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Monday, December 29
SUNRISE RECONSIDERED
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Dec 2008 11:40 PM PST
[Warning: If you haven't seen Sunrise, don't read this -- instead go
see Sunrise immediately.]
Sunrise may not be the greatest film ever made -- it may not even be
the greatest film of the silent era -- but it certainly has passages,
many passages, that rank among the greatest in the history cinema and
still help chart the limits of what the medium can do.
Oddly, though, most of these supremely great passages happen in the
first 45 minutes of the film. After that, there are many wonderful
moments, much gorgeous lighting and many striking plastic effects, but
none of them are breathtaking in the way the high points of the first
half are.
I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this, and it has to do
with the structure of the story itself. The film tells the tale of a
simple man living in a rustic farming and fishing village who's seduced
away from his wife by a vamp visiting the village from the city. He
determines to drown his wife in the course of a boat outing but when he
moves to do so he sees himself, sees what he's become, in her terrified
eyes and draws back from the deed. She flees him when they get to land
again, jumps on a trolley -- he jumps on, too, and they ride into the
city. There, as he's trying to atone for his awful behavior, they
stumble on a wedding. The man falls apart, begs for forgiveness, is
forgiven, and they walk out of the church like a newly married couple.
This is the artistic, emotional and spiritual climax of the film . . .
but the film is only half over.
We then see the couple recover their former lightheartedness at a
fairgrounds. We cut back to the scheming vamp in the village, and this
sets up an expectation that she will somehow intervene in the couple's
reunion and jeopardize it -- but in fact this never happens. The man
has made his choice -- the vamp has no more power over him.
On the boat ride home a storm washes the couple overboard, the man
thinks his wife has drowned, and he's devastated. There's great irony
in this, of course, but no great dramatic weight, because it doesn't
involve any further development of the characters' inner lives. The
storm is a mechanical contrivance -- an impersonal threat to a marriage
that has already been reborn and renewed.
The man rejects the vamp with physical violence, almost killing her,
before being told that his wife has been found alive -- saved by a
bundle of reeds the vamp had gathered as a device for the man to use to save
himself after he'd killed the wife. Again, there are multiple
ironies in these developments but, again, no real progression in the
inner lives of the characters. The storm isn't a direct consequence of
the man's past behavior and the reeds don't redeem the vamp -- they are
like visual and narrative puns with no fundamental significance for the
basic drama.
The second half of the film does contains things one would miss if Sunrise had ended at the halfway point. In the fairgrounds
carousing, Janet Gaynor's character gets to reveal herself as a sensual
being, something she isn't really able to do as the long-suffering wife
in the opening sequences, where her astonishingly bad helmet-wig seems
to be giving her a headache -- as it gives us one. The George O'Brien
character is so frankly sensual, even when he's menacing, that there
would be an imbalance without those fairgrounds scenes. O'Brien's
character also suffers in the second half from the apparent loss of his
wife, a tragedy he almost brought upon himself. Without seeing that
suffering, we might feel that he'd gotten off too easily for his
despicable behavior. And of course the vamp gets her comeuppance --
though it's almost more comeuppance than she deserves.
But none of these things transcends the emotional and dramatic climax
of the scene in the church or adds anything of essential significance
to it. They're like echoes of and reflections on a story that's
already been told. In the second half, Murnau can't summon up sublime
cinematic expressions for powerful emotional developments -- because
those developments simply aren't there.
Pointing out the flaws in the dramatic structure of Sunrise does
nothing, of course, to diminish its stature as one of the most
important works in the history of cinema. It was the film that taught
John Ford the secret of movies, and that alone would make it a work of
inestimable value. It's one of those rare films that one one can watch
again and again with increasing astonishment and enchantment, and it
continues to inspire each new generation of filmmakers, especially
cinematographers, for whom it is a kind of touchstone. But recognizing
its structural flaws might help explain the vague and perhaps even
guilty feeling of disappointment which steals over one whenever that
"Finis" card comes up on the screen.
The great passages of the film, great as they are, don't add up to a
great whole work.
[Vincente Minnelli's fine film The Clock has a couple of intriguing echoes of Sunrise, which I think are too close to be accidental. Both films deal with moments of crisis in a marriage that play out in an urban setting. In both movies, the crisis is at first exacerbated and then transcended by the city environment, which becomes a kind of character in the drama. In the aftermath of both crises, the married couples try to get back to a state of normality in a restaurant, but the simple act of trying to share a meal only emphasizes the distance between them. In both restaurant scenes, the women break down. These scenes are followed by ones in which the couples happen upon a wedding in a church -- they enter the church and participate vicariously in the ceremony, which restores their sense of commitment to each other. In each film, the church scene is the emotional climax of the story. In The Clock, the rest of the film is coda -- in Sunrise the rest of the film is coda, too, but stretched out far too long, and too loaded with incident, to work properly as such.]
Tuesday, December 23
VERA-ELLEN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Dec 2008 06:59 AM PST
Vera-Ellen had her big breakthrough in MGM musicals as the sultry femme fatale who danced with Gene Kelly in the "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue" number in Words and Music. She had the misfortune, however, to be at MGM when Cyd Charisse's star was on the rise. Charisse simply did sultry balletic numbers better. Vera-Ellen had a girl-next-door quality which didn't lend itself to the femme fatale role, whereas Charisse seemed like a creature from another planet, where Amazons ruled -- she could make sex scary. Vera-Ellen also had more curves, a respectable bust, wide hips and a narrow waist, which didn't serve the languid lines of ballet-inflected dance. Charisse's line, from her graceful arching neck to her legs-without-end (amen), came at you all at once on screen, like a silk scarf floating in the wind.
Vera-Ellen did a few lovely lyrical dances in which she didn't try to be sultry -- such as the rehearsal room number with Kelly in On the Town and the delightful "Baby Doll" routine with Fred Astaire in The Belle Of New York -- but what she was really good at, better than anyone but Eleanor Powell, was the snappy, upbeat tap number. Kelly didn't know how or didn't care to use her skills in that department, but Fred Astaire and his choreographic collaborator Hermes Pan did. They were responsible for most of her really great performances on screen, though sadly they were in musicals of the second rank like Three Little Words and The Belle Of New York.
Still, those numbers are wondrous. Vera-Ellen's precision and verve and lightness in the air, the joy in movement she communicates, take us back to the great upbeat numbers in the Astaire-Rogers films and in Broadway Melody Of 1940, the only film in which Astaire partnered Eleanor Powell.
Vera-Ellen had only a brief flirtation with glory in movies, and an unhappy life off screen -- a bout with anorexia, two failed marriages and a child who died of infant-death syndrome. She retired from movies in 1957 and lived in virtual obscurity from then until her death in 1981.
Still, she had her moments, she made a very special kind of magic on screen -- she kept step with Fred Astaire in some of his most enjoyable numbers on film . . . and what dancer could ask for a better legacy than that?
Saturday, December 20
UNNERVING
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Dec 2008 07:25 AM PST
Matt Barry over at The Art and Culture Of Movies has recently posted an insightful short review of Orson Welles's Touch Of Evil. He calls it an unnerving film, which it certainly is, but points out that one of its most unnerving aspects is the way Welles goofs on our expectations of what a gritty little film noir should be.
The film's extreme stylization both seduces us into its nightmare world and distances us from it as an aesthetic creation, all at the same time. Touch Of Evil was not quite the last classic noir -- I think you'd have to give that distinction to Odds Against Tomorrow, which came out a bit later -- but its self-consciousness about the form was a sure signal that the tradition had all but played itself out. One definition of a neo-noir is that it's at least as concerned with commenting on the form as with working inside it. In some ways, Touch Of Evil was the first of the neo-noirs.
Wednesday, December 10
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
by
Lloydville
on Wed 10 Dec 2008 12:16 AM PST
An American In Paris has so many great Gershwin songs, so much delightful dancing and so many passages of bravura filmmaking that it's easy to get swept along from moment to moment in the film without paying too much conscious thought to the story that ties it all together -- a story that is more than a little disturbing.
Both of the film's romantic leads, Lise and Jerry, played by Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly, are involved with other people when they meet, but don't tell each other about it. The side involvements are based on obligation, not love, so Lise and Jerry are fooling others as well as each other. Lise has a kind of moral obligation to the older man who hid and protected her during WWII, when she was just a child, but it still seems weak and irresponsible of her to pretend to love him romantically, as he loves her, when she really doesn't.
Jerry's obligation to his rich patron is supposed to be purely financial, and he keeps trying to insist that it's nothing more than that, but we know it is -- she's fallen in love with him -- and it's impossible to imagine that he doesn't see this, too. When he thinks he's lost Lise he begins courting his patron, pretending he's really attracted to her, and thus moves from an implausible passive denial to active deception. Nina Foch (above) plays the patron with such nuanced grace, allowing us to see the lonely woman behind the calculating huntress, that it's hard to forgive Jerry for leading her on, giving her hope, however briefly.
The resolution of the romantic tangle doesn't come from either Jerry or Lise, but from an act of self-sacrifice on the part of Lise's fiance -- leaving us to wonder at the film's end if either Jerry or Lise has the moral equipment for a successful romantic partnership.
All of this is quite out of the spirit of the breezy, witty but essentially romantic and idealistic Gershwin songs around which the film is organized, and a kind of violation of the all-but-irresistible charms of Kelly and Caron as screen presences. It accords more with the highly skeptical view of romance brought to the proceedings by Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the script, and to the magical thinking of director Vincente Minnelli, whose films often suggest that art cancels out the dubious behavior of those who make it.
The nearly twenty-minute ballet that closes the film has no story -- it's just an orgy of aesthetic pleasures . . . but it's made to seem that the film's "happy" ending proceeds somehow from this dazzling aestheticising of emotion and conflict. The idea is not so different from the equally irrational view propounded in Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful that the beautiful films made by the movie's bad people redeem them, justify their moral perversity.
The ambiguity at the heart of An American In Paris limits the joy that bursts from the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, the flights of fancy found in the dances and in Minnelli's visual style. It's a brilliant film but oddly muted in its effect, at least on a second or third viewing. It sings slightly off key, dances just off the beat.
Monday, December 8
THE END OF ENGLIGH
by
Lloydville
on Mon 08 Dec 2008 05:34 PM PST
Dr. Drew Casper is the Alfred and Alma Hitchcock Professor Of American Film at the University of Southern California. He is a published author on film. I assume that the "Dr." in front of his name means that he has a PhD. Casper shows up often delivering "expert commentary" on DVDs. I assume that he speaks English as a first language but somehow in his journey through academia he has not managed to master the rudiments of his native tongue.
His style of speaking involves a lot of rephrasing, designed, I suppose, to suggest the addition of nuance to the points he's making but adding up only to redundancy. In his commentary on the recent DVD release of Notorious, for example, he says that Alicia "is out of control -- she has lost control." These two phrases mean exactly the same thing -- one or the other would have served perfectly well. He refers to the famous key in the film as "a prop -- an object, if you want." Yes, I will accept that a prop is an object, since a prop is always an object. It's sort of like saying, "a person -- a human being, if you want." This is a form of pretentious bloviation.
Casper misspeaks constantly in his commentary. He says that Alex's mother "yields a lot of power" in Alex's home, when he means that she wields a lot of power. Of a traveling shot close on Alicia and Devlin, Casper says it suggests that they are "floating on air, existing gravity." I'm not even sure what he actually meant to say there -- "resisting gravity"? Who knows?
Casper introduces the subject of Russian Constructivism and then goes on to refer to it more than once as Roman Contructivism, whatever that might be. Casper also misuses language freely. He says that German filmmakers "triumphed" the use of lighting as an expressive tool. He doesn't seem to know or care that "triumph" is an intransitive and never a transitive verb.
The professor is promiscuously careless about details as well. He refers to the German director "D. W. Pabst". He says at one point that Alex is taller than Alicia, when he's just been talking about the significance of him being shorter. He says that in Hitchcock's films special effects are always in the service of technique, when he means always in the service of story or character.
Is there no editor or director present when Casper records his commentaries? Doesn't Casper, or someone, listen to them after they're recorded to catch mistakes and suggest retakes? Or is it the case that any old nonsense from the mouth of a man with a PhD is assumed to be authoritative?
Casper is not an idiot -- he has many interesting things to say about the themes and strategies of Notorious -- but he seems to feel no obligation whatsoever to present his analysis with even a modicum of intellectual rigor or discipline. If Hitchcock had had the same attitude about filmmaking that Casper has about film criticism, we wouldn't be watching Hitchcock's films today. Bloviating about them in such a scatter-brained way is a kind of insult to Hitchcock's professionalism.
Casper's poor language skills offer a terrifying insight into the modern academy, and modern academic standards in the area of film studies. Presumably Casper doesn't fear that his students will note, much less correct, his mangling of English, though some of them would undoubtedly be capable of doing so. They want good grades from him, after all. Presumably, as the occupant of an endowed chair at his university, probably a tenured position, he doesn't fear the criticism of his fellow professors or supervisors, who would have a very hard time removing him from his job. Perhaps they feel that since film is a visual medium, there's no need to speak about it in precise and correct language.
It's all very depressing. When a professor at a major American university can get away with such shoddy speech, it's no wonder that American institutions of higher learning are turning out graduates who are semi-literate, who not only speak but think sloppily about film, among other things.
Saturday, December 6
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MONSTERS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 06 Dec 2008 11:43 AM PST
Forrest J. Ackerman died last Thursday, at the age of 92. For anyone who knew his name when they were 12 or 13 or 14, the news comes like the news of Queen Victoria's passing to residents of the British Empire in 1901. Ackerman presided over an empire of the imagination every bit as grand as Victoria's realm, and far more benign. He was the editor of Famous Monsters Of Filmland, the sci-fi and horror movie fan magazine around which a generation of buffs rallied during their formative years. It was a half-silly, half-serious publication devoted to the whole range and the whole history of fantasy on film. It helped to create and validate the community of kids who loved film of this sort, and gave them permission to take it seriously.
Famous Monsters was single-handedly responsible for focusing my own love of movies. It opened my eyes to silent film, because there were, after all, silent monster movies, and to other kinds of film. When I was 12 I started buying books about the history of movies just for their monster movie content and ended up enthralled by every kind of movie.
In seventh grade I met two fellow students who were secret fans of the magazine and introduced me to it -- within months we were making our own 8mm monster movies. The three of us attended a science fiction convention in Washington, D. C. in the early Sixties where we actually met Forrest J. Ackerman (seen above, on the left, with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury.) He took us out to lunch. He took us and our interest in monster movies seriously. All of us, now in our fifties, are still fanatics of the kind of movies "Forry" loved.
Such stories could be repeated endlessly. Joe Dante, John Landis and Steven Spielberg were all fans of the magazine when they were kids. In later life, Spielberg autographed a
poster of Close Encounters of the Third Kind for Ackerman, writing, "A
generation of fantasy lovers thank you for raising us so well."
And so we all do -- now and forever.
Monday, December 1
STUDIO SNOW
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Dec 2008 09:18 AM PST
Next to real snow, there's nothing quite as lovely as studio snow in black-and-white films from Hollywood's Golden age.
shahn, at the ever-magical six martinis and the seventh art, is an aficionada of bogus blizzards on film and has posted some screen shots of my favorite ersatz snowfall in movies, from Swing Time.
If you live someplace warm, like the middle of the Mojave Desert, fix yourself some egg nog, light a fake fire, gaze through the window of your computer screen and enjoy the prop flakes in cozy comfort. Better still, give Swing Time another spin on your DVD player and watch the imaginary snowflakes fall on Fred and Ginger as they sing and dance their way into your heart one more time.
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