Double Exposure: Fall/Winter 2013-2014

double exposure

columbia university undergraduate film journal issue 6 | fall/Winter 2013-2014 1

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from the editors Subtitle We present for you this evening A movie of death: observe These scenes chipped celluloid Reveals unsponsored and tax-free We request these things only: All gum must be placed beneath the seats Or swallowed quickly, all popcorn sacks Must be left in the foyer. The doors Will remain closed throughout The performance. Kindly consult Your programs: observe that There are no exits. This is A necessary precaution.

Look for no dialogue, or for the Sound of any human voice: we have seen fit To synchronize this play with Squealings of pigs, slow sound of guns, The sharp dead click Of empty chocolatebar machines.

We say again: there are No exits here, no guards to bribe, No washroom windows.

No finis to the film unless The ending is your own.

Turn off the lights, remind The operator of his union card: Sit forward, let the screen reveal Your heritage, the logic of your destiny.

- Weldon Kees, 1936 -

editors-in-chief David Beal Max Nelson

blog editors Nick Lieberman Maya Rosmarin

managing editor Will Noah

publicity director Julia Selinger

art director Katy Nelson

multimedia editor Bernhard Fasenfest

cover and inner illustrations by Emma Merkling

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l’avventura (1960)

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contents 4

bored to death

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no shoes

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amateur hour

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lovethirsty animals

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serge daney

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dave kehr

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manny farber

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judex’s confession

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workers of the world

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portrait of adÈle

jackson arn

the 1% existential ennui film, then and now

julia selinger

the (un)common worlds of Nicole Holofcener

nick lieberman

on Venice’s “Future Reloaded” program

gus reed

taking another bite out of Trouble Every Day

paul chouchana

a translation

a conversation

david beal & max nelson david beal

an appreciation

max nelson

on Georges Franju’s 1963 fairy tale

sophia skupien

a closer look at Wajda’s Man of Marble

maria giménez cavallo

Courbet and Kechiche’s feminist realism

54 seeking stars

in search of the movie star aura

theo zenou

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bored to death a brief history of the 1% existential ennui film from Antonioni to American Psycho

by j ac k s o n a r n

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hich famous american book was a huge critical and commercial success when it was initially published?

a) Moby Dick b) Walden c) The House of Mirth d) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

If you’ve ever gone through a creative writing workshop, you’re probably familiar with some version of the quiz above. If not, stop for a moment and consider how bizarre it is that the greatest works of Melville, Thoreau, and Twain were all failures in their own time—big, embarrassing, career-killing failures that made the public snigger and the critics shake their heads. And then, acknowledge how unfair it is that the author of C, a spoiled brat with about as much of a relationship with the common man as Queen Elizabeth, earned so much money from the success of her novel about spoiled brats that it made her a fortune to add to the one she’d already inherited.

The point of the quiz, usually, is that fiction need not feature a relatable protagonist to be successful. Melville and Thoreau knew what it was like to work fifteen-hour days, but that didn’t help them sell books to farmers, dockworkers, or factory laborers. With Huck Finn, Mark Twain painted one of the richest, most affectionate pictures of provincial life in all American literature, but provincial people seemed not to care. To explain their failure, I’ll borrow from Steinbeck (a writer who 6

managed to sell the common man a lot of books about himself ): the American lower classes see themselves “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” For all the talk of equality and brotherhood that’s always dominated our national rhetoric, we Americans have always had an appetite for stories about the people we’d like to be—the tiny group to the far right of the wealth spectrum. It’s true of our literature, and it’s truer of our films: the author of a book can be anybody, rich or poor, but the people who make the most popular movies in this country are almost necessarily wealthy and glamorous. It doesn’t matter whether the film is an adaptation of Moby Dick or The House of Mirth; either way, the audience is forced to interact with wealthy, glamorous movie stars. The entire motion picture industry would collapse if the 99 percent weren’t comfortable watching the escapades of the one percent.

Even putting this fact aside, it’s remarkable how wealthy people are portrayed onscreen. Through booms and busts, conservative and liberal presidencies, movies not only made by but about the one percent refuse to die out. The One Percent Existential Ennui film must be one of the richest and most resilient subgenres in all of the cinema, its clichés as familiar as those of the action thriller or the rom com: passionate but meaningless sex, high-paying but meaningless jobs, glamorous but meaningless parties, and finally, characters engaged in hushed (but perhaps meaningless) dialogue about life, love, and death. The remarkable thing about these clichés is that, unlike those of Die Hard or Pretty Woman, they’ve inspired and continue to inspire genuine auteurs, from Fellini and Antonioni to Hal Ashby and Sofia Coppola, whose Lost in Translation may be the most representative film in the entire genre. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the wealthy are always the ones to talk philosophy onscreen—they’re the only people who have the leisure time to think about it. Still, it’s worth looking at the 1%EE genre more closely, if only to explain why we continue to care so much about rich bored people.

Two observations before we begin: 1. 1%EE shouldn’t be written off as a mere theme to be looked for in other genres.

There are plenty of films with rich, bored characters that are about something other than being rich and bored. Citizen Kane spends a lot of its running time wallowing in the torturous idleness of the wealthy, but it’s not a member of the genre I’m talking about. The tone, at least to begin with, of a movie like Lost in Translation, L’Avventura, or Harold and Maude, is always one of boredom, a vague sense of dissatisfaction that never rises to the level of anger. The protagonists of these movies, as we’ll see, are always hyperconscious of their privileged isolation, but they’re also too scared, too lazy, or too weak to do much about it. Ennui is not the backdrop to the film, but its central question.

2. The 1%EE genre is decidedly postwar in its sensibility. It may be that its brand of boredom is a decidedly postwar emotion, rarely found in fiction of any kind before the postmodern era. More important, though, is the new robustness of the link between consumption and alienation in 1950s America. The same dissatisfaction with material prosperity that inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac brought American audiences to the theaters to see La Dolce Vita (though unlike the Beats, the audience wanted to have its cake and eat it, too).

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It’s strange, considering its enduring popularity in the United States, that the 1%EE genre largely began as an offshoot of European art cinema. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Antonioni’s L’Avventura, both released in 1960, remain for many the definitive films about rich, bored people. Both works are highly European in their tone, and this entails a great deal more for the viewer than where they’re set, or where their directors hail from. Antonioni and Fellini are deeply concerned with the Western cultural tradition as a whole, an ambitious obsession that Fellini announces in La Dolce Vita’s famous opening shot: a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ over a Roman arch. Here, awkwardly yoked together, are the three key elements of Western history: Greco-Roman art, Judeo-Christian religion, and the sinister mechanization of the Industrial Revolution. Fellini is trying to work out what comes next.

It’s precisely because of the richness of the European cultural tradition that the 1%EE genre had to begin in Europe, not the United States. Simply by virtue of having two extra millennia of practice, Europe far exceeded America as a source of musical, literary, and artistic production, if not originality (Antonioni and Fellini, for their part, had enormous respect for Hollywood Golden Age directors). For a handful of Italian filmmakers, the sheer bulk of European artistry, the preponderance of beauty that famously drove Stendhal to tears during his visit to Florence, was the enemy of creativity. Halfway through L’Avventura, Antonioni hints at the impotence of the modern European artist, embodied by a young, sullen painter who’s more interested in bedding his wealthy patronesses than covering canvasses.

What we do see of his work is fascinating: like Gauguin, he paints naked, erotic “savages” from non-European countries. It’s as if the Western artistic tradition had ceased to inspire its artists—everything beautiful has already been painted, composed, sculpted, written. If Stendhal Syndrome is a European phenomenon, Antonioni is saying, then ennui must be, too. A bored, spoiled Italian aristocrat isn’t petty; she’s profound. A bored, spoiled American hasn’t been to Europe yet.

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l’avventura (1960)

The European settings of Fellini and Antonioni’s films fascinated Americans for the same reason that the Tahitian natives fascinated Gauguin. To put it very bluntly: a large chunk of Italian (and, for that matter, Scandinavian) cinema’s popularity in the United States was due to the high probability of seeing tits and ass (there’s an early Mad Men episode where Don’s latest lover moans of foreign films, “they’re so sexy”). But there’s also something decidedly non-exotic about these films. The key character of L’Avventura, at least at first, is Anna, an insecure woman who takes her mind off her loneliness with parties and boat trips. She has sex with her boyfriend, but doesn’t enjoy it. She has friends, but she’s never warm with them. She’s so distant from the people in her life that she pretends a shark is attacking her, just to remind herself that there are folks who care about her. In these opening scenes, Antonioni, practically channeling Betty Friedan, is trying to define a “problem with no name.”

It takes a crisis to see the extent of this problem: one afternoon, Anna and her friends go to explore an island that’s as barren and lifeless as their emotions.

While everyone else is fooling around, Anna disappears, and doesn’t come back for the rest of the film. At first, her boyfriend, Sandro, and her friend, Claudia, are frantic, but within a few days, they’ve moved on, slept together, and returned to partying and dancing.

Just as he refuses to explain Anna’s disappearance, Antonioni never provides a satisfying diagnosis of his characters’ problems. Part of the confusion arises from the absence of any major characters outside the one percent: Antonioni allows for few clear alternatives, better or worse, to Anna and Claudia’s nauseating lifestyle. His best attempt comes in a scene toward the end of the film, when Sandro, who gave up his interest in architecture for a profitable but meaningless consulting job, sees a young student skillfully sketching a church. When the student steps away from his work, Sandro spills ink over the drawing, and cavalierly offers to pay the artist off. Because the one percent have lost their claim 9

to creativity, Antonioni suggests, they try to destroy any art they stumble upon.

Antonioni’s nameless “problem,” then, is one that’s restricted to the economic elite: the people who are so used to receiving beauty that they can’t make it for themselves. According to this view of the world, the only escape from ennui lies in the lower and middle classes. One could attack this notion in exactly the same way that far left-wing feminists were attacking The Feminine Mystique at the time: it’s narcissistic, it romanticizes the poor, it turns its back on the world’s most serious problems by suggesting that society’s most important task should be giving the rich something to do. But the novelty of the 1%EE genre was enough to win L’Avventura the Grand Prix at Cannes (amid no little controversy), and to protect it from some of the criticisms that would be made of Lost in Translation fifty years later.

I’ve lingered on L’Avventura because it does a remarkably thorough job of laying out the themes of the genre I’ve describing. Later films that dealt with “Antonionennui,” would analyze class with an almost exclusive focus on the financial elite, and problematize gender issues by lending an uncommonly large amount of screen time to female characters. Yet extra screen time hardly guaranteed that women would be portrayed positively: if wealthy idlers like Claudia and Anna are paralyzed by rampant masculinity, some of their cinematic relatives seem to be battling the feminization of modern society instead. The pneumatic sirens played by Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, and Nico in La Dolce Vita distract the would-be-writer hero Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) from his creative ambitions and leave him with time to do nothing more than photograph the endless soirees of Rome. To a point, Marcello resembles Sandro in L’Avventura: both men have given up on their creative endeavors in favor of the shallow pleasures of sex and alcohol. But Fellini trades the male-dominated landscape of L’Avventura for a city in which women seem even more comfortable with the culture of endless, emotionless hookups than their male partners. In the film’s most famous scene, Ekberg bathes in the Trevi Fountain as Marcello looks on, imprisoned by his attraction. Later, he falls for Maddalena (Aimée), who loses interest in him as soon as someone else starts talking to her. Meanwhile, the two key masculine authority figures of the film are rotting from the inside: Marcello’s father suffers a heart attack, and Steiner, his intellectual father, commits suicide after shooting his own children. In Fellini’s world, the paternal bond that holds Western civilization together has eroded; in its place, femininity, not Stendhal Syndrome, lulls artists into vacuousness.

One of the most robust points of comparison between Fellini and Antonioni’s versions of modern alienation is the tonal ambiguity of their films’ endings. Lonely and confused after a night of sexual betrayals, Sandro and Claudia burst into tears: in a gesture of consolation, Claudia places her hand on Sandro’s back, as if to forgive him for his philandering—how long this moment of peace will last, or how satisfying it feels even for the moment, remains unclear. Marcello’s drunken escapades end with his failure to recognize the young woman he has met earlier, an allusion to his failure to communicate with a group of beautiful women in the film’s first scene. There are no grand 10

epiphanies here—Fellini and Antonioni are more interested in dissecting society than repairing it. The American films indebted to Italy tend to offer more straightforward endings, working as they must within the limitations of the Hollywood studio system. Even a creative, idiosyncratic film like Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude ends on a straightforwardly happy note compared to L’Avventura. Harold enters the film in more or less the same boat as Sandro or Claudia – he wants for nothing materially, but spends his days coping with unremitting boredom. Just as Anna fakes a shark attack, Harold finds endless ways to fake his death: drowning, hanging, wrist-slitting (each attempt met by his mother with hilarious indifference). Like his European influences, Ashby characterizes Harold’s situation as a crisis of creativity; chief among the gifts the 79-year-old Maude gives Harold is a love for art and music. At the end of the film, when Maude has passed on, he honors her by playing Cat Stevens’ “If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out” on the banjo.

If Harold and Maude begins as a 1%EE work, it quickly morphs into a very different kind of film, the coming-of-age drama, with the young Harold gradually discovering his love for life. This feature of Ashby’s film has the unfortunate side effect of cheapening his rendition of ennui in the early scenes—when succeeded by a happy ending, alienation dwindles to a mere adolescent phase, rather than an inescapable condition of the modern world. Yet Ashby has more interesting things to say about women than Fellini or Antonioni: Maude is neither a millstone nor a helpless victim. What American filmmakers sacrificed in depth when they repackaged the 1%EE genre they made up for in the strength of their female characters, as if to reiterate the feminist leanings that attracted them to Claudia’s plight in the first place.

If there’s a problem inherent to the 1%EE genre, it’s a version of a much bigger problem with movies in general. It’s the same problem that lurks everywhere in the work of Martin Scorsese, most recently the bombastic Wolf of Wall Street, the same problem that leads college kids to throw Gatsby parties and start fight clubs and memorize monologues from Scarface and Goodfellas: the tendency to glamorize and condemn simultaneously. Francois Truffaut said there was no such thing as an anti-war movie, since the mere act of showing a war onscreen was a way of glorifying it. We might say the same of 1%EE films: Fellini can’t quite demonize the Sweet Life without making his audiences fall in love with it a little. I’ve noticed a more serious version of this problem among the teenagers who love the film adaptation of American Psycho, a sort of bastard child of the Italians’ 1%EE films. Like the world of La Dolce Vita, 1980s Wall Street is a weirdly feminized place, where men fawn over skin products and fancy shampoos, tan three times a week, and fuss over their dinner reservations.

Patrick Bateman, amusingly played by Christian Bale (ironically, the stepson of Gloria Steinem!) as snobbish and perpetually bored, channels his repressed masculinity into axe-murders, shootings, and stranglings, all of which have earned him something of a cult following among rich, bored teenagers (I know one who can recite the “hip to be square” monologue beat by beat). More than almost any other genre, 1%EE is about a lifestyle, one that the films’ directors simul11

lost in translation (2003)

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taneously love and hate, no matter how distastefully they present it. It is by its very nature ambiguous—it glamorizes and criticizes, it’s sexy and it condemns cheap sexism, it has its cake and eats it too. It wouldn’t be much of stretch to say that its sneaky ambiguity is always a kind of cop-out (I think of the Jesse Eisenberg character from The Squid and the Whale, whose answer to questions about the books he’s never read is “it’s ambiguous”). This would explain a lot, not least the genre’s enduring popularity—it cynically hedges its bets by pleasing proletariat, bourgeoisie, and lord alike. But perhaps we should give ambiguity some credit: when we watch a bad movie, we always know exactly what we’ve seen. It takes a masterpiece, or at least a movie that’s brave enough to strive for that title, to deliberately provoke our uncertainty.

Sofia Coppola ends Lost in Translation on a characteristic 1%EE note.

While they’re both visiting Tokyo, Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray, and Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, bond over their dissatisfaction with their privileged lives. There’s a lovely shot of Charlotte peering out of her window like a child, trying to make sense of the neon towers and cars below her. But in the face of all this hyperactive technology, Charlotte doesn’t disappear, like Anna, or surrender to lust, like Claudia—instead, she forms a deep friendship with Bob, and explores Tokyo with him. The film ends with Murray whispering an indecipherable message into Johansson’s ear. It’s impossible to tell if they are saying goodbye forever, exchanging advice, or planning to meet again. This isn’t the kind of cheap ambiguity that saves a writer the pain of deciding on an ending. It’s Coppola’s response to the kind of schlock that Bob, a big-name actor, stars in, the cheap entertainment that offers two-hour bursts of escape from the real world’s problems, complete with happy endings.

In most movies, the filmmakers slight moviegoers by assuming that, basically, they all want the same things—“Everybody likes sex, violence, and happy, happy endings!” If nothing else, the 1%EE film at its best is a more respectful kind of work, one that lets each moviegoer make up her own mind about what happens next.

Just as we can’t simply dismiss ambiguity as a cop-out, we can’t reduce a genre that’s been defined by Fellini, Ashby, Coppola, and Antonioni to white upper-class narcissism. If L’Avventura and Lost in Translation turn their backs on political populism by ignoring the poor almost entirely, they nonetheless touch on issues that affect everyone, rich or poor, equally. Think of the big, overarching “-ations” of recent decades—globalization, post-industrialization, internetization. How ironic, and how sad, that all three of these are considered milestones of communication, when they’ve made it possible to talk to other people without really communicating with them at all. Antonioni died in 2007, just a few years too early to fully experience Facebook or the iPhone, but his work anticipates Facebook fatigue and the fake friendliness of a text message by half a century. The function of the 1%EE genre isn’t exactly to pull us out of our funk, but rather to show us the extent of our problem, and suggest a few solutions we might have been too cowardly to consider otherwise. That, I’d say, is as relatable as the movies get.

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no shoes the uncommonly common worlds of Nicole Holofcener

by j u l i a s e l i n g e r

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first encountered nicole holofcener’s work in what turned out to be a serendipitously appropriate setting: my mother’s bed. The film that brought us there was Walking and Talking, her 1996 debut. Under normal circumstances, I, being the blasé teen that I was, would humor my mother for twenty minutes or so, enduring whatever schmaltz was on TV before retreating to my bedroom. But Walking and Talking was unremittingly engaging.

We lay there for the film’s 85 minutes, unknowingly acting out one of the recurring dynamics that Holofcener has expertly staged throughout her seventeen-year career as a writer-director. There we were, mother and daughter, an ideal specimen of the female relationships that Holofcener has confronted in all their inelegant and complex glory. Furthermore, we didn’t look glitzy or poised while lying there in bed; we were unkempt and makeup-less, dressed in sweatpants and schmattas.

Similarly unglamorous women populate Walking and Talking, as well as Holofcener’s subsequent films, Lovely & Amazing (2001), Friends With Money (2006), Please Give (2010), and her most recent effort, Enough Said. In these films, Holofcener sidesteps the conventions of a perilous niche of female-centric films: the chick-flick. Her characters don’t cavort around in heels and scantily clad outfits, untainted by wrinkles and greasy hair. They have hang-ups, insecurities, and neuroses; sometimes they act like narcissistic assholes. By now, one

might have hoped this portrayal of real women would have pervaded cinema.

The fact that it hasn’t, that sensationalism and superficiality still reign, makes Holofcener all the more necessary as an underrated and distinct voice in American cinema.

Born in 1960 and raised on the Upper West Side, Holofcener was the child of a set designer mother and a painter/playwright father who had appeared on Broadway. Her parents divorced when she was one. Seven years later, her mother married Charles Joffe, who would later become Woody Allen’s go-to producer. Joffe often brought Nicole and her sister to the sets of Allen’s films; they can be seen running around in the background as extras in Take The Money And Run and Sleeper. In the mid-80s, Holofcener became an apprentice editor on Hannah and Her Sisters, watching the dailies early each morning. This early introduction to Allen’s filmmaking undoubtedly informed Holofcener’s work: both directors have a keen understanding of human relationships, plotting their characters’ ups and downs with ample doses of dark humor and adroit dialogue.

Holofcener has cited Allen as a major influence, but it wasn’t until viewing a few watershed indies in the 80s that Holofcener knew she wanted to direct.

After attending San Francisco State University, she studied film at Columbia.

When her comedy short “Angry” debuted at Sundance, she was invited to a workshop where she began developing Walking and Talking.

Walking and Talking was the first in what would become a career-long exploration of women stumbling through their bourgeois environs at different stages of life. Laura (Anne Heche) and Amelia (Catherine Keener, who would go on to appear in all of Holofcener’s films) are sisterly best friends living in New York. As Laura inches towards marriage, the pair must navigate that unpleasant yet inevitable moment in life when romance takes precedence over friendship. The ugly emotions exposed in Walking and Talking become even more tangled in Holofcener’s next film, Lovely & Amazing. Here she probes more deeply at her characters’ insecurities and self-absorptions, whether they stem from a middle-aged woman’s (Brenda Blethyn) liposuction, her brutally candid and narcissistic daughter Michelle’s (Keener) unemployment, or her middle daughter Elizabeth’s (Emily Mortimer) failures as an actress. The only character, it seems, with a chance of avoiding similar neuroses is Annie (Raven Goodwin), an eight-year-old African-American girl recently adopted into the family. But Annie is just approaching the age where her chubbiness is becoming a semi-issue, and is beginning to recognize the differences between herself and her family.

In Lovely & Amazing, Holofcener moved beyond the territory of twenty-somethings at the tail end of single life. Michelle had an apparently idyllic teenage experience; she was, we learn, her high school’s homecoming queen.

But adulthood doesn’t look so cute on her, nor is it as easy. As Michelle tries to sell some of her art (read: small chairs made out of sticks) to a store, she bumps into a former classmate. She is shocked to learn that the old friend has become a pediatrician. “We are thirty-six, after all.” “Yeah, but not thirty-six thirty-six,” Michelle responds.

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“I know I repeat myself in all my movies, but I just let it happen,” Holofcener told The A.V. Club in 2010. That’s not to say that her films feel repetitive: Holofcener’s recurring obsessions include money, mortality, sex, marriage, children and friendship. Nor is it to say that she sees these topics through rose-colored glasses. Marriages are imperfect, friendships are challenging, and money doesn’t grow on trees. Those, at least, are the lessons of Holofcener’s third feature, Friends With Money. The film is another ensemble dark comedy, this one about four friends who encounter varying degrees of financial success.

The titular friends with money—Christine (Keener, as usual) Jane (Frances McDormand), and Franny (Joan Cusack)—are concerned about their friend Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who is working as a maid and can’t seem to stay in a sustained relationship. Though income is ostensibly the primary cause of tension among the four friends, Holofcener is quick to complicate the group’s dynamic. Each of the women must deal with their own challenges, whether it is Christine’s crumbling marriage or Jane’s obstinate refusal, brought on by a mid-life crisis, to wash her hair.

In Please Give (2010), Keener and Oliver Platt play Kate and Alex, a married pair of yuppie New York furniture sellers awaiting the death of their elderly neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) in the hopes of expanding their apartment.

Other players include the couple’s acne-ridden daughter (Sarah Steele) and Andra’s granddaughters, a caring mammogram technician (Rebecca Hall) and a vain cosmetologist (Amanda Peet). Kate spends much of the film grappling with the tension between greed and generosity: to remedy her debilitating guilt from ripping off customers, she gives when she can, usually by offering money to beggars on her block or engaging in misguided attempts at volunteering.

Here, we can see Keener playing another variation on one of Holofcener’s favorite character types: the self-absorbed, internally conflicted privileged urbanite.

Kate is as concerned with her forced philanthropy as her daughter is fixated on her pimples.

In her latest film, Enough Said, Holofcener returns to her steady arsenal of themes—divorce, middle age, and the nuances of relationships—from a looser, more comedic vantage point. Enough Said is Holofcener’s least ensemble-driven film since her debut. As a result, it’s tidier than its predecessors, but no less poignant. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Eva, a divorced masseuse who befriends her client Marianne (Keener) and begins dating Albert (the late, great James Gandolfini) only to discover that the two were once married. Rather than do the honest thing and tell Albert, Eva does what anyone in the Holofcener universe might do: she screws up. In Albert’s words, she does nothing, continuing to let Marianne “poison her perception” of him. Other characteristic Holofcener subplots pop up along the way—Eva coming to terms with her daughter’s impending departure to college, or coping with her self-involved clients—creating tensions that ebb and flow throughout the film. While Enough Said fits nicely within Holofcener’s career-long thematic trajectory, it feels in some respects like a return to the territory of Walking and Talking. Taken together, both films suggest that even though relationships later in life might be complicated by divorce 16

Please give (2010)

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and surly teens, the dating worlds of twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings are riddled with the same mess of flaws, foibles, and rules of attraction.

Nicole Holofcener has proven to be a rare breed: a mainstream filmmaker adept at creating true-to-life representations of imperfect women—even if the women in question are for the most part white, well-off urbanites. The introductory sequences to Lovely & Amazing and Please Give are, I think, useful case studies of Holofcener’s varied approaches to depicting female experience.

The former opens on Elizabeth, a working actress, uncomfortably enduring a photo shoot. She repeatedly asks questions about her appearance to an unseen photographer, who—hidden behind his camera—shoots them down. “Don’t you think I have too much make-up on?” “No, you look great.” He asks that she opens her jacket, revealing a sheer dress and exposed breasts. “Does this seem strange to you?” “No, it’s high fashion. It’s sophisticated. It’s totally hot.”

Elizabeth’s discomfort is palpable. “I just don’t feel quite like myself,” she says.

Elizabeth will continue to grapple with her self-image for the remainder of the film. The photographer, however, remains uninterested. He replies with a coolly detached, “Who does?”

“I am trying to demystify women and their bodies,” Holofcener said of Elizabeth’s subplot in Lovely & Amazing. That sentiment could apply just as well to Please Give, which begins at a much more comedic lilt, but is in many ways just as jarring as its predecessor. The viewer is immediately confronted with a rapid-fire montage of female breasts of every shape, age, or color. The scene takes place, we soon learn, in a mammogram office, but despite the medical implications, it lacks the coldness or emptiness of Elizabeth’s photo shoot.

Instead, it’s suffused with humor and warmth, not to mention downright silliness. Holofcener soundtracks the opening salvo with the bouncing melodies of The Roches’ “No Shoes.” The sequence speaks volumes about its maker’s acerbic flair, as well as her willingness to film the seemingly mundane and otherwise unseen. As Rebecca, the mammogram technician, expresses later in the film, she has stopped viewing breasts as breasts, but rather as potential “tubes of terror.”

Over the course of that initial, desensitizing volley of shots, we start viewing the breasts much like Rebecca does: not as sexual entities, but as biological and bodily ones.

It is Holofcener’s combination of humor and stark realism that makes her vision of femininity so unique in contemporary American cinema. Her female characters are not the flawless goddesses we see so often in mainstream films. And though Holofcener is fascinated by what it means to be a woman in 21st-century America, she never approaches the question from a ceremonious or preachy position. We never see anyone in the Holofcener universe lecturing on the struggles and advancements of feminism. Her heroines are normal people. They’re two friends giggling over The Joy of Sex at a lake house. They’re sisters bonding over McDonald’s French fries. They’re divorced parents saying goodbye to their daughter as she leaves for college. They are the reason Holofcener’s films were and will continue to be important and relatable in a cinematic culture that breeds glibness and vapidity. They’re us.

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amateur hour at Venice’s “Future Reloaded” program, a thinning line between amateur and auteur

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

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n 1958, the austrian architect and writer Friedrich Hundertwasser published his “Mouldiness Manifesto: Against Rationalism in Architecture.” “Everyone should be able to build,” he wrote, “and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.” For Hundertwasser, tenants need the power to alter designs imposed on them by larger forces. Without this freedom, so obviously afforded to writing, painting and sculpture, architecture becomes less an art than a profession—and the same is true of film. Of course, there have always been opportunities for individuals to make their own films and reprocess the material handed down to them by mass media; even in its early days, the medium’s technological demands were relatively manageable and small-scale. Even after Hollywood had firmly imposed its formal rules, there were Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and many others to chip away at the impenetrable surface of big commercial film, engaging in what Hundertwasser might call “creative moulding.” Still, though, there has always been a financial barrier—not to mention a chasm-like difference in available palettes, subjects and settings—between the well-funded haves and the independent havenots. This is swiftly changing.

In advance of the most recent incarnation of the Venice Film Festival, seventy filmmakers were asked to make 60 to 90 second films concerning the future 19

of cinema. While some focused on their careers (Krzysztof Zanussi, James Franco) and others expressed deep nostalgia (Edgar Reitz, Walter Salles), only a few actually fulfilled the assignment. There is a sense of common ground to some of these visions, with filmmakers as disparate as the Korean provocateur Kim Ki-Duk, the Japanese art horror director Shinya Tsukamoto and the godfather of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami, all contributing films that pointed toward a new kind of domestic cinema. All three directors suggest that, in a world where billions of people take calls and send texts on highly attuned filmmaking tools, entertaining films need no longer be a strictly commercial enterprise. If anything, cinema is becoming something like a parlor activity, like playing from sheet music in pre-radio days.

In Tsukamoto’s contribution, the filmmaker and his family make a monster movie revved up with kinetic energy, playfully built out of nothing more than cut-up cardboard, markers and some colored lights. Yes, it is rudimentary, but it is, in a way, more thrilling than any big-budget blockbuster could be. His son voices the characters and sound effects, and while the movie may be more inventively wrought than most student films, it makes an excellent case for the artistic legitimacy of the backyard epics that young people have been making since the 1920s.

Kiarostami, a frequent contributor to omnibus films, literally shot in a backyard, remaking the early Lumière short L’Arroseur Arrosé. Hearkening back to a time when cinema was a nascent cottage industry, Kiarostami takes a very old gag and shoots it on a small digital camera, giving the directorial duties within the film to a young kid. Like Tsukamoto, Kiarostami presents film as something that awakens the curiosity of the individual, a medium that can be used personally, at home, and in a way consistent with the methods of the contemporary masters.

When Kim Ki-Duk brings home a cheap camera, he finds discomfort, as one would expect. His mother, hearing that her son is coming over, shuffles down the stairs, across the street and back again just to make him some food.

Following her with his camera, Kim keeps catching his reflection in mirrors, a reminder that he is right there and could always set the device down to help his mother. With this gesture, Kim seems to say that prosumer-grade home movies can contain their own pathos even when we are aware of the camera’s presence— and, in fact, because we are aware of the camera’s presence. The passivity and occasional cruelty of the filmmaking process becomes a drama in itself.

Hundertwasser would likely approve of any developments that allow many more artists to produce their own content, but these three shorts point to something beyond mere “creative moulding.” They point to a world in which entertainment professionals will have the freedom to make works that function in traditionally commercial ways yet still bear the mark of their individual makers.

Film may have been an art for over a century, but these three filmmakers suggest that we are entering an era which will allow for even greater participation from an even wider spectrum of voices. Whether that will make film a greater art or a more diluted one is yet to be seen.

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from top: l’arroseur arrosÊ (1895), Untitled Kiarostami short (2013)

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lovethirsty animals taking another bite out of Trouble Every Day

by g u s r e e d

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T

wo lovers sit in the back of a car. the man arches his body over the woman’s so that, as their lips meet again and again, their faces blur into a single void. A handheld camera observes them through the car’s window, intruding on this cloistered moment of intimacy with an uneasily long take that seems to droop with the very effort of looking. In another horror film, this point of view might belong to a psychopath about to smash through the glass with a hatchet. In Trouble Every Day (2001), directed and co-written by Claire Denis, this opening image, with no further incident, fades to black. There’s no grand reveal or shift in identification to hide the fact that we, the viewers, are staring at these lovers with our own mixture of desire and apprehension. In the meantime, Tindersticks, Denis’s frequent soundtrack band of choice, plays a brooding, lovelorn ballad: “Look into my eyes, you see trouble every day…” We never meet this couple again, and don’t immediately realize that their kiss—which etches a frail boundary between ordinary affection and dangerous hunger—has quietly warned us of horrors to come.

Trouble Every Day is an outlier among outliers in Claire Denis’ diverse body of work. Too oblique and impressionistic to satisfy (or even reach) a wide horror audience and yet too graphically shocking for many critics and art-house viewers to stomach, it was more or less disregarded as a rare misfire from one of contemporary cinema’s most interesting minds—a Frankenstein monster that never quite lurched to life. It

has experienced something of a revival and critical reappraisal this past year, at least in New York City, where a restored 35mm print played at several major venues to coincide with the release of Denis’ latest film, Bastards, an icy neo-noir that is, in its own quiet way, no less troubling.

In 2001, bewildered critics at Cannes didn’t know how to handle Denis’ calm contention that her film, in which two characters hunger for human flesh when sexually aroused, was more of a love story than a gorefest. Trouble Every Day, is, in fact, one of the most unabashedly romantic statements from a director whose every work seems to pulsate with stray desire. The film sees Denis applying her characteristically elliptical, hypnotically detailed visual storytelling to a genre that already has a very specific set of visual codes, but it feels less like a true exercise in horror than a deconstruction of the genre from within. Horror, in Trouble Every Day, comes from within the body—from the lonely, ravenous drives firing off inside the human brain, from ordinary impulses enacted to vampiric extremes. The film wouldn’t disturb us the way it does if it weren’t also so confusingly sexy and endearing—if its eruptions of brute, shattering violence weren’t bound up so closely with tenderness, warmth, and disarmingly familiar longings.

Antecedents to the kind of primal terror that Trouble Every Day deals in are more easily located in mythology and fairy-tales than in other horror films. (Not the Disneyfied fairy tales that end with girls marrying princes—the ones that end with girls getting their feet cut off.) The unnamed affliction that compels Shane (Vincent Gallo), a newlywed American doctor, and Coré (Béatrice Dalle), a Frenchwoman with whom he once had an affair, to sink their teeth into their lovers’ flesh invokes the host of anxieties that attend the first uncertain glimmers of sexual desire in childhood. Or, as Denis herself once explained, “vampires, werewolves, Bluebeard, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—everywhere, man’s fear of still being part animal resurfaces.”

When we first meet Shane and his naïve young wife June (Tricia Vessey) on a flight to Paris for their honeymoon, Shane slowly kisses the translucent skin of June’s wrist. His lips linger just a few seconds longer than they should before softly travelling up her bare arm. Moments later, locking himself in the airplane bathroom, he envisions June in bed, awash in blood from head to toe and gazing invitingly up at him as his eyes slide up and down her body. When, later in the film, Shane and June visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame, they walk among stone gargoyles, eternally postured in grotesque, menacing displays. Shane teasingly staggers toward June, his arms raised before him like Frankenstein—then, framed between two gargoyles, he hisses at her like Dracula. June laughs; we may laugh too, but for us, the joke is tinged with the sinister recognition that Shane is, in fact, a flesh-andblood version of the stone caricatures he’s aping.

A few science-fiction-y scenes of stilted dialogue in a laboratory offer murky clues as to the origin of Coré and Shane’s curse: scientific research in the tropics gone wrong; an infection that spread years ago from Coré to Shane, presumably through an extramarital affair when Léo, Coré and Shane were all working on a mysterious medical project somewhere in Africa. These vague hints, which will, for most audiences, conjure up the dread of all sexually transmitted disease—especially 23

trouble every day (2001)

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HIV/AIDS—are not specific enough to slake our thirst for more information, but are somehow too specific than the otherwise deliriously oblique narrative calls for.

Denis herself is the first to admit that she has difficulty sneaking exposition into her films, and dreads shooting simple conversations between two people. It’s almost funny that these most basic tenets of classical narrative should prove at all difficult for an artist who can convey more about human nature by showing a maid carrying a newlywed couple’s bags to their hotel room than most directors can in two hours of talky philosophizing.

Denis’ direction, and the roving camerawork of her long-time cinematographer, Agnès Godard, imbues nearly every image in Trouble Every Day with an uneasily subjective warmth. Even in the cold, fluorescent confines of a laboratory, the camera seems jittery, charged with a child-like curiosity. It is often said that Denis is a master of touch, that she pays such attention to textures and surfaces that her films become tactile as well as audio-visual experiences. Trouble Every Day, though certainly one of the most lucid cases of this, is just as extraordinary for the ways in which Denis magnetizes the very spaces between people—the physical distance separating them, but also the relentless invisible pull that draws them together.

Throughout Trouble Every Day, the camera seeks out exposed shoulders, necks and backs—vulnerable, open points of contact on the human body. One of the film’s most revelatory images is an extreme close-up that suggests Coré’s point of view as she hungrily takes in the bare chest of the boy she’s about to make love to (and devour). The camera, hovering just above the boy’s skin, begins almost inside his armpit and crawls slowly around his torso, going in and out of soft focus as it explores, with hushed, sacred fascination, every hair, freckle and indent.

Shane is smitten with Christelle (Florence Loiret-Caille), a hotel maid, from the moment he walks down a hallway behind her and notices the back of her slender, pale neck, exposed under wisps of her pinned-back black hair. After this first encounter, even when Shane isn’t present in a scene, the camera hovers obsessively behind her at this precise angle, as if Shane’s fixation has taken on a disembodied life of its own.

In several subsequent sequences, we observe Christelle going through the motions of her solitary routine—changing in and out her uniform in a cavernous basement locker-room, pushing her maid’s cart down the empty hallways, washing her feet after a day’s work. The seemingly uneventful, weirdly poignant moments that the film spends with this secondary character hint at the unsettling possibility that this girl wrestles with muted versions of the impulses that rule Coré and Shane. She hangs around Shane’s hotel room when he isn’t there as if hoping to be discovered, though when Shane comes back alone and finds her in the bathroom, she mumbles an apology and skirts away. Another time, she lies on his bed and smokes; later, when Shane returns, he sees the imprint she has left behind and tenderly presses his face into the sheets. The camera appears to stalk her, lurking around corners in the locker-room or trailing behind her in hallways, but its undisguised fascination with her seems increasingly reciprocated. We feel her trepidation, but also her reckless longing for some sort of rupture with everyday experience; the anxiety of being watched, but also the subterranean tremors of desire set off in the looking.

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Coré and Shane, contrary to many critical descriptions of the film, are not vampires, nor are they even, in the strict sense of the term, cannibals. These alltoo-human monsters don’t thirst for blood for its own sake, or derive sustenance from flesh. They commit unspeakable violence with no trace of sadism; the actual killings happen incidentally—and inevitably—in the frenzy.

We only see the anxious preludes to and blood-soaked aftermath of these encounters until the first of Trouble Every Day’s notorious twin climaxes. While Coré’s husband and protector Léo (Alex Dascas) is at work, a young man who has lusted for her from afar finally breaks into the heavily barricaded house where Léo keeps her under lock and key, a nightmare version of a princess in a tower. Without a word to each other, Coré and this boy begin to make love. Coré straddles him and bends down to softly kiss his lips, his throat, his chest. The change happens so slowly that it’s hard to pinpoint the moment in which these gentle kisses become playful nibbles, then clamping, ravenous bites, and the boy’s soft moans become screams, then whimpers. Later, bathed in blood, Coré gently nuzzles her face into the boy’s as he croaks out a few last breaths. She toys with his battered but largely intact body, her murmurs of satisfaction somewhere between a young girl’s laugh and a wolf ’s growl. Within minutes, a familiar melancholy overtakes her. She wanders the house cradled in her own arms, her lover’s blood already cold.

Most horror films only convey the fear of the victims. Denis’ romance reminds us of the vulnerability and shame of the monsters, locked in a cycle of addiction and heartbreak: in their attempts to arrive at some kind of complete physical connection with another person, they only hasten the moment when this connection breaks. In her single line of dialogue, the literally man-eating Coré tells Léo that she wants to die.

Coré and Shane’s vicious hunger is not simply an age-old conflation of sex and death. Their desperate acts of sexual violence seem to strike at a deeper existential panic underlying all doomed romance. One thinks of Jeffrey Dahmer, a real-life serial killer who claimed to have eaten parts of his victims in order to feel that they had been made a part of him forever, or Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, who, upon receiving the head of St. John the Baptist on a silver platter, announces her desire to bite into his lips like a ripe fruit. The underlying need, in each instance, is not just sexual gratification, but a desperate grasping at permanence and wholeness where there is—and can be—none.

“What is disturbing about this film,” critic Charles Mudede writes, “is not the two controversial gore/porn sequences…but the fact that it is about a nightmare that essentially has no dreamer.” Films are often compared to dreams, but always with the tacit understanding that they are dreams from which we’ll wake. It is one thing for a film to leave us with images that we can recall if we wish to; it is another, entirely, for these images to remain like bruises one forgets about until, by accident, something presses into them. Like the single drop of trickling blood that colors the film’s final moments with such unresolved urgency, Trouble Every Day refuses to cleanly relinquish its intuitive path to our nerves. For no lack of indelible images, it leaves us, more than anything, with precise, durable sensations: stubbornly unfading love bites.

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portfolio

three critics

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serge daney

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dave kehr

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manny farber

paul chouchana

a translation

david beal & max nelson

a conversation

david beal

an appreciation

image above: paris, texas (1984)

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serge daney [ a t r a n s l at i o n ] by paul chouchana

S

erge daney was a french film critic and professor . he wrote for cahiers du cinéma

from 1964 (he was only 20 when his first piece was published) to 1981 before switching to Libération, a daily newspaper, for the last ten years of his life. Daney arrived at Cahiers at a time when the magazine was drifting towards elitism and slipping into the realm of theory; Daney initiated a “return to cinema” (the name of one of his editor’s notes, co-written with Serge Toubiana), a return to talking about films, a return to Bazin. In the 80s, when cinema was “at its worst” (according to him), Daney started making television his object of study, but without giving up his Bazinian lens. For him, tennis was an intrinsically cinematic subject, and a broadcast of a McEnroe-Borg match was his Citizen Kane.

Like Bazin, Daney was a “mediator.” Bazin elevated Hollywood filmmakers (such as Hawks, Ford, and Chaplin) to the status of artists; Daney traveled around the world (especially to Africa) and introduced numerous filmmakers (Stavros Tornes, Ousmane Sembene, etc.) to France.

Like Bazin, Daney died young, in 1992, at age 48, of AIDS. He left behind him an incredibly vast collection of writings, none of which have yet been collected into a single volume in English.

(There is a small contingent of cinephiles dedicated to making Daney’s work available in English online; the fruits of their labor can be found on the excellent site sergedaney.blogspot.com.)

The two pieces translated here were both published in Libération: the first, a review of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, in 1984; the second, a reflection on Bazin’s life and legacy, in 1983. As far as we know, this is the Bazin piece’s first appearance in English.

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paris, texas We have known Wenders, German, wandering and slow. There is some of this and much more in the deserved Palme d’Or from the last Cannes festival. Enough material to venture a humble “theory of emotions.”

One would need to be a beast not to be moved by the last scene of Paris, Texas. The child playing alone in the bottom left corner of the frame (wearing a black kimono, he is eight years old) slowly rises towards the woman shyly entering the frame from the right side. Because his movements are slow, it is as if he were growing before us. But not overly so. He is just a child approaching this woman he hasn’t seen for four years—half his life—his mother. He tells her, “your hair is wet,” she takes him in her arms, and he ties himself up to her like a little monkey. Outside, a man who was “back from the dead,” the father, is leaving for good.

All of this is happening in Houston, Texas, and it is the end of a melodrama. But not exactly so. In a melodrama there would have been music and close-ups, the man might have stayed, and the family, united, would have cried. It is therefore an “almost melodrama” that Wim Wenders has pulled off. This is why the film received a standing ovation at Cannes, where he saved the selection from shame. Emotion was in the spirit of the times, and, like time, has passed.

Wim Wenders plays a fairly unique role in the film world. That, both very thankless and very prominent, of the straight-A student. (He shares this role with another man, drier and more like a schoolboy, but who lives in the US: Spielberg). For over ten years, we have been doing more than watching his films; we have been observing his progress.

Meanwhile, Wenders observes landscapes, neon lights, clouds, highways. Sometimes, between two planes in the sky, we together take stock of the case of our favorite patient, Cinema. How is it doing? What is left of it? How will Wim cook the leftovers? Landscapes and children? Very good. Wandering, mismatched couples? Not bad. Cinephilic melancholy? Loud and clear (and shared). Narration? Still fairly laborious. Love scenes? A tad puritanical. Women? Hard to film. Emotion? Held back, but less and less. Etc. It has no doubt never happened before, such complicity between a filmmaker and his audience: Wenders has the privilege to affect people of forty and to seduce those of twenty. As if the straight-A student was revising for our benefit an overwhelming history and geography (of film) syllabus we remember having once gone through. As if we were asking him to surprise us with each film, but not too much, for fear we would no longer be the witnesses of his progress. That of a ferryman who sails by intuition, bringing us towards a (still possible) continuation of cinema.

Hence the emotion. For in order to carry on, one must know what (and whom) to carry on. In different respects—and among many others—John Ford, Allan Dwan, Yasujiro Ozu and Nicholas Ray have mattered to Wenders. Contemplatives. Or, more fittingly, filmmakers of emotion. It is them that he carries on, it is this emotion that no one else today knows how to invoke from a sequence of images and that I would call, for lack of a better term, “the emotion in long shot.”

What does it mean? At the risk of misremembering an already ancient film (but isn’t cinema also made up of that which we have hallucinated?) I will take an example from one of Nick Ray’s films. In In a Lonely Place, the Humphrey Bogart-Gloria Gra29

hame couple is peeling grapefruits (were they really grapefruits?) in the kitchen. Nothing is happening, and Bogart suddenly says something like, “would someone looking at us right now guess that we are happy?” And the spectator immediately thinks yes, maybe—but just a second before, he himself wasn’t thinking about it.

Emotion before the instability of the moment and the fragile beauty of cinema, capable of making the scene feel “close” to us without having to bring the camera “closer.”

Without the intrusion of a close-up, or the indiscretion of a one size fits all zoom. It is the inside-out camera movement, the one that happens within the body of the spectator, that we call “emotion.” It arises from what we suddenly guess. But which word is the most important, “suddenly” or “guess?” Both. “Guess” because we almost let the moment pass by unnoticed. But then, we agree to stay by the kitchen door of the Lonely Place, and with a new eye we notice that Ray is a great scenographer. I borrowed my example from him, but I could have taken a hundred others, along the same lines, from Paris, Texas.

Wenders has received much praise for the way he gives a style—almost a “Wenders touch”—to the way he looks at landscapes and captures their photogenic quality. But if this were his only strength, he would have shot neither Paris, Texas nor the last scene of Paris, Texas. The one who watches puts himself at a distance, but in doing so runs two risks: The Charybdis of indifference and the Scylla of mannerism. Wenders hasn’t always avoided them. But what saves him from his apparent ease is the certainty (stronger than ever with this last film) that there must be a distance (only one) from which all things (people and landscapes) appear not simply as strangely “detached,” but as the affectionate promise of a secret. A promise which it is hard to say (as in Ozu) whether it would be more elegant to keep quiet (as in Dwan), or more painful to revive (as in Ford).

The responsibility falls on the filmmaker (it is then that his immense talent as a scenographer comes into play) to keep his spectator in “long shot”: by the kitchen door, in the Mojave Desert, in a bar or a shabby motel, in a peep show, wherever the story is unfolding. To learn to live with the secret, as Travis’s brother (heroically) does in Paris, Texas.

To give the characters enough time to tame each other, as Travis does with little Hunter, his son, when he picks him up from school. The right distance, for Wenders, is that from which it would be possible for us to want at the same time to crack the secret and to leave it intact. This “at the same time” is the very time of emotion.

The contemplatives want to earn the landscape, not possess it. To furtively slip into it, not be noticed in it. To modify it, not remodel it. What does Travis, the man who (says Wenders) “comes back from the dead,” want? The same thing that Wenders wants when he “comes back” from the myth of the Death of Cinema. The same thing we want when we stand to applaud Paris, Texas at Cannes. He wants to reenter the family portrait from which he had disappeared, to take the time he needs to modify a detail from it. Only one, but extremely significant: to remove a child (or rather to “collect” him) from a corner of the frame and to put him beside a woman whose faded features haunted that same frame, in another spot. It is an alteration, the work of an acupuncturist.

The job done, Travis leaves the frame for the second time, his secret intact.

The secret (often trite) is not something that can be spit out; it is the hollow horizon of an asymptotic curve. From constantly moving closer, we get farther away. From constantly moving closer to Travis, the man who emerged from the desert, we failed to notice that he was already getting away again. The Wenders-emotion is a boomerang.

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andre bazin He was the old man of the Cahiers. He stuttered, he loved animals, and he died at age 40. He knew how to share his passion for cinema. His name was André Bazin, French critic, and an American from Iowa told the story of his life.

Bad filmmakers (sadly for them) have no ideas. Good filmmakers (it’s what limits them) tend to have too many. Great filmmakers (especially the inventors) have only one. This idée fixe enables them to keep moving on, to take the idea through ever-renewing and ever-interesting landscapes. The price to pay is well known: a certain solitude. What about great critics? It is the same thing, except there are none. They become (something else, outdated, filmmakers), they get (first famous, then on everyone’s nerves), and finally, they bore. All but one. Between 1943 and 1958 (the year of his death: he was only forty), André Bazin was this one.

He was, with Henri Langlois, the other great filmmaker (without a camera) of his time. Langlois had one idea: to show that all of cinema needed to be preserved.

Bazin had the same idea, but in reverse: to show that cinema preserved the real, and, before signifying or resembling it, embalmed it. He could not find metaphors beautiful or macabre enough to express it: death mask, mold, mummy, fingerprint, fossil, mirror. But a mirror of a singular type, “the silver layer of which retains the image.” André Bazin is in search of lost tin.

Something was threatening to disappear in this lifelong search: the researcher himself. Cited, studied, translated, refuted, sanctified even, but less and less put—as they say—“in context”: André Bazin, the man. This book by Dudley Andrew, head of the film department at the University of Iowa, does just that. Duly prefaced (by Truffaut) and postfaced (by Tacchella), the work is an intellectual biography of Bazin and an attempt (an American attempt, suffused in academic seriousness) to paint a picture more than ever useful: that of the life of ideas (Film Criticism aisle) in post-war France. At a time when Bazin was at once heir and pioneer, masthead and mediator.

What was he heir to exactly? To a studious youth (born in Angers, educated by the Christian Brothers, in La Rochelle), to a precocious taste for literature and for animals, to a career path as a teacher that seems neatly mapped out for him (École Normale of St-Cloud), and to influences which were then inevitable: Late Bergson, Du Bos, Peguy, Beguin and Mounier (founder of Esprit in 1932). All of this is very Catholic. But also very “social.” Mounier’s ideas of “proper orientation” or of the “unknown other” capture Bazin as a student. The radical example of Marcel Legaut’s Christian activism makes a strong impression on him. The texts of Roger Leenhardt on cinema (published in Esprit) strike him at a time when he had not yet opted for cinema. Eclectic, talkative, bohemian, Bazin does not yet know what great things he is destined to accomplish. Once thing is sure, he does not like mediocrity.

When did he start writing? With the phony war and with a phony personal crisis (failed psychoanalysis of which no one knew, anger at the softness of the collaborating clergy). With a real trauma: his failure at the oral exam of the professorat (“A catastrophe has struck me: I failed at the oral of the professorat. More precisely, they failed me, because I stuttered in my extended explication of a text.”) Bazin, a natural born educator, will never be a professor. Starting in 1942, despite a sick body 31

(the lungs) and a troubled spirit (he is too critical, deep down, to have the faith of a child; he always remained a free spirit incapable of allegiance, a religious man, but not a believer), he founds film clubs and leads them. It should be said that after the outburst of film theory in the Twenties, what is being written about cinema reflects the opinion of the time: it is a mediocre art. By no means elitist, Bazin thinks that giving people a taste for good films will create a better audience, which, in turn, will demand better films, etc.

This optimism reflects the intellectual atmosphere of the early post-war years.

“Cultural animation” is a new—although political—idea. People and Culture (born of the maquis resistance in Grenoble), Work and Culture (close to the Communist Party, and where Bazin works) are set on not letting the French bourgeoisie reoccupy the cultural space. Another reason for optimism: it is once more possible to live (and to think) at the pace of an art (cinema) that embraces all of the debates of the time. There are great events: the return of an American film on a Parisian screen (on October 5th, 1944, at the Moulin-Rouge: a Duvivier!), the deeply moving premiere of Rossellini’s Païsa (November ‘46), the release—snubbed by critics—of Welles’ Citizen Kane (1947). Every time, seated at the front row, Bazin is both the most feverish and the most lucid person in the audience. He is passionate. Without passion, he does not write. But if he does write, it is with the method of someone who wants to learn more about his passion, and to share that “more.”

He becomes the Parisien Libéré’s film critic (600 articles in total), writes for the Écran Français (a remarkable weekly magazine, created clandestinely in 1943), and then for J.G Auriol’s second Revue du cinéma. And what he writes matters.

What happens next is better known. For everyone, optimism gives way to disenchantment (retreat into oneself, into cinema, into cinema-in-itself ). The Cold War makes people stupid. Stalinists take over at L’Écran français and find Bazin troublesome. Bazin the spiritualist still has a taste for the social and a sense of history; Bazin, the critic of film as form, still pays attention to content.

Bothersome. With his famous text, “The Myth of Stalin” (published in Esprit in 1950) Bazin breaks off all ties (Sadoul will later write a ludicrous response in Les Lettres Françaises). With “objectivity” he then leads the most exclusive and innest film club of the time: “Objectif 49.” 1949 is an intense year. It is the year of the Biarritz Doomed Film Festival (the doomed films being Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Lumière d’été, L’Atalante), and that of the birth of Florent Bazin, son of André and Janine. 1950 is less merry: tuberculosis, sanatorium, and beginning of a (very slight) decrease of activity. 1951 is the year of creation, with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, of the Cahiers du cinéma, a periodical known for its excesses and its yellow cover.

He had eight years left to live. Bazin, dead at age forty from leukemia, has had the privilege of seeing himself become a forerunner and of being, among the Cahiers that he led until his death, the “old man” of a band of cinemaniacs that was, only a year after his death, to hurtle into French cinema. Bazin is the real “father” of Truffaut, lost child, twice deserter, passionate about cinema, a man who did not waste time declaring war (late 1953) on the establishment, wrapped up in self-satisfaction, of the French “Tradition of Quality.” Then came Schérer (soon 32

to be Rohmer), Rivette, Godard and Chabrol. Bazin provided them with the intellectual tools they needed to fight their battles: a prioritized study of great filmmakers (for Bazin, they were always Chaplin, Welles, Flaherty, Rossellini, Renoir); a demand for an “impure” cinema; a lack of appreciation for theater; a refusal to overestimate technique; an interest for minor American cinema, etc. But also this idea of the cinema-mirror with a special silvering, without which we would not have understood what the New Wave was after the death of the “guide.”

No one knows what he would have thought of the evolution of his young friends, or until what point he would have followed them. He died before the time when what we accept of a future filmmaker (talent and bad faith, sense of timing and tricks to last) no longer please the critic, who is condemned to the role of an impartial witness, or a referee above the fray. In Bazin’s lifetime, there were “frays” over cinema’s classification as an art, then over its status as society’s cultural basis (this was the role played by film clubs), and then over the importation in cinema of the literary creed which states that “the style is the man himself.” These frays are things of the past.

So much so that, when we reread Bazin, we are moved by something else. The quality of his style, the oratorical precautions, the measured tone, everything that led people back then to speak of “constructive criticism” with regard to him—another thing of the past. What intrigues us is that the Bazinian vision of cinema— ineradicably connected to cinema as the “setting up of shots”—is confronted to a cinema which is today not necessarily “collected” from the real. The electronic image does not know silvering. It is in this way that, reductio ad absurdum, he remains contemporary.

That leaves us with the man. “It is tempting to see Bazin,” says Dudley Andrew on page six, “as essentially different from the rest of us and to be secretly relieved that his early death prevented an unthinkable collision between his innocence and the complexity and compromises of the 1960s in all the spheres of life which interested him.” And, on the last page, he borrows from William Carlos Williams the words from a comparison between Bazin and Saint-Francis of Assisi, “who taught the animals to pray not because he wanted to lead them to God but because he wanted to become as natural as they.”

Despite its “Life of Saint-Bazin” aspect, Andrew’s book lets us glimpse, through the cracks of the intellectual itinerary, a man. A man who stuttered, loved animals, had a sense of humor, and knew how to share his passion. There are moving passages in this book. The story of the premiere of Païsa, for instance: “Rossellini drove up from Rome with the film and Bazin reserved the large Salle de Chimie for the event. The filmmaker spoke briefly at the outset and then the crowded audience of workers, intellectuals, former Resistance fighters and prisoners of war saw what was for Bazin perhaps the most important and revolutionary film ever made. They were also able to watch Bazin come to that judgment as he tried to express the fullness of his experience after the lights went on. Excited by the sublime emotion he felt at that first viewing and at the final awesome scene, he was initially nearly incomprehensible. He found it particularly impossible to pronounce, of all words, the word cinéma.”

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[a

d av e k e h r c o n v e r s at i o n ] by max nelson

+ david beal

F

or four decades , dave kehr has been one of america ’ s wisest film critics . after graduat -

ing from the University of Chicago, where he studied English and played an active role in the school’s film society, Kehr took a position at the Chicago Reader. His eleven years’ worth of reviews for the paper, some of which have since been re-published in the 2011 book When Movies Mattered, show Kehr’s critical method already in full bloom: his gift for close formal analysis, his patient, elegant prose style, his resistance to showy, bloated, or overly bombastic filmmaking, his ability to draw out the emotional implications of a close-up or a tracking shot. From the Reader, he moved first to the Tribune, then to the New York Post, before settling down for a fourteen-year stint reviewing new home video releases for the New York Times. In 2013, Kehr was named the new adjunct film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

When we met him in a second-floor lounge at MoMA’s executive offices to talk about the new position, it was November 27—less than a week before his first day on the job.

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Are there any particular films that influenced your decision to become a critic?

It was never a decision—it certainly wasn’t something I set out to do in life—but I vividly remember the first movie I saw. I was three years old; it was the reissue of Fantasia that year [1956]. It planted something that just never went away, and I was fascinated by movies from that day forward. As a kid, I collected 8mm silent films and saw as much as I could at various museums, but my home education was really television. In those days, you had all-night movies on the three channels, and that was effectively the American version of the cinematheque. That’s where you saw old films, and as it turns out, that was a great opportunity, because it’s become very difficult to see exactly those kinds of bread-and-butter Hollywood pictures. They’ve kind of fallen off the map.

How did you go about developing a writing craft?

It certainly isn’t a thing one does consciously, and if you asked me to say what my style was, I’d have no idea. In my case, I aim to write as clearly and cleanly as possible. I try not to be fancy, not to show off, not to be too poetic, not to use too much alliteration. Just make good, clear sentences and have something to say.

Is there anything you look for especially while you’re watching a film that you then latch onto when you sit down to write?

There’s not really a formula. You either have the sense that there’s a director here with an idea of what he or she wants to do, or it’s just a bunch of elements that some agent has brought together, or it’s something in between. One of the things I like about watching old films and researching unknown directors is feeling that voice emerging from a field of chaos. If you’ve seen forty films by Lew Landers, suddenly you feel that there is a Lew Landers personality, and you feel an individual emerging from the work, which is really exciting. There’s either a personality there, or an idea of what a movie should be, more than profound philosophical insights, which are hard to come by. If that’s what you’re looking for all the time, you’re not going to find them very often.

Does that approach have special relevance for some of these older Hollywood films, whose directors were working within more rigid constraints?

That’s the amazing thing. I begin to suspect after all these years of watching tons and tons of Hollywood movies that a lot of the stuff about how the studio system controlled everybody is baloney. I think a strong director could have a lot of freedom within that system. The ones who wanted to be cogs were cogs, and that’s fine—Robert Z. Leonard was perfectly content making eleven Jeanette MacDonald musicals—but Borzage at MGM could seize the opportunity and make something. I don’t think the whole system is as oppressive as people like to say it is, including the filmmakers, who loved to complain and say “they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do.” But here’s this astonishing body of work. You can’t argue with that. John Ford tells you that all of his masterpieces were potboilers, and I have to respectfully disagree.

There’s a myth circulating that, apart from a small stable of geniuses, Hollywood was mostly populated by talented craftsmen working inside genre constraints. But those directors made some astonishing films, which—as you pointed out earlier—haven’t been getting regularly shown.

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I think that’s true. I don’t think we’ve finished discovering major, signature authors in American film. There’s a guy named George Sherman, for example, who seems to me just as important as Anthony Mann, but nobody has really tumbled to him in a big way. But I’m just as interested in guys like William A. Seiter. Nobody knows this guy’s name, but I think he’s probably, after McCarey, the most important director of comedies in Hollywood. His most famous film is the Laurel and Hardy Sons of the Desert, but he made probably four or five movies a year from 1925 to 1952 or ’53. He has what I call the invisible style; he’s a master of that way of editing where you don’t feel that there’s a transition from shot to shot. You never have a sense of camera or composition, or really of any technical things happening at all, which is an approach that I don’t think gets the respect it deserves.

It’s very difficult to match the movement between shots, to keep the spatial sense coherent.

To me, that’s much tougher than anything Brian de Palma has even thought about doing.

But it isn’t stamped with a personality, so people tend to dismiss it. Seiter’s genius is in creating smooth, coherent, seamless experiences around his sense of actors as distinct individuals. His way of looking at a character actor and saying, “this is what this person does best; this is how I’m going to highlight their work” pays off brilliantly in the Laurel and Hardy movie. Those are the definitive Stan and Ollie characterizations, I think. Anyway, it’s that kind of thing that gets me excited these days. There’s a lot of it, it’s fun to poke around and discover things, and it’s a way of getting films off the shelf and back into circulation.

Is that something you’d like to focus on at MoMA?

That’s one of the things, for sure.

What are some challenges associated with that? Some of these filmmakers have massive bodies of work; how do you go about culling them down to a program?

That’s the fun part. The hard part, more and more, is getting hold of the prints.

Where do you start?

I just start by casting the net with friends. There’s a pretty wide network of people who compulsively tape everything that’s on TCM; I wouldn’t say it’s an underground, just friends trading copies of hard to find things amongst each other, which is especially important in the absence of the studios really making their work available in a library form.

Even when the prints exist, it’s hard to unearth films beyond that first level of A-movies—the Oscar winners, the big box office hits—which is really what the Netflix world is reducing everything to. Last time I checked, Netflix had twelve films from 1939—six of which were public domain westerns—out of the six or seven hundred films of interest made that year in America alone. A lot of people of my generation don’t realize that this has happened, that a lot of these things have been taken back. There’s a lot of complacency: “of course everybody’s seen this; of course everybody’s seen that.” But it’s becoming difficult.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of MoMA’s archive itself?

I’m no expert on it, but it’s the oldest film department of any museum in America; it started in 1935, and was actually mentioned in the founding papers in 1929. In the 30s, they were buying materials directly from the filmmakers. They bought D.W. Griffith’s own stuff. One of the treasures is a virtually complete set of all Griffith’s Biograph shorts in camera rolls, the actual negative as it passed through the camera—with alternate takes 36

and out of order, of course, because that’s how he shot it—which they’re working now to preserve and cut following the cutting in the paper prints at the Library of Congress. You look at these things and they look like they were shot three days ago. There’s a ton of things like that in the archive that have been sitting there for, in some cases, seventy years.

You’ve talked about working to digitize the archive, too. How does that work?

I wish I knew. It’s a real priority. People are not in the habit of going out to the movies anymore. They expect the movies to come to them. It’s hard to organize an exhibition strategy based on people coming to midtown Manhattan after work, because there’s a lot of people in America who can’t do that. I’m hoping we can somehow extend the film department presence through the net, through streaming, through DVDs, who knows. We’ll have to try to figure it out.

Do you worry at all that making these restoration projects digitally available—even as it vastly increases the potential audience for these films—might make audiences and potential funders think less about the long-term survival of the physical film materials themselves?

It’s a question of budgeting and other things that I don’t know much about yet. But from where I sit, essentially still as an end user of this museum, there has to be a balance between preservation and access—not just at MoMA, but as a national policy. I get the annual report from the National Film Preservation Board and I see that a hundred movies have been preserved this year. I’d love to see, say, fifty of them, and three of them will be in To Save and Project. What happened to the rest? In most cases, the answer is: “well, we made a beautiful print, and it went right back on the shelf.” It’s not free to digitize stuff or to support streaming on the net; every time somebody watches something, even for free, you are charged for that viewing. Just what the numbers are on that, and how we can work with the copyright holders to make that happen, I think needs to be addressed soon, before streaming just becomes about new or close-to-new movies.

How do you feel about home video as a kind of archive?

I’ve certainly got nothing against home video, having made a living writing about it for ten years now. It gets better all the time. I think it’s wonderful that people can build a library—like a library of books—of films that they can return to over and over again. The only downside of home video goes back to what we were talking about before: it’s this kind of “invisible hand of the marketplace” idea according to which all the good films will become available magically because those are the films that sell and the ones that people want. That’s just not true in a situation like this. You can’t miss what you’ve never heard of.

Do you think it’s different online?

Well, I’ve seen a lot of exhibition changes in my life. When I was a kid, movies opened first-run in a theater—in my case, in downtown Chicago—and it was a really big deal to go and see it. It was probably a buck-fifty or something, and these theaters had two or three thousand seats; they were built in 1929, and were incredibly beautiful, magical places to see movies, particularly when they were full. Seeing a movie with three thousand people is a totally different experience from sitting alone—I don’t have to tell you. When you see something like the Harold Lloyd film Safety Last with a full house, 37

that movie is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. Every shot is timed for the reaction of a thousand people. Watching it on home video, you think, “that’s pretty funny, and yeah, that’s funny too”—but that passionate thing never happens. How do you restore that? That’s not a digital-analog issue; it’s just an economic reality. It’s not coming back.

Getting two hundred people in the MoMA theater is already very satisfying, because it doesn’t happen all the time. More and more, movies are a lonely pursuit. It’s what you do when you’ve got nothing else to do. You play a video game; you watch a movie—it’s a distraction. It’s not an event.

Do you think that affects the way movies are being made today? Are directors not timing their cuts to a hypothetical audience of two thousand anymore?

I think they’re editing for themselves. The supercut-y, disjunctive style that’s become the norm for Hollywood pictures looks OK on a small screen, in the sense that you don’t have a lot of space and you want to keep refreshing the image and keeping people visually engaged, but on a big screen it’s a nightmare. It gives me a headache; I can’t follow the spatial relationships, which always bugs me. Somebody shoots an arrow in one scene and I’m expecting to see it hit a guy in the next shot, but no—that just doesn’t happen anymore. It’s all about stimulating your optical nerves through the constant cutting and the soundtrack, almost in this desperate, “pay attention to me” way. It keeps slapping you in the face: don’t look away!

There’s been a kind of pushback against that in certain corners of independent film now, where the long take has become an incredibly important stylistic tool.

I think it is a reaction against that jumpy style. You either have jitter-cam or fish-bowl.

And there are some great fish-bowl films. Christian Petzold, I think, is a master of that style, dropping the camera down and letting the people drift through the tank. It looks great; it’s very emotive. But it was there in classic Hollywood films, too: there’s a scene ten minutes into John Ford’s Two Rode Together where Richard Widmark and Jimmy Stewart go sit on a log next to a riverbank and just talk for six minutes. No cut. You might say that it’s un-cinema, but in fact it’s total cinema. And it’s not going to be easy for Brett Ratner to do that in his next picture.

At this point, we have three generations who grew up getting a film education from some venue other than the movie theater, whether it’s TV, or—in our cases—home video. Now there’ll be a generation for which streaming is the main platform.

That’s what concerns me. I just want to get some Griffith films on streaming. They need to have some exposure to that, just to know that it’s there. I don’t think Netflix and Hulu and Amazon offer a very enticing selection of older films. Hulu has the great Criterion channel, which is full of things that don’t make commercial sense to put on DVD. There just isn’t a big enough audience for it­—obscure Japanese swordplay films and stuff along those lines.

But then there’s the problem of organizing or presenting the stuff. Even the very good streaming sites are ordered like landfills: it’s all spread out. It seems as if it’d be easy, on an online streaming platform, to organize things in a more systematic way.

They don’t want that. Netflix doesn’t have an index. It wants to give you the impression that we, Netflix, have an infinite universe. You’re not there to search for something; you’re 38

there to select from one of the offerings we have presented for you. We’ve read your mind and have decided that if you like this, you’ll like exactly the same thing.

“Foreign films with strong female leads…”

Right. They seem like very crude algorithms, all based on the assumption that you want to see the same movie over and over.

It eliminates the element of surprise.

Yeah. And what kind of habit does that give you, if you just expect the movie to reflect your immediate desires over and over again? I guess that’s what leads to a world where there’s nothing but fantasy-adventure films that all seem identical.

That might be one of the balances to strike when it comes to making these films available online: figuring out how much to make an audience work to come to a film.

One wants to curate what’s online as much as what’s in the theater. But this is all so remote; I just don’t know where to start. I’d love to be able to say, “This month, discover the work of William A. Seiter at the MoMA website!” But how would you coordinate that with Fox, RKO, Universal, and all the places he worked? There’s some fair use leeway, maybe one can make agreements with the studios, but it’s a massive project.

Have you started planning any specific programs or festivals at this point?

Not really. There are a couple of things I’ve been discussing with friends on the staff for a couple years. One is a director named William K. Howard, who’s a really interesting guy. His most famous film is probably The Power and the Glory, which is an early Preston Sturges screenplay. Very interesting use of flashbacks. It always gets nailed as a Preston Sturges film because he’s more famous than William K. Howard, but if you watch a lot of Howard films, it turns out that the flashback stuff is pretty much what Howard was doing consistently. As it turns out, MoMA restored his most important indie film, a 1939 thing called Backdoor to Heaven, so they have a pristine copy of that and a lot of his late silent/ early sound work for Fox. There’s another big bunch of his films with the people who bought the Raymond Rohauer collection, now called the Cohen Film Group. Who knows if the films are any good or not, but nobody’s seen them since 1928, so it’s high time to get a look at them—and it’s a museum retrospective that could make that happen. The end result, I hope, would be putting William K. Howard back in the conversation somehow.

Once a director like William K. Howard is back in the conversation, how do you keep him there?

Well, if the films are good, hopefully they’ll propagate themselves. I look back at what I think of as the heroic era of curating at MoMA, when Bogdanovich was doing the first Hawks series in America, the first Hitchcock series, and, I believe, the first Rossellini series—which did change the conversation. We’re not going to find another Hawks or another Hitchcock, but we’re going to find plenty of interesting people just below that level who deserve to be in the Sarris book. If Andrew had ever had the opportunity to expand The American Cinema, I think he would’ve expanded it in this direction. That was my handbook when I was a teenager. I carried it around like a lot of people did, underlining things I’d seen. It’s a great guide, but it’s not the end.

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m a n n y fa r b e r [ a n a p p r e c i at i o n ] by d av i d b e a l

M

anny farber was an accomplished painter (who was also, at various points in his life, a teacher, a collagist, and a carpenter), but he made his most enduring paintings with words. In his jazzy and iconic film criticism, written between 1942 and 1977, his canvases were filled with loud colors; his gestures were fast, his brushstrokes dense. He collided words with each other just for the fun of witnessing the crash, like a kid on the floor with his new race cars. His sentences were kneaded and toughened and wound-up, his diction brash and cartoonish. His essays were petting zoos where the words bit.

Farber, born Emanuel Farber in 1917, grew up in Douglas, Arizona before he studied at various San Francisco Bay Area schools, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He moved to New York in 1942, where he followed the footsteps of Otis Ferguson and James Agee and began writing film criticism for The New Republic and later The Nation (he would go on to write for Commentary, Artforum, Film Culture, and Film Comment, among others). As his criticism developed, he started to write pieces in collaboration with his wife, the painter Patricia Patterson. He stopped writing professionally in 1977, and he devoted his time to painting and teaching at UC San Diego until his death in 2008. The body of writing he left behind is not only some of the most important film criticism ever written; it’s some of the most fun.

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He hated the word “nostalgic” (people used it too often to criticize his paintings), but, like many critics, he would often invoke a Golden Age: 1930s Hollywood.

He loved to play (in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s words) “hide-and-seek with Americana,” but he took fulfillment both from juggling his love for Hollywood directors like Hawks, Wellman, Mann and Walsh in brilliantly splotchy pieces like “Underground Films,” and from singing the praises of avant-garde filmmakers from other countries (Farber particularly identified with Michael Snow, a fellow polymath, a “painter-sculptor-composer-animator”). Undergirding it all was a never-ending war against the Big: the big picture, the big theme, the big plot point. Even in one of his most famous big-idea essays, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” the big idea was to uphold the small. Had Farber been born in the 17th century, he might have befriended the writer Abraham Cowley, who wrote, “I confess I love littleness in almost all things.”

It sums up Farber nicely. He was relentlessly committed to the surface of the films in question: the back-door detail; the texture of a shot; the motion of an actor through space; the rancid, bland, or enticing smell of a filmmaker’s individual personality.

Hence Farber’s disappointment with James Agee’s film criticism, elaborated in a short essay called “Nearer My Agee to Thee.” Farber subtly distinguishes himself from Agee in this piece; by the end, he has carved out his own space in the narrative of American film criticism. Agee, he says, is too tasteful with the “Big Scale work, where the Boulevard is made of National Velvet and the Limelight’s as stunning as the Sierra Madre...” Farber can only bring himself to notice in some of Agee’s reviews “a mild struggling with the awareness that the movie is talking not about art but of the necessity of placing itself in a likable position with the furthest advances in currency...” Many of Farber’s pieces apply this distinction to different films; he saw no “mild struggle” but a perpetual battle between “go-for-broke” art and pleasantry, between life and ersatz-life. He recognized this conflict in everything and everyone from Twelve Angry Men to Robert Motherwell to Saul Bellow.

Not to say that he was always on his high horse. In Routine Pleasures, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1986 documentary about Farber, Gorin characterizes Farber’s stance toward painting: “It—life—wasn’t a big deal, and you shouldn’t paint it like one.” Farber didn’t sneeze at life in his writing; he was constantly on the lookout for it, both in movies he liked and in movies he didn’t. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Farber didn’t make a big deal out of life being a big deal. He only used “I” on occasion (he called into doubt Agee’s “three-dimensional use of ‘I’ constructions, which seldom aroused the reader to its essential immodesty...”). Nor was he committed to writing much about lives, whether they were other people’s or his own. His essays on filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Preston Sturges contain little in the way of biography. The thing itself, the product, the work, the object out-there, when colored

by Farber’s prose sensibility, had all the life one needed.

And what of that sensibility? About Godard, Farber wrote, “His is basically an art of equal emphasis: it’s against crescendoes and climaxes.” So with Farber’s art. It doesn’t feel carefully structured; in some cases, entire paragraphs seem like they could be switched out for each other and the cumulative effect would ultimately be the same. His mind is too busy blaring and bursting, each phrase clambering for a space in the crowd. He rarely hits a sole note with a fermata, and rarely does a note soar 41

above the rest of a chord. He tosses out one lively whiz-bang observation and before you even have time to ask a question, he tosses out the next one. He won’t tell you where he’s going next. In “Cartooned Hip Acting,” he wrote: “The actors, in other words, are erroneously built up as migratory statues, but in reality their medium has the blur, the shifting nonform of a series of ant hills in a sandstorm.” Farber’s pieces have this same ant-hill quality: compact, layered, even, earthy.

Farber may not have been as impolite in person as his contemporary Pauline Kael was, but his prose could be even more freakish and salty than hers. Preston Sturges’ stock actors, he wrote, had “a queer, unstandard, and almost aboriginal Americanism.” On John Ford’s Two Rode Together: “The movie’s mentally retarded quality comes from the discordancy and quality of the parts: it’s not only that they don’t go together, they’re crazy to start with.” On Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman’s Shame: “very sophisticated but achieving an un-self-consciousness that makes her more woman than a movie can bear.”

He was drawn to the brief parenthetical, a grammatical burrow that nicely accommodated his tossed-off, gut-over-brain modifiers. From “Hard-Sell Cinema”: Also, the acting has so much pitch and roll that there is overflow with each performance. From Pat Hingle (mild smirking), Ben Gazzara (facial showboating), Tony Perkins (coy simpering fragility), Don Murray (boyish earnestness), Anthony Franciosa (well-oiled glibness), E.G. Marshall (superiority), John Cassavetes (aggressive conceit), and Paul Newman (surreptitious modesty), the spectator gets a load of self-consciousness along with the piles of role-bitching sawdust.

These irresistibly quotable delights, often describing male actors, often using a verb as an adjective (“mashed, faintly quivery” or “...stolidly sissified”), often jamming two words together in a shotgun wedding (“a Crisco-hipped porter, schmoo-faced child” or “Eli Wallach overworking his nervous-leering eyes” or, Gorin’s favorite, “sinewy, life-marred exactness”), are perfect demonstrations of Farber’s keen and tunneling eye, his voracious appetite for vernacular, and his ear for the staccato pounce of certain words. They’re one of his trademark devices (Google “coy simpering fragility” and you’ll only get one result). The parenthetical allows him to hit and run, to observe without justifying, to prioritize a juicy sound over a rational meaning. They’re short poems, and they’re overflowing with life.

If Farber was fighting the Big, he was also pitting “life” against everything prefab. In “The Decline of the Actor,” from 1966, he writes of a new, dead style of acting: “The peculiar thing is that each word has been created, worked over by a sound engineer who intercepts the dialogue before it hits the audience. There is no longer the feeling of being close to the actor.” There’s no analogous interceptor in Farber’s writing. His words feel un-edited, in-progress; never do they feel created, considered, reconsidered, finished, ordered, and presented to you. They feel, rather, spit in your ear, as if from an erudite and utterly alive lunatic. (Gorin remembers having conversations with Farber: he talked like “someone whose mind was rattling like a penny in a Bendix.”)

But it’s a lunatic who knows when to let you go. Not a single essay in his most famous collection, Negative Space, goes on too long. The show rarely gets stale, be42

cause everything he looked at was an endlessly interesting performance to him: the director’s work; the actor’s portrayal; the movie itself; even, in the case of Michael Snow’s films, “light and space, walls, soaring windows, and an amazing number of color-shadow variations that live and die in the window panes.” All of these he thinks of as “so many new actors.” But Farber himself is the natural star of each of his packed, vibrant little one-reelers, and he occasionally mugs and hams to excess. Pauline Kael’s fellow critic Renata Adler ruthlessly attacked her for, among other things, using metaphors that “[defy], precisely, physical comprehension.” If Adler believed Kael’s use of metaphors was too take-it-or-leave-it, I shudder to think what she would have written about Farber.

Jon Lanthier, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal, notes that Farber’s career trajectory was similar to one of his pieces: He began with bold assertions, gained speed after a brief running start, and then toyed with our assumptions, performing forcefully and falling back in cleverly timed increments both refreshing and perplexing, only to grow silent at the very moment we felt the need for continuation roughly pressing into us, like the barrel of a loaded pistol in the slick small of our backs...

His project was more consistent and benevolent than Kael’s, though he covered less ground; each one of his essays, like his entire body of work, feels somehow complete but unfinished. He pitched his tent on calmer turf than she did, and he eventually removed himself from professional criticism entirely. What might he have made of Kael and Adler’s political in-fights? He probably would have rolled his eyes, but perhaps Kael isn’t the best writer with whom to compare him.

Although these authors were writing in different contexts and at different volumes, it’s useful to look at Farber’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” next to pieces like George Orwell’s “Why I Write” or Virginia Woolf ’s “Modern Fiction.” All three essays have a similar aim: use the essay as a springboard, a space to set up the terms for a literary endeavor. For Farber, as for Orwell and Woolf, that endeavor was a dogged, life-long search for some kind of truth: The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.

If Orwell decried the loss of objective truth in totalitarian states and Woolf excavated truths in her own past, Farber was concerned with a different kind of truth—the journey to the truth, the handiwork required for its discovery, the “private runways to the truth” that he saw in his favorite films. Perhaps he was more concerned with the runways than with the truth itself. Gorin, in describing Farber the painter, described better than anyone Farber the man: someone who “always picked as a subject something that could hold on the head of a pin, and got his kicks from multiplying infinitely the entries and exits into it.”

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Judex’s confession how Georges Franju’s 1963 fairy tale re-wrote the terms of cinematic fantasy

by m a x n e l s o n

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s a roundabout way of approaching georges Franju’s Judex, I want to take a stab at defining a genre that may not, technically speaking, exist: the French cinéma fantastique. At most, it’s a loose collective of distantly-related films, including Jacques Rivette’s open-air urban fairy tale Le Pont du Nord, André Delvaux’s hushed wartime chamber drama Rendez-vous à Bray, and Jean Rollin’s wistful, elegiac vampire movie Lips of Blood. These films, it seems to me, are each driven by two competing tendencies: on one hand, a documentarian’s attachment to things as they actually appear, authentic, prosaic and unadorned; on the other, a feverish imaginative drive, a love of the gothic, the supernatural and the uncanny.

(Think of the amusement park ride that stands in for a fire-breathing dragon near the end of Le Pont du Nord, or the crumbling castle in Rollin’s film populated by voluptuous-yet-bloodless ghouls.) The films I’m including in this fuzzy half-genre tend also to: a) draw explicit attention to their own movie-ness (in each of the three films above, there’s at least one pivotal scene set in a cinema), b) treat death with a strange mixture of flippancy and terror, and c) consider life, on the whole, as a kind of deception, illusion, or game.

Franju may not have invented the cinema fantastique, but he was arguably its modern father: a bridge between the genre’s silent-era innovators and its late flowering in the mid-Seventies. Franju’s original training was as a film archivist; in 1936, he co-founded the Cinémathèque Française with Henri Langlois. The two

best known of the short, Paris-set documentaries he made after turning to filmmaking in 1949, Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides, are brutal, beautiful, and tinged with pitch-dark humor. Admittedly, they’re often crude in their oppositions—the earlier film juxtaposes tranquil shots of life in the Paris suburbs with graphic footage from a nearby slaughterhouse, while the second, a portrait of the National Army Museum, places debilitated veterans alongside gilded suits of armor and other venerated battle relics—but their visual language is surprisingly delicate. Their tone, meanwhile, is a strange balance of wonder, bemusement, moral outrage and detached aestheticism, whether it’s directed at a grotesque war mask or the mangled corpse of a bull.

By 1961, Franju had re-invented himself as a fiction filmmaker, first with a mental hospital-set drama (La tête contre les murs), then with a stark, lyrical horror film (Eyes Without a Face). The New Wave was at the peak of its influence, and in comparison to the springy-stepped work of many of his younger contemporaries, Franju’s stately, restrained films must have felt like dispatches from another era. Occasionally, he seems to be in conversation with directors like Marcel Carné or Jean Gremillon, whose movies often took tabloid-ready subject matter—crimes of passion, acts of revenge, urban decay—and covered it with a delicate, poetic sheen. But the work of Carné and his fellow poetic realists has to be understood, at least in some capacity, as a direct response to the Occupation and the Second World War, an attempt to come to terms with the present by re-staging it in the language of fantasy, romance, and myth. Franju had something different in mind. For his third film, Judex, he looked still further back in French cinema history: to the silent-era serials of Louis Feuillade.

Feuillade’s best-known films—long-form episodic yarns populated by thieves, vigilantes, supervillains and masters of disguise—were produced between 1913 and 1919. His Judex, which precedes Franju’s by nearly half a century, dates from the middle of that incredibly fertile period, and it’s an anomaly for Feuillade. Where Fantômas and Les Vampires, the director’s two biggest prior successes, had focused on largerthan-life criminal masterminds, Judex revolved around a caped, square-jawed good guy—albeit one whose guerrilla methods, imposing tower-like hideaway, and proficiency with disguises make him closer to a Fantômas than a Superman. Feuillade’s film shares a skeleton of a plot with Franju’s remake: the corrupt banker Favreux, whose sins escalate in each movie’s opening minutes from embezzlement and fraud to murder, starts receiving threatening letters from the vigilante Judex—then is publically poisoned. (Or is he?) Meanwhile, his beautiful daughter Jacqueline has become the target of a pair of shady kidnappers, one of whom has a taste for disguising herself as maids and nuns.

Richard Roud once wrote that Feuillade discovered a principle Hitchcock would later perfect—“nothing can be more frightening than extraordinary events against an everyday background”—but Feuillade was equally adept at staging everyday events against extraordinary backgrounds. His Judex often takes unexpected detours into Lumière-like actuality territory: at one point, the camera lingers for an extended single take on a pair of cute kids hanging out; at another, it follows the erratic movements of a pack of tracking dogs long after they’ve served their narrative purpose. Even in Feuillade’s least embellished moments, though, there’s always a sense of mystery and danger hovering in the background—and vice-versa.

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Like Feuillade, Franju enjoys shuffling fantasy from the backdrop to the foreground and back again, often within the space of a single shot. For all his graceful, fluid camera movements and classically poised compositions (it’s rare not to find the most important figure in any given shot smack-dab at the center of the frame), there’s a clumsy, blunt side to Franju’s films. His editing patterns can be erratic—he tends to cut certain events off abruptly and let others, from break-ins to car trips to routine conversations, play out uninterrupted from beginning to end—and his eye for human movement unforgiving.

He tends, for instance, to frame his actors in distanced medium shots that register all their stumbles, losses of balance and shifts of weight. The central, recurring theme of Franju’s career is that there’s no alchemy needed to transform the documentarian’s world, with all its unaccounted-for irregularities and restrictive physical laws, into the world of a fairy tale. His universe can be aggressively literal, but that, I think, is precisely what makes it so delicate, mysterious, and alive with possibility.

There is, for example, a wonderful moment near the end of Franju’s Judex: the timid detective Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau) is pacing around outside the ornate apartment building where Judex (Channing Pollock) has been imprisoned, wondering how to get to the top floor, when a circus caravan drives past. He recognizes the beautiful young woman aboard—“Daisy!”—who has exciting news for him. “You know my uncle the lion tamer, that brute who wanted me to be happy? Well,” she continues with a giggle and a radiant grin, “the lions ate him. Now I’m free.” He tells her his fix.

“But you must help him!” “I’m no acrobat,” he replies resignedly. Luckily, she is. All business, she disrobes into a skintight leotard—his total lack of response is priceless— and reaches to take off her tiara, which promptly gets stuck in her hair. For the next six seconds, the movie stops in its tracks to let her fiddle and struggle with the accessory until she’s free of it. It’s hard to imagine another director, Feuillade aside, who would have cheerfully indulged in such a crazy coincidence, then bent the rhythm of the scene to accommodate such a tiny logistical hang-up. Watching a Franju film, we might end up convinced that what we think of as real life is nothing more than a web of contingencies, chance encounters, unexpected transformations and deeply improbable salvations. In the world of Judex, reality is only set apart from fantasy on account of the hitches and stutters it permits, the unplanned-for detours it forces us down, and the comically matter-of-fact way we respond to it, as if it were all perfectly normal.

In other words, one of the strangest things about Judex is the way it sustains its own fantasies even as it obeys (or seems to obey) reality’s demands. Take the black-suited men scaling the building near the movie’s climax like free-floating shadows, or the inelegant rooftop fistfight that morphs abruptly, with a cut down to the combatant’s feet, into a fragile dance, or the “gotcha!” moment early in the film in which the camera scales a tuxedoed Judex’s body from the feet up to reveal a giant stuffed bird’s head perched between his shoulders. There’s nothing worked-over, touched-up, or symbolic about these images; if anything, they’re constantly announcing themselves as direct, falsifiable evidence of how the world actually was at a given time and place. (The shadow-men, for instance, cast shadows themselves.) But if that’s the case, Franju suggests, then reality is stranger, more fantastic, and much closer to fiction than we might often think.

Franju is, of course, fooling us, but he has an odd way of going about it. He is always directly exposing the shadows, masks, wires and gears that power his fantasies 46

judex (1963)

(or at least some of them), as if he wants to earn our trust by making his illusionistic devices as evident as possible. “If I lie to you,” he seems to be telling us, “you’ll be the first to know.” If nothing else, Judex is a movie about lies: the guests’ elaborate bird masks at the masquerade ball that serves as the movie’s first big set-piece, Favreux’s false death, the false ceiling in the cavelike prison where he regains consciousness, the attempted murder of Jacqueline (Edith Scob) by a young woman disguised as a nun, the secret identity of Favreux’s butler Vallières, Judex’s staged stabbing. In each case, Franju methodically lays out the precise instruments and methods of deception—a spiked champagne glass, a hypodermic needle, a concealed button, a fake beard, a mask—but the effect often feels closer to a diversion than to a full disclosure. He’s like a magician tossing out explanations for some of his tricks so that we won’t think to doubt others.

What are we being diverted from? One possibility: Franju is trying to cover up the simple fact that the structure of Judex’s universe, for all its nods to realism and all its endearing glitches, is radically different from our own. Life, after all, doesn’t necessarily follow the providential course of a fairy tale. Fistfights tend not to resolve into waltzes. Most murder victims don’t float downstream Ophelia-like, the way Jacqueline does midway through the film, only to come back to life minutes later. And there’s always the chance—as Franju cheekily admitted in a late-career interview— that Judex wouldn’t have come to Jacqueline’s rescue had she not had Edith Scob’s exquisite bone structure.

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If this reading doesn’t entirely convince, it’s because Judex seems too transparent even on this deeper level, too honest about its own status as a fairy tale—not to mention as a movie. Cocantin spends much of the film reading Fantômas paperbacks, one of which at one point gets a jarring, zoomed-in close-up. (It’s no coincidence that, two years before making Judex, Feuillade directed a hugely popular five-episode Fantômas serial.) Early in the movie, he starts filling a young girl in on the plot of Alice in Wonderland, only to get a sharp rebuke from his employer: “You’re not here to tell stories about rabbits and watches!” In another sense, though, that’s exactly what he’s here for: to tell stories and, more often, to watch them. He’s a passive, curious audience surrogate, drifting around the edges of the movie eavesdropping, spying and peeping through keyholes.

Judex, on the other hand, is a kind of director figure: the mastermind who sets the film’s narrative in motion, establishes the terms and limits of all the subsequent action (up to a point) and bends his fellow characters to his will. (In one memorable scene, he watches the imprisoned Favreux scuttle around his cell through an ornate video monitor like a filmmaker going over the day’s rushes, or a biologist studying rats.) He sets himself up as a truth-giving authority—his moniker translates to “judge”—but it’s hard to take him at his word when he is also a magician, a nameless vigilante, and a master of disguise. The central question of Franju’s film might be whether a good magician can also be a good judge—or, put differently, whether a movie can function at once as a magic act and a direct record of fact. Franju clearly wants to answer in the affirmative, and Judex is his test case: a fairy tale so bound to the cold, hard details of the world in front of the camera that it feels obliged to constantly expose itself as a fantasy; to make itself into a thinly-veiled allegory for its own creation, telling and reception.

Ultimately, this is where Franju deviates most sharply from Feuillade: both directors set their fantasies on rickety ontological ground, but only Franju’s is designed to call itself out; to confess its own lies. To me, his Judex feels like a direct product of the crisis of belief that settled into Western intellectual life in the years immediately after the Second World War. The movie’s lesson, which would trickle down to a new wave of overtly self-conscious fantastique films in the coming decade (including those by Rivette, Delvaux, and Rollin) is that, now more than ever, we need stories to tell us that individuals can still manage to exercise their wills in the name of truth and justice, that love can sometimes conquer all, and that death is only an especially convincing kind of magic trick—but only as long as the stories in question keep reminding us that all those reassuring maxims are, in the end, false comforts.

Judex’s ending is straight out of a fairy tale: Judex and Jacqueline, having survived imprisonment, separation, and attempted murder, walk hand-in-hand down a beach (he pausing to pull a pair of doves out of thin air and send them flying away). They kiss. Then Franju cuts to an intertitle: “in memory of an unhappy time.” It’s the gesture of a filmmaker who recognized the necessity of belief—in, among other things, resurrection, magic, and romantic love—but knew that the memory of unhappy times was still too fresh for audiences to fully, unskeptically believe. This is why Judex is always confessing its own lies and begging us at the same time to accept them anyway; to trust that life, like a well-told children’s story, has a kind of built-in order despite all evidence to the contrary. In other words: to have faith.

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from top: Lips of Blood (1975), Le Pont Du Nord (1981), judex (1963)

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WORKERS OF THE WORLD a closer look at Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble

by s o p h i a s k u p i e n

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he polish filmmaker andrzej wajda is known for making films that engage with his native country’s political climate. With the release of Wałęsa: Man of Hope in 2013, the 87-year-old Wajda completed a trilogy of films centered around the worker-led opposition movement that toppled Poland’s Communist regime.

During that regime, Wajda was no stranger to controversy. The first film in his trilogy, Man of Marble, released in 1977, was subject to particularly strict censorship. Written by Alexander Scibor-Rylski, the script languished for twelve years before government censors eventually allowed Wajda to shoot the film; even after Wajda completed production, the government attempted to restrict its release, limiting its publicity and allowing only a few prints to be made. Since the same censors had “already approved the content of the screenplay,” Matilda Mroz writes in her 2007 essay on the film, their reaction “suggests the presence of an element fundamentally more subversive than what could be contained in a script, an ‘impalpable something,’ Wajda suggests, ‘which renders inoperative the rules of censorship.’”

Man of Marble subtly subverts the socialist realist narrative that dominated Polish film production at the time. Outlined by Bolesław Bierut, then-president of Poland, in 1947, socialist realism declared that all art should have a political purpose, permitting only narratives that could generate support for the economic and social policies of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Life was to be presented not as it actually was, but instead

as it “should be,” with a clear separation between the forces of revolutionary progress and the dark forces of the past—forces that hamper both the protagonist’s individual development and society’s progression towards a communist utopia. Protagonists were expected to be “positive heroes,” characters who wholeheartedly believed in communist ideology and unfailingly adhered to the party line, giving the viewer a model to emulate. In postwar Polish films, most notably Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Cellulose, the figure of the worker emerged as a prominent “positive hero,” used to represent the social and economic progress communism would eventually bring, and to galvanize the viewer to work diligently toward achieving that progress.

Man of Marble, by manipulating the conventions of socialist realism, exposes the shaky premises behind the Party’s narrative. The film’s two intertwined storylines document Mateusz Birkut’s evolution from diligent bricklayer, a quintessential “positive hero,” to disaffected labor activist. In the first narrative, Agnieszka, a film school student shooting her thesis film, decides to search for Birkut, a forgotten hero of socialist labor, and she interviews his wife and former coworkers in an effort to discover what became of him. In the course of her research, she discovers a pre-existing film about Birkut called Architects of Our Happiness, directed by one Jerzy Burski: a fictional film-within-a-film that Wajda uses to deconstruct the conventional socialist narrative.

Made during the high point of socialist realism and chronicling Birkut’s attempt to lay 35,000 bricks in a single workday, Architects of Our Happiness conforms to a common socialist realist plot formula: a diligent worker exceeds his production quota. Birkut is presented as a typical selfless “positive hero,” never thinking of the personal glory the work will earn him, but only of the project’s collective benefit to the Polish state.

“I’m doing it for me,” Birkut explains when he sets himself the challenge, “to see if you can build a house in two weeks.” Then, a little later: “everybody would have a home.”

Here, Wajda is referencing the kind of symbolic discourse commonly used by the Party to collapse the distinction between worker and state—but Wajda’s film, with the addition of a narrative set behind the scenes of Architects of Our Happiness, goes beyond the triumphant storyline depicted in socialist realist films. After completing the brick-laying challenge successfully, Birkut begins touring the country to demonstrate his revolutionary team-bricklaying technique. During one such demonstration, Birkut’s hands are badly burned by a brick that had been deliberately and dangerously overheated. Though no longer able to work as a bricklayer, Birkut continues to work for increased rights and better conditions for workers, often fighting against the communist government. As Burski explains to Agnieszka, “he became too deeply involved in social issues. He found housing for workers. He fought tooth and nail for every one of them. He often fought with the housing authority.” While Birkut remains a blameless “positive hero,” his relationship with the Party changes substantially.

After his hand injury robs him of his symbolic function as a model worker, Birkut finds himself largely abandoned by the Party. In one telling scene, he visits the Party headquarters in Warsaw, and in his extremely brief meeting with an official he receives an unconvincing assurance: “I’m familiar with your case and I’m working on it… My request of you is, don’t do anything on your own. Trust the people’s justice.” Though Birkut’s case eventually goes to trial, “the people’s justice” reveals the extent of the Party’s manipulative power. Based on the claim that a group of four workers, includ51

Man of Marble (1977)

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ing Birkut’s close friend Witek, were engaged in an extensive program of anti-Party sabotage, the case is clearly a show trial. Though “the people’s justice” turns out to be a farce, Birkut remains unimpeachably loyal to his fellow worker. When asked to testify against Witek, Birkut instead implicates himself, insisting that he had knowledge of the planned attack and cooperated fully. The judge’s unquestioning acceptance of this unbelievable claim only confirms the emptiness of the Party’s symbolic identification with the worker. The brick-laying challenge, initially a symbol of progress, becomes a symbol of the Party’s manipulation of the worker for its own propagandistic ends.

Wajda makes two other allusions to socialist realism. One is the “man of marble” referenced in the film’s title: a massive marble statue of Birkut made to commemorate his brick-laying achievement. The film’s opening montage shows Birkut admiring the statue, a quintessentially socialist realist depiction of a model worker prominently displayed in the National Museum in Warsaw. By the end of the montage, however, a massive portrait of Birkut is being taken down from its place of prominence, foreshadowing Birkut’s transformation from hailed hero into internal enemy. When looking for material for her film, Agnieszka goes to the National Museum to search for the statue, and she finds it stored in a forgotten corner of the basement.

The film’s primary setting, Nowa Huta, is, in the end, a similarly empty symbol.

Constructed between 1949 and 1954, Nowa Huta was Poland’s largest steel plant, and by far the most ambitious construction project undertaken by the Communist government. The factory, surrounded by “a model socialist city, home to a conscientious workforce,” was to provide, in Katarzyna Zechenter’s words, “living proof of the benefits of ‘intensive Stalinist industrialization.’” In visual art, literature, and cinema, Nowa Huta was portrayed as a place where the Six-Year Plan’s goal of economic progress through industrialization had already been achieved. Less than five miles east of Kraków, Nowa Huta also represented the triumph of the new over the old, another key socialist realist motif. One of the few Polish cities to survive the war with its architecture largely in tact, Kraków served as a symbol of the nation’s pre-Communist past and a center of political opposition to the regime. Next to Kraków, Nowa Huta represented a literal construction of a new order to replace and surpass the old.

In Architects of Our Happiness, Nowa Huta is a workers’ paradise. The film’s opening credits juxtapose the desolate conditions the workers leave behind against the workers’ hotels at Nowa Huta. A voice-over conflates the physical growth of the city with the personal growth of the workers: “as the city grows, so do the people.” It’s while living in the factory that Birkut meets his future wife, a gymnast known as the “pride of Nowa Huta.” Their marriage—the union of the idealized worker and the idealized Polish woman—comes to represent the kind of idealized progress Nowa Huta is meant to enable. Like the statue, it’s a symbol built on shaky ground. After Birkut ceases to be a model of the ideal worker and is sentenced to jail for his false confession, the marriage dissolves. By appealing to and also subverting the conventional meaning of these symbols, Wajda manages to transform the worker from a figure manipulated by the state to one actively working to reform it. In retrospect, Man of Marble anticipates the worker-led movement that would eventually topple the regime altogether in 1989. If Man of Hope finds Wadja chronicling the past, Man of Marble has him writing the future.

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Portrait of AdÈle the feminist realism of Abdellatif Kechiche and Gustave Courbet

by maria giménez cavallo

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here’s a line of french painters, starting in the early eighteenth century and winding down to the late nineteenth, who found the classical ideal of beauty in well-proportioned female nudes. Most of these artists treated their subjects as abstractions, goddesses, or superhuman figures, from Boucher’s Diana stepping out of her bath to Ingres’ stretched-out, Venus-inspired exotic odalisque. Gustave Courbet, born in 1819, also painted intimate portraits of women—but where the Académie des Beaux-Arts encouraged idealized depictions of the female body, Courbet painted his subjects as real women of flesh and blood.

Courbet’s large-scale canvas Un enterrement à Ornans (1850) revolutionized the Beaux-Arts hierarchy. Previously, the only works thought to merit such a size and scope had been tableaux d’histoire: sprawling depictions of historical, religious, or mythological scenes. Un Enterrement à Ornans, in contrast, merely depicted a funeral among townspeople—implicitly elevating its working-class subjects to the level of kings, or even gods. Courbet’s purpose was democratic: to lend the peasants an air of majesty. At the same time, he was careful not to idealize them. Ever the realist, he emphasized their physical flaws as well.

Three hour movies might be the closest things we have today to tableaux d’histoire. At least in commercially-distributed narrative cinema, they tend to be reserved for tales of epic proportions, from Greek tragedies to era-spanning novel adaptations, rather than stories about adolescent girls coming of age. Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Vie d’Adèle is an iconoclastic exception: for 179 minutes,

the film follows its heroine as she goes to school, falls in love, and deals with all of life’s expected trials and tribulations. Like Courbet, Kechiche makes daily life into something majestic precisely by magnifying its routineness, its messiness, and its rough edges.

Kechiche’s camera is fixated on Adèle’s face. Each of the movie’s many close-ups feels like a question: an attempt on Kechiche’s part to understand what his heroine is thinking, feeling or sensing. Very often, he gets an answer: Adèle, played by newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos, emanates a wide spectrum of emotions—from affection and desire to heartbreak and disappointment—with as little as a slight twitch of the lips or the furrowing of a brow. Kechiche is deeply committed to the belief that we can know Adèle completely by studying, caressing, and examining her face, and there’s a similar thought animating Courbet’s Portrait de l’artiste (1845). The painting is an introspective self-portrait framed in what we’d now call a medium close-up. Courbet seems to be trying to know himself better by taking up a position outside himself, scrutinizing his wide eyes, open mouth and questioning eyebrows as if they might give him better access to his own emotional states.

Courbet’s Portrait de Jo, la belle Irlandaise (1865) is not the sort of portrait that would have typically been commissioned by the aristocracy. Courbet was far from the first painter to depict women at their most intimate moment—their toilette—but his version has little in common with, for instance, a Titian Venus. He refuses to idealize Jo, his mistress at the time; instead, he faithfully reproduces her natural form: frizzy hair, flushed cheeks, tired eyes. Rather than use his muse as a kind of template for a goddess, he simply paints her as herself—effectively suggesting that his mistress deserves to be depicted no less than Venus, but depicted on her own terms and under her own name.

In the same way, when Kechiche went about adapting Julie Maroh’s graphic novelBlue is the Warmest Color, he changed the title to La Vie d’Adèle (“Adèle’s Life”) in reference to his lead actress—a fact Exarchopoulos didn’t discover until she arrived at Cannes for the film’s premiere. The camera watches Adèle sleep, cry, slurp spaghetti and chew gyros, and Exarchopoulos seems so graceful, so free of complexes about being watched, that it’s easy to conflate her entirely with her character. She binds her hair up in an absent-minded bun, rarely checking in a mirror to make sure it’s Hollywood perfect, while her face is freshened by little more than soap. Later in the film, we watch her weep passionately, eyes dripping and nose blubbering, seemingly without any vanity or any care for her appearance.

In this respect, La Vie d’Adèle is close in spirit to Courbet’s Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (1857). Viewers at the time would have assumed that the women depicted in that painting were prostitutes: no well-educated lady would have stretched out on the grass so carelessly, with such disregard for her public appearance. Courbet’s Jo, in contrast, sits in front of a mirror combing her hair, scrutinizing her own face for potential flaws. There’s a sense in which we’re getting the privilege of seeing her before she’s ready or willing to reveal herself to us—and some have accused Kechiche of making a similarly voyeuristic move. Yet while Jo looks outside herself to see how she appears to the rest of the world, Kechiche situates himself on the outside looking in, using Adèle’s external features as a kind of key to her mental experience.

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from top: La belle irlandaise (1865), blue is the warmest color (2013)

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L’origine du monde (1866) might be Courbet’s most controversial and bestknown painting: an explicit close-up of a reclining woman’s exposed genital area.

Paradoxically, by calling such direct attention to his female subject’s sexual functions, Courbet hoped to discourage viewers from making her into the object of a sexualized gaze. For Courbet, sexuality is a biological function of the same order as motherhood or childbirth, not something shameful to be repressed for the sake of titillation or erotic suspense. There’s a parallel close-up of Adèle halfway through Kechiche’s film in which she poses nude for Emma, her slightly older artist girlfriend. Kechiche films Adèle from her lower body up, slowly revealing that she is lying in a pose inspired by Manet’s Olympia. The scene might not be as graphic as Courbet’s painting, but it has a similar effect: to celebrate, rather than ignore or repress, its subject’s biological functions, and in the process to let the woman’s body exist as its own autonomous entity.

On some level, the film is actively encouraging Adèle to become comfortable with her own sexual desires—and demanding that we, the viewers, accept her for who she is.

It just so happens that the desires in question are for another woman, but Kechiche’s film never comes off as political propaganda in response to the ban on gay marriage in France. In Kechiche’s world, coming out is less of a struggle than simply growing up. When social conflicts do come up later in the film, they’re based more on differences of class than sameness of sex. Maroh accused Kechiche of “the banalisation of homosexuality,” which is, in its own way, a kind of virtue.

The film works precisely because Adèle and Emma’s relationship isn’t spectacular on account of their genders, but rather because of something in their individual, day-to-day interactions with one another. The fact that La Vie d’Adèle is presented as a love story rather than as a gay film doesn’t create a division between traditional and alternative sexual preferences; if anything, it encourages us to think of gay relationships as we would any other.

There’s a similar frankness to Courbet’s Les Dormeuses (1866), one of the painter’s most direct depictions of sexual love between women. At the time, the Beaux-Arts venerated paintings of female nudes that titillate the viewer’s imagination by hinting at barely-concealed lesbian erotica. Courbet’s lovers, on the other hand, are wrapped around each other in a tender, unambiguous post-coital embrace. It’s a deeply private painting: like the solitary subject of Femme au perroquet (1866), the women are curled inwards, with the viewers positioned to be voyeuristically intruding on an intimate moment. (Courbet made this second painting as a response to Alexandre Cabanel’s La Naissance de Vénus, whose subject, in contrast, sprawls out as if inviting us to study her.) The same is true of La Vie d’Adèle’s notorious seven-minute-long lesbian sex scene, which seems designed to make us uncomfortable—as if we were invading the privacy of two people briefly letting themselves be free.

In the October 2013 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, managing editor Jean-Philippe Tessé referred to Adèle numerous times as an “ogresse” for her voracious nutritive and sexual appetites. And yet it’s precisely this focus on Adèle’s physical, corporeal desires that makes her seem not monstrous, but essentially human. Unlike Courbet’s Jo, Adèle does not prepare herself for our gaze. Instead, she’s presented as she is—without inhibitions, makeup, or Beaux-Arts artifice–and in the process, she gives us access to something still more intimate: her inner life.

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seeking stars in search of the movie star aura from Pacino to Delon

by t h e o z e n o u

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magine the following situation. you put 10 anonymous men in a police-station-style lineup with Will Smith, then bring in a kid from some remote island who hasn’t seen a film in his life and—let’s assume—has no idea Smith even exists. You ask him to pick one man out of the lineup, the one he finds most compelling, mysterious, or cool, the one his eyes go to instantly. It’s my belief that he’d pick Smith. But why? “Charisma” is too cheap an explanation; it sounds like something out of a perfume ad.

In certain spiritual traditions, there’s a concept called the “aura”—originally a Greek word meaning “breath of air.”

The occult theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater wrote extensively about it; it could be defined as an invisible emanation or energy field generated by an individual. Certain individuals are said to have a particularly strong (or “magnetic”) aura. For our purposes, let’s think of a movie star’s aura as the strong, indefinable attractive force he or she generates—whether through bearing, speech, movement, attitude, or looks. It is my intention to dissect that aura.

The first film I ever remember seeing was Philippe De Broca’s On Guard, a bona fide French swashbuckling picture. I must have been six years old, and at the time, I was convinced that you only needed actors to make a film. They came in, spoke, decided where to stand and how to move, and pretended to die in front of you—why would anyone else be necessary? They were the ones I saw, the ones I reacted to, and the ones I lived with. Over the years, my attitude towards film authorship has gotten a bit more sophisticated, but only slightly so. Stardom, I still find, obsesses us, makes us dream, enrages us, enthralls us,

bores us, surrounds us. It tends to get written about, or rather buzzed about, more often in tabloids and fashion magazines than in journals of film criticism—and yet it’s the basis for some of the most immediate, instinctive pleasures of moviegoing.

On Guard starred Daniel Auteuil, but to me the film’s real star was Vincent Perez (of Cyrano de Bergerac fame). My first cinema memory is of Perez clothed in a golden period costume, a literal bright, shining star: untied to reality, larger than life. It was Perez’s charisma that viscerally caught me, not his line readings or his interpretive methods. Ever since, genuine presence has been the one quality I look for in an actor—not above all else, but in addition to all else. That was my first clue towards a definition of what makes a movie star.

The term is unarguably deceiving. It originated at the dawn of Hollywood, with Fairbanks, Chaplin, Gish and later Flynn or Gable. There have been many others since; some deserving of the title, most not. Today, in an era when fame is usually immediate and often brief, the very idea of movie stardom has been trivialized. It’s about sex appeal; it’s about who you’re dating; it’s about who you’re photographed with; it’s about how many Twitter followers you have; it’s about how many (consecutive) hits you have to your name.

Perhaps all those elements are either the direct consequences or the collateral products of being a movie star in 2013—but they fall short, I think, of describing what a movie star is. For that, we’ll have to turn to two great, antithetical actors: Al Pacino and Alain Delon.

If movie stardom were Earth, then Delon might be the North Pole and Pacino the South. In a sense, every other country, landscape, and climate of screen acting lies between these two: Delon silent, opaque, impassively cool; Pacino the great thespian, the character actor. We go see a Delon film precisely to see Delon the movie star, whereas we go see a Pacino film because we are eager to meet a new character—albeit one as crafted by Pacino.

Delon doesn’t speak much in movies. He is often a loner, gripped by existential angst without ever showing any outwards signs of his pain. Delon is still an icon today in France; in the States, he’s less well-known. Catherine Deneuve is still seen to embody a certain kind of bygone French elegance and beauty, and Gerard Depardieu’s over-the-top, Orson Welles-esque nature still entertains. Not so Delon. That might be because he hasn’t made a major film in years; probably not. Before we go any further, then, it’s crucial to understand what Delon meant in the cultural landscape of the 60s and 70s. Delon was the Ryan Gosling of his time (though Gosling might be the better actor). Both men have an effect on us that acts simultaneously as a whisper and a shout: they break through the screen while keeping us at arms length. Their silence is interpreted as a mystery, a riddle to be solved by watching their performances again and again and again. Delon was “The Samurai,” a silent, righteous hit man, for Jean-Pierre Melville—a clear inspiration for Gosling’s nameless Driver in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

Delon is pure persona: icy, dignified, distant, cool, self-confident, ineffable, there in the scene yet somehow unreachable, his emotions hidden. He only pretends to be someone else to the extent that narrative causality and continuity require it.

That’s his hook; his aura. It’s what we’ve come to refer to when we talk about Alain Delon. When Delon was interviewed for a film, he would always refer to himself in the third person, like the kings of France used to. “Alain Delon wanted to make this movie because…”; “Alain Delon thinks that…”; “Alain Delon likes…” Vanity, of course. But maybe we can also find evidence here of the Delon persona, and of the separation it requires between Delon the man—a human being made of flesh and 59

Le Samoura誰 (1967)

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bones—and Delon the movie star, an image captured on film and screened at 24 frames per second.

A movie star’s aura depends on something other than who he or she is as a private citizen. That isn’t to say that his or her aura is entirely false or constructed, but rather that, in most cases, it can only be correctly experienced through a screen. Seen as flesh-andblood people, photographed by paparazzi, buying milk at the corner grocery store, movie stars can quickly lose their appeal. It’s only once a star’s likeness has been transformed by the camera and projected in front of a room full of strangers that he or she becomes an ideal we strive for, a fantasy of who we want to be, a friend, an enemy, an idol, a devil, or a god. This is why it is difficult to reconcile the concept of movie stardom with our current, TMZ-saturated culture. It’s hard to imagine that Delon would seem as mysterious if you saw his pictures online four times a day, driving his car, coming back from the gym, smoking a cigarette and sipping a coffee. Perhaps that explains why there are so few genuine movie stars today, at least in Delon’s mold. The spell gets broken quickly, often before an actor gets a chance to fully establish his performance style onscreen. And once the spell is broken, once private life enters the public domain, there’s no going back. Lines get blurred.

To my mind, Alain Delon’s best roles are Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil, Jef Costello in Le Samouraï, Jean-Paul in La Piscine and the title character in Mr. Klein. Plein Soleil— the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley—gave Delon his breakout role, and it’s striking to consider the film’s plot as an allegory for its star’s film career. As Ripley, Delon is a common, ordinary man. He looks at his wealthy, handsome friend Philippe Greenleaf enviously, with a mixture of admiration and hate: a process not dissimilar to our own relationship with movie stars. Once Ripley has murdered Greenleaf and assumed his identity, Delon undergoes a metamorphosis. He becomes a movie star.

He is cool, calm, and collected; he seduces women but never charms them; he is, in other words, Alain Delon.

In the late sixties, Delon applied his persona to two widely different genres: the JeanPierre Melville gangster film and the huit-clos relationship drama. Le Samouraï elevated Delon to the rank of a mythical figure, a sort of French equivalent to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. He behaves like a modernized version of a cowboy, a lawless figure writing his own legend. Conversely, in La Piscine, Delon plays an ordinary man—even a loser. Jean-Paul is an ex-alcoholic failed writer turned advertiser. He has a fling with his best friend’s daughter, and we’re never sure to what extent his girlfriend of two years (Romy Schneider) is truly committed to him. It’s a character that sounds as if it would suit Pacino, Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Jeremy Irons more than Delon—yet even when Delon seems casual (in a bathing suit or summer attire), his appearance is heavily coded. He feels like a movie star. In La Piscine, he uses his mysterious persona like a mirror, reflecting our own flaws and failures back at us.

It’s striking how much screen time Delon gets alone in Le Samouraï and La Piscine.

Each film is peppered with plot-less beats set apart from the constraints of the movie’s narrative diegesis. These scenes, in which the film becomes nothing more than the Alain Delon show, often use some kind of device to justify breaking the fourth wall: in Le Samouraï it’s Delon gazing into a mirror; in La Piscine, Delon lies next to a pool under the sun, sunglasses on, then turns his head to the camera and doffs his sunglasses, as if he’s distracted by an off-screen character.

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In Plein soleil, Delon played a man who wanted to become someone else; in Mr. Klein, he plays a man who fails to stay himself. Mr. Klein (Delon) is an apolitical arts dealer living in Nazi-occupied Paris and using Jewish rounds-ups to acquire paintings for cheap sums. Soon, he realizes that he has a Jewish homonym; when he starts receiving the other man’s mail, he comes under police suspicion and struggles to prove his identity. The persona wears off, and Klein ends up locked up with all the Jewish men and women he betrayed. Joseph Losey’s picture plays like an inverse Plein Soleil: a deconstruction of Delon’s character from movie star back to man. Ultimately, Delon appeals to us because of the slick, controlled minutiae of his behavior. When he is onscreen, we are all Tom Ripleys. It’s only fitting, then, that Delon would end up, in what is arguably his last great movie, back where he began: as a man like any other, subject to the authority of others and deprived of control. If anything, he’s become less than a man: a pariah whose duplicitous game, once exposed, makes his existence obsolete.

Al Pacino is a different case. He doesn’t have a persona, or at least one that has come to define his body of work. Granted, he is known for playing gangsters—but Michael Corleone has little in common with Tony Montana, or Donnie Brasco with Big Boy. Pacino is, to my mind, one of the finest examples of a character actor. Originally the term comes from theater; it was coined by British magazine The Stage in 1883 as “one who portrays individualities and eccentricities [often a supporting actor].” More than 150 years later, in the era of movie stardom, this definition feels a bit obsolete.

Today, character actors are recognized less by their choice of quirky material or their status as supporting talent than by their decision to suppress their own personalities, to become their characters. Pacino lacks a persona à la Delon; instead, he has a life-like, naturalistic approach to performance, undeniably influenced by his training under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

Pacino’s physical traits and mannerisms, even with make-up, are instantly recognizable: you’re always aware, at least at first, of watching Al Pacino act. But Pacino manages to manipulate his iconic physique—usually a serious liability for a character actor—for his own chameleonic ends. Contrast him with Karl Malden, a respected character actor who played alongside Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront before being Michael Douglas’ partner in The Streets of San Francisco. Malden had a working-class, blue-collar look. He was an Eastern European immigrant but could play American. He could be your neighborhood cop, your boss, your waiter, your godfather, or your salesman. Each time, you never questioned his performance: if you had a vague memory of having seen him somewhere before, you probably didn’t remember exactly where. In Pacino’s case, you know where you’ve seen him; moreover, you also likely know something about Pacino himself, whether it’s his love of theatre or his personal life (he has never married). That makes it all the more difficult for Pacino to convince you that he is someone else.

Something deceiving often happens when you watch a great actor play someone else: you think to yourself, “What an actor! He performs beautifully!” This never, or rarely, happens with Pacino. Take his turn as a blind colonel in Scent of a Woman, one of his best performances. The screenwriter of the film, Bo Goldman, once told me that “what makes Pacino a great actor is he’ll find a way into his character that will make it indelibly his 62

own.” In other words, Pacino will use his likeness—which he can only change to a limited extent—to absorb the character and create a realistic and full portrayal of what that character would be like if he had Pacino’s traits. That’s true whether he’s playing a junkie (Panic in Needle Park), a desperate bank robber (Dog Day Afternoon), or an esteemed mayor (City Hall).

Pacino’s aura—the reason he is a movie star—boils down to this bigger-than-life quality: with each movie, he stretches himself out a little more to include one more persona; one more character; one more self. Each time, he creates an entirely new being, an individual as tangible and dense as anyone we know. For the duration of each performance, he escapes his own internal life (though not his physical self ) to replace it with the character’s. After Jodie Foster’s The Beaver wrapped filming, Mel Gibson thanked his director for allowing him to become someone else for the duration of the shoot. He could’ve been channeling Pacino. So could Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons, or Leonardo DiCaprio, whose bodies of work suggest a complete devotion to each of their characters. (It’s worth noting that DiCaprio has managed to carefully build up the filmography of a character actor despite his ex-heartthrob status and leading man-looks.

At first they seem antithetic. And yet there is a long precedent of handsome stars re-inventing themselves as character actors into their thirties or forties, once their boyish good looks have started to be replaced by more rugged, manly traits: Paul Newman, Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt.)

Ask someone their favorite movie star, and you’re likely to get a kind of mirror image of that person’s character. When we see our favorite stars onscreen, we’re instantly reminded of ourselves; we think of ourselves as the stars—or more accurately, we wish we were like them. If I’ve focused so far here on charismatic leading men, it’s perhaps because, as a straight male, I have always related especially closely to actors like Delon, Warren Beatty and Tom Cruise. Cruise may be more action-oriented and Beatty more of an Old-Hollywood-type romantic lead, but both have devoted most of their performances to committed idealists, driven dreamers, and obsessive aces.

They inspire me: their determination, their will to pursue romance at all costs, their capacity to turn desire into reality. I relate to Cruise’s exhilarating enthusiasm, and Beatty has a persona I wish I could have once in a while.

The relationship goes further: I spent a good deal of my childhood and teenage years soaked in films and pop culture, and my perception of women was undoubtedly skewed in the process. As a kid, I probably had a crush on Salma Hayek (in Wild Wild West) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (in The Mask of Zorro) before having a crush on a girl at school. For whatever reason, it was almost exclusively Hollywood films that influenced me: my fantasies have never been shaped, for instance, by Godard’s hipster heroines. I can’t deny that cinematic fantasies have affected my taste and standards of beauty, my perception of women, and the way I think about romantic love and casual flings—or that the way we so much as define beauty is influenced early in life by a wide range of factors, including but not limited to movies. (What would my sense of beauty look like, for instance, in a world where Scarlet Johansson was stuck with playing ugly duckling characters, or one in which Victoria’s Secret models weren’t cast in Michael Bay com63

mercials, but in films by Michael Haneke?) A few exceptions aside, it’s misguided to pretend that beauty is a timeless, natural concept.

Yet that’s the belief held by many of Beatty and Cruise’s characters, who tend to place women on a kind of pedestal: take Julie Christie in Heaven Can Wait, Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde, or Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky. The actresses in those films embody a specific female archetype: stunningly beautiful, smart and lively, but also possessed of a certain temperament, a certain mystique, poise, elegance, or allure.

This temperament, I think, exists in its purest, brightest form as a two-dimensional moving image: a lifelike image that actually existed at some moment in time, but an image nonetheless. By definition, an image lacks the roundedness and psychological authenticity of a real, live human being—which explains why female characters can often come off as archetypes given a semblance of personality by their performers, rather than idiosyncratic characters brought fully to life. (It’s telling that even as the films’ heroes chase these ideals, they often acknowledge that the chase is a kind of fantasy in and of itself.)

Not that men have a monopoly on constructing romantic ideals. Historically, male fantasies in art and literature have been more frequent and dominating than their female counterparts, if only because women were, until not so long ago, often denied the right to genuine expression. Still, we have the Duc de Nemours in The Princess of Clèves, the collected works of the Brontë sisters, Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (along with the entire Jane Austen bibliography), Nora Ephron, Catherine Breillat, Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl, Edward and Jacob in Twilight, and Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey. You could argue that Ephron’s romantic comedies, or more recently Lena Dunham’s Girls, work as thematic and aesthetic counter-points to the traditional male paradigm, and thus can’t be evaluated using the same terms—but that’s most likely not the way the vast majority of viewers, male or female, see it.

It’s important to be aware of the constructs we make for ourselves and the other sex.

Those constructs are ideas, and like any ideas, they are not definitive, or even real. Keeping that in mind, pop culture films have every right to be enjoyed for what they are: beautiful fantasies. Lately, there’s been a lot of calculated outcry in the mainstream press about gender archetypes and female representation in Hollywood. Often these arguments are pertinent; sometimes they lose sight of the specifics of the movie in question. It’s important to consider the politics of representation without forgetting the playfulness, the childlike or teenage awe, the sense of pleasure that is essential to our experience of watching movies.

Films can show us something bigger than what everyday life holds. They reflect the world as it is, yes, but also the world as we—or at least some of us—wish it was. That’s why I’m still drawn to idealized figures, to the most glamorous of women and charismatic of men.

I may also have more grown-up, realistic interests, but it’s important not to lose sight of what is often referred to, however cheesily, as movie magic.

Note to self: when you next go to a party and scan the crowd, it’s not going to be like those classic scenes from movies where the girl is perfectly back-lit, in perfect profile, and she just attracts your eye. We always hope for a time when we might somehow learn to separate the world of fantasy and the world of reality. It’s a constant process, and one that I’m not sure ever really ends.

We need to let fantasy inspire us but not control us.

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vanilla sky (2001)

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