From the July 1982 issue of Omni; reprinted in Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues (2018). As with all the other commissioned pieces I wrote for the Arts section of that magazine, this originally ran without a title; I’ve also done a light edit on this version. Another version of this article appeared in Cahiers du Cinema, with a different title (if memory serves, this was called “Beware of Imitations”).
While I was living in Europe in the 70s, I managed to watch portions of the shooting of films by Robert Bresson (Four Nights of a Dreamer), Alain Resnais (Stavisky…), and Jacques Rivette (Duelle and Noroit), but my trip to Alaska and British Columbia in December 1981 to watch a little bit of the shooting of John Carpenter’s The Thingwas surely my most elaborate on-location visit, even though what I actually saw was much briefer in this case — hardly any more than an hour or two at most.And I didn’t even get to speak to Carpenter during my visit; absurdly enough, by arrangement with the film’s publicist, the interview in this piece was conducted over the phone several days later, with Carpenter calling me from Hollywood, after I returned to Hoboken, making the cassette recorder I had carried on my trip completely unnecessary and some portions of this piece necessarily deceitful.Read more
This essay was proposed to Another Gaze, an excellent feminist journal based in the U.K., in June 2020, lightly revised with their helpful suggestions over the next several months after I received a go-ahead from them, and still hadn’t appeared by October 8, 2021. I wished them well, but the editor was no longer responding to my emails, which is why I posted this essay here. P.S. My thanks to Scott Moore for pointing out several typos in the original posting of this piece, now corrected.
P.P.S. (12/16/21): I’m reposting this to celebrate the arrival in my mailbox of the hefty new issue of Another Gaze, including my essay, where I find myself among such fellow contributors as my old pal Lizzie Borden and A.S. Hamrah. My apologies to the editors for my journalistic impatience; it was well worth the wait. — J.R.
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Long before the Coronavirus pandemic set in and many of us suddenly had more time to explore new modes of online viewing and even canon-building, I had been trying to develop and expand my limited acquaintance with the films of Kira Muratova (1934-2018), initially sparked by my 1989 encounter with her masterpiece The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) at the Toronto film festival, two years after I began my twenty-year stint as the principal film reviewer for the Chicago Reader. Read more
`Written in late 2020 for a Re:Voir DVD release. — J.R
Seen as a troubled diptych, Troublemakers (filmed in Newark during the fall of 1965, two years before the riots) and In the Country (1966)offer, respectively, public and private glimpses of the political frustrations faced by young white radicals in the United States during this volatile period. Robert Kramer–producer, writer, and director of the second film–receives no credit on the first, but he’s one of the more vocal radicals appearing in it, expressing some of the same disillusionment with mainstream, workaday politics that the second film is also wrestling with. The son of a Park Avenue heart specialist and a textile designer, Robert attended private schools, Swarthmore College, and Stanford, carrying around his privilege like an albatross, as a guilt-ridden handicap to overcome.
The implicit hope that led members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)–including the very young Tom Hayden, Kramer, and filmmakers Norman Fruchter (sound) and Robert Machover (camera and editing)–to join and/or recruit the efforts of black activists in their Newark ghetto and the explicit bitterness of a nameless, fictional white radical couple (William Devane and Catherine Merrill) retreating to and brooding within their privileged rural isolation need to be viewed as reverse sides of the same countercultural coin. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 22, 1999). For my earlier take on this film, written when it was released in London, go here. — J.R.
The Mother and the Whore
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed and written by Jean Eustache
With Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean Douchet, and Jean-Noel Picq.
I have a friend who had a wonderful idea: he wanted to have his right hand amputated. Very seriously. Went to see a surgeon, said, ‘How much does it cost, I’m ready to pay.’ He wanted to have a porcelain hand made to replace it. And in his home, in a room, in the very center of the room, to place his real hand in formaldehyde, with a plaque reading, ‘My hand, 1940-1972’. And people would come to visit, like they’d go to an exhibit.
— Alexandre in The Mother and the Whore
Is it permissible to disapprove of a masterpiece? I find Jean Eustache’s obsessive, 215-minute black-and- white The Mother and the Whore, playing nine times this week at Facets Multimedia Center, every bit as mesmerizing today as I did when I attended the premiere at Cannes in 1973. I must have seen it four or five times since, the last time in the early 80s. Read more
Françoise Romand’s Mix-up is surely one of the greatest films I’ve ever reviewed, and I can happily report that it’s become available in recent years on DVD (which isn’t to say that it isn’t still grossly neglected); you can even find it on Amazon in the U.S. This article appeared in the February 26, 1988 issue of the Chicago Reader, and eventually it led to my becoming friends with Romand. — J.R.
MIX-UP
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Françoise Romand.
ANATOMY OF A RELATIONSHIP
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno
With Moullet and Christine Hébert.
GAP-TOOTHED WOMEN
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by Les Blank.
While the issue of representation is at the cutting edge of most debates about film, it usually gets posed in relation to fiction features; documentaries, ranging from Shoah to the evening news, are commonly exempted. The unspoken assumption that nonfictional form is a discardable, see-through candy wrapper — a means of organizing and containing information, which can safely be ignored once we get to the goodies inside — not only keeps us ideologically innocent but limits the kinds of content we may find permissible in documentaries.
Many valuable documentaries, of course, exist chiefly to let certain voices be heard that might otherwise remain silent: Carole Langer’s Radium City, about a radioactive town in Illinois, is one such example, and Deborah Shaffer’s powerful account of the Sandinista struggle, Fire From the Mountain (which is playing this week at Facets), is another. Read more
A heartbreaking French melodrama (1990), adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon (Les fiancailles de M. Hire) about a shy and reclusive tailor (Michel Blanc) obsessively spying on a beautiful neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire), who discovers and is touched by his voyeuristic interest. The plot also involves the mysterious death of a girl in the neighborhood. Paradoxically, director Patrice Leconte, who collaborated with Patrick Dewolf on the script, filmed this elegant, affecting, and highly claustrophobic chamber piece in ‘Scope; Michael Nyman contributed the haunting score. With Luc Thuillier and Andre Wims. 88 min. (JR)
Somewhere inside this moderately watchable if ultimately incoherent star vehicle is an old-fashioned grade-Z werewolf movie crying to be born. If that were the sort of thing money could buy it would undoubtedly have been factored into the $70-million-plus budget, but it seems beyond the reach of the creative participants, who try for a vague sort of profundity instead. Jack Nicholson plays an honorable failure — a book editor about to discover that he’s being demoted and cuckolded — who comes into his own after being bitten by a wolf, an event that brings out both good and bad aspects of his latent animal nature. Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen (1981), which also dealt with wolves in Manhattan’s Central Park, is a much more thoughtful and meaningful project; this one lurches along in fits and starts, mixing generic stereotypes (e.g., the villainy of James Spader and Christopher Plummer) with loftier (if more confused) ambitions, and winds up honoring neither art nor commerce. Mike Nichols’s direction is so-so; the two writers credited are Jim Harrison (though the film has no connection with his novel of the same title) and Wesley Strick. Michelle Pfeiffer, Kate Nelligan, and Richard Jenkins also star. Read more
One singular virtue of the French cinema compared to our own is the possibility of low-budget, offbeat projects that well-known actors are willing to participate in. Michel Deville’s very theatrical adaptation and direction of a whodunit novel by Franz-Rudolf Falk isn’t especially compelling as story telling, but it allows one to see eight of the best movie actors in France — Fanny Ardant, Daniel Auteuil, Richard Bohringer, Philippe Leotard, Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Claude Pieplu, and Jean Yanne — acquitting themselves honorably; Ardant and Piccoli are particularly delightful. Better yet, it permits the neglected and prolific Deville to forge an interesting stylistic exercise in mise en scene, restricting most of the action to a cavernous bar resembling a warehouse. The dialogue bristles with breezy wordplay that is not easily translated (the title means “the nonentity,” and refers to Piccoli’s ambiguous role as bartender), but Deville’s ingenious use of ‘Scope framing in charting out the space keeps things lively, fluid, and unpredictable (1986). (Facets Multimedia Center’, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, June 10 and 11, 9:00; Sunday, June 12, 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, June 13 through 16, 9:00; 281-4114)
Essential viewing. Anna Magnani plays the head of a commedia dell’arte troupe touring colonial Peru in the early 18th century who dallies with her three lovers (Paul Campbell, Ricardo Rioli, and Duncan Lamont) in this pungent, gorgeous color masterpiece by Jean Renoir, shot in breathtaking images by his brother Claude. In fact, this filmic play-within-a-play, based on a play by Prosper Merimee, is a celebration of theatricality and a meditation on the beauties and mysteries of acting–it’s both a key text and pleasurable filmmaking at its near best. (Widely regarded as the first in a loose 50s trilogy of Renoir films with related preoccupations, followed by Only the French Can and Paris Does Strange Things, it may well be the best of the lot.) Though this is widely known as a French film, its original and better version is in English, which is the version showing in this restoration supervised by Martin Scorsese. With Odoardo Spadaro, Nada Fiorelli, and Jean Debucourt (1953). (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, August 21 through 27)
Ed Harris reportedly spent years preparing for the role of action painter Jackson Pollock and also wound up directing this downbeat biopic (2000). It would be churlish to say that all his efforts were in vain; he gives an interesting performance and manages to duplicate portions of Pollock’s drip technique himself, a rather impressive tour de force. But the film suffers from problems endemic to movies about artists: trying to make taciturn types interesting and rendering messy lives meaningful (or meaningfully meaningless). The script focuses on Pollock’s relationship with fellow painter Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) and curiously enough recalls the tragic showbiz biopics that Hollywood ground out in the 50s. Any insight into Pollock’s work is overshadowed by the usual message of such enterprises — that artists are reckless, childish lunatics who suffer a lot and make others suffer as well. R, 119 min. (JR)
Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the writer and director of Being John Malkovich, have teamed up on another zany comedy, approximately two-thirds as good. Kaufman shares screenplay credit with an imaginary twin brother named Donald, echoing the story — in which a writer named Charlie Kaufman has a twin brother named Donald. (Both are played by Nicolas Cage.) The real-life Kaufman, assigned to adapt a real-life nonfiction book he admired but couldn’t figure out how to crack, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, decided to write about his dilemma, alternating bits of the book with a comic saga about writer’s block; to foreground his own schizophrenic split between suffering artist and amiable Hollywood hack, he invented a twin for the latter role. Meryl Streep, who tends to shine in comedies, plays Orlean, and Chris Cooper does an elaborate character turn as her subject, an eccentric flower poacher in the Florida Everglades. This is like a Ferris wheel — it’s enjoyable but it goes nowhere, which I guess is how Ferris wheel rides are supposed to be. With Tilda Swinton and Maggie Gyllenhaal. 114 min. (JR)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)Directed by D.W. GriffithShown: Walter Long (as Gus) surrounded by Ku Klux Klan members
In his review of Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy in the November 18 issue of The NewYork Review of Books, Colin Grant writes that “The vexed [viewers of The Birth of a Nation] included President Woodrow Wilson who, after a private screening in the White House, is alleged to have said, ‘It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.'”
For most of my life, I’ve been repeatedly encountering the first phrase in Wilson’s alleged statement, usually in supposedly reputable sources, but never until now have I read the second phrase in the sentence, which changes the meaning of the first. The first phrase, as a standalone statement, functions like an advertisement for the film; the second, for all its ambiguity, adds regret and consternation to the sentiment. Assuming that Wilson actually said this, what he meant precisely by “terribly true” may continue to elude us, but it suggests to me something other than an simple endorsement of the film. When Griffith’s film continued to be shown at Klan rallies in my home state of Alabama during my childhood (ironically, one of the rare occasions when a silent film was still being shown there for any reason), I would imagine that the first part of Wilson’s sentence could have been used to promote the event, but the second part, which might have shed certain doubts about the Klan’s triumphant lynching in the film,, would have most likely been left out. Read more
Written for Il Cinema Ritrovato’s catalogue for June 2018. — J.R.
Americans know that Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” means “Make America white again”—a nostalgic longing for the repressive 50s, when Eisenhower spent as much time golfing as Trump does today, and when black men were caddies rather than players if they were visible at all. This is the America that warmly greeted Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life in 1959, and when I saw it in a whites-only Alabama theater, this was with sobbing white matrons responding to the film’s deeply conservative message about knowing your place. Consequently, when I was informed by armchair Marxists in the 70s that the film was a work of Brechtian subterfuge, I recalled that the film was released during the Civil Rights movement, when Sirk’s bitter ironies were far too subtle to affect the status quo. As Sirk noted himself, “Imitation of Life is a picture about the situation of the blacks before the time of the slogan `black is beautiful.’ In Alabama, this isn’t called Brechtian, it’s called scaredy-cat.
Twenty-five year earlier, John Stahl’s original adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s then-current (1933) novel was also conservative, but because the Depression was a far more progressive period than the conformist 1950s, it comes across today as considerably more enlightened. Read more
Written for Il Cinema Ritrovato’s catalogue in June 2018. — J.R.
“My movies rise below vulgarity,” Mel Brooks once allegedly declared. No movie of his better illustrates that proposition than his first and most successful feature (1967), which won him an Oscar for best original screenplay and, over three decades later, was remade first as a Broadway musical (by Brooks himself) and then as a movie (directed by Susan Stroman) based on that production. Yet it was originally deemed unreleasable due to its bad taste by Embassy Pictures, then given an inauspicious premiere in Pittsburgh. It won a second life only after Peter Sellers — who’d originally been cast in the leading role of Max Bialystock (before apparently chickening out) — saw the film privately and bought an ad in Variety arguing for a wider release.
The eponymous heroes, Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) — a bombastic gigolo who gets old ladies to invest in his failed Broadway shows and a hysterical, mousy accountant, respectively — decide to rise below vulgarity themselves in order to make a bundle by producing a costly, sure-fire flop, a show so awful and offensive that it can only fail, so they can thereby pocket the surplus on all the investments, only to discover that Springtime for Hitler winds up as a satirical hit. Read more
Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film (1986, 145 min.) isn’t on the same level as his extraordinary Stalker, but it’s a fitting apocalyptic statement, made when he knew he was dying of cancer. The first and penultimate shotst–en-minute takes that are, in very different ways, remarkable and complex achievements–manage to say more than most films do over their entire length. In between these shots one finds Tarkovsky working in a mode that bears a distinct relationship to Bergman–made all the more apparent by the Swedish setting, the cinematography (by Bergman’s incomparable Sven Nykvist), and the casting of Erland Josephson in the lead–but the hallucinatory camera movements and the mysticism of the plot could belong to no one but Tarkovsky. As Alexander (Josephson), a university lecturer, celebrates his birthday with family and friends, a major nuclear crisis is reported on TV, followed by a power failure. Praying for the world to return to normal, Alexander promises to give up everything he has and winds up sleeping with his maid, reportedly a witch, to seal the bargain. As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s previous work of exile, it’s possible to balk at the filmmaker’s pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity. Read more
