Armistice Day 2011

Veteran's Day, 2011 - it's notable that 2 years ago, there were still three surviving veterans - possibly combat veterans, at that point. Now, there is only one, Florence Green, 110 years old...

I've said before, especially in regard to this holiday - I think it's important to keep the original point of days like this in mind. And probably - WWI being one of the most decisive moments of history - this one in particular. And so?

Some songs: Here's A Long Way to Tipperary, from a 1914 recording:



And Pack all your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag:



And - Over There... patriotism in full bloom:



But I can't stop without another version of Eric Bogle's transcendent anti-war song - the Band Played Waltzing Matilda...

Vampire Films, At the Beginning

The Vampire class I am taking is proceeding nicely, and it seems like time for a post. The class itself is concerned mainly with vampire literature, but I am a film enthusiast, and am only too glad to take this opportunity to write a bit about he films we're seeing. We've started at the beginning, more or less - Nosferatu and the Universal Dracula - which is also starting at the top. It's all downhill after Murnau.



Of course, that's true for most films - there aren't a lot better than Nosferatu, ever, in any genre. It's one of those foundational films - a fully realized masterpiece, hugely influential, and deep and rich, thematically, aesthetically. It's beautiful, innovative and imaginative, terrifically important to film history - a fully realized effort of the mature German style, something of a pivot between expressionism and new sobriety, with its real locations and expressionistic performances and compositions. Obviously one of the foundations of horror films, especially vampire films, and one of the primary sources of art films for the next 40 years. (That is - I think Murnau's style, developed here, in the Last Laugh, and so on, becomes something of the model for art cinema until the 60s, maybe, when other traditions - Eisenstein, say - comes back into vogue. It's an idea, anyway...) Thematically, it stacks up well against Stoker's novel, even, itself a perfect grab bag of themes, imagery, social and cultural commentary. Nosferatu's blend of expressionism and romanticism advances a number of gender concerns, psychological themes (Hutter's lack of potency, vs. Orlock's surfeit), the way Ellen takes control of the story; it contains powerful historical echoes - WWI, the inflation, the anxieties (stressed by Sigfried Kracauer) of the Weimar Republic, developing the theme of chaos vs. tyranny, weak, emasculated men vs. superpotent tyrants; it offers, as well, hints of anti-semitism (and anti-Slavism), the fear of the East, the fear of outsiders (themes certainly shared with Stoker's novel); like Stoker, Murnau's film brings out issues of class - the old aristocracy coming back to haunt the middle class, the importance of money, property, commerce; there are scientific interests tucked in - not as explicitly as in Stoker, but there - as well as consideration of nature, man's place in nature, nature red in tooth and claw. Disease, pestilence, predation, and the finality and pervasiveness of death. Add to this, I suppose, hints of a roman a clef, building on relationships among the artistic circles Murnau moved in - it's dense, dense, dense.



And all of this is put together with exquisite skill. Patterns of imagery (arches, spiders, webs, predators and prey, light, vision, frames - windows, doors and mirrors), careful editing, careful and innovative use of text and manipulation of information (Murnau picks up Stoker's multiplicity of texts - the intertitles feature, if I remember it all - text from the chronicle of the plague; text from the book of vampires; letters; a ship's log; and straight dialogue... all running alongside the imagery) - the different sources of information posed against one another, sometimes in synch, but not always. But always combined with great skill. And finally - the sheer imagination of the film's look - from the extremely effective monster, to the use of simple, but haunting special effects - using negatives, stop motion, step printing, and so on. Like so many early films, it revels in its filmicness - I don't think it's an accident that it introduced one of the fundamental rules for vampires, the fatality of sunlight - the reference to cinema is hard to miss. Vampires, like films, are shadows on the wall, in the dark, and turning on the lights, kills them both...



Not much can live up to that, and certainly Universal's Dracula doesn't. It's an interesting case, anyway. I can't deny, it can be unsatisfying - I'm inclined to think it's the weakest of the early Universal horror films. It lacks the mastery James Whale brought to the Frankenstein pictures (those are as good as it gets, really); The Mummy plays, to me, as an improved remake of Dracula, with Karl Freund having figured out how to make films, and a much more balanced cast. (Zita Johann holds her own, even against one of the truly great Karloff performances - the juveniles in Dracula are decidedly dull.) It's maddeningly uneven - in fact, my opinion of it tends to rise and fall depending on how I watch it. Sitting at home with the DVD remote in hand, I can watch the scenes with Lugosi and Dwight Frye and fast forward through the rest - I love it! whenever I sit through the whole thing, all those long conversations in the second half - Overrated!...

But I am here to praise, not complain... The availability of the Spanish version on the DVD sets is a great boon - watching it back to back with the English version is almost a history lesson in the transition from silent to sound films. It also demonstrates what Browning and company did right. The Spanish version gets a lot of praise, sometimes even being said to be better than the English version - I can't go along with that. It definitely has some advantages - the most obvious is that the source print for the DVD is gorgeous, much better than the source for the English DVD - though that shouldn't fool people into thinking the film itself is better. It is also more consistent, without the strange lapses the English version has - the production itself seems more careful and regulated. (Stories of confusion and indifference on the set between Browning and Freund abound.) It seems more confident in its identity as a sound film, though this has a cost, as it means it tends to be played much more theatrically - more on that later. More on the price paid for that consistency, too.... But the main reason the Spanish version falls well short of the English version is the cast. It's true the Spanish film has better juveniles - but the real stars, Dracula, Renfield and Van Helsing - are far far better in the English version.



Edward Van Sloan is the least of the three, but he gives a first rate character performance as the monsters' foil, giving Lugosi and Frye something to play against. And they are magnificent. Lugosi became an icon for good reasons - he makes remarkable use of his presence, his voice, his body - a grand theatrical performance that is even more powerful on a movie screen. He translates into closeups - very well in fact - and film gives him a frame to use his hands and eyes to great effect. You can watch the exchanges between Dracula and Van Helsing just by watching the performers' hands - a gesture here, a clenched fist there - though who would want to give up Van Sloan's little bows? Lugosi's glances and head tilts?



Though even Lugosi is upstaged by Dwight Frye - Renfield is a great role, and he gets everything he can out of it. This makes another interesting comparison with the Spanish version - there, Pablo Alvarez Rubio plays Renfield as a raving lunatic, all wild laughter and huge gestures, which while arresting in its way, has none of the horror and menace Frye gives him. It's surprising how restrained Frye is - or maybe, how important restraint is in Frye's performance. He plays Renfield as though his body were a straightjacket - he speaks as though forcing the words out at great pain. He builds to it, too, seeming to tighten up in every scene, as his possession becomes more complete, and the enormity of his actions seem to dawn on him. His iconic moments - his mad laughter on the ship is as iconic as anything Lugosi does - are all taut, underplayed, constrained moments, that work better for it. (Or maybe you could say, when he exaggerates, he exaggerates the restraint.) His performance is unsettling, even now - he embodies - and here the word is quite literal - the idea of a man fighting with himself, compelled to act against his better nature. He plays it, he moves it. I could watch Frye's scenes over and over, all by themselves. He's almost Peter Lorre at times....



But meanwhile - the Spanish Dracula's consistency is not always to its benefit. It avoids the dull patches and lazy scenes in the English version - but it has none of the heights of the English version. The English film seems to comes into focus whenever Dracula or Renfield is on screen,and not just because of the performers - the compositions usually get better, the staging gets more imaginative. Best of it, the editing gets crisper and smarter. The editing is wildly uneven, like everything else - but parts of the film are quite brisk, especially the first half. The story certainly whips along. This is especially noticeable compared to the Spanish version. The latter is a good deal longer, partly because there is a lot more there (the English version has been cut down severely), but also because the Spanish version is much slower than the English version. Individual scenes are longer because there is more dialogue (more exposition, usually), because they are played slower - and because they are played out in long takes more often, with more space left between speeches. The English version is cut into shot/countershot more often; there is less of it, and it is played faster. It certainly feels as though the cutting has peeled away all the gaps between the speeches - it feels much snappier than the Spanish version. But beyond all this - the fact is, the editing in the English version (when the editors seem to be engaged by the material) is infinitely better than the Spanish version. Its speed helps - it cuts a lot of the transitions, little shots in the Spanish version clarifying what is happening - you see it during Renfield's arrival at Dracula's castle, where the SPanish version makes sure you know the bats are Dracula, and the English version just cuts from Renfield to three bats to Dracula on the stairs. Things like that are not quite jump cuts, but they aren't far off. There are many examples of this - probably the best being Renfield's slow creep toward a fallen maid - the English version cuts away before revealing the real purpose - the Spanish version finishes the act (he is stalking a fly). These choices do things - they speed the film up - they also give it a sense of mystery, of creepiness - rather like the stop motion effects in Nosferatu.

And then, there is one of the film's great moments - Dracula's appearance at Seward's house - a lovely piece of sound and vision editing. They talk about the marks on Mina's neck - "what could have caused them?" Harker asks. "Count Dracula," the maid answers... It's worth asking about sound - these films were made in late 1930, and show the seams. And again, in many ways, the Spanish version seems more at ease with sound than the English version - it seems quite confident about how to play scenes. There are times - more than one - when it feels as though Browning and Freund were baffled by how to deal with sound. But at the same time, they (and their editor - Milton Carruth, as it happens) end up with a much more modern looking film - where the Spanish film is content to play scenes out as on a stage, the English version looks much more like a film. And it is much more aware of sound as an expressive element - they use it to get in and out of scenes more often - the wolf's howl, a gunshot, off screen screams... Sound moves the story, telling us things that we can't see - the murdered flower seller's scream; the coffin lid dropping when Dracula emerges from his tomb, or his death groans at the end. Offscreen sound is important, and at times, used systematically - Renfield, particularly, always announces his approach with laughter or words. In cold fact, once he goes mad, I think we always hear him before we see him - his appearance is always proceeded by sound... I don't want to make too much of this - it is very uneven in this, as in everything - and compared to some of the truly great early sound pictures, M or Blue Angel or Blonde Venus, it's quite mundane. But like so much about this film - when it's good, it's close to great.

Breathless

This is my second contribution to Joseph B's New Wave blogathon - or, since the two started out together, but both got a bit out of hand - part 2 of the first... Anyway - turn our attention to one film... The 400 Blows may be the founding film of the new wave, but for me, the definitive film remains, Breathless. It's the one, the early example, that sets the parameters for the new wave as it developed. It's all there - the jump cuts, the loose style, the movie madness, the appropriation of genres, the natural locations (shooting in the street, often enough), the seedy glamor - all there. And it establishes one of the key elements of these films - their mixed modes of discourse (to get nerdy about it.) In a number of ways - in the sense of appropriating genres and styles (the crime film); in the ways it incorporates other texts and images (newspapers, comics, films, ads, street signs, you name it); in the way it shifts registers - direct addresses to the camera, people stepping out of character, the in jokes, quotes of all sorts... This is a pretty significant change from most previous films: these films, especially Godard, but you get it from quite a bit of the new wave, do not present a unified "discourse" - what you see and hear does not all come from inside the fiction, or have the same relationship to the fiction. These films tell their stories - don't just show them. They keep the forms, the act of telling, of shaping the film, in view. And they don't pretend they are just telling a story that existed somewhere, sometime - their stories come from other texts, they are - the fictions, I mean - performances themselves - they are not to be taken as the real world...

All of which is there from the beginning:



This remains as audacious a film as I have ever seen - it's still more challenging and strange than most of its descendants. That blend of experimentation, art film, genre film, its loose humor, the whole breeziness of the story and style - and its pretty convincing melancholy - still holds up. Because it is beautiful - look at the light and space and smoke in this shot:



And - well - underrated as a straight fiction. Godard can tell a story - can get characters on screen - quick, without conventional detailing, but a shot like this, the first meeting between Michel and Patricia, packs so much of the film's style into it, a style that does sketch these people... Here they are - on the street - back tot he camera (they are indifferent to it, though they never seem to forget it) - moving, as always, the camera moving - glamorous, cool, and a bit shabby...



Finally - since I am eye-deep in Fritz Lang at the moment, it's hard to miss the parallels - not just the imagery, but the themes. Advertisements - newspapers - messages - cityscapes - Breathless is most assuredly a picture of its time, as well. And Godard seems to be aiming for the same deliberate blend of art film and popular film that Lang went for. He never quite masters making popular films in a popular style - but he never leaves the genres and forms behind either. And, like Lang never forgets the importance of information...

Throw in all the references - to Lang himself with his eyepatch and monocle:



Characters framed in shop windows:





Irises:



Ads:



Working class detectives:





And always, the city as media:

50 Years of Nouvelle Vague

Joseph B. at itsamadmadblog has fired up the blogathonatron (ho lord), in honor of the 50th anniversary of the French New Wave. He's following the lead of the BFI, which is running 2 months of Nouvelle Vague films in honor of the same anniversary - specifically, I'd say, the anniversary of the release of The 400 Blows. That makes a pretty good place to start, even if it is a bit arbitrary - Resnais and Chabrol had released important films before then, but The 400 Blows probably marks the break: it played at Cannes, it was the touchpoint for the movement -and probably the first absolute masterpiece of the movement. And that's a good reason to celebrate now....

And we should be celebrating. It might be tempting to underrate the importance of famous moments and movements in film history - to look back at the new wave and shrug it off, note that it's nothing new, or a logical development of what was already there, or, I don't know, all the ways people dismiss revolutionary things. God knows I do it all the time. And there is no doubt that the idea of the "new wave" was quickly abused, using it to be anything - a marketing slogan; a way to dismiss anything innovative, or claim innovation for the same old thing (throw some jump cuts into your genre film and voila! new wave!); a way to reduce other kinds of movements and trends to something already understood (the way the Japanese new wave - which is every bit as innovative and jarring and crucial as the French one is sometimes treated as a kind of replay of the nouvelle vague); an excuse for exploitation films; a way to skate past the individuality of the films and filmmakers working in a "new wave" style - etc. etc. etc. All that is real. And - yes - there probably isn't a good, consistent, way to define new wave - French or otherwise - you can look at it stylistically, historically, as a specific movement (the Cahiers du Cinema, writers, say), as a specific group of filmmakers - you can try to generalize whatever definition you apply to similar revolutions in other film cultures (Japanese new wave, American versions, Young German cinema and New German Cinema, Czech new wave, Cinema Novo, what else? - all of which is still going strong: Hong Kong and Taiwan had new waves in the 80s; Iran in the 80s and 90s; Romanian films of the 2000s are called new wave, etc.) - all right. All that confusion can make the term, the idea, seem dubious - yes it can, but it is just confusion - none of it changes the impact of the Nouvelle Vague. All of that (good bad and indifferent) stands just as well as a testament to the power of the New Wave - because its ghost is in most of those disparate movements and traditions.

Things changed in the 60s for films. A lot of it had nothing to do with the likes of Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard - social, cultural, poitical, economic changes, industrial changes in filmmaking, technological changes - all did what they did. But the new wave directors were usually close to those changes - they may have jumped on the political and social changes after the fact, but they certainly jumped; and they were early to the technological changes (smaller cameras, better sound gear, support for and from television, etc.), the economic and industrial changes (they were independent filmmakers, and worked with the emerging independent and international producers), and so on. But mostly, the nouvelle vague was an artistic revolution. They brought new intellectual life to film - they were critics, cinephiles, many of them intellectuals, and they brought their cultural knowledge, their critical interests, their cinephilia into filmmaking.

And I know - none of that was completely new. The art film was going strong in the 50s, with Bergman, neo-realism and its offshoots in Italy, the beginning of awareness of Japanese films, the appearance of Indian filmmakers like Ray and Ghatak. Many of the big studio systems, Hollywood and Japan, notably, were turning out popular films with very high ambitions and accomplishments. Even the specific twists the new wave brought, their way of blending neo-realism, art cinema, Hollywood films, B-movies, had precedents, especially in Japan: check out some of the mid-50s Ichikawa or Masumura films, or even Kurosawa in that period - Japanese new wave came out of that as much as from French influence. And yet, and yet....



The nouvelle vague clarified things: the appearance of Godard and Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, eventually Rohmer, Moullet - and their fellow travelers, Resnais and Marker and Demy and Varda and the rest - gave the changes a sense of unity, gave other filmmakers a point of reference. It created a focal point for a different kind of art film - one with a bit more freedom than the tradition of Bergman and Antonioni and Fellini. It's an art cinema that could absorb other traditions with fewer limits than its predecessors - popular and genre films, experimental films, documentaries, newsreels - and start inventing its own - the essay film, notably... It sharpened the edges on film style - jump cuts and extravagant angles and rough acting styles and elliptical story telling and new approaches to narrative in many ways - all were boosted by the new wave (if not invented...) And it inspired people around the world - Japanese films may have been doing similar things in the 50s, but several directors quickly incorporated nouvelle vague influences into their work - Oshima, Yoshida, Shinoda, and so on... You see French influences in Italian directors of the 60s, especially Pasolini; Americans picked up on it (as well as our own parallels, like Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke). And so on (Brazil? Germany? eastern Europe?) The nouvelle vague became the model for any film movement with that sense of renewal, and increased adventurousness - even if it's lazy shorthand to call every interesting national movement a Blank New Wave - there are usually real ties. Even if it's just more jump cuts.

Coming soon - an appreciation for what I think is the new wave film, by the new wave director:

German Film History (and 2 examples)

I have fulfilled at least one of my resolutions for 2009 - signing up for a film class, at Harvard Extension. "Masterpieces of German Cinema", it's called - which reminds me of an odd fact about my experience with German films. I have seen a pretty strong representation of the masterpieces of German cinema - certainly, most of the (non-Nazi) films featured in this class. But I have seen very little else from German films. Even the auteurs - other than Herzog, maybe Murnau, it's thin going - 8-10 Fassbinders (what's that, a week's production?), half dozen Wenders, only a couple of Lang's German films, and not much else. And not much German film that isn't sort of a "masterpiece" - a handful of films in the last decade or so, though not many even there... Compared to French films, or Japanese, or Chinese - even Italian - it's well behind those countries, not just in how much I've seen, but how widely I've seen them. No German equivalent for any of the genres I've sampled in other countries (Giallo, kung fu films, anime or Samurai pictures, etc.) I haven't really even read about German films that much - less than French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Indian, African, Iranian, Italian, even Spanish I suspect.... So I hope, even if the screenings are standards, the reading, the lectures, the clips and shorts we cover will significantly expand this knowledge.

Anyway: the class got off to a rousing start, with screenings of the 1913 Student of Prague and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The latter of course is one of the founding text of Canonical German Cinema - the former is a clear precursor of expressionism, horror films - a doppelganger story derived from Poe, featuring some neat double exposures to allow Paul Wegener to play himself and his reflection... it's both a Faust story and a doppelganger story - a sorcerer offers Wegener's student (of Prague) 100,000 marks for any one thing in the student's (very studentlike) room - a good deal! the sorcerer takes his reflection from the mirror - who, as in Poe's William Wilson, or Dostoevski's The Double, (not to mention Rob Lowe) starts showing up at inopportune times, doing terrible things that the student probably thought of first... The student pursues a woman, of course, neglecting, of course, the Poor Gypsy Girl who stalks him... all this ends in tears, and - you can read William Wilson if you need the rest... Caligari is famous enough, I'll skip the long recap - we have a mad scientist, a somnambulist, two friends in love with the same girl, a string of murders, an old book of magic and a diary, flashbacks, and a possibly misbegotten frame story - and a revolutionary and still rather radical design sense.



Though one of the things that struck me watching these two films is that Caligari (made in 1920, already showing a fair amount of understanding of classical cinema codes) looked more archaic, "primitive" than the earlier film. Not because of the sets, which are still dazzling, or the design,but because it does seem to be moving toward that classical style, but using archaic means. It has picked up on the ideas of centering and controlling the image, of creating identification with characters and holding it there - it picks out the important elements of the shot, makes most of its meaning from shot to shot, rather than within shots - all classical conventions. But it still has the older tableau style staging - fairly long shot lengths - and it doesn't really use editing to construct the story. It uses lighting - and irises and other masks, where later films would cut (or wipe or what have you.) It looks odd - creating montage like effects without montage....

Student of Prague, on the other hand, looks surprisingly modern. Part of the reason for this is that it's aesthetic has reappeared - mostly in art films, new wave, etc. It's shot mostly in long takes, usually in fairly deep spaces, and uses a lot of the "tableau technique" David Bordwell has discussed. Decentralized framings, multiple planes of action, a certain freedom in the frame - things happen that seem unrelated to the story. In class, this was used to illustrate pre-classical structures - the dispersal of action in the frame, vs. the concentration and control of classical cinema. True enough - but it's also controlled quite well. The filmmakers do a fine job of directing attention - and of shifting attention, or creating multiple points of interest. The opening sequence is a fine example: Balduin, the student, comes to a cafe - but he is broke and bored and sits apart from his friends, though they try to get him to join the party. The dancing girl (who has an eye for him) dances on a table, but he doesn't care. Finally - Scapalini the sorcerer turns up and he and Balduin share a table and a chat. Balduin wants a lottery ticket and a woman - Scapalini says he can do that. They leave together....

All that is one shot. It's a big open space, a cafe - though the cafe is ranged around the back of the shot. There is a table in the foreground... The filmmakers use this space wonderfully. The cafe is full of people - all in the back of the shot though - there is an open space in the left foreground. Three students enter from the bottom left of the screen - focusing our attention on them. But they lead us back into the crowd - except one of them, Balduin, circles through the cafe and comes back into the foreground, in front of the rest of the people, and sits at the table facing us. This creates two levels of space - the bustle in the back (decentered, dispersed, etc.) and Balduin, alone, in the foreground. HIs friends come and talk to him, connecting the two, but he ignores them - they go back and the girl emerges, climbs on a table and dances - intensifying the division of our interest. Balduin ignores her - she dances - a spectacle to us, but she is staring intently at Balduin all the time... And then - a wagon comes through the frame, cutting off the background all at once, as effectively as a curtain falling. Scapalini gets off the wagon and sits beside Balduin. The wagon rolls off - now the cafe behind them is empty, expect for the girl. And the filmmakers continue their use of multiple points of interest - as Balduin and Scapalini talk, the girl creeps up on them, trying to seem or hear - they never notice her, but we are very much aware of her. And finally, when the men leave, she creeps after them, still unnoticed.... It's a fine piece of stagecraft - and filmmaking - using the camera compositions to define the staging - using on and offscreen space, but through stagecraft (like the horse) and camera movements, or just entrances and exits. It carefully modulates our attention from foreground to background, from the crowd to he characters, and between the characters... The rest of the film, though less brilliant, probably, is similarly handled - a consistently fine use of space, staging, the borders of the camera's frame, multiple planes within the shot, use of doors and internal frames to expand and contract the space of the shot, and so on.

It looks modern because much of this has been picked up by art films (primarily) - and it looks less outdated than Caligari because later films tended to pick up these devices fairly straight. Staging and composition is staging and composition, especially within long shots - the means of editing have changed quite a bit since 1920 (let alone 1913) - but a long take of a more or less coherent space is a long take now... It is interesting to see how certain strands of film history get picked up, half a century or so later (and then off and on since then)...