Friday, August 7, 2009
Writing the City
One of the things that struck me about Hands Over the City was the number of representations of the city that appear. So much of the film is structured around ways of describing the city. We see Nottola's model (above) - we see several maps - we see his office, with a map painting on one wall, huge photos of the city on other walls, as well as windows looking at the city, and the model itself. But the city is represented by more than just images - there are words and numbers about the city, reports, statistics. The archive room is as much a representation of the city as the maps are.
But none of these representations are adequate - they are often quite flawed. The episode discussing the common wall of the house that collapsed is a case in point: the officials explain that they had no way of knowing - the scale of the map would make a meter thick wall 1/2mm wide line - their pens have 1 mm nibs - they can't represent the real width with their tools. It's a common theme - the reports are all accurate, in their way - but all miss things. You see the various officials making excuses and avoiding responsibilities - but their information, their maps, records, etc., are all equally ambiguous. The representations of the city tend to hide it as much as reveal it. Da Vita gets at this, with his all too apt metaphor - everything was by the book, but the book needs to be rewritten...
While most of this misreading and ambiguity is unintentional, Nottola emerges as a character who can exert willing control over things. He is determined and focused, he knows what he wants. And he sees - and he promises a view of the bay to everyone.. He can imagine it, and represent it - hreates the big model - his office is lined with maps and pictures. He is a visionary - he imagines the city as it will become, he sees it when it is not there. He will build it - but before he builds it, he imagines it, he is, rather literally, a writer of the city:
Now it is true, he is as apt to see the profits he can get as the biuldings he can build - he still falls into that class of ambiguous villains, the 20th century developer. There was a nice piece in the New York Times about a new book about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, her campaign to stop him from bulldozing Greenwich Village for a superhighway, or driving an interstate through Washington Square Park. Nottola is in the same vein as Moses - more of a crook, maybe, but still, someone trying to realize a vision of a city - though a vision that usually forgets about the people living there. Or reduce them to lists of names...
Anyway - it's a good film about a pretty substantial part of 20th century social history - the reinvention of cities. A process still going on - there are echoes of this film in recent films about urban renewal - Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, or Jose Luis Guerin's Under Construction - complete with the tour of the new buildings - handsome, safe, boring, and priced out of reach of the people who are being displaced...
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Crashing Walls and Broken Politics in Rosi's Hands Over the City
Sunday, July 5, 2009
July's Film: Hands Over the City
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
An Illustrative Film
Monday, June 29, 2009
"O.K. babes, You're in the Movies" The Evolution of a Performance
Because I am so absolutely obsessed with her performance, I feared having access to the rehearsal tapes might change my views on the work. It did in a way, but, oddly enough, for the better.
I found it very curious to see that the basic change in beats (to use an acting term), which sort of change with each room they enter, were established from at least the first filmed rehearsal. I guess that is not a big surprise; even the loosest improve still has to have some structure to follow. But, now I can appreciate how smooth and flowing Shelby and Alec followed each other (from room to room and emotion to emotion) all the while adhering to “the woman’s” motivation to get to her movie, despite the rough and rugged emotional terrain they travel through before she exits the door.
This flow and adherence to her character’s objective (simply to leave and go to the movie) is really what helps make …no lies seem real. In real life, isn’t it so true that these little things like keeping a date with friends, seems to be of so much more importance than finishing an insanely emotional and impacting conversation with someone, one that can literally change your very psyche. Shelby’s character HAS TO go to the movie. (As an almost related aside, one of my earliest memories of television is of Three’s Company. I couldn’t get past the fact that characters would come into the apartment and NOT close the door. It bothered me to no end and completely shattered my suspension of disbelief.)
In the first filmed rehearsal, she recounts the rape incident, at times, with something just short of delight, at one point calling herself an “exposed rape-ee” with a smile and a laugh. It’s really not until “the cameraman” asks point blank “It didn’t turn you on to be raped?” that she lets the joking go completely. Alec wouldn’t dare ask this question in the final version (although he comes close) because Shelby’s tone is not nearly as light at any moment in the final film. She makes light of things, but there is a deep pain present, even in these moments; her smiles are a defense mechanism then, a way that allows her to reveal this stuff with the camera on her. To me it is so interesting to see this actress get to that point, step by step.
Mr. Block tells us that Shelby viewed something called The Rape Tape, which comprised of woman telling the stories of their victimizations, both by rapists and sometimes by the people that were supposed to help them following the rape. With these various details, she was able to develop a composite and apply it to her character. And through her training in “method” work, she was able to link herself to these details and find the emotional connection that made it so powerful and real and create, as Glenn said, “something harrowing we can't quite put our fingers on”. One of these details, which she implements in the filmed rehearsals, but not in the final version, is about her condition just following the rape, attempting to walk up the stairs and being “reduced to the physicality of an old woman, I couldn’t walk more than one step at a time”; a powerful image, and perhaps one that would have added more power to the final piece, but, for whatever reason, was left out.
The most interesting difference between the second taped rehearsal and the final film (which are much closer to each other than the first and second taped rehearsals), is the choice Leverington makes to tell most of her rape story from the bed rather than, in the filmed version, from the chair. The difference is, in my thinking, astronomical. The movement she makes to the bed seems deliberate and does not work in her character’s underling objective, which is to leave and go to the movie. If Shelby thought this movement to the bed was needed in order for the viewer to realize that her character was in a different “place” than when she was putting the makeup on, it is such a relief to see that all the reveal of change that is needed is accomplished, in the film version, simply by her turning around and looking directly at Alec (and us) for the first time in the film. It would be interesting to find out if this was an adjustment made by Mr. Block or if Leverington herself had the instinct to make that choice. I really feel like it would be a much less successful film if this seemingly tiny choice was different.
Glenn calls this performance a “master class of method acting”. Obviously I agree. But I would go even further to say that, just because its viewership is not on par with other great film works, it doesn’t mean that this performance shouldn’t be appreciated as one of the most successful ever put on film. Not simply because this woman happens to pull off something that seems real, and not even simply because she achieves a certain undeniable emotional power in this work, but because a phenomenal truth is reached. Marc asks “Is this the truth of simply never taking cinema verite for granted? Or, more radically, any notion of any single truth?” I can’t put my finger on it. But maybe the answer lies in what weepingsam said: “It retains its power even after you know all the facts - but it makes you think about what it means to talk about fiction telling the truth...” Or maybe it’s the voices of the unheard, speaking through Ms. Leverington; the composite - alive…forever.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
...no lies Rehearsal Tapes
Rehearsal Tape 2
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Your Eyes Never Lie: Wells of Subtext in '...no lies'
Sunday, June 14, 2009
"Ask me no questions..." (an interview with Mitchell W. Block)
I reached Mr. Block, via telephone, in his Santa Monica office.
Peter Rinaldi: What was your reaction when you heard that I wanted "…no lies" to be the film of the month?
Mitchell W. Block: I thought it was a great idea. It was perfect timing because I’ve been trying to find ways to put my films up so people could see them.
What was your reaction when it got into the National Film Registry?
Well, it had been up before, so I was pleased when it finally made it past the bureaucracy.
When in the course of this film’s life did it start to be used as a public service tool?
Immediately.
Did you ever expect that to happen?
No. Because I was, like most film students, in a program, like virtually all programs, which never talks about how a film is used, or how films make money. You make films without regard to audience or market. When the film came out, a number of very smart film distributors said “This is a classroom film that can be used for training.”
That’s really ironic considering, and I don’t want to make any assumptions here, but I am assuming you made it with the intention to kind of throw the audience off once they realize it was not real.
No.
No?
No, I had to make a movie to get an MFA. And I only had seven weeks of prep time. So, I’d been a producer for a long time and if you think about it, the easiest kind of picture to make is a film with one location, two actors and so on. So the form was very much the function of being just a smart producer and the content was trying to figure out what I could do with the form. So it’s like all my pictures, where I work backwards, because my brain works that way.
Surely you must’ve realized, after the film is made, that what you have here is something that people might take to be not so much fiction, as, perhaps, a moment caught on film that was real. That really wasn’t the goal? To cultivate these performances to make them appear, for lack of a better word, “real”?
Well, they are real. I mean, the performance, everything about it, is real.
Well, (laughs) this could turn into an interesting discussion, but what I am trying to say is that, yes, she may have been playing “herself”, but the situation certainly wasn’t real.
Well that’s the joy of making a fictional movie. You create something on the screen that, because of the form, people read as real, when in fact it is fiction shot to make it look like it is vérité.
What was the reaction when it first screened? When it played at someplace like the Flaherty Film Seminar, where everyone expects a documentary, was there controversy?
Well there generally is controversy because people get pissed off at “the cameraman” for treating a woman like that. That’s inappropriate. And people get pissed off when they find that they were fooled.
So they are pissed off at the cameraman and then, when they realize there is a “filmmaker”, they are then pissed off at you.
Yes.
I read that Shelby Leverington watched rape victim tapes to get some back-story material to work with, but what kind of work was done to help her get into the place she needed to get into to sustain this performance through these long takes?
The back-story was something she used to help create that character, which is really a pastiche of her. I mean she’s really that character, who had not been raped, and, being very much a trained New York actor, could draw upon her Method approach to pull that performance together. The other thing is that Shelby and Alec (Cameraman) were very good friends and remain so to this day. So we have the benefit of that relationship already being there, which is almost like a boy/girl relationship between them, which is the idea of the film-- this guy that has a girl “friend”, which is not necessarily a date, and he has this camera and he has to do a cinematography assignment and he sets up the equipment in her place and she says she’s going out with friends to see a movie, “I’ll let you shoot me.” He says “Okay, I only have one magazine, one load, ten minutes, so just let me film you getting ready”, etc.
There is a fine line between a good film with great performances (that no one actually processes as having been an actual moment that was captured in reality) and a film like this that most people, having no preconceptions, would, due to the level of performances, process as being a “real” moment captured in reality. For this reason, this performance, to me, is something beyond just exceptional. She reaches a truth that people find a hard time processing.
We’re looking at an actress who came out of method acting in New York. Her whole approach was to be the character, to be real. So Shelby simply succeeded in creating this 15 1/2 minute character that people read as real. And you have to just say “What a good piece of work”. And it was done in multiple takes, just like a movie. So there’s no magic, it’s just being professional.
You relayed the story of the police captain that asked you for the name of the police officer who interviewed the woman in the film because he believed it to have actually occurred. When you see a reaction to the film taken that far—
That’s not a surprise. People used to contact Robert Young for medical advice. I think the audience reacts to any program and believes there is a transformation of the actor into that character. And that’s not at all surprising.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
"...I'll tell you no lies" (an introduction, and the story of my own introduction, to ...no lies)
(If you are about to read this having NOT seen the film ...no lies, I would advise you do so before reading further. Watch it below.)
In 1972, Mitchell W. Block was working as the Line Producer on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. This left him little time to complete a full-scale film of his own, which was required to get his MFA from NYU. As he writes in The Truth about NO LIES, he thought he “should do a work that would be ‘easy’ to make. Limited locations, interior practical location, a short shoot, few actors, low shooting ratio, no period costumes, no score, etc. Keep it really simple.” The result is sort of a cinematic miracle.
In the spring of 1995 I was in a similar situation. I was a film student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I had just completed my third year project, a film that seemed to polarize the class and faculty. Having had little money and not enough sufficient time to devote to a full scale production, I conceived an idea that involved basically a woman against a wall.
I showed it to my boss at the time, documentary filmmaker George Nierenberg. When it was over he didn’t have a lot to say about it, instead he starts to scan his towering piles of VHS tapes in his living room. “You have to see this documentary”, he tells me. “Documentary” is what he calls it. He doesn’t tell me anything more.
When ...no lies was over, I was so shaken by it that I hadn’t noticed the credits. George and I started talking about it. When it became apparent to him that I hadn’t seen the end credits, he told me what they said(the woman played by Shelby Leverington, etc.) and I didn’t believe him. He replayed the tape. Okay, “The filmmaker put that there so as not to embarrass the woman”, I concocted. There was no way this was acted. I couldn’t believe it. Once I watched it again, knowing now that this was, indeed, a performance, I was blown away.
Is it really necessary to go through the process of thinking you are seeing a moment captured on film that occurred in reality, and then, at the end, realize that it was manufactured like most films? How much does this play in its potential appreciation? This can be a point of discussion, but, regardless, it is how I experienced it, so it is, in turn, how I presented it to people when I showed it, on a VHS tape copied from George's.
I showed it to everyone in my life. “I have a documentary to show you. It is only 15 minutes.” I don’t remember all of the reactions but once in a while, it knocked someone out. What was it about this film that impacted us?
When the Film of the Month Club started, I dreamed of being able to present ...no lies, but I knew that it wouldn’t be worth it if we didn’t get Mitchell Block involved. I reached out to him and he graciously granted my request to put the film online so it would be available to us and he agreed to an interview.
In our interview, which I will post later in the month, I tried to find out from him if he intended to trick the audience from the beginning or did he realize, after it was made, that he had a fiction that looked impeccably like fact. After all, there is nothing in the film that leads the audience to the understanding that what they are about to see is real. Block doesn’t outright lie, like other fake documentarians do, by presenting written or spoken documentary style, fact-like information (like Peter Greenaway’s The Falls). Even so much as a date at the beginning would imply non-fiction. Some, however, might consider the title to be the written info that puts the viewer in the mind-frame of “fact”. So, can Block really be called a trickster simply because of the title? What is even leading us to believe that Block’s intention is to fool the audience at all?
Well, ...no lies played at the 1974 Flaherty Seminar, a place where people generally expect to see a documentary. It caused controversy and discussion on what “real” is in film and the emotions wrapped around such notions. If Block didn’t conceive the film as a trick, it certainly was one now. As George Nierenberg and others have theorized, there are three “rapes” that occur with ...no lies; the offscreen rape of the woman, then the figurative one inflicted on her by the “cameraman”, then we, the audience are taken advantage of by Mitchell Block. I would take this a step further and say that Block can’t do the act alone. In my case, Nierenberg himself helped in the violation by calling it a documentary, the Flathery Seminar too. Perhaps if you simply found this film somewhere and watched it, you wouldn’t feel like it was trying to trick you into thinking it was real...or would you? Wouldn't you just think, if you appreciated it, that the actors were just doing their jobs well?
Let’s forget for a moment about Mitchell Block’s “trick”. This film is (and is about) a performance. Shelby Leverington. Once this performance was made know to me as such, it became, in my mind, one of the greatest I had ever seen on film. Nuanced and complexly structured so as not to appear so, I can write (and just might) a moment by moment analysis of it. Its success does not rest simply on the fact that people think it is not a performance; its authenticity runs much deeper than that. She manages to haul her character through varying emotional terrains with no sign that the “vehicle” is on pre-laid tracks, and in such a limited amount of time. Mitchell Block is also planning on giving us the added honor of viewing the “Rehearsal Tapes”. Would it be weird if I said I am thinking about NOT viewing them? I don’t think it's right. Like reading a first draft of a masterpiece; rewarding on one hand, and forever damaging on the other. As a filmmaker, I am tremendously interested in the work it takes to get to something this successful. But as a viewer, in this case, I'm obsessed with this performance, not with the process.
Last year, No Lies was accepted into the National Registry, an honor bestowed on only a handful of films from each year. Here’s what the press release said:
Done in faux cinéma vérité style, Mitchell Block’s 16-minute New York University student film begins on a note of insouciant amateurism and then convincingly moves into darker, deeper waters. Opening with a scene of a girl getting ready for a date, the camera-wielding protagonist adroitly orchestrates a mood shift from goofiness to raw pain as an interviewer tears down the girl’s emotional defenses after being raped. One of the first films to deal with the way rape victims are treated when they seek professional help for sexual assault, "No Lies" still possesses a searing resonance and has been widely viewed by nurses, therapists and police officers.
Yes, the film has had a life as a tool to train police officers and others to better assist rape victims. Block has marketed the film for such public service use since its release. A police captain actually asked Block for the name of the officer who interviewed the woman in the film. To reprimand him in some way? We can assume, I suppose. Did he not see the credits? What about the pretty obvious cut? The looped bit of dialogue? Maybe there is a mysterious quality in their performances that reached something that, even if they gave a bow at the end, some would not waver in swallowing as some kind of truth. Mystically, Ms. Leverington speaks a truth for victims that can't speak, or have been hushed. Is this the "fact" that we want to believe?
Indeed, in many ways this film is a lie, but can you think of a film that has this much truth? That is, I think, what makes great film art. And ...no lies, to me, is just that. And I'm excited to know what you think.
...no lies, verite and feminism
First of all, even though I came to ...no lies with no prior knowledge, I could not watch it "pure"; this is because I had already encountered this approach before in the great feminist work Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1978). It certainly seems that Citron was influenced by Block, although I'm not sure if Citron would have seen it (I'm guessing she might have, since she was writing criticism for Jump Cut before becoming a director). Citron's film is about 50 minutes, and features a number of verite-style situations involving two sisters. The most powerful moment occurs when one of the sisters describes being raped by one of her mother's boyfriends when she was a young girl. However, at the end, we are informed that we had been witnessing not a documentary but rather a fictional construct.
The reasons why Citron chooses to do this are very much contextual. Feminist filmmaking in the 1970s begins through the use of cinema verite, talking heads documentaries that allow women to speak in their own words about their own experiences. However, this was quickly challenged by feminists who wanted to break with this idea that cinema verite realism could produce an objective truth. The call was for a documentary practice that joined with a cinematic materialism – a concern with the form of cinema’s signifying practices – and a political materialism – a concern with the concrete social practices that underpin ideology. Citron’s film can be seen as an example of this kind of feminist approach to the documentary. Her problem was trying to make a film about relations between women in the family without producing a simple cinema verite confessional or a fictional portrait of a representative family. Citron’s strategy is to reconstruct and juxtapose different forms: cinema verite, soap opera melodrama, home movies and journals. Citron thus problematizes identification itself – its false and easy notions of truth. Citron replaces more conventional and unitary REPRESENTATION OF with multiple, overlapping and contradictory RELATIONS TO: a polyphony of female voices in relation to the issue of mothers and daughters within patriarchy. Thus if the film is feminist, it is also post-structuralist to some degree, although certainly not to the degree of a Derrida or a Foucault: there is still a feminist foundation.
Likewise, I thought about Block's film within its context. The other film that came immediately to mind was Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary (1968), one of the first extended questionings of verite and the notion of cinematic truth. But Block is up to something more, I think, something quite radical in its view of cinema and reality. That he chooses to use the subject matter of rape is not at all surprising and not without precedent in modernist explorations of cinema. Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), as Lynn Higgins has convincingly argued, is very much about the seduction/ rape as a metaphor about the elusive nature of storytelling and fiction. Block uses rape here at least partly because as a crime it hinges on who is telling the truth. Or, so we think. As Peter points, there is more than one rape here: he mentions the camerman's rape of her and the director's rape of us. But, I think more important is the rape by the police, especially the man asking her for details of the crime. And here's where I would qualify the statement about Block "raping" the audience: I think if this wasn't fiction, if I was in fact "real" or we were made to think it was, it would be more of a rape, especially of the woman we see filmed. At that point, wouldn't we be victimizing her just as the policeman, wanting to hear the sordid sexual details of her ordeal?
I would consider ..no lies a work in dialogue with feminism, or at least useful for feminist appropriation, but not really feminist itself. I think this is because there is no real foundation here. I would draw an analogy with feminist like Judith Butler drawing on Foucault. Citron drew on Block's film to make a more complex feminist film than the tradition before it, but still stayed in that tradition. ...no lies seems to me a more open work, but also one that feels bleaker, more despairing, almost verging on the nihilistic. What perhaps mitigates this is the amazing performance Peter mentions. But even so, as Peter says: "Mystically, Ms. Leverington speaks a truth for victims that can't speak, or have been hushed. Is this the 'fact' that we want to believe?" This seems to speak to a pessimism around truth that is the dominant mood of the work, very different in this respect from something like Daughter Rite, which for all its deconstructing of verite never questions the women's stories and situations (hence its feminist foundation). Nevetheless, Peter also states that it is a film that contains "so much truth". Is this the truth of simply never taking cinema verite for granted? Or, more radically, any notion of any single truth?
Monday, June 8, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Three Half-Ironies
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Grand Theft Cimino (Random impressions: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot)
There is not nearly the same level of car fetishism in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, but Cimino is definitely trying to say something with autos. The title characters are in seven different automobiles before credits roll, four of them they stole. And even though they are always moving, they don't seem like they get anywhere.
Even a plan is worked out by drawing on a car.
Parallels to the Western genre are no clearer then when the cars are "taken to water".
There are so many scenes where the cars are not on any road at all. It is really strange and yet, because of the scenery, oddly beautiful and familiar. Replace the car for a horse and we have a period-piece.
It feels like, in the hands of another, less sincere director, the off-road abundance would approach tacky; the connections with the Western would be heavy-handed. Instead it comes off subtle and grounded in a reality that masks it. It wasn't even affecting me on the first viewing.
Jeff Bridges brought such an energy to this performance, a playfulness and spirit that worked so well with the material. When an actor makes choices that so totally create an understanding in the viewer that the words are spilling right from the character's mind, it's magic.
The sorrow and pain that Lightfoot has is only revealed cryptically, and contrapuntally to Thunderbolt. Like in the scene where Lightfoot talks about how he started on the road, after meeting a woman on a train. "Now you can't stop" Thunderbolt interjects. Lightfoot looks at him. It's a full shot, but we can still see, through Bridges' look, not just an acknowledgment of that truth, but a sadness in it as well.
Maybe someone can help me understand the significance of Thunderbolt having the white convertible Cadillac in the end, which Lightfoot revealed is his goal in the beginning of the film. Did Cimino simply want him to die a "hero" in his dream car?
Once again, the FotMC is blessed with another interesting and rewarding selection that fell under my radar all these years. Looking forward to other discussions. Thanks Glenn.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Pearls of Wisdom: The Death of Friendship in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Mabuse Wrapup
I'm certainly glad I did - the Mabuse films are as rewarding a batch of films as I've watched in a while, and they are films that lead me out from them as well. I hope I manage to continue working through Lang's filmography; I hope I get the chance to go backwards to watch films like Fantomas and other Feuillade (and others - maybe Joe May) series'. I hope I get some more posts out of these films - one of the things I most like about writing on the internet is that it doesn't quite have to be finished - you get to work through ideas in public, a bit, posting drafts and revisions and sketches, in ways you can't really do in other forums. The chance to keep coming back to the idea is a valuable one...
Anyway - I hope I haven't bored you all to death, and sorry for picking such a monster of a film. It could have been worse, I suppose - I could have been inspired to write about Berlin Alexanderplatz. I have to credit Eric Rentschler for this fascination with German film: I am taking a class with him (at the Harvard Extension School), and it has been very inspirational. And for Lang, it is hard to beat Tom Gunning's book...
And now - I'm looking forward to Glenn Heath's discussion of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.... Before I turn into Mabuse myself...
Thursday, April 30, 2009
A Note on Pacing
And of course - he alternates between the two halves of the film. Part 1 starts with the kinetic train robbery and Mabuse's dazzling tour of the city, before slowing down for later scenes; Part 2 starts with most of the characters still - usually brooding, haunted, maybe drunk... And much of the early part of the second film retains that slower pace - slow action (lots of talk), slow movement, slow cutting... These are interspersed with action - and of course the the action comes more frequently as the film progresses... a pattern appearing in most of the segments of the film.
Take this sequence near the beginning of the second film: starting with Count Told visiting the state prosecutor, telling him his story (cheating at cards, his wife has left him), cutting to Mabuse's place and the aftermath of a drunken party, then to the Countess, Mabuse's prisoner - Mabuse visits her and threatens her - but Told calls Mabuse, seeking psychiatric help... The sequence I'm thinking of lasts about 5 minutes - but shows, in that five minutes, the variations in pacing, and general acceleration I mean. In fact - thanks to the magic of iMovie - we can see the cuts (you may have to click on it to see it clearly), see the shots getting shorter as the sequence progresses:
Basically - we start with a 35 second shot of Told and Von Wenk, followed by a 22 second shot of Told (including an inserted dialogue), then a series of somewhat shorter shots - 12 seconds, 3, 11 - of the countess waking up and Mabuse's party; then a 52 second shot of the party, 44 seconds of Told and Von Wenk (including dialogue, though always cutting back to the basic two shot), then a series of shots of Mabuse and the countess, many of them involving movement, as he chases her around the room - 7 seconds, 17 (more on this below), 3, 4 (Mabuse), a 6 second dialogue card, 4 (shot of the countess - which is exactly the same length and the preceding shot of Mabuse), 8, 2, 3, 2 - another dialogue card (3 seconds) - 6, then a 17 second shot of Mabuse coming to the phone...
That's the overall pattern of the sequence - starting long, with slow movement, no action, then growing faster, both cutting and movement, before slowing down as the next sequence begins. The same pattern occurs within the shots, during the direct confrontation between countess and Mabuse. She has been unconscious - she wakes up in his house, locked in a room. He comes in from his drunken bash, thinking to molest her, she fights him off, tries to escape... The centerpiece of this sequence is a 17 second shot that recapitulates the overall pacing of the sequence: starts slow, explodes into action, stops - then explodes again. Here it is:
It starts, as many shots do, with a very quick dissolve:
This reveals Mabuse leaning over the countess - they hold this pose for about 5 seconds:
Then the countess makes a break for it, and Mabuse grabs her:
They struggle - and come to a halt, and hold this position (a very tense, violent pose, actually, Mabuse basically pinning her there) for a few second:
...before she makes another break...
... which leads to the cut - to a blank door, and the countess bursting into the frame:
It's a powerful effect - the alternation of long and short shots, of slow, deliberate movements and gestures and quick, violent movements; integrated with the variations in shot scales - long shots and closer shots alternating, shots of big spaces and tight spaces; even the varying transitions - short dissolves, longer dissolves between shots, alternating with abrupt cuts; and the variations on how the cuts come - cuts to empty spaces that people jump into, say... Everything aimed at generating tension, and doing it...
Monday, April 27, 2009
Mabuse contre Fantômas
Who is Dr. Mabuse? This is a difficult question. Mabuse is the Great Unknown. It's impossible to define his character on its own. Mabuse always needs an opposition. His defining characteristic is his role as an antagonist; he only exists when there is someone trying to find him or defeat (which is distinct from thwart) him. Mabuse is just a name for a certain evil; he's a folk tale. So, in order to be able to write anything longer than a sentence about the character of Mabuse (not really a character at all--a something rather than a someone), we always need a comparison. Mabuse is always "this and not that," but never a particular characteristic that stands on its own--the only things we have with any certainty are his name and his villainy.
Fantômas, on the other hand, is always there; he escapes as often as Mabuse seemingly dies, and his actions stir society to find a solution (for this reason, perhaps, Juve and and Fandor are generic--they could be any policeman or any journalist, and are therefore closer to Mabuse in conception that Fantômas; it's maybe for this reason that they serve as Fantômas's antagonists in every film, whereas every Mabuse movie needs new heroes). There are a thousand Mabuses, but only one Fantômas.
So: Mabuse and Fantômas. Both originated in popular novels and then found their way into silent serials, returned in the early sound era and then in the 1960s. Lang started a small Mabuse craze with his last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, and it continued through the decade with a series of spin-offs, the best of which were directed by the krimi expert Harald Reinl. Fantômas had been in a few films in the early 1930s and late 1940s (his absence during the Occupation is conspicuous), but he returned in full force in the 1960s in a trio of brightly-colored capers starring Jean Marais. Both characters are popularly associated with the major directors (Feuillade and Lang) who originated them, and both have been reinterpreted by later, equally distinctive filmmakers (Pál Fejös's Fantômas talkie, Claude Chabrol's 1990 remake of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Dr. M). Historically, they're no so different. But history's just a footnote. Fantômas is vindictive while Mabuse is vengeful. The specificity of Fantômas means that his presence has weight (there's always a surprise when we discover that someone is really Fantômas in disguise), while Mabuse's shifting identity and clairvoyance means that his presence is always assumed. While Fantômas is a villain, Mabuse is an evil.
Monday, April 20, 2009
1, 2, 4, 8, 16...
For now though, I want to take a look at one element of the film's world - the use of doubles and parallels, in characters, situations, and so on. The double is one of the great themes of German films - it's obviously not limited to German art, but it's probably not an accident that we use the German word for a doppelganger. Doubles and Faust figures - which is a variation on the double: the devil who grants power and wishes in exchange for the soul... The two combined in Student of Prague, one of the foundational German films - with a Mephistophilis figure taking the student's reflection as his price....
Mabuse is also something of a Faust story, though with Mabuse playing all the parts... But it also contains, within it, a fairly elaborate system of parallels among its characters. Mabuse himself has a double in state prosecutor Von Wenk - the film alternates between them, they are matched adversaries - Von Wenk dons disguises, like Mabuse, trying to move, undercover, through the underworld... Around them, the other major characters are arranged in pairs, sometimes loose, but usually fairly explicit. Cara Carozza, the dancer, loved (once) by Mabuse and now by Hull the playboy, is echoed in the figure of the Countess Told, caught between Von Wenk and Mabuse, replacing Carozza in Mabuse's love (or lust, or desire, or whatever it is); both women end up prisoners, and the countess identifies with Carozza... Hull the playboy, meanwhile, is doubled by the Count - both are rivals with Mabuse for a woman; both are ruined at cards by Mabuse's hypnosis; both draw Von Wenk into the story, and lead him closer to Mabuse. Both die, at Mabuse's orders, but both deaths contribute to Mabuse's own fall.
Meanwhile, the film itself is a double - released in two halves (like Kill Bill, or Che!), with scenes and situations repeated between the two films (sometimes within one half of the film). Scenes, games, situations, shots, are all repeated, replayed, with variations. Here, it will be easier to show than tell:
Here for example, are two shots, one from the first half, one from the second, of the Countess Told: in the first, she is at a gambling den, where she watches, uninvolved, curious - in the second, she is a prisoner of Mabuse, held in a room by herself.... She is unconscious in this shot, and helpless - a prisoner (itself a parallel, at that point in the film, to Carozza, who is being held prisoner by Von Wenk...). The shots are almost mirrors of one another - she's in a similar position, facing the opposite direction - with the color schemes almost reversed (dark covers, white covers - or look at how her dark dress in the second shot rhymes with the white feathers in the first one):
Or another parallel - both Mabuse and Told haunted by ghosts. Told is ruined by Mabuse hypnotizing him to cheat at cards - he sinks into madness and drink, seeing visions, pursued around his house -
only to end up forced to play cards with his own ghost:
A situation Mabuse repeats, almost exactly. Pursued by ghosts -
Forced to play cards by ghosts - who accuse him of cheating - as Told's ghosts accused him... (and notice the screen directions of all these shots: Told on the right, looking left, as he's pursued, then on the left, facing the ghosts during the card game; and Mabuse on the left during the pursuit, on the right for the card game...)
Mabuse, though, is different from the rest. He may be part of the system of doubles and parallels, but he is outside it somewhat as well. The simplest reason is that he is his own double - he keeps replacing himself. And here, as in some aspects of the structure of the film, the doubling principal becomes a serial principal - he is not a double so much as a series. And a series that, as the film goes on, and especially as we move to the sequels (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and onwards), becomes a mechanically reproduced series - first through words, but then through machines (loudspeakers and recordings) and so on. Copies of copies of copies, disembodied, dissipating into words, sounds, images... copies without originals... pages scattered on the floor.