From The Soho News (March 25, 1981). — J.R.
March 10: Permanent Vacation — a punk art film by Jim Jarmusch, with Chris Parker, visible in the Bleecker Street Cinema’s James Agee Room every weekend this month. A semi-promising beginning offers alternately deserted and busy city streets (crisply shot by Tom DiCillo), and a skinny existential drifter reflecting on the “newness” of rooms in his travels that fades away, replaced each time by dread: “The story is how I got from there to here — or maybe I should say here to here.”
The problem is, while trekking dutifully through enough architectural (and cultural) rubble to furnish at least a dozen other art movies, the movie mainly gets from there to nowhere, at a fairly leisurely crawl. Along the way are a few good ideas and jokes, most of them literary and underdeveloped (like affectless Beckett/beat conceits which evoke Wurlitzer’s Nog), one of them actorly (Frankie Faison), some of them musical (John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards). Chances are, if this is the sort of thing you like, you’ve already found your way there.
March 11: Marta Meszaros’ Nine Months, a Hungarian feature made in color five years ago, now on at the Cinema Studio 2. If yesterday’s art film suggested the more content-laden, Woody Allen side of Antonioni, this beautifully shot love story has an extraordinary amount of placeness that helps to compensate for the tinny drone of the theme music. (Why do so many sensitive Eastern European films have scores that remind one of ski lifts?) The camera takes possession of unexceptional industrial landscapes in a way that ensures we remember them like places we know (cf. the courtyard in Tree of the Wooden Clogs.)
The characters also tend to improve with familiarity. Juli (Lili Monori), the strong-willed independent heroine, starts out fairly unattractive — a bit bovine, her face a frozen, freckled sneer (though without the mashed-potato expression of an Isabelle Huppert) — and then, thanks to an inventive performance, steadily grows in character. The fucking and eating in this movie (which turns beds and dishes into memorable places, too, and are sometimes mixed à la Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses) are as attractively tactile as the natural light and the climactic childbirth.
March 12: I finally catch up with Polanski’s Tess, at the Little Carnegie. Another persecuted unwed mother like yesterday’s Juli; more lushly felt landscapes, decked out in this case with Dolby environmental trimmings. Why do the reproduction and amplification of old Hollywood literary-adaptation techniques (with additional pages from Lean and Kubrick) conspire to make an art film of the late 70s? The delayed American release seems characteristic of a period in which most art films identified with prestige and money — Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Elephant Man, Kagemusha, late Woody Allen, and Raging Bull — are Pyramid-like monuments to masculine self-pity, while the European releases are mainly restricted to movies that make the middle class look chic.
March 13: A movement from the sublime to the ridiculous today: showing Antonioni’s remarkable Eclipse (1962) in my Contemporary Cinema course at NYU, then rushing uptown to attend a press show of Bob Rafelson’s silly male-weepie remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice….What a pity that the literary defenders of Antonioni in the early 60s — presumably Woody Allen’s mentors — took to the alienation cliches and literary metaphors of Eclipse like kittens to milk, even while they were criticizing them (“Macdonald’s taste for kitsch is largely negative, but it is genuine,” wrote Harold Rosenberg), and ignored the richer exuberance of the better parts (like the Stock Market scenes, which deftly juggle documentary and choreography in the mise en scène).
Postman, the only genuinely ludicrous art movie I see for this column, is the one that most people are likely to rush off to; I know a media blitz when I see one, and what fools we mortals be. Yet despite some respect for the hard, serious work of Jessica Lange — who seems to bear the same talented relation to Tuesday Weld that Paul Newman once had to Brando — I can’t take more than a minute or two of Rafelson’s rich-boy macho fantasies about how the sweaty lower classes are supposed to behave (already painfully evident in Five Easy Pieces and Stay Hungry) without starting to snicker at all those carefully applied grease stains and creases in Jack Nicholson’s monkey suits. (In the grip of boredom, to paraphrase the ad campaign, two things can happen — the second is laughter.)
Apart from offering an insult to everyone in America who’s ever worked in a filling station, Postman lacks any coherent sense of character or place. What one gets instead is a glitzy post-Kazan melodramatic score and a pushy use of period detail, from Nicholson’s gaudy duds (he dunks, too) to oil signs to magazine covers. Describing the supposedly steamy “kitchen fuck,” which boldly offers flour to rival the butter of Last Tango and the jam of The Night Porter, a critic in the current Film Comment notes that “a very explicit move to her groin, with her hand ordering his, seems to indicate the paramount urgency of her orgasm”; if he’d spelt that “Paramount,” I’d have understood in a flash. Otherwise, Postman hasn’t much point beyond the dumb-brute arrogance of its money, which unfortunately has more clout in this world than taste, intelligence, or talent.
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March 17: One very agreeable way of obliterating all recollection of Postman might be to catch the dynamite double-bill at the Public that’s on through the 29th, and then from the 31st through April 5. Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) and Antonioni’s The Lady Without Camelias (1953) are both neglected movies which satirize popular Italian filmmaking, and each is a flawed yet fascinating “early” work by a master who started late. (Antonioni’s third feature was made when he was 41, Visconti’s when he was 45.) They are probably the closest that either director has come to comedy.
Another thing that makes these films complementary is the somewhat naive “insider’s” stance — the somewhat “insider’s” stance of the Antonioni and the somewhat artificial “outsider’s” stance of the Visconti — like the difference between The Last Tycoon and The Day of the Locust. (Neither, however, has the elegant, hard-bite accuracy of What Makes Sammy Run?) Both are fitfully ravishing concerti — the former for Antonioni’s deep-focus mise en scène and deep-dish use of architecture, the latter for the volcanic eruptions of the great Anna Magnani as a starstruck stage mother, who mutters a kind of populist stream-of-consciousness that hilariously deconstructs the madness of cinema.
The Lady Without Camelias was initially planned, in turn, for Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren, as shopgirl-turned-starlet and producer’s wife. The part went to Lucia Bose, a beautifully vacant cipher-goddess who has subsequently worked for Bunuel, Cocteau, Fellini, and Duras; here she figures grandly and mysteriously as both the pivotal point and the troubled center of a densely created universe. Bellissima is didactically structured by a Cseare Zavattini script about a mother and small daughter which echoes The Bicycle Thief in more ways than one. (Part of the accuracy of What Makes Sammy Run? is the degree to which films imitate other films — and, indeed, Budd Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd scripts borrows mightily from his own Sammy novel.)
March 18: I pay a brief, enjoyable visit to the Animators’ Gallery at 484 Broome St., which is open 11 to 6 Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 6 on Sunday. (It’s in the same building as the Kitchen, but a few doors east, toward Wooster.) It’s been open since January, is reportedly the only gallery in the world specifically designed for the showing of animated films, and there’s currently a show of drawings and films by the gifted Jane Aaron through April 5. (Another show, devoted to the work of Richard Protovins, starts on April 8.)
Aaron’s charming work generally involves filming animated drawings in real environments. Like her all-animated A Brand New Day (1974), this invariably suggests the artist performing graceful dance-duets with nature. In Plain Sight (1977), which I reviewed favorably in these pages nine months ago, as part of a Film Forum animation show, is being shown with Interior Designs (1980), which also juxtaposes the pixillated pleasures of time-lapse photography with the wiggles and struts of another animator’s hand — culminating in a circus-like climax in which studio workroom figures (some of them on display in the gallery) become animated, too. One can watch all three shorts in succession in back of the gallery; in front, along withe the drawings, In Plain Sight and Interior Designs are shown in a video format.
March 19: In order to round off this spring clearance of art movies, I make it all four of the black-and-white Ken Russell TV films about artists being shown today in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Salute to the BBC”. In order of appearance, these are Delius: A Song of Summer (1968), Elgar (1962), Isadora Duncan (1966), and Dante’s Inferno (1967) — the latter about poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On reflection, this order proves ideal, starting with the last (and best) film and then proceeding chronologically.
All four, as films, put much of the rest of TV to shame by proving that you can grab an audience with a lot more than talking heads in close-ups and medium-shots: I’ll never forget how riveted I was to Isadora Duncan on the tube (in Manhattan) roughly a decade ago. Like the others, it’s a film that riotously and triumphantly runs the gamut of size scales, from spectacular landscape vistas to sensual, fleshy nooks — a trait Russell shares with Leni Riefenstahl, whose Olympian footage he is witty enough to quote and integrate into Duncan’s Greek pilgrimage.
One problem with seeing TV films on a big screen is a hyped-up effect to certain moments that wouldn’t be excessive in a small frame. When the narrator of Song of Summer says “My mind was now full of anxieties” while the camera pulls back from a reproduction of Munch’s The Cry beside his bed, it’s like putting a footnote in neon, and some people titter. (It can’t be the sophistication of a MOMA crowd; a few hours later, people are milling out after the death of Isadora while the film’s still in progress, like leaving a football game before it’s over.)
All these movies are about the difficult alliances between art and life — specifically, the hassle artists have to endure and the pills they can be to live with; the same subject as Savage Messiah, Russell’s best theatrical film. The direct participation and collaboration of Delius’s amanuensis Eric Fenby on the script of the legendary Song of Summer clearly places it apart from the others, for it is a film about collaboration in art on the most basic levels. Near the opening, when Fenby (played by Christopher Gable) is musically notating sheep bleats and ocean waves, I’m reminded of the collaborations of Jane Aaron seen yesterday. And when, after five years of torturous work with syphilitic, paralytic composer, Fenby has a nervous breakdown and briefly loses control of his own legs, this information is made all the more powerful by being conveyed (and disposed of) in one throwaway offscreen line.
Elgar, the most conventional of the four, is no less or more a “critical essay” (with its use of newsreel and archive footage) than Dante’s Inferno, which has a naturally lit neorealist shooting style, or Isadora Duncan, which revels in Wellesian deep focus and fast editing. As efficient mass-market cultural packages and eclectic personal investigations, as curious in a way about their subjects as Rossellini’s, these fascinating, finely wrought works of the 60s are among the best things Russell has done, leagues ahead of the dull Valentino, and have yet to receive their proper due.