously hit team when used as part of the construct form. Yent/'s full-fledged recitative was upon the fascination of pop and the beauty of concert footage with his re- of a musical story. Movie musicals safely non-innovative, unless one creation of the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show appearance in I Wanna Hold Your U2: 'RATTLE AND Ho-HuM' Hand. By interpolating acted-out Beat- Iemania with the true event flashing on P hil Joanou thought about the proposition. musical journey\" into a rather awed odyssey of in-studio monitors, Zemeckis demon- Are concert films the new form of movie working-class Irish lads turned gods. The film strated how the distanced iconography musical? Then he surmised, \"Well, if there is a shows U2 trying on mythological guises: A of a concert epitomizes the significance new form, Martin Scorsese already invented it. Bearles song, Dylan runes, a snatch of the of a song and its creator-performer: Instead of breaking into song, his characters Stones, some sampled Hendrix, a stop at a Capturing that moment instan- break into tights. Scorsese's a master of musical Harlem church, a session with B.B. King, and a taneously stylizes it. The cultural event movement. His films are all musicals-New visit to Graceland, where Mullen absolves the can seem intimate and yet open to York, New York, Raging Bull. Check out the pool film career of Elvis Presley. interpretation. Onstage in Sign O'The hall fight to \"Please, Mr. Postman\" in Mean Times-a space of infinite expressive All this bucking for legendary status takes freedom-Prince discovered and Streets. \" the place of a lucid, satisfying show. Instead of relayed the principles by which songs Rattle and Hum, Joanou's U2 concert film , offering a new perception of the rock concert now work in the popular consciousness: experience as The Smiths' Rank album does, or that a good song needs no explanation, proves his boyish enthusiasm when it shows that can be sensed from the lively idiosyncratic an inspired performance needs no him asking the gwup sycophantic questions just representation Alex Cox found for The Pogues excuse, and the yellow brick road of the as Scorsese asked The Band in The Last Waltz . in Straight to Hell and Alan Rudolph found for Hollywood musical, iffollowed, led to a U2's immense popularity catches Joanou in a Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in Song- bind. This is his second feature (\"The first time writer, Joanou polishes the concert tropes in dead end. ~ I've done something representative of me; order to preserve U2 as an institution. No con- where I'm not a hired gun\") but he can't simply cert film has shown more care or concentrated present U2 putting on a show. He has to apos- imagination. It's not Joanou's fault his subject is theosize them according to the scale of their the world's most pompous rock band. success . -ARMOND WHITE \"Music videos have opened up people's sense of what they'll accept visually. They would have ~ejected black-and-white before MTV,\" Joanou says, explaining his film 's exalted visual style. \"Kodak had to specially print an extra batch of black-and-white stock because there wasn't enough in storage. And Paramount agreed to print the film on black-and-white, which is rare-not even Under the Cherry Moon was printed on black-and-white. I was lucky. The band let me see my vision through and put their money behind it.\" Joanou's visual drama distracts from the vagueness of U2's socially conscious rock with stark hyperbole. And just as David Byrne's big suit trapped a white man in a black man's jazz form (\"Stop Making Sense was technically the best executed concert film,\" Joanou says), U2 hardly measures up to Joanou's tailoring. He inflates what drummer Larry Mullen calls \"a 36
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From Big Band to Be-Bop azz by Kenneth C. Spence tions (much less depict them), and for similar sentiments uttered nearly three the most part, wrap up the film with a decades earlier by another brilliant pia- C onsider four modest exam- happy marriage or at least some nice nist/composer, Fats Waller, who, when ples: 1.) Idea's eureka light lighting effects. Hollywood has worked asked to define jazz, replied, \"If you flashes for an instant across hard at expressing its need to explain gotta ask, then you'll never know.\" Jimmy Stewart's face: \"Wait a min- how jazz is \"created\" and how ulti- ute... a clarinet lead!\" And so was born mately successful one can be in that Hollywood consistently has asked one of this century's more distinctive creation, providing it is the \"right\" kind the question through the decades but musical sounds-Glenn Miller's orches- of jazz. has also answered it audaciously as well. tra is instantly recognizable. But, of There has always been an association course, we knew that sound even Jazz, however, is not one but many between film and jazz, both developing before we had seen Stewart play the forms of music-New Orleans, big- simultaneously. The transition by musi- lead in The Glenn Miller Story (1953). band, small group swing, modern, cians from silent film accompanists to Perhaps during this short scene the bebop, progressive, avant-garde, third soundtrack performers inevitably audience was meant to prompt poor wave, mainstream, old, new, tradi- crossed paths with the medium's ven- struggling Jimmy, \"Come on, Jimmy, turing into nooks and crannies for story dump the trumpet, try the clarinet.\" Hollywood became a and slice-of-life sidetrips. Jimmy (well, Glenn) was searching for ways to express himself. He played kind ofcleansing agent, Duke Ellington's band starred in jazz; we see him join in a jam session Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan Fan- with Louis Armstrong and Gene atfirst introducing jazz tasy (1929), a short film with a slight Krupa. The movie Miller has this deep- story, not much more than a filmed felt need to get that passage just right, into the mainstream the Cotton Club revue but packed with announcing that the only way to express absolutely stunning music. This is a himself was through an arrangement. way it did sex-as vital historical record. John Murray Anderson's The King of Jazz (1930) is 2.) Despite everyone telling him in titillating for the less so despite it being an early techni- the film, \"Don't be that way!\" (not so color amalgamation of sketches and co-incidentally the name of one of his mystery ofloss of musical performances. Paul Whiteman hit songs), Benny Goodman just is that was hailed as the \"King of Jazz,\" a way, and that's how Steve Allen plays control and status, preposterous idea so early in the devel- the title role in The Benny Goodman opment of film and jazz. That same Story (1955)- stubbornly needing to then, as reassuring of year, however, Ellington returned in a play \"his kind of music.\" Goodman/ feature film, Check and Double Check, Allen pointedly eschews attempts by \"family\" values. an outrageous Amos 'n' Andy film. In others to have him play in a more com- 1934 he made another short, Symphony mercial (hence lucrative) manner. tional, free. Jazz is constantly moving in Black (providing one of Duke's ear- and evolving, co-existing with all other liest extended compositions and intro- 3.) Sal Mineo starred in The Gene forIT\\s of music. We have danced to it, Krupa Story (1959), quite ably mimick- laughed to it, cried to it, made love to ducing Billie Holiday), as well as two ing the real drummer's rudiments on it. It has expressed joy as well as sorrow, other features, Murder at the Vanities the soundtrack, expressing his need to anger as well as love, fear as well as and Belle of the Nineties, as well as a play his kind of music. hope. We have tapped our toes to it, film short and a newsreel. wiggled our hips to it, moved our 4.) As did Robert De Niro as the bodies, bobbed our heads, snapped our As the bands' popularity grew, thea- fictional Jimmy Doyle in New York , fingers. This music of many forms has ters began featuring them not in the pit New York (1977), spurning the commer- moved in countless ways, summoning but onstage as standardly as the lines of cial road to success while choosing the our emotions. It intrudes on us, becom- exultant teen-agers snaking around city purer-intentioned road to artistic ing the secret voice of our soul. It is our blocks waiting for the 10 P.M. show. Not expression. private experience. only did the kids dance in the aisles when Benny Goodman played the The filmic conventions illustrated But what is it? Bill Evans, an extraor- Paramount, but often the stage show here are fairly prominent: Set up the dinary pianist and composer, once said was more popular than the film. creative artistic genius as a cultural icon that \"you can't explain jazz to anyone in as simple a manner as possible. Let without losing the experience. Words Unlike the rock films of the Fifties the new musical \"discoveries\" be that are the children of reason and therefore where the male rock star (Frankie Ava- of an individual effort, found in isola- can't explain it. Jazz has got to be expe- lon, Elvis, etc.) was the central charac- tion. Avoid talking about social condi- rienced because it's not words, it's feel- ter-or of the Sixties where the decade ings.\" This 1966 statement echoes began with films that incorporated the antics of a band into a storyline (Help, A 38
Jimmy Stewart and Louis Armstrong in The Glenn Miller Story (1953). Hard Day's Night) and then shifted into Steve AI/en on clarinet, playing \"his kind of music\" in The Benny Goodman Story. rockumentary (Don't Look Back, Gimme Shelter, etc.) because reali ty began outstripping fiction for interest- when a musician or a band was featured in a Thirties or Forties film , jazz fans tolerated the dismal plot for only a twO- or three-minute glimpse of their idols. In some films it paid off with a divi- dend; in others it was an embar- rassment. Goodman's band and racially inte- grated quartet played powerhouse music in Hollywood Hotel , directed by Busby Berkeley (1937). The story was transparent: Dick Powell goes to Holly- wood to seek fame and fortune and gets to sing a few numbers along the way- yet it is Goodman's band and its energy that are memorable. Rather forgettable is the 1941 Birth of the Blues , a melo- drama that fancifully details the birth of jazz in New Orleans. The reward is Jack Teagarden playing some excellent trombone, but the effort is almost unbearable, however. As a form of pen- ance for denying the role of blacks in the birth of jazz, the film concludes with brief homages to the Dorsey brothers, Louis Armstrong, Duke El1ington, Benny Goodman, and Paul Whiteman. Several films featured major band leaders and soloists in better light. Some Like It Hot, a 1939 Bob Hope comedy, showcased Gene Krupa and recorded a few production numbers usual1y reserved for personal appear- ances. Glenn Mil1er's band was well- featured in the two films they made, Sun Valley Serenade (1941), a romantic comedy, and Orchestra Wives (1942), a comedy on the big-band business that preserves many of Mil1er's most popular recordings. The Nicholas brothers how- ever, stole both the films with their extraordinary precision tap dancing, and \"Chattanooga Choo-Choo,\" one of Mil1er's major hit records, no longer seemed his property alone after Harold and Fayard Nicholas put their stamp on it. Harry James, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and a host of others continued to make feature films and short subjects, and by 1948 A Song Is Born boasted a stellar roster: Lionel Hampton, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Louis Armstrong all playing together. Despite the antics of Danny Kaye, these first- rate jazz musicians do manage a few tunes, yet Goodman is reduced for some idiotic reason to wearing a mus- 39
THREE LON CHANEY FILMS Introducing the Ackennan Archives presentation of volume three in its series on Lost Film Reconstruction-\"The Hunchback of Notre Dame\" complete with a facsimile of Director Wallace Worsley's hand annotated script and rare photographs depicting scenes cut from the original 1923 release print-not existing in any known print today. Just added, 200 original nitrate photographs, construction photos and art department sketches. Truly a collectors item. . . Included together with what will be one of the greatest books in the history of Hollywood- Introduced by DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR. Filmography by Jeffrey Carrier Have you ever: At last! A heartwarming, vivid and loving experience during the formation through the Golden Years of the 20th Century's Been saved by an Angel (?) while swimming during a greatest artform-THE MOTION PICTURE! barbecue at Tom Mix's beach house? Known New York's ~terary e~te while in the company of your friend F. Scott Fitzgerald? Learned the art of acting from the great Nazimova or Characterizations from the immortal Lon Chaney? Gone on picnics with Rudolph Valentino and known \"Rudy\" and the account of his coming to America? Traveled to far away Tahiti with Lila Lee? Smuggled documents past Nazi agents? Known the famous , the high society, the film and theatre greats and traveled the globe in the romantic pre-war days? PATSY RUTH MILLER has and she shares it with us in: My Hollywood- Patsy Ruth Miller When Both Of Us Were Young The memories of Patsy Ruth Miller A VERY SPECIAL OFFER BOTH BOOKS IN ONE VOLUME ONLY Prepublication Price $39.95 (Shipping & Handling Included) (After Jan. 1, 1989, $45.50 plus $3.50 for Shipping and Handling) Exclusive Retail Distribution by Samuel French Trade (US) 800/822-8669 (C a) 800-72 2-8669 or 213/876-0570 A ll orders received by December 15th are guaranteed for C hristmas deli very. Available in New York C ity at The Muse um of Modern A rt and in Los A ngeles at Larry Edmunds Bookshop and Pepper & Stern in Santa Barbara , C a. O'RAGHAILLIGH LTD., PUBLISHERS P.o. BOX 128 BRIGANTINE, N.]. 08203 TELEPHONE: 609-266-6500
RESTORED IN BOOKFORM LON CHANEY'S LONDON AFTER LOST HORROR • Complete Shooting Script MIDNIGHT MELODRAMA • Pressbook , Cut Scenes , Production Notes A BLIND BARGAIN • Biographical notes on Director Wallace By Philip J . Riley Worsley by Wallace Worsley, Jr. The legendary lost Vampire film reconstructed (Goldwyn 1922) • Detailed look at Lon Chaney's make-up box as using over 300 photographs and titles publishe By Philip J. Riley • Foreword by Robert Bloch it exists today by Cornwall Books is available in very limited • Introduction by Patsy Ruth Miller • Film reconstruction using all available stills and supply by sending $35 .00 plus $2 .50 shipping I • Lost Films of Lon Chaney by Jon Mirsalis original title copy and handling . • Over 300 photographs-many never Send $29.95 plus $2.50 for shipping and \\ published before handling. (N .J . residents add 6 percent sales tax . ) CRITICAL ACCLAIM \"'A Blind Bargain' : a book about part of the fascinating and most mysteriou s life and art of LON CHANEY- a fascinating addition to magical movie lore .\" VINCENT PRICE '\" A Blind Bargain' is a lovingly reconstructed version of the film on paper. Since the film no longer exists it's the next best thing to seeing it.\" MARTIN SCORSESE \"Another lost Chaney? Wonderful! The Ackerman Archives provide another treasure for posterity? \" RAY BRADBURY \"Philip Riley is setting the Industry standard for preserving the great silent film history in book form. \" KEVIN BROWNLOW \"With ' Phantom of the Opera' a hot item, Lon Chaney's version is getting attention again . But the non-Phantom Chaney is virtually, as the title of one of his pictures puts it, THE UNKNOWN. Philip J. Riley is trying to rectify that. Following Riley's marvelous book on the legendary 'London After Midnight ', comes' Blind Bargain' completely forgotten (at least, to me) . It's fun to reconstruct the film through effective text and generous pictures. Besides the kick of discovering a 'new' Chaney, it's pleasant to again meet one of the great beauties , Jacqueline Logan . Let 's have more, Mr. Riley.\" JOHN SPRINGER WE ACCEPT Order both books-$50 plus $5 postage and handling. All orders received by December 15th are guaranteed for Christmas delivery. Available in New York City at The Museum of Modern Art and in Los Angeles at Larry Edmunds Bookshop and Pepper & Stern in Santa Barbara , Ca. MAGICIMAGE FILMBOOKS P.O . BOX 128 BRIGANTINE, N.j. 08203 TELEPHONE: 609-266-6500
tache and playing a character named (1950), set in New Orleans, perks with amok. I 'Professor Magenbruch.\" Dixieland (and the threat of bubonic plague.) Fritz Lang's 1952 They Clash Movies mostly muddied jazz's image I Jazz fans did not see film as art; they by Night featured Benny Carter's band, in the Fifties, and not unlike the bene- were used to seeing musical artists while Don Siegel's Private Hell 36 fits that accrued to black artists during treated poorly. Similarly, filmmakers (1954) sported a full class of the West the blaxploitation Seventies, the conso- did not look upon jazz as art. The big Coast \"cool school.\" lations were jobs and exposure. The bands of the swing era had reigned chance to play, to create an audience, supreme for more than a decade, but The startling quality of the new and to cash a check were far too tempt- musical tastes and society kept shift- music seemed fit for film noir, charac- ing to resist. Jazz fans, again, over- ing. During the Depression the big terized by its brooding, somber, anx- looked the vehicle and came for the bands , with their insistent beat, ious nature . The war won, doubt motion. brought a nation to its feet dancing. floated up through the sea of tran- The Second World War, with all of its quility, love, and happiness that was And so we see Frank Sinatra in The tensions , fears, anticipations, and anxi- supposed to flow after victory. Man With the Golden Arm (1955) por- eties set the stage for personal melo- traying a modern jazz drummer and drama: Replacing the big bands post- A plethora of films alloyed psycho- junkie. Chico Hamilton's score war, vocalists stole the show and the logical friction and neurosis with mod- sounded the alarm about America's kids swooned. ern jazz. The zenith may have been trading authenticity for glitz in the 1957 reached in 1953 with The Wild One. Sweet Smell of Success, a tale of power Modern harmonies fit the restless- Thematically and on the jukebox, and corruption. Susan Hayward won ness of the nation. William Wyler's 1946 Shorty Rogers' music supports the dramatic honors for her 1958 portrayal of The Best Years of Our Lives featured image of Marlon Brando and Lee Mar- a murderer who has a liking for modern Hoagy Carmichael in a major role, play- vin as avenging angels. The Fifties hys- jazz in I Want to Live. The film opens ing some plano, too. His was a friendly teria induced by Joe McCarthy caused with a rush of modern jazz from the voice-old reliable banging out the aliens from Mars and Metaphor to spectacular onscreen combo of Art tunes in the corner bar. But the invade theaters. It seemed to be a war Farmer, Gerry Mulligan, and Shelly changed lives of the film 's returning of the worlds with danger residing not Manne. Released later, the soundtrack servicemen, who no longer fit in easily became a hit, as did The Wild One's. stateside, were underscored by the har- Perhaps the filmmakers Otto Preminger, who had done Golden monic dissonance of the soundtrack. Arm, directed the 1959 mystery Anat- New lives needed to be newly lived, knew that they could omy of a Murder, starring Jimmy Stew- new sounds needed to be heard. art but including Duke £lIington in a not adequately explain speaking and playing role. Duke had Modem music grew out of the big- jazz and settledfor the composed the soundtrack, and that, band response to the social cli- too, became a hit record. mate. Assembly lines for war produc- opportunity to explain tion had been integrated racially and it away. Hollywood, then, became a kind of sexually. Nightclubs featured racially cleansing agent, at first introducing jazz integrated musical groups routinely. in the unknown but in the known. The into the mainstream the way it did sex- Their audiences, too , reflected the most devastating menace came from as titillating for the mystery of loss of change . Bebop, which began as small each town, each home-if they weren't control and status, then as reassuring of group musical expression, soon devel- Commies, they were teen-age rebels. \"family\" values (read \"white\"). And so oped into large-scale format. Some big came a string of saccharine biographies band musicians began experimenting Zoot suits had already been banned of major jazz musicians during the late with the new harmonics, and several in some cities after rioting between ser- Forties and throughout the Fifties. embraced the new music. Stan Kenton, vicemen and teen-agers broke out, Plots were devoid of real issues, and the Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman , Gene ostensibly over the threads. But the central character possessed an idealis- Krupa, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy clothes simply dressed the music, and tic heroism-usually in service to the Eckstine, and Claude Thornhill both reflected a shift in the social cur- American dream. The compression of fronted large bands that continued to rent. The zoot suiters preferred the time and events could only distort his- play theaters, tour the country, and Afro-Cuban elements of Bebop, which tory. Nostalgia became pandemic; dif- make films. Short films. Feature films was banned from radio stations for ficulties oflife and time were forgotten; did not present modern jazz to a large being the cause of degeneracy among all was well. audience. Its importance as an art form youth. was overlooked. In some cases there were troubling Teenagers were depicted as un-man- omissions. How account for the absence Yet not completely. The new music ageable (uncontrollable), perverted, of black musicians or arrangers or song- was more apt to turn up in some form as twisted, \"out for kicks,\" violent , writers in the story of Glenn Miller's thematic underscoring in films. unpredictable. The Wild One depicted life? How see the great band leader and Employment of jazz musicians began youths as vagabond bikers, spoiling for arranger, Fletcher Henderson, who to increase behind the camera while it a fight, disrupting a quiet town. And worked for both Miller and Benny steadily decreased in front of it. Many enjoying Shorty Rogers music. Obvi- Goodman, relegated to holding the lat- musicians unwittingly supported films ously, modern jazz, motorcycles, and that communicated mixed messages at mashed potatoes (oh, what the hell) ter's clarinet in one scene as if he were a best, clearly adversarial at worst. were responsible for all those who ran valet? Not to mention Lionel Hampton serving as a waiter in the film at a Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets waterfront dive in California? When Goodman hired him, in fact, as a mem- 42
about violence or drugs ? Perhaps the filmmakers knew that they could not adequately explain jazz and settled for the opportunity to explain it \"away. The Glenn Miller Story (I. to r.) : Louis Armstrong, Cozy Cole and Gene Krupa . Society can rarely account for genius. Film is no worse off. Tal- ber of the quartet, Hampton was front- day's Lady Sings the Blues , when their ent, real talent, is a difference that cannot be accommodated in a world ing a band at the Paradise Ca(e, a large important voices were integral to her that has been so artificially created. The genius of the jazz musician sub- nightclub in Los Angeles , and had success? How else understand the jects of the bio-films became a mas- querade of diluted passions that had to been a recognized star for almost a inclusion offictional characters created fit the normative mold of white society. There was as little room in the world decade. for \"stars\" in order to bolster the box- referred to onscreen for real genius, or real rebels, as there was offscreen for How else can we account for the office and somebody else's career? How either. absence of Lester Young , Tedd y else explain that films dealing with jazz The musical bio-pictures (and this may serve Michelangelo as well as .-Wilson, or Buck Clayton in Billie Holi- musicians usuall y became homilies Mozart, Liszt as well as Lautrec) por- tray genius as present not elusive, sim- Lana Turner dances with the Artie Shaw Orchestra in DanCing Coed. ple not complex. It seems easy. Yet jazz is struggle, and the creation of a jazz piece is not positioning a series of notes in some modal harmony but getting in touch with that struggle . Jazz has always been a fringe culture, always on the edge of society or of the soul, always an avant-garde music that resists reduc- tion to Muzak. Jazz has become its own metaphor for the slippery self sliding around social constraints. Too often we have been given por- traits of jazz musicians that are mired in a wallow of nostalgia, rendering their creativity mundane. Yet their music lives . That is testament to the real power of their creativity. The music can speak to us from beyond time and place. It transcends to our inner being. We come to it with our inner selves. In the words of a friend: \"I never liked jazz until I got to the point where my soul was tormented, until I experienced real pain. Then it spoke to me.\" Jazz is the \"melody that haunts my reverie,\" to borrow a line from Hoagy Car- michael's \"Stardust.\" On the day of Charlie Parker's death there appeared on sidewalks and walls the legend \" Bird lives.\" It still appears , over three decades later. His records continue to be re-issued; in fact, virtually every note that he recorded has been made available. As \"Bird lives,\" so jazz lives. Despite Hollywood , jazz cannot be adequately portrayed nor adequately described . For to describe it contains it and it cannot be contained. Certainly not by the four sides of a picture's frame. Jazz cannot be caged . It flies free. ~ 43
D.A. Makes 'em Dance by Lauren Lowenthal Swift F ilmmaker D.A. Pennebaker D.A. Pennebaker. does not go out looking for movie deals-he doesn't even be pulled into areas you might not think send out sample reels. He's more than you should go. If the stakes hadn't been happy for someone to walk through the high, if they' d said, 'If you want to door. Last April , a representative of the make a film, that's fine,' then I don't British synthesizer group Depeche know if we'd have done it. It's like holding your whole night's winnings Mode did just that. The group was planning to do a cross-promotion video and it's the last bet. I didn't even know to be released in January, '89 with a what I was saying 'yes' or 'no' to. Or live album , but then decided to do a what the film was going to be about. I feature film for theatrical release . decided just to go along and see what a concert was like, and it was beyond It seemed like an unlikely combina- anything I'd imagined. I kept looking tion: Pennebaker's films read like the for some little flash. And then I saw the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame-Dylan , audience all do that wave. It was mar- Lennon , Bowie, Hendrix, Joplin, Otis velous. You don't see that at a Vladimar Redding-and Depeche Mode is a pop Horowitz concert. phenomenon to which reaction in the rock press has ranged from disfavor to \"I knew it wasn't going to be some oblivion. kind of dramatic piece,\" continues Pennebaker, \"and they're not as savvy But for Pennebaker, the ready-to-go, as a David Bowie. This is going to be now-or-never nature of the Depeche another kind of movie for me.\" Mode offer was provocative . Their music also provoked thousands of \"I can't keep making Bob Dylan American teenagers. In fact, if the films-I don't think it's necessary to music of Depeche Mode is about any- have the same spiritual ascendancy as thing, it's about flirtation with gutted, Dylan to make an interesting film. yet psychologically intense, power This film may not have as broad an symbolism-and you can dance to it. audience as you had in the Sixties. But we're not in the Sixties. We're in some- Depeche Mode's music includes thing different. We had all that any- \"Just Can't Get Enough\" , \"Everything body could handle. This is now.\" Counts\", \"Master and Servant\" and ''A Question of Lust\". Their sets are mod- The four young musicians in elled on Leni Reifenstahl designs for Depeche Mode are not Bob Dylan and the .1936 Munich Olympics. Their syn- this is not Don't Look Back II. They've thesizer music is full of programmed got half the ego, and ten times his sequences of deep, powerful, often entourage. Instead of the American repetitive sounds and are almost Wag- folksinger touring England with his nerian in their dramatic effect. \"The guitar we have four English boys tour- kids get drawn to it,\" comments film- ing America with a multimillion-dollar maker Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker's wife. \"The group gets to wave their arms in unison-it's almost frightening when somebody controls an enormous group like that.\" It is that promise of new and uncharted territories that convinced Pennebaker to take on Depeche Mode. ''At first I thought, here's some people I don't even know,\" says Pennebaker. \"I don't even know what their music is like. What am I doing? But then I decided not to turn it down out of hand. As you get older, you try to let yourself
There are certain and roll. Nonetheless, his style has become such standard usage in \"rocku- nwments when the arts mentary\" film that he must now rein- ve nt it to avoid stereotype. \"I think intersect with their every new film is a reinvention . You don't know what you' re going to do. It's times in such a way as a trip to someplace you've never been. That's why you make it-to see where it to define them- will take you.\" Twenty-five years of rock and roll have been captured in his jlashpoints where camera, the same camera that's filmed Norman Mailer, Pablo Casals, John historical trends are DeLorean , the Kennedys, and the Aga Khan . His is the distinctive perspective defined by a single of physical proximity without a per- sonal agenda-an up-close observer event. This is the with unlimited access and nothing to gain or lose. Pennebaker metier. But how can rock and roIl-syn- rock event, hauled across the country onymous with youth and rebellion-be by three massive semi-tractor trailers institutionalized as a tradition ? At the requiring a crew of 50. same time it's woven into the fabric of national culture, rock faces the risk that Pennebaker was constantly amused it will lose the very edge that sets it by the spectacle of Depeche Mode apart from generically popular music. blowing into town and shaking \"There is a constant struggle,\" Pen- $500 ,000 to $1 million from eager nebaker says, \"as each generation tries pockets in one night, then moving to throw off whatever has gone before , along to do it again somewhere else. either by trashing it or sucking it up and They make money and they spend making it their own. Music always money-but not on bills for hotel furni - plays into that, but it's endemic with all ture at the bottom of the swimming art. Whatever art can't stand up over pool. This is serious business. There time will fall. Painting is that way, but are corporate jets and mobile phones the audience for paintings is thinking and regular reports on all aspects of the more of investment. People who are business. There are still girlfriends and bu yi ng records aren't looking for parties, but the legendary excess and inves tment, they're looking for the self-destruction of rock and roll is news. anachronistic. They've heard all about Chuck Berry and fortunes no sooner \"From where I stand, it's not really a made than lost. pejorative opinion-but music has changed. In each new form of music , or This film is not just rock and roll film, when things are just getting under reportage. On the flip side is a scheme way, people can do anything they want dreamed up by the band's management because it hasn't been organized-no to take ten young fans on a cross-coun- A&R man has been assigned to the job. try bus trip with stops at Depeche Then as time goes by, people figure out Mode concerts along the way. A Long how to make money ou t of it, and it gets Island radio station held a \"screen test\" more organized and much less easy to at the Malibu Disco, and Pennebaker do what you want. Pretty soon all it and Hegedus filmed the event. Then does is what it needs to do to keep the filmmakers Joel De Mott and Jeff money flowing and the organization Kreines joined the trip, filming from intact. Many times it's been easy to say, the bus' departure in a Long Island 'That's the end of rock and roll. ' But it parking lot to the conclusion at the Rose never is. As soon as it gets all caged up Bowl concert in Pasadena, California. and locked together somebody comes along, blows the whole thing up, and P ennebaker insists that he knows sort of starts over. If you are a musician , very little about the world of rock
or any kind of artist, you must be will- record . It's always, \"What are you going are less interesting. ing to move forward and not worry to do to get on the charts ?\" As soon as \"To see music juxtaposed to the about what people expect. you start worrying about that you have succumbed to the problem. I think that architecture and scenery of everyday \" I look at these kids in Depeche it's inevitable, and that it recurs in life and to do that without being Mode, and the temptation must be cycles .\" obvious. That's the motive of music enormous for them. All these people filmmaking. \" they like and trust have some agenda What energizes Pennebaker's films that would make them more money, and is the underl ying desire \" to make P ennebaker did not set out for a that's the idea-more money. Nobody things dance ,\" he says. \"To make the career making rock films. It just ever complains they make too much film get up and fly. You want something sort of happened. Sara Lowndes, the money. The pressure is on them to do that people can get into without having then future Mrs . Dylan was working at it. They say all the time they are to listen to what you say, something that Time-Life in the famous Living Cam- designing music in their heads. But moves with its own internal momen- era offices where Pennebaker, future they also say they want it to be a hit tum. Things that have to be explained partner Richard Leacock, and Albert and David Maysles were working in the Everything for the filmmaker, early Sixties. One day in 1964 Dylan's producer, actor & film buff manager, Albert Grossman, strolled into the newly formed office of Leac- Samuel French ock-Pennebaker wanting to make a film . Pennebaker saw the potential for a Theatre & Filtn Bookshops feature documentary and Don' t Look Back was born. PLA YS, and BOOKS Hollywood: on FILM, THEATRE and the 7623 Sunset Blvd. The same story precedes most of MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY (213) 876-0570 Pennebaker's other films , including Monterey Pop , David Bowie's Ziggy Business of Film Film History Studio City: Stardust, and Sweet Toronto , shot at the 11963 Ventura Blvd. 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Screenplays Documentary featuring Chuck Berry, and the debut (818) 762-0535 of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Plastic Screen writing Music Ono band. In later dealings with John Samuel French, Inc. and Yoko , Pennebaker felt motivated Professional Directories Video Play Publishers and by a \"guardian angel\" to decline their request to make films for them. He did, Reference Television Authors Representatives however, appear as Legs in their film Up Your Legs Forever. Cinematography Opera With the characteristic attention to Animation Dance the bottom line that his father evades, Frazer Pennebaker, the \"managerial\" Special Effects Directing side of the famil y business , explains their involvement in rock films . \"Musi- Directing Biographies cians have more money, \" he points out. \"They have access to certain kinds of Film Theory Film Genre money other arts people simply don' t have. The new U2 film Rattle and Hum Acting Largest selection cost $5 million. More than ten times our budget on Depeche Mode. Who of PLAYS else but a rock band can film them- selves for that kind of money? That's a in the world lot of money.\" ...and more Despite its rockumentary track record, family-run Pennebaker Associ- WORLDWIDE MAIL ORDER ates has spent years trying to wrest financing for films other than rock phone: (800) 8-ACT NOW (US) films. Their attitude toward the end- (800) 7-ACT NOW (CA) lessly frustrating process of grant fund- ing can be described as a pessimistic mail: 7623 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood,CA 90046 disinclination, at best. Television pre- sales are the preferred alternative, but send for a copy of our current American commercial TV has no clue FILM BOOK CATALOGUE (frce) or what to do with a Pennebaker film. BASIC PLAY CATALOGUE ($2.25 postp<lid) Cable and PBS will always consider all proposals, but in the end the cable VISA • MC • Am EX people want rock and roll. HBO just purchased Shake (retitled Otis Red- 46
ding), Jimi Plays Monterey (retitled theatrically, because we had to cut the stage and say, 'Now pay attention Jimi Hendrix), and Sweet Toronto (reti- tled John Lennon and Yoko Ono in them specifically for TV, so we were because Hamlet is going to do some- Toronto). compromising from the very thing very tricky, and I don't want you It's anybody's guess just exactly what beginning. to miss it.' What we were doing was like PBS wants. Nick Hart-Williams, com- I missioning editor for documentaries at I \"TV really wapts twO things: either saying we didn' t shoot well enough, England's Channel 4 explains that \"the failure of Penny's work to be seen on programs desighed exabtly for TV's ! and the medium is too limited , and we U.S. TV has nothing to do with him or his work. He is one of the greatest mood and sensibility or something ' don't want you to be confused. That documentary filmmakers. U.S. net- works won't buy documentaries, they designed for something else entirely- doesn't bother me so long as you can might make them in-house. \" feature films. My preference was to go hold out something that will make peo- for feature films that TV could then use. ple stick with you--energy or images or But with Drew, we deliberately made some sort of promise that makes them them non-theatrical , substituting nar- say, 'I don't know what this is about yet, ration for real character confrontation. but I'll watch a little more.' \" \"In theater a guy doesn't get out on \"With every film , we always go in The challenge is not so much PBS itself as the funding that must then be found to underwrite a show. Take Pen- The World's Best Animation! THE PERFECT nebaker's recent proposal to make a •• HOLIDAY GIFT! behind-the-scenes film with the key a· :1..1• 1IG\" 1'01THE INTERNATIONAL TOURNEE OF players at the Democratic National . ..... :: . : .. .. . . \"SUPERB Convention. The project had been ' . ..' ENTERTAINMENT\" selected for inclusion in the PBS National Election Coverage package. The BBe was also interested in the film , VOLUME 1 -San Francisco Chronicle and all the pieces were in place, except for $200,000 needed from a foundation \"VERY FUNNY AND or corporate sponsor. The film was not INVENTIVE\" made. -Sneak Previews I f there is a single area where cinema \"OUTSTANDING\" verite distinguishes itself as truly unique, it is the films shot behind the -Los Angeles Times scenes of politics. Beginning with Pri- mary, the film pivotal to the develop- \"IMAGINAnON ment of the equipment and style that UNHARNESSED\" spawned American cinema verite, these films have provided an intriguing -Vmage Voice and entertaining look at the person- I Featuring the Best of This premiere collection of alities and dynamics of public life. Tra- The 19th International Tournee the world's best i:!nimation versing the state of Wisconsin with of Animation senators John Kennedy and Hubert Includes 14 outstanding Humphrey as they compete in the shorts and features CHA- state's 1959 primary, the film achieves RADE and ANNA & BELLA an extraordinary intimacy ordinarily the 1984 and 1985 Acad- precluded by the adversarial relation- emy Award™ Winners for ship between politicians and newsmen. It is this distinction between journalists best animated short! and filmmakers that formed the basis for the remarkable access to the Ken- 1o~~ldli~tobuy~copy(s)of~I~~fthemternat~lTh~~ nedy White House enjoyed by Pen- nebaker, Richard Leacock, and Albert of Animation Collection. Available in the USA and Canada only. Pay in U.S. Maysles. As part of Robert Drew Asso- ciates in the early Sixties, the group was currency only, $39.95 plus $4.05 for shipping and handling, $44.00 (Califor- free to experiment and develop its dis- tinctive style with Time-Life footing nians add 6.5% sales tax). Please allow 6 weeks for delivery. the bill. Free' to be filmmakers and not fund-raisers . Enclosed is my 0 check or 0 money order in U.S. currency for the total But, as Pennebaker explained, \"The amount of payable to Expanded Entertainment. Drew films were plagued by his [Drew's] need to be completely com- Mail to: ANIMATION, P.O. Box 25547, Los Angeles, CA 90025 prehensible, with lots of stuck-on nar- Nante: __________________________________________________ ration. The filmmakers were always the masters of the film, never letting it cut Address: ___________________________________________ loose. The films could never make it City: __________ State: __________ Zip: _______ LPh_one_: (w_ork_) _______(h_on_te)__________________~ 47
The crew of Monterey Pop with (kneeling, I. or.) Pennebaker, Leacock, Baird Hersey and Peter Hansen. -II \"Cal thinking we're making a theatrical asked, when he knew where to be with from Harlem into Times Square. A pall Le~1 release, but for one reason or another the camera and sound equipment. He covered the city. Janis [Joplin] and Big HoI some films were not destined to be a has an instinct for what is going to Brother and the Holding Company theatrical release,\" explains Frazer. A matter. were here, and they were doing a gig -Thl contributing factor is that Pennebaker down at a club that was going to be the always shoots in 16mm, and the cost of The unreleased Wake A Generation last time they ever played together. I got - blowing up to 35mm is exorbitant. The was filmed a few days after the assas- Robert Leacock [Richard's son] to Depeche Mode film is meant to be a sination of Martin Luther King. Pen- bring down a big half-inch recorder, Th theatrical film. \"We want it to be dra- nebaker recalls: \"A shocked silence and I had the Nagra and one camera. It matic rather than documentary, a musi- persisted for a few days in New York. wasn't even a concert-just a lot of peo- cal with narrative,\" says Hegedus, who Then trouble started; people were get- ple showed up. Joni Mitchell, Janis, of is editing the film with Pennebaker. \"I ting very nervous. Radios advised course, Jimi [Hendrix] was there. He think it's also going to be funny. The motorists not to go above 96th Street, helped me take sound for a while, and story is basically about music and kids and there was talk of the riots moving then he played. B.B. King. Buddy in the Eighties.\" Guy. It went on till dawn.\" They could never find anyone interested in buying One might imagine that Pennebaker the film, so they offered it free to the could clean up making music videos. Martin Luther King Foundation. Pen- The opening scene of Don't Look Back nebaker conjectures that their reason shows Bob Dylan in an alley tossing for declining the offer was probably that away cards printed with the lyrics of \"seedy junkies in a rock club was not \"Subterranean Homesick Blues\" as their idea of how to elevate the ideas poet Allen Ginsberg looks on. It is and name of Martin Luther King. We often credited with being the first con- couldn't find anyone who wanted it. TV cept video and is even played on MTV. sure didn't want it.\" And there it sits. The popular Australian band INXS remade it for one of their recent hits. \"Films are important to see\" adds U2 and The Beatles have borrowed Pennebaker. \"It doesn't matter that Pennebaker scenes for their own pur- people see every film you make. What poses. But Pennebaker has no desire to do I know about a wider audience? If promote more business in that area. ten more people see a film, how can I \"They're fairly ornate,' and I distrust know unless they call and tell me? I just anything that falls back on aesthetics to can't think that way.\" grab you. What's interesting to me is who their audience really is because if Pennebaker has set up camp in a you can interest them .... But they are territory that defines film as art and just commercials, promoting person- values it most as personal statement. alities and their music.\" He films only things that \"want to be filmed.\" This modus operandi is T here are certain moments when Depeche Mode. At the feet of fame. unique in the celluloid universe where the arts intersect with their times aggressive go-getters are the ones who in such a way as to define them-flash- get. Says Pennebaker: \"You do what points where historical trends are you can, and if you can make something defined by a single event. This is the happen, that's fine. But I think you can Pennebaker metier. His sensibility work only so hard at it because you have combines a filmmaker's eye for the other things to deal with-your chil- visually arresting with the journalist'S dren, home, your own life. It's like that sense for the right story. There have great line of Igor Stravinsky's in Ricky been times when he didn't wait to be Leacock's film Stravinsky: 'I'm like an insect. I can wait... '.\" ~ 48
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