I’ve tried to understand what the big deal was about Andy Warhol. When I lived in Columbus, I went to a major Warhol exhibit and looked at his silkscreens, sat through a few of his films, read his history, but I can’t say I ever made a personal connection to any of it.
It’s easy to say, “You had to be there,” but in his case, I really feel that’s true. For all of the articles that testify to his importance to art history and pop culture history, I don’t grok any of it, and certainly not his films—I mean, who would want to sit through a static shot of the Empire State Building for eight damn hours? More to the point, who would feel such a film had value?
I get that Warhol was mostly pulling everyone’s collective leg with his work, but audiences of the 60s strike me as willing accomplices to the joke. I dunno. Still, his films have a relevancy because of who he was, if not for their content, so I will examine a few and try to appreciate the importance they may have. No promises.
I don’t blog about short films very often, outside of what I see at the Queens World Film Festival, anyway. This seems like a good opportunity to change that, especially since so many underground filmmakers are known for their short film material as much as their features.
There are lots of filmmakers I could talk about; for this post I’ve chosen five, all based in America. I may do a post like this again with other underground filmmakers; don’t know, but I’ll try to talk about shorts more often.
Meshes of the Afternoon. This was Vija’s suggestion: Maya Deren was a dancer and all-around creative person in addition to being an experimental filmmaker. In 1943, she and her husband Alexander Hammid got together to make this wordless, dream-like narrative—and it does resemble a narrative more than I had expected; I had thought it would be more impenetrable.
She stars in it, and given her thick, dark hair and the abstract nature of the film, it kinda resembles a Kate Bush video. The cinematography is good, and she and Hammid pull off a few clever camera tricks. For what it is, it’s not bad.
Deren is considered a major figure in the field of experimental film. She’s quoted at length in this piece about her.
Bridges-Go-Round. Shirley Clarke was also a dancer. She studied film at the City College of New York and was down with not only Deren, but other experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.
1959 was a very good year for her; in addition to her contributions to the Oscar-nominated short Skyscrapers, a collaboration with four other directors, including DA Pennebaker, she made this ode to New York’s bridges. The angles she shoots from, the double exposures, the color filters, make the bridges look like Spirograph designs (I can’t be the only one out there who remembers Spirograph, can I? Can I?). Here’s a more complete profile.
Pull My Daisy. This was Virginia‘a suggestion. Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac wrote and narrated this 1959 short directed by Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, featuring Allen Ginsberg and a bunch of other Beats (I presume) at a small party at some couple’s apartment. The people are definitely talking to each other, but you can’t hear what they say because Kerouac talks in a voice-over the whole time, making up some narrative about their conversation—I think.
I can’t say I’ve ever had much interest in the Beats, so while the contrast of Kerouac’s running commentary and the relatively mundane imagery feels like an overly literary MST3K episode, I zoned out after the first ten minutes once I realized this was going nowhere.
Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans was adapted into a Hollywood movie the next year, with Leslie Caron and George Peppard. Kerouac has been the subject of a number of docs, and movies have been made of On the Road and Big Sur. This Atlantic article wonders why Hollywood can’t make a decent film about the Beats.
Mothlight. Stan Brakhage was known for his abstract short films that really played around with the medium. He was also friends with Mekas and Deren, as well as the composer John Cage. For this 1963 short, he worked without a camera: moth wings, flower petals and blades of grass were pressed between strips of 16mm splicing tape and the finished product was contact printed. I like the strobe- like effect the film produces; it’s not the kind of effect you could easily reproduce with computers.
Scorpio Rising. Kenneth Anger is one of the first openly gay filmmakers in America; his films came under scrutiny in the past on suspicion of obscenity. You may have heard of the duology of books he wrote, Hollywood Babylon, about scandal within the Golden Age of the film industry. Here’s a piece on him from 2016.
In this short, images of biker gang members preparing to go out for the evening lead to a really wild party and a cross-country motorcycle race, all set to oldies music—though they probably weren’t old in 1964, when this was made.
The homoeroticism in this is evident almost from the beginning, and the party scene brings that subtext to the surface in a big way, but what struck me the most was the editing. He mixes in images of the Brando movie The Wild One with a Christ narrative and Naziism, and the Eisenstein-like cuts are sometimes no more than a split second, other times they’re longer. The effect is exhilarating and more than a little disturbing.
Many of these filmmakers were part of the film distribution collective co-founded by Jonas Mekas called the Film-Makers Cooperative, also known as the New American Cinema Group. Their archive of over 5000 titles are in a variety of formats, from 35mm to video and DVD.
“Independent film” has become a loaded phrase these days, and it may mean one thing to you but something else to me. Is it simply a matter of working outside the Hollywood studio system? Maybe, but then why are so many smaller boutique studios owned by the majors still considered indies? Is it measured in budgets? If so, what’s the upper limit for a budget before a film no longer becomes “independent”? Is it an aesthetic, an attitude, a frame of mind? If so, who determines it? Is it a matter of distribution? Maybe, but these days it’s possible to see an indie at the local multiplex, at least in big cities.
I remember wrestling with similar issues during my years in the comics industry and I never found the answers there. With the movies, it’s probably even more knotty and tangled.
Ultimately, I can’t say I care one way or another beyond a certain point, but I think some filmmakers and some films are and will forever be associated with alternative cinema in America because of either their approach to filmmaking or their themes or their budget or any combination of the three—and it’s these films I’m gonna look at this month and possibly next month too.
For the sake of simplicity, I’m gonna focus on the 50s to the 70s; maybe the 80s if I feel like it. We have to begin somewhere, and for me, if we’re talking independent film, we have to begin with John Cassavetes.
I think for a long time, the phrase “art cinema” was synonymous with Ingmar Bergman: black and white; really deep thoughts about Life, The Universe and Everything; playing chess with Death and other abstract visuals, etc. And to Bergman’s credit, he became popular enough that such imagery became so cliche. But does that mean people love his films the way they love those of Kubrick or Scorsese?
There are a bunch of YouTube videos in which critics and filmmakers and scholars talk at length about why Bergman is so great and what his films are “really” all about, but if I’m coming at him from the perspective of just another film fan, albeit one with a little more knowledge of film history than some, I shouldn’t need any of that for me to appreciate his work; indeed, I’m trying hard to avoid those videos while writing this post about Persona because I want to be as unbiased in my opinions as possible.
Some might say knowing Bergman and his worldview is necessary to grok his films—but did the average moviegoer have that information when he made his movies during the sixties, pre-Internet? If Bergman was the capital-A Ar-TEEst he was proclaimed to be, I imagine he’d have wanted his work to speak for itself. So let’s give it a shot.
Run Lola Run seen @ Celebrate Brooklyn, Prospect Park, Brooklyn NY This is a story. Last Thursday I went to Prospect Park's Celebrate Brooklyn festival to see the German movie Run Lola Run. I took the G train. A street musician entered the subway car at the Carroll Street station. He had a violin. Right before he began to play, though, he sat down, holding his stomach. Then he threw up onto an AM New York someone left on the floor. A pair of guys who looked like they were a couple came over to the musician. They propped his feet up. I heard one of them say he was a med student. He asked the musician questions about his health, who he was, that sort of thing. At the Smith/9th Streets station, the med student's boyfriend ran for the conductor, and sure enough, the train was delayed. There was nothing I could do for the guy, and the med student looked like he had things under control, so I got out and walked to Prospect Park.
The Blair Witch Project IFC viewing I didn't believe it was real. Not completely. I remember the tremendous hype for it and I remember following it until the release, so I kind of had a pretty good idea that while they were trying to pass The Blair Witch Project off as real, I kinda knew it wasn't. But I wanted it to be real. I remember wanting to believe in it, too, because it was so completely unlike any horror movie - hell, any movie - that had come along. I mean, it made the cover of Time. I saw it with Jenny on opening day at the Angelika. The line was HUGE. I remember seeing a display in the lobby explaining the extensive "history" of the Blair Witch, and there were people debating whether or not this whole thing was real. By opening day, people still weren't 100 percent sure. BWP almost made Jenny nauseous with all of the scenes of running with the camera - and she is so not the type to get freaked out by a movie, any movie. But I remember her telling me afterward how uncomfortable she was with all those scenes of them running around in the woods at night. Can't say I blame her. Watching it again for the first time in years, those scenes were still a little unnerving.
BWP came out around the time that reality television was starting to take off, thanks to shows like The Real World and Survivor. At the time, I still thought it was a minor fad that would never really catch on, but in a way, BWP showed why it blew up. Heather, Mike and Josh were convincing because they really were hiking through the woods and filming themselves, but they were also improvising from within a rough outline written by directors Eduardo Sanchez & Daniel Myrick. The film-within-a-film aspect allowed them to make the movie dirt cheap. No doubt network execs found this sort of thing appealing.
And now much of network and cable television is dominated by this aesthetic, in one form or another. During my recent hospital stay, I got re-acquainted with reality TV for awhile - not by choice. The TV in my room had very limited options. I actually found myself drawn to the Animal Planet channel. There was a show about different kinds of dogs and how to distinguish them that wasn't bad. It made me think of my friend Lynn, who owns a service dog (and was actually featured on Animal Planet once).
There was another show that was not unlike BWP: these dudes go hiking not in the woods but in the mountains, in search of some kind of legendary treasure, if memory serves. I forget the title and I'm not sure what it has to do with animals. Anyway, we see footage of them climbing through caves and down rivers and over rock faces and all this stuff, and there are points where they bicker, just like the protagonists of BWP. Like The Real World and Survivor, there are also interview segments, presumably taken, after their little adventure, so we can see them provide commentary to their story.
Like BWP, reality was manipulated to fit the design of a "storyline." For instance: will Jack and Joe make it to such-and-such a location on the mountain before the storm hits? Footage of their hike is spoon-fed to us a bit at a time and edited just so, in order to fill an hour, complete with commentary from other members of the expedition and a few "experts" for added context. While it was entertaining, to a certain degree, I couldn't help wondering how much manipulation of the actual footage - real people doing things that can't be faked, just like with BWP - was being done, like I do whenever I happen to stare at a reality TV program. In re-watching BWP, I was aware of Heather's role as camera operator in certain emotionally charged scenes. For instance, when Mike admits to throwing the map away and Josh blames her for getting them lost in the first place, she's furious. She physically charges Josh, trying to attack him, but she's also holding the camera, and you can sort of tell that she's trying to keep him within the frame at the same time. At least, that's how it looked to me. Heather, Mike and Josh are actors within the movie, but they're also their own DPs, and in trying to balance both tasks at the same time, sometimes the "reality" of the story gets compromised. BWP is a movie that would be difficult to pull off today, in the age of social media giving away every last secret of a movie. Plus, the ubiquity of cell phones makes it harder to get lost (Heather was right about that much when she says it's hard to get lost in America these days) - though who knows if you could get a signal that deep in the woods?
Lady in the Lake TCM viewing You turn on the television and see the movie Lady in the Lake will start in ten minutes. You're intrigued; you've heard of the movie before, but you've never seen it. You know the gimmick: it's a film shot subjectively, from the point of view of the main character. You're impressed that an Old Hollywood film could be this experimental. One could almost say it borders on being an art film - or what passed for an art film in 1947. You decide to watch. The Christmas carols in the opening credits surprise you. You had no idea this film was set during Christmas. You wonder how much the holiday will factor in the story, if at all. You're reminded of the post you wrote about holiday movies that have little to do with the holiday, and you suspect that this is probably another one in that vein. You think with a smile that Paddy would approve.
You see the name Raymond Chandler in the credits and you remember that this is a crime story, probably a film noir. You think that a Chandler adaptation is a hell of a film to play guinea pig for such a radical experiment. You're reminded of the movie Dark Passage, another noir film (from the same year!) with a peculiar gimmick: you don't see Humphrey Bogart's face for the first half of the film. You wonder whether the filmmakers of both movies were aware of what each other was doing. And then you see the director's name: Robert Montgomery. You know the name. You've seen him in one or two other movies, such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Never thought that much of him, to be honest. Only recently did you learn that he was the father of Elizabeth Montgomery, from Bewitched. You don't really believe Montgomery will be as good as Bogart, but you like that an actor decided to direct and star in a film like this. You hope it'll be good.
Robert Montgomery plays Philip Marlowe, Chandler's private eye character from such stories and films as The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet and The Long Goodbye. You see Montgomery as Marlowe in an introduction that addresses the audience directly, explaining that he's gonna tell the story of the case of the lady in the lake and he challenges the audience to follow along to see if they can figure out who the killer is. From there, the film shifts to Marlowe's subjective POV. In effect, the viewer becomes Marlowe. The camera acts as your eyes and ears and arms and legs. The actors look directly at the camera and speak to it as if it were a real person, but intellectually, you believe Montgomery must be a physical presence on the set somehow, and as you watch further, you realize he is. You see hands, from the bottom portion of the screen approximately where you'd expect your own hands to be, ringing doorbells and accepting objects from other actors. You wonder where exactly Montgomery is relative to the camera: to the left or to the right, above or below it?
Occasionally, you see Montgomery reflected in mirrors, to remind the audience that yes, he really is there on the set and not just doing voice-overs or something. Montgomery isn't acting as his own DP, even though he's an actor in his own film. The camera doesn't move the way you expect a human to move. It doesn't have that "found footage" look, as seen in more contemporary films such as The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. Still, you believe Lady could be a forerunner of movies like these. Marlowe gets punched, slapped, and kissed in the film, and the actors who do the punching, slapping and kissing do it directly at the camera, complete with the appropriate camera movements to help sell the illusion, and sound effects where necessary. The scene where Marlowe gets punched comes as a shock to you when it happens. You didn't expect it and you react as if you yourself are getting punched. You imagine this was probably the reaction Montgomery was hoping for. You wonder if there's a "making of" video somewhere on the net, but you fear there isn't. There was no home video market to make it for back then.
You try to follow the story, but you're too caught up in the how-did-he-do-that aspect, and in any event, the plot is as labyrinthine as The Big Sleep: something about the wife of a magazine publisher having gone missing and being implicated in a murder. You find the requisite femme fatale character shrill and over-dramatic and you don't believe for a minute that Marlowe would fall for her. You think Montgomery as Marlowe is okay, but something about his voice - which is all you have to go on - strikes you as a put-on, as if he's talking the way he imagines a tough guy should sound like. Although his looks are a non-factor here, Montgomery makes you think of a game show host; like your neighbor with whom you go bowling on Saturday nights, not a film noir-type private eye, like Bogart or Robert Mitchum. The subjective POV also reminds you of the acting classes you took when you were younger. By staying focused on the other actors as Montgomery speaks and not cutting away as you'd normally expect, it reminds you of the scenes you'd act out and how you were told to always keep your attention focused on your partner, no matter what. You imagine yourself as Montgomery, rehearsing a scene with the other actors, looking deep into their faces for the ''pinch'' - a physical or verbal reaction to your words - that will give you the ''ouch'' - a truthful response. It makes you miss acting for a moment. Overall, you find Lady to be a clever experiment, but not much else - but it does give you a great idea on how to write about it...!
Years ago, a close friend gave me a gift: it was an anthology CD of Carpenters cover songs. It wasn't as if I was a Carpenters fan; she just thought it'd be something I'd like. And I did. I was naturally familiar with a few of the songs, like "Close To You" and "Top of the World" (my mother always liked that song, as I recall), but hearing them with a bit of a harder edge was a definite improvement.
I vaguely remember the days of AM radio in the 70s. Riding in the back seat of my parents' car, fighting with my sister over the radio, those were the days of "soft rock," so to speak: Gordon Lightfoot and Olivia Newton-John and Anne Murray and The Captain & Tennille and Air Supply (my sister loved Air Supply). Every now and then I'll hear a song from that period on the radio and I'll go, oh yeah, I remember that, and I'll be a kid in my parents' car again, or listening to my sister's 45s again. It's not like I have any deep abiding love for those records; it's more that they take me back to when life was a whole lot simpler.
Okay, remember earlier this year when I talked about whether or not so-called boring movies had any value? I said that it depended on one's level of receptiveness, and that if you didn't like a certain movie, you shouldn't let other critics opinions of it sway you. I still believe that - but I'm kinda struggling with applying that belief myself here, so bear with me here.
As we come to the end of French New Wave Week, I've saved the biggest for last: Jean-Luc Godard. Like Francois Truffaut and others, a writer for Cahiers du Cinema prior to becoming a filmmaker. Also like them, started out doing short films before graduating to features (though Godard also made a feature-length documentary during this period). At Cannes in 1959, when The 400 Blows made its big splash, Truffaut introduced Godard to a producer willing to take a chance on him and the result was 1960's Breathless, the film, Godard said, that was the product of "a decade's worth of making movies in my head." And the hits just kept on coming. Contempt. Band of Outlaws. Alphaville. And much more.
I understand that JLG did things in movies that nobody else had done before, like jump cuts. I understand that his films were radically different than others in terms of story and storytelling. And I understand that his influence could be felt in America, which led to a similar cinematic renaissance in the mid-60's and into the 70's. And maybe I just picked the wrong movie of his to watch...
... but Pierrot le Fou made no damn sense to me at all. I tried, I really did try to stick with this as long as I possibly could, but I bailed out just before the end, partly because I was running late with this post on account of not only being sick earlier this week, but massive schedule changes as well, partly because I got in late last night and didn't watch it like I had planned (I'll explain on Monday), and partly because I simply got tired of trying to make heads or tails of this movie, which so many people are convinced is a masterpiece of some kind.
This isn't even my first JLG movie. That would be Contempt, but at least that had a naked Brigitte Bardot in it! This one has everything and the kitchen sink, plus the Liquid Drano, the scouring pads, the dishwashing detergent, the plunger, and even the tiles on the floor! On the one hand, it is undeniably audacious filmmaking of a kind never seen by anyone else before, but on the other, I didn't understand any of it, and I realize it may be possible that that was intentional on JLG's part.
Here's what I liked: The recurring motif of visual art throughout the film, even going so far as to inter-cut images from paintings and illustrations into the "narrative," such as it is. The vibrant color. The composition of certain images. The lovely shots of the south of France. Even the cameo appearance by Samuel Fuller.
That's about it. I can see some parallels to Bonnie and Clyde, another movie about two young lovers on the run committing crimes (and I have no doubt Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn were influenced by Pierrot), but to the extent that these "characters" are characters in any literal sense, I still need a reason to care about them, to stick with them for two hours, and JLG didn't give me one. Musical interludes aside, it's not light enough to be an escapist comedy, and it's not heavy enough to be a grim noir, and very little Jean-Paul Belmondo or Anna Karina said or did interest me, and the film trickery wore thin after awhile.
But it's a film that traditional film critics cream themselves over. I dunno. Like I said, I don't have the benefit of watching it in 1965, so I can only speculate, and read through historical accounts, about what watching a film like Pierrot back then was like, to see its impact from the point of first contact onward. Maybe I shouldn't need to do that. All I know is I gave it my best shot, and I will try not to let other people's opinion of it influence me. Though perhaps at some point in the future I'll watch another JLG movie.
In the summer of 1995, I was working as a camp counselor in the woods of western Massachusetts, and we created a time capsule. It was a tradition at this camp; every ten years they throw a bunch of items from the campers and staff into a container and bury it somewhere on the camp grounds, to be opened ten years hence. I contributed some comics I had made. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the campers of 2005 made of my comics or anything else in our time capsule, but I like to think that it interested someone.
The concept of a legacy - leaving something behind for future generations that indicates one's time on this earth - is a powerful one. We like to think that our lives matter in some way, even if, in the cosmic scheme of things, they're nothing more than the blink of an eye - but the average person hardly ever thinks in such terms. For artistic people - and I use the word "artistic" in the broadest possible sense - this concept is especially strong, because the hope is that one's work will outlive themselves.
Life in a Day is this concept taken to a macro scale. It's a remarkable enterprise undertaken by Kevin MacDonald, director of The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, among other films, and Ridley & Tony Scott. Last year, they partnered with YouTube and invited amateur filmmakers worldwide to record their life as it was lived on July 24, 2010. The result was over 80,000 clips from almost 200 countries, edited into a single narrative.
And it does play like a narrative, which surprised me. It begins with footage from late at night, moving into sunrises, people getting out of bed, making breakfast, and going about their day, and so on into sunsets and night footage again. There is no political rhetoric, or commercial pitches or religious sermonizing, just people going about their lives, some of them aware of the camera, others not. For some, the day was a significant one, but for most it's simply another day. There's a lovely original score throughout the film as well. You can read more about the process behind the film in this interview with MacDonald.
Yes, the movie shows how much we all have in common and it unites humanity in a beautiful mosaic and blah blah blah. But it took MacDonald, and his editor Joe Walker, to sift through all of those videos and find those common threads, and arrange them in a compelling manner. It bears repeating: this is not a collection of home movies; this is a fully-realized film, with a narrative structure. I think it's safe to say that nothing of this scale has ever been done before.
Will Life in a Day stand the test of time? It's far too early to tell... but if there were those who took part hoping for a shot at immortality, they could do a lot worse than this.
Performance seen @ 25 Kingsland Avenue (backyard), Brooklyn NY 9.8.10
I almost wasn't going to go see this. I'd heard about this film before, but from the reviews I'd read on IMDB - which were glowing, but also made clear that this was unconventional - I wasn't completely sold on it. I almost went to see Inception a second time (which I'll probably do anyway). Plus, I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the previous night and wasn't looking forward to coming home late. I decided to give it a chance, however.
The screening was presented by a local film-lovers club called the Kings County Cinema Society. The screening of Top Hat I went to last month was theirs. At first I thought the website was just a resource for free screenings - which of course, it is - but it wasn't until after the fact that I realized that they're the ones that show these films they list.
The screening was also being presented by a local filmmaker named Jason Tallon. The apartment we were watching Performance at belonged to some friends of his and the movie was projected on one wall, through a laptop computer with separate speakers, as was the case at the Top Hat showing. In addition to the main event, Tallon showed a couple of his shorts. While visually stunning, they didn't have much in the way of narrative, but I suspect that was probably intentional.
This felt more like a private party that I had crashed rather than a film screening. I talked to a few people, but I couldn't help feeling more than a little anxious and out of place - which wasn't anyone's fault really, but that's how it is when you're surrounded by total strangers. The hosts made cookies and other snacks and offered wine, and the audience, many of which looked like friends of Tallon, congregated either outside in the backyard or in the kitchen. The backyard was terrific - a concrete patio with a garden off to one side and a tree swaying in the chilly breeze. Christmas lights ran like runway lights along one side of the patio, with 70s-ish canvas-and-wire chairs mixed with wooden ones. I'm somewhat large, and I had to settle into the canvas chair slowly, for fear of busting right through it. It held, but it made me fearful of getting up again!
While the editing, cinematography and especially sound was remarkable and must have seemed cutting-edge in 1970, I honestly couldn't make heads or tails of Performance. It didn't help that it was getting colder as the night progressed. At one point I slipped my arms out of my short sleeves in an attempt to keep warm. The wind was steady and at one point it blew hard enough to sway the branches on the tree considerably. I was yawning off and on, though I never fell asleep. I switched from the canvas-and-wire chair to a wooden one and I kept shifting back and forth in it, desperately trying to maintain a level of comfort. Some people were laid out on the concrete in the front. One chick sitting next to me was fiddling with her Blackberry. I suppose I couldn't blame her if she was bored.
This must sound like I had a terrible time, but I want to make clear that I think the KCCS does a good job at organizing these screenings. I'm certainly grateful to have the opportunity to see free movies, especially now that summer's just about over.
