Monthly Archives: September 2012

Acquired Tastes
If one wanted, for whatever reason, to sketch a dividing line between the casual movie fan and the serious cinephile, the early talkies are probably the place to do it.

Their stars are unfamiliar—flashes-in-the-pan whose popularity is more mysterious and unaccountable than those that came immediately before and after. (Modern audiences instinctively understand the magnetism and sexuality of Valentino and Garbo or Stanwyck and Gabin; not so El Brendel, whose narrow ethnic burlesque is such an acquired taste that it beggars belief he was ever accorded starring roles in big-budget specials.)

Too often, discussion of the earliest sound movies (say, between 1928 and 1932, but especially those made before the summer of 1930) is heavily laced with apology. It’s assumed that they’re successful in spite of incontrovertible deficiencies. Their music often comes across as a soupy, repetitive mess. The sets are sometimes barely dressed. The takes are long and the camera movement minimal. The dialogue is so heavy it’s no wonder they were called talkies.

With eight decades separating us from their original context, it’s an understandable misreading. The late silent era boasted such a consistently high level of craft that it’s somewhat baffling that moviegoers were content to exchange high-toned masterworks like The Sorrows of Satan, The General, The Docks of New York, The Crowd, The Wind, and The Wedding March for Al Jolson in The Singing Fool, the first talking blockbuster. (The ledger looks even more uneven and incredulous when one factors in mute exercises in mass-market formalism from across the Atlantic: Napoleon, Faust, L’argent, Rotaie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Fall of the House of Usher.)  Today’s scholars value these films as showcases of dazzling camera choreography, intricate montage, subtle performance style, and a generally ecstatic engagement with the technological promise of cinema—a new language for a broken world. Why discard all this for something so inert? (Until the 1960s, many film buffs refused to do so, with a reflexive and reactionary insistence that the major artistic milestones in American cinema were largely confined to the pre-talkie era.)

There are some potential—and highly condescending—explanations. The Hollywood machine conspired to thrust a false talkie consciousness upon the masses, who were naturally powerless to resist. In the less populist version, the yokels of 1928 had never appreciated the Art of Cinema in the first place and were just knocked out by any damn thing that moved and spoke (or sang or barked or yapped) at the same time. (Of course, many Americans had never heard electronically amplified sound in a public space before the movies began to talk, and that’s not nothing.) Really engaging with the early talkies, though, demands a more charitable framework that allows that the exchange of silence for sound may well have been seen as a fair trade by the average moviegoer.

Ambient
What the movies lost in graphic sophistication was at least equaled by a new polyphonic dimension of strange, ancestral accents, disarmingly elemental sound effects, abstract layers of aural atmosphere, and the newly legible terror of true silence. In aggregate, they had no less claim to art. And indeed, films like Thunderbolt, Alibi, Hallelujah!, Morocco, Enthusiasm, and Berlin Alexanderplatz suggested an entirely new kind of art—ambiance radically conjured through ambient noise. For a western like Hell’s Heroes, the soundtrack served to underline and enhance the severity of the outdoor photography. In style and effect, these early talkies are in no significant fashion different from the recent ‘slow cinema’ features (Syndromes and a Century, say, or the work of Hong Sang-soo) much-lauded on the festival circuit over the last decade.

In a category all its own was the music-and-effects movie, that most ephemeral of forms to spring from the early talkie era. Conceived to show off sound reproduction capacities at wired theaters but designed to play comprehensibly in equal measure in old-fashioned houses, they contained little or no spoken dialogue. These delicacies retained the graphic and rhythmic punctuation of the silent-style intertitle while subjecting lucky listeners to a barrage of non-narrative aural information. In their gratuitousness, the music-and-effects movies suggested a poetic overlay upon prose entertainment—a genuinely experimental form arising wholly from economic necessity. The best music-and-effects fusions—Sunrise, Tabu, The Man Who Laughs, Prix de beaute, the international version of All Quiet on the Western Front—combined stock music and new compositions with machine sounds and truly disembodied snatches of indistinct voices.

We need look (and listen) no further than Paul Fejos’s Lonesome for the characteristic music-and-effects masterpiece. (Available for decades only in a heavily-circulated but still underseen 35mm archival print, the latest restoration from George Eastman House was finally released on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection last month.) A mutant entirely of its time, Lonesome samples and summarizes three decades of technological progress: straight black-and-white photography, hand-colored sequences, in-camera tricks and optical superimpositions, avant-garde cutting, pokey dialogue interludes, and more. Appropriately enough, the happy ending hinges upon a 78rpm phonograph record—a redemption by (and of) pop culture. (In this respect, and many others, Lonesome suggests an immediate and complementary comparison with its tenement cinema contemporary, The Crowd.)

Some modern-day fans of Lonesome lament its three dialogue sequences as rude interlopers in a ‘pure’ feat of visual cinema. I can only respond that I wouldn’t love this film half as much with these awkward scenes excised. They emanate from a very brief moment in cinema history when the need for dialogue was understood but the imperative to import professional writers from Broadway had not yet ascended to conventional wisdom. The dialogue in Lonesome is not in the least bit literary; indeed, it’s shockingly trivial and, in that sense, reveals depths of vulnerability unavailable to the most seasoned of playwrights. The lines may not represent the way real people talked to each other in 1928, but they do capture the mass-culture-mediated way people talk to themselves in any year. It’s just talk and doesn’t aspire to anything else. (Of course, these verbal exchanges were hardly incidental to the studio’s bottom line; Universal had to the chutzpah to tout Lonesome as its first all-talking feature on the basis of six minutes of dialogue.)

Alchemy
If early talkies are distinguished by their gimmicks and rough edges, they’re also marked by a drive for something more coherent and unified. We might call it genre.

Until 1932, American films are only groping towards pre-fab, assembly-line blueprints. Their tonal shifts and plot twists are wholly their own, with the seeds of genres-to-be freely cross-pollinated. The Great Gabbo is both a backstage musical and a despairing character study. Madam Satan is a comedy of infidelity and a dirigible spectacle for the ages. Is Blonde Venus a maternal melodrama, a swanky musical, or a bawdy fairy tale? Can it all be three at once? How can you even classify a film like Other Men’s Women or The Strange Love of Molly Louvain? They shift moment to moment, not only in their register but in their presumed audience.

By virtue of its peculiar alchemy, Just Imagine probably reigns as the ultimate early talkie. Its existence is a triumph of blind faith in the cumulative power of wholly unrelated mass culture obsessions and idioms. An other-worldly operetta that correctly predicts the promiscuously electronic entertainment landscape of the eighties, Just Imagine looks strangely prescient. (It would take five decades for Giorgio Moroder to retrofit Metropolis as MTV Ground Zero; Just Imagine was already there in 1930.) It’s a truism that period pieces often say just as much about their own time, but it’s especially true of Just Imagine, which seems consciously to strive for time capsule status. (In fulfilling that goal, Fox could cast no better leading man than El Brendel, whose every dumb Swede rejoinder carries an imminent expiration date.)  It’s a designer folly that takes itself for a subject.

The soundtrack of Just Imagine is likewise representative. Its musical numbers are uneven, but consistently sincere. The recording quality is primitive, even for 1930—a fact compounded by the questionable lab work that mediates all modern prints of Just Imagine. In one scene, the soundtrack is abandoned entirely, with the track area on the left edge of the print occupied by the ‘noise’ of the picture. (When read by the sound head on a projector, this section produces a garble that would be the envy of any sound engineer in 1930.)

Inevitably, Just Imagine disappoints as a musical and as science fiction. (It’s too serious to be really pulpy, but its statist scenario sounds more like Tea Party paranoia circa 2012.) For a film like Just Imagine to be enjoyed and understood, it’s most productive to treat it, generically-speaking, simply as an early talkie, its concerns and methods shaped most decisively by the rudderless abandon of a new plaything.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Just Imagine in a 35mm print on September 30 at Cinema Borealis. See our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Brian Block at Criterion Pictures, USA and James Bond.

“Sometimes miniature electric train cars simply will not stay coupled. At some crucial tunnel, curve, or grade, the locomotive charges forward, leaving uncoupled cars behind and possibly derailed. It often seems that extra exertion at switches, curves, and grades has something to do with the uncoupling.

“Much, perhaps most, of the film footage that you project is coupled into “trains.” Like those miniature trains, films must stay coupled and on track through something like tunnels, curves, and grades, and switches. Therefore, couplings—let’s, of course, call them splices or joins—are crucial. Making good splices is one of your key responsibilities as a film handler. ”

– The Kodak Book of Film Care, 1st Edition, 1983

Films on Fire
Sometimes I’m afraid that the migration of film writing from the page to the blogosphere has made it more difficult for us to conceive of déclassé, orphan cinema. Can we access and understand the sense of complete aloneness that first-generation auteurists felt when championing Marnie or Red Line 7000 or 7 Women? Although Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate an instant consensus, the unruly infinity of film blogging assures that, somewhere, every film has an eager on-the-record advocate. No product is truly marginal and every ‘outrageous’ critical position has been spoken for. (See, for example, Zach Campbell’s apologia for Anna Faris.)

At least this was my governing assumption until I met a teenage art student when I returned to my high school a few years ago. My reputation undiminished as the school’s reigning cinephile, a teacher thought to introduce me to another such up-and-comer. Our exchange was pleasant enough. I tried to feel out his taste.

He proclaimed Tony Scott’s Man on Fire his favorite film ever.

The visceral disconnect I felt upon learning of this valuation is difficult to describe. He patiently described the technical virtuosity of the film, Scott’s attention to varied lens and film stocks, the fluidity of the montage, but I couldn’t keep up. I had never seen a Tony Scott film and was genuinely surprised to learn that Man on Fire had any popular following. It was common enough to hear young cinephiles rate Fight Club or The Matrix as a pinnacle of cinema, but this was entirely unexpected. I remembered the simple and literally flaming one-sheet for Man on Fire, but knew nothing of the film itself. Wasn’t this just another macho actioner with a standard-issue Denzel Washington performance?

One some level, it was electrifying to play the dowdy John Simon to this student’s upstart Andrew Sarris. I was twenty-two and already destined for the cinema compost bin, too old-fashioned to grok the underground’s new auteur. My progressive advocacy for Jia Zhangke and Wong Kar-wai immediately felt like calcified consensus. Was he crazy or was I?

I’m not prepared to answer that question, but he had a point about Tony Scott.

Stateless Art
After the pounding (and undeniably well-crafted) excesses of The Hunger, Tony Scott became a prototypical blockbuster director for producer Don Simpson. With Top Gun, he created official state art for a capitalist-democracy that thought itself above such things. Not only a recruitment film in itself, Top Gun provided an advertising template and aesthetic for all branches of the armed forces—a template, one might add, that survived the traumas of Afghanistan and Iraq stunningly intact.

Thus, for any socially-engaged film viewer, Scott’s name represented not only a certain strain of mindless entertainment gobbled up by the mass audience (from which we claimed to stand apart), but also a real political legacy with genuine culpability for extending and consecrating an ever-militarized, bipartisan international policy. Why should anyone get excited for the latest Tony Scott film?

I’ve never managed to sit through Top Gun, but the equally right-wing Man on Fire is a real piece of ugly work. In one scene, divinely-ordained counter-insurgency black ops expert Denzel Washington inflicts rectal torture upon a corrupt Mexican police official. Another half-dozen thugs are treated to humiliating and fatal ‘enhanced interrogations.’ (Cosmically, Man on Fire opened in theaters the week before revelations of appalling prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib gained media traction through 60 Minutes II and Seymour Hersh’s reporting in The New Yorker.) Like a morally unclouded variation on Dirty Harry, Man on Fire is a vigilante movie that casts retribution in world-historic terms.

It’s also a singular work of cinema.

Tony Scott’s movies are often held up as the poster children for our fallen art—the hyperkinetic, the MTV-derived, Ritalin-fueled infotainment with Average Shot Lengths (ASLs) so trigger-happy as to foreclose on any possibility of responsible adult storytelling. (One representative critical bromide aimed at Scott from The Onion’s evaluation of Déjà Vu: “Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people’s intelligence.”) And yet Scott is also an unheralded practitioner of such long-out-of-favor screen grammar as the slow fade and the lap dissolve—an improbable link to the utopia of such works as Sunrise and Lonesome. Man on Fire also incorporates unexplained flash-forwards and highly abstracted bursts of ultra-saturated color.

Laying out Scott’s devices one-by-one makes Man on Fire sound like an overzealous film school exercise, one that crams together unmotivated technique to demonstrate a student’s multi-faceted skill. The effect of Man on Fire is quite different. There is one sequence in which Washington sits in a room and contemplates suicide. Dramatically and spatially, it’s a simple set-up, but the cutting fragments it in wholly unexplainable ways. From one shot to another, we’re outside of chronology and outside of space; at moments, we cannot quite say whether one scene has slipped into and displaced another, or whether any physical integrity has been maintained at all. The material world has become voluptuously fragile.  If we come away from Man on Fire with the question, “Where am I?,” it is not out of a disgruntled desire for conventional continuity, but a proactive embrace of dislocation.

Parallel Tracks
Is it any coincidence that the first person I knew who recommended Unstoppable, Scott’s unintended swan song, was a projectionist and model train hobbyist? The fundamental analogy between railroad track and film strip has been reiterated often in recent years, not least in the reactions to James Benning’s extraordinary RR and Lynne Kirby’s book-length study Parallel Tracks. Partisans of rail and reel are, after all, often one and the same.

While not nearly as manic as Scott’s underrated satire Domino (a pre-fab, wannabe punk touchstone whose genuine marginality, especially among actual punks, almost accords it such a laurel), Unstoppable is still a mighty abstract action picture, one where color, speed, and mass are expressive tools and the thing being expressed. It’s one hell of a film for train-watchers, especially since Scott and cinematographer Ben Seresin photograph it in an ultra-saturated, ultra-grainy texturalist fashion. (Scott’s late films all originated on 35mm, with editing and color-correction performed through the now-standard Digital Intermediate process. Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, Scott’s films burnish their film aesthetic with an almost comical devotion. The pronounced grain is just another industrial accoutrement on a macho chassis.)

Some advocates of Unstoppable, like Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Mark Peranson, have bolstered its working-class credentials—a course I find both appealing and somewhat frustrating. Politically-speaking, it’s a blinkered, contrafactual film, where the grizzled freight veteran has survived three decades without a contract and the next-generation college boy represents a union wave. Corporate profit motive is pitched as a foe of public safety, but Hooter’s is advanced as a symbol of upward mobility.

And yet, there’s a sense in which the plot mechanics of Unstoppable are uncommonly sophisticated. The suspense at the heart of the movie issues not from an omnipotent megalomaniac (like, say, Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises or Dennis Hopper in Speed and a hundred other descendants of Dr. Mabuse) but from everyday workplace carelessness. Without a media-savvy villain to pump up the action, we’re left with an unthinking, irrational, and wholly mechanical source of terror. No less than Lars von Trier’s The Boss Of It All (with its randomly selected camera angles), Unstoppable is a product of this very machine, replete with unmotivated camera pans and infinite set-ups. (Scott, somewhat ingeniously, justifies his endless helicopter coverage by incorporating the camera crew into the diegesis, with Fox News always hovering nearby and providing instant replay. Talk about corporate synergy.) Stephanie Zacharek, a long-time Scott skeptic, was quite correct when judging Unstoppable “a thing of majesty and menace … one gleaming machine paying tribute to another.”

As tributes go, Scott couldn’t ask for one more concentrated and beautiful than Unstoppable.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Unstoppable in a 35mm print at Cinema Borealis on Sunday, September 9 at 7:00 and 9:15pm. Please see our calendar for more information. Special thanks to Brian Block.