Nice work if you can get it: Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin had brought a burgeoning sensitivity to the myriad social problems proliferating out from the Depression to Modern Times (1936). Industrial alienation, police brutality, citizens reduced to crime by hunger, hostility toward labour unions and petty micromanagement were all worked deep into the film’s fabric through a chain of brilliant comic sequences that endure all the more for their indifference to ideology. One of the most memorable ones features Chaplin’s Tramp, leading a parade of protesting workers demanding unionization, touting a red flag no less, and doing so completely unknowingly—he was just trying to flag down a truck.

Modern Times is not the story of a worker who discovers politics but a worker who discovers that he’s, like so many others, unemployed and hungry. So often he just wants to eat, something anyone can understand without the slightest bit of social context—that’s why this is a terrific film for kids. Of course this particular worker is also afflicted with a condition that compels him to wreak a little havoc everywhere he goes, especially in the places least appropriate, the ones where explosively tempered authority figures loom. This affliction takes its toll on the Tramp. Chaplin had heard about farm boys who’d been sent to work on Ford assembly lines and quickly succumbed to nervous breakdowns. Following the opening sequences that find the Tramp getting literally consumed by a colossal machine and having his body so consumed with repeating the same nut-tightening gesture in rapid succession that he can’t stop running around with his wrench trying to screw everything in sight (insert Chaplin-as-pussy-hound joke here), the Tramp himself collapses into nervous breakdown and is dismissed.

But what I found so arresting in my latest viewing of Modern Times—now available on gorgeously rendered and heavily supplemented DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion—was the entrance of the film’s other central character sometime after the Tramp’s hospitalization. The young woman referred to only as the Gamine is first seen cutting and tossing bananas from a cargo ship to some raggedy children on the docks, doing so with a zest that’s positively deranged, not to mention undeniably sexy (and perhaps looks forward to the work of Christina Ricci). It’s a stunning entrance, and the camera favours her as it does no one else in the film. This Gamine, who seems game for anything, will come to play a dynamic role in the Tramp’s recovery, though their attempts at upward mobility are always endearingly absurd. She’s played by Paulette Goddard, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Chaplin’s discovery of her as a budding actress, a respected collaborator, and a lover, was the other key element in the conception and execution of Modern Times.

Unsurprising too, that Chaplin couldn’t bear to use his original ending in which the Gamine entered a convent, leaving the Tramp to walk that final dusty stretch of road alone. The image of Chaplin walking away, with Goddard at his side, would be the last we’d ever see of the Tramp, closing the last (largely) silent film from this master filmmaker, which, despite the film’s title, was made nearly ten years after the introduction of sound, yet remains as timeless today as anything the movies have offered us.

Rough trade, distant trains and sumptuous darkness: Gus Van Sant's beguiling debut

Now is a pretty-much perfect moment to celebrate Gus Van Sant. Van Sant’s films entered the cultural consciousness when I was still in my teens, and I for one can trace my response to his work from my complete marvel at the winsome singular stylings and melancholy infatuation with marginalized young hipsters and hustlers that marked Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (91), to my increasing disappointment over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (93) and To Die For (95), my exclusively abstract admiration for his Xerox of Psycho (98), and my sense of outright betrayal over the unapologetically commercial Good Will Hunting (97) and Finding Forrester (2000), to my ongoing fascination with his return to form(alism) with Gerry (02), Elephant (03) and Last Days (05). This leads us finally to Paranoid Park, his latest and in many ways finest film, which gleans a revitalized sense of humour and dreaminess from his earliest work and weds it to the time-curling narrative schemes of the recent preceding “death” trilogy, capping a diverse and adventuresome two decades of making movies in and out of the Hollywood system.

The movie that started it all however is one I’ve only just seen after many years of hearing about it. Mala Noche (85) was Van Sant’s feature debut and the film that put him on the map. Though based on the autobiographical novella by Portland, Oregon street poet Walt Curtis, Mala Noche feels distinctly indebted to Jack Kerouac –not to mention Robert Frank– in its youthful tale of longing, aimlessness, wry Americana and skid row communion. It’s seductively oneiric, flat-out gorgeous to gaze at, decidedly loose with narrative but utterly assured with tone, a jewel in the crown of 80s indie cinema, impressively resourceful in its imaginative use of a miniscule budget (personally financed by Van Sant) and non-existent gear. And its now available in a lovely new package from The Criterion Collection.

Shot by John Campbell like some primitive noir, with hard white spots illuminating faces and objects amidst pools of sumptuous darkness, Mala Noche imparts mood from the get-go, with fetching, stubbly liquor store clerk Walt (Tim Streeter) telling us through elegant voice-over of his overwhelming crush for a Mexican drifter named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate). Johnny speaks no English but he gets the gist of Walt’s cheerful advances with little trouble. Walt quickly surmises that his chances of beguiling Johnny into any sort of sexual union are way slim, and opts for offering up a straight money for sex exchange. Johnny still doesn’t bite (maybe because Walt only offered $15), but he does go along for numerous rides through the country in Walt’s beat-to-shit sedan, so long as his traveling companion Roberto (Ray Monge) is in tow. They also share a gleeful night of drinking, eating and dancing in the kitchen of Walt’s apartment before Johnny disappears as casually as he arrived.

In the end, bedding Roberto –a one-night stand of sweaty, coarse man love, conveyed in tight close-ups of fields of dimly-lit flesh and one filthy-looking jar of Vaseline, unfolding to the strangely soothing sounds of distant trains and church bells– is about as close as Walt ever gets to the object of his affection. But in truth Johnny is a remote if ferally charismatic figure, more a type than a fully realized person. Even Walt himself admits his awareness to being drawn to Johnny at least partly through sheer exoticism and racial fetish: this shaggy-haired wetback makes for a certain cliché of dark-skinned rough trade and easy exploitation, yet there’s no denying the romantic sense of connection Walt, the self-confessed (comparatively) rich gringo, aspires toward. His story, however slight with regard to events, is as thoughtful as it is coolly audacious, and a sheer pleasure to sink into for its 77-minute running time.

Criterion’s disc comes with a good, hour-long doc on Curtis as well as terrific interview with Van Sant, who regales with stories about the winding road that led him to filmmaking, his relationship with Curtis and the Portland poetry scene, his enthrallment over reading weirdly formatted Stanley Kubrick screenplays at the American Film Institute, and the unique conditions under which Mala Noche was made. There’s also a very good essay on the film by Dennis Lim, who does a remarkable job of contextualizing Van Sant’s impact on gay cinema and the almost singular universality of his approach to gay themes.

Viridiana: the follies of desire

A quick survey of Entertainment Weekly’s recent “25 Most Controversial Movies Ever” proves that even terms like “controversial” can be baldly co-opted by commercial interests. How else can we account for the presence of Ron Howard’s New Agey, theologically egalitarian, soft-on-the-Vatican adaptation of The Da Vinci Code scoring Number 13? Was anybody actually offended by that movie? Did anyone take it seriously enough to be offended? Did Howard even take it seriously?

I’m not proposing that anyone actually take Entertainment Weekly seriously, but it says something about the narrow range of the mainstream media’s cultural radar when Da Vinci ranks so prominently while Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana doesn’t even make EW’s final cut. Deliciously provocative, caustically insightful, hounded by censors and legal troubles, Viridiana was controversial in the richest sense. It’s the work a seasoned master, playfully confronting the deep-rooted socio-religious ideology that shaped his own life.

After making such an early splash with the scandalous Un chien andalou (1928) and L’age d’or (30), Buñuel underwent years of sporadic activity before reinventing himself in Mexico, where he made numerous films in quick succession, some of which (like 1950’s Los Olvidados) are among his masterworks. He’d garnered an international reputation and proved that, with age, even the most maverick artists earn grudging acceptance by the establishment.

A quarter century after the end of The Civil War, Spanish authorities decided to thaw their previously icy relations with their most notorious filmmaking progeny. Invited home under the auspices of the Franco regime he once fled from, Buñuel, a few restrictions aside, was given free reign. Viridiana was completed just in time for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or and was declared blasphemous by the Vatican’s newspaper. The director of the Spanish Film Institute who approved the production was dismissed, the film was disowned by Spain and all prints were ordered destroyed. It was never shown there until 1977.

Picking up thematically where Nazarín (58) left off, Viridiana concerns a young nun (Silvia Pinal) who accepts an invitation from her Uncle Jaime (the marvellously melancholy Fernando Rey) to pay him a final visit before entering the convent. Jaime reveals his fetishistic obsession with his dead wife, whom Viridiana closely resembles, convincing Viridiana to dress as her before pleading with her to maintain the role permanently and live on his estate as his spouse. Viridiana leaves in disgust.

Jaime eventually finds a perverse way of making Viridiana stay, but once settled she endeavours to transform his home into a house of Christian charity, inviting vagabonds to work on the estate in return for food and shelter. The benefactors inevitably abuse Viridiana’s charity, making a wild party in her absence, climaxing in a portrait where the drunken bums are positioned at the banquet table in imitation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’

With characteristic cool, Buñuel claimed he never set out to blaspheme, and to a degree this seems genuine. Many of Viridiana’s controversial details (the crucifix switch-blade, the tortured dogs) are taken directly from Buñuel’s experiences of Spanish life. His characterization of Viridiana isn’t mocking but sympathetic. Characters aren’t judged morally, but rendered as complex and deeply human in all their weaknesses and strengths, their acts of malice or altruism. Guided by Buñuel’s increasingly elegant, quietly strange camerawork (highlighted by his jarring, erotic isolation of legs), Viridiana is unsparingly, blackly comic, but a keenly observed portrait of the follies of desire.

A French documentary on Buñuel found on Criterion's DVD of Viridiana, features comments by a Jesuit priest from the seminary where Buñuel studied. “Even in his most irreligious films,” the priest says, “some traces of religion can always be found.” This testimony is in keeping with Buñuel's famous anti-declaration "I'm still an atheist, thank God."  If Buñuel could truly offend, it’s only because his films are founded in belief and wonder. And that’s something you’d never say about Ron Howard.

Off the beaten track: Riding Toward Everywhere

I live near train tracks. I hear them mostly late at night, when aching dreams of escape are given freer reign. I love trains with a childish awe, but the tracks have been made absurdly inaccessible, the fencing around them formidable. You cross over or under these fortressed tracks and the passing trains seem like some disorderly mirage, the poltergeist of some rumbling, colossal, transient machine from the distant past. It makes you wonder: do people still hitch rides on these beasts? Paying passengers hardly even use them anymore. What ever happened to that most glorious of victimless crimes, freight hopping?

William T. Vollmann has asked similar questions, but unlike me –unlike most of us these days– he’s taken it upon himself to answer them through first-hand investigation. Though he’s pushing 50 and still recovering from pelvic surgery and some minor strokes, Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco, $31.95) finds Vollmann packing up his orange bucket and backpack, dragging along a friend or two, and riding the rails. The numbers of fellow travelers he encounters have diminished since the days of Jack London or Thomas Wolfe, or even Jack Kerouac, three among the many American writers he cites and forges a literary dialogue across the ages with here. But most of those who still practice this particular form of wandering are prompted by the same thing most trainhoppers have always been prompted by: need, desperation, lack of opportunity, poverty. Vollmann, as he makes clear right from the start, suffers from at most one of these ailments. He’s not a hobo but, as he puts it, a fauxbeau, a dilettante who when he desires need only wait for the train to slow or stop, jump off, and find himself a warm bed and a hot meal.

“Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted,” Vollmann writes. “The question is what I make of them.” He points out that even Thoreau had a safety net to rescue him from any genuine peril during his submergence into Walden’s wilderness –but does that make his observations of the life left behind and the one adopted in exchange any less resonant? Vollmann’s reasons for trainhopping are many. His interest in those who live outside the dictates of the approved (if difficult to acquire) state of prosperity and ambition have informed much of his previous work, his travels to Afghanistan and the Arctic, and most notably his recent book Poor People. Much of this new book is indeed concerned with those he meets and learns from during his travels, as well as the graffiti they leave behind as traces of their vagabond musings, their frustrations and madness. But for all that, what seems to bring Vollmann to the rails is finally a much baser, more personal urge: to get out of Here -wherever Here may be– and find Everywhere.

“The lives I could have lived or at least imaged living teased me,” Vollmann writes at one point while gazing out from his perch on the iron horse, and elsewhere: “how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason!” Vollmann is a divorced parent, a man who confesses to finding his inner rage growing with age, who doesn’t own a cell phone or a credit card, who’s sick with anger over the direction his country has been taking in this new century of increasingly compromised liberties. He is a great, persuasive believer in civil disobedience. Though much older and much more practical than the likes of say, Chris McCandless, Vollmann needs to flee the grid, at least for a time. (Who doesn’t?) Vollmann searches for the same thing most artists or anyone with a wandering spirit seeks: the epiphanies granted by freedom. Why else do so many of the book’s evocative accompanying photographs feature open doors looking out on the fragmentary promise of some thrilling expanse?

Admittedly, as Riding Toward Everywhere chugs along it does get repetitive, its romantic viewpoint and Zen laughter a little hackneyed, and sometimes its existential questions begin to feel generic. Vollmann often asks what’s wrong with aimlessness, and at times the shapelessness of this book answers him back loud and clear. But Vollmann never goes too long without bringing his ramshackle narrative back to deeper, more specific questions about identity, nomadism, solitude, solidarity, and being lost in life. What works best for me here is the first essay in particular, in which Vollmann writes a great deal about his father, all the ways in which their lives, their choices and their politics conflict. But for all their differences Vollmann clearly admires his father and recognizes how much their perspectives have to do with the eras in which they reached manhood and the idea of American life that seemed possible during these times. And in one of the most touching moments in Riding Toward Everywhere Vollmann dreams that his father is riding the rails with him. In this dream Vollmann’s train crosses not only space but time, taking him through an emotional detour as revealing of his truest longings as other parts of Riding Toward Everywhere reveal Vollmann’s most fundamental flaws. Put together all of these aspects might tucker you out, but I think you’ll still be glad for taking the journey.