Monthly Archives: March 2005

Frederic Back

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In precise and elegant scribbles, a robust party comes to life filled with folk dancing and social rituals; peasant couples in colorful dress twirl and part, women in rocking chairs sway in time to joyous fiddles, children watch from the top of a stairway. A man takes a drink and sprouts antlers, shadows flicker across the candlelit room. And the image itself can hardly contain the energy as the “camera” constantly shifts to capture as much of the action as possible, finally tilting up to the chandeliers while continuing to rotate in its own private exhilaration.

An avant-garde film? No, just a few moments from the intensely creative animation of Quebecois artist Frederic Back, who was honored last night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The event hosted a round table discussion with industry professionals (including the director of Monsters, Inc. and Disney’s top animator, Glen Keane), screened four of Back’s most famous works–All Nothing (1980), Crac! (1981), The Mighty River (1993), and The Man Who Planted Trees (1987)–and interviewed the octogenarian himself.

Back has been described as an impressionist who draws with colored pencils on frosted acetate, then uses a variety of dissolves to animate his pictures into highly textured and suggestive movement. His films are particularly notable for their transitions between scenes; objects or backgrounds morph into new ones and the perspective fully incorporates 360-degree space, creating a deeply immersive and vibrant aesthetic. Back has no qualms using white space and relays only the details he needs from shot to shot. The information he presents follows emotional rather than logical rules.

Back studied art at the Rennes School of Fine Arts but emigrated to MontrÈal in 1948. After being profoundly inspired by the “Rite of Spring” sequence of Fantasia, he decided to embark on a career of animation. During the ’50s, he worked for the French CBC doing graphics and special effects for television and in ’68 he joined the new CBC Radio Canada (which released Back’s films on DVD in 2002). Directing his own films for the first time, his subjects were ecological in theme and often incorporated Native American legends.

At the honorary event, Keane used an overhead projector and showed the audience some of Back’s original drawings, which were only a few inches wide–a much smaller scale than most animators’ work. “Back’s drawings are like miniature Sistine Chapels,” Keane said, and surprised the audience by focusing on a detailed rendering of whales swimming together and placing his thumb, gargantuan by comparison, next to it. (“He is doing what I want to do,” Keane said of Back in 1997. “He is saying something personal, because he believes it and his drawing is a passion for him.”)

The Man Who Planted Trees is widely considered to be Back’s masterpiece. Five years in the making (he and an “inbetweener” assistant produced 20,000 drawings), the 30-minute film tells a quiet fable about a mysterious old shepherd who lives by himself in the mountains and plants trees simply for the joy of it, whose efforts eventually outlive two world wars and establish a national park. It is highly poetic in its shadings and literary narration (the English version was recorded by Christopher Plummer) and the color design is stunning as it slowly evolves from monochromatic, rocky landscapes to a fully blossoming forest.

Back is renowned for his modesty, and only appeared on stage at the end of the program. The small, elderly man seated across the aisle from me, looking every bit like the man who planted trees with his wintery white mustache and wispy hair, suddenly stood up and walked to the front of the theatre. But as critic Charles Solomon praised Back’s work, the animator continually deflected compliments by highlighting his collaborators, such as composer Normand Roger and producer Hubert Tison.

Mostly, however, Back obviously relished the opportunity to voice an impassioned plea for the industry to use its technology and distribution resources to make better quality films. And the resulting applause didn’t deter him–he really meant it. As the clapping built in intensity, Back had to raise his voice to be heard. “You can do more,” he said. “You can do better.”

The Best of Youth

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Classical narrative has dominated Hollywood commercial filmmaking for so long that it’s easy to grow a bit jaded toward it, particularly when best-selling screenwriting gurus promote plot structures by page numbers. (“Plot point one must occur within three pages of the 30-minute mark…”) But films that really know how to spin a good yarn, create memorable characters with complex shadings, utilize talented actors, and render novelistic stories are rare enough that they stand out like hand carved sculptures in a Wal-Mart store.

Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth attains its degree of accomplishment partially by allowing itself the luxury of time–six hours of it. Generating rave reviews around the globe, the film laid around the vaults of Miramax for a couple of years until it finally received its US distribution this month, earlier at the Film Forum in New York City and this week at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. Both theatres opted to show the film in two parts with separate admissions, and after glowing reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the LA Weekly, the single screen Royal was swamped with several hundred ticket buyers last weekend forming a rare line that extended several blocks down Santa Monica Boulevard. So much for exhibition hand-wringing.

Written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli (the craftsmen behind Amelio’s Stolen Children and The Keys to the House), the film details the lives of two Italian brothers from their college years in the ’60s through their early careers up into the present day, intertwining their lives with key moments from nearly a half century of Italian history. Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni) Carati are initially drawn to the field of psychology, but only Nicola makes a career of it; Matteo finds his inner desire for structure and rules directs him to the military. In a sense both brothers represent two paths to justice–empathy and enforcement–although the film is far too nuanced to make either character into a symbol.

The brothers begin in an era of intellectual curiosity and grow through a time of social upheaval that comes close to pitting the two of them on either side of a cultural divide–Nicola attempting to reform institutions and Matteo seeking to defend them. The film carefully traces their lives as they travel through Italy (and abroad), building and moving beyond their assorted relationships as they process largely undefined emotional baggage inherited from their formative years.

In fact, the view of Italian history presented in The Best of Youth is less political than emotional, with many key eras and events (educational reform, social protests, corporate malfeseance) relayed as supporting contexts for character development more than social commentary. The viewer never gets a full understanding of the political discourse that happened during these years, but attains a strong sense of how that discourse affected certain lives. While one could argue that this is an inherently conservative bias in its engagement of history (similarly the drama stresses a riot guard’s injuries rather than a protester’s and paints the only political reactionary in the film as a terrorist), the film is far from socially apathetic and displays a genuine degree of human understanding.

To a large extent, the screenplay relies heavily on certain rites of passage (taking exams, graduating, enjoying young love, getting married, establishing a career and family) to anchor its plot. But it also avoids the pratfalls of easy melodrama by maintaining a psychological distance from its characters–while their lives are carefully and intimately presented, there are never any obvious explanations for their choices or behaviors. At one point, Nicola (a psychiatrist) muses that of all people, he himself ought to understand Matteo’s ambiguous emotional pains, but he regrets that he doesn’t; it’s a statement that could be equally applied to the viewer, and the film creates a significant amount of dramatic momentum with its interplay of emotional action and psychological mystery.

In many ways, The Best of Youth is vehicle for the beauty of the Italian landscape and culture as they reveal and comment upon the search for personal identity–making an overt reference to Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli in one scene entirely appropriate in more ways than one. With its superlative ensemble cast and deft dramaturgy, the film offers a compelling example of mainstream narrative filmmaking at its finest.

The River

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Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the famous impressionist painter, is commonly referred to as a major filmmaker in history, but his films, strangely enough, rarely figure prominently in retrospectives or the era of Internet film discussions. Part of that may be attributed to the fact that his directorial style is gentle and restrained. He is no volatile Eisenstein or iconoclastic Godard or perplexing Bresson. In one of the better entries of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes: Renoir “liked simple incidents and their fusion with popular theatre and never chose to go beyond elementary narrative forms. . . . What produced the glorious tension of his films was the naturalism of the cinematography, so that during the 1930s there is not an adventure in natural light, camera movement, depth of focus, real location, or the blending of interior and exterior that Renoir did not make.”

Renoir made a profound impression on many critics and filmmakers of his day and according to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, “on the very day the Germans had marched into Paris, Renoir had marched out, taking with him his wife, and just such of his worldly belongings as could be got into one small suitcase.” Renoir then worked in Hollywood with mixed artistic results but returned to France in the ’50s.

Just before he returned, however, he made a transitional film, one of the first movies ever shot on Technicolor in India, The River (1951), recently released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. It was based on Rumer Godden’s novel of the same name (she had earlier written the source novel for Powell and Pressburger’s classic film, Black Narcissus) and it was filmed in Bengal “where the story really happened,” the narrator (a woman remembering her adolescence) informs us. The setting, “one of the many holy rivers,” becomes primary in the film and serves as a constant reminder of the flow of life; birth, death, and the passage of time. Renoir’s film was in some ways devised as a cinematic introduction to India for Westerners and stresses the country’s mid-century cultural and spiritual life.

While the film’s point of view is decidedly colonial and the central characters are a British family of jute merchants, it conveys an undeniable sensitivity to the sights and sounds of India through its constant focus on celebrations and customs. It’s a story of “first love.” Three girls, an adolescent (Harriet) and her two teenaged friends (Valerie and Melanie, who is half-British and half-Indian), find themselves romantically attracted to a visiting American (Captain John) who was wounded in the war. The story considers the leisurely ebbs and flows of the various relationships as the girls process their feelings and enter a new emotional world while Captain John quietly attempts to regain his own sense of peace.

The film is colorful and lovely, with many exterior scenes showcasing, not the typical elephants and exotica, but tranquil views of the placid river and the life surrounding it. The story never becomes overly complicated or melodramatic–although several crises do occur–and it is partly due to this subdued approach that the French critic AndrÈ Bazin championed the film as “Renoir’s Rules of the Game of his second period.” Like the searching, exploratory characters of the film, Bazin suggested Renoir’s film illustrates the filmmaker’s personal evolution:

“Why, then, instead of blaming the unevenness of Renoir’s American period on the fluctuations of economic and social conditions, do we not see it as part of a profound moral evolution of the artist? Why not suppose that for Renoir it was less a question of adapting himself to Hollywood than of developing himself, of at once mastering a new way of thinking and feeling and creating an adequate means of expressing it. . . . Renoir recently wrote: ‘I spent ten years outside of France. The first time I came back to Paris, I sat down with some old friends and we took up our conversation not where it had stopped when I left, but where it would have been if we had continued to see each other all those years.’ I suspect that this statement is more of a wish than an objective fact. But whatever it is, consider the idea of evolution which it implies.”

Bazin then writes at length on the film’s atmosphere (“its majestic dimensions, its sense of grandeur, its universal spirituality”) and its refreshing simplicity: “Some are surprised by the slightness of the content of The River. . . . I think they are blinded by their literary frame of reference. They judge the film on the basis of the novel it could be turned into.”

True to Renoir’s subtle sense of construction, however, the first scene at a party unites the three girls and Captain John and serves as a dramatic model for the characters’ subsequent interactions. John inadvertently hurts Harriet’s feelings by innocently calling her a “little girl”; he awkwardly shares a drink with Melanie, who seems frozen between friendliness and remove; he dances with Valerie, whose flirtations are expressed as equal parts physical and willful competition.

But the film’s scenario is merely a loose framework for emphasizing its setting through various festivals, bazaars, and imaginative legends. Bengal is beautifully revealed and the film offers a relaxed portrait of a culture with an ancient history, the drama rising and receding like the serene waters of the river itself.

Bringing Up Baby and To Be or Not to Be

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Bringing Up Baby

Viewers new to American comedies of the ’30s are often surprised by the period’s sophistication and wit, two words not usually reserved for Hollywood comedies nowadays. Screwball comedy, in particular, was a genre that offered an opportunity for Depression troubled audiences to enjoy stories promoting a complete reshuffling of the social order, where classes and sexes intermingled with equal agency, random events ensured happy endings, and chaos reigned supreme. The genre was given its start in 1934 when three films were released–It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man–and petered out sometime during World War II and the following era of optimistic conformity.

In the last couple of weeks, a string of DVD releases have brought the Golden Age of Hollywood back into the spotlight, with Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby (1938) in the classic screwball corner, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) representing the romantic comedy (a nice resissue, but cinephiles are still waiting for the earlier Cukor/Grant/Hepburn Holiday), Ernst Lubitsch’s satire, To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Preston Sturges’ screwball film (often considered the last of its kind), The Palm Beach Story (1942). Any one of these movies is well worth checking out, but I’ll focus here on Bringing Up Baby and To Be or Not to Be.


Bringing Up Baby

Often considered the “screwiest” of the screwball comedies, director Hawks later suggested he wished he had included at least one sane character in the film, but its off-balance consistency is somehow both hilarious and enchanting.

Cary Grant plays a straight-laced but flustered paleontologist who’s about to be married to a stuffy colleague, but Katherine Hepburn, a playful heiress who (innocently?) takes mischievousness to a whole new level, arrives out of nowhere and wreaks havoc in Grant’s ordered life. Disrupting his golf game, stealing his car, and generally embarrassing him in public, she manages to completely derail his romantic intentions while entangling him in her own life. Her greatest asset is Baby, a pet leopard she inherits that provides her bountiful opportunities for comic crisis.

Grant had already established his reputation as a comedic leading man, but Hepburn’s looney turn was a surprising tangent to her dramatic screen persona (which oscillated throughout the ’30s until The Philadelphia Story solidified her stardom). She is delightful in Bringing Up Baby, frantic and graceful, manipulative and sweet, and her timing is impeccable. Of course, much of the film’s driving rhythm and speed can be attributed to Hawks, whose career of unassuming but effective camera styles, breakneck pacing, and thematic consistency amazed the French auteur theorists.

In fact, there has been considerable critical commentary on the film for some time; one of the most influential is found in Robin Wood’s 1968 study of Hawks’ career. Wood wrote that the film is “perhaps the funniest of Hawks’ comedies but not the best,” highlighted Grant’s progression from Duty to Nature (Superego to Id), and suggested one of the film’s problems is the dubious thought of Hepburn being “a suitable life-partner” for Grant. However, I would suggest this is a trademark tenet of screwball comedies–that “happy endings” serve as temporary moments of stasis rather than any return to social normalcy. (One remembers Sturges’ parody of the stereotypical Hollywood ending at the beginning of The Palm Beach Story: “They lived happily ever after . . . or did they?”)

The new Warner DVD is a lovely 2-disc package with a reasonably good commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, who, as with his commentaries on Welles DVDs, can’t resist offering odd impersonations of the filmmaker’s voice whenever he quotes him.

The DVD release also contains two feature-length documentaries, one on Cary Grant and the other on Hawks (Richard Schickel’s straightforward overview of the director’s career for his 1973 Men Who Made the Movies PBS series, recut with new narration by Sydney Pollack). Hawks’ laconic and understated persona is enjoyably juxtaposed with memorable moments from his films; seen as a whole, it reinforces the claim that Hawks may not have been a formal innovator, but he probably made more great films in more genres than any other Hollywood director.

To Be or Not to Be

Although the screwball genre faced its demise with a growing sobriety in America’s changing worldview, it nevertheless left its mark in several wartime films that emphasized other kinds of comedy. One of those films was To Be or Not to Be, a tremendously accomplished satire of the Third Reich that oscillates between outrageous farce (enlivened with screwball humor) and genuinely suspenseful drama.

The story concerns a Polish acting troupe that is rehearsing an anti-Nazi play when Germany invades Warsaw in 1939, and as part of the troupe’s resistance, it begins to stage false situations and impersonations to confuse the Nazi occupation. The Gestapo’s propensity to resemble a theatrical performance with its own entrances and exits, as well as personal manipulation, thus provides ready-made material for the troupe–and the film itself. The performances (particularly by the two leads, screwball standby Carole Lombard and Jack Benny), exude an aloof elegance, gracefully navigating the seriousness of the drama by highlighting the story’s theatricality without undermining its gravity. The film exhibits a rare example of ironic detachment adding new layers of interpretation without squandering the emotional connections with obvious winks and nudges.

Partly this is because the film is about actors acting (“to be or not to be”–that is the question dramatically and politically), and partly this is because Ernst Lubitsch directed it, a filmmaker renowned for the way he grafted “European sophistication” onto Hollywood comedies. That some of his work is now criticized for its superficial luster makes this film in particular (as well as 1940′s The Shop Around the Corner) a noteworthy example from his oeuvre: a movie shockingly of its time (so much so that it was criticized for being in bad taste) that fully understands that comedy can be one of the most piercing forms of serious engagement.

Susan Sontag Selects 2, Naruse

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Repast

One of the last things Susan Sontag did before she passed away last December was program a sequel to her last touring series of classic Japanese films. Of the nine titles in the new series now playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I’ll remark on the Mikio Naruse selections here. (And I’ll catch up with The Story of the Last Chrysthanemums at the American Cinematheque’s upcoming Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective in the next couple weeks.)

Repast (1951)

Although he is considered a major filmmaker by any measure (critic Audie Bock includes him with Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu as “the third member of the [Japanese] triumvirate of early cinematic portraitists”), the films of Mikio Naruse are virtually unseen in the US; this film is considered to be the movie that brought him out of a fifteen-year creative slump and, according to Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese Film, inaugurated the shomin-geki (working class genre) revival of films of the 1950s typified by Ozu. Several commentators have suggested Naruse’s obscurity can be attributed both to the poor distribution of his work (only one or two of his films exist on video in this country) and his own self-deprecating, withdrawn personality.

But this personality is also undoubtedly what makes his films so emotionally compelling–stories of people (usually women) trapped and restrained in a society with no place to run, no hope of fulfilling their dreams, harboring the mere consolation of perseverance.

Repast is an adaptation of a novel by Fumiko Hayashi, Naruse’s favorite author, and stars Setsuko Hara as Michiyo, an unhappy housewife living in Osaka who fears that her stagnating marriage will eventually spell her doom. The film follows her as she slowly contemplates leaving her husband, taking an indefinite road trip to Tokyo to weigh her options. And that’s about it, plot-wise, but the movie is a tremendously nuanced portrait of emotional ambivalence, the struggle between free will and fate (the latter almost always triumphing for Naruse), and an admirably generous portrait of human disappointment without any villains to blame.

Setsuko Hara displays her usual capacity to convey an astonishing range of emotions through various degrees of smiles–happiness and warmth, but also awkwardness and sadness. Her subtle acting merges with Naruse’s unadorned, piercing stare, and Michiyo’s existential concerns and search for meaning slowly emerge with compelling clarity.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

This film is Naruse’s portrait of the life of a Ginza bar hostess named Keiko (or ‘Mama,’ wonderfully played by Hideko Takamine), who is approaching middle age and thinking about settling down with her own bar rather than simply entertaining men indefinitely. She faces several obstacles, all of them symbolized by the flight of stairs she dreads ascending to her workplace–her younger brother and his handicapped son are financially in need, her potential financiers are patrons at the bar who merely want her company, and most challengingly, her own integrity measured through a promise she made to her deceased husband. Though she physically ascends to her unhappy vocation, her emotional and economic weights threaten to ensure her diminishing options.

The film is beautifully shot in ‘Scope widescreen, but Naruse’s compositions are far from luxurious; the extended horizontal framing emphasizes the congested interiors and enclosed spaces of the film and Keiko is rarely alone as she constantly attempts to placate the romantic advances of potential lovers while remaining essentially aloof. As in Repast, Naruse represents the protagonist’s interior monologue through a spare voiceover that psychologically intensifies the viewer’s association. When Keiko muses on the women of Tokyo and mentions how in the evening most of them go home but her job is just beginning, Naruse presents some of the film’s few exterior shots of the city streets, with dusk settling, and the moment is both wistful and evocative.

It would probably be an interesting project to compare Naruse’s films to some of the roughly contemporaneous “women’s pictures” directed by Douglas Sirk in America. Their similarities and differences are intriguing: both focus on social pressures and domestic disillusionment yet Sirk’s famed Technicolor melodramas are the visual opposite of Naruse’s focused, black-and-white mood pieces.

Regardless, Naruse is clearly a filmmaker seriously in need of Western discovery.