Ferdy on Films, etc.

Douce (1943)
Director: Claude Autant-Lara
Screenwriters: Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost

By Marilyn Ferdinand

One of my favorite directors is Bertrand Tavernier. I haven’t come anywhere near to seeing all his films, but I’ve tried to take advantage of every opportunity that comes along. I was fortunate enough to see the terrific cop drama L.627 at the 2002 Ebertfest and watch Roger interview Tavernier. Little did I know that when his then-newest film, Laissez-passer (Safe Conduct), played at the Gene Siskel Film Center a few days later, I would see Tavernier again and get a chance to participate briefly in an informal chat he was having with some other film fans in the lobby of the theatre. It was easy for me to see why he can make such wonderful films—he’s a genuinely nice man.

The reason I bring Tavernier up here is that Laissez-passer chronicles the world of French filmmaking during the World War II German occupation of France. The film is based on a memoir of one of the screenwriters of that time, Jean-Devaivre, and features as one of its main characters Jean Aurenche, depicted as a bon vivant who manages to stay just the right side of the stern Germans who man Continental Films, the German production company that controlled the French film industry, in general, and its French employees, in particular. I was utterly captivated by Tavernier’s film, his comments about the period he was depicting, and a whole era of films I knew nothing about. I set about learning, seizing whatever opportunities I could to view the mainly escapist entertainment of the time that nonetheless bred some of the great French filmmakers to come—Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville, and others. Fortunately, the Siskel Center ran a series of these films in 2005, and now, DOC Films at the University of Chicago is doing the same on Tuesday nights this spring. The hubby and I took the long drive to the South Side to view Douce last night, and it was certainly worth the trip.

Douce, an historical drama typical of this era, tells a story of love and ambition in class-conscious 19th century Paris. The film takes place near Christmas. The story opens on snowfall created by trick photography—rather distracting—but settles down as the camera ventures into a church and into a confessional, where a heavily veiled woman is being grilled by a priest about a love affair she is having. Listing the various impediments to a happy union, the priest finally hits on the right one—low born. The priest is appalled and tells her a horrible fate awaits her and her lover if they should go through with their plan. “I want to be happy," she answers defiantly. “Do you want me to grant you absolution?" he asks accusingly. “Well, I won’t." She storms out of the confessional and the church, leaving her umbrella behind.

In a nifty segue, a feeble-minded young man is sent to return the umbrella to its owner. He is cautiously admitted through the gates of a stately home. When the front door opens for him, we are admitted into the opulent, pampered world of the wealthy de Bonafé family. Loyal servant Estelle (Gabrielle Fontan) fusses and musses about, then calls Mademoiselle Irène (Madeleine Robinson). A beautiful and elegant woman emerges onto the long, balustraded hallway of the upper floor. Estelle says a boy has come with the umbrella she left at church. “What did you give him?" a somewhat startled Irène asks. “My umbrella," replies Estelle. “He needs something to get home."

Irène returns to her needlepoint and hands Douce (Odette Joyeux), a young lady in her charge, a wooden egg used for darning socks. The egg has “Trouville," a seaside resort, burned into its side. Douce gets very excited: “You know Trouville?" “No," says Irène. “It was a gift from some people who had been there." Douce listens to a thumping above her head. She is annoyed. “Doesn’t he know how it sounds?!" she says in exasperation. Irène warns her to be more respectful of her father and sympathetic with the fact that he has to walk on a wooden leg, and then questions her about the umbrella. At this point, it becomes clear that Irène is Douce’s governess, and Douce is the well-born young lady in love with an inferior.

This surprising reversal sets up a subtle dynamic that infuses the rest of the film with commentary on social climbing and stifling social roles. With great dexterity, Bost and Aurenche manipulate a simple love story with a hundred small, telling moments. The first, of course, is our assumption that Irène is the mistress of the house. Indeed, she is aiming exactly for that position, having noticed and cultivated widower Engelbert de Bonafé’s (Jean Debucourt) attraction to her. The fact that he is a cripple and considers himself a failure—his leg wasn’t even lost in war but in a riding accident that was his own fault—and Douce his only success marks him as a relic of the past being overtaken by the schemers of the present. We know that Irène, though very tightly self-controlled throughout the film, is one of those schemers because he finds her in his library reshelving a book she has finished, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Her partner and lover is Fabien Marani (Roger Pigaut), manager of the family’s estate. Of course, Douce is in love with him, but he wants Irène to emigrate with him to Quebec and be out from under the humiliating, controlling thumb of the de Bonafés. With a financially advantageous marriage within her grasp, Irène rejects him. Marani pursues her, planning to tell all to Engelbert and his mother, the wickedly imperious Madame de Bonafé (Marguerite Moreno), but Douce intervenes. Les Liaisons Dangereuses does indeed seem to be the driving narrative of this film as it unwinds to a sad, inevitable conclusion. The classes should not, must not mix. The worst curse Madame de Bonafé can cast on Fabien and Irène is that they remain together, trapped in their low-born status.

Douce was the first film scripted by the so-called “Tradition of Quality" team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Tradition of Quality films were dubbed as such by the leading critics of the 1940s and 1950s for their academic production values, basis in traditional literary classics, and theatrical scripting. I might add that the work of Aurenche and Bost, frequent collaborators of Autant-Lara, is where I would place the quality. Their writing is extremely witty and subtle when they are going for social commentary. Marguerite Moreno certainly had a plum role as the Grand Dame of the house. Her lines and actions would have been buffoonish if they hadn’t been closely observed and written. When she goes through her closet to choose items to give to the poor tenants on her land for Christmas, she holds back one jacket. “That’s too good," she instructs Irène, saying (I paraphrase), “It will only depress the people because they will see the heights to which they never can aspire." When she calls on her tenants, she brings Irène and Fabien with her to carry the clothes and soup. One tenant gets up to heat a bowl of soup for herself and her husband. “No, no," says Madame, “It’s my turn to serve you. Irène, put the soup on the stove."

Some quibbles. Joyeux looked too old to still be dressing like a child, and Joyeux, Robinson, and Pigaut have a severe, mannered acting style. The love talk between Pigaut and the two women is the ultimate in purple prose, as well. The film takes a somewhat predictable turn to tragedy, but it was startling to me because up until then I had been watching a very funny comedy of manners. The overly melodramatic elements made me all too aware that there was a moral to this story. I wonder, in fact, whether the German honchos might have insisted that the story reflect a superior/inferior class ethos to suggest the depravity of “mixing." But this is mere conjecture.

Interestingly, Tradition of Quality films were condemned by André Bazin and his protégé, François Truffaut. This condemnation reflected the desire for a purely cinematic art form not beholden to literary tradition, ushering in the naturalism of the French New Wave and other film movements of the 1960s that took their inspiration from the French movement. However, according to John Hess:

Truffaut denounces these men (as well as the cinema they represent) for their irreverence toward the literary works they adapt (most of the scripts and films in question were literary adaptations), their anti-clerical and anti-militarist stances, their pessimism and negativity, their 'profanity' and 'blasphemy.' His concerns here show the utter conventionality and the extreme cultural and political conservatism of his views on art. These scriptwriters’ irreverence toward their sources, the great French literary masterpieces (in some cases at least), reveals to Truffaut their lack of concern for tradition and conventional values, Truffaut sees the cinema d'auteurs as a return to the eternal verities and the classical French values of the enlightenment and romanticism. His opposition to their insertion of anti-militarist and anti-clerical stances into the works they adapted is a defense of art’s autonomy. No social or political views, those dreaded 'messages,' are to mar the purity of art. Art must be free of all outside influences, Truffaut thought.

Truffaut also objects to pessimism and negativity because he holds the opposite view of the potentiality of (at least some) human beings. And these special human beings, not the common person, are to be the fit subject of art, Here Truffaut is also opposing the deterministic view of life which often prevailed in the French cinema of the 1940’s and 1950’s, a view of life which had its origin in Zola’s Naturalism. Finally by objecting to the 'profanity' and 'blasphemy' in many French films, Truffaut declares his allegiance to Catholicism, the continual target of the French Left. For, as stated in Part One of this article, la politique des auteurs was a recapitulation on the level of culture of the bourgeoisie’s forceful reassertion of power in the decade after the war. Aurenche and Bost were the products and representatives of the era of the Popular Front and the Resistance, the ethos of which Truffaut opposes.

It is interesting to read that the intellectuals and filmmakers who ushered in the breath of fresh air we think of as the French New Wave were, perhaps, the reactionaries, and that the German-controlled masters of the Tradition of Quality films were, perhaps, the revolutionaries. Douce is a highly entertaining, well-written, if somewhat mannered example of a very high quality of filmmaking indeed.l

“Our Backstreets" #17
A Critical Question

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This past week at Cinema Styles, Jonathan Lapper linked to a column by controversial New York Press critic Armond White that was, frankly, a mess. I can’t really tell you what he was driving at exactly because he appeared to be tripping while resting his hands on his computer’s keyboard. But others boiled it down to this: “My opinions are right, and if you don’t agree with me, you’re an asshole." The column appeared to be triggered by the adulatory articles about ailing film critic Roger Ebert, most notably one appearing in White’s hometown—and rival—newspaper, The New York Times. Perhaps he wasn’t tripping—he might have just been brain-addled from banging his head against the wall in frustration that the proverbial thumbs-up weren’t for him.

A lively discussion ensued during which we commenters wondered about our own styles of blogging and criticism, what we liked in films, DVD extras, and other things film buffs like to talk about. But are we really film buffs—amateurs—or have we crossed the line to become real critics? Here’s what Andrew O’Hehir said in a Salon article:

Former New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed years ago that the film critic's pose of being an ordinary moviegoer is just that. You can't watch 100 or 150 or 200 films a year and be an ordinary moviegoer; you become a specialist with a defined aesthetic and rarefied tastes in some direction or other. Whether that direction lies in Thai kickboxing films or Tarkovsky-esque meditations on the soul is purely a question of temperament.

I think it’s interesting that Canby and O’Hehir don’t specify formal training as being the hallmark of a film critic—they emphasize the act of watching movies as the crucial factor in developing an aesthetic. Nonetheless, can any avid film enthusiast really go beyond the expressing of an opinion and into what used to be the formal discipline of criticism without multidisciplinary training in the arts, in general, and film, specifically? Here’s another quote from one of my favorite movies, Metropolitan:

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?

Tom Townsend: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.

Tom Townsend’s preference for nonfiction as a more real experience than actually reading a novel is an interesting one to ponder. Some of us read criticism either because we can’t get our hands on the films under consideration or because we’re more interested in the ideas found in cinema, be it of a genre, an artist, or a style/school of filmmaking. Most of us wouldn’t go as far as Tom by only reading about, not watching movies. Nonetheless, when one does see, as Canby says, 200 (or more) films a year, a certain malaise can settle in, a feeling that we’ve seen it all before, a sense like Tom’s that the tried-and-true formulas that have powered so many films in the past 100 years remind us that it’s not real, that we’ve been seduced by our addiction to storytelling and somehow are spending too much time escaping real life and not really engaging with it. Perhaps an intrinsic and valuable knowledge or philosophy worthy of formal criticism may actually have little or nothing to do with the business of moviemaking.

Are we making a mountain out of a molehill, elevating a low form through pretentious points of view and false meaning-making? I find a lot of instruction and comfort for what I am doing in the introduction to James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

There are many invisible circumstances, which whether we read as enquirers after natural or moral knowledge, whether we intend to inlarge our science or increase our virtue, are more important than publick occurrences. Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not forgot in his account of Catiline to remark, that his walk was now quick, and again slow, as an indication of a mind revolving with violent commotion. Thus the story of Melancthon affords a striking lecture on the value of time, by informing us, that when he had made an appointment, he expected not on the hour, but the minute to be fixed, that the day might not run out in the idleness of suspense; and all the plans and enterprises of De Witt are now of less importance to the world than that part of his personal character, which represent him as careful of his health, and negligent of his life. … If a life [biography] be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.

This quote reminds me that the actions of any person, whether real or fictional, can create meaning. Anyone can give an opinion, and the value of that opinion is based on the views of the person receiving it—not on the person giving it. Training to be a professional critic—as in one whose opinions are thought valuable enough to pay for—may include formal study at a university, but it also involves the expansion of one’s critical thoughts through experience. It is through the act of the inquiring mind that the miracle of insight can occur. So I feel that I am both a film buff and a real critic, and perhaps the two never can or should be divorced. In my opinion, a critic who dismisses the populist nature of film viewing and the unpaid ranks of volunteer film critics on the Internet and elsewhere who exemplify the love that is the Latin/French root of the word “amateur," it is this type of critic who has degraded the discourse on film and who keeps it trapped in the business part of show business. l

Fright Night (1985)
Director: Tom Holland

By Marilyn Ferdinand

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted in a few days. There’s a reason for that—it’s been a bad week. I had a minor car accident on Monday that has the potential to get a bit sticky, though I’m still hoping for the best. I spent much of Tuesday evening helping a doctoral student prepare for her oral defense; her reward to me was a Korean-style massage, which involved getting twisted, flung about, and pounded on (actually, it was great, but a lot more active than I’m used to). On Wednesday, I had meetings up the yin yang and then found a ticket for an expired license plate on the hubby’s car, which I had borrowed for the day so the insurance investigator could photograph my car. Oh, and in case you're wondering why I have no report from Champaign, I missed Ebertfest on the weekend because of work I had to do for the aforementioned doctoral candidate. All in all, not the best atmosphere for creative writing, BUT a very good opportunity to watch something extremely silly to get my mind off my admittedly minor, but still nagging, problems. What better way to do that than to dip into an ’80s horror spoof? Fright Night was just what the doctor ordered.

I have to admit that the 1980s represent one of my favorite movie eras. I’m not necessarily talking about the great films of that decade, such as My Dinner with Andre, Ragtime, Blade Runner, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and others. I’m talking about a certain look, sound, and sensibility of many of the decade’s films that are so much fun to revisit—the big hair, the fashion disasters that we thought were so hip and funky, and the technopop music with a driving backbeat that turns you into a bobblehead whether you like it or not. All of these wonderfully awful ’80s artifacts are on splendid display in Fright Night.

The story is pretty simple. Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is a typical horny teenage boy. The film opens with him making out with his perky girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse) on his bedroom floor while his favorite TV show, “Peter Vincent: Vampire Killer," plays in the background. When she refuses to go all the way, Charley gets mad. They’ve been going together for a year, after all. Charley looks out his window to avoid Amy’s hurt gaze. He doesn’t notice that she has moved to his bed and is willing to give him what he wants. He’s too busy watching an elaborate coffin being moved into the house next door. Naturally, Amy is insulted and leaves.

The next day, Charley passes a very attractive woman on the street who is looking for the address of his new next-door neighbor. I had to be told by the hubby that she was a hooker, because a lot of women dressed like her back then—tight, short skirt in an impossibly bright blue; big, blonde hair; shocking nail polish. Naturally, Charley sees her again, stripping in his neighbor’s window. Leering lasciviously at her through binoculars—also a very ’80s accoutrement in movies—he gets a big shock when he sees the man of the house bite her. A very cool shot of three rivulets of blood trickling down her bare back caps the scene.

Charley is sure his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon) is a vampire. When he tries to confront Dandridge, he is stopped by smarmy Renfield-like houseboy Billy (Jonathan Stark). To stop Charley from snooping, Dandridge trashes Charley's already trashy-looking car; don't ask me how that's an effective deterrent.

Now Charley is in full vampire hunter mode. He insults Amy yet again by his obsession with the vampire instead of her, brings a cop over to the home of the vampire to see the coffin and realize that the murders being reported in town—in a very blasé way, I might add—is Dandridge’s doing. The cop laughs and leaves. Like any self-respecting teen-centered movie, after introducing Charley’s clueless single mother (Dorothy Fielding), she is brought in one more time to perform a plot twist—inviting the vampire into her home—and then is never seen again.

Charley, now in grave danger because the vampire can enter his home at will, tracks Peter Vincent down at the TV studio. Vincent’s show has just been cancelled, and he waves Charley off with the whole “it was just an act" routine. However, Amy and Charley’s nerdy friend Evil (Stephen Geoffreys) somehow finally decide to take up Charley’s cause. Amy appeals to Vincent to help, offering a $500 savings bond as payment. He takes the job, of course, and eventually must help rescue Amy, a lookalike of Dandridge’s lost love, from being turned into a vampire herself.

Like just about every woman alive, I’ve got a thing for vampires. Not like every woman (or man, for that matter) I find Chris Sarandon’s face disturbingly out of proportion—kind of a massive head with a tiny, straight-down nose. Oddly, however, Sarandon as a vampire was kind of attractive. A Keanu Reeves lookalike, William Ragsdale showed about the same acting chops as Reeves—earnest, but not very convincing. At least he couldn’t convince anyone that Sarandon’s character was a vampire. Roddy McDowall had to notice Sarandon didn’t appear in McDowall’s hand mirror to be convinced.

The film has its obligatory smoky disco scene, with Dandridge in ’80s dressed-to-kill garb hypnotizing Amy and bringing her onto the dance floor. Suddenly, Amy is transformed into an ’80s-style vamp, her perky, barrette-clad hair poofed into serious big hair and her unadorned face painted and seductive. We get a lot of disco-beat close-ups of Dandridge manhandling Amy, putting his hand up her skirt (that even shocked me and the hubby a bit), and then whisking her off to his lair, with Charley in hot pursuit. The corny vampire-hunting scenes in Dandridge’s home reveal some of the silliest-looking vampires I’ve ever seen. Roddy, with his clown-whited hair, is perfection in a seriocomic role, performing with conviction to give the kids in the audience a thrill while maintaining a certain ironic distance.

This isn’t great art, and it’s not even a major comic addition to the vampire canon. But, all the “don’t worry, be happy vibes" of the 1980s found in the abundant tongue-in-cheek horror movies of the era—in its own way, much smarter than the humor of today—still makes for a great evening of popcorn movie-watching. l

An Interview with Errol Morris on the Occasion of His New Movie, Standard Operating Procedure

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There are few film fans and no documentary buffs who don't know the name Errol Morris. During a long and distinguished career, Morris helped free an innocent man from prison with his investigative documentary The Thin Blue Line, had Gates of Heaven made one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies, and finally won an Oscar for his 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Morris' skillful blend of interviews, reenactments, and archival and new footage moved the documentary form away from the monotonous talking-head format and toward a more engaging, contemplative form. His new film, Standard Operating Procedure, mixes his time-tested techniques with the infamous photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to help viewers get beyond the borders of the images and consider the bigger picture. How could an American president and his staff approve of torture and how could the American Congress and public sit quietly by and let the low-level MPs take all the blame?

My interview with Morris took place on April 15, 10 days before the film's official opening. After a rocky start, we settled into a more contemplative conversation about what seems to be the (hopefully) temporary insanity of the American populace and America's need to come to terms with a radical change in its self-image dating back perhaps as far as Vietnam. I hope to post an audio link to the entire interview very soon, but this article represents a nearly complete transcript of the entire interview. My comments are in italics.

After watching this film, I felt that the people in it were guilty as hell and being self-justifying.

Let me ask you a question. What is Sabrina Harman guilty of?

I would say that she participated in some of these abuses, and she didn’t speak up.

What would you have done if you had been at Abu Ghraib the night of Al-Jamadi’s murder, you saw that all of your commanding officers were participating in a cover-up, you realized that much of what was going on around you was a matter of policy, what would you have done?

It’s a difficult question. If it were me, I probably would have excused myself and gone somewhere else.

You’re in the middle of a war zone. Where do you go?

To my quarters, anywhere away from the abuse. But it’s a tight situation. The Army is chain of command. I suppose if you’re told to shut up, that’s exactly what you do. That’s what they felt they needed to do. But I will also say…

And yet Sabrina took these pictures.

And that’s a good question. Why? She said it was in order to document what was going on. There were a number of people who took videos, a number of people who took photographs, several hundred.

Thousands. And it was an amnesty period where the guy who essentially ran the prison ordered the destruction of all the evidence. These were not destroyed, I think, for one simple reason: they provided evidence to deflect blame from people who were really responsible.

And yet if they were destroyed, nobody would have ever known.

Why do you say that?

No physical evidence.

How do you think the media have become aware of these photographs?

I imagine somebody turned them over to a newspaper, a journalist.

Which is what happened. We live in a digital age in which it’s very easy to take photographs and easier to distribute photographs around the world. Hard to destroy everything. The photographs taken of Al-Jamadi, the corpse, we wouldn’t have any knowledge of this murder if they had not been taken by Ivan Frederick, Chuck Graner, and Sabrina Harman. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder or the cover-up. The people responsible have never been charged with the crime. In this instance, what makes them the center of evil?

I don’t think they’re the center of evil and I’m not trying to suggest that they are. I’m merely suggesting that was my reaction when I watched this film, and that I would have liked to get interviews with higher-ups.

I was not interested in interviews with higher-ups. If people want the same cookie-cutter movie about Iraq, there are plenty you can go see.

But you talk about putting the photographs in a context, otherwise we don’t really understand what we’re seeing.

And to that end, am I required to interview every single person in the U.S. government? You have so much god-damned context. America puzzles me at the moment. There is an immense amount written about the higher-ups. What the fuck does America need to be convinced that the material is staring them in the face? Do they have to be hit over the head with a smoking gun? What would you like? What is your dream interview that you would have liked to have heard in this particular movie to clarify things for you?

Not to clarify…

Then to do what?

If you’re only going to present, just as in a trial, only the evidence that the lawyers want you to hear. I’ve been on a jury, and I had lots of questions that I was not allowed to ask. I only got what they wanted me to see, and from my point of view, if I just look at what these people are saying and what they’re doing…

If it seems like I’m saying they’re lily white, I’m not saying that, and my apologies, because I’m not making that argument. But I’m making a somewhat different argument that…hard to know where to even start. You look at a photograph, you think you know what the photograph is about. You don’t. You look at the photograph of Sabrina Harman smiling next to Al-Jamadi’s corpse, you think she’s responsible for the murder. She isn’t.

To me, which is the worse crime—the thumb up or murder? People don’t see the murder. People are obsessed with the thumb and the smile. It’s an essay on the Cheshire Cat. You see the smile, you don’t see the cat.

You see what you want to see. I think that does stick out more than the gruesomeness. You can only handle so much gruesomeness, and there is a level of disbelief in the American public. These are not who Americans are.

It’s denial. Much easier for all of us to blame the seven bad apples. That’s the easy way out. I think it’s really interesting and I don’t think any accident here that both the left and the right accept them as monsters. It doesn’t matter. The left says, oh, they’re monsters because of the three-headed monster in the wings—Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. That three-headed monster made them into monsters in its own image. The right says no, no, no, no. They’re monsters to be sure, but they’re monsters because they’re monstrous, self-directed monsters, rogue monsters. Seven bad apple monsters. But monsters, both left and right.

It allows us to blame somebody, to actually push this away from ourselves and not deal with it. It allows us actually not to look any further than the photographs because then we can say, “Oh this is it. Done. Finito."

It seems a theme through a number of your films to take the monster and put a human face on.

This is correct. Thank you.

I think this film carries on in that grand tradition. I also think it will be misunderstood.

I think all of them have been. Look, you’re talking about a film that’s coming out about a story that has fingerprints all over it. This is not The Thin Blue Line, this is not a story that people don’t care about, that they don’t know about. Everybody knows about it. They’ve seen the pictures. Along I come claiming there’s a story hidden here that hasn’t been seen that is also a story about scapegoating, that Abu Ghraib really needs to be investigated. It never has been. The photographs I think effectively prevented an investigation. Easier just to look at Lynndie England or Chuck Graner or Sabrina Harman and say this is the problem.

I even think the bad apples got George Bush reelected in 2004 because they gave him someone to blame. It’s them, not me. You want to know why the war is going south, why the insurgency is growing, why there are all these beheading videos. Actually, with the beheading videos it's even more cause and effect. These guys embarrassed America. The crime here is so perverse and so odd, is not the stuff depicted in any one picture, it’s the existence of the pictures embarrassing the administration, embarrassing the Army, embarrassing America.

Why did they do it? Why did they photograph these things? Why did they video them?

Go back to Sabrina. In a way it’s an essential question and I don’t pretend that I have some definitive answer. I think, in general, we photograph things because reality is peculiar. Maybe we need to stop it and look at it and memorialize it so we can scrutinize it at some later time, refresh our memory of our own experiences.

Sabrina says she took the pictures, she says this again and again in the letters, to expose the military as “nothing but lies." She was lied to. She also knew that a lot of the things around her—this is just the opposite of the faceless automaton picture we’re given of these people—she was aware that what she was doing was wrong. She was aware that there was some horrendous moral compromise here. She was uneasy with it. She imagined…that was a way of creating moral distance, but it was also a way of analyzing and also perhaps imagining yourself as the whistle-blower, imagining yourself as standing up against this. I somehow think that some of those pictures were acts of disobedience. They were saying, “We know what you’re doing. We can show people what you’ve been up to, the real cards you have in your hand." The real irony of it is the pictures were turned around and used against them. They thought that in many instances they were protecting themselves.

It’s unfortunate that you were not allowed to talk to Graner. Graner certainly did seem to be the ringleader. Did you get that impression?

My impression is that this all comes down to one night, the night of the pyramid. There was horrible, horrible abuse in that place that goes far beyond some photographs. We’re fighting a war of humiliation—sexual humiliation. We have been from the very beginning, a war, I guess, to show Saddam who’s boss, who’s got the biggest stick. We’re a country of 300 million people who had a foreign policy of "Kill Saddam." I don’t mean a foreign policy for the Iraq region or the Middle East. That was our complete foreign policy, the sum of it. What I’ve watched is a story of humiliation and rehumilitation, the administration’s attempt to humiliate Saddam, the use of women in American military prisons—American women to humiliate prisoners.

Do you think that was a specific directive to them?

Absolutely. It’s one of the sickest things about this war—how women have been used. To think the fact that there are women in the military, suddenly the military is egalitarian. I think there’s a sick—I don’t know how to describe it any other way—undercurrent to all of this. Using American women to humiliate Iraqi men.

Which is simultaneously humiliating to the women, who didn’t want to be in the picture in the first place.

There you go. I often think that Graner in his crazy-type way when he put Lynndie at the other end of that tiedown strap and took the picture and later cropped Megan Ambuhl out of the picture, that he was creating a little vignette about the war, you know, American male dominating his American girlfriend, who in turn is dominating an Iraqi man. It’s a crazy, crazy story. These bad apples humiliate America. The administration tries to humiliate them, and so it goes.

Somehow, we remain blissfully unaware of the real nature of this war, the real content.

I was looking at some polls, and only two weeks after the photos came out, the public were already not wanting to see them anymore. They said, the press has covered this too much, they were wrong to show those photographs. Just two weeks after, when earlier they said, this is an outrage. The American psyche switched that fast.

I really want to know where you read that stuff. That’s really fabulous.

I’m not saying anything remotely original or even interesting—we live in a world of spin. There’s a glut of information. It’s spun, the photographs come out, they essentially become a political football. Nobody stops to say maybe we should find out what really transpired there. There’s tons of investigations, a laundry list of investigations, none of which really produce a conception of what went on, almost as if the goal was obfuscation, and it becomes this crazy, polarized world where we’re all concerned with blame.

There’s information out there. If we wanted to, we could impeach this president. How many torture memos do you need to see before you realize the administration is into torture? The odd thing about the world we live in now is do people care about the information that’s right in front of them? I thought, and this is a crazy idea, to come at the story in a different way. It may irritate people because they have their own ideas of what the story should be, but if you approach it in a completely different way, you’re liable to find out something that people don’t know about. If you’re following that same herd path, the chances of finding something are much, much, much less.

It goes back to that Cheshire Cat concept. We see the smile, and we don’t see the murder. It’s almost a metaphor for the entire war. You can’t force people to see what they don’t want to see, what they’re not predisposed to see. I don’t really know how things have gotten to this point, it’s one of the great mysteries of America at the moment. The values that make this country a great one seem to be forgotten. And one value that I keep going back to is It’s a Wonderful Life and Potterville. It’s a movie in part about little guys sticking together against the big, bad guy. It’s almost like a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where we’ve jumped to blaming the little guys, that Potter and his cronies can walk away scot-free. I’m a populist. It’s not a level playing field, no society will ever be, but you can pay lip service to it, you can try to move in the direction of greater rather than lesser equality.

You don’t watch the big guys pin medals on each other’s chests and the little guys go to jail. I think restoring them as people is important, I really do. It’s a first step. I bristle at the idea of seeing them as evil incarnate because it’s a way of abdicating our own role.

If we don’t face our shadows, we’ll never conquer them.

I think you have to and I think one of our great shadows is this war. I feel it much more so than I did of the war during which I came of age—Vietnam. This one seems crazier to me. Maybe it’s ideology that I didn’t grow up with, but it’s hard to see rhyme or reason in any of this, and it’s hard to know why there is so little opposition in Congress and America to it.

Can we have an update on “Nub City"?

I still want to make it, I have the script. There’s two kind of quasi horror movies that I wanted to make. One of them is “Nub City" and the other the movie about Ed Gein. I think of all the movies I’ve wanted to make that I haven’t made. I’m too slow. Doing this kind of movie is just plain exhausting. But I hope it sparks questions. l

My review of Standard Operating Procedure is here. Be sure to read Errol Morris' blog on the New York Times.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
Director: Errol Morris

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Early in 2004, the world got a firsthand, uncensored, unorchestrated look at what American troops were doing in one corner of Iraq—Abu Ghraib, a prison formerly used by Saddam Hussein to detain and execute enemies of the state and then (and now) under the control of American and Coalition forces. Like Saddam, the American military used Abu Ghraib for the detention of suspected spies and insurgents and carried out interrogations there. The American military police who served as the prison’s guards were instructed to “soften up" the prisoners for interrogation, and by example and specific instruction, very little was off limits in the discharge of that duty. Just how little became clear as hundreds of the thousands of pictures taken by the MPs who performed this pre-interrogation softening were leaked to the press and made public.

Images of naked Iraqi men apparently being taunted by female MPs Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman and posed in a human pyramid shocked the nation. Other photos of humiliation showed prisoners handcuffed in stress positions with women’s panties on their heads. One particularly heinous scare tactic was the use of attack dogs. And of course, the iconic photo of a prisoner nicknamed Gilligan dressed in sack cloth and a hood, awkwardly balanced on a box, his outstretched arms attached to wires became the image of torture Americans now had to understand was being done in their name. Perhaps predictably, the American public blinked. The “bad apples" were prosecuted, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was relieved of her command of the 800th MP Brigade in Iraq and busted down to colonel, and Abu Ghraib receded back into its dark, dirty corner. Out of sight, out of mind.

Errol Morris didn’t forget. After an exploratory interview with Karpinski, he determined that the story of Abu Ghraib hadn’t been fully explored, that the pictures had, in fact, closed down a wider investigation of the truth because they made it so easy to point a finger at the grunts on the ground and be done with it. Morris was sure that there was a story outside the frames of those pictures, a human face to the low-ranked monsters who were punished that deserved to be seen as well, a cover-up to be investigated. Returning to the investigative mode he so brilliantly executed with The Thin Blue Line, Morris doggedly pursued interviews and information, eventually getting Javal Davis, Tony Diaz, Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl Graner, Sabrina Harman, Janis Karpinski, Roman Krol, and Jeremy Sivits—all prosecuted or otherwise punished for the abuse—to speak with him. Former Abu Ghraib MPs Ken Davis and Jeffrey Frost provided their version of events. Military interrogator Tim Dugan discussed what he saw and gave his opinion of the effectiveness of the MPs’ softening techniques. Finally, Brent Pack, a special agent for the Criminal Investigations Division, showed how he put together a timeline of events and corroborating evidence of who took part in the abuse through the use of the photographs themselves.

Morris introduces us to the prison first. We learn about an elaborate tour of the facility that was planned for Secretary Rumsfeld’s visit in September 2003. Rumsfeld entered the room where hangings took place under Saddam, then hurriedly left the prison with an offhand “fine, fine" comment. When Major General Geoffrey Miller visited Abu Ghraib a day later, the results were more “fruitful." He intended to run the prison in Gitmo fashion, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez issued the now infamous Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy for Iraq, which tacitly and explicitly authorized certain forms of torture and humiliation in opposition to the Geneva Convention. With the necessary instructions now in place, the 372nd MP Company took up their duties in Abu Ghraib.

Specialist Sabrina Harman’s letters to her “wife" Kelly start spelling out the oddity of some of the sights she’s witnessing. She snaps photos of a prisoner who is handcuffed to his bed with panties on his head. She continues to document many of the abuses she sees. She explains to Kelly that she is keeping a photographic record in case the incidents get them in trouble. She does not, however, refuse to appear in the pictures, often with the thumbs-up pose that seems so callous to the general public.

Lynndie England, of leashed-prisoner photo fame, says all her troubles stem from a man—in this case Corporal Charles Graner, her lover, and a man officials refused to let speak to Morris. Graner seems to have been the ringleader for most of the staged photos of prisoner humiliation. England did what he said out of love and at other times, out of persistent coercion. She was, she said, unwilling to stand by one of the Iraqis who was forced to masturbate and only did so when Graner gave her little option. England also didn’t notice that Megan Ambuhl, who was present during many such incidents, was cropped out of the photos being taken by her secret lover and current husband—Charles Graner. Morris restores the original framing of one photo to show us the reality beyond the edges of the image.

This perspective is exactly what underlies Morris’ purposes in making this film—to show us that the reality we assume these photos show us is only partial. This presentation is, I think, meant to lead us to question what we think we know about Abu Ghraib and demand more answers to nagging questions about how widespread and systemic these abuses were (and are). He intends to show us that these “monsters" are human and, in fact, pawns who were nearly powerless to refuse to abuse these prisoners and predisposed by living in a hell hole in a war zone to dehumanize themselves and the detainees in their care.

I completely agree with Morris’ intentions with this film, but my gut reaction to what I saw was that with the exception of Jeremy Sivits—a classic wrong place, wrong time case—these people were guilty and self-justifying. To me, the film affirmed the bad apple theory, with Graner and Ivan Frederick (also forbidden from talking to Morris by prison officials) as the ringleaders, and the rest—especially the women—going along to get along. “I was only following orders," comes to mind, a poor excuse in a post-Holocaust world. Despite Morris’ attempts to contextualize their actions by helping us to understand their chaotic surroundings, the examples and orders they were told to follow, the stress of living and working in a war zone, and their interpersonal relationships, I still found myself unmoved. More than anything, I felt these grunts were immature, improperly trained, and definitely not too bright. As the experienced and smart interrogator Tim Dugan said, these tactics were useless and actually encouraged detainees who had indicated a willingness to offer information to clam up.

The investigative arm of this film was tantalizing. I was enthralled by Brent Pack’s explanations of how he was able to cross-reference photos taken by different people to establish the dates on which abuses took place and who was present. If you like CSI, you'll love this photographic forensic work.

Of course, Morris stages reenactments to help us see what cannot be seen. Some people strongly criticize these reenactments, saying a documentary should deal in real documents, not reimaginings. I disagree with these critics. I want to get an idea of what happened visually, and Morris is careful to stage these reenactments based on the best available information. I think the fact that he does them so well is the major reason for the criticism—it’s sometimes hard to know if you’re seeing the real deal or not, and some people don’t like to be fooled, although that is not Morris’ intention. During the film, there is an insert of some footage, a small square in a large, black frame, detailing abuse. I watched it, trying to make up my mind whether it was shot at the time of the incident or a reenactment, so good are Morris’ set pieces.

His technique of placing artistically rendered mood pieces throughout the film to break up the talking heads presentation worked less well for me. Some of these visuals were so stunningly beautiful, coming as they did from ace directors of photography Robert Chappell and Robert Richardson, that they simply didn’t seem to belong in such a brutal film. Perhaps it was Morris’ intention to provide us with the equivalent of Yasujiro Ozu’s “pillow shots" as a way to take us out of the horror for a few moments and help us reflect on what we saw, or simply just rest our minds and eyes. The effect on me, at least, was a bit jarring and distasteful. Other reviewers have found Morris’ graphic depictions of the abuse excessive and exploitative, a charge with which I personally do not agree. A film about torture and humiliation shouldn’t worry about the taste or tolerance level of its audience. The detainees couldn’t back away from it; why should we, especially since it was done in our name. l

My interview with Errol Morris can be found here.

There Will Be Blood (2007)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

By Roderick Heath

There will be spoilers.

Paul Thomas Anderson is the most talented of the generally overhyped wunderkind directors to emerge in the mid 1990s. Of his first four pictures, my favourite was his debut, the diamond-hard little noir film Hard Eight (a.k.a. Sydney, 1996) that announced a truly interesting director. His spectacular follow-ups, Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), were, in essence, extraordinary collections of character sketches without resolutions to match. Boogie Nights’ last act became a familiar guns-and-coke crime film, though with a dash of absurdism, and Magnolia’s even more surreal frog rain covered up some weak story terminations. But I could still give Anderson kudos for an ambition, and the skill to back it up, that dwarfed most of his competitors in the new American cinema.

There Will Be Blood is a kind of demonic howl from the wasteland, a frankly eccentric epic that’s part excoriating character study, part rewrite of the foundation texts of Gilded Age America, a darkly gothic tone poem with a sea of black comedy beneath its feet as thick as the oil its anti-hero Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) discovers. Anderson, frank about his influences, cites Treasure of the Sierra Madre as his favourite film, but based the film on a section of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927). He pays an amusing tribute to that film’s director, John Huston, by having Day-Lewis put on a Huston accent. Like Fred C. Dobbs, Plainview begins as a reasonably sane and sympathetic protagonist who spins towards monstrosity as his obsessions progress. The first 15 minutes of the film are wordless observation of Plainview toiling in his silver mine in the late 1890s. Breaking a leg and ribs after falling in his shaft, Plainview stuffs his pockets with ore, hoists himself out, and proceeds to crawl across miles of rugged earth to have the ore processed before getting medical attention.

Such fixation of will assures us Plainview is no common man. Shortly thereafter, two accidents provide him with future direction. The death of one of his hired labourers leaves him with the dead man’s infant son, and instead of striking silver in another mine, he hits oils. The film leaps forward a decade, to when Plainview is sought after for his skills as an oil driller. He has claimed the boy as his son, introducing him as his partner H. W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier). Daniel is straddled somewhere between tradesman and tycoon and needs the chance to drill a big oil deposit that he alone can exploit to make the final leap. Fortune knocks in the guise of Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), a religious but canny young man, who offers Daniel information about his family’s ranch near the barren hills of Little Boston, California, that has “oil seeping out of the ground." All Paul wants for this is $500, and then he disappears.

Under the guise of shooting for quail, Daniel and H. W. peruse the Sunday’s rock farm and find Paul’s report was correct. Momentarily startled to find that Paul’s brother Eli (Dano again) is his lookalike twin, Daniel nonetheless proceeds to buy the ranch from their father Abel (David Willis), a frail man whose surface gentility conceals a basher of both bibles and children. Eli is a proper preacher, and knowing damn well why Daniel wants the ranch, extracts a promise from him to support his church if he finds any oil. Daniel shortly begins buying up land from the rest of the townsfolk to whom he poses as a benefactor, bringing not just wealth, but also stimulus for all aspects of local life.

Daniel attempts to keep his wildly antagonistic poles of personality in balance. He is ambitious, driven, as he confesses, to not let anyone else succeed— he only feels he has achieved something when he has crushed everybody else in the process. He wants to make enough money to get away from people altogether. Yet he also defines himself as a world builder and family man, intently protective of H. W. There is a war between something like rapacious nihilism and more humane aspirations within him. An atheist, he chafes at Eli’s pious posing, and deliberately insults him when Eli proposes to bless the first oil derrick. Instead, Daniel calls for Eli’s younger sister Mary (Sydney McCallister) whom he has learnt gets beaten for not saying her prayers.

In a staggering sequence, Daniel’s team hits its first gusher on the site. Exploding out of the earth without warning, it knocks H. W. for six and renders him deaf. But even this can’t hold Daniel away from the gusher, which catches on fire, consuming black gold and derrick as it burns through the night like a fountain from hell. Daniel’s plan is to build a pipeline to the sea, thus circumventing the exorbitant carrying charges of the railways. But with H. W. deaf and taking care of him becoming increasingly problematic, Daniel eventually has him shipped away to a special home. He has found another emotional surrogate to be his confidante in a world he readily admits to despising—his half-brother Henry Brands (Kevin J. O’Connor), who shows up to tell him of his father’s death and ask for a job. Henry’s own life is a flop, and he accounts that he’s done his share of sinning. Daniel’s father had a mistress—Henry’s mother—and Daniel knew about it. Daniel has come from a background that made him a misanthropist, and yet he clings to familial loyalty like a life buoy to remain sane long enough to gain the separateness he craves.

Daniel finds a true rival in Eli, whose beatific manners and showy sermons conceal an ambition and malignancy nearly equal to Daniel’s. Prodding Daniel to pay over the money he promised the church, Eli is instead slapped and dragged through the mud by Daniel as he takes out his pain over H. W.’s deafness on the phony, showy faith healer. Eli, in turn, attacks his father for selling Daniel their oil and raising the errant Paul to be the “stupid son of a stupid father." The film’s air of throbbing menace begins to solidify in Daniel’s and Eli’s first revelations of the violence we sense in them. Thus, Anderson takes by the throat a deep-rooted hypocrisy in the American tradition—a reverence for immense greed coupled with a pretence to spiritual enlightenment.

Meditating on this American split personality, Norman Mailer once commented that “Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t sit too well in the same psyche." One does not have to look far in classic Hollywood films to see the way this relationship is enshrined and supposed to work , for example, somebody like Spencer Tracy taking Clark Gable to task for greed and sin as in San Francisco (1938), or, cogently, the oil-prospecting epic Boom Town (1940) where Tracy is not a priest, but his relationship to Gable is the same. It’s a moral framework that’s still popular in Hollywood: what is Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton if not a new-age Tracy to George Clooney’s Gable?

In There Will Be Blood, Eli is ancestor to the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jerry Falwells who grew rich and powerful exploiting the lingering guilt and anxiety in a country “under God" but dedicated otherwise to mammon. Eli will eventually become a tycoon of religion as Daniel becomes one of oil. The film deconstructs both the socialistic simplicities of Sinclair’s writing, and the affirmation of the American founding fantasy in writers like Edna Ferber. Daniel and Eli have divergent definitions of the landscape around them. The Sundays and their like have sought this anti-Eden as a place of purification by trial, its remote aridity fit for moral regeneration. For Daniel, it’s nothing to be conquered and made to yield something. For both, the oil has an importance beyond the practical. It’s the blood of the earth, the blood of the lamb, the redemptive substance. To emphasize this relationshiop, Daniel is shown placing a sacramental dab of the ooze on the infant H. W.’s forehead.

Daniel takes Henry with him to survey the route for their pipeline to the coast. Daniel only opens up to people with whom he assumes a family relationship, H. W. and Henry. When Standard Oil executive Tilford (David Warshofsky), attempting to buy Daniel out, makes a casual reference to his deaf son, Daniel’s response is a renewed fury to accomplish his plan. It’s apparent that Daniel is mad and that the trigger to his madness will be found somewhere in the dark nexus between his ambition and his love of family. It comes out like one of his gushers when a casual slip in conversation makes him realise Henry is an impostor. In fact he’s a drifter who has taken on Henry’s identity. Although he swears that Henry died of tuberculosis, Daniel shoots him and buries his body. He is found the next day by one of the Little Boston townsfolk, Bandy (Colton Woodward), whose land he needs to build the pipeline and has followed him to the coast. Bandy offers Daniel a deal; he can build the pipe across his land if Daniel is baptised at Eli’s church.

It’s the bitterest of humiliations for Daniel, who must get on his knees, shout out the confession “I have abandoned my child," and accept Eli’s slaps in the face. Eli is playing with fire here. Nonetheless, it seems to have a momentary effect on Daniel, who shortly thereafter has H. W. brought back. But there’s something fawning, desperate, off kilter in both his welcoming back of his boy and a subsequent encounter with Tilford in a restaurant. Daniel prods both, attempting to exact a pleasure of reunion and victory, but without truly succeeding.

H. W.’s flirtation with Mary Sunday crystallises in the film’s final segment, in 1927, when the pair (Russell Harvard and Colleen Foy) are married in a ceremony she communicates to him by sign language. Daniel has walled himself up in his Xanadu, reminding us of a mix of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley as he sits around in his cocoon drinking copiously and shooting household objects. He has finally achieved his isolation from humanity—all too well. When H. W. announces his attention to go off on his own with Mary to Mexico and start his own drilling company, Daniel cruelly informs him of his true origin as a foundling. “Thank god there is no part of you in me," is H. W.’s response before walking out. Anderson’s recurring motif of men who chafe under the control of obnoxious families, especially domineering father figures, here achieves an almost Shakespearean vividness.

H. W.’s restraint is the bravest behaviour in the film. Something murderous, long incubated in Daniel, is now awake. He drinks himself stupid and falls asleep on his private bowling alley, only to be roused by Eli. Now a famous radio preacher, Eli has come in the guise of making a friendly overture to arrange for the final sale of Bandy’s land, but actually desperately needs money because his investments have gone south in the Wall Street crash. Daniel forces Eli to declare his God is mere superstition before informing him that any oil on Bandy’s property is long gone, sucked out by all the drilling around it, yielding the now famously hilarious analogy of drinking another man’s milkshake with a long straw. But humiliating Eli isn’t enough now. Daniel chases Eli around the alley like Wile E. Coyote, tossing bowling balls at him before beating his brains out with a pin. His servant finds him seated by Eli’s corpse. Daniels sighs in a mood of weary satisfaction, “I’m finished."

His statement is a double pun—he may or may not be finished in the sense that he’s going to prison or the madhouse, but he’s certainly finished in terms of his quest to smash both competing humans and competing values. I found the finale perfect; many have not, but it simply takes to a kind of ecstatic extreme the alternations of dark humour and grim confirmation that vibrate through the work. More importantly, There Will Be Blood refuses to hide behind abstractions, like No Country for Old Men’s gutless conclusion, and goes instead for a finale heroic in its risk-taking intensity. Whilst it explores allegory and symbolism—the doppelganger siblings are imbued with an edge of surrealism—but its characters are properly realized.

As Boogie Nights and Magnolia showed their debts to Scorsese’s style and Altman’s structuring, There Will Be Blood leaps off from Gangs of New York, by borrowing Gangs’ lead actor to give another epic performance pitched close to extravagant grotesquery, and taking up a vision of American history not too long after Gangs concluded. Like Gangs, too, it approaches American history through a sense of mythic metaphor—Gangs referenced both Christian and pagan mythology as There Will Be Blood references Cain and Abel and other Biblical tropes.

However, There Will Be Blood represents Anderson’s full maturation, both returning to the stark sense of the American landscape that made Hard Eight’s opening hypnotic, but also expanding beyond it. His alien perspective on landscape and industry resemble Werner Herzog’s, whilst his taut mixture of visual lucidity and tonal flux recall Kubrick in a masterful slow burn. As in his earlier films, he maintains a disquieting balance between hilarity and horror, perhaps most clearly seen before in Boogie Nights, when Alfred Molina chases the feckless heroes in his underwear with a shotgun in hand. As with the perverse romance Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood achieves a kind of texture of unease, but unlike the former film is not aggressively twee. Shot for shot, it’s a triumph that avoids the archness that occasionally afflicted The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford, but perhaps even more so in its sound textures, from the careful use of sound effects to the score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Music is as vital as sinew for connecting the tissue in Anderson’s films, even more so than in Scorsese’s and Tarantino’s (or the airier but equally vital fashion of Sofia Coppola), aiming as it does for a musical compulsion to their structure. There Will Be Blood becomes a kind of modernist symphony. l

Girl with Green Eyes (1964)
Director: Desmond Davis

During the 1960s, world cinema took a great leap forward. The French New Wave, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, and the British Free Cinema were among the movements that influenced each other in bringing film out of the studios and their staid conventions and into the streets and everyday life. As my blog partner Rod Heath has noted, the British Free Cinema was characterized by its “realistic life stories, honest portrayal of sub-bourgeois lifestyles … a visual rhetoric that had poetry and personality (and) strong literary influence." Girl with Green Eyes is a typical example of this school of filmmaking from Desmond Davis, a Free Cinema director with few movies to his credit. With a screenplay by Irish writer Edna O’Brien based on her own short story, Davis creates a subtle farce that powers along on its own particularly Irish vitality—an interesting feat considering that all of its principal creatives, save for O’Brien, are English.

Kate Brady (Rita Tushingham) and Baba Brennan (Lynn Redgrave) are longtime friends from convent school who move to Dublin together to escape the boredom and provincialism of their small town. Baba is a flirty, gabby extrovert whose lighthearted approach to life energizes the more reserved Kate. Davis introduces us to the social milieu of 1960s Dublin in rapid skips through Kate and Baba’s daily life. Baba is a student at secretarial school. Kate works in a grocery. As she stands at a meat slicer, she is told by the female customer not to cut the bacon too thick this time—it only went around to three people the last time—an indication of the economic class of this Dublin neighborhood. The girls apply makeup with the experimental enthusiasm of 11 years old. They go to dances with boys who are more friends than suitors. They talk about fooling around in cars. They’re so full of youth, it made me quite jealous.

One day, the girls pile into a the rusted truck of one of the boys and head into the country—only 14 miles away—where they are to sell a dog. “I’ll get 10 quid for it," one of the boys says with enthusiasm. They all pile out of the wreck. The man who is to buy the dog, Eugene Gaillard (Peter Finch), comes up the driveway, a walking stick in hand. Kate eyes him with a semi-innocent curiosity. She asks Baba later what he does. A writer, apparently, but of dusty, dry history or something like that.

By chance, the girls bump into Gaillard while they are having tea out one day. Baba launches into a flirtatious, nonstop chatter while Kate sizes Eugene up intently. She’s definitely fixed her fancy on him, and waits day after day at the tea shop for a chance to bump into him “accidentally" again. When he doesn’t appear, she writes him a letter inviting him to tea. It was a strange, but practical choice Davis made to show the note, perfectly legible and on screen long enough to be read, side by side with Kate at her desk writing it.

Eugene accepts her invitation. Kate arrives looking as smart as she knows how, which for her is wearing a gauzy scarf around her neck. Eugene chides her for being a convent school girl and mutters wistfully about young girls. He doesn’t want to get involved. Kate gives the usual answer to such a declaration, “Can we still be friends?" We know exactly what their fate will be.

One day, Kate, dressed in a scoop-neck dress, meets Eugene at her boarding house. She enters on Baba and Eugene already in conversation. Baba comments, “When did you start showing cleavage?" Embarrassed, Kate attempts an air of sophistication by lighting up a cigarette. She holds it awkwardly, and when her arm is jostled, the cigarette drops into her dress. Baba empties a pot of tea on her to douse the fire. Kate, infuriated, only says, “Now I’ll have to change." This is more than a literal change. She dresses in a mod sweater, pencil pants, and gold chain necklace that belong to Baba, and goes driving with Eugene.

Kate starts spending nights at Eugene’s house, and finally, comes to his bed, though the experience remains awkward. One day, a friend of Eugene’s bumps into him and Kate on the street and asks him how the wife is. Kate runs off, and Eugene feels he must now take her ser- iously to make up for his caddish- ness. He gives her a wedding ring, buys her some sophisticated clothes, and moves her into his house. Their “wedding" night finally has real passion.

Kate takes this marriage seriously, but Eugene is world weary and makes no real attempt after the first couple of weeks to give a rat’s ass that she’s not old enough to understand the facts of his life—that he has a need to maintain a relationship with his estranged wife because they have a daughter, that he has to work when she wants to play, that he has friends that will understandably talk about his wife. For his part, Eugene does not understand the milieu in which Kate was raised.

Davis and O'Brien make sure we understand. After receiving an anonymous note detailing Kate's scandalous conduct, Kate’s father (Arthur O'Sullivan) comes to Dublin and forcibly spirits her back to his home, where he invites the village priest by to tell her she is in mortal sin for which she must confess, that “this man" is God’s test of her love for Him. That does it. Kate runs back to Eugene, fearing that her father will find her. Eugene (and we) poo-poos her fears until the the comic showdown pitting five Irish farmers against the bourgeois writer in his home. The melee ends when Josie (Maire Kean), Eugene’s maid, empties a shotgun into the plaster ceiling, raining debris throughout the sitting room and scaring the Brady posse off.

We’re just waiting for the beginning of the end, which comes soon enough when Kate opens a letter from Mrs. Gaillard that contains a plane ticket to New York. Kate runs off, and as all young girls do, expects her man to run after her and beg her to come back. Naturally, ge doesn’t. The film ends with Kate, now firmly transplanted in London with Baba, entering a pub with some young men. She's older and wiser, but still sharply touched by her ridiculous, intense May-December romance.

Davis films Dublin and, briefly, London with a loving eye for detail and street life. The film fairly bounces off the screen. While Redgrave is the more showy of the two actresses, the homely Tushingham shows a spunky daring that explains why the pair is friends. O'Brien lovingly pokes fun at the emotionally intense Kate, while Davis directs Redgrave in a humorous caricature of a hyper, impressed-with-herself, teenage girl. Both actresses, however, are careful to rise above the comedy to make us feel this coming-of-age story in our hearts. I quite remember feeling just like Kate whenever young love struck, wishing I could be more fancy-free, like Baba.

The British Free Cinema tended to dwell on women as emotional beings whose rebellions, in contrast to the Angry Young Men, necessarily had to be romantic. Lindsay Anderson stretched this female role to include a woman as armed rebel in If.... Regardless of the somewhat limited aspirations of women characters during this period, the Free Cinema let them run as far as they could, making their own lives in the end. l

Tomorrow (1972)
Director: Joseph Anthony

In 1972, Robert Duvall appeared in one of the most iconic films of all time—The Godfather. His supporting performance as Tom Hagen, Irish consigliere to the Corleone mob family, is measured, rational, understated. He provides a counterbalance to James Caan’s hotheaded Sonny Corleone, whom Hagen idolizes, and an insider/outsider character that gives the audience a way into the picture.

Duvall will always be remembered for The Godfather, but he appeared in another 1972 release for which he gave what is arguably his finest performance—the almost forgotten Tomorrow. This independent film with a no-name cast is an adaptation of a William Faulkner short story by the much-honored writer Horton Foote. Foote, whose To Kill a Mockingbird (adapted for the screen with a plum role for Duvall) amply demonstrates his sensitivity and understanding of the South. His screenplay gave Duvall plenty of space to fill the character of Jackson Fentry, a poor, lonely backwoodsman offered by chance an opportunity to love. Duvall has said that Fentry is his favorite role, and it’s clear he gave it his whole heart. I cried like a child for 20 minutes after the film ended, so powerfully did his performance affect me.

The film uses a voiceover narrator by a man we will later learn is a lawyer named Douglas (Peter Masterson, Horton Foote’s son-in-law), who tries to explain why Fentry is a lone holdout on a jury asked to convict a man for killing a young thug named Buck Thorpe (Dick Dougherty). The film opens up and tells the part of Fentry’s life that led to this impasse. We are taken to a shack at a sawmill where Fentry lives alone, acting as its guard and caretaker while the sawmill sits dormant during the cold, winter months. The essential nature of this bare bones world are shown starkly in black and white, with the ambient sounds of birds accompanying Fentry in his daily routine.

Isham Russell (Richard McConnell), the son of the mill owner, calls in on Fentry just before Christmas. Fentry is getting ready to head down to his father’s (William Hawley) cotton farm for the holiday. The two men wish each other well, and Russell takes off. As Fentry packs a few of his meager belongings, he hears what sounds like a woman crying out. He goes out and toward the sound, and does indeed find a woman prostrate at the bottom of a small rise near the sawmill. She appears to have blacked out or slipped on some snow—probably both in her weakened state. He takes her back to the cabin, where he offers her food and stokes the wood stove to help warm her up.

When she is rested, he learns her name is Sarah Eubanks (Olga Bellin). He asks her where she was going. In a sort of a daze, she tells him she wasn’t really going anywhere. Her husband left her three months before when she told him she was pregnant. Her “people" told her never to come back home after she married Eubanks against their wishes. Realizing she has nowhere to go and no one to look after her, Fentry tells her she can stay with him. When she goes back to sleep, he goes to the grocery in town. He asks how much hard candy 4 cents will buy him; the storekeeper holds up a huge scoopful. He says he’ll take it. Sarah is delighted.

The months pass. Fentry and Sarah have settled into a domestic existence of sorts. They frequently talk about the weather—how nice the sun feels, whether the spring will ever come, whether the rain will ever stop. This is small talk, of course, the talk of strangers thrown together, but it is also very real in a place where the elements have such a bearing on how the day will progress.

Gradually, Sarah's talk becomes more personal. She quite chatters at times about herself while the reticent Fentry listens, watches, and cooks. Sarah has little interest in food. One day, when the weather has broken, Fentry says that the Russells have promised to build him a house near the mill and asks Sarah if she wants to see the site he’s picked out, the prettiest in the area. They walk there together. The clearing is bordered by white pine trees, a very pretty location, agrees Sarah. Sarah says she always wanted a house like one she saw in Jefferson, with a wraparound porch, oak trees, and flower beds. Her daddy never let her plant flowers or, it seems, showed her any kindness at all. Rather suddenly, Fentry asks Sarah to marry him. She says she can’t because she’s already married. He drops it. But when her time comes, he asks again. This time she accepts and tells him to get the preacher right away. She fears she will die. “She’s played out," Mrs. Hulie (Sudie Bond), the midwife, tells Fentry after she has helped Sarah deliver a son. Two minutes after they are declared man and wife, Sarah dies, having extracted a promise from Fentry that he will raise her son as if he were his own.

Duvall’s Fentry is a man who speaks infrequently, slowly, and simply. According to the hubby, who lived in the South for many years, his backwoods accent (which Billy Bob Thornton must have ripped off for Sling Blade) is very authentic. His actions are as simple and straightforward as his words. He sees a woman in need, and he takes her in. She says she’s been abandoned and abused, and he is attentive and gentle. She asks him to care for her son, and he does, with all the love he wanted to shower on her. His pure, decent heart so filled with pent-up love finally has a path on which to shine, and when that path is blocked, he still finds a way to nurture the love he’s finally come to know.

Bellin’s Sarah is not nearly as convincing. She does project frailty and anger, but her speeches seem a bit too sophisticated and poetic for the life she’s lived. One day, when Fentry is late coming home, she paces nervously, but it seems more like a pose than actual panic. That said, one scene shows Sarah’s growing tenderness for Fentry. As they sit in front of the wood stove, Sarah takes a safety pin from one of the many tears in the only shirt Fentry ever wears and refastens a split in his sleeve that has fallen open. It’s a completely useless act given how hopeless the shirt is, but it conveys a level of caring and desire for contact that she never really achieves. These small gestures, repeated again and again by the characters—and especially Fentry—build a story of great emotional power. It shows yet again how less is more when it comes to acting.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, bringing a particularity to their characters no matter how little screen time they have. I especially liked Fentry’s father, who shows in one brief scene how much of a real relationship he and Fentry have—angry that Fentry didn't show up for Christmas, matter-of-factly accepting his explanation that he got married and had a baby, and happy to let Fentry name his son after the generals under which the old man served.

In 1972, Robert Duvall showed just how good an actor he was playing two understated characters. I think he would agree with me that Jackson Fentry is the one for which he really should be remembered. l

2008 European Union Film Festival

Kings (2007)
Director/Screenwriter: Tom Collins

Ah, fawk, I really wanted to give Kings, the first film performed largely in Irish, a big thumbs up, really. It’s a good thing when a language that has teetered on the edge of extinction, as Irish Gaelic has, gains exposure to an international audience and a large segment of its would-be indigenous speakers through a popular cultural form. Language can legitimate a culture as few other expressions can. Faraor (alas), Kings will only appeal to Irish speakers, and perhaps only to those who lived the émigré experience of 20 to 40 years ago. Indeed, at the screening I attended last night, I was surrounded by Irish-born, Irish-fluent seniors, mainly men, who identified strongly with the story. “That’s just how it was," said the nice Irish gentleman on my left, who assured me that the subtitles were dead on. That’s something, I suppose.

The story and look of Kings tracks rather closely with John Cassavetes’ searing look at men in pain, Husbands. Five Irish men who emigrated to England in the 1980s to seek fame and fortune—and presumably to return to Ireland as kings—gather together to mourn the passing of a sixth of their number, Jackie (Seán Ó Tarpaigh), who died under the wheels of a train in London’s Underground. Two of the men, Git (Brendan Conroy) and Jap (Donal O’Kelly), still live together in the apartment all six shared when they first arrived from Connamara. Both men are alcoholics and unemployed. Máirtín (Barry Barnes) is in a marriage strained to the breaking point by his drinking. Shay (Donncha Crowley) is middle class and responsible; he picks up Jackie’s father (Peadar O’Treasaigh) at the airport and arranges the funeral and transport of Jackie’s body back to Ireland for burial. Joe (Colm Meaney) is the rich success of the group. He’s addicted to cocaine, “the rich man’s alcohol," as Git calls it. Our dead man was rejected by Joe, whom he looked up to like a big brother, because he was an unreliable drunk.

After the funeral, which Joe skips out of guilt and only the four other friends, Jackie’s father, and a few nuns attend, the lads meet in a pub called Connamara, keep bellowing “all for one and one for all" at each other, drink, and wax sentimental all night about Jackie. Harsh truths that can come as a surprise to no one in the audience come out one by one as alcohol loosens inhibitions while seeming to have no other effect on these professional drinkers. Everyone leaves. The end of yet another bender. Nothing changes.

So what have we just seen? An Irish film that takes place entirely in London, with the exception of some brief flashbacks that look like they could have been shot almost anywhere. Five out of six Irishmen in a single group of friends who are addicts of one sort or another. Immigrants of such long standing that most of them don’t consider Ireland home anymore but still imagine they'll go back one day. Sentimentality laid on with a cement trowel. In other words—every stereotype of the Irish you can imagine.

None of the actors give life to their sketchy characters. The writers don’t provide them with any kind of substance, only speechified resentments and melodramatic crosses to bear. The ensemble is even forced to sing “Danny Boy" to a jukebox accompaniment, though they are careful to ridicule it afterwards. Instead of Jackie, they should have thrown the script (based on what I’m sure was an equally tedious play) under a train and started over.

Yet, my fellow moviegoer said, “that’s just how it was." Perhaps it was indeed. Life comes with regrets, and it may have done men of his generation a service to air them in a language they hold dear. Perhaps it’s even appropriate to an Irish-language film to be about this generation, as the youth of the Celtic Tiger generation understandably have no attachment to the tatters of the past.

A commenter on IMDb said this about Husbands: “A beautifully observed and outrageously unsentimental study of sentiment, Husbands explores the desires, loves and losses of a generation constantly running away from their lives through three men who actually do it." The generation Kings captures deserved at least as much. l

Stomp the Yard (2007)
Director: Sylvain White

By Marilyn Ferdinand

From the early 60s to about the mid 80s, you weren’t likely to see much dancing on the big screen. Yes, there were Broadway-style musicals, particularly in the 60s, and a few glances toward disco with films like Saturday Night Fever. In general, however, the Free Love generation was amazingly uptight when it came to dancing. Disco died among white Americans, but continued on in the African American community, changing and growing entirely new forms under the radar of mainstream culture.

The 80s marked the first breakthrough into the mainstream of this vital new dance scene. Beat Street (1984) brought breakdancing memorably to the movies. There seemed to be some money in programming dance films, so a smattering of dance movies for the teen market began appearing.

There was definitely something unusual about the way these movies split along racial/dance style lines. Breakdancing, hip hop, crumping, salsa, and other grassroots forms were the province of African Americans and Latinos. White dancers stuck with ballroom and ballet. The first real crossover film, Save the Last Dance (2001) has nondancer Julia Stiles play a thoroughly white-bread ballet dancer who learns hip hop when she ends up going to school on the black South Side of Chicago. This film was very good and a surprise hit in the normally moribund movie month of January. Its honesty about the cultural divide in the way Stiles’ character had to negotiate a world both foreign and hostile to her was a welcome change of pace. Unfortunately, its bold experiment has not yet been repeated. White America is in desperate need of a dance revival, and I hope that a steady stream of African American dance films will help lead the way.

Stomp the Yard tells a familiar, even hackneyed, story. DJ (Columbus Short) is the head of a dance crew that battles with other crews in the rough dance clubs of Los Angeles. DJ, a cocky hothead loaded with talent, decides to diss another crew on its home turf. His younger brother Duron (Chris Brown) begs him to back off. DJ says, “I really want this." Duron reminds him that they are a team and should act as a team, but he eventually agrees to the dance challenge. Payback’s a bitch when DJ and his crew are jumped by the other crew after the dance battle, and Duron is shot and killed. DJ serves a stretch in jail for assault and then is packed off to Atlanta to work as a gardener for his Uncle Nate (Harry J. Lennix) and attend Truth University on a scholarship. DJ’s the quintessential street kid thrown in among the elite of black society to learn lessons in humility and teamwork, and as he says late in the film, “become a better person" through education, brotherhood, and the love of a good woman. In turn, he teaches the straightlaced, sometimes ruthless preppies at Truth University how to get down and be real. We even get a competition at the end that rivals that of any sports movie out there.

So why would I recommend such a formulaic film? Two reasons: the performance by Columbus Short, which is superb and which forms the strong backbone that lifts this film beyond the commonplace, and the dancing and choreography that point to the future of dance in America and around the world.

DJ moves into a dorm and tries to understand his new and alien world. He walks around campus and sees a dance crew performing the traditional step dancing (“stomping the yard") on a riser. It is composed of the members and pledges of Theta Nu Theta, a fraternity that has lost the national step competition seven years in a row to the powerhouse Mu Gamma Xis. DJ watches this stiff form of dancing as though he were a traveler from the future looking at the yokels of the past. Indeed, he is—his street dancing is exactly what stepping needs to remain relevant to the younger generation of college students. DJ commits a faux pas when he breaks through the line of the Mu Gammas, who are getting ready to perform, to pursue a girl he was instantly smitten with the first time he saw her—April Palmer (Meaghan Good), daughter of the university provost and girlfriend of Mu Gamma leader Grant (Darren Dewitt Henson).

Freshman hazing doesn’t sit too well with DJ, who fights back. Being told by Grant to leave April alone doesn’t sit too well, either. DJ finds a way to get to know her by signing up to be tutored by her. One night, DJ’s roommates take him to a local club, where he shows off his dance skills. Grant tries to recruit him to pledge Mu Gamma Xi. DJ knows it’s just because of his dance skills. “Stepping’s for pussies," he spits into Grant’s face. “What do you do?" says an angry Grant. “I battle," is the answer. His intensity is so real, we can feel it.

Theta Nu also tries to recruit DJ. Sylvester (Brian J. White) admits he hopes to knock Mu Gamma off their pedestal in the step competition, but he also offers DJ the opportunity to join a brotherhood he can count on the rest of his life. Having just lost a brother, DJ takes this message to heart. He pledges the Theta Nus and begins to challenge their traditional step style. He also wins over April by showing her that he really cares about her as a person, not just as an accessory to the good life, as Grant does. He plays love scenes with just the right touch, intimate without being too forward. One scene really worked for me. DJ becomes a little goofy and tongue-tied when he's out with April at lunch, a lunch he won by answering her question from his tutoring lesson correctly. He flirts, but she makes a comment about still being with Grant. He says, "You're fine, but you ain't all that." April is warmed by DJ's bad attempt to cover up his feelings for her. It's very sweet and real.

There are obstacles and dirty tricks thrown in DJ’s way, including suspension for lying about having a criminal record on his scholarship application. The film climaxes at the national step competition, at which the rival fraternities perform stunning routines layered with street moves and special effects. I guess I don’t have to tell you who wins, but the final dance-off really shows how far DJ has come in dealing with his life and responsibility for Duron’s death.

The video below gives a chronological rundown of the dancing in this movie. The flash, rhythm, and unison are obvious. What may not be so obvious is the precise technique of many of the dancers, especially Short, who has a long resume as a professional dancer. So good is the choreography of the club sequences that they seem effortlessly spontaneous and surprising. Short contributed most of the choreography, and he really knows how to work with space and play off other dancers to create the challenges that are so much like jazz musicians who are cutting heads (competitively improvising). On the vast stage of the step competition, he gets in Grant’s face, closing the space and upping the ante for the competitors and the audience.

If you’re not a dance fan per se, there’s probably nothing compelling for you in Stomp the Yard. But if you want to see what will be bubbling up in our culture in the immediate few years and watch a dancer who can act and dance with fire, this is one dance movie you’ve got to see. l