I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:—I did those then
but that was then
that was then—
O I would quiet old men
say to them:—I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again—
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.

—Gregory Corso, “I am 25”

Juliette Binoche catalyzed the captivating Clouds of Sils Maria on the set of Summer Hours (08), when she told writer-director Olivier Assayas that their shared history lacked some essential component—a film waiting to be made that would tap the very roots of their artistry. Assayas had helped catapult Binoche to French film stardom by co-writing the fluid, jolting erotic melodrama Rendez-vous (85), in which she played a hyper-sexualized gamine. As Nina, a poor girl from the provinces, the 20-year-old Binoche moved like a scarlet streak through the lower straits of Paris theater, acquiring a string of male devotees without violating her own peculiar integrity or putting herself at spiritual risk. Binoche was hailed as a born screen performer playing a quintessential creature of the stage—a woman who accrues identity and depth from her roles and her collaborators.

That’s the suggestive backdrop to Assayas creating Clouds of Sils Maria, a movie that uses off-screen associations and onscreen Pirandellian games to fuel a generation gap comedy-drama that’s playful, harrowing, and profound. Last summer, Binoche drew an enchantingly authoritative portrait of a painter—partly because she is one—in Fred Schepisi’s Words and Pictures. Here she’s frank, charming, and poignant as Maria Enders, an international A-lister who shot to prominence playing Sigrid, a Nina-like free spirit who becomes the lover and personal assistant of her boss and eventually drives her to suicide.

At the movie’s start, Maria railroads to Zurich and prepares to accept an award for her breakthrough role’s creator, only to learn en route that he has died. Prodded by her assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), and a persuasive though suspiciously chic director named Dieter (Lars Eidinger), she agrees to perform in a theatrical revival of her star-making hit—this time as the older woman, Helena. Youthful film-and-tabloid phenomenon Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) has signed to play Sigrid. She’s known for superhero films and scandal. Dieter insists that she’s a theater-tested talent.

This film had the potential to be too precious for words, but Assayas’s underlying drolleries put you at ease. From the start, we see how interwoven Valentine and Maria have become by how the assistant pronounces with sotto voce certainty on whether the star will speak as promised at the prize ceremony and be properly fitted for a svelte Chanel gown. Binoche, by the way, looks stunning all made up, with hair styled to her shoulders—like Tina Fey at any given awards show. It’s wonderfully entertaining to see the seasoned, wily Maria toy with an ex–leading man and lover she despises, who delivers a speech at the memorial. She rejects his admiring yet reductive view of the play as a masochistic melodrama, though she actually agrees with him. She dashes his hopes for extending the evening, then she hands him a card with her room number.

Assayas sounds deeper, more troubling grace notes, too. At the playwright’s home in the nearby town of Sils Maria, his widow (Angela Winkler) blithely dumps a pile of notebooks into the fireplace. She soon hands the house over to Maria as an ideal space for her to work on the play, joking that there aren’t any ghosts. Maria brings the ghosts of the past with her.

Assayas stages Maria’s unofficial rehearsals with bracing directness. Maria and Valentine know the play so well that they can do it virtually “off book.” In their virtuoso on-and-off duet, Maria goes in and out of character, depending on her fluctuating insights, attitudes and moods, while Valentine is so relentlessly at one with Sigrid that we realize she’s acting the part only when she reads the stage directions. As soon as Maria goes up against this whip-smart young woman, she regrets her decision to take on the older woman’s character. Sigrid was a career-defining role, and Sigrid’s defiant freedom has defined Maria’s life, too. Dieter insists that Helena, the supposed victim, and Sigrid, her apparent conqueror, are true mirrors of each other, not identical but opposite mirror images. Valentine tries to persuade Maria that Helena’s vulnerability will draw her closer to the audience, who’ll see her as more sympathetic and complex than Sigrid. But Maria resists, resists, resists. Valentine takes this aesthetic rejection personally. She feels that by ridiculing her reading of the play, Maria is condemning her sensibility and intelligence and dismissing her as part of a shallow generation, weaned on escapist blockbusters and connected to the world by social media.

You come to know “Sigrid” and “Helena” as intimately as you do Valentine and Maria. As the star and her assistant read lines, they suffuse the dialogue with all the clashes in style, attitude, and mindset that would emerge between a 40-year-old like Maria (Binoche is now 51) and a twentysomething like Valentine (Stewart is now 25). Assayas is inspiringly unassuming. It’s difficult to think of another world-class writer-director who can wring so much humor and irony from Maria’s attraction-repulsion to the Internet age and from Valentine’s readiness to call her on it. Their comic-dramatic colloquies—rushes of energy interrupted by splutters, stutters, and flubs—bring out the best in Kristin Stewart, the same way Barry Levinson, another master of seemingly unrehearsed behavior, did for the teenage Stewart in What Just Happened (08).

Stewart is here as marvelous as only a natural movie star can be: she’s “real” yet heightened, and there’s nothing narcissistic about her intensity. She creates, in Valentine, a smart, energetic young woman who prizes maturity more than Maria does herself—yet she also forces Maria to understand that youth does have its privileges. The scene of them attending Jo-Ann Ellis’s latest 3-D space opera together, and arguing about it afterward over beer and grub at a casino, is a contemporary classic—emphasis on both words. Valentine argues that Jo-Ann brings a complex presence to a genre whose conventions aren’t any lamer than other movie formulae. Maria can’t get beyond the surface silliness and stupidity. Assayas displays his endless capacity for ironic invention by compelling Maria to crown the sequence with one of the corniest clichés of movie comedy: a projectile spit-take.

The movie is called Clouds of Sils Maria because of the playwright’s obsession with the Alpine mountain event of the “Maloja Snake.” It’s a thick, puffy white serpent that fills the Upper Engadin Valley when warm air ascends the Maloja Pass and morphs into clouds. The name of the play-within-the-film is Maloja Snake; it’s the main source of the film’s unaffected visual poetry. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s elegant images of rugged, pristine heights and hollows provide an invigorating backdrop to Maria and Valentine’s—and Helena and Sigrid’s—verbal sparring. You want them to synthesize their arguments, but when you least expect it, an argument erupts and their rapport disappears. All the moving parts of this film mesh. It’s inherently funny that no movie or stage person seems to notice that Valentine is gorgeous simply because she wears big glasses and grungy outfits. Let’s just say that her near-invisibility pays off in a startling climax that comes together in your head—and makes you wonder whether all these debates took place in Maria’s.

Stewart told People this week that Maria represents performers “who are interesting and good and strive to do cool stuff and do stuff that makes people think," while Jo-Ann stands for the "surface BS, put-together commercial/commodity-type actresses." But Stewart doesn’t exhibit that prejudice when Valentine defends Jo-Ann, and Moretz doesn’t when she plays Jo-Ann. As a woman, Jo-Ann is alarmingly relaxed in a world where scandals spread at the speed of keystrokes, but as a performer she’s wide-awake and sharp, whether she sheds a tear in a sci-fi showdown or shuts down Maria’s suggestion that she extend a moment in the play. What makes Clouds of Sils Maria hopeful—and, ultimately, a comedy—is that Maria learns from both young women, or at least sees how they connect to the younger self that’s still inside her.

Assayas (who is 60) is the kind of seasoned artist who can revel in youth and maturity without sentimentalizing either. How telling it is that he put Gregory Corso’s poem “I am 25” at the center of Something in the Air, his memory-saturated film about the politicized Paris of the early Seventies. In Clouds of Sils Maria, he wants Maria to resist becoming the older artist who says: “I did those then/but that was then/that was then.” He brings Binoche triumphantly into the here and now.

Like the work of the artist whose life and times it evokes, Peter Watkins’s 1974 film Edvard Munch comes off as a thing of frayed nerves, passionate resentments, and stray sexual frustrations, made on what feels like the edge of delirium and out of what seems like a desperate need to confess or exhume. The truth of the matter, in the case of Edvard Munch’s paintings and Watkins’s movie, is more complicated than that description suggests.

In the second half of his life, Munch (1863-1944) reminded anyone with a mind to read his diaries—of which Watkins’s film makes much use—that

when I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look at these notes as confessions. I have chosen—in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard—to split the work into two parts: the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is universal in the soul.

What Munch says of his diaries could be applied just as well to the many pictures he produced between the early 1880s, when he was nearing the end of his teens, and his death in 1943. It’s at once one of the main limitations of Watkins’s excavation of the Norwegian painter’s inner life and a primary source of its emotional power that it concentrates on Munch’s unstable, passionate temper at the expense of his fierce intelligence and, no less importantly, on his gift at poetic self-mythologizing. You would hardly guess watching Edvard Munch that the artist was, in fact, an avid reader of high-level mathematical treatises, nor that he was strikingly savvy about courting the public attention he sometimes claimed to resent.

Coming between his 1964 debut feature Culloden and his most recent full-length film to date, 2000’s La Commune (Paris, 1871), Edvard Munch remains one of Watkins’s most ambitious attempts to film pre-cinematic history using the methods—and the ethics—of modern documentary reportage. One of the British director’s most relied-upon moves in the film is to open a shot from wobbly mid-distance—he shot the movie on grainy 16mm using a handheld camera—and zoom rapidly into a tight close-up after a second’s pause, like a fly-on-the-wall videographer zeroing impulsively in on a revealing bit of evidence. It’s hard to remember a period film with fewer establishing shots than this, or, for that matter, any sorts of attempts at prefatory scene-setting.

What we see instead, watching the film, is an unbroken, chronologically shuffled three-hour stream—the version Watkins prepared for television was closer to four—of brief, lacerating, confrontational close-ups, many cued to start and end midway through a single camera movement, most designed to collide violently and jarringly with the shots in their orbit. A handful of images draw on events from Munch’s childhood and adolescence: the deaths of his mother and sister from consumption, his own bout with the disease at 13, his early, traumatic love affair with a married woman he refers to in his writings only as “Mrs. Heiberg.” These punctuate the movie’s telling of the artist’s life, which veers back and forth between his youth and his mature career before stopping, somewhat abruptly, at the dawn of the 20th century.

What we hear watching the movie is a multilayered collage of environmental sound, dance hall numbers, plaintive piano music, violin sonatas, choral readings from Munch’s diaries, and, above it all, Watkins’s dispassionate voice giving a biographical account of the painter’s life and career that wouldn’t feel out of place in any number of made-for-TV documentaries. From time to time, the movie pauses for a direct-to-camera interview—the sort reserved, in those TV documentaries, for experts and scholars—with an actor playing one of Munch’s friends, lovers, colleagues, or critics.

One way to take Watkins’s stylistic habits—rifling from shot to shot; using zooms and sudden pans to pull the rug out from individual images; piling on sonic elements of vastly contrasting registers and tones—is as approximations of the effect Munch wanted his own pictures to have. “One sees things at different moments with different eyes,” the artist wrote in his journal in 1890:

Coming in from a dark bedroom in the morning into the sitting room one will, for example, see everything in a bluish light . . . If the atmosphere of this kind is being painted, it won’t do merely to sit and gaze at everything “just as one sees it.” One must paint precisely the fleeting moment of significance—one must capture the exact experience separating that significant moment from the next—the exact moment when the motif struck one.

It is as an attempt to find a cinematic vocabulary with which to “paint the fleeting moment of significance” that Edvard Munch arrives at its most staggering effects. When Watkins is at his best, few other filmmakers could shoot a historical re-enactment with such attention to what it would have been like to be there in a particular studio, bedroom, café, or bar, struck by a particular barrage of smells, proximities, blushes, emanations, fragments of music, and casts of light.

Would Watkins have been satisfied doing only this sort of work? There’s an expectation running through the movie that the stream of mental data we see when we watch an artist’s imagination at work will give an explanatory account of why, exactly, the man in question painted what he did. The adult Munch, played by Geir Westby, is, as shown here, haplessly buffeted in his mental life between images that correspond (somewhat crudely) to the terrors of sex and images that suggest (no less crudely) those of death: a shot of a gob of thick red paint emerging from a tube gives way to a familiar image of young Edvard keeled over in bed on Christmas morning coughing up blood; a scene of the mature artist painting The Vampire comes intercut with repeated glimpses of “Mrs. Heiberg” (Gro Fraas) fixing a druggy kiss on the younger Munch’s neck. With these attempts to account for what we see in the paintings themselves by appealing to what we know—or think we know—of the painter’s life, the movie, it seems to me, goes off-track.

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 to a devoutly Pietist doctor and his much younger wife, who bore the older man five children before her death from consumption five years after Munch’s birth. His was a fairly grim childhood; the family lived on the brink of poverty, often having to scour the house for loose coins to cobble together money for the rent. In 1977, Edvard’s sister Sophie, with whom he had the closest of his boyhood relationships, died at 15 of the same disease that had killed her mother. It was the start of a long history of unhappiness and mental illness among the Munchs. His younger sister Laura would eventually be institutionalized for schizophrenia, and his brother Andreas, the only one of the siblings to marry, died young and, by his own account, miserable. In Edvard Munch, the siblings’ father, Christian, comes off as unbendingly moralistic and stern. In fact, he was occasionally garrulous and playful, but more often it was weakness, rather than hardness, that defined him in Edvard’s eyes. A doctor, he was said to go pale at the sight of blood.

Munch returned incessantly to images from his early childhood in his art. When he was very young, the family moved to Kristiania (now Oslo), where a cultural revolution was just starting to develop. In his late teens, Munch fell in with a circle of radicals based out of the capital and centered on Ernst Jaeger, a publicity-hungry anarchist to whom Munch would later credit his choice to repudiate the religious tradition in which he had grown up. It was in Kristiania that Munch would develop his lifelong acquaintanceship with the painter Christian Krohg and his wife Oda, and there he met, and lost, Mille Thaulow—the “Mrs. Heiberg” to which his diaries keep returning. (Munch’s other most influential relationship during this period was most likely with Aase Carlson, a fellow artist with whom the painter developed a close platonic bond after the collapse of his affair with Thaulow. Carlson’s wedding, which Munch attended clandestinely and, it’s often speculated, with regret over a missed opportunity, has a prominent place in Edvard Munch.)

In 1886, Munch succeeded, with some much-needed lobbying from Krogh, in persuading the jury of the newly created Autumn Exhibition to show his painting The Sick Child, an agonized canvas inspired by Sophie’s death and covered with scores, cuts, scratches, and blacked-out elisions by the time Munch left it for done. The painting, as Watkins’s film declares insistently, appalled the local press—as did the solo show the 25-year-old Munch held in 1889. Munch left soon after for a transformative period of study in Paris under Léon Bonnat, during which he learned from afar about his father’s death, but his art only received serious attention once he had traded his circle of Kristiania bohemians for the community of artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, and occultists then simmering in fin de siècle Berlin.

In many of the best passages in Edvard Munch, Watkins’s camera twists and glides desirously around Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (“The Black Piglet”), the wine club where Munch first became entangled with, among others, Stachu Przybyszewski and August Strindberg. Here too he met Dagny Juel, with whom he had a brief, artistically productive affair—she posed for, among other pictures, his Madonna—before she fell into what would be a tumultuous marriage to Stachu. Juel was a disruptive presence in the all-male Ferkel crowd, and though Munch, like the rest of its members, could be too quick to relegate her to the status of a temptress or a muse (“all she had to do,” he wrote of her, “was look at a man, place her hand on his arm, and immediately he found the proper expression for something over which he had been brooding helplessly”), the two of them stayed on good terms. Munch wrote her one of her few truly admiring obituaries when, in 1901, she was shot dead in Tbilisi by a disgruntled lover, and Watkins does her equal justice; it’s she (as played by Iselin von Hanno Bast) who, in her direct-to-camera interviews, gives the movie some of its most levelheaded insights into the business of romantic love.

The Munch on which the movie focuses, it’s important to say here, is the persona the painter took on as a young man, and from which he drifted away as the new century went on. We see nothing, in Edvard Munch, of the artist’s tumultuous cross-continental affair with Tulla Larsen (the couple fought, separated, and re-united incessantly until Munch took a gunshot wound to the hand during one of their quarrels); his decision to commit himself to psychiatric care; his subsequent retreat to a cottage in Åsgårdstrand; the muted, intensely private, possibly platonic relationships he maintained later in life with a succession of live-in models; or the two decades he spent watching the Nazis come to power. (“His works speak to me,” read a gushing third-person birthday letter Munch received in 1933, “of life’s profound seriousness… A powerful, independent strong-willed spirit-heir of Nordic culture, he frees himself from all of naturalism and returns to the eternal foundations of National art-creating.” The letter was from Joseph Goebbels, whose admiration for Munch’s paintings did not keep them from being labeled “decadent art” under Hitler.)

If it is no accident that Edvard Munch stops where the 19th century ends, it’s perhaps because the young Munch—passionate, tortured, vigorous—is particularly adaptable to the picture of artistic genius in which Watkins is invested. This is a Munch for whom sex is a debased, contested, and endlessly agonized-over need, a Munch who keeps long, brooding, downcast silences in the most boisterous company, and a Munch for whom it is possible to say of Mille Thaulow, as he does in the movie’s last lines, that “I felt as if there were invisible threads of her hair still twisting themselves around me.” Many of the lines attributed to Munch in the movie are drawn directly from the artist’s journals from the period: feverish jottings on solitude and loss, written in an elaborately poetic style.

Watkins is careful to insist on the extent to which this Munch was a product of his unusually dense, richly textured epoch. The contrast between the breezy lifestyle of Norway’s turn-of the-century upper classes, who take strolls down Kristiania’s central boulevard every afternoon, and the squalid conditions in which the country’s working poor lived; the particular brew of Satanism, Freudianism, Nietzscheism, anarchism and nihilism that emerged among the literati in Europe’s major cities around that time; the revolution in sexual mores that took place on the continent as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth—Edvard Munch is remarkably clear-eyed about the manifold conditions under which Munch’s art developed. It’s all the more surprising, then, that Watkins refuses to acknowledge what Jay A. Clarke astutely points out in his book Becoming Edvard Munch: that Munch’s persona as a tortured, sexually haunted young genius was as much a deliberate, artful creation as were his paintings.

Munch had a special gift for engineering scandal. It takes a particularly brazen temperament, or a precocious skill for self-mythologizing, to give yourself the first-ever solo show in your country’s history at age 25, and to include in that show—for which you are charging a fee at the door—everything you have ever made. It likewise takes a certain kind of ambition to document one’s traumas in the specific way Munch, in his diaries, documented his: poeticized, stylized, often written in the form of third-person dialogue scenes between pseudonymous parties. (“Fru Heiberg placed herself before the piano / Brandt sat in the corner—by the stove and / watched her—while she sang he followed / one soft inclination of her back…”) Munch’s early career was an odd mixture of feverish, generative artistic activity and savvy self-marketing. In that second capacity, the artist’s friends, colleagues, and rivals also played a part; the collection of four essays Przybyszewski edited on Munch in 1894, written by essayists from Strindberg’s school eager to claim the painter as one of their bohemian own, played a large part in creating his international persona.

You could call what we witness in Edvard Munch a record—or a product—of a different sort of seduction from the kind to which Munch claimed to have fallen victim with Mille Thaulow. The movie is visibly intoxicated by the persona Munch gave himself, often to the exclusion of recognizing that persona as the construction of, in Munch’s words, “the distraught [painter’s] friend the poet.” It buys perhaps too readily into the lofty, slightly inscrutable goals Munch set for his own art, whether those were—as Munch put it—“to dissect what is universal in the soul” or, as the movie’s narrator characterizes the aim of the great “Frieze of Life” series Munch painted in Berlin, “to unfold the very meaning of nature and existence.”

On the other hand, you could argue, it is precisely the movie’s refusal to interrogate Munch too deeply that motivates it to attend to his pictures with the passionate focus that it does. Look, for instance, at how Watkins re-stages the making of the works themselves, keeping a tight lock on the character’s hand as it chisels away at the surface of a woodcut, or slathering the soundtrack with what sounds like microphone static whenever the artist scores deep enough into a canvas. It’s worth watching the attention the camera gives in those scenes to the material out of which Munch worked, or to the physical business of thickening, thinning, layering, or violently scraping away at paint on a surface—just as it’s worth listening, throughout the movie, for the thrilling ways in which Watkins uses snippets of music or voice recordings to give each image precisely the additional sort of texture it needed. “It may even be,” Christian Krohg wrote about Munch’s work around the time of the latter artist’s move to Berlin, “that [his craft] is related most closely to music and not to painting, but in any case it is brilliant music.” It may be that Edvard Munch is, in any case, something like brilliant cinema—but to say that is to say that it succeeds more fully as a musical composition than as a picture of what it looked like for Munch to live a life in art.

Edvard Munch screens April 12 in Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. For many of the quotes and biographical details used in this essay, the author is indebted to Sue Prideaux’s Munch biography Behind the Scream (Yale University Press, 2007).

Nick Broomfield has come a long way from his first years as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1970s, when he made shorts about British housing projects and borrowed equipment from Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker—although his crew is still distinctly small. Accompanied for decades by his former partner, frequent co-director and cinematographer Joan Churchill, Broomfield became infamous for blundering about in front of the camera wearing a pair of giant headphones and wielding a boom mike. In 2002 Jon Ronson crowned Broomfield as a key member of "Les Nouvelles Égotistes"—a group of "faux naïf" celebrity documentarians that included Michael Moore, Louis Theroux, and Ronson himself, who were in vogue during the late Nineties and early Aughts. Two years after Ronson labeled the group, Morgan Spurlock started vomiting up Big Macs on camera, and the rest is history. Thankfully, Broomfield's own shtick may have reached its apogee in 2011 with Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, when he traipsed around Wasilla in a furry Elmer Fudd hat and pestered Palin's neighbors.

Ronson was right to single out Broomfield in his article as the best investigator among the so-called Égotistes, less grating than his peers, and less polemic than Moore (which isn't saying much). Broomfield has developed a knack for approaching his subjects from the outside in, and not only because many of his star interviewees avoid him like the plague. To Broomfield's credit, he is more interested in the social, cultural, and economic circumstances animating his subjects—which has lead some of his less attentive fans to misconstrue his films about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Biggie and Tupac, and Aileen Wuornos as corroborating conspiracy theories. While it is true that Broomfield is ineluctably drawn to tabloid fare (his films profile murderers, prostitutes, rock stars, politicians, and white supremacists), his perspective is often more balanced than one might assume. He is also capable of being surprisingly considerate of his interviewees.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper, which focuses on the notorious serial killer of South Central L.A., is Broomfield's finest film to date. He decidedly paces around the perimeter of his subject and does not interview his ostensible central character, Lonnie Franklin (aka the Grim Sleeper), even once. Broomfield instead "rides" with his neighbors (as they did with Franklin for years), while tracking down and interviewing the surviving victims. Broomfield is much quieter in this film; his son Barney has taken over as cinematographer and he spends most of the film out of the camera's range. When he does pop into the frame, he is a bit sheepish (recoiling clumsily when a pit bull barks at him), and his trademark boom mike is much smaller, less intrusive.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Broomfield when he was in New York for its DOCNYC screening, two months after its U.S. premiere in the New York Film Festival. Tales of the Grim Sleeper (NYFF ’14) airs April 27 on HBO.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper lacks what you've described in the past as your "elephant traps"—sudden ambushes or provocations of your subjects.

Yeah, because I didn't think the film needed it. The LAPD was certainly deserving, but I didn't have the opportunity to interview them. The neighborhood people didn't need that much help from me at all, and I really felt that was one of the reasons it was such a wonderful film to make. They were incredibly good at describing their situation in an amazingly articulate way that was full of humanity.

Everyone in New York complains about the car culture in Los Angeles, but there's something about interviews conducted in moving vehicles that has a nice immediacy to it.

Yes. Well, it's always difficult to get movement into documentaries so I enjoyed shooting in cars. People in the neighborhood were living on the streets and a lot of the women didn't have a fixed address, they moved around a lot. Most people were reluctant to take us into their homes, to be seen with and known to be involved with us. We'd either interview them in a car or have them come to our office—I call it an office but it was more like a bunker. They loved being in the car, it was a massive old Mercedes from the mid-Nineties that I bought for next to nothing. Simple, comfortable, and yeah—any excuse and they would leap back into it.

The method you employed reminded me of your film about Sarah Palin, You Betcha!, which is as much about the community of Wasilla as it is about Palin.

Yes, this is far more a portrait of a community and a tale of two cities, a tale of the strange apartheid system that operates in Los Angeles. Once it became apparent very early on that there was overwhelming ballistics and DNA evidence pointing to Lonnie, it clearly wasn't going to be a story about whether he did or didn't do it. It became instead a story about how it was possible that this happened, and about the circumstances that enabled this community to be so completely cut off from the rest of Los Angeles. There was almost a genocide that took place. Margaret Prescod, for example, would probably say that there were three, maybe four hundred women who disappeared within a 35-year period of time. This would raise eyebrows even in the most primitive banana republic, but when you think that this happened in Central Los Angeles, it's pretty scandalous. I think that all of these questions still need to be answered.

You seem to have discovered a kindred spirit in Margaret Prescod, who founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. The way that she grabbed the microphone and hijacked the LAPD press conference—that must have appealed to you.

She certainly doesn't take any prisoners. I think people like Margaret are so impressive because they've been battling for so long without receiving any help from the authorities at all. It was incredible to see this great group of women all meet at the Southern California library on Normandy, a rather amazing library with a lot of history involving the L.A. riots and so on. I think they want wider political questions asked, they want a congressional Committee looking into how it was possible for the investigation to take so long, why there was so little information coming from the police.

You often home in on circumstantial details and contingencies—clearly you're posing the question in Grim Sleeper, what would have happened if the victims were white? In your two documentaries about Aileen Wuornos, you place a lot of weight on her fraught upbringing and how it influenced her criminal behavior. Even in your drama Battle for Haditha (07) you include this heavy moment where one of the Marines requests psychological help and he's told that he'll have to wait until after his tour. Then he participates in a massacre. It's like you're showing us a chain-link of circumstances that lead up to every tragedy.

Very often we live in a world where things are very black and white, where most people have a very fixed idea about who they are and who these other people are. I think so much of what happens in our lives and what happens out in the world is a lack of accident or a combination of the two, and I think it is a protective thing to dismiss a lot of situations, to say that all of these people are lazy or they're drug addicts.

Of course, in this film for example, if Pam—who is an enormously capable person, super bright and completely reliable—had grown up in a different part of the city, in the white part of the city, or would have gone to a white school, she would be incredibly accomplished, running some sort of business or corporation, and have a chauffeur or whatever. But the circumstances were such that she obviously isn't. And I found exactly the same thing in South Africa—you know, there were kids in the township who were super bright, incredibly well read and very good at writing, but they went to shitty schools and there was no way they were going to go to universities and there was probably no way they were ever going to get out of the township, even in the new South Africa. So I think that's always kind of interesting, because I think audiences don't think that far ahead even when it's so obvious. Something the documentary can do is get an audience very close to a character like Pam, to allow them to enjoy her personality and like her, and then suddenly realize that her life options are actually so minute and teeny.

And in L.A. there's the unfortunate fact that so many people in low-income neighborhoods aren't able to vote because they have felony convictions.

Yeah. They get convicted for a teeny possession of crack, whereas if it had been cocaine it would have been a lesser charge. The other irony is if you've got a felony conviction for crack possession you're excluded from most of the rehabilitation programs. So you're really living a twilight existence once you get your first conviction.

You can see why no one in Lonnie's community wants to talk to the police. Their cageyness is definitely warranted, but there's something more that slowly emerges within the film—that some of the neighbors were possibly complicit in the cover-up of the murders. What were you thinking when you first noticed these changes in their stories?

I think I was surprised initially. When I heard the guy say "Well, I burned his car for him and there were all these bloody clothes in it" . . . the thing is, I'm coming from a very prosperous part of Los Angeles, and where I live in Santa Monica there isn't really a crack problem—but I think living in a community where there is a crack epidemic must be like being in a war zone and when someone's strung out on crack you get the weirdest forms of behavior. So for instance people in that community are used to seeing people run naked down the street [like one of Lonnie's victims] or people just shouting apropos of nothing or people showing some weird irrational type of behavior. So I think their tolerance level for weird things is pretty high. They don't ask questions, they kind of get on with their lives, and I think there is just this incredible fear that if they raise questions it's only going to get them into a lot of trouble. Like Nana Gyamfi from the Black Coalition says: "I tell my son that the last thing he should do is call 911.” That's really how people think there.

When you interviewed Chris Franklin's ex-girlfriend, first she describes the Franklin family as normal but then goes on to reveal that what was going on in the house was not what most people would consider normal at all.

[Laughs] Yes, and there were other stories about things that Lonnie did that I didn't include in the film. Apparently he had this white woman who was kind of his slave whom he'd bought and was always naked in the back of his van. He was just driving around with her like that and no one said anything.

Do you think any of the neighbors are worried about the community reaction to the film considering what they revealed about Lonnie?

I invited everyone to the screening at the Egyptian, and the only people I wasn't able to contact where his three friends. All of their phones had changed—everyone changes their phone constantly—so none of the numbers worked. Richard's girlfriend told me that he's no longer in her life, and not to call her again. Gary's phone—I drove to his house and left a couple of notes and noticed that they were still there the next day. I think the house is being sold and Gary's not there, so it's going to take me probably two or three days of hanging out there until I bump into one of them. So I don't know really, because in a way they are the ones who are the most vulnerable. It's something I'm going to have to do when I go back to L.A.

Men and women don't really talk to each other much in the film. I read that you initially considered splitting Grim Sleeper into male and female sections.

It's a weird thing. I think that one of the effects of crack is that it polarizes the sexes so there's a complete breakdown of trust and respect. Lonnie's weird introduction to crack is that he was very lonely in school and he could never get the sexy girls. Then when crack came along, he was able to provide them with drugs and he could get what he wanted from them, but there was always this sort of lingering contempt.

I think there needs to be some kind of systematic approach to the crack epidemic, because so many of the women end up on the streets and it's almost like there's a war between the sexes. It can't be treated as an individual problem, which is how it has been treated. And yeah, at one point during the making of the film we had sort of grouped together the interviews with the men and the women, but I think in the initial cuts the men were coming across much less sympathetically than they do now, because their position is a pretty tough one to accept. I was very concerned for people like Gary who said things like: "I just divorced, and yeah, I did things that I'm not proud of.” It was important to put that in the film because I didn't think that they were intrinsically bad, rather they were just in a situation where women are obviously incredibly exploitable.

I think with a lot of the guys whose marriages broke up, there was no permanence in their relationships and there was a contempt for the women in their lives. I think his friends are obviously very keen to distance themselves from murder or abuse. I don't get the feeling that Jerry was into abuse particularly, I think he was more into the crack and he was bringing women to Lonnie. He was probably very concerned about his proximity to the murders, and I think the others were too.

Some of the men that you interview are disturbingly funny. You often cut directly from those scenes to a string of interviews with Lonnie's victims, giving a sobering face to these women whom the men were just cracking jokes about.

Yes. Well, the women are very strong. Again, there are other things that I didn't include in the film. Jerry—the guy who was missing teeth who used to pick up women with Lonnie in the evening—he was horrified for example that Lonnie was so rude to his mother, because the mother is the big thing in the family unit. So there is that respect for women within the family, for the mothers.

People assign that same stereotype to Italian-American mobsters—that they have extremely close relationships with their mothers.

And completely contemptuous relationships with their molls, probably.

You pass quickly over the polaroids that Lonnie took of different women, undressed and sometimes tied up. You spend more time on the police photographs of Lonnie, where he's cuffed and practically naked and he has to lift up his shorts and be photographed from every angle. Did you draw any connections between the polaroids and the photos of Lonnie? Both sets come across as particularly demeaning.

I guess he is a sort of captured animal at that point in time, but there was also just a quality about those polaroids [of the women] that really interested me. They're beautiful photographs in a lot of ways, and the detail in them is incredible. I thought the person who took them is actually a pretty good photographer. I guess they got a lot of practice. [We both laugh awkwardly; most likely for different reasons] Some of the people in the community found the police photographs of Lonnie quite distressing because they felt that they made Lonnie look like a slave on the block, and I think that's true.

Those photographs certainly have that weird feeling in them, and I don't think I intellectualized them in that way but I can still see it. You know, when all is said and done Lonnie is obviously a product of a weird system, and he was able to get away with the murders for so long because of that system, because these are all considered disposable people—himself included.

“NHI” or "No Humans Involved" is the acronym the LAPD supposedly use in reference to crimes against prostitutes, crack addicts, and other people who are poor and of ill repute. When Chris Franklin admits that detectives congratulated his father for "cleaning up the streets," I thought of Aileen Wuornos, who also used the phrase "cleaning up the streets" in another one of your films—although she went so far as to allege that the police were encouraging her to murder her johns.

That's right. I mean, I do think that the LAPD think that way. Funnily enough, the only woman who's managed to have a series of interviews with Lonnie is this English journalist Victoria Redstall, who is kind of a police groupie—this blond girl from Surrey who managed to blag her way into the jail by saying that she knew Lonnie. She would go there once a week to see him for quite a long time, although I don't think he said anything particularly profound. She's somebody who is really close to the sheriff's department—all her best friends are sheriffs—and I did a couple of interviews with her. She didn't end up in the film, but I showed her a rough cut, and she told me that if you look at it from their point of view, the police kind of like Lonnie because he was somebody who was "cleaning up the streets" for them. They feel that they're there to protect and serve the tax-paying citizens of the city, not to deal with a bunch of people who take up all of their time and cause them problems, people who they re-arrest every two or three weeks. And that was a strand of the film that I worked on much more toward the end because I wanted obviously to make a film that I felt was accurate, but that wasn't in any way a conspiracy film. But when Christopher said, completely unannounced, "My father's got a lot of fans in the sheriff's department," that carried a lot of weight for me, because I didn't ask him the question, he just came out with it.

The effect is devastating.

Yeah. And I don't think Christopher had any idea of the significance of what he was saying, he was just reporting a fact. And it gave what Victoria had said a lot of credibility. I then researched it a bit more, and there is quite a lot on the Internet about this phrase “NHI,” and I'd also met an ex-police chief from the Seattle area who wrote a pretty amazing book, in which he also writes about that phrase a lot. So it's not just the LAPD, it's pretty widespread. I think there is that feeling that they are kind of cleaning up the streets, and there is very little enthusiasm for solving those kinds of crimes.

Even Margaret Prescod says that a captain or someone on the force said: "Why do you care, they're prostitutes?" I'm assuming he meant, you're not a prostitute so don't worry about it, you're safe.

It's also probably the reason why the Los Angeles Times didn't publish some of the stories about the murders, because no one wanted to read about it and the story wouldn't sell newspapers.

You've made several films about almost every level of prostitution, from Chicken Ranch (83) to Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (95)...

Chicken Ranch became more like a portrait of a dysfunctional family. I think they're all different stories, they're all different films. Aileen was a prostitute too, but I guess they're very much on the edge of society, it's this sort of taboo thing. An awful lot is revealed about our society and our world by the people who are slightly on the edge of it, who invoke a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of prejudice.

Are you working on anything new now?

I'm doing a four-part series for the BBC based on a book called The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett, who is a very political Irish writer. It's set in the Belgian Congo just at the time when everything collapsed, but it's really a love story between a rather cynical and disillusioned journalist in his forties and a very passionate girl, an Italian journalist who becomes involved in the cause. It's a very interior story about a main character who is full of self-loathing. Ronan is writing the script, but I think he's having lots of problems with it. I think it's sometimes hard for novelists to write scripts.

Is any of that story familiar to you?

Not to that extent. No. I went through a very short period of self-loathing. [Laughs] I think it's—no, no, not to that extent. In fact, I wrote the script because originally we were going to do it as a feature and I made the character a lot more likeable. What you can do in a series, and what we've seen in all of these series lately, is that you can really go into the darkness, really go into the contradictions of the character. So going back to the novel and getting all of that stuff out again is exciting. And shooting it in a completely subjective way thrills me. For instance, you're filming a dinner, but actually you're not because you're with this character, and then everything kind of comes to pieces because he's so wrapped up in himself, he finds himself completely on the wrong side, and on the other side of her, too, who he is obsessed with and has actually betrayed. Because the situation is so extreme, he suddenly has to engage with reality and take on a position, so he becomes a hero but in a rather peculiar way. It's interesting and very strange and I am excited by it, but I think it's going to be difficult getting it there.

Are you looking forward to directing another drama?

I am looking forward to this. It's taken me ages and ages, but it's a great excuse to go to the Congo, which I've always wanted to do. Of course, locations in the Congo are too crazy so I went to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, all over the shop—which Channel 4 paid for—to find the locations. Africa is an amazing continent. It's unbelievable, enormous, and full of dangerous things that want to kill you. It's sort of addictive. It took me ages to get a real through-line on how to direct it, but I think it's all about the interior monologue of this guy who's so involved with his self-loathing that when he arrives in Leopoldville he really doesn't engage properly. He's ostensibly there, but a lot of the time he's just watching people's lips and thinking about entirely different things and then his whole world goes completely to pieces.

Weren't you one of the first directors to shoot in Jordan with Battle for Haditha?

Yes. And now that's pretty commonplace. It's funny, my crew became like the crew from Mutiny on the Bounty. They were all married men with families back in England, and they all just stayed in Jordan. They went from my film, which was the first one, to Redacted, to The Hurt Locker—they all went blam, blam, blam! And they all ended up with Jordanian families and girlfriends. It was most peculiar.

Maybe you can initiate that in the Congo.

I think we're shooting that one in Tanzania.

A springtime satellite to the Locarno Film Festival in August, L’immagine e la parola was inaugurated in 2013 with the intention of exploring the relationship between the moving image and the written word. The four-day event, overseen by Locarno Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian, consists of workshops, discussions, and screenings, all of them open to the public and many of them free of charge, with the programming shaped by the work and ideas of a special guest co-curator. Previous editions of L’immagine featured cinematic heavyweights—Aleksandr Sokurov gave a masterclass about the making of Russian Ark in the first year, while Edgar Reitz helmed a similar session discussing the development of his most recent installment of Heimat in the second. But what lured me down to this sleepy Swiss lakeside town near the Italian border in the middle of a chilly, rainy March was a special guest whose career has a vital but more peripheral relationship to movies.

La Moustache

To be sure, Emmanuel Carrère has worked extensively as a scenarist and has directed two very good features, though it’s notable that Retour à Kotelnitch, his 2003 documentary rumination on a harrowing double-homicide in rural Russia, began its life as television reportage, and La Moustache (05) was a well-made, perfectly faithful adaptation of Carrère’s own 1986 breakthrough novel of the same name. It’s Carrère’s literary legacy that really matters here. He began writing film criticism for Télérama and Positif following his military service in Indonesia, and published a monograph on Werner Herzog. He found fame as a novelist—among his best-regarded novels is Class Trip, also adapted into a feature (in 1998)—but it was his biography of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, published in 1993, that looked forward to the sort of category-resistant work through which Carrère would distinguish himself. I Am Alive fuses events from Dick’s life with elements of his fiction, and also features Carrère as something of a character in the narrative. This drawing upon novelistic techniques and foregrounding of a first-person perspective found its first full expression in 2000’s The Adversary, a “nonfiction novel” about the infamous Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who spent years lying to everyone in his life about his career and then murdered his wife, children, and parents when he realized the game was up. Romand, it turned out, admired Class Trip and was willing to cooperate with Carrère on the project, but the writer struggled with Romand’s story for years before landing on an entry point that involved contrasting his own life with that of his subject. Carrère describes the first sentences of The Adversary as marking “my exit from my writer’s adolescence, which was steeped in influences and inhibitions.”

This literary adulthood bloomed with My Life as a Russian Novel, a 2010 work in which Carrère unearths the story of his grandfather, a translator for the Nazis who disappeared after the war; Lives Other Than My Own (11), in which Carrère witnesses catastrophic loss following the tsunami in Sri Lanka and investigates the lives of a pair of crusading French lawyers; and also from 2011 but published here in 2014, Limonov, which chronicles the wild and sometimes grotesque picaresque that was the life of Russian poet, memoirist and “professional revolutionary” Eduard Limonov. The Adversary and Lives Other Than My Own were adapted to the screen, in films directed by Nicole Garcia and Philippe Lioret respectively, with varying degrees of formal or thematic fidelity, but both features were conspicuously absent from the L’immagine programme, otherwise loaded with films connected to Carrère, including the first episode of the French television series Les Revenants (12), which he co-scripted. Instead, a suitable substitute came in the form of Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (82) and People on Sunday (29), the latter screened with sublime live musical accompaniment by Michael Jaeger Kerouac, who somehow made a humming, celestial, Joe Zawinul–inspired groove for keys, bass, drums, tenor sax, and clarinet sound completely attuned to interwar images of people streaming through summery Berlin streets or picnicking by the lake. These landmark hybrid works are closer in spirit to Carrère’s late work as a writer than any of the films directly inspired by his books, suspended as they are in the liminal pace between fiction and nonfiction cinema, appropriating tropes from both while adhering to the tenets of neither. As Chatrian put it to me: “Carrère doesn’t hesitate to combine different sources, inspirations and subjects in order to portray a prismatic reality.”

Dostoevsky’s Travels

A more contemporary cinematic corollary to Carrère’s late writings can be found in an early work by Pawel Pawlikowski, who readers of Limonov will know is an old friend of Carrère’s and who was also in attendance at L’immagine—the two participated in an onstage conversation aptly tilted “Fictionalizing Reality.” Pawlikowski’s Academy Award winner Ida was guaranteed to fill Locarno’s Teatro Kursaal, but the screening that struck me as more cogent was his mischievous, funny, and inventive 1991 mid-length Dostoevsky’s Travels, in which Dimitri Dostoevsky—the Russian author’s trolley driver great-grandson—is whisked across sundry Western European capitals to speak at the comically stuffy gatherings of the Dostoevsky Society. Reminiscent of certain stories by Bruce Chatwin and made for the BBC’s Bookmark series, Pawlikowski’s 52-minute work is an enigmatic hybrid of documentary coverage and obviously staged reenactments, following Dostoevsky on his journey—his first beyond the frontiers of the USSR—and relaying through voiceover his inner thoughts. These thoughts are almost entirely given over to the pursuit of purchasing a Mercedes and bringing it back to Russia to show off to his compatriots, who are all stuck driving dreary, rundown Ladas. Not unlike My Life as a Russian Novel or Limonov, Dostoevsky’s Travels is a playful consideration of how the burden of history renders the present into something akin to black comedy.

Dostoevsky’s Travels was for me a remarkable discovery, a film I’m not likely to have seen otherwise. But nothing at L’immagine this year felt quite as revelatory as finally being able to see Retour à Kotelnitch, which to my knowledge never received any sort of distribution in North America. Deemed a cinematic “twin” to Russian Novel, Retour only reveals its relationship to Carrère’s dark familial legacy very late in its 135-minute run-time. Kotelnitch is a town some 800 kilometers from Moscow, a place where outsiders are regarded with tremendous unease—even locals who have ventured into the outside world are regarded as suspicious. Carrère initially visited the town to report on the discovery of András Toma, a Hungarian POW, still thought to be the last WWII POW to be repatriated, who was living in a local psychiatric hospital. On that trip Carrère befriended a translator named Ania, a Kotelnitch native who had been abroad, learned other languages, then came home and started a family with a member of the FSB. Between Carrère’s first and second visits Ania and her young son were both brutally murdered. The case was dismissed as a random act of violence by a mentally deranged man, but from the start of Retour there are intimations of conspiracy. What initially seems a detective story becomes something stranger and more immersive, a portrait of people living in fear on the edge of a transfigured empire, mourning without closure, and drinking, drinking, drinking. It is a film drenched in grief and vodka.

Retour à Kotelnitch

“You ought to write a book,” one of Carrère’s subjects suggests early in Retour, and we in the audience may, for a moment, be inclined to agree: Carrère exudes such mesmerizing control of his material when able to render whole worlds into prose, whereas the sometimes very gauzy, sometimes haphazard coverage gathered by his skeleton crew cannot aspire to any comparable formal elegance. But as the film becomes increasingly unmoored from its original intentions, and grows more deeply invested in allowing this place to speak for itself, Carrère makes discoveries about Kotelnitch and its citizenry. Long, rambling, captivating scenes unfold, with Carrère himself often spied at the edge of the frame, struggling to know when to interfere and when to stand aside and simply bear witness. Retour is a remarkable film because, in a way that is indeed akin to Carrère’s later books yet is also entirely native to cinema, it retains a sense of propulsion while remaining open to figuring out what its true subject is as it goes along.

José Teodoro is a Toronto-based critic and playwright.   

One of Edgardo Cozarinsky’s short stories pivots on a sentence that exemplifies the delicate tone—tender, sympathetic, gently ironic, a little tersely evaluative—of the Argentine writer-filmmaker’s many evocations of transatlantic émigré life. In the story (“Days of 1937”) a German pianist, having left his country during World War II, drifts through the Buenos Aires he’s come to call his home. He makes a living playing regular sets at a sparsely attended café where, once a night, he’s brought a small bowl of cocaine to keep his spirits up. Recently, he has been surprised to start getting a series of anonymous requests for German songs he thought only he remembered. One night he walks down to the edge of the city, where he believes he hears “the promising murmur of engines now at rest but which at any moment could roar into life and push these floating palaces off towards Europe.” He looks out over the water:

He saw the Rio de la Planta, like the Atlantic Ocean it was part of, exclusively in terms of the distance that separated him from Europe; it would have been pointless to remind him that if he had traveled out in a straight line, he would have come to Cape Town: in the map of his imagination there was only one cardinal-point: north-northeast.   

What does it look like to try to reconstruct the cardinal-points of a person’s imagination, to look at a city exclusively in terms of its distance from another, distant one, or to track the movements of one’s parents and grandparents from continent to continent and port to port? The characters in Cozarinsky’s 2001 collection The Bride from Odessa, in which “Days of 1937” appears, often end up playing detective with their own past. An aging Argentinian man happens upon a translation of a devastating letter his Russian-language teacher received in 1946. An art forger of Argentine extraction travels to Budapest, the city of his mother’s birth, in search of a rare painting lost during the war. A writer on a stay in Lisbon tries to reconstruct the brief period his grandparents—a New York heiress and a German émigré whose identity may have been forged—stayed in that city before emigrating to America and giving birth to a daughter who would, in turn, settle for a time in Buenos Aires.

Many of Cozarinsky’s stories are laced with elements of their author’s family history. One way to look at Letter to a Father, Cozarinsky’s exquisite new essay film, is as another angle on the historical event behind the title story of The Bride from Odessa: the massive initiative sponsored in the 1890s by the German banker Maurice de Hirsch to fund and support Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to pre-established agricultural colonies in, among other countries, central Argentina. In that story, a young man meets a Russian Orthodox shopgirl, a stranger to him, during a brief stay in Odessa. He is on his way from his home in Kiev, he tells her, to start a new life in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. (“He explained to her that . . . on the other side of the ocean there was a land of infinite possibilities, a country where a Jew like him could own a piece of land.”) He confesses that the young woman he’d recently, unhappily married had refused to join him on the trip—at which the shopgirl insists, “laughing all the while,” that he take her with him instead.  

The story ends with the eventual couple’s great-great-grandson laid up in a hospital bed, where he learns about the secret of his distant parentage in a letter from his aunt and resolves “to write it as a story.” Cozarinsky, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1939, was indeed undergoing cancer treatments in a hospital around the time that he wrote “The Bride from Odessa.” Until then, he had published relatively little, save for a single, relatively successful novel (Urban Voodoo, 1985). His international reputation as a filmmaker, on the other hand, was well established. In 1974, as bloody conflicts were breaking out in Argentina between ultra-right-wing paramilitary groups and guerillas associated with the Peronist left, he left Buenos Aires for Paris. Not having prepared for a long-term stay—he would have preferred London—he started calling the city home. Living abroad as the violence in his home country intensified, he developed a deep interest in Paris’s wartime history. One Man’s War, the collage movie Cozarinsky made in 1981 out of newsreel footage of the occupied city and readings of Ernst Junger’s diaries from the time, remains his best-known film.

Cozarinsky re-visited Buenos Aires in the early Nineties, and Sunset BoulevardS, the essay film he made about the city in 1992, anticipates many of the devices on which he would depend in Letter to a Father. Like the new movie, it sets up Cozarinsky as a sort of detective figure combing Argentina for traces of persons exiled or displaced. In Sunset BoulevardS, the persons in question are Maria Falconetti, the legendary star of The Passion of Joan of Arc who moved to the city from Brazil in 1943 under tight financial strain, and Robert Le Vigan, a French actor forced into exile on account of his strong fascist ties. The movie alternates between interviews with the pair’s acquaintances, testimonies from the city’s old hands (including Cozarinsky’s longtime friend Adolfo Bioy Casares), excerpts from pre-war movies, snippets of newsreels, and restless urban footage shot on the fly.

Cozarinsky’s own presence in Sunset BoulevardS is cagier and more reticent than in the new film. But the earlier movie is no less driven by his need to pin down what, exactly, his Jewish family’s position was during his childhood in Argentina, which persisted in its stubborn, tense neutrality for much of the Second World War. At one point in the film, he reminisces about being taken as a boy to hear Falconetti join in a singing of the Marseillaise immediately after the liberation of Paris. (The words, sung in a language he didn’t know, went over his head.) That memory recurs at an important juncture in Letter to a Father, as does a memorable line near the end of Sunset BoulevardS: “Every detective always ends up learning something about himself.”

Like the young man in “The Bride from Odessa,” Cozarinsky’s grandfather readily took the chance given him by Baron Hirsch’s relocation project. He left Odessa on August 10, 1984 for “Colonia Clara” in Entre Ríos, a province that Cozarinsky, as he confesses in the opening scene of Letter to a Father, never visited until the movie’s making. It is, in fact, the story of this grandfather of Cozarinsky’s—and the legacy of the Jewish immigrant population in Entre Ríos—to which much of the movie turns out to be devoted: the couple’s fortnight-long layover in a shack-like “immigrant hotel” in Domínguez; the library the new arrivals built there; the safe in which the more prosperous among them pooled their money to help their less fortunate settlers keep their land; the two museums in Entre Ríos filled with the early immigrants’ trinkets, tea sets, phonographs and books; the cemetery where “Abram Kazarinsky”—as he is named on the log of the ship that bore him over from Odessa—lies under a stern-looking portrait taken of him in his later years; the moving letter he wrote in pained, formal Spanish script to his son after the latter joined the Navy and left for America in 1919.  

Here Cozarinsky’s strategy is to accumulate details with scrupulous attention, letting the world in which his father grew up—and the people to whom he grew up—gain in texture and presence with the revelation of each new image, the unveiling of each new site and the disclosure of each new fact. For Cozarinsky to ask about his father’s life directly means, in contrast, bombarding the movie with questions. “What made that child of ‘Jewish gauchos’ dare join the Navy at 18?” he asks in one voiceover passage. Another line of questioning plays over a languorous shot of a misty river running through Villa Clara: “Did he ever miss this river, these fields, this sky?” “What did he find in his travels?” “Where can I find answers?”

Not, it’s suggested, in the many old photographs through which we see Cozarinsky leafing over the course of the film, nor in the colorful, exotic postcards he received throughout his childhood as a Navy son, nor from the inscription on the seppuku knife his father brought him back from Japan as a gift. It’s basic to the movie’s design that its assertive, swelling dominant melody keeps giving way to these tentative, less confident passages of interrogation or doubt. Cozarinsky lost his father at 20. Theirs was, he admits at one point in the film, a relationship in which little time was spent together and from which little was learned. What survives from it now are—above all—the letters, to which you could read Letter to a Father as a belated reply. (The epistolary film, as the scholar Hamid Naficy once pointed out, has historically lent itself well to cinemas of diaspora or exile. Consider, as he does, Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia, Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance and Tangos: The Exile of Gardel by Fernando Solanas, another major Argentine filmmaker forced to re-locate to Paris during the military junta’s reign of terror in his home country.) To Cozarinsky, the author of those letters stayed partially undefined. If memory serves, we never hear his name.

Ignorance, it should be said, is less what defines the Cozarinsky character than his ruminative streak. He is a hawk-like, severe man furrowing his brow at the passage of a city by the windows of his car, a deliverer of half-whispered soliloquies about the need to compile and conserve what records of the past one can, and a eulogist standing in a cemetery at nightfall, reflecting on just how many failures met the 19th-century immigrants buried under his feet. Letter to a Father is well-stocked with colorful family anecdotes—a beautiful 21-year-old girl, one of Cozarinsky’s aunts remembers, was called up for military duty one summer on account of an error by a drunken clerk—and casual, tender portraits of the current inhabitants of Entre Rios. But it depends for many of its grander effects on a deepening of its voice, a stretching out of its vowels and a rumbling of its consonants; its five-minute-long penultimate shot, set to the only piece of non-diegetic music in the film, is of sunset slowly fading into dusk.

Many of Cozarinsky’s stories depend just as heavily on his ability to introduce—and alleviate—this heaviness of tone. Most often, it’s deployed in connection with a time slipped by, a relative lost or a homeland painfully abandoned. It’s sometimes jarring to encounter these heavier, more ruminative sections in what is otherwise the mellow, inquisitive flow of Letter to a Father, but they play a clever rhetorical role for the movie. Watching them, I was reminded of an exchange that takes place near the end of “Émigré Hotel,” the long final story in The Bride from Odessa, between a wizened Lisbon bookshop owner and the younger man who’s sought him out for information about his grandparents’ convoluted early life. “For people living there in those days,” the shopkeeper has just insisted, “there was nothing romantic or novelesque about . . . Lisbon in 1940.” (Nothing, in other words, in connection with which it would be worth filming a day’s five-minute journey into night.) “I would have liked to explain to him,” the younger man thinks,

that there was a lot of romance and fiction about it, that perhaps one needed not to have lived “there, in those days,” but to have been born much later to be able to appreciate, from a radically different world, how romantic and novelesque a simple name and date—Lisbon, 1940—could be to the imagination of someone like me.

One of the strengths of Letter to a Father is that, like several of Cozarinsky’s films, it shows an active imagination scanning over and sifting through a particularly tumultuous period in world history: guessing, making inferences, tracing out possibilities, worrying over loose ends. (“I cannot help wondering,” Cozarinsky asks of a group of schoolgirls glimpsed in a photograph from his father’s Japanese tour, “if these little girls in 1940 survived the nuclear destruction of their country five years later.”) To many ears, the mention of Entre Rios in 1894 wouldn’t carry the “romantic and novelesque” charge of that of Lisbon in 1940—nor, for that matter, that of Paris in 1944 or Austria in 1938. It’s in this respect that Cozarinsky’s nimble film is as much an argumentative essay as it is a letter or a poem. If the stories of the Jews who left Odessa for Argentina just before the 20th century haven’t yet entered the canon of pre-war displacement narratives, the movie insists, they are no less rich with detail, incident and texture for it—no less deserving of proper eulogizing, nor, as the case may be, of some detective work. 

Most Western moviegoers think that Abkhazia was where the wizards kept their prison in the Harry Potter saga, but Tangerines, a potent, intimate war movie about this contested pocket of the former Soviet Union, has the emotional force and intelligence to break through apathy and ignorance.

A co-production of Georgia and Estonia (and the first Estonian film to be nominated for an Academy Award), it unfolds during unpredictable pitched battles between Georgian soldiers and Abkhaz separatist forces in 1992. The movie’s central figure, Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak), is a sexagenarian carpenter in a rural area whose residents, fearing random atrocities as well as “ethnic cleansing,” have returned to Estonia, their ancestral home. Ivo and his neighbor, Margus (Elmo Nüganen), a tangerine farmer, and Juhan (Raivo Trass), a doctor, are the only other Estonian holdouts (and Juhan leaves with his wife a third of the way through). Margus plans to exit once he harvests and sells his crop. Ivo helps him by building crates and picking fruit, but he aims to stay in Abkhazia, even after a firefight breaks out between Georgians and Chechen mercenaries employed by Abkhazia, right in front of Margus’s orchards. Ivo nurses the wounded survivors: one burly, bullet-headed Chechen, Ahmed (Giorgi Nakhashidze), who must recover from a body shot, and one shambling, baleful-eyed Georgian, Niko (Mikheil Meskhi), who almost dies from a shell fragment in his head.

Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze’s triumph is to extract a tough-minded, lucid, even gravely beautiful drama from this panorama of Eurasian chaos. His choice to put an Estonian at the center is inspired. It fuels a plague-on-all-your houses approach to a dispute that generated barbarities in every quarter. As Andrew Mueller, one of the few Western reporters to visit Abkhazia, writes in his book, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong, “Abkhazia’s 1992-93 war with Georgia was as hideous as it was obscure . . . Human Rights Watch had declared both sides responsible for ‘gross violations of international humanitarian law.’” Up to 10,000 Abkhazians perished at a time when their population numbered perhaps 250,000. Roughly 300,000 ethnic Georgians fled the territory. So did other ethnic groups, like the Estonians.

The filmmaker’s decision to pit a Chechen mercenary instead of an Abkhazian against a Georgian soldier is both historically accurate and evocative. “Abkhazia’s eventual victory was achieved with the assistance of some dubious customers,” Mueller notes. “The Russian military joined in, as did a poetically named outfit called the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, an amalgamation of Islamist hillbillies from the region’s more ornery corners, notably Chechnya.” This jumble of racial, political, and religious attachments keeps Urushadze’s characters on their toes and his audiences guessing. When Margus says near the beginning that a major has offered troops to load his tangerines in carts, you can’t guess from which army.

With this volatile background, it would have been twisted for Tangerines to become a drippy fantasy about the brotherhood of man or a simplistic pacifist parable. Instead, it’s flavorful, sinewy, and replete with real-life contradictions, right up to the bitter and semisweet end. Urushadze manages to dramatize the central source of armed conflict in our time—the battle between rival nationalist forces over shared terrain—around the kitchen table of a man who disdains petty tribal allegiances. All the action occurs organically. It’s embedded in Ivo’s quiet determination to hold onto his home and moral sanity, and his refusal to let military forces breach his integrity, though they threaten to turn his and Margus’s tracts into a no-man’s-land.

No mere mouthpiece for the filmmaker, Ivo is a majestic character, rooted, sardonic, compassionate, and wary. Even more than the charged setup of enemies recuperating beneath one roof, Ivo’s personality draws an audience in. He may open his doors to men in need, but he’s savvy, private, and in his own way, territorial. He gets Ahmed and Nika to abstain from killing each other in his house, precisely because it is his house, and he’s their “savior” (as Ahmed puts it, sarcastically). Ivo is always straight with them, so the Chechen knows he means it when he says Abkhaz soldiers would kill him for harboring a Georgian (just as Georgians would for harboring an Abkhazian or Russian soldier or Chechen hired gun). But Ivo also keeps his distance from them. To him, they’re just “boys,” not merely because of their ages, but also because their patriotism is puerile—a weaponized version of “anything you can do, we can do better.” The older man proudly keeps a picture of his blossoming granddaughter in plain sight, but his guests must earn his trust before he reveals her name or anything else about her.

Lembit Ulfsak gives a greathearted performance. He’s a writer-director as well as an actor, and his presence alone, like Victor Sjöström’s in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, suggests a lifetime of experiences absorbed through the pores. Without any actorly giveaways, he conveys Ivo’s ability to address a person on different levels, according to his closeness and reliability. Ulfsak’s performance can also be spontaneous and visceral. The panicked widening of Ivo’s eyes when he sees a small explosion down the road puts across all the shock and violation of life during wartime. After Ivo, Margus, and Juhan push a wrecked Georgian combat vehicle down the hill and out of sight, Juhan says he was expecting it to ignite, the way it would go off in the movies. In one of several mordant, funny strokes, Ivo drily says: “The cinema is a big fraud.”

Tangerines is anything but. It’s the rare film that’s sensitizing as well as horrifying. Nothing human is taken for granted. When Ivo and Margus bury Georgian bodies, Margus, though fed up and weary, folds each man’s arms over his chest. At Ivo’s request, he checks their uniforms for papers that could identify the corpses for family members who may search for them. Nuganen creates a modified Sancho Panza character. Initially he seems semi-ridiculous as he frets over his crop, but he comes off wiser as the movie goes along. He sees the awful irony of killings so ruinous and bloody being nicknamed “The Citrus War.” (Who knew that Abkhazia had a climate that was friendly to tangerines and eucalyptus trees?) When musing that his orchards survive everything, including the armies that surround them, he could be an Estonian cousin to the Carl Sandburg who wrote, “I am the grass; I cover all.”

In fact, Urushadze is sharp as a carpenter’s tack with all the characters and actors. He renders the growth of grudging respect between Ahmed and Niko incrementally and believably. Nakhashidze’s Ahmed at first seems all aggression, and Meskhi’s Niko all passive-aggressive arrogance. Then both actors prove adept at the poking and prodding that leads these hard guys to understand each other.

As a writer-director, Urushadze has the vision to come up with lingering images—like Ivo’s long, sensitive hands guiding pieces of wood to a buzzing saw—and the taste and the film sense to pick them up again only when needed. It’s quietly devastating when we realize that the carpenter must go through the same process whether making tangerine crates or coffins. Even narrative details as unassuming as Niko’s attempt to repair his favorite audiocassette tape have apt and often unexpected payoffs. Visually, the film is alive with autumnal colors and textures that are vibrant and changeable. Urushadze and his cinematographer, Rein Kotov, capture how the setting sun can make trees burst into red-orange colors, and their images of mist and cloud hanging near Margus’s home are as memorable as the Maloja Snake in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Best of all, Urushadze’s embrace of humanity includes a healthy dose of mordant comedy. It reminded me of an Abkhazian joke from the Soviet era that Mueller recounts in his book: “The Russians launch a lunar mission. So, the first two Cosmonauts land on the moon. When they get there, to their surprise, they find an Abkhazian. They ask him, ‘What are you doing here?’ He replies, ‘I heard there was a funeral on.’” There are several impromptu funerals in Tangerines, but this movie is a cause for celebration.

For me, watching Eric Rohmer’s 1984 film Full Moon in Paris—Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, re-released this week—was a pure dose of that fabled malady, Proustian Rush. This is one of those Rohmer films that capture their particular moment perfectly, in this case 1980s Paris in its high phase of post-modernist chic. You might think of Rohmer as a quintessential Sixties and early-Seventies director because of his Moral Tales series, but for me he embodies French cinema in the Eighties. It’s partly because that’s when I started to spend a lot of time in Paris (and therefore, inevitably, at the movies), and partly because of Rohmer’s extremely regular output in that decade; it feels as if I measured the passage of the Eighties in episodes of his six-film series “Comedies and Proverbs,” made between 1981 and 1987.

Not all Rohmer films are tied indissolubly to their moment. The first in that series, The Aviator’s Wife (81), with its landscape of parks, cafés, and bedsits, is set in a Paris that would not have been so different two decades earlier, while some of his later films, including episodes in the “Four Seasons” series (90-98), could easily be made today without much discrepancy. But Full Moon in Paris* is entirely a snapshot of its instant. Visually and sonically, 1984 is present throughout. It’s there in the music, a frothy neo-yé-yé electro-pop score by duo Elli and Jacno, alumni of pioneering French punk band Stinky Toys (singer Elli Medeiros is glimpsed dancing in a party scene). And it’s there in the décor: grey walls, Mondrian prints, “witty” lamps (heroine Louise is a trendy creative who makes her own lights, presumably because she’s unable to afford Memphis creations). Other design touches include the neo-classical pillar in Louise’s apartment, and novelty furnishings like the trompe l’oeil sofa at her workplace (at first, I thought it was held together by masking tape, then realized it was painted to resemble the table in front of it, complete with vase of flowers—oh, that crazy design decade).

This is also entirely a film of its time in its depiction of Louise, who is Mademoiselle 1984 to the hilt. Full Moon in Paris is one of the rare Rohmer films to feature a fully-fledged star—by contrast to “Comedies and Proverbs’ actresses like Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, who seem to have wandered in off the street, and prove absolutely riveting and memorable. But Full Moon features a star insofar as its heroine is herself a star, a charismatic scenester whose problem, she complains, is that everyone loves her too much, which doesn’t leave her much time to herself. Louise’s life seems to be a permanent, hyper-elegant performance, as witness the way she’s constantly positioning herself, head cocked just so against walls and in doorways. And yet, this performance seems absolutely natural and artless; as well as elegant, Louise is also oddly gauche, in the way that only hyper-sophisticates can be.

Louise is played—or since the fit is so close, perhaps it’s better to say embodied—by the late Pascale Ogier, who was 25 when she made the film. The daughter of Bulle Ogier, Pascale memorably teamed up with her mother to co-write and star in Jacques Rivette’s enigmatic psychogeographical romp Le Pont du Nord (81); playing a motorbiking free spirit and tracker of conspiracies, she comes across as at once leather-tough, otherworldly, and impishly comical. She then appeared in arguably the ultimate intellectual-chic oddity of the decade, Ken McMullen’s essay/fiction Ghost Dance (83), in which she quizzes Jacques Derrida on the nature of ghosts. After that, Pascale made Full Moon in Paris, which won her the Best Actress award in Venice—shortly before she died in October 1984 of an overdose-related heart attack, the day before her 26th birthday.

So Full Moon in Paris is deeply poignant to watch again, especially, if like me, you had it bad for Ogier at the time. In 1984, she seemed impeccably glamorous, in a witty, wildly offbeat way; seen today in Full Moon, she looks oddly awkward and childlike, especially with that high-pitched sing-song voice that some French actresses (but by no means all) contrive to use to great effect. The clothes that seemed so cool, by the then modish but accessible design house Dorothée bis, look faintly ridiculous now—the flat shoes, bulbous sack-like coats, oddly tapered trousers. Add to that the vast bouffant hairstyle tied with a Minnie Mouse bow, somewhere between Versailles and early Madonna, but now irresistibly suggesting Seinfeld’s Elaine, some five years early.

In many ways, Full Moon in Paris is a portrait of Pascale Ogier’s moment, and of her personality and taste. She created her own interior designs for the film, using works by designer friends, and one assumes she was largely responsible for the prominent use of Mondrian prints—an artist whom Rohmer disparagingly said at the time had come to be seen as “more of a design accessory than a painter.”

Full Moon in Paris is an account of the sort of dilemmas that a woman like Louise, or Pascale, might have faced in Paris at the time, balancing the demands of autonomy, hipness, and having a love life. An intern in a design company located in the upmarket Place des Victoires (in the same building as Kenzo’s HQ, one shot reveals), Louise lives with her older boyfriend Rémi (Tchéky Karyo), an urban planner, in the drab new town of Marne-la-Vallée—which DP Renato Berta makes resemble nothing more or less than a lunar wasteland in the opening and closing shots. Rémi is a physical type, first seen working out on their balcony, but prone to stay at in the evenings, while Louise likes to go to parties in town and occasionally spend the whole night out (chastely, it’s suggested—for the moment, at least). But Louise doesn’t seem sure whether she wants Rémi to accompany her on her sorties, or to give her space; apparently, she wants both, and neither. She’s always saying she wants solitude, yet doesn’t seem happy being alone; too popular for comfort, she’s the opposite of Delphine in The Green Ray (86), who yearns for company but backs off whenever anyone invites her on holiday.

Meanwhile, Louise keeps her options open by retaining her Paris apartment as a pied à terre. To complicate matters, she’s invariably accompanied by writer Octave (Fabrice Luchini), a platonic pal who doesn’t want to stay platonic. A highbrow (ostensibly) unthreatening best male buddy, he is to Louise somewhat as Duckie was to Molly Ringwald’s Andie in Pretty in Pink—at once her confidant, flattering courtier, resident highbrow jester, and her “walker” at parties, where she’s likely to go off and dance with more muscular types. Octave is what, in a 17th- or 18th-century French comedy, would have been called Louise’s “follower”—but he wants to be more than that, as becomes apparent when he starts disparaging her taste in men, while slyly, fondly stroking her arm.

While Ogier’s untimely death leaves her frozen in her moment, it comes as a rather comical shock to see the slender, effete, youngish (33-year-old) Luchini here—then just settling into his career of playing pompous, self-deluding intellectuals, but decades and a whole different body away from the boorish, bourgeois patriarch of François Ozon’s Potiche (10) or the grizzled grandee of French theater (famed, among other things, for his staged readings of Céline and other literary texts). Luchini’s Octave is charming, comical, absurdly mannered as he widens his eyes and declaims the sort of finely carved but hollow nonsense that Rohmer characters often spout when they think they’re being insightful and original—but does Octave really believe that he’s the first person to suggest that cities are more restful than the country, or the first to come up with the idea of writing in cafés?

However, Octave (whose name inescapably evokes the morally tainted social gadfly that Jean Renoir played in The Rules of the Game) is more than ridiculous. He is, I’d argue, the only out-and-out villain in Rohmer’s films. Watching Full Moon in Paris again, he now strikes me as quite loathsome. It’s not only because, married as he is, he comes on to Louise in his apartment, with his daughter and her babysitter on the premises—it’s also because he’s so unpleasantly high-handed with that babysitter. But he’s also filled with self-congratulatory contempt for others, showing a monstrous sense of his own superiority when he sneers at her penchant for men of “an animality that’s pathetically bestial.” Just because he’s forever stopping to jot down his pensées in a notebook doesn’t mean that he’s not pathetically bestial himself—as his increasingly frequent lunges at Louise make clear.

Then there’s the villainous stroke he pulls off when out in a café with her. Louise has just spotted Rémi on the premises, and when she tells Octave, he says he’s pretty sure that Rémi was with Louise’s friend Camille (Virginie Thévenet). At least, he thinks it was Camille, but he can’t be sure: “I have a selective memory—I don’t remember people who bore me.” You really want to see Octave get a kicking, but the only violence in the film—and, so far as I can remember, in any Rohmer film—is Rémi literally beating himself up in frustration at his and Louise’s inability to communicate.

Things come to a head when Louise finally hooks up with sax player Bastien, played by Christian Vadim in a sleeveless T-shirt and a Billy Idol sneer. Bastien’s preposterous cool marks him out as one of those bestial boys that Louise can’t resist; early on, in a terrific extended dance-floor shot, he and Louise slowly, unfailingly gravitate towards each other, driven by the common certainty that they’re the sexiest people present. Eventually Louise has a wild night with Bastien—but that only sends her off restlessly pacing the moonlit Paris night. Taking refuge in a café, she ends up listening to words of wisdom from a chance confidant (Nouvelle Vague stalwart Laszlo Szabo) and expressing her plight in concisely geographical manner: once convinced that her suburban apartment was a place of exile, Louise says she now feels exiled in Paris, while it’s Marne that suddenly seems like the centre of things.

The comedy plays out in a way that’s finally tragicomic, with Louise seemingly hoist by the petard of her contradictory desires. There’s irony but no cruelty here; Rohmer is not making Louise the butt of the joke or saying “serve her right.” It’s simply in the nature of stories illustrating a proverb that someone is bound to suffer from the principle at stake. Louise simply incarnates the plight of an attractive, intelligent, independent Parisian woman of her time, following her own will, but coming uncomfortably to terms with the fact that a lot of people want her too, and not always in a way that suits her. Louise’s chic furnishings reminded me of the John Cooper Clarke lines—“Just a tiger rug and a telephone / Say a postwar glamour girl’s never alone”—except here it’s an angular neon lamp and a grey telephone to match the walls. For Ogier’s postmodern glamour girl, never being alone is her curse, and finally her tragicomic lesson—but, because of Rohmer’s characteristic empathy, decidedly not her punishment.

*The fourth in the “Comedies and Proverbs” series, Full Moon in Paris claims to illustrate the dictum, "He one who has two wives loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind"—which appears to have been entirely made up by Rohmer.

Virgins of the Seven Seas

“Put frankly, Kuei was not a big-time director in the Shaw stable,” said screenwriter Szeto On in an interview about Kuei Chih-hung with the Hong Kong Film Archive. But while he was regarded as minor league during his time at Shaw Brothers, today he’s a giant, standing alongside Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung as one of the best directors the studio ever produced. A pissed-off perfectionist with proletarian sensibilities, he directed groundbreaking, realistic crime flicks and some of the filthiest horror movies ever to leave a slime trail across the silver screen. Kuei applied the technical chops of Lau Kar-leung to exploitation material. He had Chang Cheh’s obsession with violence, but he was willing to offend his audience in a way Chang wasn’t. The only Shaw director with a similar sensibility was barefooted Marxist hand-biter, Mou Tun-fei, but Kuei was better at navigating the system. For all of Mou’s fire, he turned in just five features for Shaw (and two shorts). Kuei delivered 33 features and four shorts over a 20-year career. And then he just walked away.

Kuei honed his technical skills to a razor’s edge during an abnormally long apprenticeship as an assistant director, working mostly with foreign auteurs like Shaw’s in-house Japanese trio of Ko Nakahira, Inoue Umetsugu, and Koji Shima, as well as the Italian director Bitto Albertini (Supermen Against the Orient, 73; Black Emanuelle, 75). Run Run Shaw even paired him with the Austrian Ernst Hofbauer to co-direct their pirate film Virgins of the Seven Seas (74), containing all the dwarf-tossing, kung fu spitting, mass rape, lesbianism, and torture you’d expect from a pirate film.

Although he’d directed six previous movies, they were mostly standard issue Shaw Brothers fantasy films and light comedies because Kuei, despite his combative reputation, was a good company man. The first generally acknowledged “real” Kuei Chih-hung flick was The Delinquent (73), co-directed with action maestro Chang Cheh (one of Shaw’s “major” directors, who says he merely lent his name to the flick to reassure the boss). The entire movie is one big punch to the audience’s face, opening with star Wang Chung running out of the darkness, smashing through paintings of Hong Kong, before screaming and shattering the movie’s frame with his fist. Wang plays an angry kid from the ghetto who tries to escape his crummy existence by joining a gang. He winds up getting his dad killed and taking a bunch of saws to the gut before murdering his boss in a posh high-rise apartment, then leaping out a window to his death.

The Delinquent

Kuei’s status as a “minor” director meant he had trouble booking studio time, so he filmed The Delinquent on location in some of the dirtiest parts of Hong Kong, a rarity for Shaw Brothers films. Cinematographer Yau Kei lashes these wild surroundings into a rabid frenzy with frantic zooms, grotesque wide-angle lenses, and bizarre compositions, framing action scenes through mountains of garbage with an extremely long lens. Yau and Kuei would go on to work together on approximately 14 movies over the next three years, which constitutes the first stage of Kuei’s career.

Next came the apocalyptically sleazy Bamboo House of Dolls (73), about an all-female World War Two Japanese internment camp that featured rampant racism, fellatio on a gun barrel, strap-on dildos, and more catfights per square inch than any five women-in-prison movies combined, but it was a relative breath of fresh air before Kuei’s grimy dive into the unforgettable Killer Snakes (74). Star Kam Kwok-leung (cast because he was the only actor who could handle snakes and remember his lines) plays a sexually humiliated loser who rediscovers his virility when he starts to murder the people he hates with his beloved poisonous snakes. Shot in another ghetto sweatbox, draped in piles of slimy snakes (trained by snake-handler Lam the Snake King) it’s a movie that leaves you dripping with fetid fluids: sour sweat, rancid spit, bright red Shaw Brothers blood, and yellow venom. But the movie that moved Kuei up the ladder at Shaw was The Teahouse (74) in which Chen Kuan-tai plays an immigrant teahouse owner who uses his restaurant as an extrajudicial courtroom, forging shaky truces between various tribes of Hong Kong’s unwashed underclass. Shot on location, with dialogue in Cantonese (rather than dubbed into Mandarin like most Shaw movies), it was a huge hit that spawned a sequel, Big Brother Cheng (75).

Kuei and Yau remade Straw Dogs, only with more motorcycles and spear guns, as Killers on Wheels (76), a movie featuring so many hardcore stunts that when a stunt rider was injured on camera, Kuei made him retake the shot before allowing him to go to the hospital. Kuei also became one of the prime movers in Shaw’s Criminals series (76-77), five anthology films based on real criminal cases that gave Shaw an outlet for failed feature projects, and allowed some of their most rabid directors to unleash their unhealthiest fixations. With segment titles like “Nude in a Box” and “Teenager’s Nightmare,” it was an unsavory series of films, and Kuei participated in more installments than any other director. His “Teenager’s Nightmare” about a serial rapist stalking public bathrooms doesn’t just feature a teenaged Kara Hui being told to “get your ass up” before being sodomized over a dirty toilet, it also features grotesque cinematography and humor so black you almost can’t see it anymore.

Killers on Wheels

Kuei’s great masterpiece, his only wuxia movie and biggest flop, Killer Constable (80), saw him exchange Yau for Lee San-yip, the cinematographer who’d stick with him for the rest of his career. Lee didn’t go for Yau’s hyperactive camerawork, instead exercising a smoother style that found its strength in his harshly geometric compositions, stylized lighting, and Lee’s uncanny ability to shoot coherent action in near-total darkness. All of these skills were on display in Killer Constable, which is a bleak, blasted monument to the entire wuxia genre. 

Killer Constable starts with the Empress Dowager giving her security force 10 days to retrieve two million bucks in gold lifted from the royal treasury. The only man fit for the job is Constable Leng, whose motto is “Kill them all,” and whose bloody-minded pursuit of justice has even his own brother denouncing him. “You’re not a constable, you’re a murderer,” he spits. He ain’t wrong. Stabbing unarmed men in the back, torturing witnesses, callously killing informants who are no longer of any use, Leng’s investigation becomes more and more twisted until finally it eats itself. As Kuei said in an interview when his film was released: “I simply wanted to depict how insignificant commoners are.” Imagine an ancient Chinese version of Dirty Harry where Jeffrey Dahmer plays Eastwood’s character and you’ve got it about right. 

“The more vulgar the movie, the more likely you will make money,” Kuei said in an early interview, and he was about to redefine vulgarity. Leaving behind the overheated social commentary of his earlier films [they really are socially concerned movies in the Hong Kong context - few directors were dealing with ghetto life, juvenile delinquents, triads, drug use, and real blue collar language and neighborhoods before Kuei, except for some outliers like Patrick Lung Kong], Kuei leapt into a giant pool of green pus for the second stage of his career. He’d already paddled around in this putrid puddle back with Spirit of the Raped (76), a movie that offers up family-sized servings of “Did I just see that?” moments with its tale of a woman having a very bad day: in a single afternoon she loses all her money, gets drugged, raped, sold into prostitution, given a venereal disease, and driven to suicide. Happily, she comes back from the dead to exact goopy revenge.

Spirit of the Raped

Spirit of the Raped was written by Szeto On, who claims that the next stage in Kuei’s career was all his fault. “I just thought that wacky, freaky stuff was right for him,” he said in an interview. First up was Hex (80) which was a rough remake of Clouzot’s Diabolique—with a naked dancing exorcism at the end. Then came the comedy sequel, Hex vs. Witchcraft (80), and Hex After Hex (82). The series was a hit, and while Kuei was still trying to insert social commentary, no one was having it anymore. (Hex After Hex originally had a criminal getting “1997”, the year Hong Kong was “returned” to China, branded on his butt; Kuei was forced to substitute it with a brand featuring the Shaw Brothers logo instead.) Cut off from his gadfly roots, Kuei would just have to make use of buckets of maggots and worms instead.

“Everyone in the business is giving all they can without reservation,” Kuei said in an interview. “In the past, they would hold back and save a few tricks for the next movie. Now it is an all-out game and you have to go for it.”

And he did. After Hex vs. Witchcraft, Kuei unleashed Bewitched, a movie about a cop investigating a black magician who murders children by driving nails into their skulls. Featuring lots of soft-focus shots of topless women running on beaches and making love, it stands out mostly for two gonzo black-magic duels between the evil wizard and a Buddhist monk, one of which includes the wizard powering up by guzzling down a pot of dead babies and rotten corpse parts. But these were just warm-ups for The Boxer’s Omen (83) a movie that will turn your hair white.

Boxer's Omen

There is a recognizable plot somewhere in Boxer’s Omen about a guy getting killed in Thailand while boxing and his brother’s search for revenge, but really it’s an excuse for some of the most lurid and surreal imagery ever put on film. A woman is sewn into the stomach of a dead crocodile. An army of animated alligator skulls march across a bleak hellscape before bats fly out of their eyes. A monk wraps himself in an enormous placenta. Whatever you think you’re prepared for, you’re not. Boxer’s Omen is the kind of movie that’s seared into your brain, but there’s always some stomach-churning marvel that ambushes you upon each new viewing. You remember the wizard puking up raw chicken guts and eating them, sure. But do you remember the wizards group-eating each other’s vomit? Or the flying alien sperm with glowing eyes and thrashing tail?

At the end of Boxer’s Omen, the main character puts on his street clothes, walks out of the monastery and abandons Buddhism without a backwards glance, and that’s essentially what Kuei did, too. In 1984, at 47 years old and at the height of his career, he walked away from Shaw Brothers and filmmaking. As Chua Lam, one of his longtime producers said: “He was disappointed with the whole film industry.” He moved to California and opened a pizza parlor. In 1999, he died of liver cancer. His son, Beaver Kuei, still works in the Chinese film industry and his most successful films are the rom-com Sophie’s Revenge (09) starring Zhang Ziyi, and The Painted Veil (06) starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. No one eats vomit in either film.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Cannes has revealed its lineup for this year, and there aren’t many surprises in its Asian entries:

Competition

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien) The best news in this year’s festival. HHH’s wuxia movie starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen, has been in pre-production (and raising its $15 million budget) since 2005. It’s been announced for Cannes before, only to disappear from the lineup, so one hopes that this time it’s for keeps.

Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhang-ke) A 2014 Cannes jury member and winner of 2013’s Best Screenplay award for A Touch of Sin, China’s most marketable art-house director turns in a three-part movie about a guy in love with a woman (Zhao Tao, as usual); he gets spurned by her, then reconnects years later, and winds up wandering off to find her son who’s working in an Australian casino. This will be the fifth movie by Jia to premiere at Cannes.

Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda) The film adaptation of the manga Umimachi Diary, it’s about a 14-year-old girl who goes to live with her twenty-something half-sisters. This will be the fourth film by Kore-eda to premiere at Cannes.

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Madonna

Madonna (Shin Su-Won) One of Korea’s few female directors, Shin has made what’s described as a follow-up to her film Pluto (13), a harsh movie about schoolkids torturing each other over grades. In this go-round, a nurse’s aide tries to score a donor organ. A good time will assuredly be had by all.

Fly Away Solo (Neeraj Ghaywan) The first-time filmmaker already received $100,000 from the Sundance Institute for this film, which they describe with the following: “Four lives intersect along the Ganges river: a lower-caste boy in a hopeless love, a daughter torn with guilt, a father sinking in greed, and a spirited kid craving a family, all yearning to escape the constrictions of a small-town.” Global miserablism prevails!

Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) The great Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer) and Eri Fukatsu (Bayside Shakedown) co-star in a film based on the novel by Kazumi Yumoto. Asano plays a husband who’s been missing for three years who suddenly reappears in his wife’s life. This will be the fifth movie by Kurosawa to premiere at Cannes, and he won the Jury prize at the 2008 festival for Tokyo Sonata.

The Shameless (Oh Seung-Uk) The director of Kilimanjaro (00), Oh turns in this mob drama starring Kim Nam-Gil (The Pirates) and Jeon Do-Yeon, who won Best Actress at Cannes for Secret Sunshine (07).

MIDNIGHT

Office (Hong Won-Chan) Not much is known about this serial-killer flick from Hong, who is the co-writer of ultra-grim Na Hong-Jin films The Chaser (08) and The Yellow Sea (10) and the fun ’n’ bouncy Confession of Murder (12). 

In news that has nothing to do with Cannes...

... On April 1, Hong Kong’s government made the unprecedented decision to strip the world’s first Chinese television station and Hong Kong’s oldest broadcaster, ATV, of its license. The day before this was announced, ATV went on the air to claim that it had sold a 52 percent stake to up-and-coming television tycoon (and founder of Hong Kong TV) Ricky Wong. The next morning, Wong said: “What? Are you kidding? I never agreed to anything.” Once again, ATV looks like a bunch of boobs. Their broadcast license was immediately stripped, and they have a year before they go dark. Almost simultaneously, the Li Family, entrenched plutocrats, received a free-to-air license for their TV station, HKTVE. Ricky Wong, not a member of one of Hong Kong’s four big business families, is still being kicked to the curb by its government. His only hope for airtime now is his offer to sell four hours of his own programming per day to ATV between May and when they close the doors.

... Hey, look! Warner Bros Japan is using blackface to sell the new Will Smith movie! 

... New Godzilla movies are coming, and they won’t star America’s “fat” Godzilla. Toho announced that the man behind the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime, Hideaki Anno, will be head director and scriptwriter. Backing him up as special-effects director will be Shinji Higuchi, who served in the same capacity on Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy.

The story in Dog Lady is straightforward: on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a woman lives with 10 dogs in relative isolation. We watch her survive through the seasons without money, scavenging off what others throw out and what nature provides her. Veteran actress Verónica Llinás and director Laura Citarella together create a remarkable documentary-style narrative, which dispenses with verbal communication and lets time in all its bluntness pass by gracefully on screen.

That simplicity is the product of nearly three years of shooting with an all-female crew of five and almost no budget. Citarella is part of El Pampero Cine, a self-governing collective and production company in Argentina; her debut feature was 2011’s Ostende, an atmospheric thriller set at a resort, and on Dog Lady, she and Llinás co-direct. Along with her comrades at El Pampero, Citarella tries to rethink independent filmmaking and the way it is produced.

In Dog Lady, with El Pampero DP Soledad Rodriguez, Llinás and Citarella photograph a landscape caught between nature and city life. Llinás, who is most famous for her work in the theater, began her career producing low-budget shows with minimal means. Llinás returns to those roots in Dog Lady, shooting the film not just with her own dogs but also in her very own backyard in the outer edges of Buenos Aires. Barely speaking a word over the course of the film, her unnamed protagonist is portrayed almost as an equal to her dogs: she doesn’t talk to them, doesn’t command them, she simply survives with them.

Dog Lady (aka La mujer de los perros) screens tomorrow in its home country as part of BAFICI, a few months after its world premiere in Rotterdam. FILM COMMENT spoke with Citarella and Llinás just after the film’s U.S. premiere in New Directors / New Films.

Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás

I would like to begin by talking about your collaboration process and how this project came about.

Verónica Llinás: The project originated while talking with my brother, Mariano Llinás, who is Laura’s friend and colleague. Together they have a production company called El Pampero Cine along with Alejo Moguillansky and Agustín Mendallaharzu. I wanted to do something more personal, something that represents me more. I had this character in mind who lives with her dogs and survives from what other people throw out. She does not handle money and that’s where the idea was born. So I pitched the idea of this character to Mariano mostly because it was in my reach. I wasn’t ready to go through the process of raising a budget. I know El Pampero well, how they manage to make excellent films with a low budget, so I thought of them. I didn’t want to ask INCAA (Argentine National Film Board) for money.

Also what surrounded me was very beautiful and very interesting: the idea of a character that could be immersed in that world and live from what people throw out and the water she could find in the fountain. I live near that fountain and in fact, there are people who live off the water they collect from it.

Laura Citarella: At El Pampero Cine we’ve been making films for 10 years, and we work a bit in reverse of how filmmaking usually operates. Usually, one person writes a script, raises a budget, casts, finds locations, makes contracts with those locations… You create a whole structure and a system based on a screenplay someone wrote. Here, it’s a bit different: Verónica actually lives with these dogs near the location where we shot, and we had all these things at hand that stimulated our imagination. It’s not that we settled for what we had—we transformed it and re-thought it and asked ourselves what to do with this. We built this fiction based on what we had and this is precisely the way that El Pampero works. It’s a production company and a collective that sustains itself completely independently, without government funding and without institutional support. I think this was key for producing the film that Veronica was imagining.

VL: When I started out as an actress in theater I formed a group called Gambas al Ajillo that had a similar production method to El Pampero: what we had was what inspired us to create our performances. We would go to the Cottolengo, which was a place where you could buy very cheap things, and we would buy outfits and things and from that we’d create a spectacle. Subsequently, I began working more professionally in film and television and slowly distanced myself from that stage of my life.

LC: [laughing] We summoned her back to the independent world.

VL: It was a return on my part. This world where everything is already made, where they pay me to work, where I sit comfortably in a chair while others get the wardrobe, apply makeup and get me everything… That was, at a certain point, not satisfying me creatively. This film was a return to that independent and creative spirit.

How did Laura end up co-directing with you and not Mariano? [Mariano Llinas is the director of Extraordinary Stories among other films.]

VL: At first, since he’s my brother, I wanted him to direct it but he said no. He told me I had to do it: “We’ll end up killing each other if I do it.” I told him I couldn’t do it alone, so he said: “You must do it with Laura. She’s the one for this project.” At first I said no, but as soon as I got to know Laura a little bit, we began working, she began getting into the material and absorbed it, I realized then that Mariano was right. Laura was the one for this project. Laura gave the film a cinematic language, and we were able to work very well together, something that perhaps would’ve been impossible with my brother.

He is credited as a producer.

VL: He was like the godfather of the film.

LC: He got the ball rolling. In fact, he thought about how to do it from a production point of view. Later on, it wasn’t made the way he thought of. Since the film is divided by seasons, he suggested shooting a season per week, but we ended up shooting for three years. All of the ideas we initially had kept falling apart; the film demanded other ways.

VL: I think our feeling was that, at a certain point, the film began to have a life of its own, as if it was already there and all we had to do was unveil it.

LC: There were initial script ideas and character ideas but in order to translate that in a cinematic process was not so easy. We had seen films about similar characters, but to stay away from that and make the character unique was hard work. Even in the first few days of shooting, I didn’t know where it was going, I was like “well, let’s give this a try”. We threw away three days of shooting because everything we tried was either too forced or too realistic. We couldn’t find the balance in which this character existed and we did not find that balance in ten days, we found it almost after a year— but we weren’t that worried.

VL: We shot a monstrous amount of material.

LC: We have like 75 days of material, not even counting some half-days. Also, we were working with the unexpected: not just the fact that we were working with dogs, who do whatever the hell they want, but we were working in a very complex space. There were a lot of things that were beyond our control and that added to the complexity.

VL: Things happened like the tornado in the film when the character is collecting wood, that tornado really happened and tore most of the trees in the area. So the film, in its structure and genesis, had the ability to incorporate reality in that way.

Where did you shoot?

VL: In La Reja, 50 kilometers from Buenos Aires. It’s in the city limits where there are some weekend houses, large fields, poor houses, some thieves… It’s a big mix of things.

LC: It’s like the far west. There are farmers who have their cows and sheep, there is a rejection of city life, there’s undocumented people living there, a big Paraguayan community… There’s a mix of animals and people who come from all over.

VL: There are cowboys who graze their cattle on motorbikes. It’s all very strange.

It’s interesting because in the film, we get a sense that we are not completely severed from urban civilization.

LC:  We did not try to find explanation in why this woman is living separated from the city. We tried not have a psychological logic about her position on society nor any kind of backstory. She does, however, relate with urban life: she goes to the doctor, she has a friend in the city… She has a little relationship with society but with a certain distance and precaution.

It’s very interesting how people look when they don’t speak. The relationship between her and the world that surrounds her seems different when you don’t show her speaking. Could you talk about that choice?

VL: The idea of not talking was something that we decided while shooting. We had shot some scenes where the character speaks but realized immediately that it didn’t work. For me, I don’t know if Laura agrees with this or not, this film, in a way, celebrates the mystery in people. There’s a part of every human being that we cannot access and that is what makes people distinct. One sees a person walking on the streets without shoes or dressed in a certain way and immediately thinks they know something about this person. One of the things this film showed me is that people and their lives and motivations are more particular that one can imagine. The film pays tribute to that: the part of every human being that cannot be penetrated. The problem with language was that it gave away too much information.

LC: There is something beautiful about the quietness in the film that helps create a contrast with the fast and noisy world—without generating an opinion or a critique. She’s not mute—she can speak, and in fact, there’s a scene where you hear her speak to a farmer, very subdued, only a suggestion of voice.

The film manages to not fall in the narrative trap of too much exposition or contextualizing. Things just happen naturally on screen.

LC: The film does not demand context. The film works with the present, the presence of the character, the daily life of this character and that ingenuity she has. We were working with the inner questions and answers of the character, not so much the bigger conflict of the character. The conflict one day is that she has no food. In that sense, the film resists a classic dramatic structure.

How did you prepare for such a character?

VL: The only preparation I did, and I think this was fundamental for the character, was that I began taking long walks with my dogs, almost every day. It was also important because the dogs needed to get used to being together with me. I would formulate a character structure based on what I would find in these walks. I found many of the things we used in the film lying around in the garbage. There wasn’t any preparation in terms of acting. I felt like I wasn’t acting, I was thinking more with Laura as a filmmaker than as an actress. Of course, sometimes I would do some horrible takes where Laura had to tell me: “You are miming again!” I was a mime in one period of my life.

LC: She used to mime, she did a lot of theater and television, more comedies. And when we began, it was difficult to approach her and direct her because she has such a big career in Argentina. We worked to find this character together and found that neutrality was the key to this character, this idea of “not doing.” Sometimes that “not saying,” “not doing,” and that neutrality that works so well with Keaton or Chaplin and Tati, could be funny. The not-doing, in a certain context, has a degree of humor. In the first days of shooting, the character was much more expressive, and that did not work.

The film has a strong connection with nature, not just nature but the world as a whole. Nature is so powerful in the film that if we added anything else, if we had certain camera movements or any artificial sounds, it would not have worked. We had to reach a very precise level of control.

VL: And to me, that was an incredible exercise. I wasn’t used to that neutrality.

LC: There’s footage of me telling Verónica: “Don’t do anything.” And she’d say: “But I’m not doing anything!”

VL: I had to tame the acting beast I had inside. Once I’d found that neutrality, everything began to flow differently.

LC: It was a matter of going there and shooting, like a band that doesn’t need rehearsal. It was so clear.

Tell me a bit about your crew. You said there were just five of you?

LC: It was our DP Soledad Rodriguez, who had been with us at Pampero for a long time; an art director named Laura Caligiuri who left at some point and was substituted by her sister Flora Caligiuri; and our costume designer, Carolina Sosa Loyola. We were five in total, but with time, that basic crew grew even smaller to the point where sometimes it was just Verónica and I.

What about sound?

LC: That was a strange decision. I had previously made a movie called Ostende where we recorded the sound with the camera microphone except for the dialogue scenes. Ostende has many issues with sound so, coming into this project, we thought: “Well, how do we make this dynamic?” We needed something cheap and agile. If we would’ve had an Alexa or a Red, we would’ve not been able to do it the way we did because we would’ve needed a larger crew, focus pullers, grips, etc. We needed that agility for the method we used. A sound recordist would not have been practical for the location. We decided to do the same with Dog Lady: use the camera except for the scenes with dialogue. Later, we had sound people recording ambient sound and completing things we were missing, but basically the film was shot with camera sound, ambience, Foley and other recordings that we kept doing in a more artisanal way.

I’m surprised because when I saw the film, one of the things that caught my attention the most was sound, especially the sound of nature.

VL: We had a good sound mixer who processed the sound of the camera.

LC: The sound of nature was an aesthetic decision. Production sound could be a bit tricky because in general, when one records production sound, depending on where the camera is—let’s say it’s a master shot and you have your main character in the back and you’ve got a mic on him to record his footsteps or some other sound that goes on back there... It’s not going to be democratic. Production sound is not democratic. Our idea was to emulate camera sound, make the sound more equal and democratic where the footsteps are heard in the same level as any other sound.

VL: Not privileging one sound over another, just like it happens in nature.

LC: There’s something absurd for me about production sound, and it happened to me in Ostende. There are certain cinematic conventions that are very strange: all of a sudden, you hear the footsteps of someone who is walking 300 meters away and that is because of filmmaking customs. However it’s also strange not to hear those footsteps because we are so used to those conventions.

Another thing I enjoyed very much in the film was the music. Could you talk a bit about the collaboration with your composer Juana Molina?

VL: Juana is a musician and this is her first film. El Pampero had always worked with a very talented musician called Gabriel Chwojnik—

LC: —but he was a man so he was out. [Laughs]

VL: Juana had a strong desire to do it. I showed the film to Juana and she loved it and began to share her ideas about how the music should be, that it had to be a non-disruptive soundtrack, that should emerge from the ambient sound instead of being a detached piece of music.

LC: She is also very well known in Argentina and in other countries. Juana has something I thought was perfect for the film. The way she structures her songs, based on repetition, has a sort of mantra-like attribute and that served the film well. Juana was great because she is a sensible person who listens and sees and above all—she thought of how the soundtrack can serve the film, and I am so grateful for that because there are so many musicians who only think of showing off.

VL: In fact, the first suggestion that Juana made was that the film should have no music.

Was the idea of having an all-female crew planned or did it just happen that way?

LC:  It happened very naturally. It was strange how all the men were naturally left out of the film.

Starting with Mariano Llinás.

VL: Starting with Mariano. There was something about the female sensibility in this film that fit perfectly. It was a sensibility that harmonized. There were some men who helped of course, but they joined that energy.

LC: The film required a certain patience, a receptive and observing capacity that I think is more inherent in women. We did not have a militant feminist position on this, but we did understand there was something in the energy that fit better among women. The film would have been something else if it was co-directed by a man or shot by a man.

VL: And that was something that Mariano understood from the beginning. He perceived that, he knew the film required a female energy.

Do you have a manifesto at El Pampero?

LC: We have one, yes. It’s perhaps a bit violent. Mariano wrote it.

VL: He is a bomb-thrower.

He founded El Pampero Cine?

LC: Mariano made a film called Balnearios in 2001 and from there, he and a group of people decided to create El Pampero. I began as an apprentice and worked on some films and officially became part of the collective when we finished Mariano’s second feature Extraordinary Stories. Our manifestos are also our films that serve a way of making films not just production-wise but with aesthetic systems, staying away from the “misery films” about poverty in South America.

VL: In festivals, especially in Europe, they love seeing poverty in South America.

LC: The tradition of films at El Pampero is very much linked to literature, for example. We have all different ages and different capacities, but in general the group works by making films. Of course, we want our films to earn money, but we never demand that the motor of their existence is based on selling them. We live off of our other audiovisual projects.

Could we talk about the health of independent cinema in Argentina?

LC: It’s very ill. It’s a complex question because I am part of it. I’ve been making independent films for a long time, and it’s hard for me to see a clear perspective. However, what I will say is that independent cinema in Argentina is going through, if we talk in terms of health, a severe illness. When one makes independent cinema, one does it to do films like we did. What’s happening now in Argentina is that independent cinema is being acquired by the industry which turns films that are free, new, and young into formatted films, catering to a money-motivated industry that follows formalities that affect your casting choices, the screenplay structure, etc. Independent cinema is also being acquired by something that for me is worse than the industry: screenplay clinics, where a tutor guides you, restructures your film and influences you. Instead of talking with filmmakers about their films, they talk about what is expected in certain festivals. So, these filmmakers who had a certain potential become academic and focused more on what is expected from them in film festivals.

This is something we at El Pampero try to resist. We had an experience with Dog Lady at the Venice Biennale College, part of the Venice Biennale, where you go for 10 days learning from a bunch of so-called “experts.” The people who tutored us on the film, a film that has no classical storytelling structure, had never seen Argentinean films. It’s a bit difficult to read a written treatment of Dog Lady when you haven’t seen Argentinean films—films of Alonso, Rejtman, or Trapero. It’s difficult to understand what we were trying to say. This is a particular film with a very particular character, with a certain universe, and for someone who has a more classical background to come and say “Your script needs rehabilitation” is something terrible. But that’s what’s happening.

That’s why I think El Pampero is perhaps a more radical manifestation of independent cinema because we are truly independent, we don’t answer to anyone: not INCAA, not anyone from the bureaucracy of the Argentinean government, not anyone who tells us how to write our scripts… It’s just us getting together and making films. 

“Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid . . . This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Cèline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey comprises two markedly different cinematic styles. The first, established early in the film as our species rises from starvation to civilization, is dispassionate, anthropological—in a word, Kubrickian. The second, introduced later as man grapples with the realm of space, trades anthropology for visceral sensation: shaking cameras, freeze frames, close-ups of a blinking, dilated eye.  As Richard Brody recently wrote, it’s “an experience” of space travel, not an “arm's length” record of it.

In a new cut of Kubrick's film, Steven Soderbergh pushes these two styles so close together that they're almost indistinguishable. Posted in January on his website—then removed a few weeks later “AT THE REQUEST OF WARNER BROS. AND THE STANLEY KUBRICK ESTATE”—2001.5 (as I’ve come to think of it) is 110 minutes long, over half an hour shorter than the original version commonly seen today.* Kubrick himself removed 20 minutes from his own film after its premiere (partly out of recognition that a second docking scene was repetitive). And in the past, Soderbergh has reinterpreted other directors' work with his remakes of Solaris and Ocean's Eleven. More recently, since his hiatus from feature filmmaking in 2012, he's posted three other recuts of existing films: Psycho (interspersed with scenes from Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake), Heaven's Gate (at about half its original length), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (black and white, set to the Social Network soundtrack). 

A sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark

In spite of their inventiveness, none of these three recuts substantially differ from their originals in style or theme; in the case of Raiders, Soderbergh's stated purpose was to draw attention to the ingenuity of Spielberg’s editing and composition by downplaying the film’s most beloved elements, such as its John Williams score. He saved his most ambitious and original reediting project for 2001, despite, or perhaps as a consequence of, considering it "the most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century." To touch that sacred cow, he wrote on his website, "I'd better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring."  It's hard enough for a critic to write 2000 more words about one of the most closely scrutinized films of all time—and Soderbergh not only re-edits it but in turn reopens and reroutes the critical debate.

Much of the footage Soderbergh has removed comes from the long “Dawn of Man” prologue, the section I remember squirming through when I saw the film for the first time in middle school.  He also leaves out most of Dr. Heywood Floyd’s layover on the space station, with its Olivier Mourgue furniture and witty references to American corporations.  These edits to the first third of the film (which ends up amounting to about a quarter) make Kubrick a little friendlier for contemporary audiences not raised on title overtures and intermissions, but the changes also miss out on some of the subtleties of his themes, most evidently and importantly the contrast between prehistory and civilization.  No Dr. Floyd layover means no chatter between Floyd and his friends, one of the only moments of actual extended dialogue in 2001.  As Roger Ebert once noted, the significance of their conversation isn’t related to what they’re saying; Kubrick wants us to recognize the oddity of people talking as their prehistoric ancestors couldn’t.  In the same vein, I was disappointed to find that Soderbergh had removed one of my favorite shots, in which the stewardess on Floyd’s Pan Am flight returns to her seat and resumes watching a judo match on TV—the suggestion being that Homo sapiens have stopped beating each other with bones and learned how to vent their aggression through art and entertainment.

A sequence from 2001.5

These kinds of complaints are inevitable, but Soderbergh rises above them with his bold reimagining of Kubrick’s work.  The new center of gravity in 2001.5, uniting the visceral and the coldly Kubrickian, is HAL—the sentient computer whose fate is to be perfectly objective and yet hopelessly subjective (indeed, in the Discovery One section, Soderbergh preserves all of the computer's-eye-view shots, reminding me that HAL sees the world through the same wide-angle lens through which we view Alex’s depravity in A Clockwork Orange). In Kubrick’s original, HAL’s presence feels like a fascinating but nonessential step in man's journey from ape to star child. Watching the new cut, one gets the idea that this movie was about HAL all along. He's always watching, too—as Frank and Dave whisper to each other by the pod bay doors; as man discovers tools; as astronauts explore the moon; as Dave travels through the Stargate. In Soderbergh’s cut, the two most famous shots in 2001—the close-up on HAL’s red eye, and the alignment of celestial bodies above the black monolith in the Dawn of Man sequence—are now in consecutive sequence.  At the end of the film, when the star child stares enigmatically at Earth, HAL stares enigmatically back, his presence as essential to man's evolution as that of the monolith itself.

Thematically, this reordering makes explicit what Kubrick strongly hinted at: the symmetry between the aliens' creation of humanity as we know it, and humanity's creation of artificial intelligence.  Strictly in terms of plot, they provoke some intriguing questions.  How much does HAL know about the monolith? Is his presence in Africa merely symbolic, or could he be struggling to grasp what takes place there at the same time that we are? Is he driven insane by his secret knowledge of the mission, or by the aliens themselves?  These queries are impossible to answer, of course, as they were when 2001 was first released. Just as the strength of Kubrick's film was its ability to provoke unresolvable debate, Soderbergh's achievement is to inspire new questions and identify new points of emphasis without providing a single new answer. Largely for this reason, the connections he draws are occasionally literal, but never banal.

In scrambling Kubrick's carefully paced chronology, Soderbergh has made a film that sometimes feels like a big, cubist collage.  The image of HAL's unblinking eye, cross-cut with Dave's rapid blinking, now serves as a frame for the entire story.  Combined with a few shrewd edits in the first act, which bring out György Ligeti's reverberant, iterative choral music, it creates the sense of eternal recurrence, outside the conventional rules of time. It's almost as if the plot of the film is playing out as a flashback, or within the bounds of an individual consciousness, so that the vast open plains of Africa become a kind of mental prison.  Here again, Soderbergh turns to the computer to embody the contradictions of his vision.  HAL's mind was always uncannily close to that of a human being; critics often point out (accurately) that his pleas for his life are the most striking displays of emotion in 2001.  Soderbergh pushes our temptation to humanize the artificial still further; one of the new questions 2001.5 raises is whether the mind in which the film might be playing out is HAL's or Dave's.

What remains unexplained is why, exactly, Soderbergh was reediting 2001, or why now. It’s easy to answer glibly: he’s had some extra time on his hands. But it’s also possible that his departure from the production of Moneyball (mere hours before shooting had been scheduled to begin) triggered his exasperation with the 21st-century studio system, about which he’s been plentifully vocal. Shuttling in and out of Hollywood, he’s directed on budgets high and low; Ocean's 13, released in 2007, cost approximately 85 times as much as The Girlfriend Experience, released in 2009. For most of his career, he’s actively avoided the auteur label; it’s been pointed out that many of his films are about people engaged in deception—pathological liars, con men, corporate double agents—but this point yields limited insight about his body of work. It’s appropriate, considering how hard it is to describe what constitutes a Steven Soderbergh film, that the director chooses not to credit his work as “A Steven Soderbergh film.”  As he once put it, "People get tired of brands and they switch.”

The 2001 reedit is not without precedent for Soderbergh. His affinity for editing, recreational and otherwise, is well known, and his abilities have been actively sought out by other directors. Spike Jonze has called him “the smartest, fastest editor-filmmaker”; when Jonze asked him to trim down an early, 150-minute version of Her, Soderbergh responded with a 90-minute cut of the film in less than a day. (Other directors, like Paul Schrader during postproduction for The Canyons, haven’t taken up Soderbergh on his services.) Even his descriptions of his own feature films sound like exercises in pastiche: The Limey (99) was, in Soderbergh’s words, like Get Carter remade by Resnais. It’s possible, then, to view 2001.5 not as a career swerve but as quintessential Soderbergh—a risky technical experiment more suitable for the laptop than the theater.

As the mention of Resnais would suggest, non-linear editing has played a major role in building the tone of Soderbergh’s films: Solaris, with its protagonist’s uneasy memories of life on Earth; Out of Sight, which milks flashbacks for quick comedy; Traffic, featuring 120-odd scenes from D.C., Tijuana, and San Diego; and The Limey, which blends Terence Stamp’s flight to the States, his shower, his revenge, his return to London, and even his audio from the 1967 Ken Loach film Poor Cow into one unstable version of the present.  The sudden spatial or temporal cuts in these features tend to draw attention to themselves, but they’re frequently paired with soft voiceovers and cool jazz riffs (Cliff Martinez, David Holmes). In 2001.5, Soderbergh exploits an equivalent tension between the music and the editing rhythms: the sudden cuts to HAL may feel artificial and disorienting, but clever manipulation of the Ligeti score pushes us back in and makes us accept what we see.

Like Kubrick’s, Soderbergh’s films make free use of voiceovers and narration, but often their semantic contents are only vaguely related, starkly opposed, or deliberately irrelevant to the visuals with which they’re paired. In The Informant!, Soderbergh conducts his most devastating assault on voiceover clichés; in Solaris and The Limey, voiceovers resist guiding us reassuringly through the plot’s twists and turns. Kubrick returned to narration again and again throughout his career, from the early noir effort The Killing (which compensates for its scrambled chronology with Art Gilmore’s booming, omniscient voice) to the unfinished script that would become Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Yet for 2001 he rejected Douglas Rain’s voiceover recordings, and (for the first of only three times in his filmography) let the imagery speak for itself. Soderbergh, true to form, throws out two of the remnants of cohesive order in 2001: the chronological plot and the intertitles.

Kubrick missed out on the 21st century by less than nine months, but in Soderbergh’s eyes, his work only came to look its best within the last decade. "I’ve seen every conceivable kind of film print of 2001," Soderbergh wrote on his website next to his new cut, "and I'm telling you, none of them look as good as a Blu-ray played on an pioneer elite plasma Kuro monitor. And while you’re cleaning up your spit take over that sentence, let me also say I believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization." Warner Brothers and the Kubrick Estate may have overestimated the threat Soderbergh posed to their intellectual property. Clearly he envisioned his recut as an advertisement for the original masterpiece as much as a free alternative to it, although judging by the dearth of copies of 2001.5 to be found on torrent sites or elsewhere on the web, most people took it as neither.

Whatever the case, Soderbergh’s re-cut also induces a tendency to reenvision Kubrick’s creative decisions in Soderbergh terms, even the sequences from the original that he preserves shot-for-shot: the Blue Danube docking waltz, the death of HAL, the shifting POV that accompanies Dave's accelerated aging. (Do those close-ups of HAL's eye echo the voyeuristic themes of Sex, Lies, and Videotape?) It would be fascinating to see other directors take after Soderbergh’s experiment—to see Wong Kar Wai’s cut of Imitation of Life, for instance, or David Fincher’s take on Rear Window.

* For the sake of brevity, I’m dispensing with Soderbergh’s title, The Return of W. de Rijk, which alludes to the man who vandalized Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in 1975.

Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii

What we call popular culture is, to a certain extent, a collective delusion, in which prognosticators, using sheer guesswork, assign importance to the herd movement of audiences and critics as being indicative of trends. Special priority is attributed to properties whose only measurable intrinsic worth, putting aside the intangible that is “quality,” is the financial investment that’s been made in them, all of this ineffably influenced by the shadowy machinations of PR. As I write, the day’s pseudo-event is the #StarWarsCelebration livestream, whipping up anticipation for a trailer for the forthcoming Star Wars movie, the seventh in the franchise’s history. (This morning I noted in passing that the New York Daily News had seemingly awarded five stars to the trailer.) Two weeks ago, another number-seven in a franchise—James Wan’s Furious 7—was grounds for panegyrics and pièces de pensée. At Salon, for example, an essay by holidaying television critic Sonia Saraiya identified the Furious films as “diametrically opposed to detached, blasé hipster irony,” a sort of Voltron super-straw-man if ever there was one.

In such a world as this, the Adult Swim web series Decker, a masterpiece of blasé hipster irony starring Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, is a necessary antidote. The second “Book” of the series, this one subtitled Port of Call: Hawaii, ended its 20-episode run two weeks ago. It stars Heidecker as special agent Jack Decker, America’s only line of defense against terrorist attacks, thanks to ineffectual, craven, do-nothing liberal President Davidson (Joe Estevez, the brother of The West Wing’s Martin Sheen). The first five-episode season, which ran in the summer of 2014, ended with Decker preventing a terrorist attack on “Central Park”—a nondescript, scrubby patch of picnic ground somewhere in southern California—by flailingly overpowering a suicide bomber, Abdul (Mark Proksch, noticeably not an Arab, though playing one, dressed in the fashion of a Saudi Sheikh), then throwing the explosive device into the sky where, superimposed over a stock aerial photo of Central Park, it exploded into the pattern of an American flag firework. The stock photo bears a very prominent watermark and, while “racing” to save the day on his Kawasaki motorcycle, Decker is easily overtaken by a female bicyclist. Every episode is densely packed with such “errors,” most prominently Heidecker’s line readings, each one a thicket of malapropisms and clichés. The second series catches up with Decker taking a much-needed Hawaiian vacation that is interrupted by a Taliban takeover of the islands, and features an expanded role for Turkington’s character, the code-cracker Kingston. (The name is variously pronounced as “Klington,” “Klingston,” and “Kington,” while the editing tends to disrespectfully clip off the end of his line readings.) The average episode runs around five or six minutes, with a third of that time devoted to recapping the previous episode and the opening titles, accompanied by Hot Guitar Licks.

Habitués of art cinema will recognize Heidecker as the star of Rick Alverson’s The Comedy (12), in which he and Turkington discuss the spotlessness of hobo dicks while brunching at a sidewalk café. Most recently, Heidecker and Turkington collaborated with Alverson on the screenplay for his new film, Entertainment, which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Entertainment stars Turkington as an itinerant lounge comedian called “Neil,” a close variation on “Neil Hamburger,” a character whom 47-year-old Turkington has been playing, first on record and then in live performances, for nearly a quarter of a century. When I interviewed Turkington for FILM COMMENT some weeks back, shortly before Entertainment closed this year’s New Directors / New Films, he described the origin of the first Neil Hamburger records as “conceptual recording projects.” And though I am not usually in the TV recap business, Decker similarly has a strong conceptual underpinning which makes it worth talking about in terms other than “What happens next?” In fact, it has a great deal to say about the consumption of motion pictures and what we call the “conversation” in 2015.

On Cinema at the Cinema

Before delving into Decker, we should first discuss the show that it spun off of, and which it complements, On Cinema at the Cinema. On Cinema first appeared in November 2011 as an audio podcast; according to a recent interview with Heidecker at the A.V. Club, the idea was hatched while shooting The Comedy. The podcast’s inaugural episode was a one-and-a-half-minute celebration of the 20th Anniversary of 1984’s Ghostbusters; the following episode celebrates the 20th anniversary of 1980’s The Shining. It introduced the characters of “host and creator of the show” Tim Heidecker and “film buff/special guest” Gregg Turkington, who share their names with the performers playing them, but presumably very little else. For the purposes of clarity, I will henceforth refer to the characters as Tim and Gregg, and to the men playing them as Heidecker and Turkington.

Reviewing movies—“classics” at first, then contemporary releases—Tim and Gregg exchange banalities, boring speculations, and gibble-gabble about the performance, past or potential, of the movie or actors in question at the Academy Awards. (“This is the type of movie that Oscar loves to reward, and what greater reward would there be than to get an Oscar?”) These early episodes, complete with their recorded-inside-of-a-coffee-can audio, are a goof on the interchangeable film podcasts hosted by mealy-mouthed, adenoidal movie enthusiasts, and on the culture of studio-flack film-buffdom generally—a target that other Heidecker projects have taken aim at in the past. On two of Heidecker’s shows with partner Eric Wareheim, Tim and Eric Nite Live! (07-08) and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (07-10), Bob Odenkirk appeared as Danny Mothers, a socially maladroit stale-popcorn-munching “film reviewer extraordinaire” with an uncontrollable wince, seen reviewing Christmas season fare and interviewing the local director of no-budget sci-fi epic Crystal Shyps. It is worth noting that Heidecker and Wareheim aren’t outsiders to cinephile culture themselves: they met as aspiring young directors in film school at Temple University in (as Wareheim put it in an interview with Marc Maron), “these bullshit theory classes with five hundred people.” There must be something in Philadelphia’s water supply that gives birth to a particularly acerbic brand of comedy: it’s the birthplace of William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W.C. Fields, as well as The Dead Milkmen, who took shots at both the “mainstream” and “countercultural” identities of their day. (From 1987’s “Instant Club Hit (You’ll Dance to Anything)”: “Oh, baby, look at you / Don't you look like Siouxsie Sioux / How long'd it take to get that way / What a terrible waste of energy.”)

On Cinema began to appear as a web series beginning in 2012—under the aegis of Adult Swim subsidiary ThingX.com for its first two seasons, then through Adult Swim alone. The format is something like Roger Ebert’s At the Movies, with Tim and Gregg working on a screening-room set that the show leaves behind only for rare special segments like “On Cinema On Location,” which visits nondescript locations around Los Angeles where mediocre, non-picturesque movies may or may not have been filmed. Gregg, pale with a cowl of chin-length hair, looks the genial shut-in; Tim like a Young Republican club president gone to seed. (His vanilla appearance is a comic boon; I particularly loved the detail of his character in Season Four of Eastbound & Down being constantly clad in Wake Forest University gear.) As in its podcast days, the webcast is as much a study in passive-aggressive workplace toxicity as a commentary on hack expertise, a weekly psychodrama in which the host/co-host dynamic teeters on the brink of outright hostility. Most of the elements which would be developed and embellished in seasons to come are visible in the first episode, in which the films discussed are RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists and Robert Zemeckis’s Flight. Tim high-handedly wields his host status over Gregg, letting his second banana flounder in disapproving dead air whenever he oversteps his boundaries, hanging him out to dry in punitive silence, and reminding him whenever possible of the temporary, probationary nature of his guest status. (“Hey, guys, good to be back in my seat again!” “The seat is for anybody who’s a guest of the show.”) Meanwhile, Tim’s own incompetence—he impatiently blows through introductions and synopses, full of garbled English and blithely mispronounced names—goes completely unchecked. He is particularly resentful of foreign-sounding monikers, and often loses patience with “no-name” casts, demanding that Tom Cruise appear in more films. At one point he identifies Ryan Reynolds as Burt Reynolds’s son. The more qualified and competent host, Gregg vacillates between open rebellion and toadying; most of the time he has to content himself with little victories, responding with tight-lipped, self-satisfied grins at Tim’s flubs.

On Cinema at the Cinema

The reviews are marked by unfailing default positivity, even when accompanied by no visible enthusiasm, and untouched by discriminations of taste. Per Heidecker: “It comes from that fanboy culture where, if it’s a Hollywood movie, it’s great.” Gregg specializes in cutesy pull-quote bids full of sub–Gene Shalit wordplay—“John Goodman should be renamed John Greatman after this, because he’s Oscar-worthy”—and some of my favorite moments involve Tim letting his guard down, blandly smiling at one of Gregg’s puns. Films are rated on a scale of up to five “bags” of popcorn, which are rewarded liberally. Though initially there was some minor variance in the (again, almost uniformly positive) ratings, now practically every movie receives the maximum. Sometimes Tim goes to six bags, which is the cue for Gregg to petulantly remind him that the scale only goes to five, which Tim dutifully ignores. The only time when either of them gives a movie a bad review is when they are in a spat and an opportunity appears to use ratings as a way to wound their partner, as in Tim’s relentless slagging on Gregg’s beloved James Bond franchise, which pushes Gregg to call Tim’s cherished Jack Reacher the worst movie of 2013. It is unclear whether either Heidecker or Turkington have watched the movies that they are talking about—I strongly suspect not—though as we have seen, this is no hindrance to many real cultural commentators, and if anything fact has outstripped parody in this department.

While Tim wields absolute power over the show, he is himself a weak-willed, easily taken-in faddist, always on the lookout for a new self-reinvention, be it a flax-seed diet, an acupuncture program, a scam website, or a temporary move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And while Tim’s enthusiasms may come and go, his grudges are forever—since the podcast days, the duo have kept up an ongoing debate over whether it’s Star Trek II or IV that takes place in San Francisco. (Gregg insists it’s the former, and must know better by now, but can’t stop himself.) Gregg always greets Tim’s latest preoccupation—including the addition of backup guest Ayaka (Ayaka Ohwaki), introduced as a foreign exchange student from Japan staying with Tim’s family (though she soon becomes Tim’s girlfriend)—as a threat to his always tenuous place on the show, and a distraction from the movies. If the derailments which occur to Gregg’s great chagrin tend to focus on Tim’s personal life, this is because Gregg doesn’t discernibly have any personal life of his own. The references that he does make to his leisure hours mostly refer to his unending quest to add titles to his exhaustively catalogued VHS tape collection. (“…if you haunt the dollar bins…” “…one of my journeys to the flea markets…”), and his mission to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records by watching #500Moviesin500Days. Gregg’s VHS collection is highlighted in one of the show’s recurring segments, “Popcorn Classics,” which is introduced by a snatch of wobbly, old-timey music that only struck me as really hilarious when I’d heard it for about the hundredth time. Titles discussed include Just the Way You Are (84), Murphy’s Romance (85), 18 Again! (88), A Simple Twist of Fate (94), The Mod Squad (99), Two Weeks Notice (02), Jack Frost (98), and Forget Paris (95), most coming from the final decade of the VHS format’s life. The impact of being reminded of these mercifully forgotten movies is something like that created when Tim introduces celebrity guest Joe Estevez by reading off every single item in his filmography—reminding one of the staggering excrescence of movies that exist, the utter ephemerality of most of this product. Heidecker addressed this point in the aforementioned A.V. Club interview:

“[T]here’s just a shitload of movies that come out; there’s just an unending river of movies that come every week, and a lot of times there’s not a lot of demand for them. There’s a film review show in L.A. every Friday morning on NPR that’s called Film Week or something. They have these three critics come in and they sit there and talk about the 11 movies that are out that week and it’s like, ‘How did you guys have time to see them? How did you form opinions about them?’”

I suppose that some of my colleagues might take offense at this, but if you’re offended, you’re probably part of the problem.

Decker

We first hear tell of Decker sometime around the end of season four of On Cinema, when Estevez, as a special guest, refers to Tim as his “director,” and Tim mentions he has been shooting scenes for his opus “every weekend for the last six months.” (On Cinema uses Hollywood journeymen like Estevez and Jimmy McNichol in much the same way that Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! used public-access “stars” like David Liebe Hart—with affection and a puzzled awe.) The first Decker series aired in the summer of 2014, in the middle of season five of On Cinema. Imagined as the ultimate vanity project, Decker exists to provide Tim an opportunity to preen and strut as the badass of his adolescent dreams: Jack Decker wears all-black attire, sunglasses, and a pinched expression studied from Steven Seagal movies. The show is also an outlet for Tim to express his political convictions, which he’s discouraged from doing in On Cinema: Gregg chastises him after his one attempted “60-Second Soapbox” feature (“It is a fact that when you look at history, it is better to not tax so much and have not as much regulations”), though he still manages to slip in occasional asides. His passion for acupuncture, he notes, is predicated on the fact that it is paid for out-of-pocket, not through Obamacare, and when he receives word that Ayaka, back in Japan, is pregnant with his child, he sends her money to take care of it, all while remaining a “member of the Pro-Life community.” (Decker, he notes in passing, was financed through a small business loan.)

Decker is an extension of the On Cinema world, and the same mounting tension, spats, and temporary truces circulate between one and the other. (Although he often boasts about his social life, it is not at all evident that Tim has any male friends other than Gregg who might appear on his shows.) The interconnected ecosystem achieved a new level of complexity on the concurrently airing runs of On Cinema Season Six and Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii, on which Gregg reprises his role as Kingston, and is credited for “Additional Dialogue Concepts.” On the penultimate episode of On Cinema, Gregg and Tim prepare to shoot the finale of Decker; Gregg hasn’t seen the script, which Tim announces that he’s “still tweaking.” The reasons for this evasiveness become apparent in the Decker finale, as Decker drags Kingston’s videotape collection onto the beach and sets it on fire—ostensibly to get rid of a “bugged” copy of the 1995 Paul Reiser comedy Bye Bye Love, though obviously it’s just the petty, vindictive act of a sociopath. Gregg, blindsided, breaks the fourth wall, and ineffectually tries to salvage a few tapes while 2000 dramedy Isn’t She Great smolders among the ashes. When we come to the On Cinema finale, posted this Wednesday, Gregg is MIA for not the first time, and Tim is working with “last-minute” replacement guest, Ayaka.

Those who have been following the On Cinema/Decker melodrama know that the end of the respective seasons of these shows is not the end of the Tim and Gregg narrative. Adding yet another wrinkle to the multi-platform melodrama, the dysfunctional relationship spills off of the set and into online backbiting via Gregg and Tim’s Twitter accounts. On the evening of April 13, @greggturkington broke the silence about the acrimonious split in a serious of missives, including “The $8800 @timheidecker owes me for funding Decker travel expenses with my Visa card will be addressed outside of this public forum.” @timheidecker responded in kind—“@greggturkington 's writing on #Decker sucked and he was not easy to work with. I doubt we'll work together again,” and so on.

Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii

And there’s still more. Heidecker and Turkington’s project not only solicits audience participation, but relies on it to complete the work. After Tim explodes at Gregg for using his “On Cinema On Location” segment to repeatedly visit scenes where the movie Oh, God! (77) was shot, for example, Gregg retweets the support of the vox populi to vindicate himself. (“I thought all 3 #oncinema on location segments dedicated to #ohgod were wonderfully nostalgic and fun!”) The YouTube comments section of any On Cinema or Decker installment is a battleground between pro-Gregg and pro-Tim factions. From the season finale of On Cinema: “While I’m afraid that the Popcorn Classics series is now irreversibly tainted, I feel that Gregg could still salvage the smoking ruins of this once-so-great show.” There is even biased media coverage, as at the website of Consequences of Sound, which ran pro-Tim and pro-Gregg pieces.

What the fans of On Cinema and Decker presumably enjoy in them (their excruciating sense of humor and insight into the morbid psychology of codependence) is not what they celebrate them for in public forums (helpful consumer reports-style opinions about Hollywood product; pulse-pounding action and stirring patriotic brio). These are not opinions, then, but “opinions”—just as On Cinema and Decker are not shows, but “shows.” As it happens, both do exhibit a significant amount of artfulness and technique, but these attributes are in the service of creating work which completely and conspicuously fails on every plane to successfully emulate its obvious model: a professionally made, seamlessly constructed, conventionally entertaining movie review show, or a professionally made, seamlessly constructed, conventionally entertaining tough-guy espionage thriller.

The creation of a comic “universe” with a rotating cast of characters, like that which On Cinema has created, is nothing new: you can point to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Springfield on The Simpsons, Scharpling & Wurster’s Newbridge, or Marvel Films world-building, for example. What is singular about the On Cinema universe, however, is its use of social media, the way it encourages fans to role-play a burlesque of fan culture, as they burlesque entertainment journalism and action filmmaking. Talking to Maron, Heidecker described his and Wareheim’s shared sensibility: “You have to all be on the same page that we’re all fucked and most things are garbage, most products, whether it’s movies or TV shows or books, it’s mostly garbage and patronizing to us.”

Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii

This attitude, which extends to Heidecker’s work with Turkington and the assumption he makes about the On Cinema audience, is diametrically opposed to a certain strain of gee-whiz populist enthusiasm which has never lacked for a platform—for it is reassuring to be told that we live in the best of all possible Golden Ages—and has enjoyed especial respectability of late. Two years ago, writing about Tim & Eric and other strains of “sick” satire which sought to “[fight] vulgarity with vulgarity,” I struck on a pungent metaphor, noting how “devotion to the pop news cycle makes us into an ouroboros, swallowing our own tail—and eating our own shit.” Only a few months later, Heidecker, who is a skilled musical performer and songwriter in the pastiche mode, did me one better for images of waste consumption and recycling, releasing an album performed in the key of Seventies Southern rock on Drag City Records called “Urinal St. Station,” under the auspices of the Yellow River Boys. The leadoff track, “Hot Piss,” begins as follows: “I got my two-gallon jug of apple juice gonna drink it ‘til the jug is dry / And then I whip out my dick and I fill it back up and drink it all up tonight.”

Caricature is a form of distillation. By rendering familiar genres in grotesque, exaggerated shape, stripped of the elevating sheen provided by performance or production values, Heidecker and Turkington create homuncular versions of their models—warped, reductive, but also disturbingly familiar. It is through the parody of Web 2.0-era fandom that they have cultivated around their creations, however, that their work gets at something entirely of the moment: the comments-section cacophony, the use of art as ideological upholstery, the urge to break into pro- and anti-camps. It’s in that spirit I say “No, thanks” to Han and Chewie, forget Dom Toretto and Brian O’Conner—Jack Decker and Klingdon are the action heroes of our time. 

Ex Machina is a high-IQ sci-fi film that connects viscerally and on every other level to audiences of all kinds. It’s exhilarating to see this movie in a theater packed with people rapt in the taut spell of its life-or-death drama and rippling with nervous laughter at its frisky, kinky sexuality and absurdist undertones. The subject is artificial intelligence, but the writer, Alex Garland, in his debut as a director, makes it about traditional intelligence and emotional intelligence, too. Though Garland builds dark twists into his realistic fantasy, he also imbues it with unexpected streaks of sympathy—for humans and for humanoids—that actually add to the tension and the horror.

This coiled-wire story unfolds within the confined research compound and conceptually limitless world of a genius tycoon, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). He wrote the base code for the world’s dominant search engine when he was 13. Now he dwells in his own Fortress of Solitude in a mountainous northern clime. (The published script places the action in Alaska, but the stunning locations are Norwegian.) The movie starts when a young programmer wins a contest in Nathan’s company. His name is Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), and he looks impossibly boyish even for a lad in his mid-twenties.

The grand prize is to spend a week with Nathan at his lair. Caleb soon learns that he won’t just pal around with the boss in a grand-scale goodwill gesture, he’ll also test Nathan’s current object of obsession—a talking robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), who could be Caleb’s dream girl. Her fresh face is crafted from some creamy flesh-like substance, and her fascinatingly curvy physique is molded from various metals and fibers that look tensile yet inviting. Special-effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst has cited Brancusi as an influence on her design, but Ava plays like a runway superstar at the height of peekaboo fashion. She moves like a silvery vision—pretty and in synch. Apart from opaque patches on her chest and hips, she resembles a sensual version of the “Visible Woman” modeling kit, with fluid new technologies and snaky wiring viewable through her meshwork instead of bones, arteries, nerves, muscles, and veins. You notice strings of lights running down her neck like a vertical necklace or looping through her innards like warning lights at a rollercoaster turn. She’s the best-looking automaton ever—and the first that may be capable of thinking like a person.

Nathan wants Caleb to be the human component in his version of the Turing test. In the course of his getaway week he will interact with Ava and decide whether there’s any difference between this thinking robot and a real live human. Caleb says that to play “the Imitation Game” by classic rules, “the machine should be hidden from the examiner.” Nathan argues that Ava’s voice and verbal responses are so lifelike that Caleb would have to consider her human if he didn’t look at her. The true test, he contends, is whether Caleb can see Ava as the robot she is yet respond to her thoughts—and, yes, her emotions—as if they’re real.

The “Ava Sessions” comprise a superbly cunning setup for a surprisingly affecting sci-fi movie that’s also a merciless nail-biter. The content is cutting-edge science and the script is replete with debates, but Nathan’s challenge to Caleb puts the emphasis on his feelings and his ability to analyze the evidence of his senses. The narrative twists make viewers judge the depth of their own feelings and the keenness of their own senses. If you go in knowing it’s a thriller, you still wonder, in a good way, what kind of suspense is being generated, even as the film exerts an ineluctable pull. For long stretches Garland avoids conventional conflict and jeopardy while making clear that the stakes are as momentous as they are in a sci-fi epic like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (another movie that turns genre melodrama upside down, in an optimistic way). After all, bonding with the first fully human-like AI is as epochal an event as communicating up close with an ET. Ava is so enticing that Garland achieves erotic shock and awe.

That’s partly a tribute to Vikander, who at 26 has established herself as a performer of immense charm and range, breathing a full spectrum of poignancy into the ultimate ingénue role of Kitty in Anna Karenina (12), and summoning the passionate smarts needed to play Britain’s Princess Caroline Mathilde as an Enlightenment heroine in the terrific historical romance A Royal Affair (12). As Ava, Vikander explodes the concept of tabula rasa. She is not merely blank. She plays a multitude of nascent emotions infinitesimally small, as if Ava realizes how closely she’s being studied and knows that any flicker of her eye, upturn of her chin, or nibble of her lip creates a thunderous mood change. As a character, Ava is in turn touching and eerie. You may not realize how witty Vikander’s performance is until after the movie is over. Vikander does to moviegoers what Ava does to Caleb—draws us ever closer in.

Ava turns the tables on Caleb early on, noting, “You learn about me and I learn nothing about you”—forcing her interrogator to admit that it’s not a balanced foundation for friendship, as if being friends or lovers had always been their goal. Before long, it’s evident that she’s quicker at reading him than vice versa. She says she can tell that he’s attracted to her because of his “micro-expressions.” That’s a great word to describe the subtleties Gleeson invests in all his roles, even as the hero’s Army Air Force buddy in the bludgeoning Unbroken. Right now he’s nonpareil at playing a bright young man who can be affable to a fault, but is also wily and proud. He’s spontaneous and archetypal in Ex Machina—a scrawny Everyman for a wired world. He’s funny and sympathetic when he expresses fear, especially when he worries that shacking up with Ava would be like living with a lie detector.

In a narrative deck stacked with wild cards, Isaac’s Nathan is the craziest. He’s a mad scientist who is oppressively physical—a super-nerd who comes on as a crude guy’s guy. A workout fiend with a mysteriously silent mistress/assistant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), he shaves his pate down to a stubble, lets his beard and moustache go full, and sports oblong wire-rim glasses. Nathan is a mess of contradictions. He’s a control freak who gets drunk. He’s a connoisseur who puts Schubert and Bach on his sound system and Jackson Pollock and Gustav Klimt on his walls but pretends he’s wowed by Caleb’s eloquence and cowed by his cultural references—notably a glib nod to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Isaac’s vapid Michael Corleone imitation in A Most Violent Year, it’s wonderful to see him comically original and creepy, whether disco-dancing with Kyoko or asking Caleb “Who you gonna call?” Isaac turns an unhinged knowingness into a horror-comic style.

Garland implants multiple themes in each strand of his simple plot. Even the asides in this movie are continuously intriguing, like Nathan assuring Caleb that his facial-recognition key-card will be a convenience, since it opens only rooms that should be guest-accessible. How often in this connected age do we barter away freedom for convenience?

In his most revealing speech, Nathan tells Caleb that his competitors thought search engines were “a map of what people were thinking. Actually, they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse, response. Fluid, imperfect. Patterned, chaotic.” Those last half-dozen words sum up the look Garland, production designer Mark Digby, and cinematographer (as well as camera operator) Rob Hardy have devised for this movie. Garland and Digby imagine that Nathan carved his mostly subterranean grey-wood compound straight out of a craggy hill, then filled it with pieces that cry out “Scandinavian Modern.” It may be chilly, but it’s fun. For me, it evoked memories of Dr. Morbius’s rock-walled sanctuary in Forbidden Planet. Nathan lines one hallway with a display of masks through the ages. When Ava peers at them, the image is part Return to Oz, part Time-Life Books “March of Progress.” Whatever you think of him, Nathan is a genius who cross-pollinates digital and organic thinking. On the wall behind his computer he’s mounted a veritable cliff-side of Post-Its.

You think you see daggers of thought jump between his and Caleb’s eyes—that’s how precisely Garland and Hardy frame tense, elegant compositions. But they’re not slaves to formalism. Ava prepares herself for a fantasy date with Caleb in an intimate montage of loose, handheld shots, well cut by Mark Day. The movie is simultaneously playful and serious: blue bolts seem to shoot through Caleb’s ginger hair from the software Nathan embeds in company computers.

The movie is fraught with possibilities. Is Nathan genuine when he argues that every sort of consciousness contains a sexual element, or is he merely bending logic to explain his urges? Is Ava devoted to self-preservation or is she also in love, at least for a time, with Caleb? Is she ultimately a misanthrope, and if so, does that make the film misogynistic? (I say the latter notion is humorless, if not ridiculous.) And what responsibility does Nathan owe any conscious beings of his own creation after they’ve outlived their usefulness?

Ex Machina is the best kind of speculative fiction: its action is brisk, its characters startling, and its meanings multifarious.

There’s a moment in Iris when the documentary’s subject, venerable fashionista Iris Apfel, is presented with a department-store carrier bag emblazoned with her own photo. The Iris on the bag has a very faint look of Joan Rivers, in the expression at least—that wide-eyed stare of “Now what?” amazement. But while the late comedian’s gaze of perpetual astonishment—not least at the excesses of red-carpet clotheshorses—had much to do with the long-term work-in-progress redrafting of her face, Iris’s comically alert expression is just a symptom of delight at the excesses of life.

It’s not artificially enhanced, at any rate. Apfel, now 93, declares that she has always hated the idea of cosmetic surgery: “Unless God gave you a nose like Pinocchio, why mess?” Nor was she ever that keen on conventional beauty, not least because she was never possessed of it herself. As she says at the end of the film, in one of the few moments at which she sounds even vaguely cantankerous, “I’m not a pretty person.” And if you’re not pretty, she goes on, “you become a lot more interesting. Anyway, I don’t happen to like pretty. Most of the world is not with me.”

The penultimate documentary from Albert Maysles, who died last month—his final film, In Transit, is playing in Tribeca—Iris is a fond portrait of a personality who could easily be regarded as a freakshow. Better, though, to say that she’s an entertainer—the mistress of ceremonies, creative director and orchestrator, the Diaghilev, of her own resplendent solo circus. Apfel has a background in interior design and textiles; she and her husband, Carl, launched the company Old World Weavers, and helped furnish the White House (“We had a problem with Jackie…” Carl begins.—“Stop!” Iris firmly silences him, perhaps her only moment of discretion in the film).

Nowadays, however, Apfel is primarily that peculiar commodity, a “fashion icon” (a rag-trade function that, to most of us, is only more nebulous than “stylist” or “muse”). The reason she’s an icon is that she dresses crazily, following a mix-and-(non)match principle that makes her a one-woman walking souk. At the start of the film, she produces an eye-searingly clashing Ungaro floral top with striped Versace trousers; she appears before the camera a-clatter with about a hundredweight of amber necklaces. Later she’s a bright red cloud of something that could be fur, or feathers, or just a body-enveloping scarlet miasma, or she’s draped with a turquoise boa, or maybe bag, that’s at once a more exotic and more sophisticated answer to the notorious swan that once flopped round Björk’s shoulders at Cannes.

Then there’s her signature touch—huge black goggle glasses that have a hint of George Burns, a soupcon of Swifty Lazar, a parodic dash of your grandma’s bridge buddy, and a great deal of The Incredibles’ Edna Mode, who must surely have been part modeled on Iris. We see photos of Iris looking elegant as a bride in the 1940s—she and husband Carl, seen celebrating his 100th birthday, have been married for 66 years at the time of filming—but, as she points out, she was always a snappy dresser rather than a looker. In fact, her face, seen in pictures maturing over the years, always has a rough-and-ready, expansive energy—she’s a big-time smiler—making her living proof of her theory that character is the real beauty. What makes her interesting in Maysles’s study is not simply that she looks dazzlingly goofy, but that her visual euphoria is offset by a poised, dry, self-deprecating wit—she’s something between a Catskills stand-up and a 19th-century Parisian salonnière.

“Wit,” rather than “style” in the usual fashion sense, might be the true description of Apfel’s shtick. She can philosophize about what she does, but in a throwaway, no-nonsense fashion. “I like to improvise—try this, try that, as though I’m playing jazz” (in which case, her mode would be anything but black polo-neck Cool School). One of the curators, designers and pundits interviewed says that she’s an artist who uses clothes to create a vision—but I’d be tempted to say that it’s less a vision than a sound, a joyous cacophony. (In fact, if there’s any jazz artist she corresponds to, in the sense of her visuals matching his sound, it’s surely Sun Ra, without the cosmic mysticism).

Apfel isn’t unique among fashion eccentrics of a certain age, but she’s different. In the U.K., designer Sandra Rhodes and sculptor Andrew Logan created eye-searing rainbow styles for themselves in the Seventies, but pretty much stuck to them for decades, with only the colors themselves changing; while the late editors and oddballs Isabella Blow and Anna Piaggi boldly took the WTF principle to out-beyond-outré lengths. Apfel is different—she isn’t outlandish, just exuberant, and always looks as if she’s dressing for herself, to express rather than impress. And there’s a relaxed, casual wit about her, a distinct lack of grandeur; seen advising young women at a live event in Loehmann’s, she comes across as generous and good-natured. “The sage has spoken,” she quips, but she’s anything but a professional High Priestess.

Iris prides herself on the art of combination: she puts stuff together in wild juxtapositions, which makes you wonder—not just, how does she know what will go together interestingly, but how does she remember what she has in the first place? She owns a hell of a lot of stuff, and is seen acquiring more; and although she’s seen shopping for bargains in a Harlem store, clearly most of her collection is very expensive. The Apfels’ Park Avenue apartment is an Aladdin’s Cave—or less charitable, a junk store stacked to the rafters with ephemera, bric-a-brac, and silly kitsch, like an cocktail cabinet in the shape of a life-size ostrich, ridden by Kermit the Frog. But she seems to really enjoy, and know by heart, every item she owns; she’s no cold accumulator.

This raises a question that may not really interest Maysles. If you’re wealthy and can afford to play around with all this finery, then great. But how are you supposed to express your inner splendor if you’re limited to a thrift-store budget? I’d much rather have seen a Maysles study of some bright young fashion blogger—although I wonder whether many of them would have had the worldly brio of Mrs. A. There’s a nice scene, in fact, in which the “geriatric starlet,” as she cheerfully dubs herself, is doing an onstage Q&A with just such a person, stellar fashion ingénue Tavi Gevinson, now 19; the young tyro does seem to, well, take herself and her discovery of rags as identity a little bit seriously.

Maysles watchers may, of course, be reminded of another of the director’s studies of eccentric grandes dames—Grey Gardens, which he made with his brother David in 1975. Iris contrasts interestingly with “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale in that film, who seemed utterly adrift in the universe—but who had a very idiosyncratic, knowing theory of the way that pantyhose could and should be worn. It’s invidious to contrast Iris with the depth of insight, and painful intimacy, that Grey Gardens offered. With its chic rock soundtrack, busy cutting and by-the-book interviews, Iris feels like a glossy promotional number for its heroine. Iris has created herself as a routine, and that routine, in its enthusiastic confidence, seems to be indistinguishable from her true self, but she doesn’t seem to have to offer that much to the camera in terms of telling glimpses of gaps in her self-awareness. Such flashes in the film are perhaps the same ones you might get in any portrait of a flamboyant character who happens to be aging. Sometimes, in the back of her limo, Iris looks wan and tired; at one point, she offers a snappy but hackneyed one-liner about age: “When I get up in the morning, everything I have two of, one hurts.” The few defenses-down moments involve Carl, who seems to get deafer and wearier in the course of filming; her solicitousness towards him, and his wisecracking devotion to her, are very poignant.

Entertaining as it is, you wouldn’t know that Iris is the work of a documentarian who once declared, “I happily place my fate and faith in reality,” because Iris is more about a non-stop show than about reality revealed. Carl is one of the people who refer to Iris’s restlessness and seeming addiction to a frenzied pace of life, and the film’s subtext is the battle with mortality. “Color is so important—you can raise the dead,” Iris says—and presumably you can also scare off the Grim Reaper with some blazing reds and yellows.

Iris does get repetitive after a while—bolt after bolt of fancy fabric unrolled, more costume jewelry laid out, more stuff unearthed from the warehouse. But Apfel leads the dance, and what really dazzles is the force of her personality. The paradox is that she’d be just as interesting—maybe even more so—if she just turned up in a tracksuit top and comfortable golf pants. Perhaps Maysles got some footage of that, too.

For his debut feature Theeb, Jordanian filmmaker Naji Abu Nowar spent a year in the desert, living with and observing the customs of the last nomadic Bedouin tribe in Jordan. Set in 1916 at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the masterful film is a moving portrayal of history, brotherhood and betrayal, seen through the eyes of its titular protagonist, a young Bedouin boy (Jacir Eid) living in the confines of his community, unaware of the conflicts shaking up the world. Theeb’s secluded existence is disrupted by the arrival of a British officer who needs guidance to reach a remote destination, a request that the hospitable Bedouin cannot refuse. Eager to accompany his older brother Hussein who is appointed as a guide, Theeb embarks on a perilous journey across the desert, where the hostility of man and nature will precipitate his rough coming-of-age.

Winner of the Orizzonti Prize at the 71st Venice Film Festival, Theeb screened in this year’s New Directors / New Films and continues its tour of festivals as well as an exceptionally successful run in the Middle East. FILM COMMENT spoke with Abu Nowar on Skype last week about Bedouin culture, his vision of the desert, and the intricacies of making movies in the Middle East.

Theeb takes places during a period of radical change whose impact is still deeply felt today in these regions. Why did you choose that setting and did you have any intention of reflecting on the present through the past?

Obviously, if you’re down south and you’re looking at Bedouin history, then that really is a massively critical turning point. The fall of the Ottoman Empire is what pushed them into being settled. That’s what sealed their fate, as it were. And even after that, the collapse and the drawing up of the borders made things much worse. So that was an important thing, and you can see that when you’re talking with them, with the old men, and hear the stories they have about the revolt. That worked very nicely in terms of this idea of a western at the beginning of the project. I think it moved away from that as the project went on, but it was something I was thinking about a lot.

All the great westerns are set at this time of great change. You know, in the Kurosawa films, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjurō, it’s the end of the shogunate era. Also Leone’s films, the expansion of the railroad in Once Upon A Time In The West, all the civil war in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the same thing with the American westerns—John Ford’s The Searchers is at the end of the civil war, The Outlaw Josey Wales is at the end of the civil war; perhaps in more indirect ways even in Straw Dogs, the L.A. riots have happened and something bad has happened to him back in L.A. or back where he lives, and he’s escaping from it in the Cornish English countryside. I like that and so obviously, that was an immediate resemblance. I wish we could have said that we had great foresight and knew that the Arab Spring was coming. But I think it was in the zeitgeist. It was more an instinctual than an intellectual choice.

What I found unique about Theeb is how subtly the historical context is handled. It’s never emphasized too much and that gives the story a kind of timelessness.

That was essential for me because it’s a point-of-view film. And one of the things I really liked about it being a point-of-view film was that they don’t really have a concept of time in Bedouin culture. They don’t really mark things by the day or the year; most don’t even know their birthdates or exactly how old they are; it’s just not important in that culture. And so I liked imagining what would happen if you lived in that period or how you would experience it as a Bedouin, so I very much liked the idea that the boy wouldn’t know there is a First World War going on, he wouldn’t know who the Englishman was and how strange that would seem if this strange man turned up. The same thing with the Ottomans—he would have never encountered an Ottoman before. So that really fascinated me, just following his journey and not giving you information that he doesn’t experience, as in we’re really putting you in that world.

A wonderful moment that illustrates this is the scene of the Englishman’s arrival, in which Theeb watches the men’s encounter with a mixture of awe and fascination. Could you talk a bit about that scene, which captures Theeb’s aspirations beautifully?

I really love that scene. It was one of my favorite things to do. When you’re writing and directing, there are certain scenes that you don’t know how you’re going to do until you get with the team and you work it out. And there are certain scenes that, maybe even before you write, you know are going to happen. When I think of a story, I’ve usually got an image or maybe one scene or a line of dialogue that keeps rattling around, and those are usually what make you want to do the film and they’re usually what end up also staying in the film, when they’re that powerful. And certainly this idea of that whole scene of Hussein disappearing into the dark and reemerging with this Englishman, was something we had very early on and I knew exactly how I wanted to do that. And also Wolfgang [Thaler] did some wonderful lighting there.

The cinematography in that scene also reinforces our identification with Theeb. The camera is on the ground, at Theeb’s level, and the men’s bodies are colossal next to his, obstructing his view. In fact when the Englishman enters, Theeb has to push them away to see—he’s like a spectator in a movie theater.

Yes, that was very important. The scene is doing a lot of things. One, it’s a boy trying to join the world of men. He wants to play in the man’s game. It’s this intimacy of the family which we’re going to counter and make dangerous. So there’s always bodies in the frame around him, which for me would then accentuate, when Hussein walks into the darkness and they’re separated from them, this idea of the elder brother not really being aware of things in the same way that Hussein is, and Theeb and the other tribesmen not being aware of things as Hussein is. So it’s also setting up this idea that Hussein is someone who’s pretty skilled and knows what he’s doing and is aware of his surroundings.

I was also thinking about the desert, and how you can see everyone coming from miles, but at night you can’t see a thing. And that’s how the Bedouin used to attack people. When the Bedouin do tribal raids, they’ll come just before dawn when it’s still very dark, because you get the element of surprise. So for the Bedouin, that’s an extremely tense scene as well, because in their vocabulary, that is really predicting an attack. I hope that any audience would feel that there’s potentially an attack coming, but for the Bedouin, it really is that way.

Your panoramas of the desert have a disquieting effect. We’re outside, in the middle of this vastness, and yet it feels like we’re trapped indoors. There’s a sense of pressure in the frame.

You do feel like that in the desert. If you’re not in a car, once you’re in the desert, the vastness of it is quite intimating, and you immediately get a sense of how fragile life is and how fragile your life is. And also to traverse or move in that environment, if you’re not on a camel or in a car, is mind-blowing. There’s that sense of distance. You think something’s close but once you start walking, you realize just how far a mountain range or an object is away from you. It changes your sense of perspective. The other thing is, we were very interested in this idea of micro and macro, and one thing that you experience when being in such a vast place, is that your immediate sensory experience is heightened. Because it’s often very quiet, sounds become very heightened—you’re alert to the minute things around you. So you do kind of feel trapped in that sense.

You’ve mentioned the influence of Kurosawa and John Ford. I also saw the influence of Peckinpah’s films, and even Antonioni and the Dardenne Brothers, in your way of filming landscapes and bodies.

Probably subconsciously Antonioni is an influence on me. I’m ashamed to say that living in Jordan, unless you buy pirate films, you don’t often get a chance to see films, and I don’t buy pirate films so I haven’t seen any Dardenne brothers’ films, so they’re definitely not an influence. [Laughs] Peckinpah is definitely a big influence. Straw Dogs is a big influence on the film. But there are also many subconscious influences that you don’t know anything about—I suddenly realized that in one sequence I had almost ripped off entirely four shots from Peter Weir’s Master and Commander. There’s a sequence where they discover the French ship on the other side of the coast, the Galápagos islands, and it is almost an exact rip-off of four shots after each other in the film. And I had no idea I had done it, I really honestly had absolutely no idea I had done it.

Were you influenced by any painters? The night scenes, with that intense chiaroscuro created by the torches and campfire, have the effect of a Caravaggio painting.

Oh you’re wonderful to talk to! I’m always surprised that the film critics or journalists don’t seem to have noticed anything. But yes, Caravaggio is very important, specifically in the night scenes. We studied him a lot, and that was the thing that I brought to Wolfgang. I said I really want you to try and achieve that. And obviously, it’s an easy thing to say to a cinematographer, and it’s an entirely different thing for a cinematographer to be able to go out and do it. And I think he did an absolutely incredible job. We studied the films of some of the best and biggest directors in the world today, and in the night scenes, there’s always a kind of fake moon glow going on in the background. But I think Wolfgang shot some of the best night scenes that I’ve ever seen, in Theeb, not because it’s my film, but because I’m really proud of his work, I think it’s really exceptional. And I think if you put it next to certain films, you can really see the difference, and he did it with very minimal equipment.

Wolfgang Thaler is Ulrich Seidl’s cinematographer, right?

Yes, and Michael Glawogger’s.

Are you familiar with Seidl’s cinema?

I love Ulrich Seidl’s cinema. One of the reasons why I wanted Wolfgang though is: have you seen Whores’ Glory? Have you seen the section in the Indian slum? The way he shot those nights as well, the way he captured that, obviously we knew that he had limited grip equipment because it’s documentary and it was in the real location. So that really impressed me. And one of the reasons why I really wanted Wolfgang is that he had worked with non-actors before because Seidl has done that, he had worked in very difficult situations all around the world, he had done that with Seidl and with Glawogger, in far-off places and in different communities. So he’s used to getting along with people from very different cultures and environments. That was very important to me because he had to really get along with the Bedouin and they had to trust him. And they absolutely loved him. He’s one of their favorite people in the team, and when I go down to see them now, they continually ask about him.

You workshopped the Bedouin cast for eight months. Since Theeb is quite a physically driven film, I wonder what you focused on in your work with them. What sort of training did they get?

I studied situations where this had occurred in the past and we bought the books of people who had done this and anything we could get our hands on related to this topic. One of the people we studied was Guti Fraga and his workshops and what he did with the favela kids for City of God. And there is an actress who does workshops in Jordan called Jana Zeineddine and she gave me all her books, which led us to discover people like Augusto Boal, who’s another guy who does workshops in communities to resolve problems or issues. And we also studied more conventional people like Meisner, and then through Scandar Copti, we found the acting coach on Ajami, Hisham Suleiman. We got Hisham to come four days at the beginning of the workshop and four days at the end of the workshop and he helped me design the curriculum. He taught us how to teach as well. So we’d go through like a lesson plan as it were.

What it involved was basically two major things. On a technical level, getting everyone used to the camera and a crew. So there was always a camera. The key thing for me was for them to get so bored of the camera they just didn’t care it was there, they didn’t care the crew was there, and they’d get used to performing in front of people. In a way, we kind of did the opposite. We waved the camera everywhere and we would just continue on with our lesson, and it’s good because it helped people to build focus as well. And obviously the key thing was to develop them as actors. And because the Bedouins don’t care about film, they’ve never been to a cinema, it wasn’t a situation where we were like: “Hey guys we’re going to make a film.” and everyone was like: “Oh, great! Can I be in it?” It was more like: “Please come to the workshop.”

And was there any special preparation with Jacir Eid who plays Theeb?

It was very difficult with him, because although he’s an exceptional talent, he’s very shy. In Bedouin culture, if you’re a young boy, you’re seen but not heard. And so he was with all elder men. So he also felt very shy because of that. We had to reprogram him to do the opposite, which is to contribute and perform. And then the only issues we had was that he was very nervous and shy and intimated by Hassan [Mutlag, who plays the stranger] because Hassan comes from a different sub-family of the same tribe—these tribes are really big so a sub-family is like another country to us in a way. So we spent a lot of time trying to make him comfortable with Hassan and also in order for him to play those scenes where he’s really got to have problems with Hassan. That was very difficult for him obviously because that’s very rude in that culture; you know, you shouldn’t be hitting an elder man. So he had a teacher that was very mean to him in school and who would hit him with a ruler, so we used that and that became the basis point for all the direction for him with those scenes with Hassan.

Was that something he shared with you?

The benefit of living with the community for a year before we made the film, was that you get to know everyone and then you can use that when you’re directing them. I remember something that Elia Kazan had talked about a great deal. He would take the actors out for dinner and he would get to know them and that would help him be a better director. If they know you and you know them on a deeper level, then it’s a lot easier to express an idea.

You mentioned Hassan Mutlag who plays the bandit. That character was probably the most intriguing one to me because of his ambivalent nature. Obviously, he’s not the most likable character, but at the same time there’s something very tragic about him: he seems to be a victim of his time, displaced and marginalized by the forces of modernity. How did you develop that character?

I always try to understand people, and I don’t like it when you have very one-dimensional bad guys or good guys, so for me it was fascinating to have a character like that. And the story demanded that because you’ve got a situation where these two people help each other to survive, they’re being forced into that situation, even though they essentially want to kill each other. So there had to be interesting things about that character, and that really just comes from the storytelling of the elders of what happened to them. The hard thing was really finding someone who could play him, and when we met Hassan, one of the things we noticed in him was that he’s obviously a strong man and he was in the army, so there’s a power to him, but also something very sad happened in his life, and when we first met him in our interviews, we’d ask a question like “What’s the saddest point in your life?” just to see if people will share information with us, to see how open they are to communicating, because for me that’s one of the signs they potentially could become an actor. And he shared with us this really tragic story, and he was almost brought to the point of tears, which is very rare for the Bedouin, to express emotion like that, and he definitely almost had us in tears. And I thought “Wow!” you know, he’s someone who seemed very intimidating when he first walked through the door but he’s also capable of creating that emotion within us, so he has this duality that we need.

It’s hard to believe that it’s his first time acting because he portrays that character with such confidence.

Out of everyone, he really became passionate about acting, and he became passionate about the craft of acting. And he started doing things by himself to develop his role and to perform in certain scenes. And it was really wonderful to watch someone fall in love with that craft. He’s my John Wayne! [Laughs]

You’ve said that for you, Theeb is really the story of a boy coping with his father’s death. In fact, you open the film with the father’s words to Theeb: “He who swims in the Red Sea cannot know its true depth. And not just any man Theeb, can reach the seabed my son.” I thought that those words informed a lot of Theeb’s actions and gave the father a continuing presence throughout the film.

Yes, that’s the essential backbone of the film. And in some ways in the deep background of the film, it’s sort of a fairy tale. And it’s about this boy moving between surrogate fathers as he’s trying to cope with the death of his father and understand what his place in the world is and how to readjust to life in the wake of losing his father and what that means. So you’re not supposed to notice—I hope it’s more experienced than a conscious thing—but a lot of the design of the film is running along that theme. The music cues are all related to those moments in the telling of that story—all about the father and the moments where Theeb is dealing with those issues. And that’s something that myself and Jerry Lane, the composer, worked on very carefully.

The music is based on Bedouin melodies, and the key melody for the film is one surrounding a song about the Red Sea, and that is what inspired the poem which a Bedouin poet wrote for the film. The poem is all about the Red Sea as a metaphor for life in the Bedouin culture, so when you hear that main theme, if you’re Bedouin, you know it’s about the Red Sea and you know it relates to the father’s poem. It’s something that’s probably lost on the rest of the world, but it was very important to me.

Maybe this hints at the idea that Theeb is like a record of or a testimony to a dying tradition.

Yes. Jacir was the only one that was born in the village. The rest had spent their childhood as nomads. It was really strange in a way because the adults were reconnecting with that way of life a bit, and Jacir was learning about it the first time, and they all found it very interesting. When we did the premiere in Wadi Rum with the community, one of the things that a lot of the elder men came up to me and said was how happy they were that we had made the film because it’s a chance for the young people to learn about their culture, because that’s becoming lost now. And I don’t know if everyone else feels like this but certainly I do in my personal life. When you’re in the Middle East and every news day is filled with death here, death there, bomb there, war here, war there, there’s a kind of longing to break free, to escape somehow. I hope that when people experience the film, wherever they’re from, there’s a kind of catharsis or exhale at the end of the film.

Theeb has had an incredible reception in the Middle-East. How do you feel about the movie getting as positive a reaction in your homeland as in festivals abroad, which does not happen very often with a film like this?

It feels really fantastic because what I have been dreaming to do was to make the kind of Arabic film that I wanted to watch, and that my friends and colleagues wanted to watch. But at the same time, you don’t know if it’s going to work. You don’t know if people will feel the same way. And it was a huge relief and a huge joy when the audiences responded the way they have, because it gives us permission to keep doing films. Also when you talk about this festival issue, one thing that I find that happens a lot is that when these films are made, they’re kind of art-house films. They go to the festivals and they’re very popular, but when people watch them here, it’s got nothing to do with our world, present or past way of life. People don’t see themselves in them or recognize anything to do with a lot of these films. And I think that’s because a lot of them often have to, and it’s not the directors’ fault—it’s because the system for making movies in the Middle East is so difficult, depend on funds and people outside of the Middle East, who want a certain box ticked. I feel like that hurts the films’ authenticity, and I think that’s why they don’t go well in the Arab world because people are not seeing a world they recognize.

You grew up in England. Did you also study there?

I’m half-half, and I’ve lived almost exactly half of my life in both countries, not in two blocks, but going back and forth the whole time. I was born in Oxford and grew up there until I was 10, and then I moved back to Jordan, and then I moved back to Oxford when I was 15 or 16, finished the last two years of school, moved back to Jordan, moved back to England again, did university there, moved back to Jordan. And I’ve been living in Jordan for the last 10 years.

Did you study film?

No, I always wanted to study film, but I just didn’t think it was on the cards. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that I could become a director because I come from a military background and both of my brothers and my father and my uncles served in the air force and the military. So I thought that was something I would have to do—well, not have to do, but I just thought that that was what life was. I never wanted to go into the military, but at university, I studied War in King’s College, which was kind of the philosophy, sociology, politics, and history of war. It was really fascinating, and because it’s ultra-disciplinary, it also taught you to look at things from different angles or theoretical frameworks. So it was extremely useful. But then when I left university, I saw that some of my friends were going into film and I went: “Oh, you can just do that, can’t you?” And I’ve always loved cinema, I’ve always wanted to do it, and I was independent obviously, so I just tried. But by that time, I couldn’t afford to go to film school. I wanted to go to the National Film School in London and romantically, I wanted to go to Lodz, the incredible Polish film school, that produced Polanski, Zanussi, Wajda, Kieślowski, but I couldn’t.

And did you always want to go back to Jordan to make films there?

I always wanted to make movies, and it’s not that I think of it in terms of the countries. Really what happened was, I was trying to learn how to write by myself. Actually, the first thing I wrote was a Bedouin western. It was like a rip-off of a Leone film, it was terrible. And I was also trying to write other things in England. But I got into the Rawi Sundance Screenwriters Lab that is run between the Royal Film Commission of Jordan and Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and that really changed my life. The people that taught me there—one of them is a very prominent filmmaker called Ziad Doueiri and the other one is Zach Sklar, who’s been an incredible mentor and supporter since. So there I developed a philosophy of researching and exploring things for writing, and that really just led me to stay in Jordan. I wrote a B-movie, a western with a feminine hero, about a lady whose family is trying to kill her in the name of honor and she defends herself. But right now, I just got the rights to a book that I can’t talk about just yet, and I’m also working on a Jordanian film. It’s really whatever takes the fantasy.

So will you continue to go back and forth between England and Jordan making films?

Yes, and one day I would like to go to space. [Laughs] I would love to do a sci-fi one day, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. One of the things I learned during the making of Theeb is how little I know as a filmmaker and as a person. So I’m trying to constantly grow and improve myself so I can try and make better films. I know that I’ve got a long road ahead before I try and make a real sci-fi movie that’s not only epic, but perhaps deals with some deep philosophical issues that I can’t really get my head around yet. So I’m hoping that I’ll get smarter or at least have more knowledge by the time I do it.

A sci-fi western with a Bedouin cast.

Yes, the first sci-fi western. [Laughs]

On April 27, the 42nd annual Chaplin Award Gala at Film Society of Lincoln Center honors Robert Redford. In the March/April issue of FILM COMMENT, Beverly Walker wrote about Redford; below, exclusively for online, is her chat with the star.

Having never performed—except athletically—until you began studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, how did you feel the first time you got up in front of people?

Angry, because I was self-conscious and not feeling a part of anything. The idea of becoming an actor seemed strange and lesser than. But something unfamiliar was clicking inside.

What was your first stage appearance?

I was in The Seagull and Antigone at AADA. On Broadway, it was Little Moon of Alban with Julie Harris.

Once you decided to give it a go, what did you do—continue to study, get an agent?

No study. An agent came to me. I didn’t even know what an agent did, or why I would want one.

What caused you to so radically change creative direction?

I was surprised at how satisfying [acting] was. It also put money in my empty pocket.

Were you comfortable in front of an audience from the get-go?

Oddly, yes.

Was your approach to character influenced by your natural painterly instincts?

Painting came more into the picture when I started directing. I tried to ignore camera and crew. I tried to stay in focus, usually by staying away from the set until ready to shoot.

All the President's Men

Without divulging your innermost “secrets,” how do you prepare for a role?

I first hear it as a voice in my head, then incorporate it into action.

What qualities do you seek in a director?

Point of view overall and in smaller movements. To join in a search for the truth.

You’ve been quoted in print as saying you always wanted to use art for political purposes. Did you mean as either actor, director, or producer?

As all three. But not make it overt. I am against agitprop.

You play Dan Rather in the film Truth, for release later this year. How was that experience? Did you meet Rather to talk about it?

Strange and challenging because he was such a familiar face to the public. To find his essence rather than a straight imitation. I spoke to him on the phone. He was generous.

What forces during your years growing up contributed to your strong feelings about nature? To your patriotism?

Watching the decline of the city I was born in (and loved). I sought the mountains, the ocean, and the desert for comfort.

All Is Lost

How does it feel to be so lionized at this stage of your life? Did you ever imagine yourself becoming an institution? How does it feel to be Robert Redford?

It’s a constant surprise and hard to be comfortable with (do I deserve this?). It’s a powerful feeling, to be known for your work and appreciated. No, I never imagined it. But I am sure I wanted to be somebody.

When, a few months ago, I set out to write something about George Armitage, who’d directed a few of the finest American genre movies of the last 40-odd years, I was surprised to learn that practically no one had done so already. Aside from a mention in an article in a 1977 issue of this magazine by Dave Kehr, titled “Four Auteurs in Search of an Audience,” there was no in-depth critical discussion of the director of Vigilante Force (76), Hot Rod (79), Miami Blues (90), and Grosse Pointe Blank (97), and not a single interview readily available online; the trail went cold after his last film to date, The Big Bounce (04).

Shortly after my column on Armitage was published, someone in the comments section repeated an apocryphal report that Armitage had suffered a stroke on the set of The Big Bounce. Below, a commenter calling himself “George Armitage” chimed in: “Just for that I'm going to make another movie! No stroke. Sulking.” This was, as it transpired after a couple of e-mails, the man himself, who was gracious enough to give me 90 minutes of his time to speak about his career in movies, which began in the 1960s with Roger Corman. “I was thinking about all the movies we were making for Roger and New World,” Armitage wrote me recently, “Kaplan, Demme, Dante, Arkush and me... We were making little 45 RPM Rock ’n’ Roll movies. Same subject matter as early rock songs and same lack of respect until... This is what made us different even from Roger, who was half a generation ahead, a liberal but no Rocker.” 

Now, Armitage’s Rock ’n’ Roll movies will be easier to see than ever before. His adaptation of Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alec Baldwin, and Fred Ward, is available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory as of today, and Kino Lorber has announced the release of Vigilante Force, with Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent, in September of this year. So, to cap this annus mirabilis for fans, here are a few words from George Armitage.

Miami Blues

Can you tell me something about your background?

I’m from Hartford, Connecticut. Left there in 1956, moved to Beverly Hills, then later moved over to the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, a racially mixed neighborhood, near the park. Now I live up in the Beverly Glen canyon, in West L.A.

So you were in Southern California from your teen years on?

Yeah, in ’56 I was 13. What a culture shock, by the way—I’m still reeling. In Connecticut there wasn’t a hot rod in sight. Out here it was people racing up and down the street, building their own cars—it was teenage paradise, the kids were running everything.

Were you involved in the racing scene?

Yeah, I got into everything. I surfed, and we did some street racing, a lot of cruising, listening to music, it was a great time, an amazing time to be a teenager. And of course the drive-in, where I came across Roger Corman.

I had a ’55 Pontiac. I wasn’t a mechanic, but the mechanics who built their cars were a little too gentle with the cars and kept losing, ’cause they didn’t want to rebuild it, so they gave me $100 to race—they raced for $500 or so in those days—and I just drove the hell out of the things, broke a lot of them, but we were able to win a few that way.

You mentioned the drive-in—were you already at this point thinking about making a career in movies?

No, I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do. I had a friend who said to me: “I think I’m going to go make movies,” but I don’t recall having that notion at the moment. I went to UCLA with a political science/economics co-major. Afterwards I was looking for work, waiting for my real-estate license to come through, and I got a job in the mail room at 20th Century Fox. It paid $53 dollars a week. I thought, “Well, I’ll wait for my license”—but it was such fun, the Fox lot at the time. They’d just come off the disaster of Cleopatra [in 1963]—at least the budget was a disaster, I don’t know if the movie should be called a disaster—and so the movie section was pretty near closed down, but TV was supporting it.

Within a year I was associate producer on Peyton Place [64-69] and I had my own unit. We had two half-hours of the Peyton Place television show to do each week. It was two units, and we shot two episodes in six days—in fact, we each shot one episode in six days, both units working at the same time, waiting for the visible cast members to go from B Unit to my unit. It was an incredible experience. There was a producer there named Everett Chambers who would work on a number of films with John Cassavetes, he was usually helpful. This was just at the time when the fortysomething producers who were kind of hip and jazz-oriented were coming in… I was 21, 22, something like that, and if you were young, if you had an opinion, were kind of hip, knew what was going on with your own generation, you were very valuable. So I went from producer to producer all over the lot pitching ideas, I created series, I wrote a couple of things for television and, about that time, started writing screenplays.

Peyton Place

How did you go from Fox and Peyton Place to Roger Corman?

I met Roger when he was there… The commissary was a place called the “Gold Room” where the producers would go. They were all sort of mothballed, but they still had energy enough to snob the television people, who were making High Noon, Lost in Space, Batman. The movie producers would sit on the other side of the room from the TV people. This left the TV people with nobody else to snob, so they would snob Roger Corman, who was there making St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And that really pissed me off, because I was a fan of his. So I began to visit him on the set and the whole thing, and told him about the conflict that was going on, and he got a kick out of that.

I left Fox in ’67 to try to write and direct movies. I didn’t see Roger again until… I wrote a script called—it was called either Carrot Butts or A Christmas Carrot—which had animated cartoon characters, Bugs Bunny and so on, coming to life. It was about the studio systems and all this stuff. My agent gave it to Gene [Corman, Roger’s brother], who gave it to Roger, and he loved it, so they submitted it to UA [United Artists] where they had a deal—Mike Medavoy was just taking over there and he was younger than I was. From there, Roger said: “Well, that didn’t work, why don’t we try something else?” Usually he has a title or something and he’ll say: “Go ahead, write something, just keep the title.” With Gas-s-s-s it was just the concept: “Everybody over thirty died.” I think that’s what he had, a sentence, and that’s what we went with.

He gave you that and from there you were on your own?

Yeah. He let you make it your own, and I did. UA greenlit it, we went back in ’69 to shoot in New Mexico and Texas. I was the associate producer as well, and we were writing it as we went—which is something that Roger liked to do and something I do too—and I was also in the movie, I played Billy the Kid. Mostly, though, in observing Roger there, and then on Von Richthofen and Brown [71], which he shot in Ireland, where I was simply an actor, I really observed Roger’s style of approaching a film. He was absolutely brilliant. He would shoot a scene completely in two hours, cover everything, and then, if he had time, he’d go back and do little bits and pieces of things. So he would get his day in, and then he would play. And that was very fun, allowing the actors to improvise. It’s the way I approach filmmaking today.

And within a year you had a movie of your own to direct.

Peter Bogdanovich and Francis had left working with Roger, so there was an opening there for directors, I asked him if I could direct, and he said sure. He said: “Would you like to do a nurse movie or a stewardess move?” I said I’d like to do a stewardess movie, and he said: “Okay, well then you can do the nurse movie.” Okay! Anyways, I got into it, and I wrote the script, and I got Everett Chambers, from Peyton Place, a crew of some TV guys that I’d worked with, and some young commercial crew. This fellow called Fouad Said had invented this thing called Cinemobile—they did the Culp/Bill Cosby show [I Spy] with it—and I used it to film on location. I did everything on location; in fact I’ve never shot on a stage in my life. I shot the whole movie in the South Bay, Manhattan Beach—it’s exactly the same place and time period that Paul Thomas Anderson used in Inherent Vice.

That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about the movie, the way that it functions as a time capsule of that moment.

A little while before Quentin [Tarantino] moved in. He was working at the video shop there [Video Archives], where I went many times for the four or five years he was there.

Private Duty Nurses

You said that you’d been given a one-sentence description to work around on Gas-s-s-s—what were the requirements or expectations on Private Duty Nurses?

Certainly sex.

My favorite scene is the let-down sex scene near the beginning, where Paul Hampton takes Pegi Boucher back to his place…

I was talking to the girls and they said: “Hey, why don’t you do a guy who’s just a lousy lay. Sometimes you run into that.” And I thought that’d be perfect for the South Bay, because it was a pretty crazy culture going on down there at the time, so that’s what we did.

Paul’s fabulous, by the way. He was quite a well-known country-and-western songwriter before that. He wrote a great song called “Sea of Heartbreaks”: [singing] “Lost love and loneliness / Memories of your caress…” It’s a chestnut. He did Lady Sings the Blues around that time, did a lot of stuff around that time, but I think he just got sick of Hollywood and left. I haven’t run into him in a little while. When I was in Paris, I ran into some friends of his from Oklahoma City, where he was from, and they knew all about him, but I haven’t seen him in years.

Another big element is the band Sky, who are prominently featured.

Where did I find them? I don’t think they had a recording out… somehow I came across them, I went out to see them play at a high school. Doug Fieger, who later went on to record “My Sharona,” was the lead singer, and there were a couple of other guys. I noticed you singled out the line “How’s that treat in your mouth”—there’s another song where the lyric is “I don’t wanna go down on a burning ship when I could go down on you.”

Masters of the single-entendre. There’s a lot of au courant social issue material in the movie, too.

Corman left that up to me. He wanted us to do whatever we felt, what we were thinking of poetically, socially, culturally at the time. So I tried to look at it from a woman’s point-of-view, adding my own feelings about what was going on. Corman and I got along very well. I didn’t like the way Hollywood treated him—he was kind of an underdog and I loved the fact that he would just say, “Here, go make the movie.” He never came to the set, he totally allowed us to do what we were doing. And in my seven movies, I’ve never been a day over schedule, and have probably come in $20 million under budget, total, for the entire career. So he had no problem, ever, with me. And Private Duty Nurses was done in 15 days.

Hit Man

How did your next movie, Hit Man (72), come about?

I had never seen the first movie based on the book, Get Carter. Gene [Corman] gave me a script with no title on it and said: “MGM owns this.” He didn’t tell me that the movie had already been shot. But I took it, rewrote it, and placed it in the African-American community. I gave it to my agent, and he said: “Hey, this is Get Carter!” So I said: “Gene, c’mon, let me know!” So that’s how that started.

I didn’t feel at the time that a white director should be directing it. So I met with Bernie [Casey, the film’s star], who wanted to direct it, and campaigned for him with Gene, and he said: “I don’t want to take a chance on someone who hasn’t directed.” So he wasn’t going to make the picture, and at that point there was a lot of crew and cast involved, and they were friends, so I said: “Okay, I’ll do it.” There was a great deal of improvisation by the actors, who were bringing me dialogue from the African-American community, and it really worked. Growing up in a racially mixed neighborhood, like I did in Baldwin Hills, I knew a little bit about the culture, but the actors brought so much in terms of dialogue and honesty.

Not unlike Private Duty Nurses, the movie is grounded by its sense of place, the Los Angeles of motels and porn theaters…

We were all over Los Angeles. I was just thinking about Miami Blues this morning, and remembering that when I went down there, the first thing, Jonathan Demme and I went off in a car, and we totally went everywhere in Miami. He had lived there, and he showed me everything, and the same thing was true—when he moved out here I took him around Los Angeles and showed him everything, and I realized that I did know the city pretty well.

The Colonial Motel up on Sunset worked beautifully for us, and we also shot at a funeral home in southwest L.A., we shot all over there, with a crazy police escort holding traffic on every location. And between locations I’d get in a squad car with these crazy cops and drive 150 mph to the next location, I thought: “God, Roger would be so thrilled with that, that’s the way to travel.” And I’m so glad we were able to shoot in the Watts Towers, right down there at 103rd.

Darktown Strutters

And then the next movie that you have a hand in that goes into production is Darktown Strutters (75), which has a very strange relationship to the Blaxploitation—it’s almost a parody of the tropes and symbols of Blaxploitation.

I wrote Darktown Strutters in three days, and the script form is all one sentence, the entire script is one sentence. I just did it to have fun. I was going to direct it, but I had another script that I sold called Trophy, which was about two police departments who end up in a shooting war, and it was really a labor of love, so I asked Gene to excuse me to work on that, but it never got made, unfortunately. So Joe Viola came in to direct Darktown Strutters, but then he left the project and William Witney came in. And he was fantastic—I was an old Roy Rogers fan and he’d done so many of those. Roger Moseley, who was in Hit Man, was also in that.

When it was done, Gene said: “You know, we could punch this up a little.” He had a screening after it was first made and was taking suggestions, and he’d invited Richard Pryor to come. And I remember about three-quarters of the way through I looked down in the aisle, and Richard was crawling out. He obviously didn’t care for the film, but was crawling up the aisle so nobody would see him, and he escaped. So he didn’t contribute much to the movie, other than giving them a reason to say: “Hm, maybe there’s some work to be done here?” Still, I enjoyed that movie, I thought Witney did a good job, and it’s a lot of fun.

His serials have a lot of crazy, breakneck stunt-work, which is also something I love in your next film, Vigilante Force, which starts off with these almost suicidal stunts.

Well that’s all Buddy Joe Hooker. You know the film Hooper [1978, starring Burt Reynolds]? That was originally titled “Hooker.” And it’s about Buddy, who’s an amazing character, he’s been on all the films since—I guess Vigilante Force was the first—but he’s been in every film I’ve done since. That was a 30-day film, but it would be 60 days today because of the stunts and the pyrotechnics. We had Roger George, who was quite a well-known special effects man. It went really well, though we had one little mishap that wasn’t really our fault—in the final shootout we blew up a blue van that was parked over an oil pipeline, so after the initial explosion the oil pipeline caught fire. I’m a little suspicious of Gene Corman on this, he always knew how to get a little something extra. I’m kidding, of course.

Were you repurposing any of the material from Trophy into Vigilante Force, or was this a whole new movie?

Yeah, again it was Gene with a title: Vigilante Force. And technically what’s going on in the town is not vigilantism. I suppose when the Green Mountain Boys respond that might be vigilantism, but… And Bernie Casey wasn’t a hit man in Hit Man, either. Another title that was available before the script was—they were worried about pre-sales, and titles could sell a picture.

So you’ve got the two brothers, Jan-Michael Vincent, the good brother, but he’s named Ben Arnold, which has to be Benedict—

Oh, good, I’m glad you got that. And Kris Kristofferson in Aaron, as in Aaron Burr.

Vigilante Force

The entire movie is full of these very slightly coded reference to the Revolutionary War…

It was going to be released during the Bicentennial extravaganza, which was a pretty crazy time. There’s one more, Judson Prett’s Harry Lee, that’s Lighthorse Harry Lee, who was Robert E. Lee’s father, who was a general in the Revolutionary War. Not many people picked up on it.

The final shoot-out is almost an assemblage of all these different pop signifiers: the band in redcoat gold braid, the Green Mountain Boys in tricorner hats, and then Kris doing his Cagney in White Heat death scene…

What I was really doing there was Vietnam. What would it be like if people took over your town, as we had been doing to the hamlets of Vietnam? What if we brought Vietnam back to America, what would that be like? That’s kind of what we were going after, but since the Bicentennial year was coming on and bringing a lot of revisionist history with it, I thought I’d include a little Revolutionary War in the recipe. I’ve always tried to include something subversive, not hidden from anyone, just for my own interests.

Your production designer, Jack Fisk, who also worked on Darktown Strutters, and went on to an illustrious career. How did he influence the look of the movie?

He went out and did most of the location scouting—and we always looked at every exterior with a mind to be able to use the interior as well. The oil field where they are is not far from my old house in the Baldwin Hills. Where the shooting range is up there among the oil wells is the old lovers lane that we used to go and park in, so that was kind of fun to be back there. We were out in Simi Valley for Corriganville, we were everywhere. We had absolutely no money, no budget, but Jack did extraordinary things—and Sissy Spacek was our assistant art director on that.

Vigilante Force

Jan-Michael Vincent and Kris Kristofferson are both fantastic.

Kris is very interesting, not a trained actor, but he’s extraordinarily smart individual, and a very natural actor, where he comes from is very much “What would I be doing, what would I be like?” He was going through something personal in his life that was rough at the time, but in recording the commentary for Vigilante Force, I was just amazed in thinking about how hard he’d worked. Though I think, in seeing it again, that the picture is almost more Jan-Michael Vincent’s than Kris’s. It wasn’t intentional, he’s just really very good in this. As soon as Kris came on board, everybody else followed. Bernadette [Peters] wanted to work with him, Victoria [Principal], and Jan-Michael came over, he’d been shooting with some of our people; Don Heitzer, who was the production manager, had been on White Line Fever. It was a good shoot, but it was rough. It was 30 days, it was 108 degrees in the Simi Valley, so a lot of it was tough to do. But we worked through it, finished on time and under budget.

Your next movie, Hot Rod, was made for ABC. How did you wind up there?

They had a movie division called ABC Circle films which was a prestige outfit. And for some reason, again, they had just a title: Hot Rod. And I went over there and talked to them, they said: “Yeah, go ahead.” It was a street racer movie, that’s what I came up with, and we shot that in 15 days—TV was not generous with their time. We shot that up in Northern California, in Calistoga, wine country, and at the Fremont drag way.

Again you’re working with iconographic figures, though here it’s Fifties rock ’n’ roll, car culture, against this creeping Seventies corporatism.

Yeah, you noticed that Gregg Henry wears the Rebel Without a Cause red jacket, but did you happen to notice that Owen [Wilson] wore a red jacket also in The Big Bounce? We made one, then finally they found one that was nylon, like that. He wore that, and he loved it, too. I don’t know what the James Dean thing was, but it was fun for me.

Again, when I first came to California I saw kids who were 15 years old building cars that were beating Detroit. I mean, Detroit started making cars after what these kids were doing: A ’57 Chevy, with 287 injectors in it, it was really fast, it was amazing what these kids were doing, going so fast. Then all those muscle cars started coming out later in the Sixties. We raced down at La Cienega and Centinela, near the airport. There was a walkway over La Cienega there, so kids could walk from the housing over to the big schoolhouse, on the other side. So what we would do, we’d line up, everybody would run and stand on the top of the walkway, which was exactly a quarter-mile from the corner. Four cars would come, the two who were going to race, and two behind them to hold traffic so nobody else got involved. The people who were racing would go off, they’d go past the school and the walkway, and the people above would call the winner, and then everybody would run and get out of there, because the police were going to be there in 15 minutes. So 15 or 20 cars would show up, everybody’d run out and hop up on the runway, boom, boom, boom, the two guys on the corner would go off, race, then they’d continue east on La Cienega so they were pretty well out of sight, then we’d all run back to the cars and get out of there before the sheriff came.

Hot Rod

So you were drawing on a very vivid and direct memory of this scene?

Oh, yeah. That’s what I grew up doing. There were four, five, six drive-ins around southern California, and on Tuesday nights everybody’d drive around to all of them: there was Bob’s Big Boy in Van Nuys and Smokey’s in Downey and The Wich Stand up in Baldwin Hill. And so people would race for $100, $200… Nobody ever raced for pink slips, I don’t know where that came from. I never drove a ’41 Willys, but I drove a ’40 Ford with an Olds in it… This would go 120mph by the time you finished the quarter mile. There was a long, long, long onramp called the Imperial Onramp. You’d go down there and stop again, there’d be cars holding the cars, then loop around and boom, boom, boom, outta there. No spectating at those kind of venues. There were no accidents. It’s just part of the culture—I mean, Howard Hughes used to race cars around there. It’d been going on a long time.

The philosophy that we hear from the Gregg Henry character seems remarkably close to what we find in your other leading men, from Bernie Casey in Hit Man all the way down to Owen Wilson in The Big Bounce. Independent-minded guys who stay out of the fray, stay to the side of the action and bide their time before making their move.

I think generally they’re all outsiders, all coming from somewhere, to somewhere, going somewhere else. I really… I guess there is a great similarity, I hadn’t really thought of it, though. When I sit down to write, those are the kinds of characters I find interesting. The line you quoted in your article: “When it breaks you build it again… Gotta fix it faster.” That’s the philosophy of street racing. Overall, I’d say it’s independent, decent people who are forced into some kind of action against what they consider to be an incursion on their way of life.

The movie is very, very well loved by not only movie lovers, but car enthusiasts, racing enthusiasts. Will it ever have a DVD release?

I only have it one three-quarter tape, a VHS U-matic. It played around for years under another title, called Rebels of the Road… but I don’t know. I would love to have it come out. About four or five years ago a guy who builds Willys sent me his e-mail, I don’t know how he found me, and I was thrilled to find out how many people in the car world loved it, I had no idea. He wanted to raise money for a sequel, but it never happened. I went to a car club reunion about a year and a half ago out at one of the old rag strips and I couldn’t believe how many people had seen it.

The principal character, Brian Edison, is based on a friend of mine called Bob Edelson, who was an incredible mechanic, not much of a driver. He didn’t want to break his car, so he had me break it for him. He is a CPA—he’s retired now—but it’s really his story, a really interesting cat. So the night that it’s playing in L.A., he is in Chicago, trying to get on a plane to come back and watch it with a bunch of us on TV, he can’t get on his flight, gets off one plane and on another, that plane is held up, meanwhile the plane that he got off of crashed that night in O’Hare [American Airlines Flight 191], in 1979.

Hot Rod

One detail I love in Hot Rod is that the villain of the piece is a root beer magnate. Where did that come from?

On the cruising circuit we would start at The Wich Stand at Slauson and Overhill, then we’d go out to La Brea, which became Hawthorne Blvd., to the A&W root beer stand out there where more car people would meet and go race. And so that’s where it came from. The name “Munn,” that belongs to the root beer family, is a character that went to high school with all of us. Robert Culp and Pernell Roberts, I really enjoyed working with those guys—they all had contracts at ABC so they encouraged me to use them, “Could you take Pernell” and so on. Grant Goodeve was from Eight Is Enough, for example.

Can I ask what the name of your car club was?

The Judges. As in “Sober as a judge.” We had our plaques in the back of our cars—a hot rod with a big ball-and-chain on it was our graphic. People would put their plaques on the package tray, in back of the back seat, people would put their plaques there so people driving by could see it, but we were so cool that we laid ours down so people couldn’t read the name of the club.

And then we have a good ten years where your name doesn’t appear on anything. I’m imagining a little script doctoring, a little pre-production hell, maybe?

After every movie, it’s a year where you’re off the planet. I don’t like to be off the planet that long. So when they’re over, the next year I’m just sort of oof, y’know? I go and live. And then I start over again. I write constantly, I’ve written at least a hundred original screenplays and probably, God, five thousand drafts, God knows how many passes. So I’m constantly writing. Some of them nobody ever reads. I was in a meeting with Michael Douglas one time and he said “What happened to the Eighties?” And I said: “I just thought I had to get better as a writer, and that’s what I tried to do.” And luckily, along came Miami Blues.

Cockfighter

Had you met Charles Willeford when Corman was making Cockfighter?

No, unfortunately he passed away before I could meet him. I did see Cockfighter, I saw it with Warren Oates, though I don’t quite know where I saw it. But by the time Miami Blues was in pre-production, he had passed away. His wife, Betsy, who was the editorial writer for The Miami News, she was very helpful while we were down there. It’s one of the regrets of my life that I never got to meet him. I love his definition of a psychopath in Sideswipe: “I know the difference between right and wrong but I just don’t give a shit.” And he said fully 50 percent of the people who were in the Army with him were psychopaths.

Was it Fred Ward who owned the rights and initiated the project?

What happened was, Bill Horberg, who was associate producer, brought the book to Fred, and Fred said: “Oh, this is great.” I don’t know if Bill had money or not to option the book, but Fred did, and he optioned it. He brought it to Jonathan [Demme] and Gary Goetzman, he wanted Jonathan to direct it. Jonathan had just finished Married to the Mob, which hadn’t been released yet, and he had shot in Miami, and he said to Fred: “Why don’t you give it to Din? Give it to George.” And he did, and I loved it. He said “Do you want to write the script and direct it?” I said “Absolutely, let’s go.” I had worked for Mike Medavoy, who was now head of Orion Pictures, on Vigilante Force, and he said: “Sure, good.” Fred, Jonathan, and Gary—who would go on to produce a number of wonderful things for Tom Hanks’s company, though this was his first film—were amazingly helpful.

I’m sorry, the nickname is “Din”?

Yeah, Brandon is my middle name, and that’s what I went through school as, though for some reason when I got to the Fox lot I changed it to George. I have no idea why. “Din”—my brother called me that because he couldn’t pronounce “Brendan.”

The script, at least as filmed, is such a smart streamlining of the novel. The major difference, of course, is that the Hare Krishna that Junior kills in the airport is revealed to be Susie Waggoner’s brother in the book, whereas the movie omits this.

It took 10 or 15 pages to explain that relationship, and it bothered me—that kind of serendipity. And we were just sitting there talking: “Why do we need to have that anyways?” It really was just a matter of economy. In early drafts it was in. In the novel it works beautifully, because it’s Willeford.

Miami Blues

I’ve heard that Fred Ward initially wanted the Junior part that went to Alec Baldwin?

He was kind of undecided but he was sort of leaning towards the Junior part. What happened was when Alex came in to read for us—sorry, Alec. My next-door neighbor for a number of years was Alex Van Halen, and I always mix the two up. When Alec came in and read, he knocked us out, so I said: “Fred, what do you think?” He said: “He’s Junior. I’ll be Hoke.” And Alec was extraordinary. It rained a lot during the shoot, which would shut us down because you could hear the rain on the roof, it was too loud, so we’d have to wait it out. One day we were sitting around Junior and Susie’s house, and Alec gets behind the camera and does about a five-minute impression of Tak Fujimoto. Then he moves over to the electrical department and does spot-on impressions of all of those guys. Everybody was awestruck. He also did an impression of me that was rather insulting, and very funny.

What I wanted to do in that was have the audience go on that ride with Junior while he was running around and playing cop, and to really enjoy it—and the audiences I saw it with did—but then slowly I wanted to take it away from them, so that by the end they would feel a little bit guilty about having so much fun earlier on in the picture. However, it kind of backfired—we did a preview in New Jersey, and the audience was horrified when Junior died, they practically rioted when Alec was killed.

Well, a lot of that is a tribute to how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is, the gravitas that she brings…

She’s the glue that held it together, just extraordinary. Alec… I’m a Richard Lester fan, I love understatement, and all the great British comedies are so beautifully understated. Alec had a little problem with that—he wanted to be a little broader, I was afraid he was commenting on the character, but I must tell you: he was right. We didn’t really agree on set, but then he gave me a call, he’d been shooting in Chicago, and saw Grosse Pointe Blank, which he loved—and which I’d tried to get him into, but he couldn’t—but he called me and said: “Hey, I’m glad you made me do this and that.” I said: “I’m glad you did what you did, too.” It was a little broader than I would’ve asked him to play it, but I really like what he did.

Miami Blues

It’s one of the only films from that period that hints at how funny he is.

He did Married to the Mob just before that with Jonathan, though there wasn’t so much humor with that character. But that’s where I saw him, I thought “Oh, this guy’s great.” Incidentally, at one point Gene Hackman was interested in playing Hoke—it would’ve been Gene as Hoke and Fred as Junior.

Was there ever an idea that you would film more of the Hoke Moseley books?

My son, Brent Armitage, wrote a draft of Sideswipe, but we couldn’t get that made—Gary and Marshall Persinger worked on that. I don’t know if you know, but they tried to do a TV series called Hoke, Scott Frank and Curtis Hanson. They didn’t use any of Miami Blues because that’s still owned by whoever owns Orion. But I was stunned they couldn’t get that on with that talent, though I’m not crazy about Paul Giamatti as Hoke. I just don’t get cop from him. But then if Jonathan had listened to me he wouldn’t have cast Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs—I didn’t think she looked tough enough. Fortunately he didn’t listen to me, and she was brilliant.

Could you say something about the great Shirley Stoller, who plays the pawn shop owner who lops Alec’s fingers off?

The Honeymoon Killers! An amazing film. I guess it’s sort of a tribute to that film, and also a way of saying that the film we were making is following in its footsteps. Again, I really like understated comedy, deadpan comedy.

The Honeymoon Killers

Grosse Pointe Blank is the first film that you directed that you don’t have a screenplay credit on?

I probably could have, but I didn’t want to, because I was afraid… There was an initial writer who did a great job, then John Cusack and Steve Pink, who now directs, and because the Writers Guild is insane with the way they handle the credits, I decided that if I threw my name into the mix, the percentage would drop for everybody and they’d get screwed out of it. But I did as much as anyone did in terms of writing.

The script, when I met with John [Cusack] and the writers, was 132 pages. I said: “Look, I’m not doing anything over 100 pages.” They said, “Okay,” and they did a re-write, and it came back 150 pages. So I said “Okay, you guys are fired,” and I spent most of pre-production re-writing the screenplay, getting it down to 102 pages. Then we would improvise, and I noticed that some of the stuff I’d cut out was in the improvs, they were bringing back stuff that I’d cut out, but we had a good time with it.

It seems to me less rooted in a recognizable social reality than your previous films. A guy from a posh suburb like Grosse Pointe becoming a contract killer is pretty fanciful.

Well, it’s about an outsider returning home, so there’s some similarity there to my other movies. If you look at what we’re dealing with there, he was a hired killer from the National Security Agency, so we’re dealing with, really, stuff that went on later, with the second Bush administration. That was what we were particularly interested in, showing that this was his background. The movie is just a shade under my second favorite, it was so amazing to work with those actors and do the movie the way we did—we shot 750,000 feet of film over 45 days.

Grosse Pointe Blank

You were using the Corman method? Getting everything in the can, then using whatever time was left over to embellish, mess around?

Yes, absolutely. With Grosse Pointe Blank I shot three movies simultaneously. We shot the script as written, we shot a mildly understated version, and we shot a completely over-the-top version, which usually was what was used. We cast that movie—and I’ve cast most movies—by having the actors come in and read, then throwing the script out and saying: “Okay, let’s improvise.” That’s what I was comfortable with. I say to the actors: “You are creating the character. This is written, these are the parameters, this is the outline. Now you take this, make it your own, and bring me, bring me, bring me.” Most actors will stay within the written word, some will go off, like Paul Hampton in Private Duty Nurses, who would improvise and bring Pegi along with him. I’m very fond of Grosse Pointe Blank because of that, the insanity of it was trying to keep thing working with three different registers to choose from.

It’s also an outlier in that it has a relatively straight romance in the center of it—or at least a little less warped.

I’m usually rather rough on studio heads in terms of creative help, but after seeing the audience so angry at Alec dying in Miami Blues, I decided that on Grosse Pointe Blank, this time, dealing with another psychopath, another sociopath, John’s character—I just wanted him to survive. And we shot so many different endings. They were so generous at Disney, we had Ovitz and Joe Roth were running the place, they were really great with us. We shot two or three different endings, the two of them getting together, talking about things, and everything didn’t work. And Joe Roth said at one of the screenings: “When the father says ‘You’ve got my blessing’ in the bathtub at the end, after the shoot-out, just cut to the two of them leaving.” I thought, “Let’s give it a shot,” and it worked beautifully.

The comedy is very different in Grosse Pointe Blank. Miami Blues, true to Willeford, is so deadpan, matter-of-fact.

I consider both of them comedies. Willeford is a great comic writer; I put him right up there with Elmore [Leonard]. I had great conversations with Elmore about Charles. Evidently Elmore told Charles, about making film adaptations: “Just take their notes, put up with their bullshit, and try to make it good.” And Willeford wouldn’t, he just fought back, broke deals, wouldn’t play ball. Another reason to admire him.

So talking about Elmore brings us up to The Big Bounce…

Steve Bing gave me Sebastian Gutierrez’s script, which was still set in the pickle fields of Michigan. It’s a funny story—Ryan O’Neal was on Peyton Place when I was there, and we were good friends; I went to his wedding, we went to see boxing together. And he did the first movie from The Big Bounce [1969], which Elmore considered better than mine…

The Big Bounce

I think he’s alone feeling that way.

What happened is, The Big Bounce, the book, when you break it down, is basically an act and a half. It’s not a real three acts. So you’re going to have to add half of the picture. So right away you’re in trouble with somebody like Elmore, who I considered to be an absolutely brilliant writer. So he worked on the script with me, he gave me notes, and the notes are classic, they’re great.

The first time we showed the film, it came in at an NC-17 instead of an R. And it was unreleasable in that form. So I said: “We’ll make it an R.” Grosse Pointe Blank was an R, we made it for $7 million and it probably made $45 million lifetime, all in. But they said: “You can’t make an R-rated comedy, they don’t make money.” That’s what they were saying in 2004. Since then, of course, a lot of R-rated comedies have done beautifully. So I said: “Look, I’m not going to oversee the destruction of my own movie, there’s no way. If you go to a PG-13, you’re going to eliminate Elmore Leonard from this movie.” The language, there’s some incredible love scenes… But the decision was made—they felt that they had to do that, so I said: “Goodbye.” I left the picture after my second cut. We’d already had two very, very good previews: in the 80s, up to the 90s. I don’t think I’ve even looked at the release print. I do have a cut of my own on DVD, I’ll have to get you a copy. I was really pleased that you liked what you saw in the movie…

Some of the material that I like best, it feels like there’s meant to be more of it, like the poker scene with Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton and Morgan Freeman…

You’re right about that scene. My God, I could still be shooting that.

There’s a sense of this laid-back, hang-out movie that’s been squeezed into a different shape.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of the cuts were language and nudity. Owen and Sarah were good sports, very generous with themselves. But when people ask to see my last movie, I show them my cut of The Big Bounce, I don’t show them what’s out there. It isn’t absolutely complete, but I think it could have been a far, far better film.

The Big Bounce

You had to shut down production briefly, as well?

Yeah, on the first day of pre-production shooting, we were up in a helicopter, getting some stuff and getting everybody broken in. And as I got out of the helicopter I got hit in the eye with a piece of lava rock. And there was some kind of virus on the rock. They treated the eye, and it was fine, but they didn’t realize that there was an infection. So with nearly two weeks left in the picture, I had to go into hospital, I was flown back to L.A. and the whole thing. Fortunately it was right at Christmas, so it turned into a Christmas break that we hadn’t planned on, and I completed the picture afterwards.

Everyone who worked on that film has said to me that it was the greatest experience of their lives. Now, being in Hawaii was probably a great deal of that. But it was just an extraordinary experience, and I credit the producer, Steve Bing, with that. He put up his own money, and I think he had $250,000 in bar bills, just picking up drinks for the crew and cast for all that time. So he couldn’t have been more wonderful. But the wrong decision was made. He was getting advice from people who’re in the money business, and he felt that to have a chance to get his money back, he should go PG-13. It was very difficult for some people to understand that when you take away the reality of these people, the way they speak, what they do—these are important elements of the movie that make it work. Whether they would’ve made it a financial success I don’t know, but they make the movie work, and if the movie works, you have more of a chance of more people seeing it.

Do you have any projects in the offing right now?

What I do primarily for fun and money is I do a lot of script doctoring. I’m able to help people who think their picture should be made for $30 million but have only $25 million, I show them how to do that. The first speech is: “Get your picture made. Don’t be sitting around for 50 years whining about it, get it made.” Then I show them how to cut days. They’ve got 40 days, you go down to 35 or whatever, you show them how to combine locations, break characters into roles for different actors so you don’t have to keep an actor on hold and pay for thirty days. It’s kind of anonymous, but it’s great to see the films get made.

The first speech is “I’m telling you, get your picture made. Don’t sit around for 50 years whining about it, get it made.” And then I show them how to, basically, cut days. If you’ve got 40 days, I get it to 35. Talk to the production manager find out where you can shave money. How to combine locations, to create different characters from the same character, so you don’t wind up holding an actor from day one who you’re only going to use again on day thirty. I’ve done this on seven or eight films over the last seven or eight years.

Now I’m working on two things. I also have a script called Hollywood, which is about a crew that goes off to make a picture about aliens invading, and they’re abducted by aliens, the entire crew. What it is, is a love poem to Hollywood crews and the incredible talent that they have… I’m introducing something I haven’t seen yet, which is alien reenactors—you’re familiar with Civil War reenactors and all of that? I have alien reenactors. I’m having fun doing that.

The second thing—are you familiar with the term agnothology? It’s the study of the cultural production of ignorance. So I’m trying to find a proper vehicle for that. I’m overcome by the amount of absolute stupidity that’s being spewed out there, not just politically, but everywhere now. It seems like anybody can say anything at any time about anything and somehow somebody legitimatizes it. It’s just beyond bizarre.

Watching writer-director Joss Whedon handle the staggering number of superheroes, just plain heroes, sidekicks, super-enemies, super-frenemies, and super-friends with potential benefits in Avengers: Age of Ultron is like observing a 3-D chess master struggle with an epic bout of whack-a-mole. The subtitle might be Age of Ultron but the meta-message is: “We’re in the Age of Marvel: prepare or be square.” (Warning: to know what’s happening at the beginning, brush up on the mid-credits scene in the last Captain America movie.) Whedon must have hammered like crazy to forge a narrative through-line that would help non-initiates or even casual fans find their way into the contemporary Marvel Universe. The writer-director recently advised the rulers of the comic-book/multimedia empire to create movies that are engrossing and comprehensible, not just frantic chapters in an ongoing saga. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, he contradicts himself.

In the Russo Brothers’ terrific Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the First Avenger, striving to catch up with his country’s postwar changes, jots down items like “Thai food.” I grew up in the now distant Silver Age of Marvel and DC Comics (my first published piece of writing was a letter to the editor of Hawkman), so my reporter’s notebook for Age of Ultron resembles Captain America’s checklist. Instead of tasty items like “Thai food,” it contains subjects for further research like “Infinity Stones.”

In the opening sequence, the Avengers—Cap (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)—battle their way through a snowy mountain forest to a HYDRA stronghold in the Eastern European country of “Sokovia.” As revealed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, HYDRA, a subversive fascist organization bent on world domination, has wreaked havoc by infiltrating America’s SHIELD (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division). Now the Avengers aim to stop HYDRA’s Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann) from harnessing the earth-shaking power of Loki’s scepter (Loki, of course, is Thor’s evil adopted brother).

The Baron’s greatest success so far has been transforming attractive, embittered orphan twins Wanda and Pietro Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) into the super-speedy Quicksilver and the telekinetic, spell-casting Scarlet Witch. The Maximoffs blame Tony Stark’s armaments for annihilating their family and country and are hell-bent on ruining Stark, his alter ego Iron Man, and Stark’s compadres and compadrettes in the Avengers and SHIELD’s noble remnants. Quicksilver, who quickly develops the signature phrase “You didn’t see that coming?” and the Scarlet Witch, who catalyzes confounding visions in the minds of the Avengers, zig and zag physically, emotionally, and politically throughout the movie.

Maybe I should say that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are “heck-bent on revenge.” One of the few running jokes to pay off is super-straight Captain America calling out the hip, racy Iron Man for “language.” Although this movie is full of witticisms, they often whiz right by you because they’re aimed at moving targets, and I’m not just talking about Quicksilver. Age of Ultron amounts to a panoply of entrances and exits by exotic and spectacular action figures.

Everything I’ve said so far is preparation—and I haven’t even mentioned baroque elements like Iron Man’s “Iron Legion,” his arsenal of drone Iron Men designed for tasks like protecting civilians from collateral damage. Age of Ultron doesn’t just start in media res; it never gets out of media res. After the Avengers wrest the scepter away from Hydra, Tony Stark wheedles a few days from Thor to test it, with the help of fellow scientist Dr. Bruce Banner (Dr. Jekyll to the Hulk’s Mr. Hyde). We learn, in passing, that ever since the Avengers nearly lost the Battle of New York to Loki at the end of The Avengers, Stark and Banner have been working on an “Ultron” defense program that would protect the globe like AI armor. (We don’t learn what their original version would have looked like, but anyone who’s read the comic books or seen a movie ad knows that Ultron functions most of the time as an ultra-intelligent robot.) Laboring in secret, with Banner as his sole partner and confidante, Stark aims to use the scepter’s omnipotent operating system to bring Ultron into being. Too bad the scepter’s OS, based in one of those Infinity Stones, has an imperial impulse of its own.

When Stark and Banner aren’t looking, the scepter-powered Ultron, after absorbing and crippling Stark’s talking AI assistant JARVIS, emerges from the lab in a metallic form soldered together from damaged and spare parts of Iron Legionnaires. With a bent spine and an eerie acid-streaked faceplate, Ultron looks like Igor and Frankenstein’s monster rolled into one—and, even creepier, he speaks with the oleaginous voice of James Spader. Stark’s goal for Ultron was creating “Peace In Our Time”; in Spader’s booby-trapped intonations, that phrase becomes both arch and menacing. In one of many cartoon ironies, Ultron decides that the first step toward “Peace In Our Time” is killing off the Avengers. (Ultron’s aggression feeds off his Oedipal hatred for Stark, which includes a streak of self-hatred, since his coding is partly derived from Stark’s mind.) Ultron soon builds his own army, as well as a sleek, fluid physique, from the Baron’s failed robot experiments in Sokovia.

At 141 minutes, it’s a miracle the movie is never merely mechanical, but like JARVIS or Ultron, it’s not fully human, either. Whedon studs the action with bits of “personality” that rarely add up to character. The movie’s premier odd couple (or perhaps odd quartet) is Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow and Bruce Banner/Hulk. Black Widow coos the Hulk down from his galvanizing rage and back into the human form of Banner; Romanoff strives to persuade Banner that she loves a man who avoids a fight. Her fellow semi-normal mortal and non-romantic best friend is Renner’s Hawkeye, who becomes the blue-collar anchor for the team and remains aware how incongruous it is for a mere archer to team up with a super-soldier, a Norse god, a self-made mutant, and a genius. Whedon’s actors are admirable and at times amusing, but his slab-like spectacle and blundering ambition blunt their stabs at robust poignancy and humor. Whedon puts the Black Widow/Hulk romance on hold in a supposedly funny, rousing action turnaround that fails as both a setpiece and a sight gag. Whedon reveals the basis for Hawkeye’s good-guy sanity in a homespun sequence that’s as corny as Kansas in August—and might actually be set in Kansas in August.

The stream of gags and wisecracks is like a bizarre version of Laugh-In tucked into a succession of special-effects mini-apocalypses. There’s even a Laugh-In–like party scene with James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle) endearingly struggling to win yuks with an anecdote about his armored strength. Later, he and Iron Man and the other Avengers attempt in vain to lift Thor’s hammer. Hemsworth as Thor proves to be the film’s deftest deadpan comedian. In one juicy throwaway riff he modulates his grandiloquent rhetoric about reveling in the screams of the dead by mumbling about muscle sprain and gout. But the heavy machinery of the storytelling grinds away at the cast’s gaiety. We witness the birth of an intriguing character, a righteous android called the Vision (Paul Bettany), but he registers as little more than a charismatic enigma. In the film’s drollest exchange, Ultron accuses the Vision of naïveté, and the newbie replies that he was, in fact, “born yesterday.” The film, though, is weighed down with too many yesterdays.

Bryan Singer had just as many comic-book icons and shifting realities in X Men: Days of Future Past, yet he kept them spinning around a single dramatic axis (the threat of the Sentinels in the present, the need to prevent Mystique from catalyzing their creation in the past). Even characters reduced to walk-ons, like Halle Berry’s Storm, enriched the emotional atmosphere. Simon Kinberg’s script, unlike Whedon’s, didn’t force one-liners and two-liners into the dialogue. So moments of inspired hilarity—especially a Buster Keaton–worthy sequence featuring that film’s Quicksilver (Evan Peters)—had an undiluted potency that gave the entire film a healthy shot of laughing gas.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron suffers from a surfeit of talent, not a lack of it. Whedon tries so hard to be personable and purposeful that you feel the effort every step of the way. His first Avengers managed to be an engaging, profoundly American film without really trying. Coming out during the 2012 presidential campaign—the same month as Washington Post political columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.’s book, Our Divided Political Heart—Whedon’s spectacle illustrated Dionne’s thesis about the need to balance individualism and community more viscerally and persuasively than President Obama did in his “You didn’t build that” speech. In the first movie, most of the Avengers distrust each other, jockey for power, and splinter over tactics; it takes the murder of a human they all love to unite them against an alien invasion. For Americans sick of polarized politics and a government operating under constant threats of shutdown, The Avengers provided a fantasy of rivals transcending their differences so life can go on.

In Age of Ultron, Captain America continues to be the voice of community, insisting that the team prevail or fail together, and Tony Stark re-emerges as the entrepreneurial maverick who thinks he knows best how to save the world. Their conflict is all the more promising because Stark, the individualist, is also the elitist intellectual. But the conflict doesn’t play out—it just peters out. The movie will define “over-stuffed” for its epoch the way a certain all-star comedy did for the Kennedy era. It’s a Marvel, Marvel, Marvel, Marvel World.

Clouds of Sils Maria

Olivier Assayas, a critic-turned-filmmaker with a confessed debt to Guy Debord, operates at the intersection of the essay and fiction film—a dubious proposition, save for the fact that Assayas permits his actors necessary breathing room to develop their roles beyond the limits of generational placeholders. Actresses have given particularly marvelous performances in his  films—Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (96) and Clean (04), Asia Argento in Boarding Gate (07), and now Summer Hours co-star Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, which opened in New York three weeks ago.

In Clouds, Binoche plays Maria Enders, an actress in her forties who is preparing to return to the stage in the play which first earned her fame, Maloja Snake, a drama concerning an affair between two women—one an ingénue, the other approaching middle age—which becomes a war of wills. Maria’s participation is set in motion when the play’s author (and her former lover) Wilhelm Melchior dies outside of his home in the Swiss Alps, under circumstances which evoke the death of Robert Walser, just as everything about him seems to evoke the legacy of high-minded European modernism. In this go-around with Maloja Snake, Maria will be playing the elder part, opposite a young American star, Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz); to prepare, she reads lines (and works through a midlife crisis) with her twenty-something assistant, Valentine (Stewart). Maria has had a prestigious career punctuated with occasional commercial compromise, while Jo-Ann has been in and out of the scandal sheets, and is known for her work in multiplex sci-fi spectacles like Time Shift, which Maria incredulously watches on a research mission with Valentine. For them to work together is as absurd as the pairing of, say, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. In fact, Valentine may be Maria’s projection of Jo-Ann/Stewart—a point teased at when Valentine disappears from the narrative in a scene that at once nods to the midcentury milestone of L’Avventura and kisses it goodbye.  

To date, Clouds of Sils Maria has, per Box Office Mojo, earned $545,000 in domestic box-office. It has resolutely failed to topple Furious 7 from the top spot that film has remained astride for four straight weeks. Furious 7’s worldwide gross, at the time of this writing, now stands at $1,321,536,000. Unadjusted for inflation, that makes it the fifth-most profitable movie of all time, so far. Last week, the rumor of an eighth film in the franchise, to be set in New York City, was confirmed. And while the financial success of Furious 7 was, to some extent, a foregone conclusion, the fact that it has been more than moderately successful with critics was not. Metacritic presently rates it at 67/100, while it has an 82 percent “Fresh” rating on the Tomatometer, and these numbers can’t be accounted for by junket junkies stuffing the ballot box, either; Critics Round Up, a curated aggregator which “select[s] reviews based on writing quality instead of popularity,” currently ranks the film at 75/100.

Clouds of Sils Maria

The highlighted reviews include that of The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who begins with a discussion of “the liberated Hollywood of recent years” whose output, in his estimate, is divided between the “conspicuously personal and idiosyncratic” and “the nakedly mercantile.” Pedigree, however, does not predetermine results: “Just as some movies by the most distinctive directors also prove to be profitable, some movies made as part of a baldly commercial slate also have artistic merit—and James Wan’s Furious 7 is among the latter.” (This fact, and this division, happens to be at the heart of Sils Maria, which Brody reviles.)

I’m not particularly interested in talking about Furious 7 any more than I have already. No, really, I’m not—I think it’s a slapdash, deathly dull, and unavoidably morbid movie, and history will validate my opinion. I am, however, interested in the place that it has assumed in the discussion of popular art—particularly “nakedly mercantile” films and music, and particularly in recent years. Though my bailiwick is movie chat, I have always found it instructive to look at music journalism, which is closer to the concerns of young people, and therefore closer to the speed of change, to get a sense of what lays ahead for my own field. In the tenor of the conversation about Furious 7, I detect something like the language which has been used in the discussion around the by-no-means-new issue of rockism vs. poptimism, one of the defining dichotomies of the last decade of pop writing. To recap: the rockist is a devotee of small-band guitar/bass/drum music; he is also, the grievance goes, usually a “he,” and touts the authenticity of the music that he listens to over that of the poptimists. The poptimist is open to various pop/hip-hop/electro/R&B/dance idioms which invite an ethnically diverse/female/LBGTQ fan base, idioms dismissed as synthetic by the rockists who, until relatively recently, at least, held all of the most important positions in music journalism.

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga—or at least the most recent that I’m aware of—is a piece by Washington Post pop-music critic Chris Richards titled “Do you want poptimism? Or do you want the truth?” which appeared last week to a clangor of page views, and which in setting out to curb poptimism’s excesses offered a Cliff’s Notes version of its history, from Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New York Times editorial “The Rap Against Rockism” to Saul Austerlitz’s “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism” which appeared 10 years later in The New York Times Magazine. Setting aside the laughable idea that the crucial battlefield of any significant question of aesthetics has ever been fought on the pages of the Times, we can say that these pieces are significant as high-profile manifestations of ideas which appeared as bellwethers elsewhere. In the weekly installment of “Do You Like Prince Movies?”, a Grantland pop-culture podcast co-hosted by Wesley Morris and Alex Pappademas, Pappademas linked “poptimism” to a pushback against indie snobbism on the ILXOR message board at the fin de millennium, and the reign of Chuck Eddy as editor of The Village Voice’s music section. (Interestingly, Morris and Pappademas also connect the poptimism argument to the ascendency of the Furious films, and the feeling that “the people who don't like them now are asked to leave Eden.”)  

Furious 7

Richards identifies poptimism as the new dogma, “the prevailing ideology for today’s most influential music critics,” who go unnamed, although he does take shots at Slate, The Fader, and Grantland. While conceding that poptimism was a necessary corrective to existing dogmas and undertaken with noble intentions, he states that it has now entered its period of decadence, going from a considered critical validation of some popular music to a hasty embrace of any and all popular music. Pappademas, for his part, objects to the premise that there is some kind of poptimist politburo now overseeing music writing. I was put in mind of a piece written by Maura Johnston in response to Austerlitz’s Times screed. She notes that rockist revanchism “sounds not unlike the whining of people about ‘men’s rights’ and ‘reverse racism.’ (Oh no, the back of the complainant's brain says, our ethos might be treated with the same amount of disdain that we give to other people.)”

There is, of course, a great deal that separates the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of pop monoliths like Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Rihanna’s forthcoming eighth studio album from the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of a multiplex monolith like Furious 7, or the forthcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron, which has already supplanted Furious atop the box-office internationally, and will inevitably take the domestic crown this weekend. The means through which they will be discussed in public forums, however, are not altogether different: both will receive their requisite think pieces or hot takes. A concision of expression, minimizing the risk of TLDR dismissal, means that any examples that might seem to call into question the existence of the trend being identified (say, that poptimism is the new religion) will be either ignored or crowded into a digressive paragraph of second-guessing. Context, when it might soften the impact of the argument, should be avoided completely,¹ particularly historical context. Sanneh, for example, dates the “rockism debate” to “the early 1980s,” but no one excerpts this part of the article—get out of here with your ancient history, Herodotus!

This is the way things work now. What is less clear is how much, outside of strictly delimited parameters, any of it matters. Johnson understood well ahead of the curve a truth that most commentators are still grappling with—that it is increasingly difficult to define a “consensus” in the atomized Web 2.0 world. “The manner in which people consume media,” Johnson wrote in her rebuttal to Austerlitz, “has become more fragmented and simultaneously more all-consuming; a Twitter feed can seem like it holds a lot of information even though it holds a fraction of a fraction of what's happening in the world, and the spot-reading that happens means that fraction is only smaller.” As it happens, Johnson is part of my Twitter feed, and while on the ground at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle last week, she tossed off some pertinent points on (what else?) poptimism: “it’s important for critics to dig and question what they’re being sold, not just by labels but by their colleagues and audiences… it’s not about deifying rihanna or blindly accepting that terrible wiz song, it’s about questioning and breaking down narratives of taste.”

The “terrible wiz song” in question is rapper Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” [feat. Charlie Puth], which plays at the end of Furious 7 over an In Memoriam montage paying tribute to the actor Paul Walker. It is his death, more than any vast qualitative difference in the craftsmanship of the latest film, that must be taken into account when reckoning with its exceptional box-office performance. (Fast & Furious 6 earned $788,679,850 worldwide; Fast Five, the best of the bunch, did $626,137,675.) As for Rihanna, whose “unfolding prosperity gospel” was the subject of a recent ode by Doreen St. Felix in Pitchfork earlier this month, she has been busy indeed. On April 6, the video for her trudging, lugubrious single “American Oxygen” debuted on Tidal, the subscription-only music service launched by the Swedish company Aspiro, which is owned by Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter through his Project Panther Bidco, Ltd., and which has failed spectacularly, to the great delight of many. The Darren Craig–directed clip for “American Oxygen” cuts between Ri-Ri twirling about on the steps of the Pasadena City Hall, which doubled as the Pawnee City Hall in Parks and Recreation and also appeared in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), and a heap of button-pushing stock footage, juxtaposed for provocative effect (e.g., Wall Street followed by Occupy Wall Street; a teargas canister launch cutting to an end-zone touchdown grab; White/Black Power sloganeering.)²

“American Oxygen”s breakdown—a repetition of the lines “This is the new America / We are the new America”—recurs at the song’s close, accompanied by images of multiracial cooperation and reconciliation. The video premiered something like a week after the release of DreamWorks Animation’s Home, in which Rihanna voices the character of teenager, Tip, the first black protagonist in a DreamWorks film. (And black protagonists do not, precisely, abound in animation as a whole.) And it is on the front of representation that at least a few advocates of the Fast & Furious franchise have staked their claims for the importance of the films. Salon dot com’s Sonia Saraiya notes that the Furious movies “makes a place for women, for minorities, for any number of languages and multiple continents,” while unofficial dean of the Vulgar Auteurists Armond White³, writing in the National Review, praises the series for “transcend[ing] modern racial differences” in its celebration of “social mobility and social velocity,” “cross-cultural camaraderie,” and “genre-movie democracy,” advocating a “united front of brotherhood [which] supersedes and outdates the concept of race war.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, three-quarters of the North American audience for Furious 7 was non-white. I saw the movie with a packed house at my local multiplex in Astoria, Queens, recently touted on Morning Edition as one of the most diverse urban spaces in the world. (Furious 7 was playing on not less than half of the multiplex’s 14 screens, and trying to negotiate the parking garage is a memory which will stay with me for significantly longer than anything in the movie itself.) The argument goes that Furious 7 has, thanks to its multicultural cast, connected to an increasingly diverse moviegoing public starved for representation. I suspect that this tells part, but not all, of the success story. Furious 7 doesn’t contain a single speaking role for a Chinese actor that I can recall, while $323 million of its gross to date has come from the People’s Republic of China—also a credited partner in the production through China Film Co.—and will very likely finish with a higher gross in China than stateside. (Chinese audiences coughed up $66 million for Fast & Furious 6, their first taste of the franchise.) With Furious 7 reviews fresh in my mind, I recently re-watched Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth film in the inestimably superior Resident Evil series. The cast, which includes Furious veteran Michelle Rodriguez, Li Bingbing, and Boris Kodjoe, is hardly less diverse than that of the Furious films, though to my knowledge the Resident Evil franchise has never been singled out as praiseworthy because of this. (Nor were the representation plaudits anywhere to be found when Blackhat was sinking like a stone.) In fact, I suspect the relative diversity of the Furious and Resident Evil films is a byproduct of Hollywood racism—like other franchises of the last 20 years which rely on ensemble casts (Step Up, Final Destination), they’re drawing from a talent pool of something other than top-dollar name-above-the-title stars, who tend still to be overwhelmingly white. Without megastar wattage, they opt for demographic outreach, a matter of marketing strategy rather than egalitarian sentiment. (If you think this is cynical, I have some leaked Sony e-mails you might like to read.)

Resident Evil: Retribution

Nevertheless, with the impenetrable logic through which these things are decided, the Furious franchise has become a standard-bearer for blockbuster inclusivity. The “new America” that Rihanna speaks of is, we may reasonably surmise, the audience for Furious 7, an America in which the standing racial hierarchy has been upended, and the “White Minority” of the tongue-in-cheek-paranoiac Black Flag song of the same name has become a reality. “White Minority” was written by guitarist Greg Ginn and first performed by briefly tenured Puerto Rican frontman Ron Reyes on the Jealous Again EP which, pressed and released in summer of 1980, was the third-ever release of SST records, an independent label founded by Ginn and based in the working-class environs of South Bay, Los Angeles. The acronym stands for Solid State Transmitters, the name under which a young Ginn had sold electronic equipment, and it speaks to the blue-collar self-identification of the band and label—the logo is of the sort that wouldn’t look out of place on a workshirt with cutoff sleeves.⁴

As an independent record label, SST created the template followed throughout the Eighties, to a lesser or greater degree, by other independent U.S. labels, including Twin/Tone (Minneapolis), Homestead Records (New York), Touch and Go (Chicago), Bar/ None (New Jersey), Enigma (California), and Sub Pop (Seattle). Retrospectively, the ferment of left-of-the-dial independent rock represented by the above seems today like the last time when the dichotomy that had defined American culture since the ascendency of the Boomers—that of a corporate mainstream, and an “underground” counterculture that germinated, largely unnoticed, in its shadow—was actually applicable. In last week’s column, on the subject of Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s On Cinema and Decker “universe,” I quoted Heidecker on the prerequisites for an appreciation of his comedy—“You have to all be on the same page that we’re all fucked and most things are garbage, most products, whether it’s movies or TV shows or books, it’s mostly garbage and patronizing to us.” This stands in pretty well for the basic attitude behind the counterculture idea: the people in power are doing it badly and for the worst of motives while, given a space of our own, we can and will do it better. The idea of a self-selecting cult audience was built into this music, even reflected in album titles: What We Do Is Secret, This is Our Music, and so on. Where the mainstream put up bridges with welcome signs, the underground built fences.

The rise of the rockism vs. poptimism debate corresponded roughly to the upending of paradigms that accompanied everything becoming tangled up in the Internet: nothing that anybody did would be secret now, and your music would be everyone’s. Fences put up for self-preservation came to appear merely exclusionary when deprived of their original purpose, and the fact that making a show of “opting out” of participation in mass culture is, to some extent, an exercise of privilege was evident as never before. The gesture of abnegation, after all, only takes on meaning if you’ve been invited in the first place.

Scenes From The Suburbs

The dismantling of previous distribution models, per Slate’s Carl Wilson, “blurred any clear distinctions between insiders and outsiders.” The preceding comes from a recent piece titled “Against ‘Indie’,” which calls the designation “implicitly racist,” following on the heels of a Pitchfork piece “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie,” and takes up the assumptions of poptimist dialogue. (In 2004, Sanneh asked: “Could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.”) Indeed, there is a venerable lineage of these pieces by now: Wilson, mentioning “the endless ‘authenticity’ debate,” links a Slate piece by Jody Rosen from all the way back in 2006, “The Perils of Poptimism,” in which Rosen discusses the ’06 Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where none other than Carl Wilson appeared to present a paper on his struggle to understand the appeal of Celine Dion, the gist of his conclusion being that “critics should spend some time trying to understand other's tastes rather than building ideological buttresses to bolster their own.” (This would become Wilson’s 2007 entry in the 33 1/3 series: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.)

For Rosen, poptimism is based in the “the wholesale rejection of ‘guilty pleasures’”; for Richards in the Post, it’s the recognition that “guilty pleasures are really just pleasures”; and Sanneh uses the same language to address the loaded language which perpetuated rockism: “Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create ‘guilty pleasure’ singles.” Down with guilt! It’s time to stop holding out and #Justsayyes—to cite the hashtag popularized by Taylor Swift, who The Guardian credited with “lead[ing] poptimism’s rebirth” in 2014. FILM COMMENT, for its part, has intermittently run a feature called “Guilty Pleasures” ever since it was inaugurated by Roger Ebert in the magazine’s July/August 1978 issue. In the September/October 2000 issue, the guest columnist was Harmony Korine who, whatever the merits of the films he’s directed, has always been frightfully of his time. “I have never felt guilty about any pleasure,” Korine wrote, “so what follows is a spontaneous list of those films that seem to be the most important to me, for various reasons. There is no specific meaning to the order and placement of the titles.” Korine’s dashed-off list included Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, and James Fargo’s Every Which Way But Loose.

The placement of a relaxed, quite enjoyable movie in which Clint Eastwood travels around central California with an orangutan named Clyde, alongside two austere art-house classics, is a piss take, Korine’s typically lazy, churlish way of throwing a monkey wrench (sorry) into the idea of canons. This provocation, however, is not so very far from the championing of Cecil B. DeMille in the same space, 20 years earlier, by Martin Scorsese—the nearest thing that American film culture has to an official face and spokesperson. Here is where the parallel between the critical culture surrounding music and film begins to break down. While the mainstream pop/underground rock dichotomy has its rough equivalent in the counterpoising of factory town Hollywood and various handcrafted “fringe” cinemas (avant-garde, Underground, independent, “B,” exploitation, documentary), working film critics who reject Hollywood out of hand are a relatively rare breed, and critical apparatuses for discussing industrially produced movies has existed for as long as anyone who is presently writing about them has been doing so. (This does not prevent some commentators from going full-on Gabbo-style “I’m a bad widdle boy” when “daring” to champion the most expensive and profitable movies in the universe.) The most popular and durable of these apparatuses, which we call Auteurism, classically depended on the identification of an individual artistic personality and force of will at the heart of the machine, while very little that I have read about Furious 7, positive or otherwise, ventures to suggest that the movie says anything about director James Wan, or his worldview. To trot out an automotive metaphor, Furious 7’s champions seem not so much to celebrate the designer, but the assembly line. Indeed, for Grantland’s Mark Harris, Furious 7 is significant of movies becoming something other than movies—what he calls “steroidal Brand Edifices.”

In point of fact, any attempt to divide either music or cinema, at any point in history, into cloistered and mutually exclusive spheres is doomed to failure. Under the name of “Ciccone Youth,” Madonna obsessives Mike Watt, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore released material through SST in the mid-to-late Eighties. I could fill a bulky Spotify playlist with tuff-guy hardcore bands semi-sarcastically covering pop songs. (Gang Green doing ’Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry,” Sheer Terror doing The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”) Euronymous and Hellhammer, architects of that most forbidding of genres, Norwegian Black Metal, dabbled in trance and techno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. In cinema, without the anti-model of Hollywood, American Underground/avant-garde filmmaking—think Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Les Frères Kuchar—is unimaginable, just as Madonna’s videography is unimaginable without the example of Maya Deren, or “American Oxygen” is without that of Bruce Conner. The over-enthusiastic reporting of “They’re just like us!” instances of “highbrow” auteurs mucking about with “lowbrow” texts—Bresson’s fondness for John Glen’s For Your Eyes Only, Terrence Malick’s Zoolander fandom, Jean-Luc Godard consulting Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D before undertaking Goodbye to Language, and the posthumous discovery of copies of Ghostbusters and Romancing the Stone in Ingmar Bergman’s VHS library—only further disproves the idea that the art house is or ever has been hermetically sealed off from what Pappademas calls “the larger culture.”

I’m sure Assayas is kicking himself for not including a scene of Maria finding a copy of Freddy Got Fingered among Melchior’s effects in Clouds of Sils Maria, though there is plenty of other fuel for Maria and Valentine’s ongoing dialogue, especially on their way out of Time Shift. (Incidentally, it’s the most bizarre film-within-a-film I’ve seen since the crime thriller that appears in Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer.) One of the basic points of contention between the two is wrapped up in assumptions about taste: Maria feels that youth is insufficiently skeptical of self-evidently junky corporate entertainment, as I myself often do. (Though clinging to membership in the advertiser-coveted 18-34 demographic by my fingernails, I had a “cool” brother seven years my senior, which bumps up my age of generational identity into Generation X digits.) Valentine feels that Maria allows herself to be led around by “narratives of taste”—what makes the junkiness of corporate entertainment self-evident?—for with age comes a certain narrowing, a willingness to dispense with things that one thinks aren’t worth the time.

This is called experience or, alternately, prejudice—either one a death knell for a critic, who ought to retain some capacity for being surprised or hang up their beat. I have approvingly quoted François Truffaut’s maxim “All films are created equal” in this column before, and I still believe that it’s a worthy credo for writerly practice. In actuality, however, equality is only a reality for films inasmuch as it is for people born in this great Republic. More than ever we live in an attention economy, and the work that has money behind it gets the lion’s share. On this point the Post’s Richards makes his most salient point about poptimist “apologia”: that even while making strides towards accepted wisdom, it “treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs.” As Johnson wrote, we need to change the way that we talk about consensus—in fact, I think the conversation might be improved if we took a decade-long hiatus from talking about it at all. “Me against the world” rhetorical devices can make for compelling reading—the like-minded reader may feel that they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the author, holding a Thermopylae—and they’re hard to get rid of, consequently. I’ve used them myself, and benefited from the “Right on!” back-pats. But when “the world” is literally at your fingertips, you’re never far removed from forming your own consensus, and the voice in the wilderness act is an absurd piece of grandstanding.

Jauja

Other, actual imbalances are more easily quantified. The fact is that megaproductions in any medium have never, ever had a hard time purchasing attention, outside of a handful of highbrow bastions—and even these have largely ceased to attempt to stem the rising tide of poptimism/ populism. If you are attempting to make your living as an arts journalist—and I don’t know why you would ever consider doing such a thing—you are de facto a poptimist and vulgarian now, as dictated by editorial mandate and the need to stay relevant. (I am a grown man with a functional knowledge of the Great Books, and I have consulted something called a “Tomatometer” in this piece.) Even the erstwhile friend to “difficult” cinema, the alternative weekly, is now loath to lend space to offer coverage to anything without a celebrity hook, as in the case of Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja or, indeed, Clouds of Sils Maria. Under the classic critic-sets-the-agenda model, the idea was to tell the reader what they should know about. Now, you might be lucky to slip a reference to that into a discussion of what they’ve already heard about.

There is, it seems to me, an unresolved contradiction implicit in the poptimist line. On one hand it advocates letting go of the guilty pleasure, to indulge without shame our sweet tooth for invigorating pop. On the other, we’re also asked to suppress the gag reflex when something sufficiently popular doesn’t hit the spot, as in Wilson’s journey with Celine Dion, to reserve judgment and see if it isn’t some kind of acquired taste after all, because 50,000,000 Dom Toretto Fans Can’t Be Wrong. In effect, it’s a matter of self-explanatory work demanding the same prerogative which in the past had been reserved for the obtuse and obscure—the right of repeated viewings. “This is the stuff that we should be talking about as critics,” Pappademas says on the Grantland podcast, “the stuff that most people are excited about.” What troubles me about this statement is that it ignores the fact that a vast machinery exists for the purposes of generating excitement, a machinery which some entities have access to, and others do not. (This is not to speak of the problematic idea that participation in a phenomenon is equivalent to excitement about it—my Furious 7 screening was full, but the atmosphere was one of palpable boredom.)

To in some small way attempt to correct this, to futilely resist the Borg and reserve the discretion to say “Not that, but this,” is part of the role of the critical profession, as I have understood it. When TIME magazine critic and former FILM COMMENT editor Richard Corliss died last week, FC republished an interview in which Corliss described his vocation: “Elevating popular taste and popularizing elevated films.” Without getting into the discussion of what constitutes an “elevated” film, we may note that this mission is the diametric opposite of being led by the nose by Trending Topics. The idea that there’s nothing wrong with feeling and writing seriously about popular art is, certainly, all to the good, but when this becomes tantamount to “Even if you don’t like it or think it deserves further attention, it’s the thing this week… so write about it anyways,” it’s a problem. That’s a stance that just so happens to perfectly answer the demands of the market, like television getting super-duper good at precisely the moment that a new need for constantly refreshed critical content appeared. It’s PR handing down editorial dictate, and it may be as unstoppable as The Age of Ultron, but that doesn’t mean we have to celebrate it.

1. For example, there was a significant dip in domestic box-office in 2014 which anyone who bothered to look could tell was connected to the relative dearth of proven franchise tentpoles, though this didn’t hold back doomy “Hollywood is up against it” prognostications. Nor will the fact that a gangbusters 2015 is a foregone conclusion, thanks to the scheduled returns of Iron Man, Bond, “Ethan Hunt,” Terminator, and Jurassic technology, prevent starry-eyed “Hollywood is back, baby!” pieces later this year.

2. Content-farmers and advanced-degree eggheads alike can’t resist diving headlong in a big ol’ pile of signifiers like this, though I will not dwell on the irony of people who’ve accrued insurmountable lifelong debt learning the vernacular of theory turning around to use that knowledge to “unpack” the prepared-by-committee work of obscenely wealthy pop icons.

3. White was well ahead of the curve on the “mainstream is the new Underground” tip. I often recall a 2007 interview with Steven Boone in which White lambastes the idea of a “Trojan horse” outsider artist bum-rushing the show: “Let that go. You don't need that. Please understand. One of the greatest American movies of the past ten years is Beloved. Ain't no underhanded, sneaky thievery thing about that. It's a mainstream movie made by people with money who were brave enough to stand up for what they believe in and turn that into art. The same stupid critics that didn't like The Landlord when it came out dismissed Beloved when it came out. But you have a culture of criticism that simply doesn't want Black people to have any kind of power, any kind of spiritual understanding or artistic understanding of themselves. That's the example that I think is helpful for you to follow. No need to be a sneak thief. Stand up and say what you believe. Do it. Use the mainstream apparatus to create a work of art that's useful to everybody.”

4. Furious 7’s fans have tended to highlight the film’s defiance of physics: Brody writes that director “Wan renders the weightiest items weightless,” while The Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek notes “there are probably more instances of airborne cars than in any other single movie in the series… There's something marvelously freeing about watching objects that were meant to hug the road soar through the heavens.” More than a shift in the ethnic identity of American multiplex audiences, I suspect that Furious 7, which is only the latest instance of the gradual elimination of mass and weight from the action movie, signifies another demographic shift: the transformation of the action movie from the province of the blue-collar audience to a white-collar, service industry one, a change from a physical to a virtual economy which has been accompanied by a change in our perception of the world around us. (A while back a former professor observed to me one difference he’d found in recent undergraduates: “No one knows what a transmission does anymore.”)

I’ve written more times than I’d care to recount about the disappearance of weight—physical and moral—from the action movie, but the recent underperformance of those multiplex films (Fury, Run All Night)  in which I’ve found these qualities is enough to convince me that I’m fighting a hopeless, rearguard action, and that those of us for whom Mr. Majestyk is the apotheosis of the genre’s ideal will have to find our kicks elsewhere.

In Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger (variously translated as The Outsider and The Stranger), the Algerian killed by the anti-hero Meursault has no name: he’s simply l’Arabe. That omission recently prompted Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud to write a book that has—as you can imagine in the year of the Charlie Hebdo massacre—been much discussed of late, The Meursault Investigation, in which the anonymous character’s death is discussed by his brother, and in which he at last is given a name, Moussa. The absence of a name might be read not as a cavalier oversight on Camus’s part, but as an indication of the callousness of Meursault, and of French colonial society, towards North Africans. But in Camus’s short story “The Guest,” published in the 1957 collection Exile and the Kingdom, an Algerian character is again referred to simply as l’Arabe. This is all the more surprising, since the story involves the emergence of a solidarity between this man and the Algerian-born European who is assigned to act as his temporary custodian.

In David Oelhoffen’s new film Far From Men, the Arab finally gets a name, Mohammed, and a face: he’s played by the craggy-featured Reda Kateb, who has been a prominent new presence in French cinema since his supporting role in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. He played the male lead in Claire Simon’s intriguing essay in Paris psychogeography Gare du Nord (13) and was even one of the few semi-saving graces of Ryan Gosling’s preposterous Lost River.

Camus’s story is about a white man born in Algeria, Daru (Viggo Mortensen), who after World War II is assigned to work as a teacher in a remote village in the Atlas Mountains. One day, the Arab is delivered to his door, hands bound; the local law officer instructs Daru to escort the man to a nearby town to face trial for murdering his cousin. Daru refuses, but is told he has no choice; the background to the story, which Oelhoffen specifies is set in 1954, is the outbreak of unrest in Algeria, which led to full-scale war and beyond that, to the country’s hard-won independence. The Arab spends a night in Daru’s schoolhouse, ostensibly as prisoner but really as guest; simply sharing a sleeping space, Camus’s story specifies, creates “a sort of brotherhood.” Daru declines to deliver his guest to justice, but gives him the choice between walking towards his trial and taking the other direction, to liberty; Mohammed’s choice in the film is not the same as that of Camus’s Arab, and is less resonant. But the upshot for Daru in the short story is a bitter payoff which gives “The Guest” its full philosophical dimension as an existentialist parable of choice and consequence.

On paper, the story is concise, big on description of the austere landscape of the Atlas in winter, and concentrates on the two men’s night in the school and their parting the next day. Oelhoffen spins Camus’s anecdote into a full-blown adventure yarn, turning the short walk from school to town into a proper odyssey over brutal terrain, as Daru and Mohammed leave the road to evade pursuers. Oelhoffen, in fact, has made something that it’s impossible not to describe as a North African Western, and there are plenty of visual clues to this being just what he has in mind: the clincher for me was a shot of the exterior of the schoolhouse, a wooden pillar on its porch suddenly looking very Tex-Mex indeed.

Shot by Guillaume Deffontaines—who brought out the parched austerity of Provence in Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915—Far From Men is a compellingly austere figures-in-a-landscape film, and the second we’ve seen Mortensen in this year. He must like walking, and must especially enjoy the challenge of bleak rocky terrain, since this film’s Atlas is a lot like the lunar-looking Patagonia he rambled over in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja. Far From Men presents a journey to be undertaken in dogged silence, on foot over sharp crests and hostile stretches of plateau. At one point, Daru and Mohammed take a tumble down a slope of scree, and neither makes a sound of protest. Oelhoffen’s intensely male film, like the considerably weirder Jauja, lies at the conjunction of existential odyssey and extreme hiking.

The film is most impressive when it emulates the taciturnity of the characters in Camus’s story, for which these actors are supremely suited. Kateb’s hyper-contained performance, coupled with his imposing Easter Island features, make us suspect that Mohammed is a man who will eventually reveal a startling hidden truth—as indeed he does, when his backstory emerges. There’s a wonderful shot of him staring straight into camera—or toward his fate—and he seems to have turned his face into a blind mask, he’s so enigmatic. And Mortensen again proves to be one of today’s few actors who can evoke quiet self-sufficiency and absolute resolution, à la Gary Cooper. The odd fragility of his features—he truly looks here like a man who has been reduced by solitude and ascetic living to the barest necessary husk of self—convinces us totally that Daru is a modern anchorite as well as an ex-soldier who has known terrible times.

Oelhoffen’s film is good on the dogged, silent trekking through arid heat or pouring rain, the nights spent camping out in abandoned villages. There’s a nice understated sign of cultural difference—and affinity—as the two men sit down to dinner in the school, Mohammed washing his hands, Daru crossing himself. But Oelhoffen is also good on taut, tough-guy confrontations—of which there are several, both with Arabs and French, equally hostile to the two men—and action sequences. The film suddenly bursts into agitated life after a night camping with an Algerian detachment led by an old army buddy of Daru’s, Slimane (Djemel Barek), who fought with him in Italy. In the morning, the men all emerge into blazing daylight and into the path of a French army ambush, as editing and handheld camerawork erupt in a flurry of galvanized nerviness.

But to expand Camus’s slender story to 101 minutes, Oelhoffen decides to say a lot more than the basic dramatic situation necessarily demands. A film among laconic men in the tightest of situations becomes oddly over-demonstrative. There’s a good case to be made for the dramatic effectiveness of Mohammed’s expanded backstory here—Oelhoffen has him explain that he killed his cousin to protect his family, but that he now intends to face the death sentence so that his family, which can’t afford the traditional diya (blood money) won’t be subject to the laws of vengeance. It’s a neat, unanswerable riposte to Daru’s accusation that the man lacks courage and honor.

However, Oelhoffen’s script is less effective when it articulates Daru’s situation: Slimane points out that, old comrades as they are, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill Daru if they were on opposite sides in the new war, which they would be if Daru refused to support the Algerian cause. Elsewhere, Daru talks about his own background: he was born in Algeria, the son of Spanish immigrant workers (known as caracoles, or snails, because they carry their possessions on their back). It’s an effective piece of realist background, but it leads to Oelhoffen overdoing it when Daru says: “For the French we were Arabs. Now for the Arabs, we’re French”—just too self-consciously a good line to work. The worst misjudgment of this kind comes when Daru says—not once but twice—that a French army officer has done wrong in having his men fire on opponents who have laid down their weapons. It’s a war crime, he points out. To which the officer replies that he was only following orders and that his job is to clear the plateau of terrorists. I think we’d have understood just as well the implications of his deed in the present-day, as well as in the context of World War II, if Oelhoffen hadn’t spelled them out; Daru’s terse refusal to return the man’s salute would have been communicated more than all the talk.

Oelhoffen finally puts his neo-Western cards on the table when the two men show up at the traditional saloon-cum-whorehouse, or rather cantina—since it’s run by a Spanish lady of a certain age (the revered Angela Molina). This episode allows for a complicit though muted smile between the two men, putting the decidedly heterosexual seal on their cross-cultural bromance.

Oelhoffen’s second feature (I haven’t seen 2007’s In Your Wake) shows him to be a director of more confidence than subtlety, the latter best supplied by the muted steeliness of his two leads. But the film’s visual stamp sticks in your consciousness: the shadow of slats in an empty house resembling a cave, Kateb’s dead stare, the pink-streaked sky over imposing ’Scope sweeps of craggy desolation. The images are accompanied with appropriate terseness by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s super-spare score, at its best when it veers away from ambient eeriness towards the abrasive scrape of violin or an ominous tremor of reedy organ. Oelhoffen may overstate both his case and the story’s set-jawed maleness, but as neo-Westerns go, Far From Men is an inventive and haunting appropriation of the genre. (And you can say what you like: any film in which the sound of a rifle shot is followed by a horse’s plaintive neigh is a Western). Meanwhile, the question remains: after speaking Spanish and Danish in Jauja, and French, Arabic, and Spanish here, what languages will the impressively polyglot Mortensen tackle next—and need he ever bother with English, or Elvish, again?

“For me, films are born in the same way that poetry is born for poets; I don’t want to pose as a poet, but I would like to make an analogy. Some words, some images, some concepts come into the mind, and they all mix together and become poetry. I believe that the same thing happens with the cinema.”

—Michelangelo Antonioni, My Experience

Like his great Italian predecessor, French director Bertrand Bonello is a poet at heart. Constantly exploring the links between cinema and music, between cinema and painting, Bonello’s movies are delicately composed canvases of sensorial and bodily experiences, where images, like musical notes, resonate with one another.

Perhaps the formal liberty of Bonello’s mise en scène is echoed by his characters’ continual search for freedom or grace—they are struggling bodies that desire to break away from the confines of consuming relationships, corrupted mentalities, and capitalist institutions. “There is nothing more beautiful than the end of things, things which die to disappear forever,” Bonello says in his short film Où en êtes vous Bertrand Bonello?. He captures this disappearance in all his films—the dissolution of a couple in Something Organic (99), the fading ideals of an aging pornographer in The Pornographer (01), the end of an era embodied in a 19th-century Parisian brothel in the symphonic chamber drama House of Pleasures (11), or the disintegration of an artist, a genius of pure talent, swallowed up by his own ambitions and the society that deifies him, in his latest masterwork, the hypnotic and surreal Saint Laurent.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Bonello on the eve of a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the director in person that will be followed by the opening of Saint Laurent on May 8.

Où en êtes vous Bertrand Bonello?

In your short film Où en êtes vous Bertrand Bonello?, you recount the course of your cinematic journey to your daughter, and at one point there’s a line that moved me a lot: “Cinema harms men.” And in connection with that, I wanted to ask how you experienced the shooting of Antoine Barraud’s Portrait of the Artist—a film that deals a lot with the distress and solitude of the artist and that, to a certain extent, is also a portrait of you.

Portrait of the Artist is a particular kind of film because it was made over three years. Antoine wrote me a letter one day saying he was really in love with my films, and that he did portraits of artists: he had done films on Koji Wakamatsu and Kenneth Anger. And he said he wanted to make a documentary about me. I asked how long it would take, and he said a few days. Then we saw each other a couple of times, and he said that it would be interesting if while we’re doing the portrait, there is a sort of red mark that grows on my back. And from then on, the film became a fiction. It was a rather strange experience for me, because I didn’t know exactly where it was leading or when it would end. Every three months, Antoine would say: “We’re going to shoot for two more days.” But I think the fact that it was made over a long period of time gives it a very free feeling.

But did it also provide you with a space for personal expression?

I tried not to reflect on the film, because I think that’s the director’s job. I tried to be the actor that I like working with as a director. Someone who doesn’t ask questions, who lets go, and who tries to do the best he can at any given time. Someone who doesn’t have an overall vision of the film, because I think that’s the director’s work. So I tried to be as sincere as I could in every scene, I came in knowing my lines and I tried to do things the way I felt them, without having big ideas on the creation of the film. I tried to abandon myself as much as possible. Portrait of the Artist really belongs to Antoine, and that short film, the letter to my daughter, is really me at every word.

Your narratives are often elliptical, responding to poetic rather than causal or logical demands. How did you approach the question of time in Saint Laurent, in which you sculpt it a bit like Tarkovsky, blending past, present, future, reality, dream, and delirium?

It happened progressively. Early on, we structured the film into three parts, with a second time period for the third part. Then when we started getting into the details of the scenes, I realized that I wanted to enter Saint Laurent’s mind more and more as the movie progresses. And entering someone’s mind also means mixing everything up a little. I had this image, for instance, that the last hour would feel like entering a room with mirrors everywhere—each mirror reflects an image of Yves but it’s never the same. And that’s when we try to get into his brain a little with mental images like the snake or the Proust painting. But afterward it’s the question of how everything manages to resonate with one another, and that’s really not theoretical at all.

Saint Laurent

It’s something organic, to borrow the title of your first feature.

Yes, exactly, it’s about sensations. If for example we show Helmut Berger [as the older Saint Laurent] saying something, and then we go to Gaspard [Ulliel], suddenly that sentence echoes with him. So it’s more like painting.

In fact, you use the camera like a brush. You often favor long tracking shots that reveal the scenes as they are being constructed, creating an almost documentary-like immediacy. This idea of construction is at the heart of a scene like the meeting of Jacques de Bascher and Saint Laurent, in which the camera weaves the gaze like a thread. How did you conceive and execute that scene?

There are two things. It’s true that one of my obsessions was to do the club scenes successfully. First because I think they are essential to the film, and also because I am often disappointed when I watch club scenes in movies. I find that the sound is not done well—it looks like a music video or suddenly the music is lowered so we can hear people speak, and the extras keep dancing in the background but there is no music. So I really wanted to create an atmosphere or an ambience in those scenes. The second thing is that this was a club that Yves went to every night, and I thought that instead of doing four small scenes in there, we would do it in one step, so we would do a long scene that would last six or seven minutes. I thought that it was better to spend time with them in there, try to feel the world, the sweat. I have to say that I had brilliant extras. They gave everything they had and that helped a lot.

But then I thought to myself, how can I film a meeting without a word? And the idea came to me on the day of the shoot. I had certain shots in mind coming in, and one of them was just a tracking shot for something else. The club was like a square: there was Gaspard on one side and Louis on the other, and the crowd in-between. We had installed dolly tracks, and suddenly I thought to myself, what if we do a sequence shot rather than a montage, which would make the scene feel, not artificial, but a bit fabricated, and the sequence shot allows to isolate Gaspard, then suddenly we feel the ambiance, and we arrive on Louis isolated. So we can isolate the two by showing that they are separated by the crowd, and the sequence shot allows to really feel the scope of things, the duration and the distance, and I did it three times. It takes a bit of time, but I need that time to show how things develop in that scene. And when you have done that, you just need a shot-reverse-shot to make the scene work. But of course this doesn’t mean you arrive on set empty-handed. You have thought everything through in advance, but you can change your mind, because suddenly you see that something else might work.

Saint Laurent

And how do the actors experience a scene like that?

It’s extremely difficult because there are extras everywhere, and when the camera gets to a certain spot, I shout “Extras out!” and there is an assistant who gets behind them and pulls their sweater. It’s very technical because the shot is a very complex one to achieve, even if it doesn’t look like it. I rarely do this, but in that kind of a scene, the actors really have to be at the service of the mise en scène.

I read a phrase by Emmanuel Levinas that made me think of that scene: “To watch a look is to watch something that doesn’t surrender itself, doesn’t give itself over, but stares at you: it is to watch a face.” And I think the movie also ends a bit on this idea, with that shot of Saint Laurent staring at us. It’s as if the spell is broken, and we are brought back to reality, like at the end of House of Pleasures.

Oh, if I had departed from that Levinas phrase to construct that scene, it would have been petrifying! [Laughs] Actually, for Saint Laurent, I thought that the ending line “Move your arm to show that you are alive” was sublime. I thought that it was a line that was at once morbid and alive, that opened the movie rather than closed it. And there’s also something that Yves had, and Gaspard has it too, something very particular—that kind of immense smile that “crosses out” the face. The ending of the movie can be quite deadly in a sense. For me, ending on that smile combined with that line, it’s like taking simple elements and putting them together, and suddenly creating something that’s not simple anymore. House of Pleasures is the same. You have the jump to contemporary times, and suddenly we’re in another period but the actress is the same, we switch from 35mm to MiniDV, but there is still prostitution going on.

How do you manage the rhythm of that final shot in Saint Laurent? We see the smile only for a few seconds and then suddenly the music comes in and breaks it.

For me a shot is like a note, and I always ask myself when I need to hit the next note. And the thing is always to make it surprising, without it becoming ostentatious—to hit the note either too early or too late, so as not to fall into something metronomic.

House of Pleasures

One thing that strikes me in your early films—and that is absent in House of Pleasures and Saint Laurent, except in diegetic situations like the reading of letters or books—is the use of voiceover as a narrative tool, but especially as a way of penetrating the psychology of the characters. In a film like Tiresia (03), it has quite an unsettling effect because it feels like we’re inhabiting the the thoughts of that obsessive esthete played by Laurent Lucas.

Voiceover has a bad reputation in cinema because people tend to think of it as a literary device. But for me it is in fact a very cinematic device, because it adds something to the image but also frees it from what is being said so that it can serve another purpose. So it creates a discrepancy or adds something complementary. I like that the image says something other than what is being spoken—it’s very enriching. Of course, I also use it as a kind of musical partition, which becomes something very intimate and personal for the characters.

In House of Pleasures, you seem to observe a world without intervening—abstractly speaking, of course, because you are in fact the creator of that world—but you simply show the life of these women, without romanticizing it, without a concern for plot, almost in the manner of a documentarian. What made you want to operate this way?

There was a lot of factual research involved in that project: private diaries, journalistic accounts, etc. So I had a lot to work with. And from brothels, we only knew what happened between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Many painters have depicted that setting, as well as several novellas, but mostly from the point of view of men, and therefore from a nocturnal point of view. I wanted to show what these women did between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. And inevitably, that becomes something like, I wouldn’t say documentary, but more like a chronicle. Because in fact what do they do? They wash, they eat, etc. Maybe these aren’t fascinating things script-wise, but I thought they were very beautiful to show.

So the script isn’t at the center of the film—it’s more about this idea of witnessing these women’s lives without them being watched by men. Because I quickly came to think of these women as actresses—they go onstage and then they return backstage. They are different at night and during the day, and the film was supposed to show the two. But in fact it’s the same for Saint Laurent. There’s Saint Laurent during the day and Saint Laurent at night. What’s not documentary-like about House of Pleasures is that there isn’t a single line that’s improvised—everything is very scripted. And I used the word “chronicle” because I think there is a sort of platitude in the movie that makes us live with these women.

Did you look at any paintings for House of Pleasures?

I was looking at paintings that were contemporary to the period of the film, but not so much actually. I was more interested in anything related to the representation of a group of girls, whether in 19th-century paintings, or even pictures in fashion magazines, just to get a sense of how to put all those girls together in the frame. But I examined 19th-century paintings also to understand how lighting worked back then. It’s quite a particular period because it’s during the arrival of electricity. So we had decided, arbitrarily,  that we would only have electricity on the ground floor, and that the higher we went up, the less light there was, and in the end, there were only candles. These are sort of carnal or sensual ideas that come from looking at those pictures.

The Pornographer

You’ve often talked about your desire to make the script “disappear,” to allow the film to be transmitted through the actors. How did you experience this idea on the shoot of The Pornographer, for instance, when you’re working with someone like Jean-Pierre Léaud?

When I watch a film, if I feel the script, if I feel the pages being turned, if I feel the plot or whatever, for me it’s not a film anymore. So it’s in that sense that I mean making the script disappear. But in order to achieve that, paradoxically you have to work on the script a lot. You have to see it as a path to the mise en scène. That’s why the script for me is something that’s somewhat badly written—it’s not meant to be read by itself, it’s meant to disappear, it’s a working document. And making the script disappear means not allowing it to show up in the image.

In terms of working with Jean-Pierre, he has such a particular connection with what’s real, what’s not real, with words. When he learns his lines and acts, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about anymore. It’s only a music in his head. That’s what I think makes his performances so distinctive. It’s not at all about psychology with him, about what the character does at a certain moment. He invents his own music. Afterward it’s up to us to know how to navigate his performance and integrate it in the movie. But he has already departed.

Your next film is called Paris est une fête. I know the title comes from Hemingway’s novel, A Moveable Feast, but maybe it’s also rooted in this line from The Pornographer: “We live in a time without feast, and we have contributed to it.” Is there a link between these two movies?

Yes, there is. It’s not a link that I looked for, but Paris est une fête tells the story of a group of young people who plant bombs in symbolic places in Paris. The Pornographer was about young people who already had revolutionary ideas, but they were more of a bourgeois youth and the kind of revolution they envisioned was more intellectual. In Paris est une fête, it’s much wilder because they actually take action. But it’s not only a banlieue youth. I don’t want the movie to stigmatize a religion or a geography in any way. The way the group comes together is told in the film, but there are people who come from the banlieue, others from the 7th arrondissement, some from Sciences Po [a preeminent research university]. I had written this movie after House of Pleasures, but the proposal for Saint Laurent came and I set it aside. But I feel like now is really the time to do it.

And to conclude, perhaps we can return to that phrase that I seem to have misinterpreted: “Cinema harms men.”

The answer would almost be in the character of Yves Saint Laurent. At a certain point we completely consume ourselves in doing things—it costs us a lot. At least it costs me a lot. That short film [Où en êtes vous Bertrand Bonello?] also speaks about the movies that I couldn’t make. And that’s a flame inside of me. When I say “cinema harms men” there is also this idea that it drives you mad. Because there is something megalomaniac in cinema—this mixture of art and industry—and it also harms the relationships that we have with other people.

Translated by Yonca Talu.