Film Club
The first Saturday of each month at Coledale Community Hall at 7:30pm. Tickets here
Film Club is curated and hosted by film expert Graham Thorburn, and is open to anybody interested in seeing, thinking, and having fun talking about films.
Each Film Club night starts with some background information – the times and context of the film’s making, the people who made it, and something notable about the content or techniques of the film – perhaps even a bit of gossip. After the film screening, the film is discussed over a cup of tea and a biscuit, or a glass of wine (BYO). You can read some of Graham’s introductions to previously screened films below.
December 2024 - Divertimento
Hello everybody, and welcome to the last First Saturday Film Club screening for 2024.
So, thank you. I’m planning to do this again next year, and I hope I’ll see you there. We’ll start on February 1 with Wes Anderson’s film Grand Budapest Hotel which – if you haven’t seen it already – is a deliciously stylish romp.
And, I would argue, Ralph Fiennes’ finest performance – comedic performances are always underrated, even though they are much, much more difficult to achieve than dramatic performances.
Tonight I’m screening a French film only released this year called Divertimento. I don’t want to say too much about it now, because I don’t want to spoil the experience by encouraging you to analyse it as you go.
I’m just going to say something about the beginning and the end of the film, so once the film is underway, you can just let yourself go with the flow.
Like many films, the ending of tonight’s film faces the beginning, especially in the way it uses a particular piece of music.
It’s quite common for the end of the film to face the beginning of the film – by which I mean that the ending is in some ways a new version of the beginning. Constructing your story like that helps give the narrative a sense of coherence and closure. But there’s another reason too.
That’s because when you put the end of a film up against the beginning, it’s a way of unconsciously benchmarking whether change has happened during the story. We can see that there is a connection between the beginning and the end, but is there are also a difference?
Did anything change over the journey of the story?
That’s important because you can divide almost all stories into one of two shapes, and films are no different.
Either the story is about the possibility of change, or about the impossibility of change. Or the futility of change, which is a subset of the impossibility of change.
Most Hollywood films are about how it is possible to change the world, change your relationships, perhaps even change yourself – though always with some effort, and at some cost.
Even when Hollywood does make films about the impossibility of change, they are almost always structured as comedies, and almost always carry a coda in which change is finally achieved.
Films from other cultures – European, Japanese, Chinese et cetera – are much more likely to say that change is impossible – that human nature and human relationships and human society are largely out of our conscious control, and though we might act as if we are able to change things, in truth we are essentially powerless against the forces of time and history.
This is especially true of what is called the modernist movement in film, which came out of the countries that were most deeply affected by the 2 world wars in Europe, and the associated emergence of existentialism in philosophy and literature.
As a social observation, in my experience when Americans tell anecdotes about themselves, they are mostly about their successes, whereas when Australians tell anecdotes about themselves, they mostly about their failures.
Beliefs about whether change is possible or impossible are deeply embedded in culture.
But I’m going to reassure you right now, that I wouldn’t choose a film for the last film of the year that was about the impossibility of change. Divertimento is absolutely about the ability to change yourself and change your world.
The second thing I want to talk about is a new emotion. Or rather, a newly named emotion.
You’ve no doubt heard the claim that the Inuit have 30 different words for snow (or was it 50?) – supposedly because they live in a world of snow, and each kind of snow has a different effect on their chances of survival in a harsh world.
Sadly, I’ve discovered that this is probably an Arctic myth, but similarly (and in this case truthfully) it’s true that different cultures divide a rainbow differently to our culture. Some cultures only divide the rainbow into 6 colours (for them indigo and violet the same colour) and some cultures have only 5 colours (they also merge what we think of as yellow, green and blue into 2 colours).
And now it appears that psychologists and cultural anthropologists in Western society have decided that there is an emotion that needs to be named and separated from the emotions that we are familiar with – that just as green is a mixture of yellow and blue, although this emotion is a mixture of a number of familiar emotions, it deserves its own name.
And that name is kama muta. 2 words, k-a-m-a m-u-t-a. Catchy huh? The person who gave it this name – Alan Fiske - who calls himself a psychological anthropologist, took it from a Sanskrit phrase meaning “to be moved by love.”
And it happens that Kama Muta is an emotion that many films want to trigger in the audience – and I would argue, in the case of the film we going to see tonight, successfully.
So, what is kama muta?
In short, it’s that warm fuzzy feeling you get in your heart that makes you feel at one with the universe, and at one with each other. It’s an intense and brief feeling of communal love.
You might have got it holding your newborn child for the first time. Or seeing an Australian swimmer with one arm and no legs below their knees win a gold medal at the Paralympics. Just the other day, my wife Sophie definitely got it when I told her that the gorgeous 2-year-old who lives across the street saw me and asked, in a disappointed voice, “But where is Auntie Sophie?”
Some national anthems create a sense of kama muta – even if you’re not French, I suspect a massed choir singing The Marseille triggers kama muta in most people.
Perhaps not the Germans. Or the Algerians, for that matter. Because, sadly, kama muta can also be connected to extreme and unhelpful forms of patriotism.
I, for one, are quite happy that Advance Australia Fair fails miserably on that count. As Samuel Johnston said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
If you want your movie to have something to say, it’s not enough to make a rational logical argument. For it to really stick with the audience you need to connect it to an emotion.
And one of the best emotions you can use to do this is kama muta. If you can reinforce the thesis of your film by connecting it to a moment of kama muta, it can be very powerful. Remember those Telstra ads about calling home?
But of course, like many powerful things, it can be used for better or for worse.
So, what about Divertimento? Does it deliver kama muta for you, and does it do it as a force for good?
It certainly does it for me.
November 2024 - Arrival
Tonight I’m going to screen the 2016 science-fiction movie Arrival, which was directed by Denis Villeneuve, and adapted by Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life.”
Arrival was nominated for 8 Oscars in 2017, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and 2 different areas of sound, and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound Editing.
Extraordinarily (for me at least) Amy Adams wasn’t even nominated, though she did get lots of recognition in other awards. (Emma Stone won for La La Land. What do people know, right?)
When I was choosing the films to screen for the second half of 2024, I realised that two years into our film club I still hadn’t screened a science-fiction movie.
The challenge for me is that you are all sophisticated adults, so if I was going to screen a science-fiction film, it needed to be sophisticated and adult – both cinematically and philosophically. No superheroes in ripped T-shirts and body-hugging spacesuits fighting wars in space with evil aliens, space guns, death stars et cetera et cetera, but something that asks an interesting question in an interesting way.
For me, Arrival meets both those criteria – but in doing so I also think that it’s potentially confusing the first time you see it. Certainly I didn’t get what it was really about until I was thinking back on it afterwards, and as a result I got much more from watching it a second time than the first time.
So tonight I’m going to do something I normally avoid – I’m going to tell you a bit about what the film is about upfront, because I think we can short-circuit the path to understanding the film and that way enhance your enjoyment of it.
But first, a little bit about the makers.
Denis Villeneuve is a French-Canadian director who first got international attention with his 2010 film Incendies, which is a slightly mystical film about adult twins journeying back to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to track down a father they thought was dead and a brother they never knew they had in order to deliver a letter from their dead mother to each of them.
Then in 2015 he made Sicario, with Emily Blunt playing an idealistic FBI agent caught up in the tangled loyalties and politics of stopping drug running across the border between the United States and Mexico.
Since then he has moved much more into big budget sci-fi, including Dune 1 and 2 and Blade Runner 2049.
The screenwriter Eric Heisserer started out writing horror films with Wes Craven and has largely written horror adjacent movies since. But along the way, in an attempt to break out of that world, he wrote an adaptation of a story by a hugely talented but at the time largely unknown outside the science-fiction world writer called Ted Chiang as a spec script – that is an uncommissioned script that you shop around in the attempt to get some attention – and eventually it got picked up and made.
This eventually became the film we are seeing tonight.
So, now to the film itself.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with that old artistic aphorism that ‘…good art matches the form to the content.’
I think that one of the problems with understanding Arrival is that, despite the best efforts of a very talented team, it’s almost impossible for the form of Arrival to match the content of Arrival – because the content of the film is almost opposite to the form of cinema, especially in relation to the idea of time.
The film is asking the question ‘What if time is not actually linear in the way we experience it, but could flow equally in either direction?’ Which would mean that past, present and future could all coexist in our mind.
‘And what if some human beings were able to break out of our linear time straitjacket, and perceive time as being like simultaneous layers? They would then have access to every moment, every experience, and every emotion they would ever feel across their life.’
Which all leads to the big question: ‘If you have the ability to know everything that was going to happen to you in your life – good and bad, wonderful and awful – would you still live your life to the full?’
Big questions, right?
Cinema, on the other hand, is as much about withholding information as giving it. Cinema uses information almost as a form of currency, with the filmmaker doling it out bit by bit in order to create maximum drama in their story.
The audience has almost no control of what they see or hear, or of when they see or hear it. The filmmaker controls what’s inside the frame or outside the frame, what’s hidden in the gap between cuts, the order we get the information, and when we get the information. We are almost entirely at the mercy of the filmmaker, as she controls what we know and don’t know, and the rhythm and pace and order in which we glean that knowledge.
We can’t even flick back a couple of pages to clarify something.
So, the film of Arrival is trying to do contradictory things: on one hand it’s asking ‘What if time is reversable and therefore effectively simultaneous?’ but it does it through a medium which uses time in a very linear way.
And although I think it does this very intelligently, it is still potentially confusing. For example, by the end of the film we realise that the first sequence in the film is really the end of the film, and happens after almost everything that we are about to see.
But because of the way that we experience cinema (and for that matter life), the first time we see the film, we tend to perceive that first sequence as the ‘now’ of the film, and the following sequence as the ‘next’ of the story – the ‘and so now…’
And in truth, it seems to me that we are deliberately mislead as part of the filmmaker’s strategy, so we perceive Amy Adams’ aloneness and depression when she gets the call to help with the aliens as the result of what we saw at the beginning, when the connection is actually the reverse of what we read.
But now you know. When you watch the film, remind yourself that almost everything you see after that first sequence is what leads up to that first sequence, not what follows it. And all the little flash sequences are ‘memories’ of something that hasn’t happened yet.
I agonised whether or not to tell you this, but I think its justified because I believe that it will immeasurably enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the film
But all this confusion is not just a filmmaker being too clever for their own good. It’s actually central to what they’re saying. Let me illustrate.
I’m standing here in front of you. Which direction from me is the future, and which the past? The future is in front of me, the past is behind me, right?
That perception is true for many cultures, but it’s not universally true. In some cultures, the past is in front of us, and the future is behind us.
Whereas in our culture we think of the future as the direction in which we going – the direction our 2 eyes point so we can see where we’re going, and the direction our 2 feet point to take us there – for other cultures the past is what we can see and know, and the future is what we can’t see or know.
Therefore, for them, the future is behind us, and the past is in front of us.
And this difference in perception has cultural significance.
Our Western culture is about relentless progress and movement; the other cultures are about living in the present, and about perception.
‘Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, live for today.’
But, to use another time analogy, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? Which came first? In these differences, did the culture precede the perception, or did the perception precede the culture?
As the film also explores, this is also a question about language. The film references something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically says that the language we use doesn’t just reflect our perception of reality, it shapes our perception of reality.
Head hurting yet? I know mine is.
But the aliens in Arrival are not built like us with only two eyes and two feet, both pointing in the same direction. They are heptapods. They have seven legs and seven eyes. For them, there is no front and back, there is just ‘around’ – and as it turns out, for them there is no past and future – there is just multiple layers of the present. For them time is not in front of them or behind them, it’s around them.
Amy Adams is playing an extraordinary linguist, who is able to understand the aliens even though the underlying world view is so different.
But, in doing so, she begins to also take on their perception of reality, which gradually bleeds into her day-to-day life, and eventually permeates it.
Which creates an enormous dilemma for her – if you know what’s going to happen in your life, both the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, would you still choose to live it? What matters, the journey or the destination?
This question turns out to have enormous implications – perhaps too many to be explored at depth in a film that runs for less than 2 hours.
Is happiness and achievement a zero-sum game, where any gain must be balanced by a loss?
What are the implications for capitalism if gain and loss are the same thing, just played in different directions?
This is referenced very early in the film, in a question about the underlying meaning of the Sanskrit word for war. It’s also implicit in the enormous question that powers the oppositional narrative of the film: ‘but what do the aliens want; can we bargain with them; can we get more than we give; and can we outwit the other nations?’
There is also another enormous question in the film, which is ‘if the language we use reflects and shapes our view of reality, so that we can never be sure that our perception of reality matches anybody else’s – especially if they speak a different language and belong to a different culture – can we ever really understand each other?’
Arrival wrestles with some meaty intellectual questions. But it’s also powerfully emotional in a way that I find deeply satisfying.
Now for a few metaphors to look out for in the film.
The screen through which the humans and the aliens communicate. Remind you of anything? Like what you’ll be looking at shortly? Notice also the contradiction – that like all forms of communication it is both transparent and a barrier.
Many, many references to circularity and versions of circularity and reversibility. Corridors, images, staircases (a double metaphor about climbing and circularity), jewellery, the first and last words that Amy Adams says to her daughter et cetera et cetera
Palindromes – Hannah’s name, and the theme music are both the same, whichever direction you read them or hear them.
References to the heptapods themselves in Amy Adams’ fingers, and her daughter’s costume during the tickling sequence.
The names they give the heptapods – Abbott and Costello – which in this case doesn’t refer to right wing Australian politicians, but to a pair of comedians whose most famous routine ‘Who’s on first?’ is all about miscommunication through understanding language differently.
Note the reference to the canary in the coalmine? Listen out for when those chirps are incorporated into the sound mix, and what they portend.
Lots and lots to talk about. I hope you enjoy the film.
October 2024 - Hell or High Water
I’ve been thinking about screening a Western for some time, because Westerns are such a core part of cinema history. But I wanted to explore how they’ve gone beyond the white hat/black hat, cowboys versus Indians simplicities of the original Westerns, and evolved over time into something much more interesting.
Because Westerns have been around for a very long time – well over a century. Which speaks to both their resilience and their adaptability.
Arguably the first Western was made in 1903 (The Great Train Robbery), and they’ve been a staple of American studio production ever since. Early television was populated by Western serials, which were themselves derived from the supporting feature tradition in cinema. Because, in the days that the main feature wasn’t preceded by ads for fast food, cars and telephone companies but by a cartoon and a B-movie, the B-movie was very often a Western.
But over the decades many Westerns have made it out of the supporting feature category onto the main stage. Ever since the Oscars were established, a Western has been nominated for Best Picture on average every three or four years.
Just to remind you, here is a short list of seminal Westerns: Stagecoach; Red River; High Noon; Shane; The Searchers; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; The Wild Bunch; Dances with Wolves; Unforgiven; Paris, Texas (which is a kind of sequel to The Searchers half a century later); and so on.
I’m sure you can add a few of your own. The Western has proved to be a strikingly resilient and adaptable genre - because it taps into a core American mythology.
Tonight I want to screen what is usually called a neo-Western, released in 2016, and itself the recipient of four Oscar nominations – Best film, Best Original Script, Best Editing, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Jeff Bridges (though I have to warn you, his nomination was certainly not for clarity in speaking).
This is a terrific film – but hardly anybody saw it. It had a low budget – only $12 million – and it made about $35 million back – but that wasn’t enough to save the production company, which went bust.
But before we watch it, let’s explore some of the ways that Westerns have evolved over the years. And we can’t really look at how Westerns have evolved without understanding the concept of Manifest Destiny.
The concept of Manifest Destiny was coined in 1845 by John L O’Sullivan, a newspaper editor and political agitator, as the core of his argument that the United States should annex Texas, which had declared independence from Mexico in 1836 as a result of Mexico abolishing slavery in 1829. The southern slaveholding states of the United States were very keen to bolster their numbers to prevent the encroachment of the federal government on their state rights – i.e. the continuing legality of slavery, which was often presented as a state’s rights issue.
Manifest Destiny essentially wrapped a pro-slavery State’s Rights argument in ethnic nationalism, arguing that it was the manifest destiny of white people to expand across the entire North American continent from coast-to-coast, pushing out Mexicans and any inconvenient original inhabitants along the way. Its enthusiastic adoption as both an argument and a rallying cry led to decades of violence and dispossession – all glorified in the original Westerns.
Manifest Destiny is a seminal part of American Mythology, and for many years Westerns were the most visible cultural manifestation of that doctrine. Even now, nearly two centuries after it was first propounded, and long after end of the original conditions that lead to articulation, its underlying values continue to taint American politics.
Manifest Destiny was underpinned by several key beliefs:
Racial Superiority: the belief that Anglo-Saxon Americans – particularly Protestant Christians – were morally and intellectually superior to all other races.
Divine Providence: in His wisdom, God brought white people to North America, had granted them Dominion over all the land, and expected and demanded that they take over the land, spreading democracy, Christianity and civilisation in their path.
American Exceptionalism: because America was chosen by God as the home for his people and was therefore morally and politically superior to all other nations, American politics was not to be challenged or questioned by political or social ideas that arose in other countries – such as the abolition of slavery (or, in more recent times, universal healthcare).
Sound familiar? I told you it was an enduring myth. But, as expressed in Westerns, it has also been an adaptable myth, capable of being turned on its head by different generations of film makers.
For decades those early cowboys and Indians Westerns painted a simplistic picture of the cowboys as heroes and the Native Americans as villains. Those powerfully simple stories preserved the mythology and values of Manifest Destiny long after the massacres and the dispossession that it underpinned had successfully ended.
But genres survive by being adaptable, and Westerns have proved to be remarkably adaptable. The Western tradition still has potency because the original myth is still a core part of American identity – but the meaning of the Western has changed as American culture has changed.
John Ford used the Western to turn examine the tension within the white frontier settler communities between those seeking the peace and community, and the violence that created those communities and maintained the peace within them – asking whether there was a place in civilisation for the men who carved out a place for civilisation.
Two of his greatest films, The Searchers and Stagecoach, bring different approaches to this same question.
Unfortunately, in putting his focus on the tensions within the white settlers, Ford’s films also bring with them a stereotypical view of Native Americans – which Ford himself acknowledged later in his career. After all Ford, who was and remained Irish to his core, had his own powerful national traditions of violent suppression and dispossession to draw upon.
And then, in 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, High Noon celebrates a commitment to individual conscience and clear-eyed morality that challenged the witch-hunt that was the House Un-American Activities Committee’s pursuit of its imaginary enemies within the nation – and was recognised by that Committee as doing so.
Those Hollywood liberals and communists!
Then, in 1962, John Ford made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, questioning the entire mythology of Westerns, and shows how truth has been sacrificed in creation of those myths.
The Wild Bunch (a remake of Kurosawa’s Japanese masterpiece, Seven Samurai) and Soldier Blue were both made at the time of the Vietnam war – and it’s easy to see how they reflected America’s changing view of the nature and heroism of war. Of course, right about the same time John Wayne was making Green Berets, an old-fashioned Western with the Vietnamese as the Indians/Mexicans, and the Green Berets as the Texas Rangers.
And then came a series of films reversing and revising the power relationship between the white intruders and the native inhabitants, like Dances with Wolves. And others, like Django Unchained (and, if we go back a long way, Blazing Saddles), which explored the role of African-Americans in that world.
Recently there has even been a television series that reverses the roles of men and women in the West – Godless – and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
I could easily extend this exploration of the various ways that Westerns have reflected and challenged the changing American social and political values, but I’ll save you from the screen studies lecture, and move on to tonight’s film.
Hell or High Water is the middle film of the trilogy of what are generally called neo-Westerns written by Taylor Sheridan, who started out as an actor, and then moved on to being a writer/producer. These days he is probably best known as the creator of the TV series Yellowstone, and its various spin-offs.
By the way, the other two films in that trilogy are Sicario and Wind River, and they are both worth watching.
The director, David McKenzie, also started his professional life in cinema as an actor – but in Scotland. He’s made many interesting films in Scotland and Europe – but I’ve got a Tim Tam for anybody who can name any of them.
Incidentally, both writer and director continue their acting career with small on-screen moments in this film.
A couple of things to look out for, for our discussion later.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this film came out in the year the Donald Trump was first elected President – many of the things that the film is about plug into the zeitgeist of that time. Just as many of the underlying values of Manifest Destiny are writ large in the MAGA movement.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jeff Bridges’ partner in the story is played by Native American/Mexican – one of only two non-white roles in the whole film.
What’s going on underneath the surface in this relationship? What is Bridges’ character up to with his constant needling of his partner? Does their first scene together and their last scene together shift our interpretation of that?
Finally, remember how I said that John Ford’s films wrestled with the core contradiction in westerns between community and civilisation on one hand, and violence on the other?
Hell or High Water uses a common narrative trope called duality to explore the same contradiction by embodying it in the two sets of brothers – one literal, and the other metaphorical.
Duality in character development works by taking what could be a single complex and contradictory character and splitting him or her into two characters that each take on one half of the internal contradiction. If one is shy and timid, the other is brash and extroverted. If one is moral and considerate, the other is immoral and inconsiderate.
On one hand they are almost the same person (quite often they are twins) and are bound together in the narrative by a common situation and a common purpose; but at the same time, they are diametrically opposed in character, impulse and action, and bring opposing solutions to the problem. Sometimes for the best – much more often for the worst.
Duality is a very useful device that goes well beyond character. For example, take the last two lines the brothers say to each other – you can’t get a much clearer example of duality than that exchange.
This trope is very common in genres that are essentially melodramatic, because it enables you to externalise internal conflicts and make them more visible, and much more active. Which also allows the film to make its philosophical premise tangible and active – as we’ll see in this film.
As a genre, Westerns are about as melodramatic as you can get. But leave your prejudices about melodrama at the door, because this film is filled with perfectly cast actors bringing strong truthful performances to what could easily be melodramatic clichés. If there was an Oscar for the film with most excellent one-scene characters and performances, this film would be right up there.
So – let’s go to rural Texas, Hell or High Water!
September 2024 - Eat Drink Man Woman
There are some films that are more than the sum of their parts. They might have clumsy dialogue, or performances that don’t quite work, or perhaps longueurs in the storytelling – but when the closing credits roll, you are deeply satisfied.
For me Ang Lee’s 1994 film ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ falls squarely into that category.
The dialogue we are reading on-screen was originally written in English by James Shamus, a New York screenwriter and teacher, then translated into Taiwanese by Hui-Ling Wang, who wrote the original story with Ang Lee, and then translated back into English by whoever wrote the subtitles. It’s a miracle it’s comprehensible.
The film itself was made very early in Ang Lee’s career, when he was somewhere between being a Taiwanese director and English-language director. Similarly, the performances fall somewhere between Western naturalism Ang Lee learnt at the University of Illinois, and Taiwanese melodramas he grew up with. As does the entire structure and tone of the picture.
And yet, it still works. In a way those contradictions in tone and style speak to the theme of the film, which is about the tensions between those two worlds.
Anyway, I’m a sucker for films about different cultures, and about how, under the skin, human beings share so many similar hopes and fears and ways of looking at the world. Somehow or other, the different world gives me just enough distance and perspective to notice and care about our common humanity.
Especially in the hands of Ang Lee, who despite having perhaps the widest repertoire of any current working director – this is a director who averages a new feature film every 18 months, and his first three films were set in Taiwan; then a period piece set in England (Sense and Sensibility); then The Ice Storm set in 1970s wife swapping suburbia in Connecticut; followed by a movie set in the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil); and then a Chinese martial arts movie (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). And so on. Brokeback Mountain. Lust, Caution. Life of Pi.
But no matter the genre, when Ang Lee manages to tap into the humanity of his characters – as he usually does – there’s something for me to connect to.
Ang Lee was born 1954 into a family of mainland Chinese refugees in a small provincial town in an agricultural county of southern Taiwan. Both his parents were teachers, and they gradually moved to larger and larger provincial towns and higher and higher positions within the school hierarchy. So, like so many artists, he had a peripatetic childhood.
By the time he finished high school, his parents were principals of two adjoining high schools in a much larger town in much more sophisticated northern Taiwan.
And, like many high achieving migrants, his parents wanted and expected him to have high educational achievements. A Professor, at a minimum.
But he failed the university entrance exams twice, and in despair they sent him to the national art school. After he graduated there he spent four years doing military service in the Navy, and then went to America to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.
But he’d come to English late, and never really mastered it. Even now, after a 30-year career directing English-language movies, he still struggles with nuance, and often uses non-verbal psychological games to help the actors find the performances.
In fact, Emma Thompson, who both wrote and starred in Ang Lee’s first English-language film, Sense and Sensibility, spoke about the difficulty he had communicating with his English cast, and particularly the difficulty he had with them questioning his artistic choices. In a Confucian system, you don’t question those above you in the hierarchy.
But it’s noticeable that, despite criticising Ang Lee, she did it with great affection – clearly his underlying humanity communicated with them, just as it does with us. And he clearly listened and adapted.
So, having decided that his difficulty with English probably meant that a career as an actor was off the books, he married his university sweetheart, who was also a student from Taiwan pursuing a PhD in molecular biology, and moved to New York to study directing in the famous Tisch School at NYU. Spike Lee was the dux of the year before him, and he was the dux of his year.
Which got him representation with the William Morris Agency – the biggest agency in New York at the time. But for six years he had no work, and the family – by now four people, with two babies – were completely dependent on his wife’s income.
During that time he wrote constantly, and when the government information agency in Taiwan announced a competition for film scripts set in Taiwan, he submitted two scripts. Those scripts won first and second place, and got him noticed by a Taiwanese film studio, and then got made by that studio.
Those two films – Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet – both set in the Taiwanese diaspora in America – became big hits in Taiwan, and critical hits outside it. The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International film Festival and was nominated as Best Foreign Language film in both the Golden Globes and the Oscars.
The third film in what became known as the Father Knows Best trilogy was Eat Drink Man Woman, and is the only Ang Lee film set and shot entirely in Taiwan.
This is the film that made Ang Lee’s career. For the second year in a row a film he wrote or co-wrote and directed was nominated for Best Foreign Language feature at the Oscars and Golden Globes, and he won a string of nominations and awards for directing it, which led to him being offered the job of directing Emma Thompson’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility.
At the time that was considered a very ‘out there’ choice, with so many experienced English directors available, but it turned out to be a masterstroke, and launched his mainstream English-language career.
But back to Eat Drink Man Woman. Around that time there were many films made with food at their centre – the ritual of creation and sharing and the sensuality of food itself. Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, Big Night, Like Water for Chocolate and so on.
There is often a duality to ritual in cinema. On one hand it can be the glue that holds families, marriages and communities together – what you might call the love language of the family. But on the other hand, it can be a way of deflecting emotional tension and avoiding conversation about anything that matters. A safe haven, or a cage.
In Eat Drink Man Woman family Sunday lunch is the ritual that does both.
Incidentally, it took an entire week to shoot the scene of the father preparing the first meal we see his family share, with the best chef in Taiwan standing in for the father’s hands.
Like all three of the Father Knows Best trilogy, Eat Drink Man Woman explores the tensions between tradition and modernity; between the hierarchical communal world of Confucian society, where your principal obligations are to immediate family, and where parents are the ultimate authority; and the more individualistic world of American Christianity, where your principal obligations are to your own salvation, and to your new ‘family’ in the church – and then to bringing other people to the church.
This is exemplified in Eat Drink Man Woman by the tension between eating and drinking – a familial and communal activity both in the creation and the enjoyment; and ‘man woman’ (sex) which is a private and individual pursuit which threatens to pull the family apart.
Things to discuss afterwards.
What’s the meaning of the journey of the father’s sense of taste?
Note how the film presents a nuanced view of tradition – not just fusty old conservatism – this is a father who, as a matter of course, does his working daughters’ laundry.
Metaphors and illusions: the middle daughter being kicked out of the kitchen and forced into a professional career (echo and inversion of Ang Lee’s own experience?); and the youngest daughter’s choice of where she works – the very place that her father would abhor.
The unseen and idealised mother, and idealised marriage versus the reality (or delusion) of the daughter’s relationships.
“I have a little announcement to make…” versus secrets.
Progress versus nostalgia.
August 2024 - The Earrings of Madam de…
All art asks us the question: ‘Is reality truth, and truth reality? Or is truth something beyond reality?’
All narrative asks another question as well: ‘Do we each have free will and agency, or is our life governed by forces beyond our control? Is life about possibility, or inevitability?’
The film I’m going to show you tonight – Max Ophul’s cinematic masterpiece from 1955, The Earings of Madam de…, confronts both questions squarely.
It is without doubt one of the most contrived and artificial films you’ll ever see outside the Marvel Universe – but it’s also one of the most beautifully stylish films that you will ever see, and it uses all its contrivance and artificiality in the service of emotional and psychological truth. Doing that takes great skill, and that is why this film has, over the 70 years of its life, become regarded as one of the great examples of cinematic storytelling.
Jean Renoir, the great French filmmaker, son of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and who made The Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game said: ‘To make comedy requires a warm heart and a cold eye,’ and that perfectly captures the affectionate cynicism that Ophuls brought to the people in his films.
Each of the central characters in The Earrings are deeply flawed and fallible. But Ophuls loves them and understands them, and eventually he brings us over to his point of view.
Max Ophuls’ bio
Max Ophuls was born Maximilian Oppenheimer (no relation) in Germany in 1902. He took the name Ophuls to avoid embarrassing his family when he abandoned their flourishing schmutter (textiles and clothes) business to go into theatre, rather than to dodge anti-Semitism (Ophuls is also a recognisably Jewish name).
He worked as an actor, then a theatre director, before moving into film in 1929. But Germany in the early 30s became increasingly difficult for Jews, and in 1933 he moved to France, and then to the United States via Italy and Portugal.
Championed by Preston Sturges in Hollywood he eventually came to direct four major Hollywood films: THE EXILE with Douglas Fairbanks; LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN; CAUGHT and THE RECKLESS MOMENT, before returning to France in 1950.
Postwar French cinema, before the advent of the new wave, suited Ophuls’ aesthetic and philosophical sensibility much more than Hollywood’s, and in the 1950s he was clearly one of the most distinguished and critically acclaimed directors in Europe. He was even specifically excluded from Truffaut’s scathing critique of ‘cinema de Papa’ - though, on the surface, he could have been seen as a prime example.
During this time he made LA RONDE; LOLA MONTEZ; LE PLAISIR; and THE EARRINGS OF MADAM DE…, all of which are now considered cinematic classics. He died from rheumatic heart disease in 1957 during the shooting of his final film THE LOVERS OF MONTPARNASSE.
Ophuls was one of the great cinematic stylists, with masterful use of the moving camera. He was famous for creating elaborate sets within which he could construct long elaborate tracking shots.
So much so that James Mason, who largely owed his Hollywood career to Ophuls, and who spent a great deal of time sitting around on the sets of CAUGHT and THE RECKLESS MOMENT while Ophuls set up his famous shots, penned the following piece of doggerel, and pinned it on the back of Ophul’s director’s chair:
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he’d never smile again.
But those beautiful tracking shots are more than just stylistic artifice. The way Ophuls uses them is central to the way he engages with that great narrative question I mentioned before: ‘Do we have free will and agency in the world, or is our life governed by forces beyond our control?’
To explain how that works, I need to talk about time in movies. Because time is at the heart of cinema.
If five of us started to read a book simultaneously, we would all read at different speeds. Very few of us would read a book all the way through in one sitting. And if we did break it up, there is no reason we would take the breaks at the same point in the story. We would certainly not finish simultaneously.
But if five of us sit down to watch a film together we will all watch it all the way through in one sitting, we will finish watching at the same time, and we will all experience same moments simultaneously. Of course we almost certainly won’t process what we are seeing and hearing simultaneously, although laughter will tend to synchronise our thinking.
When we are watching a film our time is dictated by the film’s time. And not just in its physical running time. In a much more subliminal way, in the ebb and flow of time within the narrative. Because when you cut between shots you are able to compress and extend time subliminally – and not just in the ‘five years later’ cut, but in reaction times and realisations.
The process of filmmaking is also all about time. It’s about turning days of shooting into seconds of screen time, and months of production, editing, music and sound design into minutes of screen time.
To vastly oversimplify the process, the filmmaker confronts a fundamental choice when they work out how they’re going to shoot the film: do you collect lots of simple shots, each capturing a moment, and construct a narrative out of joining those shots and those moments together?
Or do you spend all your time on set constructing a single elaborate shot that captures all those moments in one long flowing shot?
And of course this is more than just a matter of scheduling and economics – it’s also a question of taste, style and art. Cinema has always been a struggle between commerce and art, and the long shot versus montage is a perfect encapsulation of this struggle.
Because you really have to know what you’re doing if you choose to spend your time and money making a long elaborate shot work.
You’ve got to get the pacing right. You’ve got to get the flow of light and shade right. You’ve got to make sure you capture each of those crucial moments. You can’t go back later in the edit and speed things up, or slow things down, or drop a line, or emphasise a moment.
And the performances have to work for every moment through the whole shot. You can’t take one part of the performance from one take, and another part from another take.
The whole thing works, or it doesn’t work.
But if you are skilful enough to make it work, then there are great artistic rewards to be had.
Because long tracking shots make time seem more real to the viewer. They give us a much more visceral sense of the time and effort that is required to achieve anything. And they place the character firmly within their world and their situation in a quite different way to the way a series of shots capturing moments does.
A tracking shot gives you a much more three-dimensional sense of the space than any combination of single shots does.
More than that, in the hands of a master like Ophuls, this strategy of using long extended tracking shots also allows him to engage with that great narrative question I raised above about free will and destiny.
Because you can use a long tracking shot to emphasise a character’s agency, through seeing what it takes them to achieve something. But you can also use it to underline the way the powerlessness of a character by making it seem that they are overwhelmed by the world and what is happening to them.
The opening shot of this film is a great example of demonstrating agency, as we see the titular character, whom we only ever know by her first name Louise, deciding what she will sell to pay off her debts.
At the same time, through this shot, without ever showing us anything but the fingers of the actress until the very end of the shot, when we see her face reflected in a frame of opulence – the perfect metaphor for a life of wealth and appearances – Ophuls and Dannielle Darrieux tell us a great deal about the character of Louise, about Louise’s needs, and about the circumstances of Louise’s life.
And that famous opening shot is just the first of many shots in the film that show us a character moving through time and space as they try to achieve some task. Along corridors, through doors, up and down stairs and so on.
Each of these shots seem to emphasise the agency and effort of the characters. On the face of it, they are on the side of free will and agency.
But at the same time there are other shots and sequences in the film that emphasise the way that characters are subject to outside forces.
Just watch the long ballroom sequence of Louise and her suitor Donati (played by the incomparable Vitoria de Sica) trying to manage a flirtation without actually falling in love and endangering the whole enterprise.
And then Ophuls turns the meaning again as, paradoxically, we start to see that even the shots that emphasise the character’s agency come to have an ironic futility at their heart. These people think that they have agency, and are acting as if they have agency, but actually they are subject to forces beyond their control.
The last shot of Madam in the film captures this conundrum tragically. More often, Ophuls explores this conundrum comically. The doormen at the opera. The jeweller’s son and the circular staircase.
My favourite of these is a very simple shot of the jeweller’s son going up and down the stairs of his father’s shop as he collects all the accoutrements his father requires to dress himself in order to pay a visit on the General.
The son is working very hard – as the shot emphasises – but does he have any agency? No, he is governed by the needs of his father. As his father is governed by the need to make his appearance match his task.
And there’s even another level to this.
Because when we watch a film there is always an underlying question for the audience: who is driving this film – the author/director, or the characters? Does it feel like the characters have free will and agency, or are they just pawns in the service of the filmmakers’ agenda?
Different films and different film styles sit in different places along the continuum between the auteur and the character.
But, if we feel that the film is being driven by the filmmaker, not the characters, it plugs into the feeling of inevitability and destiny. And, unless the director is very skilled, it distances us from the characters. We become observers of their dilemmas, not empathetic participants.
At first Ophuls’ films seem firmly in the former camp – driven by the author/director, and therefore contrived and artificial – but as his films develop, his affection for and understanding of the characters starts to come through.
We begin by watching these people through Ophuls’ cold eye, but end up seduced by his warm heart.
Things to watch out for and discuss later:
The use of reflections, echoes and repetition. Of course, the whole story is constructed around circularity and repetition with the earrings, but there are many other repetitions and reflections in the story.
The general saying goodbye to his mistress at the railway station, and then later to his wife. Even the shots are identical.
Many filmmakers find a way to explicitly encapsulate film their theme quite explicitly at some point – often with the last line of the film.
For me, Ophuls and his fellow writers quite explicitly address the theme of this film in a short sequence right at the midpoint of the film, where Ophuls cuts directly from the General exhorting his wife to take control of her emotions and life to her consulting the cards to see what is destined.
And, adding another metaphoric level, the General does it while he is closing the windows to their mansion – by which he intends to exclude the outside world, including the Baron – while he assures his wife that she can achieve anything she wants – by which he means, get over her infatuation with the Baron.
To which she responds by getting her maid to read the cards. Which of course is simply another act of will on the Countess’s part, because she doesn’t want to give up the Baron, and would like to feel that she can’t be reasonably expected to give him up because it’s fated.
She deliberately, in an act of agency and free will, calls upon destiny to give her the permission to eventually act on her desires. And by doing so, she sets in train the series of events that will condemn her. Free will and destiny bound together.
When Ophuls and his fellow screenwriters adapted the novel on which the film is based, they moved the characters a couple of steps up the social hierarchy – much to the chagrin of the original author. Why would they do this? Because of another philosophical question: when you tell a story that is about agency or lack of agency, how does the social class of the characters affect the story?
July 2024 - Mustang
Welcome everybody, and apologies if you turned up a month ago and discovered that we had cancelled the session. At the time I was still in hospital recovering from the operation to reconstruct my wrist.
Today’s introduction is going to be shorter than usual. Partly because it’s still very difficult for me to type; and partly because I find the content of this film much more compelling than the technique, and the content is what we talk about in the discussion afterwards.
By the way, that’s very unusual for the first feature film of a film school graduate – usually they end up relying too heavily on all the techniques they’ve learned at school.
One of the interesting questions about movies these days is ‘who is allowed to make them?’
Once upon a time this question was all about whether you were able to break into the closed shop of moviemaking – a vast esoteric and expensive system. More often than not it came down to who you knew.
As well, right up until the late 1960s, filmmaking was essentially an industrial process aimed at making entertainment, especially in Hollywood – not so much in Europe.
The old aphorism about the film business – 50% of the people in Hollywood are trying to turn art into money; and the other 50% are trying to do the opposite – was probably more like 70/30 then – some directors had certainly established an individual style – you would never mistake a Frank Capra film for a Howard Hawks film for a John Ford film.
But even those illustrious directors were still, in essence, guns for hire directing studio contracted actors in studio developed scripts.
But in the late 60s, even Hollywood movies started to become much more personal.
This is partly because the artists took power. European countries had long had the view that cinema was a branch of art, and that it was a valid – perhaps even necessary – function of government to spend public money in the support of art. But by the late 1960s even Hollywood filmmaking had shifted from being purely a series of factories for generating entertainment, and more and more became about expressing the emotional, psychological and political experiences and views of the filmmakers.
People like Roger Corman demonstrated that it was possible to make financially viable movies much more cheaply. And people like Jack Nicholson, who had worked for Roger Corman as both an actor and director, expanded that insight from Roger Corman’s exploitation movies into more personal artistic movies.
Movies like EASY RIDER and FIVE EASY PIECES had a big impact – much bigger than their actual financial success, but since their budgets were so low it didn’t matter.
Before too long directors were constructing films from their own personal experiences – films like Peter Bogdanovich’s THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, or Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS.
All this also slowly shifted people’s expectations of what it meant to be entertained.
But pendulums always swing past the midpoint, and a couple of decades later the argument that cinema should be meaningful as well as entertaining, which came to mean that they should also express the individual and personal views and experiences of its makers, grew into something else. By the 21st century as various suppressed minorities started to all become more visible, and more accepted, they inevitably sought more control and more power.
Within the film business this took two forms: access and representation. Suppressed minorities demanded access to the means of production, and they also demanded control over how they were represented.
As a result a movement that began by arguing for inclusiveness, expressed through more openness to personal and individual experience in mass media, became an argument for exclusiveness, expressed through constraints on who was allowed to make what.
For example, whereas once women filmmakers were arguing that they shouldn’t be all sidelined into only making so-called women’s films, now many people were arguing that only women filmmakers should be allowed to make women’s films.
This is a very big subject, with many points of view – many of them with at least some validity, even though they might be contradictory.
The reverse of this argument is the aphorism that ‘whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish!’ In other words, for me at least, sometimes outsiders have the clearest insights.
The reason I bought it up is because the film I’m going to screen tonight became trapped in this argument in the country of its production and setting – Turkey, now called Turkiye – because, although the writer and director was Turkish, she was seen and represented as ‘not really Turkish, but criticising Turkey’ because she was the daughter of Turkish diplomats, had been educated extensively outside Turkey, and had spent most of her life living outside Turkey.
Perhaps we can talk about this after the film.
In these nights I try to cover a broad range of films and filmmakers, and I was wanting to screen a Turkish film, because Turkey has quite vibrant film culture.
The most celebrated Turkish filmmaker is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, sometimes called the Chekhov of Anatolia. His films, which include ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA and WINTER SLEEP are wonderful and mesmerising. But they are also what might charitably be called a slow burn, and typically run for more than three hours.
So I chose a Turkish film by a much younger female filmmaker with a much more direct approach to filmmaking.
Deniz Gamze Ergüven was born in Ankara, but has lived most of her life outside Turkey, and is currently a French citizen. In the mid 2000’s she attended the famous French film school La Femis in Paris.
When she left film school, she started to develop a film about the 1992 Los Angeles riots – something she had no personal experience of. That film was eventually released in 2017 as KINGS. But in the meantime she met another writer-director, Alice Winocour, who was developing her historical feature Augustine.
They decided that for their first feature they needed to work on something that had a lower budget, and was more personal. Together they wrote the script for MUSTANG, based on some of Ergüven’s personal experiences – for example, the sequence at the beach at the beginning of the film – and her observations of the lives of friends and acquaintances.
That film became MUSTANG and, while it was only relatively successful financially, it became a big critical success. Except in Turkey, of course.
The film also has an Australian connection – the score was composed and played by Warren Ellis, who is Nick Cave’s regular collaborator, and recently played at Anita’s with his band The Dirty Three. This was Ellis’s first solo film score – he previously worked on a number of films with Nick Cave, including The Proposition; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; and The Road.
The score won a number of awards, including the Cesar.
A couple of last points. There are no Mustangs in the film, so why is it called that?
While the film is more realistic than symbolic, there are a number of obvious metaphoric images in the film. Did you notice any?
Of the girls, only the girl who played Ece, the middle sister, had ever acted before. The others were discovered in numerous idiosyncratic ways, including at the baggage carousel in Charles de Gaulle airport, and given an intense two-week workshop to develop the relationship between them, and give them basic screen acting techniques.
DISCUSSION
One of the interesting things to talk about is the title of the film. Clearly there are no mustangs – or at least no literal mustangs – in the film. So why is it called ‘MUSTANG’?
My paraphrased quote from an interview with Deniz ‘I wanted the girls to be like mustangs – wild, and free and a little bit untamed. And then comes a time when they are rounded up, and they are either broken in, or break away.’
Obvious symbols: the prison, the apple orchard, the tunnel.
April 2024 - Little Miss Sunshine
Back in 2000, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was beginning his transition from movies to politics (confirming the adage that politics is show business for ugly people), he gave a graduation speech at a Los Angeles high school, which was, somewhat amazingly, reported in newspapers around the country.
In it he said, justifying why he moved from ‘socialist’ Austria to free enterprise America, ‘I hate losers – I despise them!’
Over in New York, Michael Arndt, a recent graduate of the Tisch School of Performing Arts at NYU, was working as a personal assistant and script reader for Matthew Broderick, who was starring in THE PRODUCERS on Broadway, having pivoted from movies (FERRIS BUELER’S DAY OUT).
Arndt was reading all these scripts being sent to Broderick, trying to write his own scripts, and was feeling just a little like a loser himself.
Schwarzenegger’s speech made him so angry that he wrote the first draft of a road movie satirising that attitude over a long weekend, planning to shoot it on a camcorder with a bunch of friends in the summer break. He wanted to use a Kombi as the hero car because he thought they were inherently amusing; he had many childhood anecdotes centred on disastrous journeys in the family Kombi; and because he thought you could shoot all the car interiors from inside the car, instead of the usual process of putting the car onto a camera trailer and shooting from outside the car.
But although Arndt was on the periphery of the biz, he was still in the biz, and the script got noticed, and then sucked into the washing machine of development. Over the next six years it would go through over a hundred drafts – some written by other writers with Arndt being sacked and rehired a number of times, and through a series of producers and production teams.
Quite early in that process it fell into the hands of a husband and wife (or should that be wife and husband?) team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Fairs who, after ten years of making music videos and TVCs, were looking for a script for their first feature film.
They say you should never play bridge with your partner – and directing a movie together is playing bridge at three different tables simultaneously for 14 hours a day for a couple of years. Remarkably, nearly 40 years, three kids, three movies, a couple of TV series, and numerous music videos and commercials later, Fairs and Dayton are still married. So perhaps they do know something about taking your family on a long journey.
Like so many American comedies, for example PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES (which I screened last year); DUMB AND DUMBER; THE BLUES BROTHERS; ROAD TRIP; MIDNIGHT RUN – to name just a few, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is a road movie, with the journey (and the carriage) acting as a core metaphor.
And like far too many movies to list, it’s about two things: the contradictions at the heart of the American Dream; and the tensions at the heart of every family.
Well, except of course our families…?
Arguably all these films derived from the great 1939 John Ford film STAGECOACH, which is also a road movie about micro-community – but I’ll save that analysis for a screen studies lecture, not a Saturday night outing.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE puts a loving but dysfunctional family – with each member pursuing success; each having a different measure of success; and each a different way of attaining success – into a broken down mustard-coloured VW Kombi (and we can also discuss what THAT represents after the film) on a road trip from Albuquerque in New Mexico to Redondo Beach in California, and forces them to come to terms with who they really are, and what matters to them.
In short, like all good comedies, it’s about much more than meets the eye. The laughs hide the meaning.
The directors and the writer got together very early in this journey; and stuck together throughout the 6-year journey to completion – which was much longer and probably much more arduous than the journey of the story. Many of those hundred plus drafts were spent trying to work out who was the central character, and trying to work out the balance between the characters – essentially whether it was an ensemble piece, or a star-led piece focussing on the father’s character.
It's much easier to write and cast a comedy with two central characters – every one of the examples I mentioned before fits that mould. But, as you’ll see, although technically the father character is the nearest thing to a central character, in the end they successfully created an ensemble piece.
And for me, that was the right call. Because those multiple characters allowed them to explore the notion of success and failure to a much greater depth than any ‘hero’s journey’ film might have.
Across the course of its hundred minutes the film asks us:
Who defines success – you or others?
Is success the same thing as winning?
Is it failure to reassess and change your mind?
Is failure a sign of personal unworthiness?
What creates success? Conformity; nonconformity; effort; focus; luck; talent; self-delusion…?
For example, one of the characters demonstrates a remarkable commitment to achieving their goals, only to have their dream shattered by something inherent in them, over which they have no control, and which cannot be fixed in any way. So, does that make them a loser?
But every member of this ensemble has their own equally meaningful journey.
And what an ensemble! LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE has one of the great ensemble casts – every one of them the sort of character actor who is always the best thing in any movie they are in, despite never being the lead.
And then they topped it all by casting a ten-year-old (actually, Abigail Breslin was six when they first noticed her in the M. Night Shyamalan’s movie SIGNS) who almost steals the movie.
If there was an Academy Award for casting, they would certainly have added it to two the film won – for Best Original Sceenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin).
Incidentally, Arndt also won an Oscar for his next produced screenplay – Toy Story 3 – this time for Best Adapted Screenplay – becoming the first person to do so.
A few last comments before I screen it.
There’s a lot of swearing in the film – so much so that they made Abigail Breslin’s character listen to music through headphones all the time so they could shoot the scenes with her in the frame without censoring the dialogue. If you find it too much, just cup your hands over your ears.
At the time the film was made, America was three years into the Iraq War, and George W had just won his second term as President, largely on the basis of the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln – how wrong he was!
For the record, about 7,500 Iraqi civilians lost their lives prior to that speech, compared to about 150,000 after it. And 93% of the eventual cost of nearly $820 billion was yet to be spent.
However, despite this incredible waste of blood and treasure, the content of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is driven much more by the economic carnage being wreaked back in the good ole USA by so called ‘trickle down’ economics.
For example, the family name Hoover is a reference to Herbert Hoover and the Hoovervilles that sprung up across American during the Great Depression – self-governing shanty towns that gave shelter and community to the homeless and unemployed. They were given the name Hooverville by FDR’s publicity team, after Herbert Hoover, who was the Republican President at the time. A Hoover blanket was a newspaper, and a Hoovermobile was an old broken-down jalopy pulled by a couple of horses.
As we’ll see, the idea of success being a ‘beauty contest’ is central to the story, and I think it’s not just a coincidence that the film coincided with the rise of ‘post-feminism’, where the major fashion magazines pivoted to the idea that the war for women’s equality had been won, and it was time for women to focus on fashion and beauty again.
There are two things I want to draw your attention to for our discussion after the screening.
The first is the use of metaphor to convey meaning. To point out just a few: food – especially ice cream; colour; the Kombi van and its journey; and the beauty contest at the end, and beauty contests in general.
The second is having characters say aloud, in one succinct sentence, what the filmmakers are saying through the film – their premise. Many films use the device of having a peripheral character speak the premise. In this film I’d argue that each character, at some point, speaks aloud their version of the premise.
Who speaks for you in this story?
NEXT MONTH
Sophie and I are going to be away in May, and my good friend Catherine Millar will present the Norwegian film Woman at War. Catherine has a long and illustrious career as a writer and director, and recently directed One Night, which was shot around here. Woman at War is a great film, and Catherine is the perfect person to introduce it.
March 2024 - Cold War
COLD WAR & allegory
Welcome. You’ve been watching images of the famous Polish Mazowsze (Mah-zofshé) troupe – a state sponsored effort beginning in 1948 to revive rural Polish traditions in the interests of creating a national identity for Poland – a country that had spent most of the last centuries largely under threat or under occupation by powerful neighbours – as it still was in 1948, under Uncle Joe Stalin.
In the late 60’s the famous Mazowsze troupe visited Australia. Naturally, every Pole in Australia turned up to the concerts, and then competed with each other to show the most hospitality to the members of the troupe.
This created a uniquely ironic situation – the Australian Poles, consisting almost entirely of exiles and escapees from Poland, turning up en masse to enthusiastically partake of some completely ersatz national nostalgia, and hosting a group of performers who almost certainly would have defected on the spot except for their family members back in Poland.
The Mazowsze troupe plays a central part in the film that we’re about to watch – an epic romance that has at its heart the tension that occurs when you love your homeland but it oppresses you.
COLD WAR was Pawel Pawlikowski’s 5th feature film. All his early films were made in his adult home of England, but the last two – IDA and COLD WAR were set in his ancestral home of Poland. Both of those drew on a mixture of personal history, and socio-political allegory.
Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw to a doctor, and a ballet dancer who later became a professor of English literature – and who was and remained a devout Polish Catholic (and there is a difference) all her life. So it came as some surprise to him to discover, as a teenager, that his paternal grandfather was Jewish and had been murdered in Auschwitz.
His parents had a tumultuous relationship, and when he was 14 his staunchly anti-Communist mother took him to England on a ‘holiday’, from which they never returned.
After spending most of his adolescence in Berlin, he moved to England for University, studying literature and philosophy at Oxford. At Oxford he discovered that his professor’s wife, who he thought of as a friend and a very kind and funny old lady, had a been a brutal Stalinist prosecutor in Poland in the decade after WWII, sentencing many innocent people to long prison terms – and often the death penalty.
She became the model for Bloody Wanda in IDA.
Like many European films – especially films made behind the Iron Curtain – both IDA and COLD WAR are allegories.
The Oscar winning IDA is the more obvious allegory, about a nun who leaves a cloistered abbey on the verge of taking her vows, discovers that she is in the abbey because she is an orphan whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and experiences the truth of life outside the abbey thanks to her aunt – the aforementioned Bloody Wanda.
Finally, after a one-night stand with a saxophone player in a touring jazz band, Ida goes back to the abbey and takes her vows.
Both the film and the character of IDA are obvious metaphoric representations of Poland itself coming out from under decades of Soviet and Catholic repression and facing both the freedom and the truth of the new world.
Allegory is common in films from repressed cultures. The censors might not let you make a film about how the leaders of the so-called workers party have betrayed and exploited the actual workers – but you can make a film about the miserable life of a donkey.
Or take PAN’S LABYRINTH, an allegory about Franco’s Spain. HIGH NOON, about McCarthyism. SPIRITED AWAY, which we think of as a children’s film (beautiful animation), but is really about sexual exploitation of children in post-World War II Japan.
Repression takes many forms. It doesn’t just apply to ‘the other side.’
CASABLANCA, that great romantic epic is also an allegory, using epic romance to address the powerful isolationist forces in the US in the first few years of WWII.
Ilse represents Europe. Ric is America – an idealist turned cynical by having his heart broken. The cynical nationalistic politics of the Treaty of Versailles had not only made WW II almost inevitable, it had left many Americans feeling that their blood and treasure was squandered in foreign lands for petty national debt-settling, not some higher moral calling.
But in CASABLANCA Ric/America is at heart a good man – which is being kind to America, which at the time was holding huge pro-Nazi rallies at Madison Square Gardens, and where the biggest American hero of the time – Charles Lindberg – was aspiring to leadership of a homegrown fascist government and leading the very powerful America First movement determined to support the Axis powers by keeping America out of any European wars. (Sound familiar?)
Meanwhile, in the Casa Blanca at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, President Roosevelt was using Lend Lease to support the Allies despite the isolationists, and attempting to rally enough support to get America to support the Allies – firstly with materiel, and then with soldiers.
And so a bunch of American idealists and refugees from Nazism got together in Hollywood to make a film that would argue the case against isolationism.
Most people don’t realise that CASABLANCA is an allegory, partly because by the time it was released, Pearl Harbour had brought America into the war anyway, and partly because what you might call the ‘top’ story – the romance between Ric and Ilse – is so powerful that we tend to lose sight of the allegory.
Like COLD WAR, CASABLANCA is an epic romance, with a very powerful and coherent ‘top’ story, which again makes the allegory less obvious than it is in IDA. But I’d argue that it’s still there.
What do you think?
And just before I screen COLD WAR, I just want to point out another visual metaphor that Pawlikowski often uses – he frames his closeups so that the face sits in the bottom half of the frame – which simultaneously places them in the environment – whether it’s a crowd of people or a field – but makes them seem isolated and dominated.
So here it is – COLD WAR.
QUESTIONS
Is the allegory clear?
What is the allegorical story?
Does each level (‘top’ and allegory) make sense on its own?
Does the allegory dominate the surface narrative?
EXILE AND ART:
The tension between familiarity/authenticity and freedom; the question of whether great art comes from freedom or oppression.
Is there such a thing as collectivist art?
The authenticity of the past? (Or perhaps the feeling of authenticity that you get from the past, whether it is true or not.)
February 2024 - The Visitor
Tom McCarthy – THE INVISIBLE AUTEUR
In many ways, Tom McCarthy is the auteur you’ve never heard of.
He has written and directed seven independent feature films, including The Station Agent, The Visitor (tonight’s film), Win Win, and Spotlight, plus the script for Up.
Those films received multiple awards and nominations, not only for writing and directing, but also multiple acting nominations and awards. Because Tom is not only an award -winning writer and director, he is also a very successful actor in his own right, and clearly knows how to cast good actors, and then help them create great performances.
He’s been in over thirty feature films in supporting roles – probably most famously as Dr Bob in Meet the Parents and Little Fockers.
His films are full of actors who made their mark in his film, and then went on to much greater success: Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams, John Slattery, Mark Ruffalo, Bobby Cannavale, Paul Giamatti, and Amy Ryan, to name a few.
But cinema is an intensely hierarchical and status conscious business, and in the hierarchy of directing, auteurs get all the kudos. If you go to see a film because of who made it, rather than who is in it, or what the story is, then – for better or worse (come in Zack Snyder) – that director is an auteur.
Without going into the whole history of the auteur movement from Cahiers de Cinema to Pauline Kael etc etc, suffice to note that these days the world of cinema – both the business and the cineastes – makes a clear and hierarchical distinction between the gun-for-hire director and the auteur.
The gun-for-hire director is brought onto a project that already exists and essentially serves the project (‘realises it’, in the somewhat patronising formulation of the various screenwriting guilds around the world). An auteur, by sheer force of talent and will-power, brings a singular, recognisable personal vision to all their work. Whether they initiate and drive the project – often as a writer/director – or simply take over any project they are hired for – often with the acquiescence of their collaborators – the project is seen as unified by their vision, and therefore ‘theirs’.
Scorcese, Coppola, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Campion are all universally recognised as auteurs, and their films all carry their recognisable fingerprints. Poor Things (or should I say Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things?), is promoted as and seen as the work of an auteur (rightly in my opinion – it clearly is his vision) despite the fact that so much of what is distinctive about the film is the work of the Production Designers and their team.
By any objective measure, McCarthy is also an auteur, but in contrast to the auteurs I’ve named above, nobody goes to see a McCarthy film, and I suspect most cineastes would struggle to identify what he brings to his projects.
That’s because McCarthy’s vision is of shared humanity, not of striving individualism, and that applies to him as well. He’s not trying to draw attention to his creativity, or create a brand. Instead of showing his hand creatively, he hides his vision inside the characters and their stories.
The stars of McCarthy’s films are the characters, and by extension the actors that portray those characters. If Yorgos Lanthimos’ key collaborators are the design team, whose work is visible to all, then McCarthy’s key collaborators are the actors, and his vision is absorbed into their work.
People talk about auteurs having a defining signature, and for me McCarthy’s defining signature is the way his stories always centre around temporary families made from disparate people. By doing that, his films subliminally emphasise that we are united by our common humanity, not divided by blood, or class, or nationality, or loyalty to powerful institutions.
Even in a film like Spotlight, which has a clear systemic antagonist in the Catholic Church in Boston and its powerful protectors, the heart of the story is in the team of journalists working together to expose the corruption in the soul of the Church.
The inhumanity of the Church is balanced by the humanity of the team exposing them.
As you’ll see, The Visitor is also centred around a disparate temporary family. And like all his films, the story almost seems to tell itself. But look closer, and you’ll see a hundred little decisions that make it work.
I don’t want to say too much more – I want to let the film speak for itself. But here’s a few things to look out for.
For me, two key things that McCarthy brings to his films are the ability to see and acknowledge the flaws in his characters, but still love them, and the ability to be very detailed and precise in his psychological story telling without becoming cold and clinical.
Unusually for a writer/director he doesn’t become over reliant on dialogue to tell his story – he knows how to use action and the camera. He gives his central character a meticulously calibrated step-by step emotional and psychological journey, and tells that journey through the camera and through their actions as much as by what they say.
For instance, he is very clear about which shots are about the relationship between the character and the world, and which shots are about character’s inner journey. He uses the closeup really well, but very unobtrusively.
He never loses sight of the humanity of his characters or uses them as pawns in the service of expressing himself. Even the one-scene supporting characters like the neighbour with the dog, the woman buying jewellery and the coffee shop owner, seem like real fully rounded characters – not just one-dimensional tools that get him around a plot point.
You can almost imagine the camera taking a detour into their lives, and telling their story.
And a tiny thing – note the way the music echoes doorbells. What’s that about?
Tom McCarthy films always leave me feeling better about human beings. They make me feel that he must be a very nice human himself. I hope it makes you feel the same.
So – here it is. The Visitor.
December 2023 - Petite Maman
In our last screening of the year, I’m going to do a shameless piece of proselytising for a film that I think has more to say in its quiet 80 minutes than either Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon have to say in their very noisy and bombastic 3 hours plus.
Unlike those films, Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman just doesn’t go around waving a big boy flag shouting ‘Look at me, look at me!’
I really rate Celine Sciamma as a film-maker – we screened her Portrait of a Lady on Fire last year. But in Petite Maman’s case I’m afraid that it’s easy to miss how good this film is the first time you see it.
The first time I saw this film in a tiny arthouse cinema in Bath, it knocked me out. I turned to the person I was with, and said “Wasn’t that beautiful? I think that might be the best film I’ve seen this year.”
Given that it was Christmas Eve, that was a whole year’s worth of films. Which for me is a lot of films.
But they replied “Really? I was bored. What is it even about?”
At this point I’m contractually obliged to assure you that this unnamed person has impeccable taste. Luckily, they loved it the second time they saw it. But I know that you also have impeccable taste, and I’m scared you might have the same reaction to the film the first time you see it.
So I’m going to tell you some of the things I love about the film before we watch it.
Of course, you don’t have to agree with me – I just hope you do.
I think the best art is created in two phases – first it is built up, and then it is stripped back to its essence.
It’s like the famous quote attributed to Michealangelo about sculpture – “I just carve away every piece of unnecessary marble until the figure hidden inside emerges,” and Celine Sciamma – who to my mind is the best writer/director working in cinema at the moment – does exactly that with this film.
She carves away everything that is unnecessary until the story hidden inside emerges. That’s what lets her say so much in such a compact film, with no major eye-catching moments.
Let me give you a couple of examples, without (I hope) too many spoilers.
As I read her film, Sciamma wants to talk about the shared wisdom and insight between child and parent. Of how easy it is to forget that wisdom can be shared. That it can cut both ways, even between and child and their parent. Mothers forget that they were once eight years old, and eight-year-olds can’t imagine that their mother was ever eight.
In short, this is a film about the complexity of a relationship between mother and daughter.
To tell this story Sciamma uses a typical science fiction device, which will become clear very early in the film.
But where most filmmakers would feel the need to explain that device with magic amulets, lightning and thunder, and hidden portals to swirling time tunnels – thus making the film all about the special effects and the magical world on the other side of the portal – she wants to ground her film in the here and now, a world that is both magical and very real.
So she just leaves all that science fiction guff out. She trusts us to understand that it is only a device, with no real value. What really matters is what that device allows her to explore.
In the current world of filmmaking that’s a bold choice – especially as it’s an invisible bold choice.
She also completely bypasses the endless fad for what I call trauma porn – stretching out a character’s pain over an entire story so the audience can all voyeuristically dig around in the character’s emotional guts. Actors love these kinds of films, because the Oscars love these kinds of films.
But Sciamma isn’t telling a story about abuse and trauma, she’s telling a story about how some pain is inevitable in even the happiest life – and then exploring how we might deal with it.
Petite Maman is not a film about someone whose pain has been eating away inside them for decades. It’s a film about how we deal with and accept pain as it’s happening.
In short, it’s not a film about emotional sickness, it’s a film about emotional health.
The final reason I love this film is its deep but unforced empathy with all the characters.
To go back to my original comparison, neither Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon exhibit the slightest understanding of their female characters. Or even any desire to do so. They’re much more interested in male power plays and posturing.
Sciamma, on the other hand, seems to be able to put herself in the shoes of every one of her characters – especially the children.
And that’s a rare gift for a filmmaker.
I hope you love this as much as I do.
November 2023 - Loving
[Play excerpt from documentary.]
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."].
That voice you heard was US District Court Judge Leon Bazile in Virginia in1959, in the first ruling in the famous case which is the subject of tonight’s film.
And the two people you saw were Richard and Mildred Loving, the subjects of that case.
Before I go any further, I’d like to acknowledge that recent events challenge any moral superiority or complacency we in Australia might feel on similar issues.
And I’d like to acknowledge that we are watching this film on the lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal nation, and acknowledge their connection to and care of these lands and waters, and their long tradition of storytelling.
Virginia, like many southern states in the United States, had anti-miscegenation clauses in the Constitution. Typically they read something like this clause from Alabama’s Constitution:
"The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro."
And typically those clauses were supported by the ‘not one drop’ doctrine, which legislated that any mixed-race person counted as black – ironically, as recent DNA testing has shown that, thanks to the ‘side benefits’ many white slaveholders asserted over the years, many supposedly ‘white people’, especially in the South, have a significant portion of negro genetic heritage.
Alabama was the last American state to repeal the anti-miscegenation clause in their Constitution – in the year 2000!
And even then over 40% of the population of Alabama voted against the repeal of that clause. Since 30% of Alabama’s population was officially black, it probably means that 2/3rds of the white population voted against it.
Or should I say that 2/3rds of the officially white population…?
Fortunately, this vote was entirely symbolic, thanks to the events depicted in tonight’s film.
There’s a long history of films that use real events to take a stand against racial injustice, including:
Selma
Fruitvale Station
12 Years a Slave
Just Mercy
When They See Us
Hidden Figures
Malcolm X
A United Kingdom
And in Australia
Chant Of Jimmy Blacksmith and Rabbitproof Fence.
All excellent films, and I recommend all of these, if you haven’t already seen them.
And of course, there are also the films that take what we might call ‘the alternate view’, among them:
Birth Of a Nation
Gone With the Wind
Mandingo
So, given the range of excellent films dealing with this subject, why did I choose Loving?
The first is that, unlike so many of the films I listed before, this film contains no rousing calls to arms by heroic figures, and no big action sequences pitting the forces for good against the forces of darkness.
I used to be an actor. I love a big showy performance portraying a historically significant figure in service to a good cause.
But I responded to this film in a different way, maybe even a deeper way, because it’s about a heroic relationship between two people who are – on the face of it – as far from overtly heroic as can be imagined.
In a very quiet way this film captures the ways that the law can impact on the day-to-day lives of people who are not setting out to challenge and confront the law, and not seeking to draw others to their cause.
And it uses two beautifully shaped and realised performances to do it.
The Lovings were a quiet couple living in an isolated rural part of Virginia, who didn’t want to bother anyone, who just wanted to get on with living their lives together to the fullest, in familiar places, surrounded by family and friends.
Richard and Mildred are people who express themselves much more through what they do than what they say. Most of the time Richard is reticent to the point of inarticulateness. The writer/director Jeff Nichols deals with this by taking great care to place them into their world. The world the film creates has substance and detail, and we see them constantly working with their hands in that world.
They might not say much, but they are connected to their world, their children, and each other.
That then allows him, and the actors, to convey their relationship through what is unsaid. So much of the power of this film comes from what is shared between Richard and Midred through shared silence, touches and glances. There are no big expressions of affection, public or private, and yet we understand that this couple have a deep and solid marriage.
And none of this would carry any power without the performances by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga – which is my second reason for choosing the film.
Joel is of course Australian, and Ruth Negga is Ethiopian/Irish, but for me their performances not only capture, but illuminate this very rural southern American couple, and their relationship.
Ruth Negga’s performance was slightly more acclaimed, in part I think because Mildred is the more articulate character, with more access to her emotions, and she gradually moves to the centre of the film. But, perhaps because I’m a man, I really respond to Richard’s dilemma.
He was the one that wanted to get married. To make a public statement of their commitment to each other. He was the one that knows that this is risky, and they need to travel to Washington to accomplish it. He was the one that put his marriage certificate up on the wall of their bedroom, like a talisman protecting them.
And then he is the one that must wrestle with the growing realisation that perhaps the kindest thing he can do for the wife and family he loves is get out of their life. A dilemma he can barely articulate to himself, let alone share with anyone else.
I don’t want to spoil your experience by saying any more about the film before we see it.
So – here it is. Loving.
October 2023 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
[NOTE – To avoid spoilers, on the night I saved the sections in italics until the discussion after the film .To make sense as a stand-alone document, I’ve moved them back into this document.]
In the late 1990s a friend of the French Belgian conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth had a boyfriend who treated her terribly, and then finally broke up with her catastrophically. Pierre asked her whether it would be better if he had never been part of her life, she replied I’d like to wipe every trace of him from my memory.
That conversation prompted Pierre to conceive of a piece of conceptual art – he would send official looking letters to friends and acquaintances telling them that a friend of theirs had decided to erase every trace of them from their memory. He never carried out this project, but he did talk about with his friend from art school, Michel Gondry.
By now Michel had become one of the most famous video clip directors in the world. Along with Spike Jonze and David Fincher, he was a leading light in the new guard of video clip directors, replacing the old exotic locations and billowing curtains school typified by the Australian director Russell Mulcahey. Theirs was a much more art school approach, favouring whimsy, intellectual concepts and a hand-made aesthetic over the old-fashioned bombast and spectacle.
If, in the late 90s or early noughties, you were inclined to arrive home at 4 AM hung over and hungry, and slump on the couch eating cornflakes and watching Rage on the ABC, you could have hardly avoided their work.
Gondry’s work in particular had an unmistakable style; marrying art school conceptual playfulness with a French new wave influenced commitment to low-tech filmmaking. His video clips typically have a highly designed but low-tech handmade aesthetic.
To demonstrate what I mean I’m going to show you a short film clip he made of a fairly obscure song by an even more obscure band – Cibbo Matto was formed by two Japanese expatriates going to art school in New York, and chiefly wrote songs about food.
[Screen Cibbo Matto – Sugar Water video clip.]
Gondry also made the clip for our Kylie’s song Come into My World, and if you remember that you’ll see the lineage.
And similarly when we watch Eternal Sunshine – there are clear aesthetic similarities.
For me there are a couple of other more obscure cinematic antecedents to his style.
The first is John Carpenter’s 1974 film Dark Star, which basically invented grunge sci-fi – the idea that perhaps the future looked more like a teenage boy’s bedroom than a cross between an operating theatre and the cockpit of an airliner.
I also think that there is another – largely unacknowledged – link between the French new wave cinema and Gondry in the work of director Alain Resnais. Although Resnais is not commonly regarded in the pantheon of directors from the new wave, he was enormously influential within that circle.
His most famous films were Hiroshima Mon Amor, which used a fractured narrative to argue that it was impossible to speak intelligently about horrors like Hiroshima, all one could do was speak about the impossibility of speaking about those horrors; Last Year at Marienbad, where two men and a woman staying at an exotic hotel discuss what happened during an encounter they may or may not have shared and may or may not have happened at the same hotel exactly a year ago; and his only English-language film Providence, about a dying novelist trying to write his last novel and struggling with the boundaries between his constructed fiction and his fractured memories.
In the late 90s all three of those video clip directors – Fincher, Jonze and Gondry – made the transition into directing feature films. Two of them – Gondry and Jonze – did so in collaboration with another slightly strange distinctly non-Hollywood rising star of cinema – the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann. Together they became the new nerds of cinema.
I’m being both sarcastic and sincere in saying that Kaufmann had a meteoric rise. After graduating from the screenwriting course at NYU in 1983, Kaufmann spent the next decade fruitlessly generating and submitting comedy sketches, TV episodes and feature film scripts and receiving multiple polite and not so polite brush-offs.
Then in 1994, a script that he had written fell into the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, whose daughter Sophia was then briefly married to Spike Jonze (real name Adam Spiegel), whom she had met while starring as a gymnast in his video clip for the Chemical Brothers song Electrobank.
That script – Being John Malkovich – got nominated for an Oscar and won the BAFTA. Over the next decade Kauffman scripted Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A pretty good run.
Which brings us back to Michel Gondry. He and Bismuth had turned his abandoned art project into a series of short written sketches, and Gondry took these to Kaufmann. Together they turned the idea into a pitch document which, somewhat to their surprise, generated a bidding war, and was eventually bought for more than $1 million by Propaganda Films.
However, Kaufmann struggled to turn the ideas into a coherent story, and moved their project on the backburner while he put most of his energies into those other films I mentioned – including Gondry’s first feature – Human Nature.
And then, in 2000, Chris Nolan’s film Memento came out. Gondry and Kaufmann were shattered, decided that their idea had been gazumped and their project wasn’t viable anymore, and tried to persuade Propaganda Films to abandon the project.
They refused, and the rest is history.
I think this wonderful film works on many levels, and I don’t want to pre-empt your response to it by talking about its meaning too much before we see the film.
I just want to talk about some aspects of the filmmaking, and then pose a question to you.
Some information first.
Lacuna – the name of the company that offers the mind-erasing treatment – means gap or absence. As in “thanks to spring, my sinuses are far from being a lacuna.”
The ever-changing colour of Clementine’s hair signifies the four seasons – not literally but metaphorically: green is the colour of spring – the first blossoming of the relationship; red is the heat of the honeymoon period; orange is the colour of the dying leaves of the relationship; and blue the winter of the relationship.
This is important because – like the video clip I showed – the timeline in this film runs in both directions simultaneously – it goes backwards into memory as it goes forward in real-time.
As far as possible, the special effects in the film are ‘natural’ – by which I mean captured at the time on the spot, not shot against a green screen and created in a computer later.
There are literally hundreds of them, so I’m not going to go through them all. Some are very complex, some of them are as simple as having Carrey change his hat and coat while he walks behind the camera so he can appear twice in the same shot, or putting a trapdoor in a set so an actor can disappear and reappear from behind the camera, or building the set of Joel’s friend’s house inside a much larger set of Barnes and Noble and have him simply walk from one into the other with a lighting change. Others are as straightforward as running the film backwards – as in the video clip I showed you.
And then there’s the incredibly complicated multi-layered sequence where Joel, in his car, pursues (a one-legged!) Clementine down a street at night, and then runs up and down a block of shops in search of her, as the shops lose their contents and signs.
The main thing is that Gondry and Kaufmann believed that people connect more truthfully to something that seems handmade than something that seems slick and industrial. So, even when they did use CGI, they took care to make it look handmade – such as in the street scene, or scene at Grand Central Station where all the other people disappear.
And I agree with them. See what you think.
I also want to talk about subplots and their function.
Most films have one or more subplots running alongside the main plot. Sometimes they’re just there to give the central character a bit more depth – the ruthless corporate lawyer also cares for their aging dementing and nasty father.
Sometimes they’re for comic relief (probably not that one).
In a well written script they also add to the meaning of the film. Sometimes they actually carry the meaning, as writers often put the real meaning of their script into a subplot to avoid being too “on the nose.”
In The Social Network (incidentally directed by David Fincher) the subplot between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica (played by Rooney Mara) only has three beats, but it not only provides the impetus for Zuckerberg’s actions, it also completely carries the meaning of the script.
[BEAT 1 – she drops him for being a dick, so he creates Facebook in an outburst of puerile adolescent revenge; BEAT 2 – after he has become uber-successful, she meets him in a nightclub with a woman hanging off each arm, and points out that, despite his overt success, he’s still the same dick; BEAT 3 – he reaches out to her.]
That’s not quite what happens in Eternal Sunshine. In this film Kaufmann uses the subplot to add depth to his thesis by creating an antithesis. He uses the subplot – the relationship between Mary and Dr Mierzwick – to create a contrasting meaning that does two things.
The first is that it makes the opposite argument to the main plot’s argument. So while the main plot is making the argument that pain is necessary to growth; the subplot is making the argument that pain stunts and traps us.
Together plot and subplot ask the question: “Is suffering inevitable, perhaps even necessary?”
The subplot – and in the particular the consequences of the subplot, when Mary gives everybody back the tapes of their initial consultation – also takes away the obviousness of the ending, allowing us (or me at least) to see the ending as bittersweet but hopeful, not neat and saccharine.
It’s a beautiful piece of plotting that Joel and Clementine listen to Clementine’s list of everything that drives Clementine mad about Joel together in the car, and later both Joel and Clementine listen to Joel’s list of everything that he hates (and loves) about Clementine together in his apartment.
Which means that, when Joel reaches out to Clementine in the last scene of the film, we read it as more hopeful than deluded.
By the way, it’s worth reminding ourselves that, as writers, we tend to look at speeches like this as written to be said, and need to remind ourselves that they are written to be heard.
See if you agree with me, because that connects to a question I think we should discuss after we see the film.
The last three words of the film are “Okay?” “Okay..?”and “Okay.”
How do you interpret that ending? Okay?
September 2, 2023: Michael Clayton
Two months ago I screened A Simple Plan – a film about a decent man sliding step by tiny step down the slippery slope to devastation.
Tonight I’m screening MICHAEL CLAYTON – a film about a man who went down that slope a long time ago, and is now treading water in the puddle at the bottom of the slope.
He’s trapped in the gap between who he once was, and who he has let himself become. And while he fools himself that at heart he hasn’t really compromised himself, that beneath the surface he’s still the honourable man he once was, and the other is just a useful mask he wears, in truth the mask has attached itself to his face, and he doesn’t know how to get it off anymore.
I think of him like a beautiful mallard swimming around in the dark waters at the bottom of a well – beautiful plumage, an air of grace, power and confidence. But underneath the water his feet are going a million miles an hour, and he can’t escape. The walls are too steep and slippery to climb with his feet, and he can’t use his wings to fly out because the walls are too close, and he can’t get the run up he needs.
And now, here come the hunters.
One of the wonderful things about this film is the way that it marries form and content.
Remember how I talked about Michael’s beautiful plumage? This film is about the corruption hidden under the surface, and one of the many metaphors it uses is physical appearance, and specifically the idea of using clothing and appearances to hide what is underneath.
For example, the key inciting incident that kicks this story into action very specifically connects the idea of truth and nakedness.
And when we see Michael Clayton back with his family, and the friends and colleagues where he came from, one of the things that makes him stand out from the ordinary working-class people around him is his classy expensive corporate uniform.
Sadly, for those of you who wouldn’t mind a bit of naked George Clooney, while his uniform takes a battering at times, it never comes off completely.
But there’s an even more specific example – twice we see Tilda Swinton getting dressed for a meeting while she practices what she’s going to say at that meeting – she’s putting on the uniform while she practises the corporate-speak she’s going to use to cover up the truth.
There are multiple other visual metaphors: two others you might look out for are Tom Wilkinson’s mad wander through New York in the middle of the film – using framing that includes crowds of ordinary people, and of international flags, to say that this story is not just about high-flying corporate power games, but about ordinary people all over the world.
And finally: around the climax of the film Michael has to make a crucial choice, and we see him literally holding one option in one hand, and the other option in the other hand.
But I think the greatest marriage between form and content comes in the way we’re given the pieces of the story.
This is a story about power below the surface, and the gap between appearance and reality. Michael constantly thinks that he knows what’s going on, but then finds out that there’s more to the story. Time after time he finds out something new that turns his picture of the world upside down.
And the same thing is happening to us as the viewer – we are constantly trying to work out what’s going on. And not just because of the use of shadows and framing to hide and obscure crucial information in the images, but also the order we (and he) get the information.
This is not a film that spoon-feeds us the story – just like Michael, we’re going to have to work to keep on top of what’s going on.
Thousands of years ago Aristotle described this process. He called it Anagnorisis, and if you’re ever looking to impress your cinephile friends, just drop it into the post-screening conversation.
‘Do you think the writer properly set up the moment of anagnorisis just before the 2nd act turning point?’ (Just practice using it – you’ll never have to explain what you mean.)
So, what is Anagnorisis?
It’s when a key piece of information turns the world on its head – for either the character, the audience – or more usually, both.
If you saw Shoplifters at Film Club last month, that story depends on a growing anagnorisis – we begin to realise that what we are watching is not an actual family as we define families, but an artificial family forged together from the circumstances.
What of course leads us to ask, ‘What exactly is a normal functional family?’
But that example is slightly unusual, for two reasons.
The first is that it’s a dawning realisation, not a sudden shift.
The second is that only the audience has the anagnorisis – the characters already have that information.
Anagnorisis is more usually like the big moment at the end of The Sixth Sense, where Olivia Williams, Bruce Willis’s wife, drops the wedding ring and both we and he realise that Bruce is already dead, and rather than being the boy’s psychiatrist helping him deal with seeing dead people, is in fact one of those dead people.
You see them everywhere in films. The Statue of Liberty in Planet of The Apes (incidentally, not in the book on which it was based). The Stepford Wives.
If you’ve seen Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, the climax is built around a moment of anagnorisis, when Daniel Kaluuya discovers all the photos of Alison Williams with her previous black ‘lovers’, and he realises that, rather than being loved and protected, he has been lured into great danger.
Shakespeare was fond of Anagnorisis. Think Macbeth: ‘Till Burnham wood to High Dunsinane shall come…’ Never going to happen, right?
Or the other promise by the witches, that ‘No man of woman born…’ will be a threat to Macbeth — which he thinks is about the word ‘woman’ but is in fact about the word ‘born’ – and here comes MacDuff, who was delivered by caesarean rather than being born naturally.
Or Othello – how Iago uses Desdemona’s handkerchief to persuade Othello that his wife is deceiving him…
This is a kind of reverse Anagnorisis – instead of discovering the truth, Othello is persuaded of a lie. But it works the same way. It reverses the way Othello perceives the world, so that he interprets every subsequent sign of love, trust and affection from Desdemona as just more proof of her guilt and perfidy.
Until the end, after he has killed her and finally realises the real truth – that Iago has deceived him all along, causing Othello to destroy the thing he values most. Another moment of anagnorisis.
Michael Clayton’s story is structured around the use of anagnorisis, including a very satisfying moment for Tilda Swinton right at the end. Watch out for it.
August 5, 2023: Shoplifters
Tonight I’m screening one of my favourite films of the last decade, Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters.
It’s a film of great subtlety, and while I normally spend some of my introduction talking about the tools that the filmmaker used to create the film I’m screening, in this case it’d be hard to do that without giving away too much of the content, so I’m going to hold back on that a little tonight.
Instead, a little about the filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-Eda.
Although he is Japanese and principally makes Japanese films, Kore-eda was born in Taiwan, where his parents went so they could get married. Japanese people used to be forbidden from marrying someone with the same surname, and as his parents shared their surname, even though they were unrelated they had to leave Japan to get married, and didn’t return until he was a teenager.
Although I’d be speculating, I find it easy to imagine how this might have fed into his two great themes – the invisible outsiders in society, and family.
If you enjoy tonight’s film I can strongly recommend previous films like I Wish, Like Father Like Son and Nobody Knows. He’s a consummate filmmaker, and the heir to two great filmmakers: the Japanese master of understatement Yasujiro Ozu – probably best known for Tokyo Story; and the English master of working-class agitprop, Ken Loach.
But he’s much less polemic than Loach. Unlike Loach, Kore-Eda doesn’t drift into melodrama, doesn’t overtly set out to persuade you of anything, and doesn’t judge the worthiness of his characters. Unlike Loach, who has become more and more inclined to preaching (in my opinion), Kore-Eda asks questions instead of making statements. And he gives each of his characters their due respect and understanding, even the ones with power.
Like Loach he’s concerned with the underclasses of society, and with questions of fairness. But he does it in a much subtler way – in a way that for me pays more respect to his characters, and more respect to my ability to understand and empathise. He trusts the humanity of his audience, and his characters, much more than Loach does.
His films contain no obvious big moments. The big moments in his films are almost invisible, like strong currents flowing under the steady stream of everyday life. There are no bravura performances – just deeply understood characters going about their day-to-day lives. There are no big camera movements or swelling music cues.
Almost always the camera just sits at or near eye-level, in the middle of their life, a quiet witness to the events. It doesn’t comment, and it doesn’t judge. It’s just present. Paying attention.
He simply says ‘Look at these people as fellow humans. Understand their situation. Understand their choices, actions and feelings. How can you not see how much like you they are, no matter how different they seem?’
There is a deep and accumulating emotional and philosophical power to his films that I always respond to.
I hope you do too.
July 2023: WILD TALES
Tonight we have a six course degustation menu from Argentina, via Spain. WILD TALES is a compendium film of 6 short films connected by a common theme or premise. It was written by Damián Szifron with Germán Servidio, directed by Damián Szifron – both Argentinian. It was made in Argentina with Argentinian actors and locations, but a large part of the funding came from the production company of the Almodovar Brothers in Spain.
But before I talk about WILD TALES, I need to go back 40 years in Australian cinematic history, to George Miller.
No, not the George Miller who directed The Man From Snowy River, and was ever after known as George ‘Horses’ Miller in the business to distinguish him from George ‘Cars’ Miller, who made Mad Max in 1979, and was to my knowledge the first Australian director to directly apply Joseph Campbell’s seminal book on narrative structure, ‘The Hero’s Journey’ to the script structure of his screenplay.
George, who graduated and practiced for a while as a medical doctor, always was a swot.
Joseph Campbell based his book on extensive analysis of stories common across many cultures (the book was originally called ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’) and was more observational than proscriptive. Basically it said that, if you extract the essence of seminal stories across many cultures you can find a series of common events occurring in a set order.
But Hollywood – and American – culture being what it is, his initial work was reshaped and reclaimed by two more men (and sorry – this story, unlike the film, is almost exclusively about men): Robert McKee and Christopher Vogler.
Robert McKee parlayed his book STORY into a handful of lectures which he travelled around the world delivering to aspiring scriptwriters – a thousand people in one room all having paid hundreds of dollars to hear a word for word repetition of one of his famous lectures, no interruptions allowed, and public humiliation for anyone who asked a question he considered beneath him.
Brian Cox warmed up for playing Logan Roy in Succession by playing Robert McKee in Adaption.
Then a Hollywood story exec called Christopher Vogler got in on the act with his book The Writer’s Journey, which sought to create an analogous connection between the journey of a writer creating a script, and the journey of their protagonist in the script. A bit more gentle on writers, with fewer insults.
What they were all working from was something like this – seventeen steps called things like THE ROAD OF TRIALS, THE APPEARANCE OF THE GUIDE, ENTERING THE DRAGON’S DEN and so on.
Incidentally, I stole this version from the website of the Royal Society of Account Planning – which just shows how pervasive this approach has become.
But what inevitably happened was that Observation became Proscription, and before you knew it, every script conference in Hollywood became about whether your script followed the rules. It became perfectly possible to have conversations and notes about your script that you were expected to take seriously, and included the following:
• Does scene 34 take us right into the Belly of the Whale?
• I don’t think the Magical Mentor is enough of a Shape Shifter
• Is [character name] Woman as Goddess, or Woman as Temptress?
• I can’t help feeling that he spills the Elixir on the Return from the Cave.
In short, in order for your screenplay to overcome a series of obstacles to be made, your story had to fit a template about a single individual overcoming a series of obstacles in order to reach their destined place in the world.
To be fair, although it’s easy to sneer, these can actually be useful notes if you understand the language and the metaphors. They can be useful tools – my objection is more to the approach becoming formulaic and compulsory.
And – returning to The Royal Society of Account Planning – these ideas went well beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe and impinged across society. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these ideas fitted perfectly alongside the rise of Neoliberalism in Western politics.
But WILD TALES has no single protagonist going on a journey of learning and discovery, so it can’t fit that model. In fact, we never even meet the protagonist of the first story.
Instead, WILD TALES harks back to a now-forgotten narrative theorist who preceded the Hero’s Journey – Lajos Egri, and his book The Art of Dramatic Writing.
The essence of Egri’s approach to dramatic writing is this:
• Drama starts from a premise that makes an assertion about human behaviour and society. Ruthless ambition leads to self-destruction (Macbeth)
• Drama is driven by character, not events. While there is the ebb and flow of dramatic tension, with climaxes and resolutions, there is no defined list of events.
• Characters are driven by a compulsive need to assert their importance, to make themselves the centre of their universe and assert their control over it.
• Characters don’t change, they simply modify their behaviour according to the pushback they get.
• Story arises from the interaction between characters, just as Society is shaped by interaction between our drives. This is how story connects with what we are saying about society.
• Premise is argued through a structure of Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.
As an enormous generalisation, all the ‘Woods’ – Holly, Bolly and Nolly – are dominated by the approach of Campbell and his acolytes, and most other cinema cultures are more like Egri.
Szifrin said that WILD TALES arose from his attempt to write a screenplay to explore a particular premise – but he felt that none of his ideas were right for a full feature – so he turned them into a series of short chapters that explored the premise in different ways.
Let’s look at WILD TALES and see if we agree that it reflects this approach.
And if so, what is it about? What idea is the film is exploring? And can you fit the structure of Thesis – Synthesis – Antithesis to a film that is 6 separate stories?
June 3, 2023: A Simple Plan
When I’m deciding what films to screen, I’m looking for three things:
1. A film that I think is underrated or overlooked.
2. A film that has something interesting for us to talk about.
3. A film that gives me something interesting to talk about when I introduce the film.
Tonight’s film, A Simple Plan, fulfils all three criteria.
It’s a film that was highly rated by the critics when it came out, but then largely disappeared without a trace – so much so that I had real trouble getting a copy to screen.
I think its biggest problem is that it came out the year after the Coen Brothers masterpiece, Fargo, and superficially is very similar – though it’s tonally very different.
Ironically, but for a twist of fate, it would have come out before Fargo.
The novel on which it is based came out in 1993, and Mike Nichols had already bought the rights from the proofs. (Incidentally, there is some evidence that the Coen Brothers also read the novel before they wrote Fargo.)
Without boring you with all the details, the project then fell into what is known in Hollywood as development hell, with two different studios and three different directors lined up to direct it – Ben Stiller, John Dahl, and John Boorman. For various reasons, each of them withdrew, or were not able to finance it.
Eventually Sam Raimi, who up to that time was mostly known for horror/slasher movies like the Evil Dead franchise, was attached to it, and it was funded by a conglomerate of mostly European broadcasters and mini-studios.
Like the antagonists in a typical Sam Raimi Film, A SIMPLE PLAN simply refused to die.
One of the reasons I really like this film is that I think it gets the balance between plot, character, tone and texture just about perfectly.
People talk about plot-driven films vs character-driven films – either senseless action movies with shoot outs and car chases, bombs and blondes; or boring dialogue-driven domestic misery – but actually it is possible to make a film with a strong plot that is driven entirely by the characters and their world – it’s just very hard to do.
Getting that balance right depends a lot on understanding the difference between documenting reality and writing fiction. Which itself depends on who we think is in charge of the story.
In a piece of fictional cinema, we know that the writer and director have almost complete control over the story. We know that they can make anything at all happen. So when something shocking or powerful happens, unless it feels part of the story, we begin to ask ourselves whether it feels truthful, or we whether we are being manipulated by the storytellers.
We may go along with the meaning if we already agree with it – if we are part of the choir that the film is preaching to – but otherwise we resist. We withdraw our willingness to suspend disbelief, and disconnect from the story.
But when a film is based on reality, whether it’s a classic documentary, or some fictionalised version of reality, we are more willing to accept that life is in control of the story, not the filmmaker. If we think that what we are seeing is a true story (whatever that is), we are more willing to accept that illogical and unexpected events are just a reflection of the random unfairness of life, and to focus on the character’s responses rather than the filmmaker’s nefariousness.
Because of this difference in how we respond to what we believe to be real, and what we believe to be fiction, when we watch a piece of fiction, there’s a kind of implicit contract between the filmmaker and the audience.
I want to lay out what that contract is, and then ask you whether you think this film keeps that contract.
I believe that all serious (and many quite unserious) films fall into one of two camps: they are either challenging the audience with a serious philosophical, political or psychological question; or they are making a serious philosophical, psychological or political statement, and challenging you to disagree.
For example, they are either asking ‘Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?’ or they are stating that ‘It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and I’m going to show you why.’
For a film to really engage and satisfy us, we need to feel that it needs to ask a question at the beginning, and deliver us an answer at the end – even if that answer is ‘there is no answer.’
And we need to feel that it has everything necessary to the story, and nothing unnecessary to the story.
In practice, that means two things: the story must be both coherent and complete.
Coherence means that when we get to the end of the film, there is nothing significant in the story and the resolution of the story that wasn’t there from the beginning of the story.
If the cavalry is going to come charging over the hill, we need to have sent out a scout to fetch them in the first act, even if we come to believe that he has failed.
To be coherent the film can (and must) introduce the key characters and the situation before the story proper kicks into action, but once it does, the rules of the world can’t change, and the film shouldn’t introduce any new significant characters, or reveal anything new about its characters – unless we recognise in retrospect that they were always there, waiting to emerge.
You are allowed to mislead the audience – the rules can turn out to be the reverse of what we thought they were, and characters can turn out to be the opposite of how we and the other characters read them – as long as our response is ‘Oh, of course!’, not ‘What the …!’
Completeness means that, when we get to the end, we have to feel that the film hasn’t fudged the question it’s asking or the statement it’s making by leaving any inconvenient truths out. We have to feel that it has dealt with all sides of the central question or statement; that the filmmaker hasn’t put their thumb on the scales to help their cause.
Of course, they almost certainly will have put their thumb on the scales, that’s the nature of storytelling and storytellers. But we have to feel that they haven’t.
Often incompleteness in storytelling only becomes clear over time – which is why there is such a thing as a revisionist Western. And why some films stand the test of time, and others don’t – films that become classics have something to say about humanity that transcends the blind spots of their time.
So, what do you think this film is saying or asking?
And did it cheat to get there? Is everything about the ending there, in embryonic form, at the beginning?
For me, this film is a classic. Is it for you?
May 6, 2023: All that Heaven Allows
Hello everybody, and thanks for dragging yourself away from kneeling by your couch to swear the oath of allegiance in front of the TV (it was the night of the Coronation).
Tonight, I want to show you what may well be the first-ever ‘Midday Movie’ – quite literally if you look at the very first frame of the film.
The film we are going to see tonight – ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS – is a superior example of what used to be known as a ‘woman’s weepy.’ But before I talk about what makes it, in my mind, a superior example, to properly enjoy this film we’re going to need to put aside our 21st-century cynicism for 90 minutes.
Because, although Douglas Sirk, who used his success with Magnificent Obsession the year before to persuade Universal to give him more money and more freedom to make ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and then used the film to smuggle in all sorts of what would have been seen at the time as subversive ideas, on the surface the film is what it appears to be – a lush romantic melodrama.
Before we talk about some of the tools that Sirk and his accomplices used, we should look at the sociopolitical context in which the film was made.
It was a decade since the end of the Second World War. The war had turned America into an industrial powerhouse, but without suffering any of the widespread destruction of the European participants. In short, America had become very wealthy, and the subsequent Korean War in the early 50s simply made it even wealthier, at the trivial cost of the lives of a mere 130,000 working-class American men.
Eisenhower’s suspicions of the growing military industrial complex were prescient.
This increase in wealth enabled a vast expansion of the American white middle-class, built around creating distinct men’s worlds and women’s worlds. As anybody who has seen the wonderful film Rosie The Riveter knows, during the war women took over all sorts of roles that were previously the sole province of men. They took over factories. They drove trucks. They built warships and tanks and bombers. They then flew those bombers across America, and later across the Atlantic, to deliver them to the frontline fighting Air Force.
But after the war there was a very strong push to return women to their previous role as homemakers, subservient to the needs and lives of men. Ironically, the rapid increase in wealth meant that a middle-class white woman’s life became even less genuinely meaningful than her grandmother’s life.
A crucial part of this push was the creation of suburbia. Before the war the vast majority of people lived in one of three places: the big cities; regional cities; and rural areas.
And the vast majority of films made in this era were either set in the dark dangerous cities, where your fellow man (or woman) was the constant danger (like all those film noirs made immediately after the war); or the harsh challenging pseudo-frontier, like Giant or East of Eden, where it was man against the world.
In Hollywood, the big films of 1955 and 1956 were On The Waterfront, East of Eden, Rear Window, Rebel Without A Cause, and The Man With The Golden Arm – all films that had strong female parts, but were told from a male point of view. Incidentally, although ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is now considered one of the great Hollywood studio films, with daring and bold use of colour cinematography and production design, it didn’t receive a single Oscar nomination when it was released.
But back to suburbia, and the rise of the American middle class.
All this new wealth, along with the incredible expansion in the American car industry, created a whole new middle-class world that sat between city and country, often on the outskirts of the big city, where the men could go daily to work in the big city where all the real power was held and the real work was done, and women could live in their gilded cages and tend their gardens, waiting for their husbands and children to bring a modicum of life back to them.
In this ideal middle-class world, even the tasks that might have given those middle-class wives some kind of meaning and satisfaction were delegated to maids and gardeners – often black, though this film avoids that question.
But this paradise was not to be questioned. ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS was made at the height of the Cold War. The Korean War had just ended in a stalemate. The Rosenbergs had just been executed for treason, and McCarthyism was rampant. To question this heaven on earth was tantamount to treason.
The other key societal change that is visible in the film is the rise of television. Television had started seriously in the United States in 1941, and by the early 1950s was considered the dominant media force in the country. Along with an estate car, every serious middle-class home had a television, and had rearranged the furniture in the lounge room to face the television instead of the fireplace.
Television was Hollywood’s major threat in the 1950s and forced major change in Hollywood. One of those changes was the rise of the Suburban Picture Palace, and the creation of films designed specifically to be seen by women at midday screenings, before they retreated to the country club for a couple of stiff gins while they waited for their husbands to come home from work and the attentive support of their unmarried secretarial work wives.
Television may have insinuated itself into the home, but movies had colour, big screens, big stars and powerful sound systems, and they made the most of them.
Few took more advantage of these strengths than Douglas Sirk, who at a time when serious movies were still being made in black-and-white, and colour was seen as a somewhat feminine affectation, used his background in philosophy and fine arts to add a whole level of meaning beneath the surface of the romantic melodramas he was contracted to make.
Douglas Sirk was Danish, and had originally trained in law, philosophy and fine arts, but then moved to Berlin to direct theatre, including the second ever production of Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, before becoming a film director at the famous UFA studios.
Then, with the rise of Nazism, like many of his fellow filmmakers he fled to Hollywood, where he was soon recognised as one of the most intellectual film makers at a time when success as a director often seem to depend more on performative masculinity than anything else.
He came to specialise in women’s movies at a time when women’s movies were funded because they were profitable, but not given any credibility. (Does anything ever change?)
After a long period of making middle-of-the-road B films, in 1954 he had a big hit with Magnificent Obsession, which persuaded Universal to give him a big budget and carte blanche to make his next movie – for which he chose the novel All That Heaven Allows, and then worked with screenwriter Peggy Fenwick to turn its 460 pages into a workable 90 minutes.
He then put together a terrific crew, centred on pioneering colour cinematographer Russell Metty and actress Jane Wyman, who had recently divorced Ronald Reagan. Reagan subsequently changed his politics along with his wife; when he was married to the left-wing Jane Wyman he was a left-wing union leader, after he married another failed actor in Nancy Robbins, he took on her values, became increasingly right wing, and moved into politics.
Together Sirk’s team made a film that questioned everything about the world that it was set in – not only using direct references in the script (which I suspect we’ll find a little bit heavy-handed – remember that many of these ideas were new and unfamiliar when the film was made), but also using what the film industry somewhat pretentiously calls the mise-en-scene.
In essence, that means building visual metaphors into the way the film is shot to imply meaning. I’m going to save the discussion of that for what you notice but I’m going to suggest some things to look out for:
1. Colour – in clothes and how we present ourselves.
2. Colour – in light – especially the contrast when exterior light spills into the interior.
3. Light and shadow.
4. Home – a haven or a cage?
5. The seasons and nature
6. Mirrors and reflections – what is real, what is a façade?
7. Windows – are they barriers to the outside world, or openings to the outside world?
8. Implied cages and prisons.
There’s also a famous, and slightly heavy-handed, visual metaphor involving a reflection in a TV screen at the end of the film.
Now let’s stop there, look at the actual film, and see what we see.
April 1, 2023: THE MISSION - Music
For most of us, music has a direct connection to our emotions. And since films are in the business of creating structured emotional experiences, music was part of cinema even before movies had sound.
During the so-called silent era any self-respecting major theatre had a Wurlitzer organ rising out of the floor, or even their own small orchestra, either playing written scores, or more often, classical excerpts or popular tunes of the day selected and fitted to the film by the organist or orchestra leader.
There’s a long tradition of using music to enhance a film, and I’m sure most of us have favourite pieces of film music, where the music, the story, the characters and the images came together to create a piece of magic, that has stayed with us ever since.
But some pieces of music seem to be able to detach themselves from the film and take on a life of their own, even though they were originally written to be part of a whole cinematic experience.
Ennio Morricone’s music for The Mission, along with Maurice Jarre’s music for Doctor Zhivago and John Williams’ music for Star Wars, are prime examples.
And yet there are other wonderful scores that only a musician would notice, and certainly have no life outside the film in which they are embedded.
What’s the difference between these scores? Does it matter that the music to The Mission seems to have a life separate from its connection to the film? Does that somehow mean that it’s not ‘real’ film music?
For me these questions connect to two fundamental ideas about how cinema works.
One is about two different ways of structuring story, and I’ll come to that later.
The other is a larger question about art itself, and that is the question ‘Should the creator’s hand be visible in any artwork?’
Our response to art is like a triangle – there is always a three-way conversation between the creator, the created work, and the audience.
But how equal are the legs of the triangle? Is the primary relationship between the creator and the audience, or the completed work and the audience? How visible is the creator? How visible should the creator be?
Do we want to be aware of watching an actor at work, and admiring their skill, or do we want to be giving ourselves over to the character that they are creating?
And when we watch a film should it seem like a self-contained story that is almost telling itself, or should we be aware of the tools the writer and director are using, and the meaning they are trying to convey? Can the puppeteer make us look at the puppets, not them? Or are you Darren Aronovksy shouting ‘Look at moi, look at moi!’
To be very ‘meta’ here, I want to focus on the relationship between the creator and their work in order to argue the opposite – that the primary relationship should be between the work and the audience.
Once it was thought that the job of a creator was to create a work that reflected the needs and world view of the commissioner, not the artist. The artist’s job was to accept the commission, finish the work, deliver it, collect their pay, and leave through the tradesman’s entrance, thank you.
This was also pretty much Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn’s idea of how the movie business should work.
Then along came another idea, that the real ownership of a work depended on the unique relationship between creator and work – which means that the true owner of a work was and remained the original creator, not the interim physical owner. In cinema this gave rise to arguments about who had final cut, and to prime creators like writers, directors, and actors having a share in the success of a film.
On the whole I think this change is progress. But to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘I would say that, wouldn’t I?’
However, the further consequences of that way of looking at things are, in my mind, mixed. Because it’s only a couple of short steps from the argument that a creator’s ownership of the work rests in their unique relationship with the content and form of the work, to the argument that creators must therefore make themselves visible in their work, and that attempting to hide yourself beneath the surface of the work is tantamount to deception and cowardice.
To do anything other than stand beside your work is to hide behind your work and fail to take responsibility for how the work reflects your experience, your prejudices, and your worldview. Where once it an observation that an artist was inevitably present in their work, it became their duty to be visibly present in their work.
All art is both of the world and about the world, so this is a tension I can live with.
But I struggle with the next stage of this argument, which at its most extreme asserts that, since the uniqueness of a creator’s work largely lies in the way the work reflects the artist, a creator is only allowed to reflect and explore their direct identity and experience, that to do anything else is to appropriate other people’s owned experience.
In this view, since Morricone’s musical experience was a combination of playing trumpet in a big band, formal education in avant garde composition, and vast experience in producing and arranging pop music, what right does he have to incorporate native musical forms and instruments into his score for THE MISSION?
To be blunt, I think this notion, and its equivalents in writing, directing and acting are a dangerous dead end.
But that’s not what I want to explore. I want to explore the dichotomy between film scores that are designed to be hidden and subliminal, and scores that are designed to draw attention to themselves.
This dichotomy is very closely related to another dichotomy about the way narrative is constructed, and we can see both very clearly in THE MISSION.
To explain what I mean, I need to talk briefly about very early piece of film theory called the Kuleshov effect.
The original footage no longer exists, so we’re going by contemporary and later accounts, which vary somewhat.
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker and theoretician of the 1910 and 1920s.
He conducted an experiment to do with montage theory (the creation of meaning by juxtaposition) by making a number of different 3 shot sequences, showing them to different audiences, and asking them what they saw and understood. He constructed the sequences by repurposing footage of a wardrobe test of Russian matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine, and intercutting it with various other shots.
The shots he (supposedly) inserted for shot 2 were:
1. A bowl of soup on a table,
2. Children playing,
3. A young woman opening a door and smiling,
4. The body of an old woman in a coffin.
Each sequence ended up looking like this:
SHOT 1: Mosjoukine looking at floor, then looks up and stares at the camera impassively.
SHOT 2: INSERT SHOT from list above – bowl of soup OR children playing etc.
SHOT 3: [Continuation of SHOT 1] Mosjoukine staring at the camera impassively.
The audience raved about the subtlety of Mosjoukine’s acting (and even by the standards of the day Mosjoukine wasn’t a subtle actor). They lauded:
1. the hunger he felt looking at the bowl of soup,
2. the joy he took in his children playing,
3. the love/lust he displayed in response to his wife/lover opening the door to him,
4. and the sorrow he felt looking at his dead mother.
But the shots of Mosjoukine were all the same shot. So, what’s happening?
Two things. Firstly the audience joins the shots into a continuous narrative: Mosjoukine looks up, sees [INSERT], cut back to see what he feels about what he sees.
But the actor is not actually showing them any reaction, he is simply waiting for the cameraman to say ‘That’s enough – cut!’ The actor has left an empty space where the audience expects to see his reaction, so each audience member rushes into that emotional gap and lends the actor their own feelings.
This idea that meaning is created by juxtaposition and context – essentially not saying ‘look, here’s a 4’, but rather saying ‘look, here’s a 2, and over here is another 2, what do you think?’ applies to all good filmmaking.
It particularly applies to the subliminal use of music in film.
This experiment was done in the silent era. But what if we added music? Would it be possible to change how the audience interprets the scene by adding music?
Of course we can. As long as the actor gives us a connected blank slate, then we could use music to flip the last sequence to make it seem that the dead woman was a mortal enemy, and what he feels is a kind of cold triumph.
Or we could go one step further in complexity in the third sequence by implying, firstly, that the beautiful young woman opening the door is not to be trusted, and then, secondly, that Mosjoukine is either aware of this, but hiding it, or the opposite – that he is naively unaware that she is not to be trusted.
Music used in this way is designed to be subliminal. The composer’s hand needs to be invisible so that we can attach the meaning implied by the music to the character’s thoughts and feelings.
This kind of music often appears very simple – there’s no melody to catch your ear, just a couple of held chords. It’s doing all its work with placement, change, harmony (or disharmony), tone and timbre. What matters is where the sound starts, where it changes, and what the sound itself makes you feel.
In this case the music is all about the character’s feelings and thoughts and it’s often associated with a kind of storytelling that is concerned with a single person’s journey – what is usually called The Hero’s Journey – made famous by Joseph Campbell and his acolytes.
But a film like THE MISSION comes from a different tradition. Like all Robert Bolt scripts (and he wrote Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, among others), they come from an older tradition of storytelling – what you might call ‘The Relentless March of History’ school of storytelling, that derives from Aristotle via Lajos Egri.
The core difference is between stories that are structured around the journey of a single character, through which moral and philosophical questions can be explored; and stories that are structured directly around philosophical and moral questions, using character archetypes to represent different sides of the arguments.
This is not a strictly binary division – most films sit somewhere along a continuum, though usually more at one end or the other. So, THE MISSION does include a stripped back hero’s journey in the character of Mendoza, played by Robert De Niro, but it is much more the second kind of film, and the music reflects that.
In a hero’s journey movie, the music either tends to represent the hidden inner thoughts and feelings of the characters – especially the central character - or represent what we are being asked to feel - the triumphant moment, the sad moment and so on.
In an ‘ideas movie’ the music tends to represent the different aspects of the arguments.
There is generally much less music in the second kind of film – after all, how much of the film can be taken up with philosophical and moral arguments? – but the music is much more noticeable, because it’s actually trying to say something. It’s not trying to subliminally represent the constantly changing thoughts and feelings of the characters, or to trigger our own emotional responses; it’s trying to explicitly represent ideas.
But how can music, clearly the most abstract of all art forms, represent anything except itself?
Here’s one framework through which we can look at the music in THE MISSION.
We’re all familiar with the geometric idea that three-dimensional space can be represented by charts drawn on three axes – the X, the Y and the Z. The music in THE MISSION also works on three axes, but they’re not physical axes.
The first axis is between heaven and earth.
The second axis is between two cultures: the indigenous native culture – the dwellers in the world – and the invading technologically dominant European culture.
And the third axis is between the individual and the communal.
All of these dichotomies are quite explicit in the script, as well as being implicit in the action.
As just one example, the film quite explicitly asks the question ‘What should the church do when it discovers paradise on earth?’
And I think there are many clues that we should regard the Falls themselves as representing the journey between earth and heaven.
Finally the film quite explicitly demands of Mendoza that he subjugate his individual conscience and will to the communal conscience and will of the church, and then has him reverse that decision to the native community.
The music in THE MISSION is underlining the various philosophical and moral arguments by its placement on these three axes, and its movement from one position to another.
Sometimes, for instance, the music is purely native, and sometimes purely European. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between. Or sets them against each other.
Often it starts in one place, and moves to another, as the centre of the argument shifts.
For example, Gabriel’s theme is initially played as a solo on the oboe – an individual playing a very European instrument – then later is played on pan flutes – a very native instrument – but within a larger piece of communal music.
The music has shifted on two of the axes: European to native; and individual to communal.
These shifts happen all through the film in many different combinations and directions, and I encourage you to take note as you watch.
As well, because music is both scarcer and more noticeable in an ideas movie, its absence comes to mean something too. Like the use of negative space in visual art, absence of music can mean as much as the music does.
One very noticeable example in THE MISSION is the presence of music when Father Gabriel is first climbing the falls, and then the complete absence once he is alone in the jungle at the top of the falls.
CAVEATS
Now, before we watch the film, I have a few caveats.
The writer and/or director made some very strange choices about the use of language and accents. All Europeans in the story, whatever language they would actually speak in the story, speak English, in a random variety of accents. All natives speak their own language, which are never subtitled, even when there are Europeans present who understand them.
This is connected to the next problem (for me). The natives (technically the Guarana people, although they are played by a different Columbian tribe) are generally not well represented in this film – they are largely tokens. None of them are properly realised characters.
This is partly because this kind of filmmaking turns all characters into archetypes and characters, but it’s also partly because the argument that Robert Bolt is making in the script doesn’t give them any agency in the story, or really take into account what agency they do have.
The question of the film is not about how they should behave, it’s about how the European invaders should behave. Which has the unfortunate byproduct of turning the natives into archetypal ‘victim/noble savages’ in the storytelling.
Finally, the script sanitises the history of the Jesuits in South America considerably in order to clarify its arguments.
I would like to think that we would do better on all three fronts these days.
But I also remind myself that future generations are likely to look back on anything we made and find equivalent faults – which makes me more forgiving of those flaws – we all live and learn, and I think we should extend to others the understanding that we would like to have extended to us.
Which, in a way, is what the film is about.
March 4, 2023: Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The writer/director/producer John Hughes was married to the same woman from 1970 until 2009, when he dropped dead from a heart attack on a New York street, walking from their hotel to visit their son and meet his new grandchild.
During his career he worked in New York in advertising, and in Hollywood, in film making, but despised both ‘industry towns’ and always had his family home in Chicago.
We can see all these things reflected in his 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
The film was a success at the box office, despite most critics damning it with faint praise. Comedies never get any respect.
But I think this film is much cleverer than many of the films those critics loved in 1987, and there are three key concepts built into the film that I want to point out and discuss afterwards.
GENRE
The first is the idea that genre can contain big ideas.
It’s all too easy to dismiss genre films as lazy formulaic film-making – because sadly, they often are. But genre is just the box the story comes in. It’s what’s in the box that matters.
Genre can be used as a package to contain stories that examine complex psychological and social questions in easily digestible ways without drawing attention to the fact they are doing so. One of the great advantages of genre is that, at its best, it works on two levels. You can enjoy it on a surface level, but you can also respond to its deeper levels.
In my view PLANES, TRAINS and AUTOMOBILES – which was dismissed as ‘just another John Hughes comedy’ – does exactly this. To make that argument I need to talk about Transactional Analysis, and about Theory of Comedy.
TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS
In the mid to late 1960s, everybody who was interested in self-understanding and self-improvement (which was basically everybody) was reading Eric Berne’s book ‘The Games People Play’, or Thomas Harris’s follow up, ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’, and talking about Transactional Analysis, a reworking of Freud by Eric Berne.
To vastly oversimplify Transactional Analysis (TA in future), it essentially argued that Freud focussed too much on the isolated individual (driven by dreams and desires but constrained by trauma and taboo). Instead, TA focused on relationships and ‘transactions’, defined as an exchange of ‘strokes’, which could be either very simple of incredibly complex, and either comforting or punishing.
We still hear ‘strokes’ being used in the same way half a century later.
TA also replaced Freud’s somewhat esoteric concepts of id, ego and super-ego with more relatable characters – the Child, the Parent and the Adult.
The key characteristics of TA’s ‘characters’ are:
1. CHILD – depending on the security of their upbringing: either open, curious, spontaneous and playful; or vulnerable, needy, fearful and impulsively resistant.
2. PARENT – also has two faces, depending on how parenting was modelled to them as children: either caring, nurturing, attentive, and thoughtful; or critical, controlling, fearful of failure, judgemental, and harsh.
3. ADULT – no division. Rational and reasonable, living in the moment. Making judgements about how to respond based on the situation, not on ingrained habits.
In effect there are 5 different roles – two each for CHILD and PARENT – and in any interaction either party can take any of those roles. The interaction with the least emotional content, and the least risk of going off the rails, is Adult-Adult. Some other combinations are positive, some negative.
Destructive transactions tend to be driven by past experience and trauma, and are mutually reinforcing. If, for some reason I move into a negative aspect of my role in a transaction, the other person tends to move into the matching negative position.
The most destructive transactions are between the negative aspects of PARENT and CHILD.
For example, trying to teach my teenager to drive, (not something I’d recommend) I may start in the NURTURING PARENT role, which would invite my teenager to respond as the FREE CHILD – open, curious, confident and playful.
But teenagers don’t like feeling like they’re children, and learning to drive is an inherently stressful situation. So any single moment of stress may move both of us into a much less productive transaction, with me as the CRITICAL/CONTROLLING PARENT, and my teenager responding as the fearful, angry and hyper-resistant ADAPTED CHILD.
To link back to Freud, Transactional Analysis also posits that all those habitual INTERACTIONS also reflect UNRESOLVED INNER RELATIONSHIPS – that each of us carries within ourselves our own versions of the CHILD, THE PARENT and the ADULT, and at times of stress not only do we tend to revert to our habitual positions in our relationships with others, we also revert to them in our inner conflicts.
For example, the open curious CHILD within us misreads a social situation and is shamed by the other person (shame being the key negative tool for maintaining social status). Even after that moment has passed, our inner struggle continues. Either the NURTURING PARENT within us responds with support and reassurance; the CRITICAL PARENT with criticism and punishment; or the ADULT with calm reasonableness.
Stories often externalise this structure by splitting the central character into two separate characters, each taking on one aspect of the inner struggle, but bound together by circumstances. This is why, in a classic melodrama, the protagonist and the antagonist should be as like each other as possible – except for the one key difference that defines their conflict. They are, in a narrative sense, two versions of the same person.
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES explores masculinity in competitive corporate America by tying two salesmen – the very personification of capitalism, as Arthur Miller knew – together on a long journey. Steve Martin plays a high-status high-achieving perfectionist working in advertising, and John Candy a travelling salesman dependent on his friendly and trusting relationships with customers.
Separately, they get by. Forced to travel together they are toxic – Martin becomes the CONTROLLING CRITICAL PARENT, and Candy’s instinctive FREE CHILD is battered into submission – until finally they reconfigure as a part of a functioning family.
There is both a physical journey and a psychological journey.
THEORY OF COMEDY
In my business you often hear people claim that ‘you can’t analyse comedy – it’s either funny or it’s not funny.’ Or ‘Even if you could analyse comedy, you shouldn’t, because it will just ruin the fun.’
I believe that we can understand what underpins comedy, and if we do, we can also make better comedies. And I believe that consciously or not, John Hughes understand comedy.
It all has to do with the question ‘What is There to be Afraid of?’
To explain this, I want to start with tickling, and with roller coasters.
What do tickling and roller coasters have to do with comedy? They are both clear expressions of the core tension that drives comedy – the clash between threat and safety.
We can’t be tickled by someone we don’t trust, and typically tickling occurs in situations where we are seeking to solidify trust with someone else (whether we are the tickler or the tickled).
It’s not an accident that one of our autonomic (that means instinctive and automatic) responses to threat is to pull our arms in to our sides. We feel a visceral vulnerability in our lower ribcage, even though it’s many generations since we were at imminent risk of being killed by animal predators. At a primal, subconscious level we feel threatened and vulnerable when our ribs are attacked.
So tickling is viscerally threatening, at a level beyond our conscious control. But we can also feel emotionally safe, as long as we really trust the person tickling us.
It’s the cognitive dissonance of simultaneous threat and safety that makes us giggle.
That same contradiction applies to roller coasters. To get the thrill from a roller coaster, our conscious mind has to be completely certain that it’s safe, while our subconscious mind has to be terrified. We have to feel both at the same time or we won’t dare each other into buying the ticket. Ideally we should feel both very scared, and very safe.
But threat isn’t only physical. Social hazards can be even more threatening. TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES has both, and I’ll explore a couple of examples later.
Sometimes threat and safety ride side by side, but more often one is more prominent at first, and then the other asserts itself through a twist.
When we tell a joke, we use a twist. Sometimes the story starts dangerously, then folds over to be safe. ‘Dirty’ stories often work this way – they start ‘dangerous’, inviting us to think taboo thoughts, then become innocent.
But most jokes work the other way around. Here’s a joke for people my age, which creates tension through mild threat, then twists to a deeper threat/fear.
An elderly couple go in to see their doctor for their annual checkup. The wife sends her husband in first, whispering to the doctor ‘I’m getting worried about his memory.’
So while the doctor sets up to measure his blood pressure, he asks some casual questions.
“What have you been up to Fred? Are you getting out? Keeping yourself active?”
“Oh yes,” says Fred. “We had dinner at a new Chinese restaurant just the other day.”
“Uhuh.” says the doctor, unwrapping the blood pressure cuff. “Which restaurant?”
“Ahh…. Um. I’ll get it, it’s – Um, um – (clicks his fingers) – name of a flower…?”
“Lotus? The Golden Lotus?”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “Thorns. Um, Valentine’s Day…”
“Ah. Rose?”
“Rose! That’s it.”
He gets up and opens the door to the waiting room.
“Rose? What was the name of that Chinese restaurant we went to?”
There’s something worse than getting old, there’s getting old and getting dementia.
In a successful comedy, the feeling of threat is almost always in our subconscious – coming from the pre-conscious ‘lizard’ parts of the brain; while the feeling of safety that wrestles with that fear comes from our conscious mind. It’s the rational ADULT arguing with the fearful CHILD that allows for something to be comedic, not tragic.
Incidentally, this is a problem with CGI stunts – they can convince our conscious ADULT mind that they’re ‘real’, but our subconscious inner CHILD is more sensitive to kinetic hazard, and isn’t convinced. But that’s the wrong way round. For us to respond viscerally to the danger of the stunt, our conscious mind must be comfortable that it’s not real, and our subconscious mind terrified that it is real.
It's also a problem with the move into computer generated character animation. We find it easier to respond emotionally to non-realistic representation of characters than hyper-real representations, because hyper-real representations fall into what’s known as the uncanny valley, where they are realistic enough to convince our conscious mind, but not realistic enough to convince our much more sensitive unconscious mind.
But in most comedies, it’s not just our physical safety that is under threat. It’s only in slapstick comedies that the threats are mostly physical.
It’s only in slapstick comedies that the threats are mostly physical. In most contemporary comedies the real threat is psychological or sociological. Social ostracization, loss of status, shame and embarrassment are as threatening to our sense of safety as a charging lion would be. And they are much more common.
The key threat in PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES is the damage that law of the jungle show-no-weakness devil-take-the-hindmost masculinity is doing to men. Almost all the comedy in PTA focusses on that threat.
In other words, the film is unified by a theme – and for me the presence of a coherent theme is the difference between a story with jokes and a comedy.
Watch the film and see if you agree with me.
You might also want to notice the way the ‘set-piece sequences’ in the film relate to the theme. If you’re not sure what a ‘set-piece sequence’ is, here are three of them:
1. Getting a cab in New York the night before Thanksgiving (and for those of you who play ‘Six degrees of Keven Bacon’ watch out for another link).
2. Sharing a motel room and a bed.
3. Going the wrong way down the freeway.
What are each of them saying about masculinity, and the threats a man might feel in the contemporary world?
NOTES for discussion –
1. The three set-pieces relate to three aspects of male fear – loss of status, emotional vulnerability, and physical danger.
2. With such a controlling punishing PARENT, is it a wonder that on the few occasions Neal’s (Steve Martin) vulnerable fearful CHILD comes out of hiding, it’s with the tantrum of the oppressed and powerless?
3. Think about the people shouting ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ when they’re driving on the freeway. Would that scene say the same thing if it was just a man doing the shouting? Or just a woman?
4. Incidentally, is there a better metaphor for masculinity in the 1980’s than driving the wrong way down a three-lane freeway, convinced that everybody else is wrong?
Finally, could you make this film about women? Are there equivalent visceral fears for women?
Perhaps ‘Bridesmaids’ and the need to be perfect?
December 2022 – AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
Kay Pollak, the Swedish writer/director of tonight’s film, has had a most unusual career.
He wrote everything he directed and directed everything he wrote, starting with a 7-part TV series made in the early 70s when he was in his early 30s. Over the next 15 years he made 3 features – all about teenagers escaping the constraints of adults and hypocritical adult society.
Then he got married, did a PhD in statistics and became a maths academic. 18 years later, in 2004, he wrote and directed AS IT IS IN HEAVEN – the film we are going to see (and hear) tonight.
Despite the success of the film, culminating in a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars (losing out to The Sea Inside), he then went another 11 years before making his last film.
I chose tonight’s film because my wife Sophie – who is very wise in these matters – told me that I need to screen an uplifting film for the last film of the year. And this is an uplifting film – but not in an obvious Hollywood happy ending way.
If you like a film that will give you a good cry, this is it.
That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? ‘A good cry’
Those of you who are doing my screenwriting workshops will know that I am very interested in the power of contradiction. Lots of films are built on contradiction. Some even have contradictions in their titles: Fatal Attraction; Steel Magnolias; Eyes Wide Shut; Dead Man Walking; Intimate Strangers; Slumdog Millionaire; Back to the Future…
I’m sure you can add a few more.
So, what’s a ‘good cry’, besides being another meaningful contradiction?
2,400 years ago, Aristotle invented the technical term for a good cry in his theory of drama. He called it catharsis, and in his view, catharsis was the whole point of drama.
Aristotle was Plato’s student, but he fundamentally disagreed with Plato’s view of theatre. Plato looked at Theatre as pure entertainment – pablum for the masses – that distracted them from the task of living better lives through the rigorous application of cold-hearted logic.
Aristotle had a much more holistic and humanistic view of theatre. Rather than distracting us from our task of living better lives, he believed theatre was essential to our ability to do so.
He saw theatre and drama as a communal religious ritual, like a Requiem Mass or Diana’s funeral or a Grand Final is to many people now – it’s a time to join together with your community in a magnificent building specially created for one purpose -- to generate communal awe through partaking in a mutually understood ritual that joined two contradictory things: on one hand our individual insignificance, and on the other, our ability to imagine and create noble and honourable aspirations that are greater than us.
And by joining those two things together, theatre would purge each of us of pride and hubris, and make us more able to live a humble but noble life in our community.
He wanted us to recognise in our heart of hearts that we are not pure, but we aspire to purity; that all of us are flawed, selfish and venal, but that we aspire and respond to the most noble ideas. The humble nobility of knowing that we are both gods and miserable creatures of the dirt.
In order for drama to achieve this, he believed that there were four necessary ingredients in drama.
Last session we focussed on one of those four crucial ingredients: the willing suspension of disbelief as seen in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show.
This week I want to talk briefly about another ingredient – catharsis. But first I have to revisit the willing suspension of disbelief, because catharsis is built on it. Willing suspension of disbelief is crucial, even in films like AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, which unlike The Truman Show, is set in what seems to be a real world, with real characters living real lives, and not pretending to be someone else.
So, what is the willing suspension of disbelief, and why is it important for us to willingly suspend disbelief?
The willing suspension of disbelief is our commitment to, for the moment at least, invest in something that we simultaneously understand to be both true and fake as if it is the truth. You might say that that sounds a lot like religion – I couldn’t possibly comment.
Anytime someone leans in and whispers ‘You’re not going to believe what I’ve heard…’ you are about to willingly suspend disbelief.
It’s generally more subtle than that in a film – most of the time. Perhaps not so much in fantasies like The Truman Show or Star Wars or anything in the Marvel Universe – but definitely in realistic dramas like tonight’s film.
In realistic dramas like AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, willing suspension of disbelief, tragedy and catharsis go together like a horse and carriage. And the way they go together is built on subconscious contradiction.
Let me explain what I mean by asking a rhetorical question: Can we be successfully tickled by someone we don’t trust deeply?
No we can’t – because the cathartic release of laughter when we are tickled depends on a primal contradiction at a subconscious level. To be successfully tickled we must simultaneously feel deeply threatened – having our ribs and stomach attacked is threatening on a very visceral level – and at the same time feel deeply safe and loved.
Unless you have both things – the threat and the safety – it doesn’t work. And the more you have of both, the better it works.
Similarly, we laugh when the house falls on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr, because he unwittingly pauses for a moment exactly where the open upstairs window falls – the only safe place. Our intellect tells us that this stunt must have been planned to the inch; our gut tells us that he was in terrible danger. Both are true. That contradiction makes us laugh.
Laughter is the catharsis of comedy, and laughter is built on the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously experiencing threat and safety. Sometimes that danger is physical, like the physical stunts of Keaton and Harold Lloyd. More often these days the danger comes from social taboos being challenged.
We’ll talk more about comedic catharis when we watch the John Hughes comic masterpiece Trains, Planes and Automobiles next year, which touches on both kinds of threat – physical danger and social taboos.
But laughter not the only kind of catharsis, or the only kind of disbelief we suspend – especially if the film has tragic elements.
Imagine we have a story in which two lovers who have cruelly been separated for years are finally on their way to reunite – but five minutes from the rendezvous one of the lovers is killed by a drunk running a red light. That’s tragic, right?
Fate has stepped in to demonstrate that our highest dreams can be snatched from our gasp by the toss of a coin. If the rest of the film has done its job and got us to invest in the lovers’ thwarted hopes and dreams, then we will feel that tragedy viscerally. We will weep for our lovers’ loss as if one of them had actually died.
Now imagine that the stuntman driving the lover’s car was killed doing the stunt that ‘kills’ the character, and it’s all over the evening news. Would you be able to include that shot in the film? After all, including it doesn’t change anything. The stuntman is dead, whether you include the shot or not.
I wouldn’t do it, and I doubt any studio, no matter how venal, would.
Not only because it’s the wrong thing to do morally – but because the audience would no longer be able to suspend disbelief. Instead of giving ourselves over to the lover’s fake death and feeling real emotions; we would have to think about the stuntman’s real death. We would feel real emotions, but they wouldn’t be cathartic. The bond between us and the character would be broken and we wouldn’t cry for either the character, or ourselves.
Catharsis needs tragedy that feels both real, and unreal. That we can believe in, and at the same time not believe in – for us to respond with real emotions we need to understand that the events we are responding to are fake, but close enough to reality that we can choose to act as if they are real.
So, even though a film like AS IT IS IN HEAVEN is much more ‘realistic’ than The Truman Show, our enjoyment of it is just as dependent our willingness to suspend disbelief, and on the filmmaker’s skill in creating events and sequences that sit on the boundary between real and fake. Events that persuade one part of us, and not another. That let us think about both the characters and ourselves simultaneously and unconsciously.
So, let’s watch the film, and afterwards we can talk about whether you were willing to be persuaded. Whether you had a good cry.
November 2022 – THE TRUMAN SHOW
In 1989 The Twilight Zone aired an episode called Special Service.
In 2022 – in fact in two weeks’ time – Australian director Peter Weir will receive a Lifetime Achievement Honorary Oscar as ‘a director of consummate skill and artistry whose work reminds us of the power of film to reveal the full range of human experience,’ and whose films WITNESS, GREEN CARD, DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY, THE TRUMAN SHOW and MASTER AND COMMANDER were all nominated for Oscars.
THE TRUMAN SHOW is the film that connects those two moments thirty-three years apart.
Andrew Niccol, the writer of THE TRUMAN SHOW, acknowledges that he first got the idea for the TRUMAN SHOW from that Twilight Zone episode – in which an ordinary Joe called John Sellick accidentally discovers that his house is full of hidden cameras and he and his wife are the unwitting stars of the nation’s highest rating domestic sitcom.
Sellick’s reaction to that discovery ruins the show, and eventually ends it. At first Sellick is grateful that he is no longer spied on and talked about behind his back. But then he discovers how famous he had become through the show, and how much his character was loved by ordinary people, and he wants it all back. But it’s too late.
Incidentally, as you may know from Woody Allen’s film, a Zelig (or Sellick) is a chameleon-like person who takes on the attributes of those around him, and so fits in everywhere.
When Niccol wrote the first draft of THE TRUMAN SHOW he was in London, having escaped New Zealand to work as a director in the world of English commercials. During the 1990s he moved to Hollywood to try and break into features, carrying two feature film scripts in his briefcase – THE TRUMAN SHOW, and Gattaca.
He managed to interest up-and-coming Producer Scott Rudin in his script for THE TRUMAN SHOW, which was at the time a science fiction thriller/satire on consumerism – remember he came from advertising. But then, much to the disappointment of Niccol, who had hoped to direct it himself, Rudin hired Brian de Palma to direct it.
Whoa! Can you imagine THE TRUMAN SHOW directed by de Palma?
But they needed a big star to carry the film, which at the time had a budget of $80m – enormous in those days for non-action film.
So they signed up Jim Carrey, who was coming off a series of gigantic comedy hits – Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber & Batman Forever, but who, like all comedians, wanted to be taken seriously as an actor.
It’s not clear exactly what happened then, but de Palma left and Peter Weir came aboard. My suspicion is that it was because Weir was perceived as someone who could turn genre/comedy actors like Harrison Ford and Robin Williams into Oscar nominees, while de Palma is famous for ignoring actors while he focuses on camera moves – when he wasn’t shouting at them or screwing them.
In any case, that move significantly changed the film, which went through another 11 drafts with Weir and Niccol working together, to eventually become the film we are about to see – much more symbolic, allegorical, and emotional – all the things that Peter does so well.
Ironically that whole process took so long that Niccol got to make and finish Gattaca as a director/writer in the meantime.
Scott Rudin was an important part of this process. Rudin was a casting director who moved into producing, focusing on making what you might call ‘movies for intelligent adults.’
THE TRUMAN SHOW wasn’t Rudin’s first film, but it was his first film to make a mark.
He has since produced 11 films that have been nominated for Best Picture Oscar, sadly not including THE TRUMAN SHOW, which was only nominated for Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, & Best Screenplay at the 1999 Academy Awards – which were Harvey Weinstein’s big awards – Shakespeare In Love cleaned up – Best Film, Best Leading Actress (Gwyneth ‘Vagina Candles’ Paltrow), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench, one scene), Best Screenplay (secretly script doctored by Tom Stoppard), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Designs etc etc.
At least Steven Spielberg got Best Director for Saving Private Ryan (or really for the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan), so there was a modicum of justice.
Back to our man Peter.
After graduating with a law degree from Sydney Uni, Peter Weir joined Film Australia when it was almost the only place in Australia you could get experience in filmmaking – initially as a camera assistant.
He fairly rapidly became a writer/director and made a bunch of films at Film Australia – mostly documentaries – but eventually struck out into feature films, in the very early days of the Australian film renaissance. Initially he made a series of local genre movies: Cars That Ate Paris; Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave.
Picnic in particular started to get him international recognition, which allowed him to move into more mainstream movies: Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously, which got him his first Hollywood film – Witness.
After the success of Witness he worked almost exclusively in the Hollywood system: The Mosquito Coast; Dead Poets Society; Green Card; Fearless; The Truman Show and Master And Commander.
There are far too many aspects of THE TRUMAN SHOW to cover in a brief introduction.
I could easily spend the whole session talking about things like the visibility of the director/narrator in a constructed reality; symbolism as a means of creating narrative meaning; diegetic and extra-diegetic forms of camera point of view – Whoa – what?!
Diegetic – film maker’s jargon for being part of the world of the film. If we’re watching an orchestra playing Faure’s Pavane for a Dead Princess on screen, the music is diegetic. The orchestra, and its performance, are part of the world of the film.
If we’re watching two lovers saying farewell at midnight on a rainy train station, and we’re hearing exactly the same performance of Faure while we’re watching them, the music is extra-diegetic.
In THE TRUMAN SHOW sometimes we are seeing what the audience for the TV show is seeing (diegetic camera), and sometimes we are seeing things they aren’t seeing (extra-diegetic camera). And sometimes it’s just confusing.
You can say the same thing about the performances: sometimes people are playing their character in THE TRUMAN SHOW, and sometimes they are playing themselves. Truman himself straddles both– just as Mowgli in The Jungle Book is bought up by wolves, and behaves as a wolf, Truman is bought up by soap opera actors, and often naturally behaves like a soap opera actor. In order for his performance to be real in his world, it has to be fake in our world.
I also want to encourage you to look out for the many examples of the use of symbolism to create a heightened shared meaning. A few of many possible examples include:
· The light that falls from the sky, and first alerts Truman to the falsity of his world, is labelled Sirius, which is the star that guides sailors on dark nights.
· The boat Truman escapes on has a bird’s beak as an unlikely prow – so that, at the climax, it can ‘crack the egg’ he has been confined to. Which itself points to another symbolism, that although Truman is technically an adult already, he only really escapes childhood at this point.
· Would it change the meaning of the film if he walked in the opposite direction at the end – i.e. right to left rather than left to right? And would that still be true in a culture that writes left to right, or top to bottom?
But for me the deepest achievement of Weir is to not only explore the willing suspension of disbelief in the film, but to turn the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief to his – and the film’s – advantage.
These days people are inclined to talk about THE TRUMAN SHOW’s prescience – especially how it seemed to predict the rise of reality TV. But what I respond to in THE TRUMAN SHOW is its unreality – how it got us to accept many implausible aspects of the story.
Not only accept – embrace. Weir gets us to willingly suspend disbelief, and then uses that to connect us deeply to the film.
‘Willing suspension of disbelief.’ What does that even mean?
It’s a phrase that has a long history.
Aristotle, writing when theatre was a kind of religious ritual, used the phrase to mean that, in order to achieve catharsis, the audience had to willingly accept that what they were seeing wasn’t real, but at the same time invest in it as if it was real.
Aristotle believed that the primary function of drama was catharsis, which for him had a very specific meaning to do with ritual cleansing of certain emotions in a spiritual way. We’re going to explore catharsis at later screenings.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that the willing suspension of disbelief and its accompanying catharsis was what separated poetry, which aspired to higher meaning, from prose, which he saw as earth-bound and constrained by reality.
Psychoanalysis shifted the meaning of catharsis again so that these days we more commonly think of catharsis as an emotional release that resolves unconscious embedded conflicts and trauma, disconnected from the ritual of drama and the willing suspension of disbelief
Cinema was at first trapped in Coleridge’s paradigm as a modern version of prose, limited to capturing realty, and unable to reach for greater truths, but soon escaped it.
When the Lumiere brothers first screened their movie of a train pulling into Ciotat, audiences supposedly dived from their seats out of fear. That film worked by persuading them they were confronted with a frightening reality.
Seven years later Georges Méliès was selling the idea that you could catch a rocket to the moon. With its right-hand cinema was selling the idea that what you were seeing was real, while with the left-hand it was selling the idea that cinema could make anything seem real.
Of all the narrative forms, cinema seems most tangible. Unlike theatre, which is clearly unreal, or a novel, which offers us words from which we create our own picture of the world and the people in that world, cinema seems to go out into the world and capture what is actually happening.
But it’s not as simple as that. Effective, and affective, cinema doesn’t depend on making things seem real, even if they are fanciful. As tangible as cinema often seems, great cinema does not move us by the reality of what it presents, but by the perceived underlying truthfulness, which may have nothing to do with its reality.
As a result, the greatest emotional and philosophical engagement often comes from audiences understanding at some level that what they are seeing is fake. If the film is telling them something they want to believe in, then a certain amount of artificiality deepens their engagement, if they buy into it.
When the film achieves this, the audience is not dependent on you to persuade them, they are willingly putting aside their reservations to invest emotionally. Implausibility, managed properly, can trigger greater emotional engagement than humdrum plausibility. People seem to be prepared to invest more deeply in a film that seems unreal on a rational level but connects to them on some underlying emotional truth, than they do in a film that is more cautiously real.
This is an idea that has been explored at great depth in the world of professional wrestling – what they call kayfabe - a constructed narrative supported by apparently real conflict.
Trump was a great fan of WWE, and sadly that idea that has infected politics as well – arguably both Trump and Brexit were triumphs of logically flawed but emotionally powerful narratives.
But for the moment let’s look at how this applies to THE TRUMAN SHOW – because I would argue that THE TRUMAN SHOW doesn’t actually make sense rationally, but it does make sense emotionally, and is more powerful for the distinction.
There are lots of examples of how it doesn’t make sense rationally – I’ll raise just three here. I’m sure you’ll occasionally be pulled out of the film by others.
The travel agency.
Why have a travel agency in the town?
The Truman show makes its money from product placement, so the agency is a possible location for advertising directed at the audience.
At the same time they have to actively discourage Truman from wanting to escape, so the travel agency is constantly persuading Truman that there’s no place like home, and the outside world is terrible and threatening. In a way the travel agency is the ‘fire and brimstone’ of the moral landscape of Sea Haven (See Heaven?)
But why have one at all? Truman doesn’t have to know that travel agencies exist in the outside world. Logically, wouldn’t it be easier for Cristof (symbolism again) to simply have no travel agency in his world?
Lauren on the beach
In the sequence with Lauren (Natasha McElhone) on the beach, which shots are between only us and the film-maker, and which shots are parts of the show that Cristof is broadcasting to the whole world?
And is it a kind of mistake that we can’t know which is which, or part of the storytelling design?
The obstacles to the escape
At one point Truman takes Meryl on a surprise road trip as a way to escape with her to the outside world. It’s a sad part of his delusion that he believes that Meryl will love him in that outside world.
That attempted escape is thwarted by an increasingly implausible series of obstacles. We find ourselves torn between buying into Truman’s naïve but admirable desire for freedom, and laughing at the unlikely obstacles. But is the increasing implausibility a weakness, or a deliberate part of the design?
It’s part of Weir’s skill that the growing implausibility actually increases our emotional connection to Truman and to the story. He does more than persuade us, he gets us to willing suspend our scepticism. We don’t just reluctantly overlook things that we find implausible, we willingly buy into a story that is built on implausibility.
This is an idea that I will explore further when we see As It Is In Heaven next month.
To go back to my piece of cinema jargon, in THE TRUMAN SHOW the willing suspension of disbelief is both diegetic and extra-diegetic. The inner world of the film is built on that notion – Truman wants to believe in his world and the people and relationships in it, and does so, even when it is apparent to us that they are fake.
At the same time, our response to the film is also built on wanting to believe in Truman’s journey, even when we know that aspects of the journey are implausible.
Who is living the fake life in THE TRUMAN SHOW? – the people who know that they are just actors living a fake and deceptive life but do it anyway because it pays their bills and gives them fame; or Truman, who unwittingly lives a sincere life that is exposed as fake?
And what does that mean for us? What human hopes and fears does the story of Truman tap into, that we are so willing to overlook its implausibilities?
(NOTE: - I mean in general, not asking for true personal confessions here.)
SOME THOUGHTS:
· Being ordinary vs being special
· ‘not fitting’ –how many people have wondered ‘Am I adopted?’
· Do the people around me – especially those closest to me – know something I don’t know? And are they in collusion to keep it from me?
October 2022: The Apartment
Samuel Wilder was born in June 1906, in what was part of the Astro-Hungarian empire and is now a part of southern Poland. His mother wanted him to be known as Billy, which he became. She also wanted him to become a lawyer – I guess one out of two ain’t bad.
He first made his living as a freelance journalist, racing around Vienna in a natty suit and hat, writing racy ‘slice of life’ stories and theatre reviews for the tabloids of Vienna, before he decamped to Berlin, wider pastures, and a thriving film business.
By 1933 he was an established screenwriter in the German film scene. But in the meantime, another Austrian had started to make his mark in Berlin – a man with a funny moustache and a declamatory speaking style. Being both Jewish and a realist, Wilder quickly decamped to Paris, and then, encouraged by friends such as Peter Lorre, to Hollywood.
His mother, grandmother and stepfather would all die in the Holocaust.
Once he got to Hollywood and taught himself English, Wilder began working with Ernst Lubitsch, who was both a mentor and a hero. Lubitsch – a great humanist who used humour to explore the flaws and self-deception in human behaviour – was an adherent of Jean Renoir’s aphorism – ‘To make comedy requires a cold eye and a warm heart’ – to which he added his own wonderful facility for using tiny moments to reveal deeper truths.
For the rest of his working life Wilder kept a sign on the wall of his writing studio reading “But what would Lubitsch do?’
Billy’s first big Hollywood success came on a Lubitsch film – he was nominated for the Oscar for best script for Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo and directed by Lubitsch.
Soon after, with Lubitsch’s encouragement, he started directing his own scripts. His third film as a director, Double Indemnity, a thriller co-written with Raymond Chandler and containing one of my favourite screen lines ‘You’re not very smart, are you? I like that in a man,’ was a box office smash and his next, The Lost Weekend, a film noir about alcoholism, landed the first of the six Oscars he would win during his career.
Shortly after that he began the two great partnerships that would last through the rest of his life – the writing partnership with I.A.L. ‘Izzy’ Diamond, and his marriage in 1949 to Audrey Young, an actress, which lasted until his death in 2002.
The decade following his marriage was a time of great success for Wilder, but a tumultuous time in America.
America went through McCarthyism, the Korean war, and the great recession of 1958. Ike Eisenhower – the last honourable Republican President, and the last Republican administration to be on the right side of the race question, was elected for the first of his two terms in 1952, and was coming to the end of his second term in 1960.
Russia launched Sputnik and scared the hell out of America’s technical and military confidence – though not for long. Pretty soon American culture doubled down on American Exceptionalism, and the unquestioned superiority of American corporate capitalism. Eisenhower famously extolled the power of his generals to keep the Russians in their place – particularly General Electric and General Motors.
Television became the dominant mass media, supplanting newspapers, radio and film.
At the same time, over on West 44th Street in New York a revolution in American screen acting was brewing, lead by Marlon Brando and the graduates of the Actors Studio.
On a more parochial level – though it was big news in Hollywood – in 1951 producer Walter Wanger discovered that his wife, Joan Bennett, was having an affair with her agent Jennings Lang. Their encounters were brief, but frequent. When Lang and Bennett weren't meeting clandestinely at vacation spots like New Orleans and the West Indies, they were back in L.A. enjoying weekday quickies at a Beverly Hills apartment temporarily vacated by one of Lang's underlings at the agency. When Wanger found proof of the affair, he did what any crazed cuckold would do: he accosted the couple outside Paramount studios and shot Lang in the balls in front of his wife.
Meanwhile, happily married Billy had an unparalleled string of successes. During that decade he produced, wrote and directed Sunset Boulevard, Ace In The Hole, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Love In The Afternoon, Witness For The Prosecution, and Some Like it Hot.
And then topped it all with THE APARTMENT, which was an enormous box office success, was nominated for 10 Oscars and won five, including Script, Direction and Best Film – giving Billy his 4th, 5th and 6th Oscars, thus becoming the first person to win all three for one film. And the Apartment became the last film shot in B&W to win Best Film until Schindler’s List in 1994. (Incidentally, at one point Billy was in line to direct that.)
All the things I mentioned above played into the script and film of THE APARTMENT.
Wilder had long wanted to make a film based on the sad little scene in the 1945 Coward/Lean film Brief Encounter – itself based on Coward’s unrequited (?) love of a married man – where the clandestine lovers arrange to borrow an apartment for their first assignation, which ends when the apartment’s owner returns unexpectedly – thus causing the woman to accept the impossibility of the situation and avoid the onscreen scandal of appearing to condone adultery – but the Hayes Code in Hollywood would never allow even that.
But by the late 50’s the threat of TV encouraged Hollywood to become bolder, and Wilder and Diamond joined Brief Encounter with the Wanger scandal to make a contemporary masterpiece that used comedy to skewer corporate capitalism and contemporary sexual politics. It was the ‘Me Too’ of its day. (Though it clearly wouldn’t be the ‘Me Too’ of today – things have changed since 1960, and though I think Wilder was probably on the right side of this issue, it was a different time.)
As Wilder wrote after the box office bomb that was Ace In The Hole, ‘If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make it funny, or they’ll kill you.’
There’s a lot to talk for us to discuss about the content of the film – but I want to draw attention to two not so obvious things in how the film is constructed.
The first is the use of symbols and symbolic moments, and what I call echoing repetition to draw the audience in by letting them feel that they are discovering things for themselves rather than being told them. Keys, mirrors, hats, cards gestures and catch phrases are all used to invite the audience to complete the story – and thus invest in the story.
Follow the story of the key to the executive bathroom to see what I mean.
The second is about the revolution is screen performances, and the notion of modernity on screen.
As a vast over-simplification there is always a tension in acting between the actor consciously shaping his or her performance to tell the story, and the actor seeking to discover and reveal the inner emotional life of the character, leaving the story to tell itself.
No actor does purely one or the other, but they tend to favour one over the other.
Before Brando, screen acting was dominated by the sort of performance that ‘told the story’, adjusted for the screen by keeping your performance small so it didn’t look like you were acting.
But during the 50s a much larger, more expressive form of acting became the new screen acting standard. Lead by Brando (who incidentally rejected the notion that he was a Method actor) and James Dean – not to mention Joanne Woodward, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden etc etc – the method (and the associated idea that acting was a calling, not a job) became the dominant form of modernism in screen acting for the twenty years following Brando’s electrifying turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951.
This started a trend in cinema that married performance style to social commentary – films such as On The Waterfront, Rebel Without A Cause, The Fugitive Kind, Hud, The Hustler and many others all reinforced the same connection:
Modern screen acting equals method acting equals emotional authenticity equals working class characters equals the dominance of the id.
In retrospect it’s easy to see that this was just a tiny bit self-righteous and patronising.
Billy Wilder only ever worked with one actor from the Studio, on The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like it Hot. You can work out for yourself who that was, though it might help if I told you that she married both America’s greatest baseball player, and its greatest playwright.
We can see what he thought of that actor in a cameo about 15 minutes into THE APARTMENT. Wilder later said of the experience that his doctor and psychiatrist had advised him that he was too old and too rich to ever have to do it again.
Instead, THE APARTMENT demonstrated a different paradigm for modern screen acting – which stands out even more because of the more old-fashioned acting that surrounds it.
I want to argue that – consciously or not – one of the performances in THE APARTMENT, in its own quiet way, established a different path for modernism in screen acting – and one of the things I’d like to talk about afterwards is how the mix of acting styles play into where the film succeeds, and perhaps doesn’t work so well.
To my mind Shirley McLaine created an alternate direction for modernism in screen performance as Miss Kubelik, while Jack Lemmon can’t help adding a little ‘look at me acting’ embellishment to many of his moments. Take that moment he clicks his heels as he exits to the kitchen. It’s as if he’s scared that if he doesn’t fill every moment the audience will turn their spotlight onto someone else on the screen.
McLaine, on the other hand, gives us a much simpler performance style. It’s heightened, and at times drifts into self-consciously cute, but most of the time she’s the most present person on screen, and the least mannerly. And when we remind ourselves that Miss Kubelik is also genuinely working class, it just points out how narrow many of the social presumptions that came along with method acting really were.