Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Apocalypse Now (1979)

I learned of Dennis Hoper’s death in a bowling alley in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, while drinking warm Canadian, trying to figure out what I was doing in this place, and losing badly at five-pin. I tend to take it hard when my heroes die, even when they’ve had a good run, and this didn’t seem the ideal scenario in which to hear sad news. Yet somehow, there in that bowling alley, with the leering local drunks and ill-fitting shoes and the unseasonably bone-chilling, desperately lonesome prairies unfolding forever just outside the doors, it struck me that this place was perfectly emblematic of my personal experience of Hopper’s singular body of work. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Feck, Hopper’s character from River’s Edge (1986), perched by the bar, slapping his artificial leg, embracing his rubber doll, hardening his beady eyes, and launching into a monologue about bikes, beer, and pussy. This gave me comfort.

River's Edge (1986)

Feck. Father. Photojournalist. Frank Booth. For moviegoers of my generation, Hopper’s story didn’t begin with Rebel Without a Cause (55) or Giant (55), or even with Easy Rider (69). It began with River’s Edge and Blue Velvet (86). That famous anecdote, how Hopper phoned David Lynch, already in production in North Carolina, just to assure him that he could play the drug-addled, sexually deranged, murderous, mommy-fixated sociopath Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, how Lynch got off the phone and confessed to Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan that Hopper’s identification with the character could be great for the movie but how are they going to have lunch with him?, endures not only because it fuels the legend of the then recently rehabilitated Hopper, but, more importantly, because it functions as a declaration of an artist’s devotion to his work. Hopper recognized something of his own weaknesses in Frank Booth, and he used that recognition to elevate what in less disciplined hands might have been a cartoon villain. I will never forget hearing in an interview how the only thing that got Hopper through his worst times was his persistent belief that the cameras were always rolling.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In any case, Frank led me to Feck, then back to Father, his wonderful supporting role in Rumble Fish (83), and to Apocalypse Now (79), and Hopper’s unforgettable photojournalist or, as Hopper enunciates it in the movie, “I’m a photo. Journalist.” Between moments of eerie stillness he rattles off his monologues like a Beat auctioneer, with multiple cameras dangling round his neck like so many eyes, trying manically to take in everything. By the 1980s Hopper’s infamous past exploits, even Easy Rider and The Last Movie (71), didn’t matter as much as what he was doing right then, giving one performance after another that seemed that much more virtuosic, focused, dynamic, scary, and inventive for Hopper’s new straight edge. He seemed to convey genuine craziness with greater force when he wasn’t wasted. His work from this period, at least in the better movies—there were plenty of very bad ones, too—dispelled the notion that the demise of the New Hollywood meant the demise of great ambition in American movies. Blue Velvet was a masterpiece, and Frank Booth a walking, talking, horny, nightmare Id figure, at once terrifying and hilarious and the likes of which we’d never seen, barking lines as impossibly banal as “Let’s fuuuuck!” and rendering them gleeful howls from the collective unconscious.

Night Tide (1961)

Over time I began to grasp the larger story, to catch up with Hopper’s long and winding career, his photography and art collection and years in alcoholic abyss. For years I was merrily tracking down The Trip (67) or Out of the Blue (80) or, wow!, Night Tide (61) on VHS, while still trying to see every new movie he appeared in or directed, which wasn't easy because there were so damn many. He was always coming back, from blacklisting, humiliation, disaster, and addiction, but even Dennis Hopper’s resurrections are numbered. His death from metastasized prostate cancer at 74 came not as the last ember of a long fading away but as a sudden burning out. To the very end he worked like a madman, perhaps because he was a madman, a suggestion not meant to diminish his talents but simply contextualize his sensibility. He radiated unnerving intensity, and while he could play softer, more palatable roles, such as the schoolteacher hero of Carried Away (96), he had a special gift for weirdoes who left such indelible impressions on a movie that he barely needed names, guys known only as Goon, Moon, Prophet, Chicken, Shooter, Cracker, Doggie, and Kansas, his state of birth. He first left Kansas at 13, and it was then he first saw mountains, skyscrapers and the ocean. In every case he was disappointed because in his imagination these things were always grander than reality. For better and for worse he was born to seek grandeur, and through the most ragged and at times ridiculous routes, whether scaling the lower depths or shooting to dazzling heights, his life and work achieved it.

In the flesh: Cronenberg on Videodrome

The story goes that when Roberto Benigni met David Cronenberg he got down on all fours and kissed the director’s shoes. This was Toronto, many years ago, and it seems Benigni was in a state of euphoric relief. Cronenberg’s films, he explained, made him afraid to visit the city. It came as a surprise to discover that Canadians really were as polite as they say, that head-combusting telekinetic killers weren’t terrorizing Bay Street, that our televisions behaved. Cronenberg told the story when he dropped in on a screening of Videodrome at Jackman Hall last night. He reminisced about his stars, fondly recalling James Woods as the only actor he’s ever yelled at, and explaining how his work with Deborah Harry was essentially a matter of shrinking her performance down from rock-theatrics exaggeration to the eerily sexy hush it became. The film was presented as part of the Cinematheque Ontario’s Toronto on Film series, so Cronenberg was also there to talk about the city. There was something strangely warm and fuzzy about sitting in a capacity crowd to immerse ourselves in Max Renn’s descent into the sadomasochistic, surreal and cancerous world of Videodrome while taking note of the many glimpses of Toronto circa 1982. So much has changed since then, but it was oddly comforting to note that local legend Reg Hartt’s black and white photocopied posters for his “Cineforum” home screenings of classic films, which can still be found on lamp posts all over Toronto, looked exactly the same.

A filmmaker who truly aims for the guts

I have no idea how many times I've watched Videodrome in the last 27 years, but I can honestly say that even after multiple viewings as a child, a teenager and an adult, the movie remains absolutely fucking bananas. In his introduction to Cronenberg’s introduction Adam Nayman recalled the extra layers of taboo the film accumulated by having to be smuggled into his family home on VHS. Indeed, the film’s resonance as a home video product is a central element in its legacy, yet seeing it on the big screen with an audience reminds you how enduringly discomforting—and kind of hilarious—an experience the film offers. “It has a philosophy,” one character warns another about the titular underground torture porn, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” That’s also what makes it deliciously goofy. The walls are electrified wet clay, the wizard is nothing but a library of videocassettes, and Renn feeds a gun to his stomach vagina cavity. The film wasn’t prescient on purpose, Cronenberg emphasized. In fact it looked backwards to some degree, to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who haunted the University of Toronto when Cronenberg was a student there. And it responded to what was in the air in the moment, like the presence of soft-core porn on Canadian television, and fears of the medium’s potentially corrupting powers that had been circulating for decades. “All you have an artist that makes you original is your antenna,” asserted Cronenberg, whose own antennae have been picking up often brilliantly perverse broadcasts from the collective Id for nearly four decades.

House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

The brutality of the bourgeoisie, the allure of apocalypse: 20 years of Michael Haneke

There are reasons to be grateful for the existence of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, even if you don’t exactly fall in love with his movies. He is a master craftsman, as devoted to technical precision as the finest Hollywood journeyman, as formally rigorous as the most innovative arthouse maverick, and, most impressively, has maintained this standard while working in different languages and different countries with distinct industries. He’s prolific—10 features in 20 years, with another on the way—yet a case can be made for his having never made a single film that’s contributed to what he describes as the disempowerment of the audience. Long after the golden age of foreign and art film distribution, Haneke has held unrelentingly to a mandate of consistently challenging movies and survived, even thrived. And that’s fascinating in itself: large numbers of people see Haneke’s films, yet not a one of them promises a good time in any normal sense. They’re downright unpleasant. And there is no release.

The ten features tell a story in themselves, of a singular career, of an aesthetic, of an evolving social critique, of an increasingly amalgamated Europe and globalized world. Thanks to Metro Cinema’s generous full retrospective, Edmonton filmgoers can watch it all unfold completely and chronologically, one chilling, enigmatic, unbroken single-shot scene at a time.

Based on actual events, The Seventh Continent (1989) is a sort of diptych that’s devastatingly effective in its simplicity. A bourgeois family of three is shown performing quotidian tasks—closing doors, preparing breakfast, tying shoes—often in close-ups that show no preference for faces or offer clues that might convey an internal life. This series of what would be inserts in a conventional movie is strangely riveting, brimming with a certain tension. Devoid of scoring and making use of black leader between scenes, there’s genuine beauty to the clipped rhythm of it all, to the collage of room tones, and the superbly specifying actors—including the late Ulrich Mühe, a Haneke regular—embody the tone plausibly. Haneke’s debut follows the course of the family’s routines, checking in to see how they alter over three years, until the machinery of their “lifestyle” suddenly collapses in one of cinema’s most sustained sequences of intensely concentrated, near-wordless action. The result is really a perfect movie on its own terms, with an inspired balance of overt polemic and ambiguity. It also, to a surprising degree, perfectly encapsulates so much of what’s to come.

Benny’s Video (92) advances certain aspects of its predecessor while focusing more pointedly on what is surely Haneke’s central zone of interest: visual media. The horrific Oedipal journey of teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is one filtered through the abstraction of increasingly accessible video technology, which Haneke proposes as facilitating voyeuristic tendencies to ever-more alarming degrees. A crudely-made video of animal slaughter is slowed-down in replay, making what was initially intended as a quick, relatively painless death into a weirdly aestheticized bloodbath. Benny, almost always placid, seems completely untouched by the Real, in the Lacanian sense. He seems to process the world exclusively through video screens. Video becomes a component in teenage mating rituals, which themselves house experiments in punishment. So there is watching, there is death, and there is the cleaning up afterwards. There’s also a mother-son vacation to Egypt, where the unruliness of the greater word is still kept always at arm’s, or, as it were, eye’s length. It’s also kind of boring, but this very carefully-nourished boredom seems vital to how this all works. Haneke’s gaze can be at once that of a visionary director and that of an especially patient anthropologist. If you can jive with both sensibilities, you’re in for the long haul.

There is, however, the problem of Funny Games (97) to contend with. Haneke’s most notoriously merciless work, an anti-thriller in which a pair of absurdly polite hooligans (one of whom is Frisch, as though picking up where he left off) terrorize another of Haneke’s bourgeois families on holiday, is brutal, but it’s also quickly numbing and over-intellectualized while feeling intellectually facile. Haneke seems to have had a checklist of items he considered antithetical to genre moviemaking—kill the dog, kill the kid, break the fourth wall—and went about dutifully seeing each through. The irony lies in how, at the best of times, the very sort of polished Hollywood thriller Funny Games explicitly opposes can actually prove far more thought provoking than such exercises in didacticism. Yet Haneke was clearly happy with the results. He re-made the thing, shot-for-shot, as his English-language debut with Hollywood stars (07). I wonder if he liked the marketing—Warner pitched it exactly as if it were a generic thriller.


With Code Unknown (00), Haneke arrives at a major turning point and delivers what may be his finest work. His first film made in France inverted the hermetically-sealed strategy of Funny Games, broadening his perspective to take in a larger network of character types, relationships, social confrontations and causalities, and Juliette Binoche, who from her first moment onscreen introduces a warmth and fullness of character previously unseen, if not un-permitted, in Haneke’s work. Brilliantly book-ended with scenes of deaf-mute children playing charades—an elegant expression of the title—the remainder of Code Unknown consists of scenes, nearly all of them playing out in single, unbroken shots, that explore questions of what is and isn’t other people’s business, from an uppity young black man’s attempt at forcing an act of social justice to Binoche’s paralysis when overhearing domestic violence to a photojournalist’s resurrection of Walker Evans’ fabled journey through the New York subway system taking surreptitious photos of strangers. Like the unseen, rather obnoxious director who at one point auditions Binoche’s actress, the photojournalist seems to be hunting for a “real face.” Yet, while I’d argue that Code Unknown explores inter-connectivity with greater resonance than films like Paul Haggis’ Crash (04) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (07), Haneke is never so assuring. The characters here, spanning class, race, nationality, education and age, are given freer reign to reveal a richness of attitude, anxieties and even fleeting moments of happiness and relief. But their environment doesn’t make room for complete vulnerability and so many masks are worn that the very notion of witnessing truth becomes futile. This was the first Haneke I saw, and it remains a personal favourite.


Haneke’s embracing of France and its great actresses continued to great acclaim—and even greater controversy—with The Piano Teacher (01), an adaptation of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut, an instructor obsessed with a 17-year-old pupil, is a creature of a sort I’m not sure the movies had ever previously given us: intensely sexually repressed, sadomasochistic, obsessive, icy in that way that disguises overwhelming anguish, capable of Elektralian hysteria, and never for a moment less than magnetic. It is a career-capping performance, and with Huppert that says a lot.

When Huppert returns for Haneke’s criminally under-seen dystopian drama Time of the Wolf (03), the only way she can kick things off properly is to get sprayed with her murdered husband’s blood and then vomit in the first five minutes. From there, the apocalypse is a paddleboat ride. Whatever disaster befell society before the story begins is—and here’s a surprise—left undefined. Yet in destroying the social order, the media and consumer-based society, it’s also robbed Haneke of the key subjects of his entire canon. The good news is that Haneke not only rises to the occasion but also proves just what a shrewd and atmospheric storyteller he can be with a minimum of elements. And of course, as Huppert’s Anne and her children traverse the countryside to fend for themselves, the customs of civilized society will haunt them in their every encounter. (It’ll be interesting to see how this film compares to John Hillcoat’s forthcoming The Road.) Whether you know Haneke’s work or not, I urge you to catch this one in a rare public screening.

Haneke’s almost perverse emphasis on the irresolvable finds its apotheosis in Caché (05), another hit, and his most recent, though hopefully not last French film. Pairing Binoche with Daniel Auteuil, Caché returns to the sinister voyeurism of Benny’s Video by way of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (97), when a Parisian bourgeois couple starts receiving anonymous videocassettes that feature only unedited footage of their home’s exterior. Haneke has insisted in interviews that he hasn’t been especially interested in specificity of location in his films and that readings emphasizing the conditions of a certain national culture are usually made out of a failure to recognize how these stories could take place anywhere in the first world. It’s a respectable and quite instructive stance, but I still think it makes Caché that much richer a movie when we account for the particularities of the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961. There is a ghost lurking in this story that demands to be reckoned with. It is a ghost not dissimilar to those haunting other nations, but it looms over these characters with a particular gravity, making it an interesting companion piece to Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel (63).

Which brings up to the present, post-Funny Games US and pre-The White Ribbon, Haneke’s first Austrian film in a dozen years. Despite the divisive retroactive—not to mention reactionary—aspects of his last movie, Metro’s retrospective reminds us that there’s every reason to anticipate more provocative and fascinating work from Haneke. I only hope there continues to be room in the world for the likes of him.

Caché: The murderers are among us

Making good on one of the enigmatic triggers that gradually evaporated in the mirror-miasma of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke’s Caché begins with a VHS tape left on a doorstep, a little act of psychological terrorism perfectly blurring the innocuous and the sinister. The tape reveals only hours of the same fixed shot of the exterior of the recipients’ Parisian home. They come and go, unknowing while nothing happens, their walls remaining uncompromised—at least, physically.

Yet the tape-maker has more than succeeded in his act of invasion: the camera may never move into the house but the tape does (and more soon follow), along with some crude cryptic drawings, penetrating not only personal boundaries but psychic ones buried in the troubled memories of Georges (Daniel Auteuil). Like the tape-maker, Georges prefers to keep his thoughts and motivations hidden, even from his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche, superb) and pre-teen son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). And the tape becomes a catalyst for mistrust, which spreads like a contagion through the family.

In his chillingly clean, understated exploitation of the thriller genre, Haneke manipulates our frames of perception from the film’s opening moment, offering us suspense but no privileged information, no sudden close-ups constructed to clarify intent, no transitions that might guide us toward an easier contextualizing of what we’re watching, whether it be surveillance, dramatic action, memory or fragment of a dream. Everything in Caché is presented in the same directorial deadpan, which functions all the better toward implicating us in the very deep murk lying just outside the film’s periphery.

By accident or design, Georges is being led back 40 years to unpleasant childhood experiences shared with Majid (Maurice Bénichou), the son of an Algerian couple once briefly employed by Georges’s family. Georges’s guilt is, in fact, the true engine of the story, and Auteuil’s heavily guarded panic inspires both our identification and our dread. This is a remarkable performance that draws no attention to itself—indeed, rather than play for the camera, Auteuil’s Georges becomes so fearful of hidden viewers as to be afflicted with pretend calm that he can’t let go of no matter where he is.

But where we in the audience are being led as witnesses of Georges’s fruitless search for resolution is toward equally confrontational if unspoken questions of long-term responsibility that reach far beyond a single character’s psychological closets and into the collective consciousness: the failures of the integrationist model of French citizenship, France’s ghastly mistreatment of Algerians, and, broadening the historical scope, global paranoia about terror and Islam. For all the ambiguity, perhaps the one certainty we share with Georges is the knowledge that our sense of home comes at a terrible cost to others.

The evocation of home is as questionable on a literal level as it is on the figurative: the neatly arranged walls of books that envelope Georges and Anne’s place, while signifying educated, rationalist, middle-class comfort, are eerily echoed by the representational walls of fake books that envelope the set of the literary chat show Georges hosts. The tension between reality and theatre is left suspended in Caché; there is a deliberate lack of release (though you’re advised to sit through the closing credits if you want every chance at closure). This tension then hovers disconcertingly in our consciousness as we leave the theatre and try to make sense of the film, its final triumph being the way it finally denies a solid form to its bogeyman, knowing full well that he’s lurking inside the formless fluids of our minds.