In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

All at sea: Film Socialisme

When asked in a recent interview about the scene where Alain Badiou gives a lecture on geometry and philosophy to an empty auditorium on a cruise ship adrift in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Godard explained that he announced the lecture on the ship’s activities calendar but, sadly, nobody came. I hope there’s a better turnout when Film Socialisme screens next weekend at Edmonton's Metro Cinema, but I can almost guarantee that any prospective viewer, regardless of their facility with either philosophy or geometry, would surely have had an easier time grasping the thesis of Badiou’s lecture than that of Godard’s latest bricolage. Abrasive and staccato, fragmented in image, music and language, its multilingual dialogues obscured by Godard’s choice to offer only partial subtitles, riddled with references to politics and art yet withholding of context or commentary, this tripartite Film seems founded on the conviction that the medium itself is corrupted by signifiers that collectively fail to provide meaning. Call it Babel at 24 frames per second. Except that, for the first time in Godard’s oeuvre, it’s all video.

‘Des choses comme ça,’ the first of Film Socialisme’s three sections, struck me in my single viewing as the most coherent. Perhaps because the cruise ship seems to lend itself most easily to persuasive metaphors. A sampling of global citizens, among them a Russian detective, a hunter of war criminals, a Jewish banker, an elderly man accompanied by a young woman, and Patti Smith, found busking in the lobby, are on board, sharing a confined, landless, mobile space constructed for leisure, inaccessible to the underprivileged, offering magnificent views (Godard’s images of pure sea, sometimes almost black, are breathtaking), and containing the possibility of large scale disaster. Crowds gyrate to crushing music in the ship’s apocalyptic discotheque, captured crudely enough to seem almost abstract on what would appear to be a cell phone camera. Models stroll the decks. (There are hot young babes—a Godard staple.) Europe is “humiliated by liberty.” Everything feels vaguely ominous. Or rather ominously vague.

‘Notre Europe’ unfolds on land, amidst a family, their gas station, their llama and his donkey. It irked me to see them let the water gush at full blast while casually brushing their teeth or scrubbing a dish, but otherwise they seem decent enough folks, and there are genuinely endearing moments shared by mother and son. A TV crew arrives. I’m not at all sure they get the coverage they need. ‘Nos humanités’ promises a return to the cruise ship but proves the densest, least grounded section, a travelogue montage of war and atrocity, with visits to Palestine, Egypt, Naples, Hellas, Barcelona, and Odessa, where a re-mix of the most famous moments in Battleship Potemkin forms just one of countless flamboyant appropriations lining Film Socialisme. (Herein lies the title, perhaps: a property-dissolving collective creation, though helmed by a cinematic legend and rigorous anti-populist.) There are quotes from Shakespeare, Balzac, and Derrida, a French cover of ‘Flashdance… What a Feeling,’ and pieces of Cheyenne Autumn, if I’m not mistaken—and I could be, about many things here. My memory’s at sea. I’d need to see Film Socialisme several times to say more. But there are so many Godards to revisit, and several from the middle period especially that I still have yet to see. It might take a while to get round to this one again.

Film Socialisme screens at Metro Cinema from March 18 - 20.

Beware of cat power: Criterion unleashes Obayashi's Hausu on DVD and Blu-ray

When Japanese movie studio Toho asked Obayashi Nobuhiko to give them something like Jaws (1975), Obayashi asked his 10-year-old daughter Chigumi for advice. She thought all Japanese movies were boring, so her dad urged her to offer a remedy. The ball got rolling with Chigumi’s assertion that it would be pretty freaky if her reflection in the mirror attacked her. “I always discuss important matters with the children,” Obayashi claims, and Hausu (77), the product of this collaboration, indeed represents an exceedingly rare marriage of cross-generational sensibilities. It’s a fantasy film as seen from the perspective of a child, yet it’s imbued with the larger mythological-psychotronic-experimentalist scope of an adult with a background in advertising. It’s aggressively playful, enamored with optical tricks and with soundscapes and repeated musical themes that seem culled from Godard and blaxploitation. It’s oblivious to generic orientation—okay, it’s oblivious to many forms of orientation, yet it also has a perfectly coherent narrative through-line with roots in the Western Gothic tradition, Japanese ghost stories, and Hansel and Gretel. You could call it a cautionary tale, but then you’d just have to look out for everything. Especially cats. And watermelons.

Hausu is the Japanese appropriation of the English word House. The former sounds vaguely more menacing to me, maybe because of that extra syllable, maybe because of the pleasing weirdness of hearing a familiar word mispronounced, but Criterion has emblazoned their terrific new DVD and Blu-ray packages with the latter term, perhaps in the hope that potential viewers will intuit that, as David Lynch once said, there’s just something inherently scary about a house. Whatever you want to call it, Obayashi’s fevered debut feature follows seven teenage girls with seven smurfy names as they travel to the countryside for their summer vacation and wind up at the house of a wheelchair-bound spinster. Before they arrive, the sky is always glowing warm and soft like some hazy dream you can’t pull away from, perhaps built on crude memories of Technicolor musicals. Once they’re installed in the titular dwelling, the world turns crepuscular and shadowy, and malice becomes boundless. Futons and pianos eat people. Cats’ eyes shimmer as though sending cryptic signals from the abyss. Heads emerge from wells and bite asses. Everything is deadly, yet these girls just wanna have fun. Dismemberment is scary, but who said death can’t be like ice cream? The realm of Hausu is one of relentless colour and geometrical flourish, the screen always being divided by walls, doors, corners, irises, and literal fissures in the filmic image that remind you of how very dry and adult Peter Greenaway’s formal noodling can be. It’s a realm of trapdoors and illusion, of cornball effects executed with verve, of preposterous panty-clad derring-do, of music and morbid delight, a realm where every childish suspicion about adults is wholly confirmed and then some. Western audiences may struggle to interpret this perverse, seemingly contradictory mash-up of fear and frolicking as something terribly exotic and coded in the Japanese culture, but you could also just think of it as a far more imaginative version of this thing we call Halloween.

Generously included in Criterion’s package and equally worth checking out is Emotion (66) Obayashi’s 40-minute piece about a girl from the seaside who travels far from home, makes a friend, and enters a secret world of sadomasochistic romance. A love triangle emerges, and parents are again not to be trusted. There’s no synch-sound, so the great American-born Japanese film scholar Donald Richie provides the English narration, which often seems slightly different in meaning from the Japanese narration, for which we’re given subtitles. Never one to use a stylistic trope once if he can use it 50 times, Obayashi is crazy for flash-cuts here, and is surely even more deeply under the spell of Godard in this use of on-screen text and his determination to push continuity to its outer limits while maintaining the minimum requirements for a forward-moving story. And there’s dancing! The images are often beautiful, and yes, fraught with dizzy emotion. At one point a title card appears that reads: NOW THE STORY DESCENDS INTO A RUINOUS ABYSS WITH VIOLENT MUSIC, which doesn’t exactly signal a radical shift in tone. There’s also a dream sequence that’s only marginally more bizarre than the rest of the movie. Like Hausu, it’s all kind of exhausting, but this sort of blind and wild adventure is bound to wear anyone out, so think of it as a work-out, and watch it before bed. Your brain will rest better afterwards.

Vivre sa vie on DVD: Godard year zero – Karina's visage – trouble with words – A double game

In an interview for Sight & Sound, conducted by Tom Milne in October of 1962, Jean-Luc Godard was asked if he felt his most recent work, Vivre sa vie (62), was a departure from its predecessors. Godard replied that, on the contrary, he felt it was an arrival. The previous work had been the product of a cinephile, one whose knowledge of life had accumulated exclusively within the spectral darkness of the cinema, where as this, his fourth movie, a somewhat somber chronicle of an aspiring actress’ slippage into prostitution, was the first to be constructed in the open air, so to speak, to attempt to absorb and reflect upon the realities of the world beyond, not to mention upon art forms other than the movies. It may read as sacrilege, particularly on this, the 50th anniversary of Breathless (60), his iconoclastic debut, the movie that more than any other encapsulates the French New Wave, but Vivre sa vie does feel in some sense like Godard Year Zero, like the full emergence, both politicized and poeticized, of the auteur who dominated the 1960s and changed his medium forever. It certainly had far greater impact on me, someone discovering these movies decades later. Breathless excited me. Vivre sa vie arrested me, and continues to do so. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray, with characteristically superb supplements, from the Criterion Collection.

A “film in twelve tableaux,” each preceded by a title card listing telegraphic synopses of their contents—ie: THE BOULEVARDS – THE FIRST MAN – THE ROOM—Vivre sa vie, though compact and economical, unfolds with the rhythm and structural intricacy of a novel, perhaps a character study from Zola, from whom Godard borrowed his heroine’s name. Yet Nana (Anna Karina), first seen during the credits in a trio of close-ups, resembling mug-shots, is also an anagram for the name of the actress portraying her. This is but one of multiple allusions to the nature of this movie’s double game: it is at once a work of fiction and a kind of documentary, about prostitution, of which we will learn a fair amount, particularly in the montage of transactions set to a series of frequently asked questions; about Paris’ suburbs and the lives passing through them; and about Karina, Godard’s wife and valiant collaborator, who like her character came from elsewhere to make it in the movies. Karina’s performance is repeatedly startling. At times she looks directly at the camera, with those immense, worried eyes, as though checking in, or wondering if this is how things were meant to go. She seems always to be utterly immersed in the most immediate sources of stimulus for her character—writing a letter, dancing, conversing with a philosopher, “hooking” a client, or, most famously, being moved to tears by The Passion of Joan of Arc (28)—while also somehow aware of being the subject of a movie. While positively radiating innocence, Karina, then all of 21, had already sufficiently developed as an artist to follow her husband/director onto the high wire, the result being this movie that, in a new age of understanding and sophistication with regards to what movies can be, draws attention to its artifice, though camera work and through its eerie use of truncated fragments of Michel Legrand’s score, while never spoiling its fictive illusions.

Prostitution is a primal theme in Godard’s work, and the problematic role of actresses in the movies, as the subject of the (predominantly) male gaze, is never far from the surface. Fortunately Godard isn’t interested in victimization—the excerpt he selects from Joan of Arc emphasizes the heroine’s participation in her own martyrdom—but rather in the social dynamics that allow one such as Nana to be gradually swallowed up by misfortune. There is in Vivre sa vie a constant mistrust of interpretation, or even of the meaning of words themselves, not an insignificant statement coming from a former critic. Nana expresses her discomfort with words in the first scene, where she breaks up with a boyfriend in a café, trying out certain token phrases as though trying for the best line reading, while Godard, perversely, shoots their conversation from behind, so that their faces are unseen and all we have to go on are their words themselves. Godard places obstacles between Karina’s face and the camera almost as often as he allows her face to consume its frame in an act of pure portraiture, yet the images in Vivre sa vie, though occasionally awkward, aren’t obtuse but rather fixating and beautiful, and there seems to be a sly joke in the fact that the first name of Nana’s pimp is the same as that of the movie’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. From start to finish Vivre sa vie continually reminds us that Godard’s greatest work is never, as the cliché suggests, a cold, intellectual exercise. This is a work of rapture, curiosity, rigorous play, and, indeed, genuine compassion, so that even if its abrupt finale feels perhaps like the intrusion of one type of movie onto another, we’re left with the devastating feeling that at any moment those who slip through the cracks, whether in art or in life, are that much more likely to be caught in the crossfire.

Voy a explotar: hazardous hormones

It starts, rather misleadingly, with Román’s interior voice, a diary entry-cum-psychic yawp addressed to a mass of “Hijos de puta.” It’s Román’s aberrant fantasy we then watch play out, the one where he enters a classroom and blows away both of the trembling religious instructors before turning the gun on himself. This fantasy is what got him kicked out of boarding school and sent into the arms of destiny. Then it’s Maru’s turn, it becomes her voice that we hear express similar inner turmoil. Like Román she’s an exhilaratingly alienated teenager, anxious to rebel without a cause, her face and body alternately resembling those of a young woman and a four-year-old boy. It’ll be Maru’s voice that we stick with for the remainder of Voy a explotar (I’m Gonna Explode). She describes Román’s sudden appearance in her life as a sort of revelation, a phenomenon, this sleazebag politician’s son riddled with uncontainable angst. He does a presentation at the school talent show called ‘See You in Hell’ that falls miserably flat but manages to catch Maru’s attention nonetheless. “A perfect accomplice, a twin,” she calls him. Román is both real and a being conjured by Maru’s dreamy desperation. Maybe that’s why, despite young Juan Pablo de Santiago’s perfectly capable performance, Román leaves less of an impression, why Maru seems so much more the fully realized of the two central characters. In any case, she’s our heroine, and Voy a explotar marks an auspicious debut for Maria Deschamps, the young actress who surrenders completely to Maru’s fascinated abandon, and does so with a remarkable, individual humour.

The French New Wave is a half-century old but for Mexican writer/director Gerardo Naranjo the tropes and techniques are still buzzing with freshness and audacity, still useful tools. Voy a explotar is an unabashed homage to the Jean-Luc Godard of the early to mid-1960s, Pierrot le fou (1965) especially, with its delirious romance juxtaposed with cool formalism, its breathless, lovers on the run narrative, its flurry of jump-cuts and playful dissonance of image, voice-over and music, some of which is the work of composer Georges Delerue, ripped directly from Godard’s own iconoclastic interjections in the aforementioned film. Naranjo’s third feature, the follow-up to Drama/Mex (06), may look backward for its modus operandi, but the material this approach gives birth to feels perfectly contemporary, an irreverent reflection of Columbine culture and other recent manifestations of adolescent nihilism. It’s imbued with what might be a uniquely Mexican cynicism and some terrifically black humour. It also departs radically from other similarly themed movies, like say, Badlands (73), and from Godard’s Pierrot le fou casting of Anna Karina and Jean-Peal Belmondo especially, by using actors who really look like little kids, youngsters not fully grown into their bodies, a fact which doesn’t fail to inject the proceedings with an unnerving sense of the real.

Set in Naranjo’s native home of Guanajuato, Voy a explotar offers a portrait of the picturesque colonial city, with its houses that climb the surrounding hills, as seen from the central rooftops and subterranean tunnels that Román and Maru traverse in search of the feeling of escape as much escape’s actuality. They, and we, see Guanajuato from above and below, a sly visual strategy that mirrors the kids’ mischievous plan, to pretend that they’ve fled the city when they’re actually camping out on the roof of Román’s family home, hiding in plain sight, fumbling their way through sex or snatching booze and junk food while everyone else is asleep or out, while their parents, either lazily indifferent or hysterical and useless, go about their negligent search. (Román’s father is hilariously played by Mexican veteran Daniel Giménez Cacho, probably most familiar to Anglophone viewers as a disembodied voice—he was the anonymous narrator of Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mamá también (01).)

I saw Voy a explotar at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and have since been patiently wondering when it might resurface. The film played the New York Film Festival that same year, and eventually returned to NYC screens last summer. It never received any theatrical release anywhere in Canada that I know of, but at least, unlike a number of other equally worthy recent Latin American films, it’s now been granted a DVD release from Paradox/E1 in a no-frills package but featuring a decent transfer. The film was co-produced by Canana, the Mexican company overseen by Y tu mamá también’s stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. They recently re-teamed for Rudo y Cursi (08), which was kinda fun but not nearly as exciting a film as Voy a explotar. It did however get some limited Canadian distribution, presumably in the hopes that García Bernal and Luna’s allure could result in another art house hit. (It didn’t.) I don’t know that Voy a explotar could have generated the sort of box office that potential distributors require to justify such a gamble, but with any luck its appearance on DVD will help to keep viewers alert to the fact that, ten years after Amores Perros (00), Mexican cinema is still very much alive and kicking and ready to explode upon the international scene.

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

The long goodbye: pop culture collage + politics + genre deconstruction + divorce = Made in USA

When Paula Nelson wakes in her dormatorial hotel room in some place called Atlantic-Cité she finds at her door a dwarf with high blood pressure who knows her from some shady dealings in their past. Their arrivals here, it would seem, were prompted by the same thing, the suspicious death of one Richard Politzer. But before their relations become unduly friendly Paula beats the dwarf unconscious with a lovely shoe—a blue one, as requested by the dwarf—and the talismanic appearance of his blood becomes Paula’s entrance into an adventure where reality and fiction blur. She soon meets the dwarf’s nephew, a novelist named David Goodis, and his companion, who sings folk songs in the bathroom and whose last name in Mizoguchi. Soon she’ll meet a sinister young man named Donald Siegel and a police inspector named Aldrich. She’ll visit a bar where a very young Marianne Faithful sings ‘As Tears Go By’ a cappella, and a spa where Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are being paged. As she sinks deeper into mystery she’ll be directed to streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht.

If any of this means anything to you, you probably cherish classical Hollywood, the Japanese masters, detective fiction, or the rich cultural palate of the hip 1960s in general. (You’ll also note that the picture is affectionately dedicated to directors Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller.) The ravenously referential postmodernism of Made in USA (1966) offers a superb example of what once tied Jean-Luc Godard to his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan especially. Though where Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ spun out for nearly 12 minutes on a effervescent wave of irresistible border town melodics and expressive guitar figures, Godard’s long-lost feature is a less inviting, more difficult mélange of imagery, homage and intertext. Made in USA came at the end of a frenetic creative period launched explosively with Breathless (60). Godard had already divorced Anna Karina, and Paula Nelson would be her final role for him. He was becoming increasingly politicized and this would be described as his final attempt at a genre picture. But Made in USA is only a thriller in the most notional sense. So unconcerned with thrills, its shot mainly in front of nondescript walls, and its violence is rendered quite literally as cartoons.

The script was based, though uncredited upon its original release, on Richard Stark’s terse crime novel The Jugger (65). But Godard, never very interested in conventional narrative models at the best of times, giddily changed the gender of its protagonist and took from his source material only the most skeletal framework—though when you think about it Made in USA is only a marginally more liberal adaptation of Stark than the haunted, dreamlike and lyrical Point Blank (67), vaguely based on The Hunter (62). Fact is that the Stark novels featured an antihero from another time, where these films are so very much products of the 1960s. Among the virtues of Godard’s film is its value as an artifact that speaks to the present. The dead Politzer, whose strident political provocations are heard via a cache of tape recordings, was a communist still intensely bitter about recent French colonial misadventures and newly enraged by Vietnam. Godard’s dream of cinema as a progressive art form is conveyed most openly by the unapologetic, sometimes absurd merging of politics and pop culture, revolutionary esprit in creative life being aligned with like struggle in the war of ideas and policy. So in this sense the title of the film is almost a joke, a punk rock robbery where the vestiges of Old Hollywood’s glory days and American iconography are lovingly sewn into a quilt, only to be battered and sullied beyond recognition. It makes for dense viewing at times, but the carefully staged chaos can also be exhilarating.

Watching Made in USA is clearly a different experience when the viewer shares a modicum of Godard’s cultural knowledge base. In Criterion’s terrific new DVD of the film they even provide a video essay that functions as a sort of Coles Notes explaining each of the film’s most important references, as well as another featurette rife with insightful comments and helpful history from Godard biographers Colin McCabe and Richard Brody. Yet, rather surprisingly, the context that McCabe and Brody provide us with deepens our ability to read the film’s emotional undercurrents just as much, if not more, than its intellectual ones. As I watched Made in USA I was struck by how strangely touching certain moments seemed. Strange because so much feels cryptic and cool as can be. Yet Karina’s performance, already very fun and seductive—and so well dressed—is imbued with an elegiac weight, which transmits in one melancholically adoring close-up after another. Politzer, after all, was once Paula’s fiancé, and when she first speaks in the film she’s sleepily recalling the time when she was once “the mirror of his desires,” the virtual embodiment of his dreams. Politzer’s voice, it begs mention, was provided by Godard himself. Paula’s interests in investigating his death are too layered to fully comprehend, but on one very direct level she’s come to say goodbye to him, to meditate on the cause they once shared, and this ostensibly cerebral collage piece leaves us with the impression of having watched something once so ambitious and impassioned slowly fade to black, like the horizon vanishing behind Paula as she’s driven away from that place called Atlantic-Cité.

Guns, germs and steal: Richard Stark's Parker novels return, still nasty after all these years

Point Blank, based on Stark's The Hunter

He has several aliases but only one name, no detectable heartbeat, and, so it seems, not a single significant weakness. Money is typically his sole motivator. He’s quirkless and calculated, a logician efficiently eliminating obstacles. He beats women, occasionally, mercifully, killing them. Parker, the protagonist of Richard Stark’s long-running series of lean, mean mystery novels, isn’t flamboyant or indulgent enough to be a monster, exactly. He has no ideology, no longing for power. (If politics ever entered his mind, he might call himself an anarchist.) A thief by trade and a murderer only when necessary, he claims not to like killing people. A consummate professional, essentially—and in this sense an anachronism held over from Depression era crime, as his author’s confessed—and his professionalism may be the only aspect of his character we could consider redemptive.

Though I knew some of the films adapted from them, including the masterful neo-noir Point Blank (1967), and I’d often heard them praised by discerning fans of the genre, it took me a long time to get around to the Parker novels, partially because many were hard to track down, partially because I couldn’t quite fathom how they could be compelling for readers who weren’t just sadistic voyeurs. But the University of Chicago Press has recently underwent a campaign to get Parker back in print in affordable and handsome editions, and I dove in. And now I get it.

Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark

Richard Stark was the most successful of numerous pseudonyms attributed to the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Donald Westlake, who died last New Year’s Eve at the age of 75. The first Parker novel was intended as a one-off, a sort of experiment, but his publisher accurately predicted that it would be a hit, and many more swiftly followed. Chicago has so far reprinted the first nine. Let me tell you about the three I’ve read.

The Hunter (62), Stark’s debut and the source for Point Blank, introduces Parker in a state of uncharacteristic destitution, walking along a clogged freeway into Manhattan. He spends the first chapter reconstituting himself, quickly building capital through a day’s work of fraud and shopping. He’s come back from the dead, or close enough. He visits Lynn, the wife who supposedly killed him—the book’s first half is in one sense a divorce parable—and will soon pay a visit to the fellow criminal who set it all up. What drives Parker here is pure revenge, a force that renders him—again, uncharacteristically—vulnerable. “He wanted Mal Resnick—he wanted him between his hands. Not the money back. Not Lynn back. Just Mal, between his hands.” Of course, given a little time, he’ll want the money, too.

Point Blank

The Hunter’s more self-consciously hard-boiled than later Parkers I’ve read, emphasizing Parker’s rage, his ripping the filters out of cigarettes, his adversary’s nervous stroking of their moustaches. A pang of sexual desire is described as “a knife twisting low in his abdomen,” though Parker strictly abstains from humpy-pumpy while working. But when Lynn winds up dead and Parker needs to dispose of her body he completes the act with a telling, prophetic gesture. In slashing her face he’s being icily pragmatic, making her death less likely to be made public, but he’s also eliminating the visage of the only woman that ever possessed him, and rehearsing the erasure of identity that he’ll later seek for himself with an equal lack of sentiment. After he settles the score with Resnick and single-handedly extorts the national crime syndicate.

By the time of The Mourner (63), Parker has bought himself a new face and fully resumed his routine of performing one or two big heists a year and otherwise retiring to some resort under a false name. By now the distinctions in the Stark style are maturing fully: the vivid descriptions of spaces, the Nabakovian wit, the audaciously elliptical structures that toss the reader into the midst of the action without context and, most fascinatingly, the detours into ornate biographical sketches of secondary characters who slowly emerge as pivotal to the plot.
Parker’s hired by the father of a lover to steal a statue, one of many originally sculpted to accompany a fifteenth-century French tomb, but a well-planned job is interrupted by a separate group of criminals who may or may not be after the same thing. Parker forges an uneasy alliance with Menlo, a fat, oddly charming bureaucrat from a tiny Eastern European country under Soviet control. Like Parker’s current employer, Menlo’s a voluble romantic, and much dry comedy arises from the contrast between Parker’s taciturn nature and the rambling narratives these others casually unleash. More silent than all of them however is the titular statue itself, a brilliantly conceived symbol of precisely the sort of emotional release to be found nowhere in the world Parker inhabits, and an ostensible treasure whose owner ironically never even registers its absence.

Made in USA, based on Stark's The Jugger

The Jugger (65) begins with Parker being visited by a cheerful leprechaun from his past just as he turns to the obituary page of the local rag in a hotel room in Sagamore, Nebraska. Parker’s here to investigate the suspicious death of Joe Sheer, an old comrade who retired in the town, and the leprechaun, who goes by the name of Tiftus, is just one of several opportunists who crop up with the hope of unearthing Sheer’s ostensible buried treasure. Taking Parker out of his milieu and having him on the scene basically to solve a mystery, chart his way through a labyrinth of greed, and assess some possible damage to his alias’ reputation, The Jugger is a virtually perfect little crime story, a rural noir with character to spare and an alignment of theme and action that’s both classical and inventive. It was also the first one I read, doing so in anticipation of the belated theatrical and DVD release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (66), in which the Parker character’s embodied by Anna Karina—surely the only casting that actually stands a chance of one-upping that of Lee Marvin. I can't wait to finally see it.

Everything old is Nouvelle again: the French New Wave hits the Cinematheque Ontario

Bande à part

Ever since this past New Year’s Day I’ve been in a state of more or less perpetual amazement over the realization that 1959 was 50 years ago. Has it really been a half-century since Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, since Charles Mingus unleashed the tripartite assault of Roots & Blues, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty, since Ornette Coleman revealed The Shape of Jazz to Come? Or since the first audacious, invigorating, iconoclastic crash of the Nouvelle Vague, this thing that Nigel Andrews once declared the “greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history?” The entropic upheaval of the world renders so many things aged, quaint and useless so quickly, so why is it so hard for me to believe that these landmarks have receded so deep into the past?

The 400 Blows

There are shards of time, colossal events that we automatically read as part of that grand Other we call history (sometimes even while they’re still happening). The lunar landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, shit, even the invasion of Iraq seem somehow to be much more enshrined by history than Antoine Doinel’s frozen gaze as he stands perched at the end of his line on that lonesome beach. Something happened in American music—a topic I’ll be getting around to later—and in French film that not only changed history but also changed how we view it. The French New Wave had a winning combination: it was rigorously fun and smart. It allowed us to look at the movies not as something disposable but as as an ongoing story, referring critically, affectionately, explicitly, irreverently to the medium’s past and its accepted formal and structural inclinations—and thus breaking with them, too. They ran wild with heady literary pretensions, a pivotal investment in youth culture, a taste for at times radical political discourse and, most especially, with new technology that gave these filmmakers—many of them critics—a new freedom. The best of the movement remains so dynamic to those familiar with it, so startling to the newcomer, that it seems to live and breathe still as an ongoing event. And with a few key figures still living and working, the waves wash up around us still, however becalmed they may now be.

Breathless

À Double tour

Paris Belongs to Us

Vivre sa vie

Shoot the Piano Player

Tonight, the Cinematheque Ontario launches what is probably their most anticipated summer program, Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave, Then and Now. There are over three-dozen titles screening, among them the essential classics, but also rarities. Crowds will rightfully flock to screenings of the most popular and definitive films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard—The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless (60), Jules and Jim (61) and Bande à part (64)—but I’m really excited to revisit Jacques Rivette’s magnificently labyrinthine, conspiracy-riddled Paris Belongs to Us (60), which feels in some sense like a prismatic reflection of the other films happening simultaneously, as well as The Nun (66), which I missed during the Cinematheque’s recent Rivette retrospective. There’s also Elevator to the Gallows (57), Jean Eustache’s Bad Company (63), Godard’s rediscovered Made in USA (66), and several Claude Chabrols—including À Double tour (59), which features a jaw-droppingly sexy Bernadette Lafont flrting with the milk man from the window in her underwear and a delightfully slovenly, drunken Jean-Paul Belmondo in my new favourite eating scene of all time.

Méditérranée

There’s also something called Méditérranée (63), a 45-minute work made by Jean-Daniel Pollet with a lot of help from Volker Schlöndorff. It features images of medical equipment, barbed wire, seascapes, curving corridors, bull fighting, decaying ruins, Venetian canals, and a Greek party! Much of it accompanied by a portent-heavy score and captured in brooding lateral tracking shots like we’re surveying the aftermath of some stray apocalypse. There’s also a presumably helpful ongoing voice-over narration, and since I’ve only seen it without subtitles and my French is for shit I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be about. I can’t wait to find out.