Double Exposure: Winter 2015

DOUBLE/EXPOSURE UNDERGRADUATE FILM JOURNAL COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ISSUE 8, WINTER 2015

FROM THE EDITORS

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF David Beal Max Nelson MANAGING EDITOR Will Noah CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Alex Robertson Matthew Rivera ART DIRECTOR Katy Nelson

BLOG EDITORS Nick Lieberman Maya Rosmarin COPY EDITOR James Boudreau PUBLICITY DIRECTORS Julia Selinger Amelie Lasker WEB MANAGER Caleb Oldham

COVER ILLUSTRATION by ZOË FLOOD TARDINO

DESIGN DESIGN FOR LIVING FOR (1933) LIVING (1933)

contents contents 1

1 CLOSING CLOSING TIME TIME

david beal david beal

the blues ofthethe blues hollywood of the hollywood bartender bartender

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9 SAPPHICSAPPHIC SISTERS SISTERS

alex robertson alex robertson

Cheryl Dunye, Cheryl history Dunye, andhistory the archive and the archive

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15A BRASSABAND BRASSATBAND A FUNERAL AT A FUNERAL

nick lieberman nick lieberman

Orson Welles Orson andWelles W.G. and Sebald’s W.G.anti-nostalgia Sebald’s anti-nostalgia

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23ELAINE MAY: ELAINE A MAY: SYMPOSIUM A SYMPOSIUM

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“NO STARCH “NO STARCH IN ZE CUFFS” IN ZE CUFFS”

erica getto erica getto

on Nicholson andNichols May and May

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IN SICKNESS IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH AND HEALTH

max nelson max nelson

on A New on Leaf A New Leaf

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BATS AND BATS BALLS AND BALLS

amelie lasker amelie lasker

on The Heartbreak on The Heartbreak Kid Kid

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A GOOD A MAN GOOD IS MAN HARDISTO HARD FINDTO FIND

will noahwill noah

on Mikey and on Mikey Nickyand Nicky

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41

“IDEAS FLEW “IDEASOFF FLEW HEROFF LIKEHER LINT” LIKE LINT”

jackson arn jackson arn

on late May on late May

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46NEW SPACES NEW SPACES FOR IMAGE-THOUGHT FOR IMAGE-THOUGHT

laura cadena laura cadena

Harun Farocki: Haruna Farocki: remembrance a remembrance

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53NOTHIN’NOTHIN’ LEFT TO LEFT LOSETO LOSE

nathan katkin nathan katkin

the self-destructive the self-destructive youths of Cold youthsWater of Cold Water

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61TROUBLETROUBLE IN PARADISE IN PARADISE Ernst Lubitsch, ErnstWoody Lubitsch, Allen, Woody Allen, and the perils andof theescapism perils of escapism

matthewmatthew rivera rivera

CLOSING TIME THE BLUES OF THE HOLLYWOOD BARTENDER

by dav i d b e a l

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the bar divides. the wood’s been wiped gleaming; the counter glows with reflected Arizona moonlight. On one side stands Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, boyish-wise and rail-thin, the perceptive hero of a myth plucked from America’s imagination by its supreme one-eyed poet. On the other side stands J. Farrell MacDonald, a character actor who may not have had a better line in his entire career: wyatt: Mac, you ever been in love? mac: No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.

The movie is John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, and Fonda is alone in MacDonald’s saloon, about to deal with some nighttime outlaw trouble.

Fonda is the new temp-sheriff in the town of Tombstone, defending its citizens from the tragic and volatile gunslinger Doc Holliday; Mac is just trying to keep things together at his local saloon. Fonda radiates decency, but he’s hurt. When his tense jaws release an embarrassed smile, rainclouds part. He danced with darling Clementine earlier; his eyes are sleepy with something that might be love, but he is part-stoic, part-civic-hero, and it’s not his job to be tender. We know what’s on his mind, but we don’t expect him to ask the bartender about it, and Mac, knowing his place, gently refuses this tentative intimacy. Fonda takes a drink before he walks out the door; the pause lasts seconds but feels like days. We aren’t emotional buddies, Mac seems to be saying to Fonda. We’re connected because we’re the only two people in town who are working to maintain order, because we’re trying to look out for everyone.

Why is it, then, that Fonda can fall in

love while Mac the bartender—one of those men, like Harry Hope in The Iceman Cometh, “whom everyone likes on sight,” someone who is “without malice, feeling superior to no one, a sinner among sinners”—can’t?

Look at any bar photograph taken by a twentieth-century American art photographer, and you’ll usually find the bartender in one place: the corner of the frame. In Lee Friedlander’s New Orleans jazz photograph George Lewis and Jim Robinson, Paddock Lounge, the clarinetist and trombonist stand on the bar, horns-a-wailing, the center of attention, a giant circular light fixture drawing a halo around their heads. Amidst the commotion the bartender leans against the cash register at lower-left, looking away; we don’t know what he’s thinking but we know he’s seen it all. In Walker Evans’ City Lunch Counter, three men chow down at a diner window; somewhere nestled behind them stands an indistinct figure that might be a bartender, all but invisible if you aren’t squinting.

In Garry Winogrand’s Paris, France, two pretty dark-haired twenty-somethings hold the foreground, finishing up their order at a café. At top-right and far in the background stands our man, obscured in shadow behind the bar. Even in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the focal point—and the source of the painting’s pathos—is the patron at center, his back to the window, diagonal lines extending from him in every direction. Meanwhile the bartender leans over at far-right, on a slightly lower plane than his three customers, equally free from the troubles of the solitary man and the delights of the lovers; he grows out of the bar, moves with the bar, is the bar.

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My Darling Clementine | john ford

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Paris, France | garry winogrand

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It’s not much different in the movies. In American film, particularly in noirs and westerns, the bartender occupies a curious and slippery position at the fringes of the action. He watches the scene as it unfolds, presiding over a space of controlled chaos—providing the juice that makes men crazy and fuels these mythic dramas, but rarely participating in the drama unless he needs to defend his institution. In Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s iconic film noir from 1947, P.I. Bob Mitchum broods at a table in an Acapulco restaurant while two barkeeps wait around in the distance behind the counter. They’re talking about something—the weather, the news, the past—but their conversation is private.

The camera is far more interested in Mitchum’s tired eyes and smileless smile than it is in their small talk. Time and time again, the bartender is faceless: his hand will poke in from the side of the frame to offer a drink, and it seems as if the film is prodding its own characters, or giving them an anonymous gift. At other times, the bartender is omnipresent, but he can be so mobile as to almost vanish into the scene. In The Gunfighter, Gregory Peck spends much of the movie stuck in Karl Malden’s saloon; one of Peck’s enemies has a rifle aimed at the swinging doors should he decide to leave. Malden, his nose fat and his hair pressed down, is the go-between—constantly in motion, on his toes and eager to please, running in and out of the bar, alerting people of Peck’s presence and trying to keep things peaceful. He peeks in from behind every conversation and adds his two cents, but somehow we never see him; he’s everywhere and nowhere at once.

Still, there’s an inner calm to Malden in The Gunfighter. Like every bar5

tender in these movies, his top priority isn’t getting the girl or killing the villain or saving the town; it’s upholding his own establishment and making sure there’s no “trouble.” “Let’s don’t have no trouble here now,” Malden says, echoing the barkeep in Murder, My Sweet and countless other 40s gumshoe yarns: “I got a reputation for no trouble.” But trouble always seems to find its way through the door, despite the bartender’s refusal to vilify his customers. The bartender can be as neutral as Switzerland (in the William Wellman oater Yellow Sky, the bartender proudly claims, “I never ask a man his politics”); he can be generous with his advice and sympathy. He can do his best to be a gatekeeper, a hub for the community, an affable authority among the men he serves, but his good faith always seems to come back and bite him where it hurts. In the first scene of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, as soon as the bartender steps out from behind the counter and puts money on a pool game with Paul Newman, he gets his comeuppance for leaving the bar: Newman has rigged the stakes and the bartender has walked into a hustler’s trap. In the brilliantly-named noir Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, the bartender is a victim of a different kind—killed by fugitive Burt Lancaster in the first ten minutes of the movie.

The bartender is reasonable above all, and somewhat conservative in his behavior, dress and ethical code; it would be easy to say that he is less representative of the wild untamed strain of American energy than the peddlers, ramblers, outlaws, murderers, thieves, cops, bounty hunters, backwoodsmen, private investigators, jazz singers, con men, femmes fatales, gamblers, hus-

tlers, suckers, stool pigeons, duelers, and plain old drunks that populate his bar every night. But in America there’s always been a flipside to this energy: a kind of domesticity, an aversion to roaming, best summed up by D.H. Lawrence in his 1923 essay “The Spirit of Place” from Studies in Classic American Literature: Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away…Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community…not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

The bartender is in touch with this spirit of stability and constancy—he’s taken up residence behind the bar, there’s a built-in community there, and, to a certain extent, he has his freedom. In Side Street, the bartender thinks Farley Granger is acting skittish because his wife has a baby on the way: “That’s why I never got married,” the bartender says. “Raisin’ a family makes a guy jumpy!” Even if he isn’t responsible for taking care of a family, and even if he doesn’t have any deep obligations to his friends—all he needs to do is ask ’em how they’re doin’ and pour ’em another—the bartender has something that the Bob Mitchums and the Henry Fondas don’t: a home.

Besides the Good Woman archetype—the homey marriageable girl who’s always trying to hold our heroes back—the bartender is easily the most domestic figure in these stories, spending most of his time indoors, doubly en-

closed by walls and a counter. He wears an apron. When he offers someone a free drink, he’ll say, “it’s on the house.”

If there’s shooting going on outside, he urges our heroes to stay inside and avoid the violence. In Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s crazed noir from 1955, the bartender at a jazz club leans across the counter and grabs Ralph Meeker’s arms, like a helpless mother begging her child to keep away from the riff-raff. Only in this case it’s too late; Meeker is in too deep; the bartender’s regret, concern, and sympathy are in vain. Behind that bar is the home the bartender could never quite have; he’s a worried parent that doesn’t want his grown children to stray too far. Perhaps he had a lover once, but the romance failed and he ended up marrying his profession, choosing money over love – or perhaps money was always the attraction. “Who’s the prettiest girl in town?” Gregory Peck asks Karl Malden in The Gunfighter. “Well, I used to admire the banker’s daughter,” he says. “But I might’ve been influenced by her money.” He never dwells on the reasons, at least not to his customers.

Whether his makeshift home truly liberates him or not, we might never know; perhaps Lawrence goes too far in saying that the freest men are “unconscious of their freedom,” or maybe the bartender is more conscious of his lot than we could say. He isn’t a figure of mystery or darkness—he’s exceedingly frank, for that matter—but he does hold a secret knowledge in every transaction or sale that he makes. It’s a knowledge that doesn’t drive the story forward, but a knowledge whose presence gives the chaotic proceedings some measure of solidity—even if the barroom is often where the violence begins. It’s the knowledge of what it takes to stand behind that 6

counter instead of before it: the bartender may be a sinner among sinners, but his head is always screwed on straighter than the men he serves; he is a picture of equilibrium, firmness, and quiet poise in a world where betrayal and revenge often have the final word. He’s got two hands on the bar, elbows locked, sleeves rolled up; things are figured out in his small world. He isn’t breaking the law or enforcing it; he’s running a business, and he has the skills to take care of the place.

Although some are more scrupulous and ethical than others, the bartender almost always represents capitalism at its purest, making exchange after exchange in his dusty saloon or nightclub. As long as they’re not running a bar during Prohibition, they have some level of job security—people will always need alcohol no matter the weather or the state of the world, and somebody has to sell it to them. These men are bootstrappers; to the best of our knowledge they’re self-employed and, though they don’t have much screen time, we can presume they work long hours.

They want to make those hours worth it: in Side Street, an indignant bartender says, “I can’t have cops hangin’ around my place. It’ll kill business!” In Hang ‘Em High, Clint Eastwood shoots a man who tried to hang him, and a stray bullet hits a barrel of booze. The bartender scurries over as quickly as he can – not to help the dying man, but to plug the hole in the barrel and wipe the floor! As a character he might exemplify nothing more professionally responsible—or more domestic—than Benjamin Franklin’s tenth moral virtue: “Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.” The bartender is a man of habit as much as his clients are, but he cleans more than he drinks, inces7

santly wiping down the counter in an easy rhythmic pattern with his bar-rag, giving each scene its proper drumbeat.

(His name, too, is usually percussive, a monosyllabic yelp—Mac, Joe, Lloyd, Nick, Gus, Jack, Ed, Chuck) But a man who displays the proper virtues in a capitalist market, and who appears to be satisfied with his profession— that doesn’t make for knuckle-rattling cinema. Perhaps the inclusion of a bartender character in nearly every mid-century noir and western shows that America still valued steady, repetitive effort as a means to success, or that glory wasn’t the only thing worth having. More deeply, it might have shown McCarthy-ridden America’s fascination with witnessing and listening-in: the bartender is always the first onlooker in any scuffle that takes place in his bar. In the first five minutes of The Gunfighter, Gregory Peck shoots a cocky kid who draws on him. He turns instantly to the bartender and asks him, “Did you see that?” “Yessir,” the bartender says. “He drew first.”

But ideal witnesses observe; they don’t let their opinions color what they saw. And there aren’t many movies that let their bartenders voice genuine opinions at all, or that make any gestures towards the bartender’s interiority. Most bartenders are merely narrative functionaries, though some come close to being more. In Dial 1119, a forgotten noir from 1950, we hear the bartender complaining about how little class his place has and how crummy his customers are—but a psychopath shoots him in the next scene, and that’s the end of that. Kubrick flirts with assuming the bartender’s perspective in The Shining; there’s a zinger shot of Jack Nicholson looking straight into the camera as he talks to Lloyd, the eternal bartender at

the Overlook Hotel. But Kubrick reverts to back-and-forth conversation shots for the rest of the scene, and once we see Lloyd—a knowing ghost with a fixed robotic smile and Liberace cheeks and unblinking latex eyelids—we realize how distant he is from any reality that we can recognize or understand. He is timeless and stuck in time; he’s been a bartender all his life and longer.

In My Darling Clementine, when Mac tells Wyatt Earp he’s been a bartender all his life, it’s a rare moment of a bartender actually naming his own profession and making a kind of judgment about it. If I were in love, Mac implies, this whole story would turn upside-down—let’s keep it right side up, shall we? My Darling Clementine is still Fonda and Ford’s movie, and Mac lets it stay that way. One of the few artists ever to leap fully behind the bar, though, wasn’t a filmmaker; it was George Jones, who took on the character of a bartender in his 1977 song “Bartender’s Blues” (the lyrics were written by James Taylor but sung most powerfully—and given real authorship—by Jones, country poet of the barroom). Drinking is one of country music’s most enduring subjects, from Jimmie Rodgers singing about a drunkard’s adventures in “Gambling Bar Room Blues” to Webb Pierce singing about a drunkard’s temptation in “There Stands the Glass” to Guy Clark singing about a drunkard’s abjection in “Broken Hearted People.” George Jones sang countless songs like these too, but he drank so much that he must have gotten sick of singing about himself. “Bartender’s Blues” is one of his most empathetic performances, a classic country waltz with an imperfect cadence that gives the song a sense of yearning or deferred resolution. Jones slips on a costume, placing

his own misery in the heart of the man who serves him, and he announces his disguise early in the song: “Now I’m just a bartender/ And I don’t like my work/ But I don’t mind the money at all.” He can put everyone at ease but himself: “I can light up your smokes/ I can laugh at your jokes.” But in the chorus, he’s more trapped than we could ever imagine: I need four walls around me to hold my life To keep me from going astray And a honky-tonk angel to hold me tight To keep me from slipping away.

This may be some kind of home, but it’s not D.H. Lawrence’s living, believing community; it’s a self-imposed prison.

This is no bartender of the movies, no spectral presence shuffling around behind the bar. This bartender is rattling his chains. More importantly, this bartender can be just as in love as the men who drink in front of him – even if the honky-tonk angel who holds him tight might just as well be a fantasy, might just as well be the bar itself. But what matters is that for one fleeting moment in the soul of the country, for threeand-a-half minutes of ecstatic misery, we love this bartender, and we finally have access to his deepest thoughts.

Jones takes a breath; the honky-tonk piano backs up his go-for-broke melisma, and this time—this time only—we’re the ones that get to eavesdrop on him: Now the smoke fills the air in this honky-tonk bar And I’m thinking ‘bout where I’d rather be But I burned all my bridges and I sank all my ships Now I’m stranded at the edge of the sea.

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SAPPHIC SISTERS notes on Cheryl Dunye, history and the archive

by a l e x r o b e r t s o n

C

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heryl dunye’s 1996 debut feature film, The Watermelon Woman, is a detective story. It goes like this: Cheryl (played by Dunye herself), a young black lesbian filmmaker, wants to make a movie about black women, “because our stories have never been told.” Working as a video store clerk on the side, she’s taken to renting heaps of old Hollywood films featuring black actresses. One of these, titled Plantation Memories and directed by a white woman named Martha Page, occasions the discovery of someone Cheryl calls “the most beautiful black mammy.” Her name in the film is Elsie, and she is played by an actress credited only as “The Watermelon Woman”—only one actress, as Cheryl reminds us, in a shrouded lineage of black artists uncredited, partially credited, or miscredited for their Hollywood acting work. This is the black woman Cheryl wants to make a film about: “I’m gonna find out what her real name is, who she was and is, everything I can find out about her.” The mystery opens.

-2The first piece of visual evidence The Watermelon Woman gives us, before the aforementioned story even begins, is a title card: “Bryn Mawr, PA.” Cheryl and her best friend and coworker Tamara (Valarie Walker) have trekked out to this affluent suburb of Philly to make a little side cash by videotaping a wedding. As a Mozart string quartet purrs in the background, we get our first taste of the formal contours of Dunye’s project. The first minute or so is on video, and Cheryl and Tamara’s bantering—“Go stand over there!

It’s kinda dark!”—can be heard behind the camera. Once

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the two finish their job, the visual format abruptly shifts from video to 16mm film—from Cheryl’s directorial work to a seemingly objective portrait of her “real life.” These sort of perspectival shifts recur throughout the film.

Just as importantly, though, this frou-frou Bryn Mawr wedding establishes the stakes of the movie’s central detective story. As Cheryl and Tamara methodically arrange a shot of the two families, a white photographer shuffles in the frame and begins reordering them himself. Cheryl, for the first time, steps out from behind her camera: “Excuse me, sir? We’re working with the family right now! Don’t you even see the video equipment?” The photographer has just forced this aspiring black female director into a position of total invisibility: our detective story’s first crime. When she steps out from behind the camera, Cheryl makes the invisible—herself—visible, and at the same time alerts us to the process by which she was made invisible to begin with: our first clue.

-3The Watermelon Woman’s proper narrative begins with Cheryl, back at her home in Philadelphia, sitting down in front of a video camera and talking about her project. She plays a clip from Plantation Memories. The maid Elsie, played by the Watermelon Woman, runs through a bucolic landscape to comfort her mistress in the master’s absence: “Oh, don’t cry, Missy! Master Charles is coming back, for sure!” It’s a bit of mind-numbing typecast racism for which the central performer isn’t even properly credited. Through this film and its unnamed actress, Cheryl wants to give a voice to the voiceless, to flesh out the lives of those black artists who have been buried or ignored by

history and its iconography—its books, movies, paintings. What she recognizes here, in the words of the scholars Phyllis J. Jackson and Darrell Moore, is that anyone in the West who wants to prove their “legitimated subjectivity” has to first “name a legitimated history.” Looking at the black cinematic archive, Cheryl only finds gaps and elisions and stereotypes: no (real) names to speak of. Her own identity is a historical chasm. She wants to fill this chasm—on camera.

-4Cheryl’s project itself is, lest we forget, a movie. How does the intervention she wants to stage develop as a feature film?

After sketching the basic outline of her project, Cheryl spends much of the movie traversing Philadelphia behind her video camera in search of answers. Her first excursion is a trip to the Center City district, surveying random passers-by. A man wearing a suit and tie walks down the sidewalk. “Um, excuse me, sir?” Cheryl asks from behind the camera. “Do you know who the Watermelon Woman is?”

“Watermelon Woman…” the man slows his pace, perhaps suddenly remembering something. His eyes brighten: “Yeah, she’s the one who originated what we call…

‘Aunt Jemima.’ Like on the syrup bottles?”

The camera cuts to Cheryl, in a close-up, surveying the Philly streets, squaring her hands in front of her, enclosing the city within the frame of her digits. Three young men receive the same question and banter their way through it. “Isn’t she the lady that wore the fruit cocktail on her head?” “No, that’s Rosie Perez.” “Avocados and things?” “Isn’t that Rosie?” “This lady is from back in the 40s and 50s!” “It could have been Rosie; she looked like she was from the 40s and 50s!” A title card flashes by: “(Sorry Rosie).”

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THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996)

If the events at the wedding were a sort of narrative “clue,” then what do we have here? This offhand roast of the actress Rosie Perez—is it another clue, a red herring, a cipher? The Watermelon Woman is full of such aimless passages, and they make for wonderful viewing but frustrate the audience’s detective work. A kind of meta-mystery emerges: how can a film about undoing the destructive work of history and culture feel so much like a hangout comedy? How can it possibly resonate so strongly with the sensation of discovery, of movement, of making jokes and meeting new people? “Rather than leading to pessimism or despair,” the black history scholar Saidiya Hartman has written, our desire to “represent what we cannot” ought to “condition our knowledge of the past and animate our desire for a liberated future.” Trying to represent what she cannot—in this case, the story of an unheralded black 11

actress—is exactly what Cheryl uses her camera to do. The “liberated future” she imagines for herself mysteriously looks and feels like, say, Clerks. This too must be investigated.

-5Cheryl confesses to a second motive in her initial monologue. The stories of black women in film have not been told, and she wishes to tell them, at least metonymically, through the figure of the Watermelon Woman. But she’s picked this particular black actress as her subject “because something in her face, something in the way she looks and moves, is serious, is interesting.” Something serious, something interesting, something hidden.

Can these two motivating forces be reconciled? In his book Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, the theater scholar Bert O. States suggests that “there is a sense in which signs, or certain kinds of

signs, or signs in a certain stage of their life cycle, achieve their vitality—and in turn the vitality of theater—not simply by signifying the world but by being of it.” In States’ terminology, what Cheryl recognizes in the Watermelon Woman is the actress’ radiant internal vitality: an affective potency in her eyes and hands that, in some sense, cannot be reduced to a political project. She recognizes, in other words, the self-possessed magic of the movies.

It’s the first half of States’ two-part equation, then, that remains the sticking point for Cheryl: the power a cinematic object might take on by “signifying the world,” or, in the context of this film, impinging on the real world. Cheryl needs to make the Watermelon Woman signify—to find, in this actress, a speakable, relatable marginalized subject in cinematic history—without disturbing the aura of intensity she brings to the screen.

She wants to imagine a world in which that fire in the actress’ eyes could lick the edges of the screen, lending her marginalized audience some tangible warmth and comfort. This tightrope act of desire and history, of politics and aesthetics, is embedded into the look and feel of The Watermelon Woman. If the film seems, occasionally, to peel off from its own genre schema, content to laze around, to goof off, to take on a life of its own, perhaps this is itself a methodology—a means of balancing on that tightrope.

-6If The Watermelon Woman does indeed possess a sort of narrative “inner life,” much of that life is dedicated to the pursuit of sex and intimate relationships. A riotous setpiece early in the movie finds Tamara and her girlfriend Stacy setting up Cheryl with a blind

date named Yvette, a friend of Stacy’s “from out of town.” They all go out to a karaoke bar together, where Cheryl refuses to react to Yvette’s haughty disposition—“I think it’s time for me to sing my song…the one I sang for the Spike Lee audition at the black deb ball…”— until she proceeds to jump onstage and barrel through an ear-shredding rendition on Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.” Tamara and Stacy giggle uncontrollably into each other’s shoulders.

Cheryl looks away, anguished.

The beauty of Dunye’s narrative and formal framework only reveals itself, ever so slowly, as Cheryl develops a new love interest, much to Tamara’s chagrin: a white woman named Diana (Guinevere Turner) who moseys into the store, flirts with Cheryl, and leaves.

As the relationship evolves, some details of Diana’s life and personality begin to emerge. She’s filthy rich, evinced by the laughably spacious apartment into which she invites Cheryl after visiting the video store a second time. She’s mysteriously interested both in Cheryl and in her documentary project, always the wide-eyed inquisitor in their conversations. And, proving Tamara right, she’s just a bit racist, giddily enumerating her past relationships with black men—“two, no, three”—and her distant relationship (“my father’s sister’s first husband!”) to an ex-Black Panther named Tyrone Washington.

Cheryl understands that something is up with this Diana, but stays with her primarily for one reason: she needs Diana’s material resources to finish her film. This dilemma takes on extra weight when Diana lands Cheryl an interview with the sister of Martha Page, the director of Plantation Memories. Suddenly, the twinned 12

aims of Cheryl’s documentary—to tell the story of the black woman and to express the “interesting” and “serious” condition of the Watermelon Woman’s face—bloom beautifully to life within the movie’s narrative.

Earlier in the film, Cheryl follows a lead from her mother and interviews a South Philadelphia local named Shirley Hamilton, who gives her a shocking bit of news. The Watermelon Woman, who frequented Philly nightclubs under the name “Fae Richards,” was a lesbian—and more than that, she was involved in an intimate relationship with none other than Martha Page. This revelation stuns and delights Cheryl, whose personal connection with the Watermelon Woman suddenly feels levels deeper. (“A Sapphic sister!” she hollers into her video camera.) It’s here that the film’s apparently unrelated narratives start to merge, culminating in the interview with Mrs. Page-Fletcher. Traces of Cheryl’s conflicted relationship with Diana—her personal, “inner” life—start to emerge within her social project; as she digs through the scant archive of black film history, she finds that Richards’ relationship with Page was mostly a means through which she might ingratiate herself into the film industry. After all, according to Shirley Hamilton, Martha, like Diana, “was one mean and ugly”—i.e., bigoted—“woman.”

As Cheryl explores, relays, and creatively interprets the details of the Watermelon Woman’s working and personal life, she finds herself in turn better equipped to order and clarify the events and relationships in her own, “interior” life. The converse, too, holds. The interpersonal conflicts Cheryl faces—especially between her, Diana, and the 13

increasingly disapproving Tamara—allow her to forge a deeper connection with the Watermelon Woman, whose fraught navigations of the film industry and of interracial partnership give Cheryl a blueprint to follow, or perhaps one from which to deviate.

-7The first piece of evidence the film gives us is its introductory title card—“Bryn Mawr, PA.” Its last piece of evidence is also a title card: “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction. – Cheryl Dunye, 1996.”

-8The Watermelon Woman is a fictional construct. She does not exist—nor Martha Page, nor Plantation Memories.

Dunye foists this earth-shattering announcement on the audience midway through the film’s closing credits. Some perceptive or skeptical viewers will have seen it coming. Most, like me, will take it as a call to radically reevaluate the film they’ve just finished.

For a casual, frequently silly “hangout” film, after all, The Watermelon Woman looks a whole lot like a documentary. The film’s tripartite formal structure solidifies this impression— not only the 16mm “real life” sequences juxtaposed with the video “documentary sequences,” but also the apparently archival footage shot on Super 8 of Page and Richards, as well as faded, curling photographs of the two together. This archival footage and photography is, of course, fabricated (by the hand of the film’s DP, the well-known artist and photographer Zoë Leonard). The Watermelon Woman is, in a sense, a lie— not just the kind of narrative “lie” of

which all fiction movies are guilty, but a lie which is meticulously constructed from the beginning to appear as a truth, then bluntly exposed at the most inopportune moment. Why? -9One answer, again in the words of Phyllis J. Jackson and Darrell Moore, is that it’s part of the movie’s purpose to “both exploit and undermine the power and authority granted to photographs and films as objective or neutral visual documents.” This observation feels very familiar for a reason—Dunye is, again, trying to have it “both ways,” and this desire as such is imported into the film’s formal qualities as a mishmash of pseudo-documentary video footage, (pseudo-) archival evidence, and a standard ‘90s narrative comedy and drama.

This desire is political, as well: by waiting until the very last moment to drop the documentary act, Dunye uses her film to expose the tendency of political ideology and social status to affect even the apparently “objective” space of the documentary archive.

This point is deeply important both to Dunye and to Cheryl, her fictional avatar, who is constantly waylaid by archival incompetence in her search for substantive information on the Watermelon Woman. At the local library, she receives condescending, boilerplate responses from the white, male librarian at the circulation desk (“Check the ‘black’ section in the reference library.

In the reference section? Have you checked the reference section of the library, miss?”). A trip to New York City to visit the overwhelmingly white archival Center for Lesbian Info & Technology (“C.L.I.T.”) produces much the same frustration, as an employee

played by the novelist and academic Sarah Schulman talks down to Cheryl and then scolds her for taking unnecessary pictures. Even a cursory visit to the home of a local black film scholar, Lee Edwards, comes up short: “Women are not my specialty,” he admits. (Tamara, behind the camera: “Of course they aren’t—look at you!”) Local and national centers of archival knowledge, Cheryl finds, consistently misrepresent, obfuscate, or utterly ignore the histories of black women in film.

The Watermelon Woman’s constitutive “lie,” as such, blooms into a beautiful, deeply important truth. It’s by virtue of its narrative and formal eclecticism, as Matt Richardson suggests in his essay “Our Stories Have Never Been Told,” that the movie creates “its own archive of black queer memory from which another view of ‘family’ and ‘community’ can be formed.” In other words, if the marginalized subjects of history could manage to establish a free realm in which to create and interpret their own archives, perhaps they—and it is only fair to Dunye’s project that here, the royal, apolitical “we” must be abandoned—could better understand their own lives, their own position in today’s still-fractured world. Perhaps they could use those scraps of elided history to construct something beautiful, funny, touching, or complex. Perhaps the documentary could be reimagined as a space of play and redemptive agency rather than one of captivity. In Saidiya Hartman’s words—and in Cheryl Dunye’s resplendent images—perhaps this space of contradiction, of aesthetic vision, of political motivation and the impossibility of representation could finally converge into a liberated future.

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A BRASS BAND AT A FUNERAL Orson Welles and W.G. Sebald’s anti-nostalgia

by n i c k l i e b e r m a n

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his past summer, national geographic debuted a nine-part series entitled The 90s: The Last Great Decade? I saw it advertised on the side of a bus. According to its website, the show was supposed to tell the story of the “ten years before boom turned into bust.” The logic behind this series is dubious—the pomp, for example, with which it presents such recent cultural milestones as Anna Nicole Smith’s wedding and the cancellation of Roseanne. But particularly striking is the anxious question mark that sits at the end of—but hardly concludes—the show’s title. The question mark here wonders whether any decade can be great if it can’t decide to be distinctive, drop its self-consciousness, and pose as anything earnestly.

Then again, the anxious sensation that history has come to a close may belong more to my age than to our age. At the time of the series’ premiere, I was reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and beginning to feel like the book’s narrator: too long delayed, tasked with the reconstruction of family history, part of a generation for which something has come to an end. During the holidays, when my mother’s family came to stay with us, these feelings became particularly acute. She is one of six children born between 1942 and 1955, and the family has grown exponentially over the years. As long as there is anyone to remember, these gatherings will be defined by their continuity with years of greater health and vivacity.

Orson Welles, the consummate nostalgist, once remarked, “My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.” As earnest as this comment may seem, it has always been known that Welles did not tell the truth about his parent’s lives. He fabricated a past for himself, obscuring his origins, even those origins towards which he felt no apparent ill will. Perhaps he saw his past as too grand not to be embellished. Welles makes similar gestures in his films of the 40s and 50s, not only about his own past, but also about the whole of America’s—and Europe’s—cultural memory. His lies, as well as his films, reveal a need to insert himself into 19th century narratives in which he had no hope of participating. Anyone with a family burdened with large older generations is familiar with this feeling: the desire to have been there when the people you love were young and relating to each other simply. Touch of Evil, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons all begin at the end of a story, already filled with an accretion of resentments, memories, losses and obsolete traditions. More than any other filmmaker of his stature, however, Welles built historical doll-houses less to revel in their accuracy than to resent them for being so unlike the periods they were meant to evoke. It is paradoxical, then, how consistently careful and intelligent his reconstitutions of the past turn out to be.

There are few films more suffused with familial nostalgia than The Magnificent Ambersons. The first

half ’s idyllic set pieces and meandering expositional passages are anchored by the constant feeling of loss that erupts to the surface, unobscured and unmitigated, in the movie’s second half. Vignetting—the device of surrounding an image with a soft, faded edge, as Welles does in the film’s prologue—is more than a gesture of retro accuracy. The film’s introductory scenes are achingly remote, disappearing inwardly towards their centers. Similarly, as Welles turns his eye toward the broad cultural and technological shifts that took place in American history between Amberson’s two acts, he remains preoccupied by his story’s center, focusing on the personal effects of those shifts.

Eugene Morgan, played by Joseph Cotten, steps forward in the film’s prologue displaying the different fashions of his era. He will later be a key player in the film’s plot and the success of the automobile, but at this early date, he is merely the pathetically enamored neighbor of Isabel Amberson. Morgan is dressing for his future, being of the times in order to assure himself subsequent happiness. His attempt to succeed within the constraints of his era is, ultimately, a failure, and so he works to create a new era. In this, he succeeds; the automobiles he develops revolutionize—and erode—the Amberson’s way of life. But his ill-fated attempts at autumnal romance with Isabel, limited by her son George, fail just as definitively as his early stabs at courtship did. The life he wants with Isabel, Welles starts to suggest, was never possible. Romance of that kind was lost to them from the start.

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Emotion attaches itself to this kind of transitional figure: the recent ancestor. We feel that there must be some sort of connection between us and forebears two or three generations removed from our time, because the farther we go back, the fewer details we’re likely to recognize. Their value, these recent ancestors, is that they are forever frozen but in a relatable time. The Magnificent Ambersons is potent precisely because it was just so recently that life was lived in this way. As Charles Higham accurately describes in his book Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, “The movie was conceived on a level of romantic morbidity: it is a story of vanishings, of deaths, of doors closing with black wreaths, a recollection of mortal frailty that can only have been inspired by Welles’s earliest experiences.” Higham means to say that these types of experiences were particular to Welles’ early life. But is it not also true that the film’s romantic view of despair could only have originated in childhood?

It is the half-remembered period of our first seven years that takes on the largest nostalgic shadow for us.

This period lives on in cultural and emotional triggers far more than in crystalline regret: a wash of pathos.

Naturally, the nostalgia in Ambersons is not limited to moments of obvious joy, like the lavish parties and the bucolic tableaus that fill the film’s first section. There are also countless moments of elegant, fondly recalled devastation. Like beetles trapped in amber as they die, the characters in Ambersons are isolated in often sickeningly beautiful compositions right as their pain becomes 17

insurmountable. Out of context, these scenes are nostalgic baubles, their beauty hardly compensating for the pain they leave in passing.

Strung together, they form an heirloom, a film that is the very essence of family.

There’s another respect in which Welles’ movies capture the experience of being in a family: their trademark group dialogue scenes.

Present in Ambersons, Touch of Evil and Kane, these passages consist of Greek chorus-like direct addresses by a group of characters who, despite acting in the film as little more than information delivery systems, are all sharply individuated. The last scene of Citizen Kane is a memorable example. A lineup of men and women, most of whom have never made a previous appearance in the movie, wrap up the film’s plot by discussing Kane’s enigmatic past. Each of these actors is distinctive, yet their movements are all carefully synchronized.

They are an idealized community, put together to give the film a more harmonious structure: that of a family in which each member plays a specific role and bears a specific load.

Welles’ attitude towards the Ambersons’ world is, in most cases, highly ambivalent. The Magnificent Ambersons, in which industrialization ends up leading to the downfall and dissolution of the title family, is not a touchstone for future American success—but nor is it Welles calling for the return of dances and sleigh rides. The film doesn’t bring these long-lost experiences to life for a couple hours so much as successfully alienate the viewer from the pleasure they might give. They are all

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942)

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PUBLICITY STILL FOR THE STRANGER (1946) 19

marked with disappointment, and the victims of time aren’t redeemed in the retelling.

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n his novel The Emigrants, published in 1992, W.G. Sebald said that “the old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is...nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past, but it is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.” Indeed, The Emigrants is somehow both panoptic and miniaturized in its examination of memory: a book concerned less with re-staging events in the past than with re-constructing the process of collecting, arranging and making sense of those events. An unnamed narrator, possibly Sebald himself, wanders through England, France, Germany, and the U.S. observing the remnants of lives marked by their beginnings in one place and terminations in another.

Everywhere Sebald’s novel ventures, there are people forced to be still: one often lies face-down in the grass of his garden; another commits to life in a dingy painter’s studio. As the narrator’s journey to examine the journeys of the recently dead progresses, he discovers a world gone static.

For Sebald, these lives without movement have two faces. Mystical rejections of a “modern world” that demands its inhabitants move at a greater pace, they are also—in a more literal sense—biological indicators of death. The narrator’s Uncle Adelwarth, once the well-travelled valet to the son of a wealthy family, spends the end of his life at a sanatorium. The narrator’s Aunt Fini says

of her recently deceased relative, “the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became.”

His choice to undergo shock therapy, we come to realize, was not a cure; it was suicide. Obliterating his past leaves him sitting at home, the domestic space transfigured into self-inflicted purgatory.

Much like the compositions in The Magnificent Ambersons, scenes in The Emigrants proceed by narrowing their focus towards some small, centered cluster of details.

Loss haunts the expanding periphery of these passages as their focus gets smaller and smaller. “When one entered the studio,” the narrator says of Max Ferber’s painting space, “it was a good while before one’s eyes adjusted to the curious light, and, as one began to see again, it seemed as if everything in that space...was slowly but surely moving in upon the middle.” In the focused, airless atmosphere of the painter’s domain, certain physical objects move toward the center as if asking to be noticed and remembered, away from the impenetrable edges that, like those of a old, fading photograph, threaten to efface them. This personal space may be a succinct illustration of the central role played by objects in memory’s workings, but it certainly lacks any homey comfort.

The changing landscape of twentieth century Europe may have prompted a retreat into the home, but it is the domestic space, once associated with family and tradition, that ends up freighted with the bulk of the book’s attention—and its greatest sadness. In a particularly devastating passage, the narrator 20

travels to Deauville, noting the effects of twentieth century engineering on that old coastal region: “It was immediately apparent that the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction.”

For Sebald, the commercialized beach of Normandy is more than a victim of time’s passage; it’s a direct casualty of the same desire to which Adelwarth succumbs: the urge to blot out the past. In Deauville, the narrator observes “gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move soundlessly about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by who has happened to stop outside their prison.”

It is impossible to return home once one’s home is gone—but that does not mean that staying there will delay its disappearance. The zombified housekeepers the narrator describes here have even less purpose than the pacified housewives—preservers of domestic community— they might have once resembled.

Stripped of any maternal significance and reduced merely to action, their attempts to maintain life at home are just as futile as any attempts on Sebald’s part would be to “bring his subjects to life.” Instead, there is the wonderment of remaining and the stoic silence of physical traces.

Compared with the way Sebald discovers beauty in magnified loss, Touch of Evil is deadeningly irrelevant, a feeling only heightened by 21

its careful craftsmanship. The bitter pleasure that suffuses other film noirs is kept in Evil at an almost negligible remove. Like the deep shadows that characterize this genre, the film seems a dark plane cast by the towering presence of past events. At one point there may have been some fun to be had in the corrupt success of police captain Hank Quinlan; now, there is only brute ugliness. Welles casts himself as this central figure, whose unknowable moral core is the cause of much discussion throughout the film. The bulbous, oversized quality of his performance fits the rough-hewn excesses of the filmmaking. Its long takes play too long. They are orchestrations in narrow alleys. With one-shots like these, editing after the fact is impossible. Quinlan’s nostalgia, too, is a matter of necessity; unable to edit his future, he has no option but to look to the past. Hardly anyone discusses the memory of Quinlan’s wife or his earlier worrisome behavior, and neither of those ghosts ever appears in flashback. The unwavering loyalty of Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), Quinlan’s associate and companion, is also hardly sentimentalized. It is too late for Menzies to do anything other than die at the hands of his long-supported leader, even though we do not fully understand his complicity in Quinlan’s crimes. Furthermore, there is no obvious physical or even emotional relationship between Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), the old madame, and Quinlan, although the former gives us, more than any other character, the sense that Quinlan’s past is the richer, untold story that undergirds the film’s plot. Towards the end of the film, Quinlan asks Tanya to read his

future. “You haven’t got any,” she replies. “Your future’s all used up.”

The bleak Mexican-American border is a lost frontier sapped of romance, mirroring Quinlan’s soused yet ossified final state. This is the terminus for a certain sort of opulent American lifestyle, but also, on an individual level, for the sort of honorable charlatan that lifestyle tended to endorse: the kind of man who defines his age through self-belief. The couple at the film’s center, though just married, have no more chance of returning to an old, romantic American life—whether or not they survive.

Charlton Heston as the principled and humorless Vargas is an agent rather than a catalyst; even in the first shot, a famous camera-crawl that follows an explosion-rigged car, it seems merely accidental that he and his wife Susan (Janet Leigh) wind up caught in the frame. From this first moment on, Vargas is caught up in machinations already well underway. In the end he, along with Susan, is worse for the wear but more or less all right. They escape, but not because they have defeated the evil forces that surround them. Instead, you get the feeling that it is simply not yet their time. It is easy to imagine that Vargas’ willingness to abandon Susan for his job as civil servant—the prime cause of her brushes with danger in the film—could result in some further calamity. By the late 1950’s, this is Welles’ vision of a young person’s honeymoon, the kind of milestone that in Kane and Ambersons still retains a certain wonder.

Looking back at Citizen Kane for his Personal Journey Through American Movies, Martin Scorsese wrote that the film’s “most revolutionary

aspect… was its self-consciousness.

The style drew attention to itself,” and “somehow Welles’s passion for the medium became the great excitement of the piece itself.” Another irony of Welles’ career is that he managed to give his interest in nostalgia its most eloquent expression so early on. By the end of his career, his resounding initial success was so far behind him that he was not unlike the isolate of his first film. He sought to return to an earlier time, nostalgic for an era already marked and marred by nostalgia. “I always liked Hollywood very much,” he confessed in 1970.

“It just wasn’t reciprocated.”

Welles’ early, self-aware style, both literary in its implementation and intuitive in its execution, ushered talkies into their baroque phase.

It was already too late for certain innocences. Perhaps Kane retains such a stranglehold on the popular imagination because it shows a way out of its own overwhelming self-awareness.

It is the product of a young man’s unbridled commitment, but also an example of his sustained vision. I find that, personally, it points in the direction of productive familial nostalgia: we can never know the Rosebuds that lay at the heart of those closest to us, but we are well-poised to tell of the heights and depths to which these private touchstones drove our ancestors. Not long before her death, Susan Sontag asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible.”

Her answer: Yes; for example, W.G. Sebald. And for both Sebald and Welles, the promise of greatness, now and for the future, arose in the frustrated process of conjuring the unconjurable past.

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a symposium illustrations by zoë flood tardino

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hen she directed her first feature, in 1970, Elaine May was already at the height of her fame. “The only thing I knew anything about [at the time],” she insisted in a 2006 public talk, “was acting”—one more bit of characteristic record-fudging from a writer-director who excelled at defying expectations. The young May was, in fact, a comedian of formidable range and dexterity. Less than a decade earlier, she and her longtime collaborator Mike Nichols had been selling out concert halls for their groundbreaking improv routines. (Nichols, himself a legendary writer-director, passed away during the preparation of this symposium.) As it turned out, May’s career as a director—

four films to date, the last completed in 1987—would be one of the most hotly disputed, sadly curtailed and artistically revelatory in Hollywood history.

We’ve asked five of our writers to each reflect on a single sliver of May’s career: her early work with Nichols; her cautiously optimistic remarriage comedy A New Leaf; her second feature (and sole commercial success) The Heartbreak Kid; her shattering crime drama Mikey and Nicky; and a smattering of her late work as a writer, including her still-contentious final film Ishtar. What follows is, we hope, a mosaic portrait of a filmmaker defined—and sometimes limited—by her intransigent, restless and ferociously intelligent comedic voice. – The Editors 24

“NO STA RCH IN ZE CUFFS” “stop laughing!” mike nichols shouts to Elaine May. They are composing a comedy sketch, but they’re barely composed. Nichols sputters and spits out a joke amidst a new bout of laughter. This 1962 recording, entitled Nichols and May at Work, is meant to document how Nichols and May developed new material.

But this title is misleading: as an improvisational comedy duo, Nichols 25

erica getto on Nichols and May

and May were always sculpting setups and punchlines.

Much of Nichols and May’s comedic charm hinges on how they drew up characters—and drew in audiences—through dialogue. But part of their success also has to do with the pregnant pauses or spurts of laughter that punctuate this dialogue. During these moments, audiences can sense that Nichols and May are crafting their responses to

one another—in improvisation, there’s no script. This juxtaposition between sound and silence is evident in their sketch “Disc Jockey,” which the pair performed nightly during their 1960 Broadway production An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The scene features Nichols as a name-dropping talk show host and May as Barbara Musk, a ditzy and dizzying Hollywood starlet.

In a recorded version of the sketch, May initially seems to struggle with Musk. She hardly speaks, and when Nichols delivers his lines, she laughs as if she is breaking character. With time, however, she composes herself. First, she forms her laughter into a semi-seductive, semi-confused cackle that audiences could conceivably attribute to Musk. Next, she introduces stock phrases—“really, no really,” she repeats, dragging out each syllable. In doing so, she buys time to build improvised comebacks. “Sweetheart,” says Nichols at one point, “I understand from the Pope that you just finished a movie.” The audience laughs. May giggles, pauses, and then answers: “Well, he just can’t keep a secret,” she spits out. The audience laughs, then claps. She’s landed her line.

In this sketch, perhaps more so than in others, Nichols seems to control the dialogue while May plays defense. The fact that Nichols plays the interviewer here could explain this dominance. In this role, he has the chance to ask increasingly absurd questions—and, in doing so, to raise the sketch’s comedic stakes. This puts pressure on May, for she has to match his questions with answers that are equally funny but also reasonable. This backand-forth is emblematic of how Nichols and May pushed each other’s improvisational talents to their limits—almost to the point of taunting one another.

At one point in the sketch, Nichols and May delve into Musk’s latest feature film, a comedy entitled “Two Girls in Paris” in which she plays Gertrude Stein. As John Lahr describes in a New Yorker profile of the duo, during one performance, May noted that she—really, Musk—had recorded the title track for the film. Nichols’ response? Sing it. May accepts this challenge, quickly composing a lyrical score fit for Gertrude Stein: “There was dashing Dmitri, elusive Ivan,” she sings, “And Alyosha with the laughing eyes. Then came the dawn. The brothers were gone. I just can’t forget those wonderful guys.”

This sketch reveals the degree to which Nichols and May were both partners and competitors. They repeatedly raised the stakes during their live and recorded performances, and they countered one another with acrobatic reactions.

Nichols and May always had an improvised relationship. In the mid-1950s, Nichols was a student at the University of Chicago; May was auditing classes at the school. One afternoon, they found themselves in the same subway car. They started to chat—in character.

One can imagine that the ensuing scene might have sounded like the duo’s 1962 sketch “Mysterioso.” In this piece, the two sit next to one another on a train.

With accents that parody German spies, they try to execute an elaborate, top-secret exchange of Nichols’ dry cleaning.

“No starch in ze cuffs,” repeats May, in a whisper, with a piano nocturne playing in the background.

Following this opening act, the couple found themselves at The Compass tavern in Chicago, where they joined other improvisational actors to form the Compass Players. The troupe’s founder David Shepherd and director Paul Sills 26

had a progressive plan for these actors: they would perform completely new routines each evening. Nichols and May adhered to this model, until they decided to reprise successful sketches as a way to further hone them. The duo stayed true to this model of semi-improvised performances for the rest of their career.

They did not, however, stay in Chicago. In the late 1950s, they moved from small Chicago stages to New York City radio stations, with an interim stint in St. Louis. They would leave behind their Compass compatriots, who, in 1959, founded the The Second City, an historic improvisational theater troupe.

They would also cross paths with a number of leading improvisation advocates, including Del Close, who developed the acclaimed “Harold” structure for long-form improvisations. (In this performance model, actors incorporate audience suggestions—sometimes, as simple as a single word—into a performance that lasts at least 25 minutes.

During this time, they move through three seemingly unrelated improvised scenes that can, at various points, intertwine.) In New York, Nichols and May met agent Jack Rollins. Through radio appearances, their voices—and, in turn, their names—quickly traveled across the east coast.

And it makes sense that the duo’s work translated well to radio: even on Chicago stages, where they had visuals at their disposal, Nichols and May distinguished themselves through witty and well-crafted dialogue. Through choice words and intonation, Nichols and May delivered characters that were not situated in a particular place or time but were, nonetheless, distinct. In fact, they often staged phone conversations that rendered location insignificant.

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The duo’s “Telephone” routine— which they performed in their Broadway revue—is an apt example here.

The sketch opens with the click-clickclick of a rotary phone. “Information?” chirps May, revealing her latest persona: phone operator—and a slightly robotic one at that. “Operator, please,” answers Nichols, earnestly, “get me the number of George Kaplan, K-A-P-LA-N, at 44 Hugenot Balloon Drive.”

“Hugenot Balloon Drive” could be anywhere—or nowhere.

Within the piece’s first minute, May’s friendly operator turns out to be dismally incompetent, despite her good intentions. “Is there someone else I can speak to...a human?” asks Nichols at one point. “Information cannot argue with a closed mind,” May quips. Throughout this sketch, Nichols and May (who plays the operator, her supervisor, and then her supervisor) use wordplay to exaggerate everyday life.

In another iconic piece, entitled “Mother and Son,” Nichols plays an astronaut who, finding a free moment, calls his mother. “I sat by the phone all day Friday, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday,” exclaims his mother. “Your father said to me, ‘Phyllis, eat something. You’ll faint.’ I said, ‘No, Harry. No. I don’t want my mouth to be full when my son calls me.’’’ Once again, Nichols and May’s characters are not located in the same place, but their decision not to name or locate their characters doesn’t leave audiences lost. Instead, it makes it easier for audiences to relate to these characters, even when the mother’s kvetching approaches melodrama.

As these sketches reveal, the comedy duo did not try to transport listeners to far-off or far-fetched locations: instead, Nichols and May conducted conversa-

tions that could take place in listeners’ living rooms, bedrooms, or other common locations—even though they rarely acknowledged these settings. This approach also applies to the duo’s 1958 comedy album “Improvisations to Music.” And yet this collection features a degree of thematic consistency that the team’s Broadway show and radio work lack: Nichols and May are taking middle-class suburban life to task.

The collection is, furthermore, set to a musical score. Sometimes Nichols and May directly address the musical accompaniment—as in their sketch “Bach to Bach.” In other sketches, the music serves to bookend or provide diegetic background for dialogue. In still other sketches, the music seems to serve a non-diegetic purpose. And yet regardless of whether this score—comprised of well-known classical pieces—is meant for the characters’ entertainment or dramatic emphasis, it complements the album’s banal chitchat between spouses, couples, colleagues, and adulterers.

This album also differs from the duo’s Broadway revue in that Nichols and May do not overtly exaggerate the everyday. At least initially, these characters seem to be grounded. And yet they adhere so resolutely to stock statements and social standards that, ultimately, they appear absurd. They are more like robotic Stepford residents than real individuals. This album also lacks a laugh track, which makes these characters’ conversations even more unsettling: it is up to audiences to punctuate their listening with laughter, but it’s hard to tell when Nichols and May want listeners to laugh.

Admiring a piano cantata in “Bach to Bach,” Nichols speaks to May. “I remember,” he reminisces in a post-coital reverie, “I used to have to sneak in my

room to hear it when I was a kid. My family was your usual...you know...dull, bourgeois family, of course...and there was, really, very little else for me.” Here, Nichols tries to prove his appreciation for high art—or, at the very least, distinguish himself from his uncultured family. And yet the tune that he and May celebrate confirms his status as a dull, bourgeois man: it is a simple, conservative ditty. In depicting characters that lack self-awareness and possess faux sophistication, Nichols and May offer a droll, biting commentary on suburban life.

And yet, for an unassuming audience, this type of comedy could be confusing. A listener might, for example, construe the track “Chopin” as a dramatic piece—a depiction of family tragedy, not comedy. In this sketch, Nichols plays a disgraced father who must leave home—again—because of financial and social entanglements. He announces his imminent departure to his daughter, played by May. A somber Chopin tune colors the conversation. At the end of the sketch, the father departs, and a crying, pleading May accepts defeat: “Well, there he goes again,” she says, as the Chopin tune fades out. But that’s not a punchline. Or is it?

Perhaps Nichols and May depict stock suburban characters so that listeners will hear how dull they sound—and how a dose of good humor and social satire could enhance their dialogues. When treated through this lens, Nichols and May’s humor is not so much a relief from reality as it is a critique of reality—and a commentary on how constrained and fabricated “real” conversations can be.

In 1962, Nichols and May decided to tackle the concept of repression headon, returning to the recording studio for their third and final album “Mike 28

Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors.” This collection explores the world of psychoanalysts and their patients, and Nichols and May trade roles sitting in the analyst seat. This album is, on the whole, a prime example of how Nichols and May used comedy as a form of social commentary: Nichols and May are not really examining doctors so much as they are examining patients—and the nature of subjugation, expression, and emotion in mid-twentieth century America.

In exploring the doctor-patient dynamic, Nichols and May also offer audiences a meditation on listening. As scholar Kyle Stevens writes of the duo, “If there is a tragic aspect to Nichols and May’s comedy, it is that none of the characters they portrayed can hear themselves, and so they cannot learn from the other.”

Even in the doctor sketches, neither the doctors nor patients are really listening to one another. But in order to perform this sharp disconnect—this lack of social or self-consciousness—Nichols and May must be skilled listeners. In other words, they can only improvise characters that talk past one another if they can anticipate each other’s next move.

In radio stations, on Broadway stages, and in recording studios, Nichols and May entertained audiences through their improvised, dialogic comedy. Even when they began to make television appearances, they maintained their commitment to comedic wordplay over slapstick. In one fitting example, the duo performed a sketch entitled “$65 Funeral” on Tonight Starring Jack Paar, an NBC late-night variety talk show. In the sketch, Nichols and May sit at a desk, but the setting is nondescript.

It turns out that the pair is at a funeral parlor, and that Nichols’ father has just passed away. He’s heard about May’s low rates, and he wants to arrange his father’s 29

funeral through May. Quickly, however, listeners learn that May’s sales pitch has been misleading: the “basic” funeral plan is pathetic, and the so-called “additional” costs are essential ones (as in, Nichols will have to spend extra money for his father to be transported to the funeral home).

This sketch is, in its content, similar to Nichols and May’s earlier work, even though they debuted it in a different medium. And yet, somehow, it seems more structured than the Compass Theater material. May lays out different funeral options in groups of threes—a number that is, in comedy circles, a standard for soliciting audience laughs. But it’s doubtful that the duo has tried to incorporate more comedic “rules” into their routines or rehearsed this particular piece more than others. Rather, they’ve likely become more comfortable with one another. In any case, “$65 Funeral” comes off as a polished work, which is a feat for comedians but also a challenge: when each improvised set-up is sharper, both comedians’ punchlines had better be on-point.

Nichols and May’s partnership dissolved in 1962, at which point both comedians delved into film careers. Since then, Nichols and May have reunited for rare performances. And yet the pair’s original recordings offer the richest relics of their partnership. This work’s staying power is impressive. In a 1961 essay, the cultural critic Edmund Wilson admitted to seeing Nichols and May’s show four times. He recounts leaving the theater and thinking that “people...sound immediately afterwards as if they were having Nichols and May conversations.” In this way, the duo’s dialogues echo on any given street corner. And so long as the comedy of everyday life persists, it is worth taking Nichols and May’s work seriously.

IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH “perhaps you’re interested in how a man undresses,” a prickly newspaperman (Clark Gable) asks a runaway daughter of privilege (Claudette Colbert) midway through a charged scene in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. “It’s quite a study in psychology: no two men do it alike.” She watches curiously as he, narrating each move in turn, takes off his coat, tie, shirt and shoes. It’s only when he starts unbuckling his pants that she dashes bashfully behind the sheet they’ve spread out between their two twin motel beds as a thin source of privacy—the “walls of Jericho,” he calls it—for the night.

max nelson on A New Leaf

A New Leaf, Elaine May’s sharp-tongued, humane, and ultimately overwhelming debut feature, is—like It Happened One Night—about a marriage that arises from necessity, begins as a fraud, grows in spite of the husband’s protestations, and in the end blossoms miraculously into something like love. On another level, both movies are also about what it looks like for a marriage to become something more than—without ever becoming something other than—an economic transaction. And both, in retrospect, turn out to pivot around prolonged, comically impeccable scenes of undressing.

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The scene in question in A New Leaf takes place on the honeymoon of Henrietta Lowell (May), a dotty, unsocialized, massively wealthy botanist, and Harry Graham (Walter Matthau), the aging trust-fund baby who married her for her money—his ran out—and plans with grim resolve to murder her. (The one book he takes on the trip is “A Beginner’s Guide to Toxicology.”) All business, he’s already let her pick her bed out of the two available. “When we sleep together,” he tells her, pointing at her choice with visible distaste at the thought, “we’ll use this one.”

That evening, Henrietta enters the room wearing what she tells him blushingly is a “Grecian robe”—her first attempt, we sense, to make herself sexy for anyone. After putting her head unconsciously through the wrong hole, she’s trapped her left arm under the nightgown and can barely move her neck. In a sort of hysterically extended, clumsy ballet, he tries matter-of-factly to fix the mistake, pulling the slip half over her head until she looks like a trick-or-treater in a makeshift ghost costume, lowering it again until she’s doubly trapped, then painstakingly forcing her head and arm through the robe’s other hole. (May declined to tell Matthau that, before they shot the scene, she’d sewn herself into the nightgown.) It’s one of the first passages in A New Leaf during which Harry’s total revulsion morphs into something like unconscious care.

What does it mean, the movie asks, for two partners in a marriage—a contract that is, in the film’s terms, as much about money as it about love or, God forbid, sex—to take 31

one another into account, educate each other, convert each other?

His presence, she tells him, gives her confidence; hers—like that of all women—repels him.

When Harry’s servant, worried about his own economic future (few nouveau riche millionaires, he confesses, require “the services of a gentleman’s gentleman”), suggests that Harry marry to preserve his wealth, Matthau reacts with a sublime mixture of nose-wrinkling aristocratic pride and teenage petulance: “but she’d be there.” His is a mixture of boyish sexual terror—when a spacey fortysomething widow, one of his earliest targets, reaches to undo the clasp of her bra during a fit of erotic transport, he recoils in horror with a cry of “don’t let them out!”—and patriarchal snobbery. One of the most radically unlikeable male leads in American comedic film, he is also one of the most desperately, obviously in need of a kind of conversion.

Why, then, is it he who does the educating for so much of the film? Henrietta embarrasses him, repulses him, and makes him drink cheap wine, but she also, it becomes clear, needs his help to get by in the world. It’s he who fires her unruly, unscrupulous household staff—one of the movie’s weak spots, it seems to me, is the caricatured shiftiness it attributes to nearly all its lower-class characters—and puts her financial accounts in order, not to mention he who, in the film’s last-act turn from verbal to physical comedy, has to rescue her from the middle of a rushing bend in the Adirondack rapids. One of the dominant running gags in the

film is that he cares for her accidentally, less for her sake than out of respect for things being done right.

(Still bent on killing her, he alternates between tidying up her house and checking her greenhouse for arsenic.) But he is still a sort of savior towards her, certainly more noble, in his way, than the sniveling, obsequious lawyer (Jack Weston) who dotes on her and dips into the till behind her back—though it’s the latter character who has Harry pegged as a gold-digger from the start.

It’s tempting to describe Harry and Henrietta’s marriage as a sort of back-and-forth exchange: she saves him from public financial ruin, he civilizes her, and she—as if the value of his gift to her exceeded that of hers to him—responds by showing him the value of romantic commitment. But one of the film’s sharpest insights is that, in the final tally, he’s given her little to nothing. Rather than civilize her, he’s let her unseat him from his seat of smug entitlement, which is a way of letting her do to him what the Marx brothers famously did to their rotating casts of politicians and socialites: un-civilize them. Henrietta inducts Harry into a world in which there’s no value attached to the quality of wine, the condition of carpets, or the state of one’s modernist sculpture collection, but a great deal of value attached instead to the business of mutual care.

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ow moralistic was May’s design for A New Leaf? Her initial cut of the film famously ran to three hours and, if rumor holds, included an extended scene in

which Harry actually did commit a murder, poisoning Weston’s character with a steady stream of lethal glasses of scotch. (Some of the violence excised from May’s original version is rumored to have made its way into the final cut by way of the jarring, hilarious montage mid-film in which Henry imagines Henrietta suffering a handful of outlandish deaths.) The version of A New Leaf available now, and the only version to have ever received any kind of public circulation, was re-cut by Paramount without May’s control or consent.

She took the case to court, and, losing, petitioned that her name be dropped from the film. (The studio refused.) There’s an irony to the fact that Harry, like May, ends up practically strong-armed into giving his story a happy ending. Strolling into the woods after deciding to leave Henrietta to her fate in the Adirondacks—she’s trapped in the rapids and, predictably, can’t swim—he happens to run into a specimen of the plant she discovered and named (to his secret pride) after him. After realizing that he’s lost the charm she gave him to commemorate the find, and realizing, more to the point, what his anxiety about that loss means, he hurries to her rescue with a string of muttered invectives. “Nothing,” he tells himself, ashamed of his softness, “ever turns out the way it’s supposed to.”

Things certainly didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to for A New Leaf, which did lukewarm business at the box-office— 32

although its reputation has grown steadily in the years since. Indeed, part of what makes the movie thrilling to watch is that, even in its re-cut state, it remains a roughedged, prickly object. May’s willingness to let uncomfortable verbal exchanges and clumsy physical encounters stretch on at length recalls certain moments in the classic marriage comedies on which she’s riffing: Ralph Bellamy’s indignant mother being carried forcibly out of the newsroom in His Girl Friday; Cary Grant’s escalating domestic humiliations midway through Bringing Up Baby; The Awful Truth’s exquisitely awkward three-way dinner conversation between Grant, Bellamy and Irene Dunne. And yet May’s ear, more than those of McCarey and Hawks, is tuned for sudden disruptions and discombobulating tonal shifts; think of the muscular cross-cutting in the film’s opening scene, in which a team of specialists perform an emergency operation on what turns out to be Harry’s Ferrari, or the abrupt cut slightly later in the movie to a shot of Harry’s uncle, profiled grotesquely in the extreme foreground of the frame, laughing his head off in response to his nephew’s request for a loan.

If the picture of married life at work in A New Leaf is roughly that of the classical Hollywood marriage comedy, the movie’s formal vocabulary is more aggressive, confrontational and blunt than those of its predecessors.

It’s this tough, combative side of May’s comic voice that comes out in the emphatic “damn it!”

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Harry lets out—to himself? to the universe?—when he realizes that he has to do the right thing, if only on account of his own soft heart. He cares, despite all, but does he want to care? That a husband’s love for his wife could seem to him like a bad habit, a violation of principle, is the joke of one of the richest exchanges in It Happened One Night. Walter Connolly’s suave, billionaire tycoon, having caught Peter (Gable) on the lam with his runaway daughter, asks the man four times whether he loves her. “A normal human being,” he says for more or less the third time, “couldn’t live under the same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!”

The pressing goes on: “I asked you a simple question! Do you love her?” Peter responds: “yes! But don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself!”

One partner’s “screwy,” of course, is another one’s “virtuous,” or “sensitive,” or “wise.” What happens to Harry and Henrietta over a course of A New Leaf is perhaps simply that they arrive—he, one senses, having to do more traveling than her—at a shared vocabulary, a settled standard by which to distinguish between the screwy and the kind. His grudging concession at the end of the film to join her as a history professor at the university where she teaches botany is, on one level, a sign that they’re speaking— or coming to speak—the same language. On another, it’s a sign that, having gone through his own sort of sentimental education, he’s finally ready to teach.

BATS & BALLS in a 2006 interview, elaine may’s comedic collaborator Mike Nichols observed her instinct as a filmmaker to ask, “what is this really like?” May’s second and most popular film, The Heartbreak Kid, plays out in some respects like a light romantic comedy, but the mood of the movie is harder to place than that description suggests. Cy Coleman’s classic “Heartbreak Kid Theme Song,” with its child-like bells and whispery vocals, weaves throughout the film like a familiar lullaby, giving it a tone of innocent melancholy that’s sharply out of step with the typical romantic comedy’s sunnier glamor.

The film opens with a touching visual summary of the romance and marriage of Lenny (Charles Grodin) and Lila Cantrow (Jeannie Berlin).

amelie lasker on The Heartbreak Kid

Their courtship, like the scenes in the movie that show it, slides by: one minute, they’re making each other laugh; the next, they’re dancing together at their wedding. After that lingering wedding dance scene, the story finally finds its rhythm as the newlyweds speed down the highway toward their honeymoon, singing ecstatically. We are rooting for them.

But Lila keeps on singing, just a little too loudly and a little too long after Lenny falls silent—a cue for a series of reminders of Lila’s excessive quirks. She is pretty but unexciting, and her grating voice and constant need for validation render her unwittingly and relentlessly annoying. It’s easy to understand how the first new person after Lila to catch Lenny’s eye becomes an object of myth34

ic fascination for him. Lenny thinks nothing of giving up everything he has to seek his elusive blonde beauty, Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). The humor is effortless: we know when to laugh and roll our eyes at Lila, and when to revere Kelly in relief. We can’t blame hapless Lenny, because his choice is obvious. The movie’s screenplay, by Neil Simon, makes it so.

It’s precisely the ease with which we’re able to pinpoint these characters that suggests that May lost here in her attempt for realism over conventional entertainment. No real people could ever be so easily understood as Lenny— and, more importantly, we in the audience—understand the two women.

Much of May’s career was an idealistic struggle to preserve truthful complexity in her art—ambiguity in her scenarios, moral frailty in her characters, unresolved ellipses in the resolution of her plots—against the more pragmatic ideas of the studios for which she worked. In many ways, this second project set her back in that struggle: though The Heartbreak Kid was the shining commercial redemption in her turbulent career, it was the one movie of hers that she did not write.

“We all know that there’s something about the tiny things in life happening to you that devalues you, that lessens you, that makes you numb,” said May in her 2006 interview with Nichols. “You have to become more and more numb not to get offended.” May’s films often reflect her unhappiness with the general ways in which people treat each other—especially the people with whom she had to battle to retain her artistic freedom. The Heartbreak Kid’s Lenny often exhibits the kindness that May seemed to crave. In a tense scene in a lobster restaurant, during which 35

Lenny has to announce to an oblivious Lila that he wants a divorce, he is still attentive to her needs. He may be abandoning their marriage a week after they said their vows, but he insists that his wife at least have her pecan pie. In May’s battle with the film business throughout her career, she seemed always seemed to be trying to protect this same sort of innocent kindness in her art, while at the same time trying to be taken seriously.

On their honeymoon, the alliterative pair Lenny and Lila seem doomed not to take each other seriously, and they’re not really supposed to. For one thing, it’s hard to take anything seriously in the setting of a bright breezy Florida beach. For Lila, this is the beginning of a trial that they have “forty or fifty years” to get right. For Lenny—well, Lenny hasn’t really thought about it. He doesn’t seem to have much of a capacity for self-reflection. He doesn’t have much ambition (“you sell bats and balls?” Kelly’s father asks when Lenny describes his career in athletic equipment), until, of course, he is presented with the project of attaining Kelly. Charles Grodin perfectly illustrates the tragic foolishness Simon gave this character. Kelly calls Lenny her “teddy bear.”

Kelly, too, treats important life events with nonchalant foolishness, partly because she is just so young. She interacts with Lenny entirely through jokes and games. “You’re in my spot,” she says, matter-of-factly, breezing by him on the beach, showing off her freshness and grace while pretending she is as unaware as a child. In some ways, she is.

When Lenny follows her to Minnesota and tells her he’s ready to spend their lives together, Kelly reacts with mild surprise. She’s willing to go with him, if he feels like following her far enough.

May treats her ridiculous characters without derision. Her subjects are endearingly awkward, and what humor they produce comes from their genuine innocence. Part of The Heartbreak Kid’s conventional appeal was that it made fun of its characters lovingly, without making caricatures out of them—May did bring in her stamp of “what it’s really like.” In her other films, in which she had more agency, May frequently brings in these elements of play. Her characters are constantly disoriented and disappointed, like children looking with surprise at the real-life responsibilities with which they find themselves saddled. The distinguishing mark of The Heartbreak Kid, and perhaps part of the reason for its popularity, is its simplicity. Covered with a thin layer of bright comedy and cute settings, the story essentially depends on a clearly-defined choice between play and real life.

Critics have often referred to The Heartbreak Kid as “the poor man’s The Graduate,” probably because of May’s involvement as an actor in The Graduate, her longtime collaboration with its director, Mike Nichols, and the two movies’ shared premises: both films involve a newly grown-up man finding an opportunity for self-reflection in women. The two movies, however, take the confusions of their male protagonists in completely different directions. In The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson is Ben Braddock’s vice; he discovers and craves maturity in the innocence of Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine.

The movie’s iconic image shows Ben, desperate with love, crying for Elaine through the window at the back of her wedding. The Heartbreak Kid’s Lenny, by contrast, dismisses innocent and plain Lila in search of the maturity of

an unattainable vice, Kelly. Ben is happy with Elaine’s kindness. Lenny, on the other hand, is looking for something more in a wife than he could find in her moral character, which suggests that he is desperate less for love than for some vague happiness.

He hasn’t quite figured out how to be satisfied with his real life, so he keeps trying to change it.

These elements aren’t out of place in a romantic comedy, of course, but in The Heartbreak Kid, the responsibility of real life keeps forcing itself in.

We’re shown that responsibility most vividly in the lobster restaurant scene.

Lila’s grief over the divorce is not as annoying as Lenny had expected; actually, it’s very poignant. For the first time, Lenny understands that there are casualties in the swings of his indecisive heart. Jeannie Berlin has the chance here to add more shades to her performance, which begins to explain the apparent dark irony of May’s choice to cast her own daughter in the role. “This is my life,” Lenny pleads to Kelly, with a note of surprise that suggests he’s realizing it as he says it. “I don’t play games with my life.”

In the final couple of shots, the weight of real life finally comes down on Lenny. His game is up. We see him at his wedding, not accepting congratulations with his new bride, but hiding instead on a couch with some children. He’s reluctant to let them go when they want to leave, understandably, to have some fun. Lenny doesn’t know his new bride any better than he knew his first one, but there she is, accepting congratulations in the background. And Lenny is left alone, thinking about his new life, finally realizing that he has to take it seriously.

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A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND john cassavetes never directed a great movie about male friendship. This is odd, because from a distance, his filmography looks like a gallivanting gaggle of Gazzaras, Falks, and Cassels—not to mention the man himself—laughing, weeping, and stumbling from scene to scene. The closest Cassavetes ever gets to actually realizing this image is in Husbands, his most frustrating film, in which three middle-aged buddies react to their best friend’s death by fleeing their families for an international binge. Yet, as the title suggests, friendship isn’t even the relationship that defines this 37

w i l l n oa h on Mikey and Nicky

story. The key structural components of Cassevetes’ world are bonds between men and women, and the complications—otherwise known as family—that arise from them. For all its terrifying manias, the marriage of A Woman Under the Influence’s Mabel and Nick is still more stable than the shared predicament of Husbands’ husbands.

Friendship isn’t really a relationship at all for Cassavetes; in his films, a relationship is something you dream of running away from but never do. Friendship is a lousy idea you have about where you might run.

At the end of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, Mikey (Peter Falk) cowers inside his house next to his wife while his best friend Nicky (Cassavetes) gets shot to death on his doorstep. Friendship is now a bloody execution, the thing to be escaped, and home the refuge. We are still in something like Cassavetes’ world, anchored by two of its most familiar faces, but our expectations have been upended.

May manages to import some of the landmarks of Cassavetes’ universe into her own filmmaking, but she rearranges them to form an entirely different image. Chief among these markers is Cassavetes himself: his manic grin is as it ever was, but everything around it has been flipped upside-down.

We first meet Nicky barricaded alone in a hotel room, brandishing a gun and a half-crushed cigarette against some phantom intruder. A newspaper headline mentions “a slain bookie,” and we might as well be watching the aftermath of Cassavetes’ great gangster film, also released in 1976. Nicky, at the end of his rope, picks up the phone to summon a guardian angel: “Mikey, I’m in trouble.” There’s a hit out on him, or so he claims, because of some double-crossing that he and the bookie in question may have committed against their gangster boss, Dave Resnick (Sanford Meisner). He makes the call out of desperation, even though he suspects that Mikey—his best friend, but also an employee of Resnick’s— might hand him over to his assassin.

Nicky is a Cassavetes character through and through: his motiva-

tions are obscure, even to himself.

He doesn’t want to die but can’t bring himself to leave Philadelphia, and he keeps coming back to Mikey even though he doesn’t trust him. Mikey’s neuroses are closer to May’s home turf: the tradition of Jewish comedy. When his best friend fires off his unpredictable sparks of impulse, Mikey kvetches. Competent, more or less complacent, and comfortably middle-class, he would be out of place in a film like A Woman Under the Influence, or at best a figure of fun.

He takes decisive action as soon as appears, running to a café around the corner and violently demanding milk from the cashier in order to treat Nicky’s stomach ulcer.

When Nicky bursts out into laughter at the site of his own mother’s grave, Mikey tries to exercise respect. Whenever Nicky decides to change their plans for the night, Mikey asks why.

For anyone who’s spent some time with Cassavetes’ films, Mikey cuts an appealing figure. Cassavetes’ greatness as a filmmaker has a lot to do with his willingness to push human behavior to its most bewildering extremes, but this spectacle isn’t always easy to watch. How pleasant then, to see a film in which Cassavetes and Falk’s irrepressible chemistry is sculpted into something more dialectical, with the latter assuming the role of an audience surrogate. Mikey does all the things that a well-adjusted human being would want to do to any of Cassavetes’ characters: tell them to slow down, de-escalate confrontation, subject their outbursts of frantic activity to rational 38

inquiry. How satisfying, right?

Twenty minutes into the film, May eliminates the possibility of us sympathizing comfortably with Mikey. It turns out that all of Nicky’s most paranoid fears are true: Mikey is stalling his escape so that he can deliver his oldest friend to a hit man (Ned Beatty).

This early twist quashes any doubts about whose moral universe we’re in, Cassavetes’ or May’s; as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the shared theme of all four of May’s features is “the secret betrayal of one member of a couple by another.” May revels in trapping her audience in double-binds: who do you sympathize with, the irritating innocent, or the benign traitor? Every time Mikey seems to have the moral upper hand, May reminds us—often by cutting away to Beatty’s befuddled hitman— that he is trying to murder his best friend. Somehow, this strategy not only brings out the ugliest aspects of each character; it also slowly cultivates a reluctant affection in us for both men, a strange fondness rooted in the thoroughness with which May seeks to understand them.

It’s almost as if May has made a bargain with her characters, promising them sympathy only if they agree to let her pick apart their most horrifying faults.

These faults are most appallingly manifest during the one scene in which the protagonists draw another character into the crossfire of their aggression. After they leave the graveyard, their camaraderie renewed by a reminder 39

of their shared past, Nicky talks Mikey into paying a visit to Nellie (Carol Grace), one of his girlfriends. As soon as they arrive at her apartment, Nicky aggressively coerces her into having sex with him while Mikey waits sheepishly in the kitchen, and then instructs Mikey to do the same.

When the protagonists of Husbands try to force themselves on the women they pick up in London, they’re laying their dignity down on the line in a desperate attempt to preserve their manhood. Cassavetes treats these characters unsparingly, but he seems, like them, to equate virility with existential self-preservation. This strain of masculinism in Cassavetes’ movies is without a doubt the most unpleasant feature of his work, and May confronts it brilliantly. Where Husbands cross-cuts between three men making their coercive advances on three separate women, Mikey and Nicky puts two men and a woman in the same room. Cassavetes lingers on a series of supremely uncomfortable close-ups, shots that wield a violent ambiguity: how can you even know what’s going on between these people, in the full boil of this moment? The Nellie scene, by contrast, unfolds in shots that take in the full environment, drawing a queasy sort of humor out of Mikey’s presence in the background while Nicky forces Nellie onto the floor.

When Nicky prods Mikey to repeat this humiliation, he seems reluctant at first, only to give in and make his advances on her with alarming eagerness. Nellie begs

him not to, and then draws the line by biting his lip. Mikey slaps her and she orders them out of the apartment, prompting a vehement fight between the two men. It’s not their sense of self that Mikey and Nicky are gambling for, but their relative power over one another.

The whole episode is a theatrical confrontation between the two of them, in which the woman becomes mere collateral damage.

Grace’s performance is all the more heartbreaking for the fact that May refuses to linger on it: we follow her tormenters outside, where they argue, exchange blows, and Mikey storms off in search of the hitman, out for revenge.

Which leads us to that final scene, in which Nicky seals his fate by showing up on Mikey’s front doorstep. He’s visited Nellie again, as well as his wife, but can’t bring himself to leave town. Meanwhile, Mikey has spoken with Dave Resnick, who has ordered Beatty’s hitman to drive him home and circle his block. Both men seem tethered to each other by some invisible force, and Mikey knows—despite whatever he tells Resnick to the contrary—that he’ll be seeing his best friend again. He waits anxiously with his wife Annie (Rose Arrick) as the light of dawn seeps into their suburban home. Mikey starts to talk about his younger brother Izzy, who died at the age of ten.

When Annie says she never heard the story, he realizes that Nicky is the only person in his life who knows this key fact about his past.

He curses Nicky for breaking the watch that his father gave to Izzy

and then to him, after Izzy’s death, but this leads him to recognize that Nicky is himself the firmest link to the past that he has. In a parallel scene at the end of A New Leaf, Walter Matthau’s character realizes that he’s lost his sample of the fern that his botanist wife Henrietta (May) named after him. The awareness of this loss spurs him to save the woman he once planned to murder. Mikey’s epiphany is almost identical, but he fails to act on it. It might be the most distinctive mark of May’s dramatic genius that she can turn the same device to equally powerful ends in the contexts of comedy and tragedy.

Right on cue, Nicky shows up outside, and Mikey pretends not to be home while his wife tries to fend the intruder away. As his best friend begs for help, Mikey barricades the door against him. It’s too late for him to help now; the assassin’s car is rounding the corner. “You wait!” Nicky pleads with his killer, as if he’s willing to die as long as he can persuade himself that he hasn’t been betrayed. In the film’s final moments, its subjects suddenly realize what it is they share: a friendship so fundamental to who they are, and so bitter, that only one of them can survive it.

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“IDEAS FLEW OFF HER LIKE LINT” there’s a temptation, when reevaluating Hollywood bombs of yore— Cleopatra, Sorcerer, Heaven’s Gate— to overcompensate for the initial wave of disdain, using phrases like “rough gem” and “half-brilliant.” The brilliant half always belongs to some auteur, whose work the reviewer must excavate from the half churned out by temperamental investors and studio execs. Although Elaine May’s final directorial effort, which drew pans from all but a few major critics and earned back less than a third of its budget, is indisputably a Hollywood bomb (only Heaven’s Gate rivals its reputation of Tiresian doom), and May herself a legendarily inventive filmmaker, it’s difficult here to 41

j ac k s o n a r n on late May

perform the usual excavation process.

In other words, this will not be a rave review of Ishtar.

Nor will it be a history of the making of Ishtar. Fascinating and hilarious though that story is, Peter Biskind has already told it in Vanity Fair. His article chronicles the life of the film, step by step: Elaine May’s invaluable but un-credited rewrites for Warren Beatty’s epic John Reed biopic Reds; Beatty’s plan to return the favor (and, crucially, to prove how much of a feminist he was) by giving May a big movie to direct; Coca Cola’s insistence that its daughter company, Columbia Pictures, shoot the movie in Morocco; May’s on-set feuds with Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Is-

abelle Adjani, which culminated in her threat to walk out; Beatty’s secret decision to re-shoot every scene, essentially doubling an already bloated budget. May has not directed a film since, though she continues to churn out plays, short stories, and scripts.

Of the major films May was involved with after Reds, one is about a pair of lovers trying to disguise their gayness (The Birdcage); one is about a slippery Southern politician who wants to be president (Primary Colors), and one is about an incompetent songwriting duo who travel to the Middle East and get a shot at the big leagues (Ishtar). As Richard Brody points out, the third of these actually consists of two distinct films: one about the songwriters’ bumpy relationship in New York City, the other about their farcical escapades abroad. The inevitable question of what, if anything, unites all these projects, given May’s reputation as a New Yorker of the Woody Allen-Wallace Shawn variety, is much easier to answer presumptively than properly.

If it didn’t sound a touch cheap, one could almost say that May’s signature touch lies in her refusal to commit to any single subject; that is, in her freewheeling, improvisational style. In the 60s, when she and the late Mike Nichols were the two hippest comics in America, she favored experimental, open-ended performances; Nichols, by contrast, preferred to outline the basic structure of a sketch, then improvise within those limits.

Good improv is, in a word, difficult. It requires, in addition to the obvious wit, timing, and composure, a degree of familiarity with one’s partner that’s lacking in most

actual families. In recorded bits like “Mother and Son,” with its hysterical quibbling and Autobahn pacing, one senses that Nichols is a little frightened of May—an illusion, of course, but one that confirms the full extent of her manic energy. Considering all she’d shown herself to be capable of, it’s almost a disappointment that May went on to become one of Hollywood’s most hotly desired writers and script doctors in the 70s and 80s, during which she wrote some or all of Heaven Can Wait, Tootsie, and Labyrinth. It was her screenplay for the former that helped earn Warren Beatty four Academy Award nominations, and convinced him to hire her to polish Reds. Consider an early scene from that film, in which Louise Bryant, played by Diane Keaton, tries to get ahead by seducing Beatty’s John Reed: bryant: We certainly have come a long way fast. reed: Yeah bryant: Do you want to take it a step further? reed: Yeah. bryant: What would you think if I asked you to do something that might seem a little selfish? reed: Well, I…I think you should. bryant: Good, good, because I’d like you to take a look at my work and tell me what you think. You see, I really respect your opinion so much. reed: Well, it’s odd, because I was just gonna ask you if you had anything I could take a look at.

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There is plenty to applaud here, but May’s canny awareness of Beatty’s personality, building on her years of experience opposite Nichols, may be most remarkable. May, rather notoriously, was one of the only women in Hollywood who refused to sleep with Warren Beatty. Perhaps as a result, she catches things about him that few screenwriters, male or female, noticed.

Beatty was at his best in moments like these, which highlighted his hyper-sexuality but also his innocence. May sized him up, wrote scenes especially for him, and made her impressions a lasting part of his public image.

May was a filmmaker who always sized up her cast and crew, then wrote and directed accordingly; the consequences of a bad relationship with a colleague could be disastrous. The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who shot Ishtar (not to mention Reds, Apocalypse Now, and The Conformist), recalls the hours he and May wasted bickering over how to shoot Hoffman and Beatty’s desert scenes. May (who, ironically, hated sand and burned easily) wanted punchy, fast-paced close ups; Storaro wanted to get the most out of the desert setting by using long, majestic takes. One day, Storaro told May he wanted the camera over here; she shot back that it should be over there instead. Storaro feigned reluctance and repositioned the camera— right where he’d secretly wanted it all along. May disliked the female lead, Isabelle Adjani, even more than she disliked Storaro. While 43

there are plenty of theories about why (most of them hinging on her attraction to Warren Beatty, who was dating Adjani at the time), one needn’t subscribe to any one of them to recognize her dislike.

Here, the simple-minded Lyle, played by Beatty, tackles Adjani, who’s disguised as a boy: lyle: Did your daddy ever take you fishing? shirra: My father is dead. I have no one to protect me. lyle (struggling): That’s tough for a boy, not having a father. shirra: Here, get up. Listen to me.

Your roommate is a ClA agent. The room may be wired. He gave me his passport in lshtar. lyle: … Are these breasts?

On paper, the scene is inoffensive, even amusing. The style of humor is not tremendously different from that of the Reds excerpt just quoted; both play on Beatty’s innocence and use a non sequitur as a punch-line.

Onscreen, the scene is more or less charmless; Adjani looks more uncomfortable than Beatty. As Dustin Hoffman recalls, May barely gave her directions, and when they ate dinner together, they exchanged no more than a few words.

Ishtar marked a step away from May’s usual recipe for success, not only because she didn’t get along with her colleagues, but because the film itself was self-consciously old-fashioned. Almost from the moment Beatty offered May a chance to direct again, she conceived of a film that paid homage

to the “Road” pictures of the 40s and 50s, in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, playing the awkward schlub and the cocky charmer, respectively, would visit Zanzibar and Bali and bicker over beautiful women. Most of the humor in Ishtar relies upon the childlike naiveté of its characters—the mentality of Chaplin and Keaton as well as Hope and Crosby, whereby the heroes are simpletons, but their opponents are blind to their surroundings. Near the end of the film, Beatty and Hoffman must avoid assassination by pretending to speak Arabic at an arms dealers’ auction. The bidders get madder and madder, but, for some reason, never realize that their two clueless auctioneers are imposters. One could imagine an identical scene in 1942’s The Road to Morocco. One can also see why it elicited groans in 1987.

When a joke falls flat, a good comedian moves on to the next thing—the only pace she knows for her routine is forward, forward, forward. Movies can be tougher; the action rises and falls, slows and quickens at a maddeningly inconsistent rate. It’s for exactly this reason that even the most talented comics struggle to make the jump from live performance to film (it’s also the reason so many comedic films fall apart in the last half hour). It’s not so much that Ishtar has a few good ideas and a lot of clunkers; instead, it has nothing but good, solid ideas, crammed cynically against one another. May appears to have been perfectly aware of this objection, and then

dismissed it as small-minded—as the oily talent agent Mr. Freed tells Beatty and Hoffman, “If you wanna sell songs today, you gotta have an act with jokes, patter, segues.” Ishtar is proud of having almost no segues. One minute, we’re in New York; the next, Morocco.

From her earliest days in improv, it was May’s style to bounce from one thing to the next—as the production designer Paul Sylbert put it, “Ideas flew off her like lint.”

Yet once they’ve been dreamed up, ideas have to be arranged, proportioned, spaced apart—doing so takes communication, negotiation, and cooperation. At their best, as in Reds or The Birdcage, May’s ideas enhanced each other and strengthened the film; at their worst, when May distrusted or resented her coworkers, they retained their inventiveness but amounted to bland, formless fluff. Roger Ebert was on to something when he compared the content of Ishtar with that of a three-minute SNL skit.

None of this should suggest that May was incapable of creating films with depth. Most of her finest writing was quick and punchy, but its punchiness could generate some surprisingly tender moments. In The Birdcage (a script she wrote to be directed by her old friend Mike Nichols), Armand, played by Robin Williams, greets a mysterious visitor with a bottle of white wine. “You’ve cut your hair,” he says, stroking the young man’s head. It takes us a solid minute to realize that he is not Armand’s lover but his son, Val. When he announces that he’s getting mar44

ried, Williams’ first reaction is to kick him out of the house. But this lasts all of five seconds—overcome with love, he embraces his kid and whispers, “It’s all right.”

It’s a virtuoso piece of writing, one that plays to all of May’s strengths as a comedian without sacrificing any pathos. It’s also a shrewd and touching scene, nicely counterpointing the agony Val’s family will go through to convince his fiancé’s side of the family to go along with the marriage.

As should be obvious by now, May’s inventiveness is so enormous that there’s an almost unavoidable tendency to bring up favorite scenes, bits, and punch lines when discussing her work. It’s strange to think that these parts didn’t add up to a more impressive whole, whether in her films or her career.

Success is a dangerous business, we’re told at the beginning and the end of Ishtar, and for the woman who wrote those words, it was an ugly business, too. Comparing her career and the potential she showed in the 1960s, one notices a large, depressing gap. The gap becomes tragic when one considers how obvious it must have been to May herself. Nichols, her partner, friend, and self-described twin, had an Oscar by the time he was 46, and directed four films in the 70s alone. May only directed four films in her entire career, and the only one of these that was a bona fide hit, The Heartbreak Kid, seems to have reminded her how far she was from the level of recognition she felt she deserved. Did industry sexism keep May from commercial 45

success? Almost certainly—but so did she.

Partly out of spite, partly out of sympathy, May’s work usually characterizes fame as a sad, sleazy institution, the only thing more pathetic than failure. Beatty and Hoffman, the struggling songwriters, finally climb to stardom, but only because they’ve cut a deal with the U.S. government—in the final scene, their audience is applauding at gunpoint. The star attraction at the Birdcage, the moody, self-deluding Starina, subsists on an endless diet of “Pirin” pills—“just Aspirins with the ‘A’ and the ‘S’ scraped off.” Starina may be closer to May herself than to the sellouts she hated—when he pouts and threatens not to perform, it’s hard not to think of his creator threatening to walk off the set in 1987.

There’s a great line at the beginning of Ishtar: “I’d rather have nothing than settle for less.” The counterintuitive twist is worthy of Wilde, but the sadness resting just below it is quintessential May. Yes—she’d rather construct comedy routines that were, a quarter century before Seinfeld, brilliantly, gloriously about nothing than settle for Nichols’ directions; rather walk away from Ishtar with her reputation in ruins than give in to Storaro, Beatty, or Adjani. That’s a hard way to live any life, let alone a life in Hollywood. But perhaps it helps explain why critics are still trying to come to grips with her career—May could make films of such effortless wit that it’s difficult to see the proud, stubborn sadness right in front of our faces.

NEW SPACES FOR IMAGE-THOUGHT Harun Farocki: a remembrance

by l au r a c a d e n a

T

he image is not unfamiliar. an aerial shot of a wide landscape depicts small clusters of structures in a largely uninhabited and indistinguishable area.

Had we not been told that the image was a photograph of post-war Poland, it would have seemed harmless enough, perhaps even a bit dull. But when Harun Farocki presents an image to us, he does not simply tell us to look at it.

He tells us to look at it close, and then closer.

Airstrips are made to appear faded, overgrown with plants and muddish in their coloring. Nearby, brightly painted decoy structures distract us, inviting our eyes to trail carelessly over the factories and munition works that have been modified to resemble apartment structures.

Mounds of wood conveniently enclose rivers and train tracks, and small groves of trees hide industrial-size gas chambers. The closer we look the more the landscape reveals, and the more receptive we become to its revelations.

What Farocki gives us is a certain closeness to an image, where we extend ourselves to engage with it as if it were more than a simple object, as if it too could engage with us.

Then there is a woman. Filmed in a time and context far from those of the previous image, she sits with her eyes closed and her head submissively thrown back.

A foreign hand enters the frame and begins powdering her face with quick horizontal strokes, layers of makeup piling onto each other with hasty precision. Stroke after stroke, the hand’s movements become mechanized and aggressive, like the turning of gears or the rotation of cylinders. Just when this semblance seems overbearing, the woman’s flesh turns to marble, her flushed peach tone re46

placed by an indifferent, matted white.

Her face is treated no differently than the landscape in the previous photograph— subject to its own kind of architectural cosmetic treatment.

Arriving at this bridge, it becomes clear that Farocki’s faith in closeness is matched by his faith in distance. Just as he presses us to look close, he urges us to think far. He guides us past geographical barriers, past the limits of time and consequence, past tightly mapped thematic parallels, and toward a privileged vantage point where the world comes to resemble a single, indivisible web, within which ties can be drawn between any two images, any two concepts, or any two moments in time. These ties are, for Farocki, the key components in this careful process, which can be simply described as a process of understanding.

In the 2012 Haus Der Kunst Symposium keynote lecture “To Understand Through Images,” Georges Didi Huberman explained that, for Farocki, to understand was to “exercise one’s patience according to a double distance—to compare incomparable things.” In this particular connection point between the woman’s face and the landscape, from his 1989 masterpiece Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Farocki carries us through a new metaphor for one of his work’s overarching themes: the use of images as weapons. The film reveals to us that the photograph of the landscape is an image of Auschwitz before it was discovered. When specialists failed to adequately inspect this photograph, it suddenly became a weapon—an active player in the same game of deception that we see being played out on the woman’s face.

It seems as though Farocki’s world is one of endless bridging, but, strangely enough, the longer the bridge we draw, 47

the closer we are to understanding our starting point. The level on which Farocki wants to engage his viewer is more intellectual than it is emotional. With each bridge, he challenges our thinking, and with each image, he poses a new question.

Farocki belonged to the first graduate class of the Deutsche Film und Fersehakademie in West Berlin, from which he was quickly expelled in 1966 because of political activism against the West German “fascist” system. His early film work borrowed many formal devices from Situationism, the French New Wave, and Direct Cinema, but quickly developed its own guerilla tendencies fueled by political anger. The depth of this anger can be partly traced back to a defining incident in Farocki’s life: the death of Holger Weins.

On June 1st, 1972, Wiens—who had worked as a cameraman in Farocki’s The Words of The Chairman and who had also been expelled from Farocki’s university for activism—was arrested for terrorist activity. He was member of the Red Army Faction, a West-German leftist militant group acting against what they deemed to be the fascist state. Weins died on November 9th after 58 days of a hunger strike. Soon, Farocki would find an image of Weins, gaunt and lacerated after his autopsy, in the press—a horrific police prize that would provoke a public uprising against the West German system and embed itself into Farocki’s mind as an image that begged examination, a personal call to re-examine the store of already-existing images that dwell before the public eye.

Like the photograph of Auschwitz demonstrates, these existing images may have remained unexplored, but can be viewed in such a way that they become anew.

Rejecting the narrative personal explorations of some of his contemporaries, including Wim Wenders and Rainer

Werner Fassbinder, Farocki would opt instead for a fragmented documentary structure through which he offered glimpses in the mirror of human history—a history he saw as riddled by war, invasion, social injustice, power abuse, and desensitization. At their best, Farocki hoped, these glimpses would stimulate us into action. For this reason, Farocki’s unwavering insistence on exposing suffering has to be considered in light of his faith in the ability of such exposures to incite response within societies and individuals.

In his 1969 agitprop film Inextinguishable Fire, this faith surfaces in a scene that could be considered Farocki’s most provocative attempt at generating understanding within his audience. Farocki places himself in front of the camera, leans over a small table, and commences a thoughtfully choreographed monologue laden less with revolutionary heroism than with sober austerity. First, he reads aloud a testimony from Thai Binh Dan, a Vietnamese victim of napalm injuries. Next, like any good philosopher, he sets before us an aporia for thought: How can we show you the deployment of napalm, and how the burns that it causes? If we show you pictures of the injuries caused by napalm, you will close your eyes. At first you will close your eyes before the pictures.

Then you will close your eyes before the memory of the pictures. Then you will close your eyes before the facts.

Then you will close your eyes before the entire context.

The message is clear: we cannot bear the truth. Be that as it may, in a move that affirms his solidarity to the victims of napalm as much as his commitment to producing understanding, he reaches for a cigarette, takes a draw until it glows, and

extinguishes it on the back of his hand.

What he offers us here is a metaphor; that, he figures, we can bear. The camera moves closer to the mark on his skin, and we hear Farocki’s voice say that napalm burns at around four-thousand degrees Celsius, while a cigarette only burns at five-hundred degrees Celsius.

In many ways, Farocki fits the mold of an agitator. However, by consistently appealing to his viewers’ intellects—despite whatever evidence he might have of those viewers’ lack of sensitivity—Farocki places himself beyond mere agitation, filling each of his images with a conflicted sense of faith. Antje Ehmann, Farocki’s wife, and Kodwo Eshun, a London-based writer and filmmaker, touch on this side of Farocki when they describe the director’s way of exposing the material of his film as “writing hate letters to cinema in the language of love.” Neither love nor righteous anger can ever be enough for Farocki. But the careful, intelligent navigation of the two, the ability to compare incomparable things—even, if need be, in metaphor—can, Farocki thinks, aid us in building spaces where images can be considered in new, productive ways.

Under the influence of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the political anger Farocki harbored was rerouted, and, with time, he came to develop a technique that Thomas Elsaesser has described as “implied distance.” Farocki proceeds, in other words, by establishing an “unhurried didacticism” and “critical detachment” from the content of his movies in order to establish an objective relationship between himself and that content. This technique is, of course, deceptive, since Farocki’s films originate from a highly selective and extensive process of image curation that is in no way an objective process. It is through this kind of directo48

INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE (1969)

rial presence that Farocki builds scenes designed to give the viewer a sense of being witness to the events in question—but in assuming the role of witnesses, we find ourselves falling for the strange, crafted illusion of Farocki’s absence.

In Videograms of a Revolution (1992), a collaborative film between Andrei Ujică and Farocki that reconstructs the 1989 December Romanian Revolution from 125 hours worth of amateur footage, no image is as iconic and demonstrative of this illusion as that of Rodica Marcau, a wounded young woman from Temesvar.

The film begins in a hospital room in Banat where Marcau is painfully struggling as a small group of people lay her down on a bed. Momentarily obscured as she is by the crowd around her, we can only hear her wailing, but when an opening forms between two men and the presence of the camera is revealed, Marcau softens her crying and turns toward 49

it significantly subdued. “You’re recording sound and image?” she asks. When a voice gives her an affirmation, her face hardens, her eyes drift upward, and in a rhythmic, heroic cadence she delivers an impromptu political manifesto. “We don’t want a dictator” she cries. “We want Ceausescu to be put on trial here in Banat.” As Marcau gives her performance, we cannot help but feel that we are looking through the very lens of the camera, that we control the scene, and that Farocki has disappeared. “Pass on a message for me,” she begs, and, as the camera zooms haphazardly into her face, we accept.

It is because of Farocki’s ability to cast this illusion that Georges Didi-Huberman refers to him as a filmmaker in the “third person”—a filmmaker who creates a kind of equality between “the one who looks and the one who is being looked at” that lends itself to understanding. The understanding, in this

case, stems from permitting oneself a necessary illusion: a brief suspension of disbelief that allows one to step into the scene with unguarded intellect.

Just as important as the unseen presence of Farocki is the unseen presence of the camera. Farocki was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Dziga Vertov, who was a key member of the Kinoks: a collective of Soviet filmmakers working in 1920’s Russia. In his 1922 essay “We. A Version of A Manifesto,” Vertov argues for the perfection of the camera over the human eye and categorically rejects narrative film in favor of movies that show “life caught unaware.” Rodica Marcau’s scene in Videograms of a Revolution sets up a conflicted union between both these ideals. Marcau’s scene is in no way exemplary of “life caught unaware,” but it does demonstrate that the eye of the camera captures much more than the human eye ever could. All at once the camera sees her struggle, the space she inhabits, her emotion, the emotions of others, and her defining moment of realization.

Films like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera sought to give a voice to what the Kinok manifesto called the “new man”—a man “free of unwieldiness and clumsiness” with the “light precise movements of machines.” In his later film work, Farocki approaches this “new man” not with admiration, but with wariness.

Farocki’s 2003 documentary War At A Distance opens with a series of spiraling shots taken by cameras attached to missiles during the Gulf War in 1991.

Crosshairs sit at the center of the screen and cameras hurtle toward their targets, culminating, at the moment of collision, in a screen of black and white static. The automation of factory production led, in Farocki’s time, to the automation of

warfare. Now, images were serving as an indispensable part in a process of destruction. These images are not intended for human eyes, but for the new eyes of our time: those of visual tracking systems and militarized computers. The “new man” the Kinoks awaited is a man whose “light precise movements” come at a terrible cost—a disconnection and loss of responsibility for human actions, a world where the pressing of a button brings unrepeatable damage, a world where the selection of targets is left to the discretion of a camera.

Six years later, Farocki took these thoughts further with Serious Games (IIV), the four part video installation piece at the center of his 2009-2010 solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This piece considers video game technology in the context of the military programs where it originated. In Part IV: A Sun With No Shadow (2010), Farocki takes apart the intricacies of two immersive, virtual military programs: one for pre-deployment military training and the other a “follow-up” PTSD-rehabilitation program for soldiers after their return home. Both these programs are meant to create and support memories—the memory experienced and the memory not yet experienced. However, in doing so, both of these become somehow tainted and directed by the program, in which violence is not simply represented to the user, but expected of him or her. The turning point of this film comes with a small discovery—something is amiss in the rehabilitation program.

“The follow-up images,” an on-screen text reads, “resemble those that prepare the war, but the follow-up images have no shadows. The system for remembering is a little cheaper than the one for training.” Priority, it seems, is given to a 50

program that enables wounding rather than one that generates healing. The difference is subtle, but it strikes a chord in us. We train people through machinery, but what happens when that machinery is programmed with an inherent bias?

Once technology has become a primary mechanism for the preservation and abuse of power, Farocki shows, great oppression can manifest itself in a manner so subdued that its impalpability makes it still more violent.

For that reason, no image must remain unquestioned, and Farocki, whenever confronted by an image, is highly adept at targeting what the appropriate question is. In How To Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990), Farocki invites us into a metaphorical structure comprised of a series of small vignettes, most of them focused on exercise, training programs, or demonstrations: women prepare for the pains of child bearing, children are taught to cross a street, soldiers are drilled, machines are conditioned, and pensioners rehearse amateur performances. Most striking, however, is a moment in which a woman, standing by a stripper’s pole, is being taught how to strip. She glides uneasily from one side of the pole to the other while a voice instructs her on where to place her body, on how to seductively drop her clothing, and on when she should turn towards her audience. Here, there is a specific question that screams out at us: can sincere emotion be found in the world if we have gone as far as teaching strippers how to strip? The slowness of her movements, and the lack of genuine sexuality we see in her uncomfortably echo the images of indoctrination and self-policing scattered throughout the previous vignettes. She is a machine that must be regularly and mechanically tested to ensure its belonging in a world-turned-market.

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As a hand guides her movements up and down the pole, we are reminded of the other hands Farocki confronts. His own hand that lit the cigarette to burn his skin, the hand that held a camera up to Rodica Marcau, hands that launched missiles, hands without shadows, and hands that lost their human nature and became mechanic as they applied makeup to a woman’s face. Farocki reminds us that, for better or for worse, we use our hands to intervene. We build, we break, we touch, we stroke, we catch, we lead, we press, we kill, we capture, and somehow, in between all this contact, we create. We use our hands to hold cameras, and cameras capture images—a different and more consequent intervention, for just as hands intervene, images implicate. They implicate movements, situations, thoughts, and feelings, all of these ranging from absolute violence to unassuming caresses. Images can provoke and they can calm. No images can ever be pure or absolute, for they have all undergone a certain manipulation, an intervention by an individual hand.

Our concern lies in identifying how this hand has intervened, and to what purpose. This is the kind of image-thought Farocki engages with. In the space he creates for us, he requires us to walk about, uncomfortably and constrainedly, so that we can feel the rough edges and imperfections left upon each of his images by his own hand, by our own hands, and by the hands history has cast upon them.

Harun Farocki passed away for unknown reasons on July 30, 2014 at 70 years of age.

Apart from his work on film, Farocki was a recognized theorist, curator, editor and critic.

IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR (1989)

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NOTHIN’ LEFT TO LOSE the self-destructive youths of Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water

by n at h a n k at k i n

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O

livier assayas’ l’eau froide (cold water) is both an exercise in visual frigidity and a study of characters who have gone emotionally cold.

In the film, Assayas’ cleverest trick is subverting twenty-five hundred years’ worth of western literature’s enshrinement of the trope of the pure and noble youth; his most effective one is creating a visual landscape perfectly synchronized to the emotional landscape of the film’s central character, Christine (Virginie Ledoyen).

The total experience is utterly harrowing. Assayas sets his characters against a world that may be monstrous and unfeeling. If nothing else, his characters—whose reliability we are led to question—find it so.

Cold Water was made in the nineties, but it’s set in the seventies. The film’s costuming and its classic rock soundtrack root it solidly in the era it depicts. Assayas’ principal characters, Parisian teenagers Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine, don’t care about much, but they do care about Janis Joplin and The Who. The movie begins with the two of them stealing records.

The seventies, in Assayas’ picture, were cynical, burnt out, little more than shards of the idealistic sixties: although parents try to be sympathetic (witness Gilles’ interactions with his frustrated father), all the children can dream of is destruction, carried out for no obvious or concrete reason. A handful of passages in the first half of the movie are concerned with Gilles acquiring dynamite for some unknown purpose. Later, we see him slashing open bus seats with a knife; his motivations are never explicitly explored.

Christine and Gilles are the center of a world that often seems more like a whirlwind. Most of the first half of the movie consists of their muted reactions to various stimuli. Christine is arrested after Gilles escapes the couple’s shoplifting adventure, leaving her behind.

Assayas equates Gilles’ experience at high school with Christine’s experience in the police station: the kids are both faced by adults who claim, perhaps earnestly, to want to help, but who—as the teenagers see it—can’t help in any meaningful way. Gilles’ apathy in the classroom drives his teacher to throw him out; after she taunts and antagonizes the policeman, Christine’s parents forcibly commit her to a mental institution. The pervasive tone of Cold Water is one of fear and animosity. In one of the movie’s most memorable shots, the camera lingers on Christine in the police station for several minutes before the policeman enters, moving in and out from behind a pole at a distance, obscuring her and then revealing her again as she fidgets and frowns.

Though we think from a distance we may catch some glimpse of her and understand her, she is always ultimately obscured: such is her relation to the world. Assayas’ sympathetic portrayal of the policeman—kind, serious, frustrated—suggests that Christine’s elusiveness is as much a matter of her own choice, her own fear and mistrust, as it is a necessary adaptation on her part to some indigenous hostility in the world around her.

The only place in which these young people seem to find any hope is in rock and roll music. The nihilistic abandon with which Christine and Gilles treat the world—taken together with their abiding love for classic

rock—will be familiar to fans of Richard Hell and The Voidoids or certain other seminal punk bands which rose to prominence in the era Assayas depicts. The relationship of the movie’s characters to the era’s music is very precisely placed: Gilles and Christine do not listen to Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, but to what Lydia Lunch might have listened to herself (think Joplin, Dylan, or Leonard Cohen). Their cultural context is not punk, but the context that created the attitudes of punk: a new generation’s scramble, after the collapse of the promise of the sixties, to find something to believe in.

Perhaps most telling is the inclusion, during a key scene later in the film, of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Rather than Dylan’s politically passionate protest music or the surrealistically cocky rock and roll the singer made later in the sixties, Assayas uses a piece from the seventies that questions the value of life in the face of the seemingly omnipresent “long black cloud” of death. Assayas explores the impact of this climate on the psyche of his characters not by having them gloriously react against it, but by allowing them, in some sense, to succumb to it.

The soundtrack is one major engine of the film’s aesthetic; the two others are Assayas’ camerawork and color palette. Much of the movie seems to have been shot with a handheld camera: the frame shakes, peripheral objects slide in and out. Often, Assayas will focus in on some object and trace its path through space with the camera, leaving it the only stable center of a world in motion. He traces Gilles’ knife as it slashes through the seats of a bus; he traces Christine as she wanders through a crowd, haphazardly cutting her own 54

COLD WATER (1994)

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hair with a pair of scissors. Each time, he creates an overwhelming sense of isolation. The object in focus comes off as fundamentally separated from its surroundings, but also stuck in an essentially destructive relationship with them. These characters, in the same way, aren’t just cut off from the world; they generate friction by rubbing up against it. The scissors scene culminates in Christine’s unprovoked stabbing of another teenager.

The movie’s color palette, in keeping with its title, is clinically cold. From the beginning of the film, bright colors are muted in favor of cobalt blues, alpine greens, and flecked whites and grays. As the film progresses, every color except those few gradually fades away.

It’s difficult to describe the emotional effect of this encroaching cold, which is all the more upsetting for coming on gradually, almost imperceptibly. By the end of the film, the collapse of this colorful world into a vast, oppressively muted landscape will be one of Assayas’ most important devices for exploring Christine’s character.

T

he image of the pure and noble youth dates back at least to the 5th century BC, when Sophocles wrote Antigone, and was still easily detectable in 1951, when J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye. Antigone and Holden Caulfield are both young people who seem, if ambiguously, to know some essential truth of which the adults around them are ignorant. Both finally pursue this truth, which leads them, in the end, to a tragic fate: Antigone is ordered to die but kills herself first; Holden has a mental breakdown.

The crucial point is that they suffer for their goodness. These characters

become all the more sympathetic because their commitment to some pure ideal—Antigone’s love for her brother and Holden’s love of beauty generally, along with his conviction that an insensitive world is intent on trampling it—drives them to die (or break down) rather than submit.

Sophocles wrote Antigone in the decade between the end of the Persian Wars and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War—a period fraught with political tension between city-states which had, until recently, been allied against foreign enemies. In this context, Antigone’s dedication to her fallen brother represented not only an ideal of familial love—an important virtue in and of itself within Greek culture—but also an injunction to Athens to reconcile with Sparta before the conflict between the two states escalated to the point of violence. Contemporary Athenian writers would have been sympathetic to this goal: witness Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a very differently tempered treatment of the same political subject matter. The titular character of that play is also a young woman—in some sense, a pure and noble youth—who seems clued in to a truth that the old men who run Athens do not know: that peace with Sparta (represented by the fraternal figure of Polyneices) would be more valuable than war.

Holden responds to a problem similarly specific to his generation: the commercial boom following World War II, which resulted in an era of consumer culture unprecedented in American history. Amidst all this prosperity, it may have seemed to the young Salinger that beauty was being forgotten. The anti-intellectual thread running through The Catcher in the Rye 56

suggests that the greater accessibility of education as a result of the GI Bill and the expansion of state-funded universities was not helping the problem.

If anything, it was exacerbating it: the universities were creating the egotistical professors and pseudo-intellectuals described in detail in Franny and Zooey rather than the humble scholars of previous generations, who knew that beauty should be held to the forefront in their studies. (The depiction of Epictetus in Franny and Zooey again provides a more fleshed out treatment of the same subject matter.) The most important prerogative, in Salinger and Holden’s world, is simply to be sensitive to beauty, a practice which requires a certain orientation away from the self.

Christine in Cold Water has neither Antigone’s martyr-like sense of civic duty nor Holden’s self-renouncing aestheticism. For the bulk of the film, Ledoyen’s task is to be inscrutable, and she succeeds. Christine is utterly self-assured and intently self-destructive. She tells a police officer she was sexually assaulted; it is unclear whether this is true.

Whether it is or not, when the officer inquires further, she says laughingly of her assaulter, “He didn’t exist!” She despises her parents for reasons never explained or even explored. For reasons equally unclear, she seems to love Gilles—but in the first half of the movie, their interactions are infrequent and brief. When they are caught shoplifting in their first scene together, he leaves her and escapes with the stolen records. When Christine is hospitalized, she escapes; how, we never learn. In the movie, she is present less as a person than as an outline of one. We see her act on the world, we see her acted upon, but to the mind which processes these actions, we’re left blind.

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When Assayas finally does unveil Christine’s mind to us, it’s primarily by way of Ledoyen’s body. Following her unshown, unexplained escape from the mental hospital, during the movie’s centerpiece scene—a drug-fueled, halfhour-long party at an old abandoned house—we get a long, torturous shot of Christine and Gilles, silhouetted, embracing while the partygoers behind them burn the house’s beautiful furniture in an ever-growing bonfire.

Leonard Cohen’s tremendous “Avalanche” rumbles on the soundtrack. It’s not exactly that the horrible weight of the song transforms the innocent joy of youth into something perverse or ominous; instead, what Assayas reveals here is that youth never was innocent or joyful, at least not for these characters. The fire ascends to the sky as children dance, reveling in the destruction they’ve wrought.

For the rest of the film, Christine is every bit as fragile and captivating as that fire. The vulnerability which attracts us to her is that of a flame which, with no means to extend its tenure, has to inevitably burn itself out. Escaping the clutches of her mother and stepfather, who’ve come looking for her at the party, Christine asks Gilles to run away with her to an artists’ colony. It’s the home, she tells him, of a childhood friend with whom she has kept in touch. Almost immediately after he agrees, we find out, in a separate scene—a separate dialogue—what Gilles never finds out: that Christine has not kept in touch with this friend, that she has no idea where the artists’ colony is, and that if it even exists, she stands no chance of finding it. When asked if Gilles knows, she replies, in a muted tone, “I

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don’t want him to. I don’t want to go alone.” The last warm color we see in the movie is that of a sweater a friend lends Christine for the journey. In retrospect, this is the first point at which it’s possible to tell that Christine’s goal is her own death.

Trekking through an icescape countryside days later, Christine and Gilles set up camp for the night. The film’s final scene is set entirely to the soundtrack of a frigid river flowing by the rocky beach next to their tent: our first sight and only sight of the titular cold water, which consumes the scene’s slow-pan opening shot. Finally, the camera lights on Christine standing knee-deep in the river, fully clothed.

After she walks out and strips naked, the camera captures her body juxtaposed against the hugeness of the river: a nightmare of singular beauty. She has gone from fire to water; from an embrace to solitude.

She walks back to the lean-to and engages Gilles sexually. Their elided intimacy—the camera glides away as Christine approaches Gilles—functions in the movie as a tragically beautiful question mark. After watching Christine miss or actively reject so many connections with others (in the police station, or cutting her hair during the party scene), we see that her relationship with Gilles has given her a solitary way out of her isolation.

This is the motivation for the intensity of her motion towards him, her dedication to him throughout the movie, her desire to involve him in her quest: through him, she has been holding onto the world. Whether or not he treats her kindly—he ran away during her arrest—is unimportant to her. He is simply the only person to whom she 59

feels connected, and their moment of intimacy raises the possibility that she will continue to hold on, through him.

Then Assayas cuts to the next morning, when she is gone. Gilles finds a note.

We understand that it is a suicide note.

It is also blank.

Those of us viewers well-versed in the trope of the pure and noble youth will want to imagine that Christine died for something: that she understood some secret and powerful truth about the world, or that she was too pure to join an adult world that is, at bottom, irredeemably corrupt. Ledoyen’s blank stare throughout the film, however, suggests that there was no ideal to which she could cling. She is not wise but miserable and lonely: rather than a higher truth, she tries to latch onto Gilles, who seems no less confused than her. The climactic bonfire scene, the most extensive and precise in the film, demolishes the notion that youth is necessarily innocent, even in its moments of joy. Gilles and Christine’s youthful love, far from being redemptive, is, if anything, tragic in its insufficiency to redeem. Nor are adults presented as uniformly oppressive and ignorant. Indeed, in the world of Cold Water, adults are often portrayed with some sympathy; at their worst, they’re troubled people trying to do their best (think again of Christine’s policeman or Gilles’ father). It is the children who engage in meaningless destructive behavior.

Throughout the film, Christine drives, or perhaps is driven, towards death. Her relationship with Gilles is at once a crutch to get her there, for fear of going alone, and the one thing holding her back. Christine’s parents, when they come looking for her at the party

scene, come off as earnest if misguided; they only want to keep her from harm, but her animosity towards them is based precisely on this desire on their part to restrain her, and acts as an impetus to drive her out the door. She can only have faith, Assayas suggests, in another teenager not dissimilar to herself. Assayas’ masterstroke is in how he sets up this behavior of Christine’s as a function of the way she sees the world.

Christine chooses to die not, like Holden or Antigone, because the world strikes her as unbearably evil, but because she is tortured by a suspicion that there is evil in her. As Assayas’ careful revelations bring us closer to Christine, the world of the film loses its color; we are seeing how she sees.

The frigid landscape in which we dwell by the film’s end is the world she lives in, the landscape of her mind. There is, for her, nothing to rejoice in. The small portions of happiness which seem to render life bearable for the adults around her, Christine finds hollow and empty, frigid, sapped of color. Assayas uses the movie’s color palette to make the ineffable—the perspective, the entire worldview of a character—visible.

Christine wants to connect with Gilles because she suspects that he might see the world as she does; she accepts his occasional emotional affronts to her because, in such an ugly world, this is the only kind of love in which she can believe: confused, often selfish, but desperate in its tenacity. When she dies, it is not for a noble cause.

It is because she feels utterly isolated even with Gilles, overwhelmed by the suspicion that it’s perhaps only she who feels the world as cold. Assayas constructs Christine’s parting shot so that the audience is privy visually to

her emotional collapse: the cold water in front of which she’s framed literally overwhelms her.

The emotional impact of Cold Water results from watching a deeply sick person suffer, and slowly realizing that the disease is terminal. It’s partly for this reason that Christine’s death, when it comes, is emotionally devastating, at least equal in its impact to Holden’s breakdown or Antigone’s suicide. As captivating as the notion might be that purity makes one unfit for the world, that nobler spirits rise to the illustrious occasion of an early death, it now seems anachronistic—and not merely from repetition.

Cold Water draws our attention to the fact that people who self-destruct and die young are most often not saints but depressed people; it also demands that we love a depressed person every bit as much as we love a saint, without suggesting that we need any reason to do so beyond their humanity. For centuries of literary history, the dying good have made their exits to prove their purity of soul. Antigone dies trying to win burial rites for her brother.

She’s portrayed in the play ambiguously, but there is never any doubt that she is sincere in her love for her family, and that she is willing to die for her belief that even the dead are owed their due. It’s a wonderfully noble calling for which she dies. Christine just dies to get out. Cold Water doesn’t offer us a savior. Instead it forces us to look at those who don’t want to save anybody, and don’t want to be saved, and who, if nobody ever notices them, will slip away in the middle of the night and leave only a blank note. One of these adjunctions is very pretty. But the other is much more prescient.

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TROUBLE in PARADISE ERNST LUBITSCH, WOODY ALLEN, AND THE PERILS OF ESCAPISM

by m at t h e w r i v e r a

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we are all faced throughout our lives

with agonizing decisions. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But! We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.

The above quote comes from Dr. Louis Levy—a fictionalized version of the real-life professor Martin Bergmann—in a voice-over monologue at the end of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). It’s that film’s most direct expression of one of Allen’s central concerns: How do we make our choices?

Allen’s characters are all faced with agonizing decisions: they choose between one lover and another, between morality and immorality, between life and death.

Woody’s films are less about the results of these decisions than they are about the events that precede the decisions and, in many cases, demand them. It is when all of the pieces are aligned, and the first life-altering decision arises, that a Woody Allen film picks up momentum.

In Bullets Over Broadway (1994), the initial moment of crisis comes when playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) realizes he will have to have his magnum opus produced by gangsters in order to have it produced at all. This decision begins the film, which, in typical Woody Allen fashion, is composed of a series of gravely serious decisions hidden behind the facade of a farcical showbiz comedy.

David Shayne has to make the decision between his dazzling leading lady Helen Sinclair and his girlfriend Ellen, who has stuck by him through thick and thin. He has to decide between remaining true to his artistic integrity or taking credit for a mobster-turned-playwright’s brilliant rewrites of his play. He has to decide whether or not to tell Helen that

he is a phony or allow her to believe that he is the “genius playwright” with whom she is in love. Each decision is a stepping stone for the next, with the moments in between working only to set them up, until we reach the climax of the film, the ultimate decision between life and art: David is faced with the opportunity of killing the mob boss’s girlfriend—a hilariously terrible actress—whose performance is the only thing keeping the show and David from being an absolute success.

Allowing your play to be produced by gangsters, sleeping with your wife’s sister, committing murder: these questions themselves, more so than the way they are answered, are at the center of nearly all of Allen’s films, and the urgency with which they are posed reflects Woody’s life philosophy that, as Dr. Levy says, “we are in fact the sum total of our choices.” In Allen’s films, one of these choices is particularly common: the need to decide between reality and fiction. In Bullets Over Broadway, when David chooses to take credit for the mobster’s rewrites, he is placing himself in the fiction that he wants to live; he is finally a great writer.

In reality, he is no greater writer than he has ever been. Perhaps he is even a lesser writer; certainly he deserves much less praise than he receives.

In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Alice (1990), the choice between fantasy and reality is posed in more explicit terms. The main character in each, played both times by Mia Farrow, is given a harrowing decision by a supernatural turn of events. One has the opportunity to live inside a favorite movie; another, the chance to make someone fall in love with her. Both have to decide between the fiction they have always dreamed of and the reality that has, up until now, grounded 62

their lives. In the end, reality always prevails. These decisions are pure fantasy, as is our perception that they could offer a happy ending. In Allen’s world, attempts to live in fantasy inevitably result in misery. The unrealistic opportunities we all dream about, Allen suggests, are much more complicated than we could have first thought. But it’s the characters, not us, who suffer through the consequences of these decisions. We are allowed to vicariously experience our dreams and the consequences of those dreams, and leave the theater afterward, unscathed.

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The choice between reality and fantasy has never been more pronounced than in Woody’s most recent films: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Midnight in Paris (2011), To Rome With Love (2012), Blue Jasmine (2013), and his latest, Magic in The Moonlight (2014). With the exception of Blue Jasmine, these movies all use elements of the magical and the fantastical to bring this decision to light. Characters go back in time, confront their future selves, and become famous with no rhyme or reason.

Their greatest wishes are fulfilled in this

universe—but this does not cure their dissatisfaction. The time traveler realizes the roaring twenties were no better than today; the young architect’s future self has sold out to design shopping malls; the average citizen, having become famous for no reason, wants his privacy back, only to get it and then want fame back so much so that he’s willing to strip down to his underwear and stand on one leg in the streets of Rome.

Unlike early Allen, grounded in reality and ever skeptical of escapism and fantasy, late Allen raises cinematic escapism to a point where any trace of reality is lost. In these movies, Allen blows the tasteful beauty typically found in the settings and characters of an escapist film so out of proportion that it becomes a kind of ugliness. Just as, after making it big in Small Time Crooks (2000), Ray and Frenchy Winkler overstuff their new luxurious Upper East Side penthouse with items reflecting their wealth until they reach the point of gaudiness, escapism in Woody’s later films is sardonically over-embraced, until we realize that he is attacking it from the inside. Different as his methods are between these newer films and his films from the 80s and 90s, the underlying theme remains the same: we can only live in escapism for a short time before we must return to the reality imposed upon us, whether by necessity or by our own free choice. Reality imposes itself upon the Winklers when Ray decides the sweet life isn’t so sweet, and when Frenchy has to file for bankruptcy.

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ne only needs to watch any given scene in say, Manhattan (1979), and listen to the names dropped, to get a near complete list of Allen’s influences.

Golden age art-house masters like Bergman, Fellini, and Bunuel, classic com-

ics like The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, and W.C. Fields, jazz legends like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet: these artists all meet at a crossroads in Allen’s work. Partly on account of his own tendency to name-drop and reference them endlessly, their influence on his sensibility has become a matter of common knowledge. But an influence of Allen’s that often seems to go unmentioned are the escapist films of Hollywood’s golden age: films like Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey, or the Astaire and Rogers musicals. Outside of The Purple Rose of Cairo and a brief scene in Radio Days (1987), these films never quite receive the same treatment as, for example, the Marx Brothers, but their influence is easily detectable. Perhaps the most under-mentioned of Allen’s influences is the great Ernst Lubitsch, a master writer/director of delightful romantic comedy escapism who, like Allen, also set himself up as one of that style’s savviest opponents.

Like Allen’s films, Lubitsch’s are grounded in the tension between what’s real and what’s not. Trouble In Paradise (1932) is perhaps the greatest example of this tension. The story of a romance between two natural born-crooks, Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), the film exposes the very beginning of their romance as a put-on.

The two have dinner together in Gaston’s elegant hotel room in Venice under false pretenses: Gaston claims to be a baron, Lily a countess. We see through their overdramatized performances—Lubitsch was a master of cap-turing actors acting like bad actors—and are immediately skeptical of what these characters tell us about themselves, setting the tone for a film that constantly dares its audience to distinguish reality from fiction.

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Skeptical as we are, however, we fall for the couple’s tricks. The scene is just too beautiful to refuse. Until, that is, Lily’s landlady calls, telling her to come around the back way when she gets home. We see Lily’s apartment, from which the landlady is calling, and it is there—by its striking contrast from the sparkling hotel room where the rest of the scene takes place—that the truth becomes obvious: Lily is no countess. Soon Gaston’s own guise is lifted and, as only could happen in the movies, Lily raises her arms and 65

falls into Gaston’s lap, exulting “darling!” as she realizes their mutual falseness. The two crooks are made for each other. It’s romance, Lubitsch style.

The way Lubitsch presents the story of Gaston and Lily’s situation is itself a critique of escapism. As they hit hard times, we have to leave the beautiful 1932 art deco world of the wealthy and enter their much more realistic Depression-era hotel room. We see just how hard the times are when Lily sneaks a bite of toast while Gaston isn’t watching. Yet the most

frenzied intrusion on the escapist world of Trouble In Paradise comes after Gaston composes his greatest heist: stealing the purse of the wealthy perfume company heiress Madame Colet in the hopes of return-ing it to her for a lofty reward. Once Madame Colet offers the reward publicly, lines of the di-sheveled poor, purses in hand, form in front of her luxurious art deco mansion. Their contrast with the extravagance surrounding them is startling. Soon afterwards a caricatured Bolshevik storms up to Madame Colet and

offers the film’s most direct attack on her extravagant wealth—“phooey!” (a staple word in the Lubitsch canon, employed to further hilarity in 1941’s That Uncertain Feeling). Fortunately, Gaston is there to show this critic of escapism out, only with the secret intention of posing an even greater threat. He is no less an enemy of the nouveau riche—only much more subtle and discreet in his methods.

Trouble in Paradise does not, in other words, take place in a universe devoid of resistance. Nor, for that matter, do the 66

less ironic escapist films, like those of Busby Berkeley or Astaire and Rogers, made in roughly the same period—but in the social stratospheres of those movies, obstacles to the acquisition of wealth are simply weak, diminished, easily overcome. The great escapist film is the rags to riches story in which the main character rises up against all odds from poverty to wealth. In this story, the ultimate escapist dream, the life of the poor is romanticized as much as the life of the rich, and the path to wealth (and subsequent “happiness”) is oversimpli-fied.

Lubitsch’s barbed variation on this formula is Design For Living (1933); Allen’s, Small Time Crooks. In both films, the characters discover wealth and status as easily as they would in, say, the Astaire and Rogers musical Swing Time (1936), but their chronic misery is never quelled.

In the worlds of Allen and Lubitsch, nothing, wealth included, can cure human dissatisfaction.

In Lubitsch’s Design For Living (1933), the ménage à trois that emerges between Miriam Hopkins, Frederic March, and Gary Cooper begins on a cheap train to Paris and ends in a ritzy limousine with the same destination.

The ending is, on paper, a happy one.

Rather than having to make the decision between Gary Cooper and Frederic March (one which I challenge anyone to make!), Miriam Hopkins accepts an open relationship with them both—a risqué gentleman’s agreement that courted enormous controversy in 1933 and likely would have been deemed un-filmable after the imposition of the Hayes code the following year. The film fades out on the line, “It’s a gentlemen’s agreement!” In classic Lubitsch fashion, this refers to an earlier line in the movie that came with the pair’s first gentleman’s agreement. As 67

we see in the film, that agreement did not work out very well, and this latest arrangement will undoubtedly result in complications and unhappiness in the future. But this knowledge of future misery is overshadowed by the joy of the characters—still happily in the throes of their fantasy relationship.

Small Time Crooks is as much a riff on the typical rags to riches story as it is on Lubitsch’s version of it. In Allen’s variation, the story is of two crooks, Ray and Frenchy (Woody Allen and Tracey Ullman), who build a cookie store with the plan of tunneling into the bank next door. They end up making it big off the cookies, and within a year have built a massive cookie enterprise. Soon, the pair’s newfound elegance, sophistication, and tastefulness—in a typical rags to riches story, these are natural rewards of wealth—are blown out of proportion into gaudiness. The art deco simplicity of Madame Colet’s mansion in Trouble In Paradise has been replaced in Allen’s version with as many objects of wealth as possible. The pair’s apartment fills up with taxidermied animals, golden lamps and furniture, tasteless art, and a harp.

Unlike Lubitsch’s characters, these crooks obtain money, yet don’t know how to spend it.

This is Lubitsch gone awry. Every element is present, but just a little off— the elegance is tacky, the sex appeal gone, the escapism is quelled with hard realism.

Most distorted are the oblivious side characters. In a Lubitsch film, these roles would be played by tuxedo-clad character actors like Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn, or Charlie Ruggles.

In Small Time Crooks, this character is Frenchy’s sister, an uncomprehending idiot brilliantly played by Elaine May. May’s variation on the classic oblivious

side character altogether lacks the refinement and class of the aforementioned character actors. Her motives are a little more unpredictable, her one-liners more laugh-inducing. I’ve watched Small Time Crooks three times now, and I still don’t quite understand who her character is; all I can do is laugh.

The titular trouble in Lubitsch’s film comes from the outside. The attackers, Gaston and Lily, want to steal from the wealthy, to bring trouble to the paradise that is the escapist universe. But the trouble in Small Time Crooks comes from the inside. Ray and Frenchy are not motivated by a principled need to attack escapism, but by an urge to join the uppity society in which it resides. If they end up harming the escapist world of the rich, it’s unintentionally. In their haste to enter society, they don’t realize that their over-extravagance is in fact a threat to it. Allen’s comedy thrives on this sort of obliviousness.

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imilar as they are, Woody Allen will never be Lubitsch, and Lubitsch isn’t Woody Allen. Their films carry similar themes, their theatrical tropes often come from the same canon, but their attitudes towards their characters are, in some sense, directly opposed.

Lubitsch’s comedy depends on characters whose knowledge is endless. They say one thing and mean something else; they are infinitely capable of suggestive double entendres. Our joy as viewers is being in on the joke, knowing as much as the characters know. Woody’s comedies are based on just the opposite—how little the characters know. We laugh at Lester, the pompous television producer hilariously played by Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors, because of his refusal to recognize that he’s making a

fool of himself. Our joy comes precisely from our awareness that we have access to knowledge the characters don’t. Here, too, Allen and Lubitsch are reflecting on the escapist qual-ities of their films—in this case, by encouraging us to revel in having a kind of knowledge we’re rarely granted outside the movies. There is no reality in which people are as all-knowing as the characters in Lubitsch’s films, or as oblivious as the ones in Allen’s.

Magic in The Moonlight (2014) is Allen’s grand statement on this sort of escapism. The entire film is about how much the characters know, or what they think they know. In the end, even the audience realizes that, throughout the film, they have been tricked into thinking they knew more than they did. But while magic and fantasy may not exist in our world, there is a type of magic that has existed right under our noses, and which in the right light—in this case, the moonlight of the title—can be just as transportive and wondrous as having psychic powers or traveling back in time. Sophie (Emma Stone) may not be a psychic, as Stanley (Colin Firth) once thought she was, just as Ray and Frenchy may, by the end of Small Time Crooks, no longer have the extravagant wealth that they once did. But by the film’s ending, they—like Ray and Frenchy— have discov-ered their love for each other, something that is real, and off which they are content to live.

Lubitsch’s grand redefining of the rules of escapist cinema is To Be Or Not To Be (1942), a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the Holocaust.

In the film, as always in Lubitsch, a new level of freedom is found, the rules are broken, and we do not sympathize with any of the characters that are hurt as a result. A man in the fourth row of a theater 68

leaves his seat—in what, we have seen, is a regular routine—to court one of the play’s actresses (Carol Lombard) in her dressing room while her husband, played

by Jack Benny, begins Hamlet’s “to be or not to be . . .” monologue onstage. This moment of broken marriage bonds is not nearly as joyous for the characters as it is for us. Unlike Allen, who finds joy in what is real, Lubitsch finds joy in an event that could only happen in the space of escapist cinema, like Jack Benny’s uproariously unintuitive reaction to the infidelity that has been taking place behind his back throughout the course of the film. Certainly he knows the score when the man in the fourth row stands up to meet Lombard’s character backstage, but he is more upset by the fact that the same man is once again leaving in the middle of his most important monologue than by the proof he’s just received of his wife’s infidelity. The dichotomy here is between the emotions of the characters and our own feelings: Benny is upset, perhaps even heartbroken, and we are laughing.

What makes the moment hilarious, however, is the surprise of what he is upset by. Benny values the stage more than his own marriage—he is a ham.

Different as Allen and Lubitsch are, they are both masters of a type of escapism that is nearly extinct from the cinema. At first glance their films are escapist delights, allowing us to revel in the fantastically romanticized lives of debonaire jewel thieves in 1930s Europe or neurotic intellectuals in 70s Manhattan.

But on further inspection, it emerges that these auteurs, rather than simply romanticizing the lives of the extremely wealthy, are instead affronting those films that actually do so. In the fashion of escapist films, this affronting comes not from what is said and shown, but rather from 69

what isn’t said and isn’t shown. Just as how in Trouble in Paradise, a story about crooks, we never actually see anything being stolen, the selectivity of what we are shown is what makes us fall in love with a pair of thieves. Lubitsch hardly likes to display the ugly side of people.

The ugly side of people is, in contrast, what Allen’s films are made of. Yet Allen usually chooses not to show the ugly side of the places in which his characters exist. In Allen’s films, no matter how ugly, desperate, or upset the characters are, the world is always surrounding them at its most beautiful.

Pessimistic as Allen and Lubitsch’s critiques of escapism might seem, in the end their films still exude a sense of optimism and hope. What lifts us up in their movies is less the glamorously fictionalized worlds in which they take place than the reality that imposes itself upon and grounds those worlds. In both Lubitsch’s and Allen’s films, this reality—and the characters’ choices to live in this reality— is the true escape. We pity Mia Farrow at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo or Cate Blanchett at the end of Blue Jasmine, who sit against (respectively) the backdrop of a golden age movie theater and a beautiful San Francisco street, tears streaming down their faces, having both reached the lowest points of their lives.

Their fantastical romps have ended, and now they are left to a stark reality. Just as in the ending of Design for Living, they make the unexpected choice: they choose to go on living, to continue to face the world and make their own rules in a universe that refuses to tell them what rules—what designs for living— to make. Their endings are ambiguous, and we are left, for once in Woody and Lubitsch’s films, with only one choice: to hope for the best.

illustrations by a l e x r i v e r a

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F I N A L TA K E

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Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University. This funding is made possible through a generous gift from the Gatsby Charitable foundation.

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