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JULY 1993 /£2.20/$5.50
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THUNDERBOLT & LIGHTFOOT THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE LENNY
AFTER HOURS
ANNIE HALL
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IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT TWELVE ANGRY MEN
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THE APARTMENT
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Published monthly by the British Film Institute ISSN 0037-4806
Sight and Soun
AChinese story: ‘Bodo’, 16
Nutley’s ‘House of Angels’: 20
Features
Film reviews
THEME PARKS AND VARIATIONS
Peter Wollen on Jurassic Park, monster movies and Hitchcock Plus Henry Sheehan on Spielberg, death and children 6
EROTIC THRILLERS AND RUDE WOMEN What do Indecent Proposal and Carnal Crimes have in common? And who enjoys such films?
By Linda Ruth Williams 12
DREAM ON
Tony Rayns sees new and unfinished films in China - and experiences the rock scene 16 FACING THE SUN
Colin Nutley, the British director of the Swedish film, House of Angels, talks with Philip Kemp 20 HIJACKED
Have The Assassin and Sommersby been able to take what's best
from the French originals?
By Ginette Vincendeau 22 SIBLING RIVALRY
Why has the video camera become such an important player in recent films, from Patriot
Games to 1.627? By Chris Darke
Plus Rod Stoneman on Godard's
Histoire(s) du cinéma 26 Regulars
EDITORIAL National trends 3 THE BUSINESS Altman... Rank... Easy Rider II... 4 OBSESSION Leslie Megahey on
a haunting face in Vampyr 31 BOOKS Marilyn Monroe;
Hollywood and masculinity;
early comedy; the new Hollywood; Russian women 32 LETTERS Censorship; BBFC; Clockwork Orange; cult films 64
Anglagird/House of Angels 36 Assassin, The 36 Benny and Joon 37 Boxing Helena 38 Cliffhanger 39 Cop and a Half 40 Cows/Vacas 54 Equinox “41 Fencing Master, The/ : El Maestro de esgrima 47 Fire in the Sky 42 House of Angels/Anglagard 36 I Was on Mars 43 Jungfrauenmaschine, Die/
Virgin Machine 44 King’s Whore, The 45 Mad Dog and Glory 46 Madame Bovary 47 Maestro de esgrima, E/
The Fencing Master 47 Mistress 48 Old Lady Who Walked in the
Sea, The/La Vieille qui marchait dans la mer 55 Red Rock West — 49 South Central 50 Sure Fire 51 Swing Kids 52 3 Ninja Kids 53 Trial, The 53 Vacas/Cows 54 Vieille qui marchait dans la mer, La/The Old Lady Who Walked
in the Sea 55 Virgin Machine/ ¢ Jungfrauenmaschine, Die aq Wide Sargasso Sea 56 Television films Histoire(s) du cinéma/
History(ies) of the Cinema 57 History(ies) of the Cinema/ Histoire(s) du cinéma 57
Video reviews
Mark Kermode and Peter Dean on this month’s video and laser disc releases 58
Next issue on sale 27 July
De
Spielberg's ‘Jurassic Park’: 6 =
SIGHT AND SOUND 1|7
CONNOISSEUR VIDEO JUNE/JULYRELEASES f g
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July 5th will see the release on video for the first time of the work of Roberto Rossellini, maker of some of the best anti- war ‘war’movies. His brutal World War 2 triptych shocked audiences around the world, and despite having been shot on negligable budgets, often with hand made film stock, the films still carry a powerful emotional punch today
bl Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) Also released on this date, Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia). Starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, this English language film takes a tough, close look at the rekindling of love in a dull marriage. *A love story with a beating heart”
Voyage to Italy
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GAY CLASSICS
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A compilation of short films made by and for a
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Contributors to this issue Peter Biskind is writing a book on 70s US cinema; he is the author of Seeing is Believing
Chris Darke is a freelance film writer
Julian Graffy is senior lecturer in Russian, SSEES, University of London Philip Kemp is working on
a book on Michael Balcon Andy Medhurst teaches film at University of Sussex Claire Monk is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Sight
and Sound
Tony Rayns was a member of the Caméra d'Or jury at this year's Cannes Film Festival Henry Sheehan has previously written on Spielberg for Film Comment Paul Julian Smith is professor of Spanish, University of Cambridge
Rod Stoneman is an assistant commissioning editor, Channel 4
Ginette Vincendeau is the co-editor of the recently published volume Popular European Cinema
Linda Ruth Williams’ book Sex in the Head, a study of D.H. Lawrence and cinema, is published this month Peter Wollen's latest book
is a collection of essays, Raiding the Icebox; he is
in pre-production for
a Channel 4 film on
John Locke
National trends
With the new commercial television system barely half a year old, the ITV companies have split into two camps lobbying for opposing changes in the rules they work under — rules which at present seem to guarantee a degree of broadcasting diversity across the regions and nations that make up the UK. Should we be taking sides?
On the face of it we most definitely should. The greatest virtue of the British ITV system has always been its regional basis. And even amid all the perils of the great franchise auction, that regional basis appeared to be protected.
The same 15 regions were advertised; each has requirements for local programming more stringent than ever before; a moratorium on hostile takeovers for a year gives each company the opportunity to consolidate its regional base. Finally, cross-ownership rules guarantee that none of the nine big companies could swallow each other up (although they could each swallow one of the six small ones).
Most of the big companies, Central and Carlton in particular, now want these cross-ownership rules to be relaxed. Central’s chief executive, Leslie Hill, has been arguing for years that ITV has to concentrate into half a dozen companies in order to be commercially viable. Now, it seems, most of his senior ITV colleagues agree with him.
But not all. Meridian, HTV and Anglia — the three big companies most likely to be swallowed — are opposed to loosening the cross-ownership rules and want another year’s moratorium on takeovers. Heritage Secretary Peter Brooke seems to have ruled out extending the moratorium, but the possibility of changing the cross-ownership rules is still very much a live issue. The ITV companies who oppose it plead that they are defending the crucial principle of a real regional ITV. And for anyone who wants to see more pluralism in television, it seems tempting to line up behind them.
Tempting — but probably futile. One reason has been well aired by the Central/Carlton camp. Under the present rules they can’t take over HTV
or Anglia, but Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi or France's TF1 can, and quite likely eventually will. In most of continental Europe commercial broadcasters are national, so they have bigger economic clout than the regional British companies. Unless the British companies are beefed up in size, the argument goes, ITV’s much vaunted regions
will end up as branch offices of Paris or Milan.
The second reason has been less aired but is more fundamental. In the old days the big regional companies were each allocated a certain proportion of network programming for their own production in Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds as well as London. Now the Office of Fair Trading forbids such carve-ups. So editorial power will lie increasingly with the London- based ITV Network Centre, which will commission programmes from what will probably be London-based independent producers. Not the ideal recipe for a regional diversity in network television. And whether or not each of the regional companies keeps its formal independence is going to make little difference to the trend.
If efforts to prop up the old regional emphasis of the ITV system are doomed, then it is even more important that the BBC puts its regional house in order. This is not primarily a question of specifically regional programming. The corporation has always quite justly been accused of metropolitan bias (and, it should be added, a bias against a good many parts of the population of the metropolis itself). Until recently the BBC was running down network production from many of its centres outside London. Now it appears to have at least recognised the problem by establishing ‘centres of excellence’ in, for example, Birmingham and Manchester. As yet, however, these centres show little sign of giving a non-metropolitan flavour to their output.
The BBC needs to adopt more profound measures if it is to reflect the diversity of the population it is broadcasting to. It can no longer offer itself the (always feeble) excuse that ITV will take care of the regional aspect of that task.
JERRY ON LINE #1
James Sillavan — Peter Lydon ©
‘Jerry, I've always naid that this studio puts stories before stars - that we don't get into bed with stars because vaayne stars; that we would be a beacon of sense in a star-obsessed tow... then this morming 1 had a call from Amis, he's got a gap in Spring '95...'
SIGHT AND SOUND 3|7
The sarcastic Mr Altman... Rank and the minister... six for Russia..
The business
@ “Why can't he make up his mind?” muttered the PR person, suddenly faced with the need to accommodate Robert Altman and set up a major press conference for him three days into the Cannes Film Festival. A week earlier, Altman — whose new film, Short Cuts, was not ready for Cannes and has its world premiere at Venice in Septem- ber - had reportedly stated that he would definitely not be coming to the Céte d'Azur. Not, of course, that the PR person would have dreamed of remind- ing the Great Director of this fact: for- getting what the client said yesterday is a basic PR skill, Besides, sailing into the north of Mr A's notably fiery dispo- sition is recommended only to the extremely thick-skinned.
The scatter-gun of Altman's sarcasm, sporadically levelled at Hollywood over the past two decades, has recently been turned on one or two lesser - and rather less-deserving — targets, notably the Paris-based producer Ludi Boeken, who was rash enough to (a) produce and (b) disagree with Big Bob over cer- tain contractual aspects of Vincent and Theo, And potential targets are now beginning to multiply, since the direc- tor's presence in Cannes was designed to do more than remind the world of his existence: it was to promote what can only be described as the relaunch of the once prolific Altman industry.
With Short Cuts in the can (accompa- nied by a few off-the-record remarks that if distributors thought they were getting “another The Player, they're in for a shock"), and his next directorial chore, Préti-porter, finally financed after 10 years in the wilderness, Ait- man is putting himself about with an energy that would do credit to a man 20 years his junior (he was 68 in Febru- ary). He will, for instance, be produc- ing Mrs Parker (in which Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the divine Dorothy) for former protégé Alan Rudolph, and in conjunction with The Player executive producer Cary Brokaw is developing a movie version of Tony Kushner'’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Aids play, Angels in America.
Back in Los Angeles, meanwhile, Michael Tolkin - writer of The Player - is currently shooting New Age, about life on the city’s Melrose Avenue, which went from tawdry to super-fashionable and back to tawdry in the same five years that saw the 80s rise and fall.
And all of this presumably funded by that same industry motivated by “greed and [run by] people who take, take, take” (Robert Altman, Cannes, 9 May 1992).
eo-realism is making a comeback in Italy:
two of the biggest projects to be announ- ced this summer are worlds away from the ele- gant nostalgia and sentimentality of recent Kalian hits, focusing on famous real-life mur- ders, one recent, the other not so recent.
Giuseppe Ferrara - who, having directed ‘I! caso Moro’ (‘The Moro Affair’), is something
4|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
. ‘Easy Rider II’
Premiere: Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’, joint winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes 1993
of a specialist in the genre - is currently preparing ‘Giovanni Falcone’, about the Palermo killing of the prominent anti-Mafia judge. Michele Placido ~ well known to Italian television audiences for tackling the mob in his hugely successful series ‘Octopus’ — will play Falcone, with Giancarlo Giannini taking the role of Judge Paolo Borsellino. And direc- tor Mario Tullio Giordano has just started work on ‘Pier Paolo Pasolini: Un delitto ital- iano’, about the murder of the director on a beach near Ostia in 1975 — an event which remains the subject of much speculation.
® Shock, horror, it’s official: Cannes is fauché (broke). Source? None other than top local party organiser Henri Deleuze. Shindig spending this May was down by as much as 30 per cent on last year, according to Deleuze, who said that companies were being much more frugal and shelling out only on essential marketing operations.
Under this heading he presumably included the 50-foot inflatable Arnold Schwarzenegger moored in the bay throughout the first half of the festi- val. Or did he mean the crudely mech- anised Jurassic Park dinosaur cut-out which opened and shut its jaws every 10 seconds outside the Carlton Hotel, like a noddy-dog in the back window of some pre-historic Ford Capri? Or per- haps it was the Jean-Claude Van Damme hot-air balloon he had in mind? Or...
ind you, those who affect to know about
these things were just as busy declaring the festival cinematically bankrupt - and in terms that, had they been used as slogans, would have been suspected of coming from the same agency.
“There's little, if any, surprising buzz devel- oping here,” wrote James Ulmer in ‘The Holly- wood Reporter’ on Tuesday 18 May. “This 46th festival just hasn’t produced any discov- eries that are setting cinema seats on fire as, for example, ‘Strictly Ballroom’ did last year.”
There were, moaned Todd McCarthy in ‘Vari- ety’ on 24 May, “no unexpected gems that enabled audiences to feel they had discovered important new talent... The Market was a total void... no ‘Strictly Ballroom’ to excite the flash commercial market.”
Now | know that to be enthusiastic about Cannes is about as cool as arguing that Rod Stewart can sing. But it seems to me that any festival that can premiere ‘The Piano’, ‘Farewell to My Concubine’, ‘Naked’, ‘Raining Stones’, ‘The Puppetmaster’ and ‘Cliffhanger’ —any festival in which a quiet little gem like the Tavianis’ ‘Fiorile’ is completely overshadowed -ain’t doing half bad. And the Market did have its discoveries: Mike Sarne’s comeback pic ‘The Punk’ and US indie effort ‘Public Access’, for instance.
Still, good to see such a convergence of opinion among the opinion-makers. Or is it that the definition of ‘buzz’ is what one trade journalist says to another, in the same way that “many feel...” is hack-speak for “I think”?
And by the way, ‘Strictly Ballroom’ was in
last year’s official selection, not a chance dis- covery in the depths of the Market. @ Speaking of Variety, what is happen- ing to the showbiz bible, which used to boast “more bureaus than the New York Times”? Since Reed International took over from the founding Silverman family (the last member of whom left early this year), the bureaus in Madrid, Paris, Rome and Stockholm have gone. Veteran writers like Hank Werba (Rome), Jack Kindred (Munich) and Keith Keller (Stockholm) — whose life- time of film industry reporting was one of the things that gave Variety its authority — have been dumped.
London, one of the last remaining full bureaus, is rumoured to be due for a major scaling-down. And the entire New York operation (home of the loss- making weekly edition) is apparently scheduled to be shifted to the Los Ange- les base of the profitable daily Variety,
now that the two publications have been merged under a single editor (their word, not mine).
Just before Cannes, Deborah Young, the last remaining continental Euro- pean reporter with a solid art-and- industry track record (she was based in Rome) announced plans to quit, having reportedly been offered the calculated insult of a freelance job. And Claudia Eller, one of the longest-serving Los Angeles-based reporters, has left to join the LA Times.
Still, not to worry: Variety still gets to you a week ahead of the opposition, thanks to a wheeze dreamed up by the aforementioned editor. “Beginning with next week’s issue,” read a tiny note in the 24 May issue, “Variety will be dated one week in advance. Conse- quently, the issue that hits the new- stands Monday 31 May will be dated Monday 7 June.” Yes, and my next col- umn will be a Christmas special.
ne thing that has been operating
absolutely true to form recently has been
the UK film establishment. In Cannes, Rank announced another major plan to put all its money into American movies - something which ithas been doing on a regular three-year cycle for as long as anyone can be bothered to remember. In fact, so unusual is it for the com- pany to put its money anywhere else that when the company did back a British film (‘Just Like a Woman’), someone from Rank rang me up to point out the fact... @ Also at Cannes, the British Film Commission proudly unveiled its new promotional video, an interminable travelogue made up of stock shots of Beautiful Britain which looked as though it had been made for the video wall at Heathrow Underground.
As part of the same treat, the BFC wheeled in the pink and portly Films Minister Robert Key, who said that the video showed you why there were so
many British films at Cannes this year: because there was such an extraordi- nary variety of locations to choose from. (Actually, the only Britfilm in Cannes needing a difficult location, the BFl-produced Anchoress, which is set in medieval Britain, had to be shot in Belgium. The Belgian government also subsidised it, but that’s another story.)
The rest of Key's speech couldn't really be checked for accuracy, since it contained hardly a single fact. Given that the minister would hardly have bothered to come to Cannes to tell the world he thought films were a waste of time and any British film-maker who didn’t go to Hollywood was an idiot, he could hardly have said less than he did. Out came the usual old guff about lis- tening carefully to what the industry
CANNES NOTES
had to say, with vague promises of a real announcement later in the year.
The whole farrago came full circle when Key got reshuffled the following week to the Ministry of Transport (per- haps the BFC should let him take the video with him). He was replaced by Iain Sproat, who used to be Films Min- ister before he bucked all the trends by managing to lose his seat in the 1983 Conservative landslide,
Wardour Street - the distribution/ exhibition end of the UK film business - is crowing with delight: Sproat set in motion the abolition of the Eady Levy, the tax on cinema seats which pro- vided the only workable form of film production subsidy the UK ever had.
he recent announcement that six top
directors were going to contribute to a
portmanteau film about life in Russia, along the lines of the 1965 classic, ‘Paris vu par’, might presumably have been expected to help the international profile of the crisis-ridden Russian Federation.
The only trouble is that the six directors chosen are of much the same vintage as ‘Paris vu par’. Surely the producers could have found a slightly more ‘now’ assortment than Lina Wertmiiller, Peter Bogdanovich, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell and Nobuhiko Ohbayashi?
@ Since Christmas, there has been general agreement that three films would dominate this summer's box office: Cliffhanger (Sylvester Stallone up a Dolomite), Jurassic Park (young master Spielberg and a lot of reanimated mon- sters) and Last Action Hero (big Arnie plus a cute kid), At least one of them
provides interesting lessons in how the best laid plans can go awry. Both Juras- sic Park and Cliffhanger have slowly and carefully built up expectations, the for- mer with a terrific trailer, the latter by playing its cards very close to its chest. But for Columbia's Last Action Hero, things have made a repeated habit of going wrong.
Plans to paint the film's name on the side of a space shuttle seemed great - until NASA pointed out that the shut- tle wouldn't be launched until at least two months after the film opened. An early test screening in the LA suburb of Lakewood - about as echt as you can get — produced distinctly unblockbust- ing results (one viewer told the LA Times he didn’t fill in his test card because he was a Schwarzenegger fan and didn't want to be impolite), A special demon- stration of the new Sony Dynamic Digi- tal Sound System used in the film was not exactly a heart-stopper. And then throughout early June, Hollywood ran wild with stories of last-minute reshoots, re-edits and general damage limitation.
Of course it'll probably be all right on the night (which falls midway between press time and publication for this issue of Sight and Sound). But then again...
summer will see the planning, produc-
tion or release of a more than usually large
number of sequels: ‘Sister Act 2’, ‘Wayne's
World tl” (reportedly with Kim Basinger), ‘Die Hard Il’, ‘Naked Gun 3’, ‘Rambo IV’...
But all pale into insignificance beside the longest-awaited sequel of them all. Dennis Hopper has finally agreed to direct ‘Easy Rider I’, almost 25 years since he and Peter Fonda first set their motors running.
Leaving aside the question of whether Messrs H and F can still operate anything more powerful than a golf cart, a number of major details still need to be worked out, not least the fact that both the central protagonists were blasted into oblivion by a redneck shot- gun at the end of the original movie.
Perhaps they will be reconstituted from scraps of DNA scraped off the Louisiana blacktop. ® Finally, in case you were looking for the clincher in picking the site for your summer holidays, Beijing Studios have come up with the ultimate August attraction for the people: the Beijing Studios Tour.
If the crumbling ones outside aren't enough, you can entertain yourself by strolling the studio’s Ancient Streets. Or take part in a traditional wedding procession. Or, if none of the above appeals, a visit to the Thrilling Scenes Producing Room should do the trick.
I repeat all this verbatim, inciden- tally, from a recent issue of The Holly- wood Reporter, which obviously doesn't believe in sub-editing the press releases it receives, since the highlight of the Tour is listed as a visit to the “Biggest Stydui in Asia”.
Sidneyland beware.
SIGHT AND SOUND 5|7
What do the monster movie ‘The Lost World’, the 19th- century dinosaur
cult and Hitchcock's ‘The Birds’ share with ‘Jurassic Park’? Peter Wollen explains
Out of the tomb: a T-Rex, one of Spielberg's sexually threatening dinosaurs —close relatives of the figures in slasher movies
THEME PARK
AND VARIATIONS
To the cine-palaeontologist tracing the evolutionary history of film, Steven Spiel- berg’s Jurassic Park appears at first to be a rather obvious hybrid of Jaws and writer Michael Crichton's earlier theme-park fantasy Westworld (1973). The hybrid is made possible at story level by the concept of genetic engineering. The idea of chromosome recombination has super- seded that of robotics, which drove Westworld, a distant descendant of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, In
Jurassic Park, the concept of genetic cloning
allows the robot film to be interbred with the successful line of monster movies that runs from The Lost World, on through King Kong, and down to Jaws.
Jurassic Park also combines the Westworld con- cept of the theme park with the monster movie idea of ‘The Lost World’, derived from Arthur Conan Doyle. In King Kong the monster is cap- tured and brought by a show-biz tycoon from its remote Pacific island home to the mass audi- ence of New York, where it is exhibited in chains at what appears to be a version of Radio City Music Hall. In Jurassic Park it is the other way round: the audience is to be transported to a remote Pacific island, where the monsters are exhibited and restrained behind massive elec- tric fences. Isla Nublar is an island resort like Cancun or Djerba, what economists call an ITZ (integrated tourist zone), self-contained and cut off from the depressing and dangerous rest of the world in the pleasure periphery. It is also a safari park, planned and built around the dinosaur theme by another visionary show-biz entrepreneur, complete with tie-in merchan- dising of dinosaur souvenirs and memorabilia, On the Isla Nublar, the safari park is further combined with the Natural History Museum, displaying fabulous creatures from the past whose gigantic skeletons we are familiar with from so many museum halls, Finally, there is an uncanny echo, not only of King Kong, but of the Galapagos Islands, which Charles Darwin visited on his fateful voyage aboard the Beagle and whose wildlife formed the centrepieces of his theory of natural selection.
On Isla Nublar, the technology of the future is used to recreate the extinct species of the dis- tant past. Bio-technology, like cinema, makes it possible for us to engage in a kind of time travel. Again, instead of the tourist climbing into a time machine in order to travel back through deep time to the Age of Reptiles, the reptiles themselves are brought forward to the Age of Humans. Manipulation of DNA acts as a reverse time machine, harnessed now to the interests of the entertainment industry. »
SIGHT AND SOUND 7/7
Strange sights (from left to right): an iguanadon, from ‘IHustrated London News’; ‘King Kong’; ‘The Lost World’; ‘The Birds’; ‘Jurassic Park’
Dinosaurs, in fact, have become commodi- ties, fetishised attractions in the Society of the Spectacle. At the same time, they are like the prisoners in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which every prisoner could be cease- lessly observed from a single vantage point. Michel Foucault, in his classic book Discipline and Punish, points out that the prototype for the Panopticon was the menagerie built for Louis XIV at Versailles, where all the animals could be watched by a single guard. In Jurassic Park, the captive monsters are observed electronically rather than optically, from a computer-driven control centre reminiscent of that for the space ship in Star Trek, another form of high-tech island resort. Isla Nublar hurtles through time as the Enterprise hurtles through space.
This island is also the isolated castle or fortified island where so many other mad sci- entists and mad doctors and mad sadists have held sway. Hammond, the Scottish entrepre- neur played by Richard Attenborough, is another Dr Frankenstein, another Dr X, another Dr Moreau, another Dr No. Hammond has a Chinese American geneticist at his side, Dr Wu (shades of Dr Fu Manchu), who does the (ultra-hygienic) dirty work while he concen- trates on the grand sweep of his vision and the construction of his crazed dream. Hammond's dream does not have to be concealed from pry- ing eyes: he is not afraid of being exposed and lynched. On the contrary, his whole purpose is to display his monsters to an adoring public. We might expect that, in the end, he would be torn to pieces by his own vengeful monsters, like Dr Moreau. Hammond, however, escapes unscathed, presumably because he is too close, in some respects, to Spielberg himself.
At a critical point in the film, Hammond muses on his early days running a flea circus in Petticoat Lane, a realm of illusion, in contrast to Jurassic Park, where everything is real and tangible (and can eat you). Cinema, in these terms, is only a flea circus - the humbler, safer, insubstantial first beginning of the great Juras- sic Park dream. But the comparison between cinema and theme park is still too close for comfort, especially when we think of Jurassic Park’s museum shop, lovingly, and perhaps ironically, tracked around. Along with the box office, all those T-shirts and mugs and key-tags and toys are, after all, the fuel that drives both enterprises, real film and imaginary theme park. More than a hundred licensees are pro- ducing Jurassic Park merchandise: video games, action figures and play sets, breakfast cereal and hamburger promotions, plush toys, mag-
8|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
nets, story books, lunch boxes, pencils and, of course, a forthcoming Jurassic Park ride at Uni- versal Studio’s very own theme parks in Cali- fornia and Florida. A film about a theme park will itself end up as a theme park attraction.
It’s all as if Jurassic Park, the film, was really designed to end up as Jurassic Park, the ride. The strip of film unspooling through the projector is like the single-rail automated people-mover designed to shuttle tourists safely around the park. In both cases the ride turns into a night- mare from which we will emerge safely in the end. The nightmare is caused, first, by technical breakdown, and then by breakdown of the bar- riers which separate the safe, ‘civilised’ world from the dangerous ‘wild’ world. Things no longer stay put in their proper place. Like the Indians who have broken out of the Western reservation or the rioting prisoners escaped from Cell Block 11, the dinosaurs tear down the fences and set out to hunt down their human prey. More uncannily, the monsters have not just run out of control, they have come back from the dead as real, living, calculating pres- ences, confronting their human captors face to face. Jurassic Park is like a palaeo-zoological ver- sion of Night of the Living Dead, in which fear- some creatures exhumed from their fossil graves converge on the terrified humans in the resort’s welcome centre. Dinosaurs, like phan- toms or vampires, have come back to haunt the living - and not only to haunt them, but, of course, to hunt, trap and kill them.
Sweet and savage
All horror is based on the return of the repressed, on some metaphoric digging up of what should have stayed buried. In Jurassic Park, the metaphor is extended into deep time to bring back what has been buried for 65 million years, all the more potent for its long entomb- ment. The fascination we feel for dinosaurs must be related in some way to their extinc- tion, which troubles us. First, it makes us won- der whether we are not somehow usurpers who have taken the place which was rightfully theirs. Not that we actually did the deed, but we benefited from it and perhaps will be pun- ished in turn for our arrogance. On another level, there are the infant's fantasies of the pri- mal scene, of terrifying parents, now long dead but all the more able to torment us. In Jurassic Park, the children divide up the mon- sters into “meat-osauruses” and “veg-osaurus- es”, carnivores and herbivores, in a way which is surely gender-related: the savage predators are demented father figures while the sweet-tem-
pered grazers, their prey, are beneficent moth- ers. One leaf-munching monster is compared to a cow; the others are obviously raging bulls. Psychiatrists tell us that another common childhood fantasy is that of saving one’s par- ents from monstrous attackers. This too is faithfully enacted in that it is the young boy who gets the central computer system working again and thus saves all the surviving adults,
The dinosaur cult began in the nineteenth century with the identification of dinosaurs as a specific order of reptiles by the great palaeon- tologist Richard Owen. Owen coined the word ‘dinosaur’ and used it for the first time at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Plymouth in the summer of 1841. As he explained, dinosaurs had common characteristics which he deemed “sufficient grounds for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I propose the name Dinosauria.” Owen, however, was troubled by dinosaurs for theological rather than psychological reasons. If they were part of God’s creation, what was their place in the order of things? And in what sense did they point forward to the creation of man, God’s masterpiece? Above all, Owen wanted to disprove the theory of progressive evolution, put forward by Lamarck, a process which culminated in the transition from ape to man, If man was to be clearly separated from the apes, then reptiles could not be the imme- diate precursors of mammals but must be sepa- rate creations who reached their peak early with the majestic dinosaurs and then declined into the pathetic swarms of lizards we see today. Dinosaurs, Owen argued, were not cring- ing creatures creeping about on their bellies, but upstanding beasts with advanced cardio- vascular systems, almost like the mammals who eventually superseded them, just as man superseded the mammals. Life progressed in uneven steps rather than in a continuous upward curve.
We know exactly how Owen envisaged dinosaurs because he had life-size models built. When the Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham, after the closing of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Owen was given the opportunity to design a series of dinosaurs to be erected on an artificial island in the Exhibi- tion Park, each consisting of up to 30 tons of cement and iron, and still standing today. The Great Exhibition, as Michael Sorkin points out in his intriguing book Variations on a Theme Park, was the Urform of the theme park, bringing together the wealth of nations into an enclosed
e 6 ii a z 2 g £ 4 =| 5 §
palace for tourists, which “depicted paradise. Not only was it laid out like a great cathedral, with nave and transept, but it was also the largest greenhouse ever built, its interior filled with greenery as well as goods, a climate-con- trolled reconciliation of Arcadia and industry, a garden for machines.” At Sydenham, now under commercial management, the exhibi- tion became an expanded leisure centre and the dinosaur replicas were one of its main attractions. The artist given the task of “revivi- fying the ancient world”, as he put it, was Ben- jamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who had earlier done the illustrations for Darwin's report on the reptiles he discovered on the voyage of the Beagle. Hawkins is thus the direct ancestor of Stan Winston, whose studio built the models for Jurassic Park. Just as Winston was advised by a team of palaeontologists, so Hawkins was advised by Owen.
Spielberg and Disney
The iguanadon, then the largest known such monster, was designed as a four-legged mam- mal-like creature, 100 feet long and 30 feet high, reminiscent of a huge rhinoceros rather than some lowly reptile like the crocodile. To publicise the new attraction, a dinner was held on a platform inside the iguanadon, its back still open, with Owen seated at the head of the table in the dinosaur’s head. The palaeontolo- gists and geologists who gathered in the mon- ster’s “socially loaded stomach”, as the Illustrated London News reported, were there to form “the best guarantee for the severe truthfulness” of Hawkins’ work. The visitor to the dinosaurs’ island was rewarded not only by the giant igua- nadon, but by a monster sloth in the act of climbing an antediluvian tree, a fearsome-look- ing megalosaurus, a plesiosaurus wallowing in the mud of a pool whose waters were artificially raised and lowered from three to eight feet to simulate the tide, and many other such wonders. There were tie-ins too: wall charts and small-scale models. Plainly the newly-minted dinosaur was in at the very birth of the theme park, mixing science with specta- cle as ever, each Brobdignagian creature fright- ening the Victorian tourist “with ideas of retribution in its monstrous jaws,” as the IIlus- trated London News gloatingly observed.
Richard Owen's main public antagonist in the battle over evolution was Thomas Huxley, who countered Owen's near-mammal theory of the dinosaur with his own innovatory claim that the dinosaurs were birds. After he left Eng- land for America, Hawkins set about building a
new series of models, this time of bird-like dinosaurs, to be exhibited in New York’s Cen- tral Park. Unfortunately this scheme never came to fruition and the bird-dinosaurs were vandalised and destroyed, In Jurassic Park, how- ever, they are back with a vengeance, running around like bloodthirsty ostriches, as Huxley had imagined.
It is appropriate that Jurassic Park should pop- ularise Huxley's belief that the dinosaurs were birds, recently revived by palaeontologists, since the film that is its own closest ancestor, I believe, is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. In The Birds, as in Jurassic Park, a couple is formed and a bachelor learns to care for ‘wife’ and ‘family’, as a prelude, we suppose, to marriage. He learns to care by protecting them from the threat of predatory creatures which at the beginning of the story seem perfectly harmless. As Carol Clover has pointed out, The Birds, like
Jaws, is a “marginal example” of the slasher
film. With The Birds and Jaws, the slasher genre merges with the fantastic monster film, beaks and teeth substituting for knives or saws as instruments of savage yet intimate penetration of the flesh. With the dinosaurs, teeth are sup- plemented by claws, and instead of the woman victim as the focus, as in The Birds, it is men who are attacked and killed. In a notorious com- ment a propos of The Birds, Hitchcock gave as his guiding principle the maxim: “Punish the women!” In Jurassic Park, Spielberg's motto could have been “Terrify the children!” While The Birds, like the classic slasher film, represents displaced, stylised rapes, Jurassic Park seems to represent displaced, stylised child molesting. The dinosaurs do not simply threaten, attack and kill people, they threaten to kill the most vulnerable victims — children who loved and trusted them. Thus the slasher-monster sub- genre mutates again in Spielberg’s hands. Spielberg is an undoubted auteur and his fascination and identification with children and the child’s point of view is a key character- istic of his work. Like Disney, another child-ori- ented auteur, Spielberg both seeks to nurture children and at the same time often threatens to terrify them. Disney's own dinosaurs, weirdly gambolling to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, are innocuous enough, but other Disney char- acters are truly terrifying. Like Spielberg, one of my earliest memories is of being taken to see Bambi, a film which traumatised me. Looking back, I believe I can relate my fright to other fears, engendered by the blitz and associated with the forest fire, the armed aggressors, sepa- ration from the mother, the absent father. In
Jurassic Park too the children’s fear is aggravated by being separated from their parents and then left alone to their fate. Painstakingly, in the face of repeated dinosaur attacks, a kind of safe family haven has to be created. As in other Spielberg films, there is a scientist, Dr Alan Grant, this time a palaeontologist — like the ichthyologist in Jaws or the archaeologist in Indiana Jones, but in striking contrast to the unworldly, accident-prone palaeontologist who stars in Hawks’ Bringing up Baby. In Jurassic Park, Grant becomes the heroic father figure, able to draw on his dinosaur knowledge to protect and reassure the children,
Sadistic sublime
The dinosaurs themselves also have no parents, no family life, since they have been prevented genetically from breeding. Even more sig- nificant, they are sexually ambiguous. Al- though they left the laboratory female, they are able to change sex and become male. Thus like Norman Bates in Psycho, they are of uncer- tain sex and also seem to displace their sexual impotence into violence, itself another major trope of the slasher genre.
We know from Metropolis that technology out of control is closely associated with sexual- ity out of control, two particularly terrifying forms of disorder. They are combined in the robot Maria, the creation of another mad sci- entist, the magician Rotwang. Rotwang too is determined to recreate the dead, in the form of the woman he lost to his rival, Fredersen. He loves his monster as, I believe, Hammond loves his, endlessly denying and disavowing every- thing in the face of ever-growing evidence of viciousness and depravity. If Dr Wu is the blandly sadistic father who fertilises the eggs and then castrates the offspring, Hammond is the enthusiastically protective mother who ignores every sign of his offspring’s monstros- ity. He builds a paradise garden for his saurian children, a walled garden. full of plants and trees and flowers. Paradise has become a theme park and the theme park replicates Shangri-La. But Paradise Regained quickly turns into Par- adise Lost. Jurassic Park becomes the site of what we might call the ‘sadistic sublime’. Nursery ter- rors of being torn to pieces and devoured alive are magnified to saurian scale.
Perhaps Spielberg should stop and ponder the fate of his monsters. Palaeontology shows us that the spectacular blockbuster was even- tually doomed, to be replaced by a swarm of tiny, marginal, low-budget creatures.
Jurassic Park’ opens in the UK on 16 July
SIGHT AND SOUND 9|7
Spielberg's obsession with the relation of children and death gains a new urgency in ‘Jurassic Park’, ByHenry Sheehan
The fears of children
At the start of Steven Spielberg's
Jurassic Park, its hero, palaeontolo- gist Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill), indulges in a fantasy about killing a child. Hav- ing been pestered by a 12-year-old boy asking antagonistic questions about dinosaurs, Grant tells him what would happen if he were stalked by velocirap- tors, viciously clever carnivores who, according to the scientist, hunted in
| the board is also there with another
|
teams and struck by surprise. The |
result of an encounter with these hunters, Grant explains, would be sure death. And to make his point he pulls a wicked-looking talon from his shirt and draws it over the child's stomach, describing the fatal wounds that would be inflicted. As a final flourish the scientist informs the kid that he would still be alive as the velociraptor began to feast on him.
From the point of view of the plot, this scene is a crucial se-up for what comes later in the film, which climaxes with a pair of velociraptors, who turn out to be just as clever and vicious as advertised, hot on the trail of a couple of children. It follows a sequence set on Jurassic Park's island in which a worker at the dinosaur amusement park is torn apart by a mysterious something barely contained inside a crate. But ina film in which familiar Spielberg types make only the wannest of impressions, the association of children with death stands out as an unusually stark pre- occupation,
This preoccupation goes beyond the mechanics of suspense, although it cer- tainly lends an extra edge to the threat posed by rampaging dinosaurs who suddenly find themselves free to roam and hunt on their island domain. The two most terrifying scenes in the film revolve specifically around the chil- dren's near death at the hands first of a tyrannosaurus rex and then of the velociraptors.
But these encounters also serve to play out the child-murder fantasies of Dr Grant. Grant's girlfriend, paleao- botanist Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), claims laughingly that the scientist has a phobia about kids, as if it were a bachelor's tic. But the way Neill plays Grant, dark and morose, there doesn't seem anything lighthearted about his disdain for them. When he's sent on a tour of the Jurassic Park facilities with a small group that includes a couple of kids, he glowers and sulks.
Those kids are 13-year-old Lex (Ari- ana Richards) and nine-year-old Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello), the grand- children of the park’s owner, billion- aire John Hammond, The wealthy busi- nessman has hired Grant and Sattler to write a report that will assure his board of directors that the island is safe for paying customers (a lawyer for
10|7 SIGHT ANDSOUND
scientist, Jeff Goldblum’s lan Malcolm, to prove the opposite). As a sign of his faith in his own creation, Hammond is willing to risk the lives of his grand- children, vouchsafing them to the care of parental stand-ins, willing Sattler and unwilling Grant.
This set-up mirrors the structure of Spielberg's first big hit, Jaws. There another powerful paterfamilias, the mayor of the vacation town of Ami- tyville, had badgered his employee, the local chief of police, into opening the town's beaches to prove they are safe from shark attack. As a result, the policeman’s own kids find themselves in the water when a huge, voracious great white shark goes hunting among the bathers. The subsequent voyage out to kill the beast is not just a matter of public safety but an act of expiation.
Murder fantasies Enacted murder fantasies have occurred in previous Spielberg efforts. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the heroic Jones is drugged by mem- bers of an Indian death cult. He is in the process of sacrificing a female com- panion to the cult’s deity when his sidekick, a little Chinese boy, manages to awaken him from his trance.
The dissatisfactions with family life that are implicit in Jaws are played out in Doom’s symbolic fantasy. The peri- patetic Jones, the personification of male independence, has been uncom- fortably saddled with an instant family in the guise of a buxom nightclub singer and an orphaned kid and has frequently voiced his wish to be rid of them. The drugging doesn't impose the all-male cult’s control so much as release Jones from his self-imposed social restraints. When the drug wears off, he not only rescues his own family group, but restores several dozen oth- ers by freeing captive children from the cult’s enslavement. Even Hook's Peter Banning enjoys a resurgent pre- adolescence when the evil Captain Hook cooperatively kidnaps his chil- dren. The businessman is free to regress to childhood unencumbered by paternal responsibilities.
Jurassic Park doesn't probe into the source of Grant's child-hatred. He's a single man, after all, and his liaison
Suffer little children: the threatening spectre of escaped dinosaurs out to kill in ‘Jurassic Park’
with fellow scientist Sattler doesn't imperil his professional status in any way. The children he meets aren't par- ticularly obnoxious; at worst they can be accused of being chatterboxes, a condition Grant appears to accept in adults. The association of children and death is just there in Jurassic Park, a stubborn fact to add to the genetically manufactured dinosaurs. The film, which otherwise carefully follows the rules of dramatic logic within its fan- tastic plot, even violates these rules in order to pursue the theme.
For example, the presence of that first boy, the one who hears Grant's story about the velociraptors, is inex- plicable. Grant is out in the middle of a desert conducting a dig with a team of scientists and university students. Why should there be a single, pestering boy along? And why in the world should Hammond, a reclusive, security-con- scious billionaire, entrust his grand- children to strangers?
They are there because Spielberg is building up to the scene where the T-Rex attacks, The build-up is frighten- ingly tense, anchored by the film- maker's intimate familiarity with childhood fear. The party has been sent out in two landrovers guided by an electrically charged rail which runs down the park's main roads. When the power fails, the cars come to a halt.
The security fences lose their charge at the same instant, and it’s not long before the rumble of huge footsteps ominously shakes the stalled vehicles. The sole adult with Lex and Tim ~ the lawyer - bolts almost immediately, sending the abandoned kids into hyste- ria. This notion of being left alone, that adults are untrustworthy protec- tors, pumps up the action that follows.
For when the T-Rex attacks — which it does with brutal ferocity — back in the other car Grant and Malcolm can only watch, Or so they tell each other. For it is motion that attracts the dino- saur’s eye; he can't see a still object. Grant has all the knowledge of adult- hood to justify his immobility.
The attack goes on for a long time, the better for Spielberg to lay out its details. He cuts into the scene, juxta- posing the dinosaur's teeth and the ter-
ror-stricken faces of the children again |
and again. The creature is relentless,
tive layers of the car to get at the squirming meat inside. The only time Spielberg cuts away is to show Grant sitting in his car watching, or to emphasise the space between the two vehicles, close but irretrievably distant.
Grant is eventually moved to action and with the help of Malcolm manages to escape with the kids. It’s an impul- sive act, as obscure as the source of Grant's dislike of children, although Neill’s squirming, coupled with his impassive features, does imply a deeper struggle. You could say that the rest of the film is a ritualistic enact- ment of Grant's penance, like the police chief’s voyage in Jaws. Grant and the children make their way through the manufactured prehistoric wilder- ness and have a final climactic bout with killer dinosaurs, this time with Ellie at their side,
| ‘Schindler’s List’
But you could also say that it is the automatic playing out of a pulp plot. All the digging in the movie is for fos- sils, not character, With its echoes of other characters from other movies, this is the remotest crew to people a Spielberg effort.
The power of the film's coupling of children and death arises almost solely from Spielberg’s obsessive invocation of it. He hasn't often pursued it from the child’s perspective: the exceptions being Empire of the Sun and The Color Pur- ple, in which inconvenient children overcome death largely by their own initiative. In a comic variation, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features an adult child entangled in a nearfatal intrigue sparked in part by an ageing father's competition with him, But more often it’s a case of the father or father figure trying to rescue a child just before it undergoes the death the father has unwittingly devised for it.
Certainly this makes Spielberg's pursual of his Schindler's List project
more understandable. For years the director has been trying to film Thomas Kenneally's account of a Ger- man industrialist who rescued over a thousand Jews from the Nazis, and for years people have wondered why the entertainment king wanted to tackle such a sombre project. As depicted by Kenneally, Oskar Schindler was a pater- nalistic figure whose tactic was to build factory camps which provided risky havens for Jews while seeming to cooperate with the Nazis. But there were moments when Schindler couldn't protect his charges from being rounded up for the death camps.
So less a sudden interest in history than a continuing obsession with fathers treading the line between life- giver and life-destroyer may motivate Spielberg's project, which he has now finished shooting. There's always been a dark, almost morbid streak in Spiel- berg’s work that most people have over- looked in favour of its easier emotions.
But here in Jurassic Park, a technical |
masterpiece and indifferent piece of drama, it’s that darkness, not the light, | that remains.
systematically tearing apart the protec- |
“A MUSICAL COMEDY MADE IN HEAVEN”
a a ae a, BRILLIANT. *
| LA
FINANCIAL TIMES
“LA chinely
FUNNY
DAILY MAIL
DAILY EXPRESS
“INFECTIOUSLY
DAILY TELEGRAPH
What do films such as ‘Indecent Proposal’ and ‘Carnal Crimes’ have in
common? Who enjoys them?
By Linda Ruth Williams
EROTIC THRILLERS AND
RUDE WOMEN
Hidden connections: the down-market, straight-to-video ‘Carnal Crimes’, top, and high-profile blockbuster ‘Indecent Proposal’, above, both films with unhappy women at their core
12|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
Although Indecent Proposal may look like
the game of Scruples with a budget, its source is a maligned straightto-vvideo genre which is big business at many a local store. The film which launched a thousand dinner-party conversations has lower cultural roots than those who paid to see it — but wouldn't dream of renting an ‘erotic thriller’ video — imagine.
When Willem Dafoe posits the possibility that it’s “a crime to be a great lay”, he situates Body of Evidence also squarely in erotic thriller ter- ritory. High or low, blockbuster or denigrated sleaze video, the genre dominates the main- stream movie and video market — despite the fact that audiences and makers of films such as Body of Evidence, Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction might dispute their connection with videos such as brand leader Alexander Gregory Hippolyte’s Night Rhythms, Carnal Crimes and Secret Games.
On video, erotic thrillers are basic stories of sexual intrigue that use some form of criminal- ity or duplicity as the flimsy framework to sup- port on-screen sex which is as explicit as possible, Despite the popular image of the erotic thriller as a blanket term for unchallenging sleaze, as with any other genre there are good erotic thrillers and bad ones. Certainly some of these films are simply feebly acted 90s exploita- tion movies which fail to do anything interesting with the sex, but others are thematically, as well as sexually, provocative.
The classic opening narrative runs thus: a neglected wife, some years into her lousy mar- riage, is advised by her female friend to find sat- isfaction with some new blood. Early scenes in which wives fail to get their husbands to come to bed are legion: the resolutely down-market Car- nal Crimes and Secret Games both boast key scenes of pleading in underwear, while even the rela- tively chaste blockbuster Indecent Proposal demon- strates its kinship to the video genre when Demi Moore places the hand of her scribbling husband on her breast, only to have him remove it so he can get on with his work. Viewers in the know will spot this gesture as the first step on the slip- pery slope towards erotic thriller infidelity, and the perils as well as the pleasures of sex.
Without making radical claims for these movies, their primary brief generally ensures that there is something interesting to watch, since they explore danger and sex in a format which is both thriller and skin-flick, often figur- ing a female protagonist who herself combines the roles of sexual interest, enraged victim and
* vigilante-survivor. The film noir seductress with a
pearl-handled revolver is succeeded-in the erotic thriller by the Beverly Hills housewife with an appetite for sexual danger or the 90s adventuress with a way with candlewax and a damn good lawyer. These are women who bring their hand- cuffs with them and use their charge cards only on designer lingerie — the low-budget daughters of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, itself a rework- ing of Double Indemnity, perhaps the grand- mother of all erotic thrillers.
While Basic Instinct was frequently compared to Jagged Edge, also written by Joe Eszterhas, an even less flattering parallel could be drawn with a number of more disreputable films. Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell is only a more expen- sive version of erotic thriller video queen Delia Sheppard, who as Bridget the avenging lesbian of Night Rhythms at least sticks to her sexuality
and refuses to be swayed by the charms of the first man to cross her path. Basic Instinct is surely Jag Mundhra'’s The Other Woman in reverse: instead of the cop falling for the wrong woman and in the process persuading her away from les- bianism, The Other Woman presents the more intriguing possibility of a heroine turning away from heterosexuality to another woman, chal- lenging the notion that all she ever needed to put her on the right track was a good heterosex- ual seeing to (the message of Basic Instinct).
From their titles alone it would be hard to tell erotic thrillers apart, though this is as true of the blockbusters as of the straight-to-video releases. Almost all of them marry two shocking words in a single come-on message, and there is a sense that any of these words could be remixed into a new combination. The erotic words tend to be adjectives, adding sexual emphasis to the nouns: instincts are basic, crimes are carnal, pro- posals are indecent, intent is sexual, But this can easily be reversed, for just as dark thoughts are sexy, so is sex deadly, attraction fatal.
Yet although both are animated by explicit sex and criminal thrills, the blockbuster erotic thriller, with its high production values, massive budgets and stars who can open a movie, has a racy prestige which its video sister never gains, for all the desperately classy aspirations of its mise en scéne. This perception of video erotic thrillers as the poor cousins of the films made for theatrical release is based partly on a general privileging of theatrically released films over straight-to-video works, a distinction enforced by the Video Recordings Act. Private viewing does of course change the nature of a film, and it is true that video erotic thrillers set out to be sexually stimulating. And in that they operate with a con- stant awareness of masturbation as a prime audi- ence response and index of the film’s success, video erotic thrillers are able to flirt openly with pornography.
Stealing the plots
The Video Recordings Act of 1984, introduced during a wave of panic about “private home viewing”, was the first piece of British legislation to consider the criterion of “suitability for view- ing in the home” What this has meant is that video certification - taking into account the medium's capacity for repeated viewings and freeze-framing - tends to be more draconian than cinematic certification, a trend that runs contrary to the persistent notion that sex films made specifically for viewing within the home must be riskier, more offensive and more sexist than anything which could show at your local cinema. Backing up this notion is one particular feminist line on pornography - that the further away from the mainstream (in cinema or maga- zines) sexually explicit material gets, the more pernicious to women it becomes. While it is true that many straight-to-video films have been released with their sexual riskiness intact, sexi- ness is not an index of sexism. Since their raison d'étre is to stimulate, video erotic thrillers do of course sail closer to the wind of censorship than films such as Indecent Proposal, which was released in Britain with a 15 certificate (raising the question of what happens to a film which has its generic origins in pornography when you take the pornography out). If the video erotic thriller is ‘harder’, this is because it represents
not only the passive women of ‘softer’, main- stream movies, but more explicit sex and male bodies in equal measure, as well as sexually aggressive women. Stealing the plots of their poor relations, cleansing them of any residual feminism and some of their raw, ‘deviant’ moments, what the blockbusters have done is to engage in a series of anodyne remakes, sanding down the revealing rough edges.
All of which suggests that there might be something interesting going on for women in a genre which seems marketed primarily for the male heterosexual eye. In a recent BBC Radio 5 interview, Dave Lewis of Medusa films called these “good-quality B movies - B for beer, biriani and bonking” which would appeal primarily to “young guys aged between 18 and 30”. He added, however, that “these are films that look at sex from a woman's angle”, and it is true that the pleasures for women here are substantial, and not simply because of the videos’ willingness to represent in liberal doses good old-fashioned val- ues such as strong female characters, female friendship, and women being articulate about their desires and finding fulfilment without necessarily selling their sisters out.
The discourse of male ownership, for instance, permeates the fabric of both Secret Games and Indecent Proposal, but itis arguably only the former which challenges it. Where Julianne, heroine of Secret Games, independently capitalises on her role as her ghastly husband's prize pos- session by selling herself in a ritzy brothel (and enjoying it too), Demi Moore's Diana in Indecent Proposal is traded from husband to lover, protest- ing that she did it for her husband and that she could not make the decision alone. Women in both films might go back to where they ‘belong’ in the end, but only the video version presents the man who says “You're for sale - and I'm going to buy you” as dangerously objectionable. “You collect things, don’t you?” asks Demi Moore of Robert Redford as she is herself acquired, but Redford emerges as a benign figure who, having “collected” her, lets her go; Secret Games’ Eric, on the other hand, is finally defeated by a group of women working together,
The men in the videos are generally unequiv- ocally despicable, their threat to the heroines laying bare the oppositional nature of relations between the sexes and the danger as well as the desirability of men. Sex is both the answer to and the cause of women’s problems, and in pre- senting sexual relations as threat as well as indulgence, erotic thrillers, for all their glossy post-feminism, are still dramatising a battle in the sex war. There is little fudging the issue by presenting men - as do the blockbusters - who are nothing worse than likeably confused, mis- guided or blinded by desire (Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct, William Hurt in Body Heat, or Willem Dafoe in Body of Evidence). The husbands in the videos are at best unpleasantly indifferent to their women, at worse aggressive, while male lovers are frequently murderous. In Carnal Crimes the heroine’s vile husband and feckless lover enter into a pact against her; in Kurt MacCarley’s Sexual Intent, the tale of a villain who systemati- cally defrauds women is spliced with a series of candid straight-to-camera accounts by ordinary women elaborating with personal relish on the ‘all men are bastards’ theme (Madonna's line in Body of Evidence, “I never know why men lie - they
just do” is the faint, mainstream echo of many of the videos’ angrier voices). It is easy to see the pleasures for women in Sexual Intent, not only from the vox pop testimonies, but as it turns from erotic thriller to rape-revenge narrative, when three of the women overcome their sexual rivalry to get together, round up the villain and shoot him, only so a fourth can run him over. Even the less appealing Carnal Crimes has its revengeful heroine redistribute her husband’s money to the servants.
Sex and death
This is not to say that the simple presentation of men as villains constitutes a feminist move, even in tandem with a barrage of soft-feminist points. But neither could it be said that these are unam- biguously misogynistic films; the suspenders may be manifold, the camera may frequently linger on the perfect Californian female body, but this is not the whole story. Indeed, in films which are so overtly directed towards male het- erosexual desire, the narrative attack on mas- culinity presents something of a problem; the patterns of identification for male and female viewer are far from simple.
The fact that erotic thrillers are so resound- ingly ideologically confused, and that they wear this confusion on their sleeves in a way the blockbusters don't, facilitates other pleasures than those for which they were overtly designed. A scene in Secret Games, for instance, in which a group of women discuss the inadequacy of men (“Women are more considerate,” says one, while another protests that “Men don't know what women want") takes place as the women lounge topless around a swimming pool: the sexualised bodies and women-only talk suggests male-fanta- sised lesbianism, but the talk itself takes the scene elsewhere. Earlier, three women offer a characteristically male-oriented voyeuristic spec- tacle by trying on their raunchiest underwear in front of each other — but on the whole, the scene combines the pleasures of shopping with the pleasures of sex in an atmosphere that is part tupperware party, part orgy. Add to this confu- sion of signals a large helping of self-parody and something rather surprising is taking place. For example, Leon Ichaso’s Those Bedroom Eyes, a non- explicit made-fortelevision film (the steamy sax- ophone apparently making up for the lack of steamy sex), cuts from the shooting of a man ina torrent of jacuzzi foam to a train going into a tunnel, in a film whose hero is a psychology lec- turer with a cat called Freud.
If husbands are neglectful, best friends - in the video films at least — are indulgent. This is another key difference: in the ‘lower' films women have buddies who look out for them, but not so the blockbusters: Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal can share her moral dilemma with no one, while Body of Evidence pits all three women (Madonna, Dafoe’s wife, and Anne Archer replay- ing her Fatal Attraction role as the now faithful secretary) completely against each other in a tri- angle of hate, In Fatal Attraction the solitary Glenn Close character is notoriously dispatched by Archer as righteous wife, and while in Basic Instinct Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell is seen with a number of women of all ages, she hardly inspires affection. The videos tell a different story — loyalty and the benefits of sexual healing are central to the lore which circulates between
female friends in these films: here it is women's role to prescribe a sexual cure for the ills of mar- riage. Beyond the point that this is, of course, the justification for the heroine’s subsequent strip and every sex scene in the film, the women are at least doing it for themselves rather than being swayed by sexual pressure from the first toy-boy who shows interest or kindness. Elise’s best friend in Carnal Crimes encourages her affair and dismisses all guilt, while the distinctly unglamourous heroine of Sexual Intent, battered wife June, is told by her friend Kath “sometimes you just have to go for it — listen to your gut for a change.” In the move from ‘low’ video to ‘high’ blockbuster, such female friends are lost.
The worst that can be said about this woman- to-woman remedy is that it ignores the post- Female Eunuch arguments against sexual liberation as a lifestyle, not to say political, cure- all. This is slick sex as therapy for social ennui, a silicone sexual revolution as prescribed by the Beverly Hills sisterhood in which you can have free love as well as the face lifts. Most of the women do finally stick with their marriages: marriage does, after all, bring significant fringe benefits, in particular the pleasures of conspicu- ous consumption. In this, Indecent Proposal is something of a departure, since Demi Moore opts for loye’s sake for husband and poverty rather than the paying stranger.
Compared to their low-budget, straight-to- video sisters, the women of the blockbusters have little obvious appeal for women in the audi- ence, as the gut response of many women to Basic Instinct demonstrates. Here sex-as-crime enjoyed for its pervier pleasures is disavowed by a final message which condemns it — the return of fam- ily values, of wife to husband, the death of the harpy: in Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence, Indecent Proposal, Final Analysis, you name it. The point isn’t, as J. Hoberman has written in Sight and Sound, that the women-as-designer-sex-toys who populate the blockbusters have unexpectedly turned nasty: the shock of the icepick isn’t the shock of a woman taking up arms, it’s that some- one has bothered to lay out their fantasy of female sadism made in the image of male masochism so explicitly and expensively while pretending it’s something else. Women who kill in the blockbusters do so as part of the oiliest designer fantasy; men might die beyond the lit- tle death, but the women’s powers are hardly self-appointed.
It is left to the cheaper movies to explore more fully a woman's view of the kill, and her motives, At least the lower-budget women get good sex as well as the pleasures of the feminist vigilante. At least they can shoot the buggers honestly and for their own reasons, without finding that, after all, they were only playing out the active role in his last fantasy.
My objection to this streak in the glossies isn't that a particularly narrow mode of male sadism is having it out on the screen, but that it’s pre- tending to be something else, something smarter and less ‘deviant’ (not so the low-bud- gets, which if they want to show forms of sado- masochism from one side or the other or indulge in any variety of gratuitous ‘perversions’ will do so). The ponderous sadomasochism of Body of Evidence, so desperate to shock, entirely lacks the routine nonchalance of the numerous scenes of three-way sex, voyeurism and domi- >
SIGHT AND SOUND 13|7
In ‘Basic Instinct’, the spectacle of Tramell and her psycho girlfriend becomes that of a pair of entwined Playmates of the month
Femmes fatales: women are perceived as threatening to men in ‘Body of Evidence’, top, or by excluding them altogether asin the lesbian sex of the popular ‘Secret Games’, above
14|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
<4 nation to be found in the videos. The heroine of Carnal Crimes is initiated into infidelity as she drips blood from her wounded arm on to another woman, while a man — the film's ‘pur- veyor of perversions’ - takes pictures; the glam- orous female shrink in Sexual Intent masturbates to the videos of testifying women. Before their own lesbian encounter in The Other Woman, Jes- sica watches a man pouring milk over Traci’s breasts; the madame of the high-class brothel of Secret Games masturbates to the remote-camera images of her girls getting it on. The spectacle of female pleasure, particularly pleasure which excludes men, is central. There is little moral gloss, and women are seldom the villains, and even less often the villains by simple virtue of their sexuality.
Erotic thrillers may almost have done away with the femme fatale, but this doesn’t stop their women from being unsettlingly exciting. How- ever audacious they are, they don’t get punished for it, and having enjoyed the sex they can then switch roles as the films slip genres and the women take their revenge. Compare this to the familiar track record of the blockbusters: Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction is dispatched in perhaps the most notorious female death in 80s cinema; in Body of Evidence, Madonna is put on trial, shot and then drowned. If Fatal Attraction had gone straight to video, avoiding the infamous preview screenings at which audiences, enraged by the original suicide ending, shouted “Kill the bitch”, the Close character may have escaped. Only the incredibly pernicious conclusion of Night Rhythms gets close to blockbuster punishment, as Bridget is carted off to prison with Nick accusing her not only of killing her lover Honey, but of being lousy in bed, a frustrated dyke and an ambitious career woman who has stolen his radio show.
Lesbianism is a central concern of these films, and its representation raises the question of female response both within the narrative and for women in the audience. Susie Bright, one- time editor of American lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs, has made the point that the sexual imagination is adept at appropriating material from a variety of sources, and that lesbians have long used male heterosexual porn, viewing against the grain of the text’s heterosexual mes- sage to find other pleasures through it, includ- ing those provided by the stock images of lesbian sex that appear in all these films. While none of these films could unproblematically be called lesbian porn - even though at least one such sex scene seems obligatory in each of them - this is not to say that lesbians cannot enjoy watching them, or that the actresses involved did not enjoy what they were doing. But the values and images of the Hippolyte stable, not to say the ‘higher’ lesbianism of Basic Instinct, are neverthe- less a far cry from the lesbian porn marketed specifically for women, using lesbian models, photographers and editorial staff, to be found in On Our Backs or British magazine Quim.
Indeed, Catherine Tramell and her video sis- ters, the designer dykes of the raunchier erotic thrillers, are not so much bisexual as hetero-les- bian, putting their lesbianism on show not, apparently, for their own pleasure but as a fore- play spectacle for the eyes of a man - or, in the case of Basic Instinct, as the primary weapon of heterosexual enticement. In this capacity,
Tramell is fashioned by the sharpest misogynist knife (or icepick), as she manages to alienate other women not only by virtue of her indiffer- ence to them as sexual partners the minute Michael Douglas’ cop waves his magic wand, but by her use of them to appear more alluring to him in the first place. In this light, the spectacle of Tramell and her psycho girlfriend becomes that of a pair of entwined Playmates of the month — maybe a bit murderous, but still look- ing fixedly into the male eye which is in the end more interesting.
If lesbianism, which ought to threaten and revolt men because it excludes them, is a come- on, then so is the possibility of murder, which ought to invoke an even stronger reaction in its threat to do away with them altogether, Yet here female murderousness is a partner in crime with hetero-lesbianism; male sexual exclusion be- comes the most exciting possible thing, as does the risk of annihilation. In both cases the male sexual role is more central the greater the risk he takes, the more sexually and fatally threatened he is. The less a man seems to be needed in the sex scenes of these films, the more sure you can be that the whole thing is being played out for his benefit. When a character such as Stone's turns to women as she is turning on men, she may suggest the possibility of the man being done away with altogether; but this is a stylised ritual of taboo-breaking at which erotic thrillers are adept. Madonna’s body-as-murder-weapon — “no different from a gun or a knife” — is precisely what Willem Dafoe wants, even though, or per- haps because, he risks being its victim.
The rough incoherence of the videos - smoothed out to some extent in the blockbusters ~ facilitates a number of other readings. Susie Bright has written in celebration of dyke dad- dies, “lesbian-identified men” who “don’t want to save the lesbians” (by giving them a bit of what they're really after), “they want to be the les- bians.” Heterosexual response is obviously not as straightforward as we might like to think, with a range of subversive cross-identifications going on in the pornographic scenario of the video erotic thriller, for women as well as for men. It is this contradictory transgression of conven- tions that makes the video erotic thriller a more engaging prospect than its anodyne, high- budget counterpart.
Scratch the surface
“Today’s ‘meat movie’ is tomorrow's block- buster”, writes Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chain Saws, which highlights a key relationship between low-budget, rough-edged ‘nasties’ and high-profile, high-budget glossy shocker thrillers: “Scratch the glossy surface of Silence of the Lambs and you have a slasher film... Scratch Pacific Heights and you are in an economy of bloodsucking that looks like nothing so much as a vampire film.” Video erotic thrillers are equally the disavowed but influential underbelly of the current spate of sexy blockbusters. Scratch the surface of Basic Instinct and you have a straight-to- video erotic thriller with a bigger budget, while Indecent Proposal looks rather like Secret Games with most of the sex taken out. The soundtrack might tell us that this is “no ordinary love” as Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson fuck on their bed of money, but it is the love that erotic thrillers are made of.
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The rock music scene, ‘The Puppetmaster’, ‘Beijing Bastards’ and the Hong Kong festival: Tony Rayns reports from China
DREAM ON
The best rock band | saw in Beijing this
spring was Xuewei, whose name means ‘Acupuncture Point’. They came on towards midnight on a Thursday evening at a ‘rock party’ in a shopping mall on the city’s third ring road. Their vehement lead vocals were in English (the singer, I was told, is half-Chinese, half-Dutch) and they played loud, hard rock with more rhythmic and melodic complexity than most of the audience could handle. I liked their mismatched but all-in-black dress and loved their sound as much as anything I’ve heard since I caught Talking Heads at their Lon- don debut, supporting the Ramones at the Roundhouse. Xuewei's stuffisn’t even on under- ground tapes yet, let alone on sale in the music stores; hard to say if they'll hold it together until the right A&R scout happens along.
A week earlier, I'd sat through a concert by Hei Bao (‘Black Panther’) at the Capital Sta- dium, surrounded by students dutifully clap- ping and waving lighters above their heads. Hei Bao seemed like an interesting band a few years ago, but they've turned into China’s answer to Bon Jovi: tight trousers, hair down to their nip- ples and endless macho posturing. Rock con- certs on this scale (the stadium holds around 10,000) still require a pretext in the People’s Republic, so Hei Bao dedicated the evening to an old people’s charity and interrupted the set to hand over a cheque to a group of waiting suits. The SRO crowd clapped, but otherwise behaved exactly as the equivalent western audi- ence would have done.
Although it’s interesting to speculate why
16|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
China's cities have developed such a varied and deep-rooted rock scene when Hong Kong and Taiwan — far more open to western influences for far longer - have not, the most exciting thing about Beijing’s burgeoning sub-culture is that it now includes film- and video-makers. Zhang Yuan's Mama demonstrated two years ago that it was possible to make a 35mm movie entirely outside the state studio system, and Zhang went on to cement a link between inde- pendent film-making and the rock music scene by making three excellent music videos for Cui Jian, China's rock pioneer and still the scene’s most considerable presence. Now Zhang is in the final stages of post-production with his sec- ond feature Beijing Bastards (Beijing Zazhong), which is about kids in and on the fringes of the rock scene. And three other young directors without jobs in the state film industry have recently finished no-budget independent fea- tures, while a growing number of directors from television are turning freelance to make documentaries on video,
All of this new work stands apart from ear- lier Chinese norms. Documentary tapes like Wen Pulin and Duan Jinchuan’s The Sacred Site of Asceticism (mChims-phu, about a Buddhist retreat in Tibet), the SWYC Group’s I Graduated! (Wo Biyele, about the fate of the generation that occupied Tiananmen Square) and Wu Wen- guang’s 1966: My Time in the Red Guards (1966: Wo de Hongweibing Shidai, picking over memories of the Cultural Revolution) - all of them screened in this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival but so far unseen in China - are utterly unlike what passes for documentary on Chinese television, not only in their choice of subjects but also in their questioning and committedly personal angles of approach.
Similarly, the independently made features have next to nothing in common with main- stream movies from the state studios, nor with the kind of foreign-financed co-productions that have kept ‘Fifth Generation’ directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang in business in recent years. Since they were made on shoestrings, the inde- pendent features naturally look and sound dif- ferent from other Chinese movies. But it’s their underlying attitude that makes them truly dis- tinct. They express feelings about urban soci- ety, sex, mental health, music and dreams that have never found their way into Chinese films before — no doubt because older directors have had other priorities and other issues on their minds. These new films are obviously as varied as the directors who made them, but they all share an idiosyncratic mixture of anger and blankness, in most cases spiked with a black, cynical humour.
Not exactly a rock film
Beijing Bastards stars Cui Jian (also credited as one of four producers and one of three writers) and shows quite a bit of music in performance, but it’s not exactly a rock film. Zhang Yuan is less interested in the music as such than in the bearing it has on the lives of the young people who use it as their soundtrack. The film loosely interweaves the comings, goings and minor crises of five main characters; the song and con-
cert sequences are used to define tone and mood and sometimes to provide narrative con- text, The structure is deliberately episodic and rambling, and some of the scenes in which peo- ple get drunk, kill time or pick fights play like open-ended, Cassavetes-style improvisations. But one broken relationship gives the film its overall frame: a young man (played by the 23- year-old Li Wei, a real-life rock promoter) spends the film looking for the pregnant girl- friend who has left him and botching his approaches to potential new girlfriends. Com- pletely unpretentious, the film finally coheres into a detailed and incisive sketch of youthful doubts and frustrations, only some of which are particular to present-day Beijing.
Two of the other independent features form an involuntary diptych, partly because both are formally composed and shot in mono- chrome, but also because both worry away at precise emotional insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. Wang Xiaoshuai’s Days (Dong-Chun de Rizi, which I was able to see only in a silent rough-cut) chronicles the decline and collapse of a marriage. A painter and his wife (played by Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, real-life stars of the Beijing art world) are trapped in a grinding domestic routine and — like many self-em- ployed artists in China - worn down by the pressures of living outside the state system. They try to pick themselves up by taking a trip to Manchuria, the wife's birthplace, only to find a chasm opening up between them. On the evidence of the rough-cut, Wang (who was the outstanding talent in the directing class that graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1989) brings a clear, poetic eye to his gloomy subject. The film has the air of a dream shading into nightmare, but the tone is more elegiac than miserabilist.
He Yi is the nom de cinéma of He Jianjun, a more recent survivor of the Film Academy who worked as assistant director to Tian Zhuang- zhuang on The Blue Kite before making his own first film. Xuan Lian (the title means something like ‘Uncertain Love’) is an extended reverie: while waiting for his girlfriend in a noisy restaurant, a pale young man (Liu Jiang, actu- ally trained as a cinematographer) fantasises a scenario in which he is hired as an orderly in a mental hospital and becomes obsessed with a young woman patient, gradually entering her delusions and identifying with her sickness. Open to any number of interpretations, the film is finely balanced between nightmare and black comedy. It makes grimly humorous play with long takes and manic patterns of repeti- tion while pushing slowly towards its longed- for sexual encounter, achieving a genuine oneiric charge along the way.
Wu Di'’s The Goldfish (Huangjin Yu) is the flipside of this diptych, in that it’s framed as jaunty comedy-drama but shot through with similar emotional and sexual anxieties. The premise resembles Alain Tanner’s Le Retour d'Afrique: a personable but unassertive guy and his go-getter girlfriend plan to emigrate to the US, but he chickens out at the airport; the cou- ple then spend weeks hiding from their rela- tives and friends in a rented room in the countryside, during which time their relation-
Intimate stories:
Li Tianlu, raconteur of
‘The Puppetmaster’, above; Wu Di (centre), shooting his jaunty comedy-drama ‘The Goldfish’, below
ship falls to pieces. Like Zhang Yimou and Zhang Yuan, Wu is a cinematographer turned director; he shot part of Ning Ying’s For Fun and helped out on Wang Xiaoshuai’s Days. His film has a cheerful ebullience that ought to earn it wide distribution in China. As I write, though, word comes from Beijing that it went down badly at a screening for cinema bookers, who found it lacking in violence and other exploitable features.
Cinema bookers are revelling in new-found power and responsibility in China, thanks to the latest round of film industry ‘reforms’. China Film Corporation has just lost its monop- olies in domestic distribution and the foreign sale of Chinese films; the studios themselves are now entitled to distribute their own pro- ductions and to sell them abroad - although none of them currently has the linguistic or business competence to tackle the global mar- ket. Zhang Xingyuan, chief of the Foreign Affairs department of the government's Film Bureau, explained to me that these changes were designed to force the studios into a keener awareness of their markets at home and abroad; he didn’t need to add that they were prompted by the literal bankruptcy of the old system. The Film Bureau will inevitably retain overall ideological control of Chinese cinema and will go on supervising China’s participa- tion in international film festivals, and Zhang Xingyuan envisages that most foreign sales will still be negotiated through the Film Corpora- tion. The demoralised staff of the Film Corpora- tion, however, see things differently. They plan
to close down their English-language magazine China Screen when the current contract with the printer runs out, and are exploring the possi- bility of setting up a new line of business as an advertising agency.
Shock waves
The Film Bureau’s difficulty, it seems to me, is that the Chinese films most likely to be of inter- est to audiences around the world are going to be those from the co-production and indepen- dent sectors, not from the old-established stu- dios. In the last six months, China’s 14 major
studios have come up with precisely two fea- |
tures capable of holding their own on the inter- national stage: Xie Fei’s Women from the Lake of
Scented Souls (Xianghun Nii, which shared the |
Golden Bear in Berlin) and Huang Jianxin’s new satirical comedy about economic reforms Stand Up, Don’t Bend Over (Zhanzhiluo, Bie Paxia, pre- miered at the Hong Kong festival). The two Mainland Chinese movies that went down so well at this year’s Cannes Film Festival were both financed from Hong Kong: Chen Kaige's Farewell to My Concubine (Bawang Bie Ji) and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (Lan Fengzheng). Although Chen’s romantic epic won hima long overdue Palme d'Or, China felt so little propri- etorial interest in the film that it didn’t even send an official delegation to the festival. The appearance of Tian’s film, on the other hand, provoked shock waves in Beijing because it is officially banned and Tian was refused permis- sion to go to Tokyo to supervise its post-pro- duction. The sales agent in Cannes received >
SIGHT AND SOUND 17|7
4 san agitated phonecall at 5am from Cheng Zhigu, head of Beijing Film Studio, asking if it was true that The Blue Kite was being screened secretly at the festival. When he replied “No, not true, it’s being screened openly,” Cheng brought the conversation to a rapid close.
The Blue Kite was one of the few hits in the Cannes market this year; it was sold for distrib- ution in many countries (including Britain), an achievement unlikely to be matched by this year’s echt-Hong Kong movies, to judge by those
| screened at the Hong Kong festival in April. As
1997 draws closer and worries about the future under China’s sovereignty harden into concrete fears, Hong Kong film-makers are spending more and more time harking back to the com- forting certainties of the past. Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop, which since the mid-80s has done little but revive and update old genre movies, is now devoting most of its resources to two on- going series: Once Upon a Time in China III (Huang Feihong zhi San: Shiwang Zhengba, directed by Tsui himself) rehashes the allegorical conceits of its two predecessors before turning into a blatant remake of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 version, of course) at its climax, while Swordsman III (Dongfang Bu Bai zhi Fengyun Zai Qi, produced by Tsui and directed by Ching Siu-Tung and Raymond Lee) tries to wring blood from the stone of a feeble political satire on true and false leadership. Last year’s sur- prise success was Joe Chan's 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (92 Hei Meigui dui Hei Meigui), a camp pas- tiche of Cantonese superhero/crimebuster
| movies of the 60s. Even Jacob Cheung’s Cageman
18|7 SIGHT ANDSOUND
. (Longmin), which swept the board at the Hong Kong Film Awards, is an unacknowledged
remake/revision of the 20-year-old hit House of
72 Tenants — and it’s no less evasively sentimen- tal than the old film in resolving intractable housing problems, either. Hong Kong’s current dreams, in short, are nostalgic going on stale.
Ambiguity and mystery
Thanks to its star system, its level of technical expertise and its boundless self-confidence, there is no immediate danger of the Hong Kong film industry losing its dominance of the Pacific-Asian market. In Taiwan, where the film industry came close to rolling over and dying as imports from Hong Kong stole its audience, things are paradoxically much livelier. Hou Xiaoxian has finally completed his long-delayed The Puppetmaster (Ximeng Rensheng) and — to the surprise of his enemies in the Taiwan press - has a Cannes Jury Prize to show for it. The film suffers from being hyped as an epic-scale account of Taiwanese history in the years under Japanese occupation; it is, in fact, a small and intimate film, narrowly focused on famil- ial and domestic matters, that uses its protago- nist’s profession as leader of a traditional puppet theatre troupe as the key to otherwise elusive aspects of Chinese philosophy and folk culture. It’s based on the autobiography of Li Tianlu, who has appeared as a patriarch in Hou’s last three films, and Li himself con- tributes his inimitable skills as a raconteur, first on the soundtrack and then on camera. Hou shoots much of it in extended takes from
5
fixed angles, allowing the eye to explore the images and the mind to explore the weightand meaning of events as they are revealed through minutiae of dialogue, gesture and movement. Some viewers in Cannes, presumably needing something more assertive, walked out; others, like me, found it the most deeply engrossing film of the festival and stayed to weep at its beauty. I guess general audiences will divide much the same way.
Coming so soon after The Peach Blossom Land and Rebels of the Neon God, The Puppetmaster sug- gests that Taiwan cinema is on something of a | roll. I spent a week in Taipei in May, meeting directors and viewing new and nearly com- pleted films, and came away exhilarated. Edward Yang is busy shooting his comedy (now called The Confucian Confusion) and is confident that it’s his best work to date. Tsai Ming-Liang, still high on the success of Rebels of the Neon God in Berlin, is rewriting the script for his second feature, to be shot in the summer. And Huang Mingchuan, whose haunting debut feature The Man from Island West pioneered genuinely inde- | pendent production in Taiwan, has nearly finished editing his follow-up Bodo (Baodao Dameng), financed almost entirely from his own earnings as a director of commercials - a pro- fession he now hopes he has left behind. I saw an hour of the Bodo rough-cut and found it extraordinary: a dreamy ghost story about the army and military deserters that wavers between realism and the surreal. (Taiwan, of course, is still technically at war with China, and males are still required to do two years’ |
Wavering between worlds: military service —- an obligation that some try ‘Bodo’, a dreamy ghost to evade and others desert from.) Huang’s care-
story about the army and ful, often painterly images and the constant rome haplacen subtle changes of register reflect the film’s con- the pele Meurepiial, ditions of production: a small, self-sufficient above; director Huang unit with crew members sometimes doubling Mingchuan and actor as cast, no interfering producer, no priority but Shi Nanhua, below to make the best film possible. Neither side
knows it, but Huang Mingchuan has much in common with independents like Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai in Beijing.
Two of the new features I saw in Taipei will certainly attract attention when they enter the festival circuit later this year. 18, by the US- trained He Ping, is an all-night rave of a movie: a disquieting anti-bourgeois satire that winds up closer to existentialism for the post-amphet- amine generation. It has a one-sentence plot: a middle-aged straight on a summer drive in the country abandons wife and daughter when he grows obsessed by the dice game 18 as played by earthy locals who make him question his roots. But He Ping (or P’ing Ho as he writes it himself) fragments and splinters the story in a way that makes Nicolas Roeg look like Dreyer. Time is contracted and dilated, identities blur and the screen fills with ambiguities and mys- teries. The film often stalls in its own visual rhetoric, but still manages to build a cumula- tive emotional impact. The whole is anchored in a remarkable performance by the Peking Opera actor Wu Xingguo, making his first appearance in a movie.
Yu Weiyan’s Moonlight Boy (Yueguang Shaon- ian), on the other hand, has a consummate
sense of what it’s doing from start to finish, and does it with some of the most lustrous chiaroscuro cinematography to reach the screen in years. The opening scenes are unnerv- ing, even baffling, but the central conundrum soon emerges: why has a timid 13-year-old boy been roaming the streets of Taipei for 30 years without growing a day older?
Skewed romance
Without giving too much away, the answer lies in a skewed family romance: a stern, cold father, a helpless mother, a neurotic sister who became a Christian zealot, and a_ hapless, underachieving boy. Like several of the other new Chinese movies discussed here, this is a ghost story of a non-traditional sort that fol- lows its own dream logic; Yu even blends live action and animation in a few sequences, Noth- ing seems real - except for the huge reservoir of unresolved emotional pain that blocks the characters and becomes the film's ‘hidden’ sub- ject. Yu’s understated work with his actors may owe something to the years he spent working with Edward Yang on A Brighter Summer Day, but this film is very much his own. You have to ask where film-making as rich and original as this has come from, and you have to conclude that the collapse of old film-industry orthodoxies must have something to do with it. Maybe that’s one more thing that China and Taiwan have in common.
Author’s thanks to Paul Clark, Shan Dongbing, Huang Mingchuan and Dongdong for various kinds of help in the writing of this article
SIGHT AND SOUND 19|7
Colin Nutley, the British director of the celebrated Swedish film ‘House of Angels’, talks to Philip Kemp
FACING THE SUN
For much of last year Swedish box-office
charts were headed by a Swedish-made feature, Anglagdrd (House of Angels). This wasn’t unusual in itself: in Sweden, unlike Britain, native product often manages to hold its own against Hollywood competition. But what was remarkable was that the film was scripted and directed by an Englishman.
Colin Nutley, director of House of Angels, arrived in Sweden in the early 80s to work on Annika, a BBC children's serial about a Swedish au pair in England. Shooting in the archipelago of islands along the Baltic coast east of Stock- holm, he was captivated by the physical beauty of the country. “When you spend a whole sum- mer in a place like that, it's impossible not to fall in love with Sweden.” He stayed on, mar- ried a Swedish woman and found work in Swedish television.
In 1987, having directed a series and a cou- ple of television documentaries, Nutley made his first feature film, Nionda Kompaniet (The Ninth Company). Intentionally, it had been a cautious apprenticeship. “Sweden's a hard nut to crack. You don't just walk in telling them you've got something great for them - they'll slam the door in your face. It’s like joining any kids’ gang - you have to wait until they invite you, and then go through the ritual humiliations of the initiation ceremony.
The Ninth Company represented something new in Swedish cinema. Whole areas of con- temporary Swedish society, Nutley felt, were neglected by its film-makers. This he ascribes partly to a prejudice in favour of period films — “They can't face up to the present, they think they've become boring” - and partly to the colossal shadow of Ingmar Bergman. “Bergman is both a gift and a disaster, He's set a standard that other film-makers feel they have to con- form to. A ‘good film’ is expected to be heavy, black and in a period setting.”
One unexplored area was the Swedish army — a mainly conscript force that hasn't fired a shot in anger since 1815. Near Nutley’s home in south-west Sweden was a huge barracks packed
20/7 SIGHT AND SOUND
with expensive equipment lying idle. At the same time he was learning about the thriving black economy that flourishes beneath Swe- den’s respectable social-democratic surface. The two ideas came together in his mind.
In The Ninth Company a whirlpool of corrup- tion gradually expands to suck in the whole local community, both military and civilian, At its centre is a conscript, Private Rosenkrantz. An unprincipled opportunist like his Shake spearean namesake, he starts by flogging off brand-new engines filched from army Volvos. As he devises ever more elaborate schemes, seemingly principled figures like the local pas- tor and by-the-book army officers succumb to the lure of the scam. Eventually the entire regi- ment is in on the act. Disaster finally strikes with — almost literally - a thunderbolt from heaven. The old Lutheran morality, it seems, isn't so readily mocked.
Nutley had taken quite a risk in choosing such a subject for his first film. Swedes might well have reacted indignantly to a portrayal of their society as avidly on the take, especially from an outsider. In the event (vindicating his view that Swedes enjoy outside criticism, pro- vided it's witty) the movie was warmly received ~ even by the army, which gave its full coopera- tion, despite having seen the script.
The Ninth Company cost about £1 million to make, backed by the country’s leading produc- tion company Svensk Filmindustri. Whether or not it recouped its cost is a moot point: Nutley claims it did, SF says not. But in any event it did well enough for the company to fund Nutley’s next project, with a budget of about £1.4 mil- lion. Black Jack (pronounced Swedish-style Black Yak, and with no connection to the Leon Garfield novel filmed by Ken Loach) centres on the dance floors in most provincial Swedish towns, which serve as a combination of pub, bar and disco for Swedes of all ages.
Stifling provincialism
In terms of plot, Black Jack (1990) is the most conventional Nutley film so far: a love-triangle with the heroine, Inger, torn between preda- tory womaniser Tommy, the drummer of local dance band Black Jack, and Kai, a gentle Mr Nice Guy who runs the town garage and drives the band’s bus on its tours. Around this routine set-up, Nutley evokes a potent mood of small- town stagnation reminiscent (except that his characters are some 15 years older) of such studies of stifling provincialism as The Last Pic- ture Show or Fellini's I Vitelloni.
From this angle, the film’s key characters aren't so much Kai or Inger as Kai's friends Lennart and Robert, one a preening cop with highlighted blonde hair and a sunbed tan, the other a store-owner drowning his self-loathing in brattish drunkenness. Both men talk con- stantly of “getting away" to Stockholm — yet hold back for fear the sophisticated capital will show them up as provincial nonentities, no bet- ter than their despised fellow-townsfolk.
The action of Black Jack takes place during the Swedish midwinter, with brief pallid days hemmed in by encroaching darkness. Nutley is acutely responsive to the quality of Nordic light, and of Northern peoples’ sensitivity to
the changing seasons. “In spring, you see peo- ple in Stockholm standing stock still and gaz- ing upwards - simply enjoying the sun. In Sweden you always face the sun head on,"
According to Svensk Filmindustri, Black Jack too lost money (again, Nutley disagrees), so the company responded coolly to the director's next project, House of Angels. “After two loss- makers,” SF's Waldemar Bergendahl told the Swedish film journal Chaplin, “we weren't about to jump at a half-finished script.” Part of the problem was Nutley’s unorthodox approach to screenwriting. He writes his scenarios in Eng- lish, without dialogue, which is improvised with the help of the cast. “I don’t trust scripted dialogue - I'm always aware of actors reading lines. So I play a stealing game with my actors. I give them what they want - freedom and safety - but I take their Swedishness and use it. I work like a fast Mike Leigh.”
With SF unwilling to fund the project, Nut- ley turned instead to the Gothenburg-based independent producer Lars J6nsson. Jonsson found the bulk of the £1.2 million budget, though he and Nutley had to put up £200,000 of their own money, The gamble paid off, with the two men owning 60 per cent of what proved to be a huge commercial success, Not that SF lost out either. The company owns most of the cinemas that played House of Angels and, Nutley wryly notes, has so far made some £300,000 on the film it refused to back.
The tension between the capital and the provinces, a recurrent element in Nutley’s work, becomes in House of Angels the dominant theme, When an elderly eccentric dies, the local landowner, Axel, expects to snap up the old man’s property: the farm known as the House of Angels and the estate that goes with it. But there shows up a granddaughter no one has heard of, a sexy, uninhibited young woman riding pillion on her saturnine, blackleather- clad boyfriend's Harley-Davidson.
This couple, Fanny and Zac, at once become the focus of the rural community's fascinated resentment. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and therefore, in the eyes of the villagers, degener- ate, they stand indicted on scant evidence of every possible crime. When they invite down a gang of their showbiz friends, who indulge in nothing worse than skinny-dipping and risqué songs, local indignation explodes. “She’s Ger- man — she should live in Germany.” “They're all drug addicts — they've destroyed the solidarity of the village.” “Foreigners, the whole pack of them - our village will be ruined. We've lived here for generations. You just have to look at these people — they're shit!"
In the film’s most scathing scene a group of women led by Axel’s wife Ruth invade the House of Angels and berate its inhabitants, accusing them of turning the house into “a nightclub - a brothel - a whorehouse!" Next Axel’s nephew, the village grocer, sets out with a load of petrol to burn the place down. He's prevented, rather too easily. The second half of House of Angels suffers from what feels like a loss of nerve, as though the director had backed away from the implications of his story. For once, Nutley fails to face the sun; rather than follow the logic of the plot to its violent resolu-
Modern times: Helena Bergstrém as Fanny, the city slicker who became the focus of local resentment in Nutley’s ‘House of Angels’
tion, as in The Ninth Company, he retreats into an anodyne scenario of reconciliation.
Even so, the film struck a chord in Sweden, being released at a time when outbreaks of xenophobia - though mild compared to those in Germany - had shaken a nation that had always seen itself as a model of enlightened tol- erance. Months after its release the movie was still pulling in full houses, and it rates as the most popular and profitable Swedish film ever made, Reviewers were equally enthusiastic, but the film apparently hit resistance in certain
| high-cultural circles. Chaplin, the country’s | most prestigious movie journal, got through
1992 without once mentioning House of Angels (though it did make amends early this year with a ten-page cover feature on Nutley), and at
| first the Swedish Film Institute seemed reluc-
tant to nominate the movie for awards or festi- vals. Attitudes changed as the film garnered international success, and it was chosen as Swe- den’s candidate for this year’s Foreign.Film Oscar ~ though only as a last-minute substitute when Bille August’s Den Goda Viljan (The Best Intentions) was ruled ineligible.
All the same, Nutley’s reputation in Sweden is now secure to the point of finding himself seen, slightly to his embarrassment, as “the most Swedish of Swedish directors. I've almost become an official person, to be consulted on my view of Sweden.” All the more surprising, then, that the only British director ever to make it big on the European mainland remains virtually unknown in his home country. For
| most critics - including this one — the retro-
spective of all Nutley’s Swedish features at last September's Dinard Festival came a revelation.
Seeing the three movies together, the direc- tor’s personal voice, style and thematic preoc- cupations are unmissable. In stylistic terms his films are light on their feet, relying on a fluid camera and agile cutting to keep the narrative moving. Nutley’s editing, which some Swedish critics find abrupt, he himself describes as “an English sense of cutting - making the story move in an English way.” A catch-phrase shared
with his regular editor, Perry Schaffer, is “Let’s get out of the scene” — cutting away fast as soon as the point is made.
Nutley’s treatment of his characters is affec- tionate and uncensorious, wryly observing their knack of tripping over their own illu- sions. Often they neglect what they are for what they feel they ought to be: Kai in Black Jack loses Inger by confessing a wish to be more like the vulpine Tommy. And in The Ninth Company both the pastor and the regimental commander are angling for postings to Stockholm - an ambi- tion which makes them all the more vulnera- ble to Rosenkrantz’s schemes.
Outsider’s gaze
This restless sense of displacement — which may well reflect Nutley’s own status as a semi-assim- ilated outsider - often emerges in studied eccentricity. In House of Angels the local lawyer neglects his practice in favour of ballroom- dancing sessions with his wife; the pastor entertains the ladies’ sewing circle with music- hall songs and eagerly dons dark glasses to MC a rock concert in the church. Others find less engaging distractions: PerOve, the grocer, obsessively devours porn videos, while his wife pursues a loveless affair with the landowner’s son. Behind the amiable facade can be glimp- sed melancholy and even desperation.
Perhaps in reaction to such archetypally ‘Swedish’ elements, Nutley sometimes lets his sympathy with his characters verge on indul- gence, as in the resolution of House of Angels. It’s a weakness he acknowledges. “You could accuse me of avoiding the dark side; I’m the sort of person who expects things to turn out all right. And that side of me has got stronger in Sweden, because here they're so obsessed with the darker aspects.” His current film, Sista Dansen (The Last Dance), may signal a change of direc- tion — a study of jealousy, it’s said to be “rather more problem-oriented”. Nutley in any case wants it to be different — “otherwise they'll stick a label on me.”
But for such seemingly transparent and
accessible work, Nutley's films prove oddly resistant to labelling. It would be convenient to see him as a bridge between the British and Swedish cinematic traditions, but in fact links to other British film-makers are elusive. His improvisational working methods may have something in common with Mike Leigh's, but there the similarity ends: there's nothing in Nutley’'s work of Leigh’s political animus, nor of his weakness for blunt-instrument caricature. A better parallel might be with Bill Forsyth - the warmth, the underlying melancholy, the delight in people’s fantasies — but Nutley shares little of the Scotsman’s wistful feyness. Black Jack, for example, features the traditional Swedish effigy of the Yuletide Goat. It’s not hard to imagine the gleams of half-sceptical mysticism Forsyth might weave around such a pagan symbol; Nutley simply extracts comedy from Robert’s boozy attempts to burn the thing down.
It’s easier to find Nutley's kindred spirit in Swedish cinema, though only by reaching back beyond the high-seriousness of Bergman to the short-lived Golden Age of the silent era. Not so much to Victor Sjéstrém, though Nutley does share his lyrical, numinous feel for landscape. But with landscape a given, almost a cliché, of Swedish movies, he’s wary of the temptation to make pretty pictures, “It’s a country with great scenery and some of the most fantastic lighting cameramen in the world. But there's always a danger that the cameraman will dominate the film, if you let him. Which is why so many Swedish films are sensationally beautiful to look at, but don't say very much.”
The closer affinity is with the other master of the Swedish Golden Age, Mauritz Stiller - especially the earlier Stiller of the social satires such as Kdrlek och Journalistik (Love and Journal- ism), Thomas Graals Basta Film (Thomas Graal’s Best Film) and Erotikon. Stiller too was an outsider (born in Finland to Russian Jewish parents) with a quizzical perspective on his adopted country. Stiller’s characters, like Nutley’s, are plagued by yearnings to improve on reality, to become what they're not.
Ironically Stiller himself succumbed to the same impulse, falling prey to the two great temptations that beset successful Swedish directors: to make ‘serious’ costume dramas, and to go to Hollywood. Nutley - so far, at any rate - seems proof against both. He has no desire to make “films about suicide set in the nineteenth century”, nor to follow Lasse Hall- strém and Bille August to California. “In Swe- den the director has status, he gets final cut - thanks largely to people like Bergman. I think the American producer-dominated attitude would break me. Hallstr6m and August are wel- come to it.”
However, Nutley has made one small con- cession to internationalism. The Last Dance is being shot in Sweden and Britain — Blackpool, to be exact. It will be interesting to see how far Colin Nutley’s sensibility has become Swedi- cised —- whether he can bring the same curious, oblique outsider’s gaze to bear on his home- land as on his adopted country.
‘House of Angels’ opens on 9 July and is reviewed on page 36 of this issue
SIGHT AND SOUND 21|7
With ‘The Assassin’ and ‘Sommersby’, US remakes of French films are in the news. But can stories be moved across cultures? By Ginette Vincendeau
As Sommersby and The Assassin hit British screens in rapid succession, the issue - the ‘scandal’ - of Hollywood remakes of Euro- pean films comes back on the agenda. Review- ers usually note that these films - and many recent others such as The Vanishing, Scent of a Woman, Three Men and a Baby, Blame it on Rio, Cousins, The Woman in Red, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Three Fugitives — are based on European (most often French) titles, and then content themselves with pointing out that they are inferior to the originals. But remakes are inter- esting beyond this well-rehearsed dichotomy of Hollywood commerce versus European art. Commerce is an issue, but a more complex one than suggested by the phrase ‘American impe- rialism’, which informs most writing on the topic. Remakes also throw into relief the notion of national identity in cinema. What consti- tutes a story, how stars are framed and how gender is constructed all undergo considerable change as they cross the Atlantic - despite a seeming similarity of plot. Three recent Franco- American pairs — Trois hommes et un couffin/Three Men and a Baby, Le Retour de Martin Guerre/Som- mersby and Nikita/The Assassin - highlight the shifting patterns and issues.
Telling a different story, differently
Studies of classical Hollywood cinema have defined one of its key characteristics as clear- cut motivation, both of causality (no loose ends) and character (good or evil). By contrast, the essence of European/French auteur cinema has been seen as ambiguity (Bunuel, Fellini, Resnais and so on). Remakes show us how much this is also true of popular genres. All three remakes mentioned above go out of their way to streamline their source material, most visibly when it comes to endings.
At the end of Trois hommes — after Coline Ser- reau’s protagonists invite the baby’s mother in to discuss her plight and soon find her asleep in the cot - the camera moves to a freeze frame of the little girl: a classic open ending. Leonard Nimoy’s three men, by contrast, work out a practical deal with the mother and stride out confidently wheeling the pram. Nikita’s heroine literally vanishes at the end, leaving a cryptic note; she may have escaped, but equally she may be dead, both valid interpretations of Bob's “we're going to miss her” The Assassin adds a coda showing Bridget Fonda walking
Instant recognition: Nikita (Bridget Fonda) poised to kill in
‘The Assassin’, opposite; Jack (Richard Gere) ‘returns’ to his community and his wife Jodie Foster) in‘Sommersby’, above confidently towards a brighter future, con- doned by a benign Bob. Sommersby at first sight might seem to contradict this pattern, since the hero’s identity is never visually proved, whereas in Le Retour de Martin Guerre the return of the ‘real’ Guerre means that Gérard Depar- dieu has to admit that he is someone else. How- ever, Sommersby substitutes moral certainty for the French play on identity, as indicated by the difference in titles. “The return” of Martin Guerre alludes to both the arrival of the heroin the village after his absence, and to the return of his double at the end. By focusing on the sin- gle name Sommersby, the US version removes the fundamental point of the French film, the unknowability of an individual. The work of the narrative in Sommersby is to prove ‘beyond doubt’ that Jack Sommersby (whoever he may have been before) is redeemed into a true hero for his community and the audience. Martin Guerre overturns this belief and throws doubt on the whole story, including the validity of the audience's identification.
Thus narrative patterns may be in them- selves resistant to exportation. For example the notion of the symbolic father-daughter dyad is deeply rooted in both French cinema and cul- ture. In the 30s, remakes of French films using this narrative played down this aspect (for example LEquipage, directed by Anatole Litvak in 1935 and remade by the same director as The Woman | Love in 1937). The resurfacing of this narrative in Nikita, in the relationship between Nikita and ‘uncle’ Bob, is erased in The Assassin. In the scene where Bob invents the young
HUACKED
woman's childhood for her lover, the American film explicitly states that Bob is hardly older than Maggie and the scene becomes one of sex- ual rivalry between the two men, visualised by a mock fight, whereas in the French film the young man accepts Bob's ‘paternal’ authority. The Depardieu comedy Mon pére ce héros, explic- ily predicated on this pattern (he pretends to be his daughter's husband to fob off a younger man), is currently being developed for a US remake; according to Le Film francais, several US screenwriters have tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt it. One conclusion is that family narra- tives, far from being universal, are deeply rooted in cultural difference.
Transatlantic heroes: stars in space
Remakes also highlight crucial differences between French and US ‘classical’ cinemas, crystallised around the use of stars, The three pairs of films discussed here use stars of differ- ent status to different effects: Trois hommes and Three Men rely on middle-ranking performers; Nikita introduced a relative unknown (Anne Parillaud), while The Assassin uses a rising young star with a ‘name’ (Bridget Fonda), Only Martin Guerre and Sommersby feature top male stars: Depardieu and Richard Gere. The trend for remakes of the 80s and 90s has generally been to do without top players; however, there are indications that more emphasis is being placed on attracting a major star in initiating a remake deal, following the success of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, and, presumably, Gere in Sommersby (Gere is also billed to feature in the remake of Les Choses de la vie, in the role origi- nally taken by Michel Piccoli).
As Serge Daney once put it, Hollywood cin- ema inscribes its ruthless hierarchies in its rel- ativisation of stars, a hierarchy less marked in French cinema. And indeed, while Serreau uses true ensemble playing from her three leads in Trois hommes, Three Men self-consciously grades them. The three US actors are introduced sepa- rately and by name in the jokey credit sequence, whereas Serreau's titles are superim- posed over an opening party, which is shot very darkly, so that we only slowly pick out the three actors (the party in Three Men is lit in high-key, further distinguishing the three actors). Simi- larly Parillaud in Nikita is at first indistinguish- able from the group of punks to which she belongs, whereas Fonda is almost instantly >
SIGHT AND SOUND 237
| War of attrition
| “The sale of the story of a French film can ruin its
career abroad," wrote P. A. Harlé in ‘La Cinématographie francaise’ in 1938. Harlé put his finger on the
real 'scandal’ of remakes: not the aesthetic copy-cat (hundreds of Hollywood films are remakes, often
of other Hollywood films), but terroristic marketing practices. He was appalled that world screens
were about to be flooded with the English-speaking ‘Algiers’ (1938) while the original version, ‘Pépé le Moko’ (1937), was left on the shelf outside France. More than 50 years on, nothing has changed. As ‘Variety’ recently put it, “many remake deals effectively quash the original films’ US releases.”
But there is more. Successful French films have recently become like derno tapes for US studio executives too busy to read scripts, which would anyway be more expensive to develop than buying foreign film rights.
Thus the American interest is clear, even if US remakes have not all done as well as ‘Three Men’ or ‘Sormmersby’ So why are the French now so keen to collaborate,
to the extent of selling their rights before the original has even come out in France (as is the case for Jacques Fansten’s ‘Roulez Jeunesse’)?
Since the coming of sound in the early 30s raised language barriers, Hollywood has waged a one-sided economic-linguistic war with the rest of the world. After | various solutions were tried to circumvent the language problem (from polyglot films to multi-language versions), remakes became one of the ways Hollywood could curb the distribution of French films in the US and increase its own worldwide sales.
Divide and rule strategies also cashed in on internal conflicts within the French film industry. For while the interests of French producers clearly lay with sustaining French production, those of the distributors and exhibitors were tied to American movies, whatever their source material (American distributors were already well established in France by the 30s). This manifestation of trade imperialism was further complicated in the post-war period when new measures levied money from exhibition (including of US films) on the French market to be ploughed back into French production,
There are also more direct gains to be made. Remake rights nowadays can be worth up to $1 million to a French film-maker, more than many original versions can recoup at home. The next logical step was for French companies to co-produce remakes, as have, among others, Jean- Francois Lepetit for ‘Three Men and a Baby’ and Le Studio Canal Plus for ‘Sommersby’, thus providing a further twist in this Franco-American war of attrition, epitomised by the ineffable franglais expression, ‘le remake’ Such an ‘if you can't beat them, join them’ strategy is clearly attractive, indeed may be the only solution, although it does |ittle for French film exports as such, and may unwittingly hasten the globalisation of story-telling.
Unequal billing: the protagonists of ‘Three Men and a Baby’, in which Tom Selleck (centre) is consistently favoured in importance as both character and major star
recognisable, the camera focusing consis- tently on her face. Throughout the rest of Three Men, Tom Selleck is discreetly but consistently favoured, both as character (for example, his workplace is a feature) and star (references are made to his muscular Magnum PI. image, for instance in the jogging scenes).
Martin Guerre and Sommersby feature stars of similar status. Yet while the French film goes for longer takes and a predominance of medium shots, Sommersby classically builds up its scenes from general shots to close-ups, with a relentless emphasis on the latter (possibly not unconnected with Gere’s status as co-producer). If Depardieu is at the centre of most frames, he is usually surrounded by a crowd or several other characters, whereas the medium shots or close-ups of Gere (and Jodie Foster) create a void around them, isolating them in space. There are a few close-ups of Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, but instead of the classical Hollywood shot-countershot which structures all major encounters in Sommersby (Jack and Laurel, Jack and Orin), Martin Guerre uses two-and three- shots, or tableau scenes.
The effect is to visualise the different pro- jects of the two films. Sommersby opens on the burial of a body under a pile of stones, but almost immediately gives us a close-up of Gere’s face. Then follows a series of views of him trav- elling through nature towards the village, already an individual, distinct from the others (a long-shot of the crowded tobacco field is repeated later with him alone dancing). Martin Guerre also begins with an individual on the move, but he turns out to be the lawyer coming to draw up Martin’s marriage contract, Despite the introduction in Sommersby of issues such as racial emancipation and post-Civil War eco- nomic revival, the effect of the camerawork is to make Jack/Gere into a detached, ‘universal’ hero, with the overtones of a religious saviour. In Martin Guerre, by contrast, the way the star merges visually in space with his community echoes the way the hero and the tale are embedded in a social structure; hence the emphasis on the legal representatives who open (the lawyer) and close (the parliamentary adviser) the story. While in Sommersby, apart from Orin, the community is ultimately united, the symbolic split of Martin Guerre’s hero(es) echoes that of the community itself, a division with resonance in a French history replete with figures who both divided and rec- onciled the nation, from Napoleon to Maréchal Pétain and Général de Gaulle. As Edmund White said recently (a propos of the way Jean Genet has been portrayed in literature): “Ameri- cans don't see people like that — as figures in a landscape. They see people as close-ups of a unique face.” Here, of course, is another reason why French cinema is difficult to export: figures in a landscape are more difficult to grasp (without the knowledge of that land- scape) than “close-ups of a unique face”.
Exporting gender
All six films are concerned in some way with gender. While Martin Guerre/Sommersby asks: what is a man?, and Nikita/The Assassin: what is a woman?, Trois hommes/Three Men ponders the
nature of masculinity in relation to the experi- ence of fatherhood.
Feminist analyses of Trois hommes/Three Men have seen the films as a sinister hijacking of motherhood by men, typical of post-feminism. Tania Modleski, for instance, claims that: “the function of [Three Men and a Baby| is simply to give men more options than they already have in patriarchy: they can be real fathers, ‘imagi- nary’ fathers, godfathers, and, in the older sense of the term, surrogate mothers.”
This is true as far as the general narrative is concerned, but it ignores several important differences between the two films. Serreau, who came to mainstream genre from feminist documentary, spends much more time than Nimoy depicting the repetitious drudgery involved in looking after a baby, as well as its devastating effect on the men’s career; later, a much greater part of the film is devoted to showing the emptiness of their lives without the baby. The realisation that our dominant myth about creation (Adam's rib) is an inver- sion of nature is voiced by Jacques: “I will create Adam from Eve's rib” - a crucial moment absent from Three Men. The drugs sub-plot is secondary in the French version, but domi- nates the second half of the US version. The ‘drop’ in Trois hommes takes the form of dump- ing nappies in a park bin; in Three Men it involves a drawn-out caper. This relates to the privileging in Hollywood cinema of action over reflection.
Signs of virility
The remakes seem to indicate that definitions of masculinity are far from universal, If in Hol- lywood masculinity is defined as diametrically opposed to femininity (as seen in the Western), there is a long tradition in French cinema of depicting masculinity as incorporating femi- ninity. Three Men hysterically multiplies the tra- ditional signs of virility in its heroes: they watch basketball, play billiards, read sports magazines. Selleck, an architect, is seen several times in that very macho icon ~- the hard hat - when he is not showing off his well-toned body (and unlike in the French film, he contin- ues to have some relationship with his girl- friend Rebecca).
By contrast, Trois hommes depicts the three heroes often en déshabillé and focuses on Michel Boujenah’s short, round and soft naked torso. Mothering in men is shown to strike a chord with an inner ‘feminine’ side which, rather than being disavowed, has been dramatised through the history of French cinema as either vulnerability or capacity for nurturing. Though this trend may marginalise actual women, it also provides an exposé of ‘normal’ masculinity. Trois hommes updates this pattern to include the nitty-gritty of looking after babies, whereas older films took the children (often girls) as already grown up.
Re-viewing Martin Guerre after seeing Som- mersby, one is struck by the overt Oedipal nar- rative of the former. Revealed as sexually impotent on his wedding night, and cruelly mocked in a Mardi Gras ritual, Martin must go away to become a man — unlike Jack Som- mersby, whose departure is motivated by the
Prodigal father Le Retour de Martin Guerre dir: Daniel Vigne, 1982
With Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye _ In mid-sixteenth century France, Martin Guerre (Depardieu) returns
to his village in the south after a long and mysterious absence. Initially surprised, the villagers, his family and wife (Baye) accept him back with open arms. However, after he claims money owed to him by his uncle, and when itinerant beggars identify him as 'Pansette’, doubts creep in, and Guerre is tried in court for fraud. Released once, he is re-tried and,
at the point where he is about to be freed, the real Martin Guerre returns. ‘Guerre’/Depardieu admits to being Pansette and is hanged.
Sommersby dir: Jon Amiel, US/France, 1993
With Richard Gere and Jodie Foster
The film ends on Laurel putting flowers on his tomb, marked ‘Jack Sommersby’,
The story is transposed to Tennessee two years after the Civil War. Jack
Men’s talk
dir: Luc Besson, 1990
Sommersby (Gere) returns to his
Trois hommes et un couffin |
With Anne Parillaud, Tcheky Karyo,
small town after a long absence. His wife Laurel (Foster), the villagers and
dir; Coline Serreau, 1985
Jean-Hugues Angliade, Jeanne Moreau
Laurel's friend Orin are suspicious, but all except Orin are eventually won over. Jack, a liberal in favour of black emancipation, revives the town's prosperity with a new crop of tobacco. But doubts are cast on his identity and he is tried for murder. Even though admitting he is not Sommersby would save his life, he Sticks to this identity and is hanged.
With André Dussolier, Miche! Boujenah, Roland Giraud
Pierre, Michel and Jacques are
three Parisian bachelors sharing a flat. One day, a baby (Marie, Jacques’ daughter, of whom he was hitherto unaware) and a mysterious (drugs) parcel are delivered to them. The film charts the baby’s disruption of the men’s lives and their gradual learning how to look after her, complicated
by the secondary plot of the drugs
A former Parisian drug addict condemned to death for killing
a policeman, Nikita (Parillaud) is reprieved in exchange for becoming an undercover state assassin, under a mentor called Bob (Karyo) and the advice of an older woman (Moreau). Upon completion of her training, she executes a series of increasingly difficult hits, She starts a relationship with a young man (Anglade) who becomes suspicious of her mysterious
and baby return.
Story. After the baby is reclaimed by her mother, the men find
their lives suddenly feel very empty, and are delighted when mother
past and of her activities. After a particularly horrific mission, she vanishes.
The Assassin (US release title: Point of No Return)
Three Men and a Baby
dir; John Badham, 1993
dir: Leonard Nimoy, US, 1987
With Bridget Fonda, Gabriel Byrne,
Ted Danson
With Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg,
Dermot Mulroney, Anne Bancroft A similar storyline, transposed to the
emphases.
war. Martin returns sexually potent, as expressed by the metaphor of the leggings (too large in the past, but which he now fills) but the return of his symbolically castrated alter ego expresses the masculine/feminine dicho- tomy of the French male hero. By contrast, Jack Sommersby ‘proves’ his virility through a series of action tests: sowing the seeds, defend- ing his family against the KKK.
If we turn to heroines, we find a lesser narra- tive complexity in the construction of feminin- ity. For a start, women occupy less important roles (except in Nikita/The Assassin). But there is nevertheless greater acknowledgement of female sexuality in the French films, no doubt again linked to different standards of moral censorship. For example Bertrande (Baye) acknowledges her desire and uses sexual plea- sure as a criterion for identifying Martin in court; this is replaced in Sommersby by the
A similar storyline to the above, transposed to New York, with different
US, with different emphases and a more explicit ending in which the young woman is seen to escape.
romantic rituals of courtship and the joys of motherhood, To point to the greater explicit- ness of the French film is not to argue that it is more ‘liberated’ or feminist, but that while still working within patriarchal confines, it opens up a space, albeit limited, for femininity. Nikita, a huge commercial success, has had — like all Luc Besson’s films - bad critical press. French auteurlovers reject it as derivative of Hollywood and/or television, while feminist critics see it as typical of patriarchal cinema's representation of woman-as-absence. Yet the film’s appeal, especially for young women, is in large part due to their reading of Nikita as empowered, and to some extent as escaping her ‘makers’ This reading is possible because of the open ending, whereas that of The Assassin shows her final escape as condoned, and thus engi- neered, by Bob. But it is also inscribed through performance. Parillaud’s body is shown as more
ROWAL (a
muscular than Fonda's, and like the young Bar- dot she uses insolence and wit as weapons to attack her patriarchal rulers. There is ambiva- lence in this: her body and insolence simulta- neously provide a pleasing spectacle for men (as in the scene where Nikita outwits her judo master, witnessed by an indulgent Bob) and a point of identification for female spectators. The retaliatory power of language is less in evi- dence in The Assassin.
Lessons in femininity
The most interesting and problematic area of difference lies in the ‘lesson in femininity’ offered by the two films. One way of reading Nikita is as the transformation of an androgy- nous, transnational youth - gum-chewing and virtually indistinguishable from her male friends whose grunts consist of such words as “zapper” — into a French woman, with all the accoutrements of the part from Degas posters to couture clothes and the ability to decorate a Parisian apartment. At the heart of this trans- formation are the lessons given by the moth- erly figure of Jeanne Moreau, who teaches that femininity is a mask you learn to put on (like a clown's smile) and which you can use as a weapon. If such a notion of femininity contains its own misogyny, it also exposes itself as such, alluding to the ambivalent New Wave heroines played by Moreau (Les Amants, Jules et Jim).
The Assassin replaces this education by a more banal “charm school” run by Anne Bancroft where table rather than sexual manners are taught. The Assassin (as with the depiction of the few women in Three Men) is in a sense more egal- itarian than Nikita (and Trois hommes), but at the price of de-sexualising its heroine, as indicated by the change in title: the neutral Assassin (and the meaningless Point of No Return in the US) as opposed to the androgynous Nikita. If we recall that Nikita was distributed in the US as La Femme Nikita, we can infer that an explicitly female killer is acceptable as long as she is ‘for- eign’. The Fonda character, like Jack Sommers- by, is morally redeemed by the narrative of The Assassin, while disturbing areas are displaced on to signs of ‘otherness’ (the Nina Simone poster and songs, the New Orleans episode).
The Hollywood remake of even such a sup- posedly Americanised French film as Nikita reveals that the cultural references of the origi- nal significantly inflect supposedly interna- tional generic codes. The fact that Nikita was successful worldwide may make its remake par- ticularly pointless; one can only speculate what Besson might have made of it. Like Serreau for Three Men, and more recently Francis Veber, he pulled out of directing in Hollywood. Reasons are not always clear, but seem to hinge on con- trol. This is not surprising, since French and American lawyers are hard at work hammering out transatlantic contracts which can cope with the differences between French and US law when it comes to the film industry; what constitutes the auteur of a film, and what rights he/she has over the product are among the top questions. As with the films themselves, the differences reveal as much about cultural traditions as they do about commerce.
‘The Assassin’ is reviewed on page 36 of this issue
SIGHT AND SOUND 25| 7
SIBLING
RIVALRY
26|7 SIGHT ANDSOUND
D GRANT
LOMA
Towards the end of Eleanor Coppola's
documentary Hearts of Darkness; A Film- maker’s Apocalypse, husband Francis adds a coda in which he enthusiastically imagines “some little fat girl from Ohio making a beautiful film with her dad’s video camera.” In Coppola's sce- nario, film will be re-established as an art at the expense of cinema as a business. Queer avant- garde video diarist Sadie Benning could well be Coppola's dreamgirl, with the camera in ques- tion being the lowest of low audio-visual tech- nologies; the $200 Pixelvision video camera manufactured for children (and now discontin- ued) by the corporate big daddy Fisher-Price. In Benning’s 1992 tape It Wasn't Love, she parallels her use of this low-end technology with an appropriation of Hollywood archetypes — the vamp, gangster, crooner and thug among oth- ers - in a strategy of neo-punk DIY. This is per- fectly expressed in her declaration, “We didn't need Hollywood, we were Hollywood.”
Coppola and Benning: the mainstream and the margins. Cinema and video: Cain and Abel, as Jean-Luc Godard put it. With film increas- ingly incorporating video, the traditional face- off that so often pits the two technologies against one another — the ‘direct’ light of film versus the ‘indirect’ light of video - seems finally to have dissolved. Or has it simply been replaced by a derivation of this same opposi- tion - one that currently expresses itself in a cinematic fear and loathing of the video image, which is employed to characterise a nightmar- ish gamut of fin-de-siécle anxieties? The video image as a symbol of the end of the century? But whose century? Cinema’s, of course.
Videogenic spectacles
In June 1982 the American journal Film Com- ment ran a special supplement on video that included reports on the cable boom, MTV and video art. But nothing on video-in-film, Cer- tainly, there was a lengthy assessment of Cop- pola’s then state-of-the-art Zoetrope experi- ments in ‘electronic cinema’, but from the angle of it being an interesting, if exceptional, hybrid of the two media, a film-into-video cross-pollination. Perhaps this oversight was due to a desire to negotiate, or simply to avoid the familiarly reductive cultural parti pris — for film, ergo against video.
In the same issue J. Hoberman rendered the tenor of the times with his admirably inclusive, though somewhat disingenuous, statement that “Movies and video are two kinds of Cin- ema.” Much appears to have changed in the intervening 11 years. Cinema, to bowdlerise somewhat from the Godard quotebook, has since become occupied territory - the video image is now ubiquitous. But anyone could have told you that, anyone who'd seen Video- drome, sex, lies and videotape, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, anything by Atom Egoyan, Patriot Games, Walter Hill's Trespass - to list a few dis- parate but key films. Far more interesting are the terms of video’s ubiquity. Or, put another way, what has video-in-film come to mean?
Video-in-film allows cinema to access images from its margins - from amateur video, high- and low-tech surveillance equipment, pornog- raphy - and resituate them. Often employed in
film in order to implicate the spectator as con- sumer and voyeur of such images, video might also be seen as cinema’s means of responding to media massification and to its own loss of sov- ereignty in the process.
Yet even as video is made up of this variety of forms, it has a limited repertoire of func- tions, all of which hinge on video being seen as cinema's other. To gauge how homogeneous the connotations of video-in-film have become, it is revealing to look back to an early example (probably not the earliest, but indicative nonetheless); Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). What is striking from this distance is how archaic the video images seem, almost quaint, but also euphoric. This film doesn't have any problems with video; it appro- priates the visual styles of MTV and ‘scratch video’ (remember ‘scratch video’?) and puts them to work to add a little post-modern noise to an adaptation of Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux. The euphoria comes from the fact that Mazursky’s film features a new cinematic figure — the kid with the camcorder - who is grounded in an almost prelapsarian vision of video culture. This is before the Gulf War, before Broadgate, before video had come to be identified as witmess to real horrors that would otherwise have remained invisible — the abduc- tion of Jamie Bulger, the assault of Rodney King, the repeated sex crimes (recorded by their perpetrator on security video) of Algerian police chief Mustapha Tabet.
Mazursky’s kid has not aged gracefully - something happened to him in that Beverly Hills bedroom to produce a troupe of charac- ters whose relationship to video is seen almost exclusively in terms of a problematised mas- culinity. And in films populated by these human adjuncts to video technology, the Godardian vision of the camera as “communi- cation in a solid state” is transformed. The cam- corder becomes alienation in a solid state. Video gets in the spaces between people, mate- rialises the desires that reside there - especially the guilty, transgressive desires - and makes that space thick with images, insuperable. Fast- forward, rewind, freeze: these vital attributes of video are germane to all manner of fetishis- tic desires (pace the homicidal Henry and Otis in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the impotent Graham in sex, lies and videotape). At one level video-in-film is a character in itself, both the expression and materialisation of fetishistic drives, locked into a double-bind of symptom and cause with its user and its user’s desire.
Alongside this (already somewhat hack neyed) expressive presence, video-in-film opens up equally important formal possibilities. It is immediately reflexive and mediating, in- stalling another image-time within the time of the film and allowing modernists manqués such as Wenders in Notebook on Cities and Clothes and Egoyan in Family Viewing to create trompe l'oeil effects that fragment both the narrative and the image on the screen. Likewise, in Bertrand Tavernier’s L627, precisely because the film wears its realist aspirations so visibly, it must also acknowledge its usurper in the real- ism stakes by accommodating video, with its “extra quantity of analogy”, to quote French
critic Raymond Bellour. Bellour suggests that in the successive histories of the mechanical reproduction of the world, photography pro- duced the first image to be invested with a “quantity of analogy”, a basic realism to which cinema adds the analogy of movement. Video supplements this with “a new analogy, that of an image without any delay.” As a simultane- ously degraded and clinical presence within the well-mastered film image, the video image has come to replace the grain of 8mm and newsreel with its own zero-degree realism. That (film) was then, this (video) is now.
States of surveillance
In L.627 Lulu (Didier Bezace), an officer in the Paris drugs squad, moonlights as an off-duty video-maker. This would-be film-maker turned cop (Lulu failed the entrance exams for IDHEC, the French film school) hits on the idea of tak- ing to work the camera which until then he has used solely to film weddings (or in a playfully half-hearted but nonetheless telling attempt to cajole his wife into a little home-video eroti- cism). Having been the recorder of intimate images, Lulu's camera becomes an instrument of surveillance.
The implication is that surveillance is always already a function of video — whether at the manned, local level of Lulu’s usage or in the form of the seemingly autonomous ‘eye-in-the- sky’ of Phillip Noyce's Patriot Games. Noyce’s film, which self-consciously plays with the hybrid images of satellite surveillance, is a showcase for state-of-the-art imaging equip- ment, (Noyce further explores this theme in his new Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver, whose narra- tive concerns an apartment block owner who may or may not be using surveillance cameras to spy on his tenants.) Yet while the video image undoubtedly functions as an ultramodern tic, there is more at work here than a simple high- tech spicing of generic leftovers. These images announce that there is no longer any circum- stance in which everything cannot be seen.
Such an overwhelming mediation of reality was the subject of The Society of the Spectacle, a text written over 25 years ago by the French Sit- uationist critic Guy Debord. And though the Situationist International has tended to be side- lined as a prankish aberration, the surrealistic sloganeers of May '68, it was Debord’s work - dour, epigrammatic but prophetic - that made possible Baudrillard’s notion of the simu- lacrum. For Debord, the spectacle was late capi- talism’s crowning glory, alienation extended beyond its traditional Marxist materialist base to a near-metaphysical state of being where reality is separated from itself in an image. “But the critique that reaches the truth of the spec- tacle,” he wrote, “exposes it as the visible nega- tion of life, as the negation of life that has become visible.” It is no surprise, then, that certain film- makers should themselves undertake some- thing approaching Debord's critique, aware of their medium’s complicity but spurred on by a desire to distinguish cinema as somehow dif- ferent from the extended reach of the spectacle incarnated in what we now call video-culture.
Noyce is no such director. The video images in Patriot Games start from and call upon
SIGHT AND SOUND 27 |7
4 images attached to specific events, or rather images that have become events in themselves: the electronic warfare images of Operation Desert Storm. The film is haunted by these event images and its video images are their ghosts. These are images of war which, as a state of permanent emergency, extends into the living room via television and video. The spectacle has its own home front.
The MTV aesthetic
Aside from the fact that both films share an opening screen-engulfing squall of video static that rapidly resolves itself into camcorder images of a mob slaying and a farmyard slaugh- ter respectively, Walter Hill's Trespass and Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video beg to be consid- ered as the recto and verso of the contemporary spectacle. In Trespass Hill plays with ‘accidental’ surveillance-by-camcorder (that descends dir- ectly from the George Holliday footage of Rod- ney King’s assault) and turns a battle between two white treasure hunters and the drugs gang on whose patch they have strayed into a fable of the entropic consequences of racial conflict. Claustrophobically staged in a warehouse on the point of collapse - an urban America in microcosm — the film has the tail-chasing energy of a farce which, if the video images didn’t carry with them such grave connota- tions, would be funny.
The narrative is set in motion by the cam- corder images of the killing of one of the gang by a rival dealer on whom they seek revenge. The images are captured by a young blood called “Video”, whose camcorder shots punctu- ate the film and serve a variety of functions. The principal of these is video-as-documentary- evidence, as the proof on which to base a slay- ing (or, by inference, a courtcase, an acquittal, a race riot, a retrial...). “Video never lies,” says the black street kid with the camcorder, but the ghostly resonance of the images is contained by parallel deployments that accommodate the to- camera lip-synch performance style of the promo video and hence capitalise on the status of Ice Cube and Ice-T as rap icons.
As Cahiers du cinéma recently pointed out, Trespass also signals “the somewhat pretentious will to mix genre cinema with modernist cin- ema, to make as if, say, Raoul Walsh had seen a few Wim Wenders movies.” In this hybrid, the images of Rodney King in the hands of the LAPD (in their own way as epochal as the Zapruder frames of the Kennedy assassination) are called forth, but their iconic force is irre- trievably compromised by Hill’s concessions to the MTV aesthetic. Or could it be that the incor- poration of a promo-video aesthetic, heralded by Mazursky’s film, is problematised, Maz- ursky’s innocent euphoria now haunted by the extra-cinematic images of the King video?
Set against the rap energy of Trespass, Haneke’s film is a model of European art- cinema sobriety, shot through with a cultural pessimism that makes Wenders’ habitual Ozu- invoking nostalgia appear celebratory. Benny's Video is the second of a projected trilogy of
2 films, the first being The Seventh Continent (1988) ps the third to be the story of a serial killer seen from the perspective of his victims. They
28|7 SIGHT AND SOUND
chart the director’s account of “the progressive emotional glaciation of my country”.
Benny (Arno Frisch), a lonely Austrian ado- lescent left to his own devices by his well-to-do parents, shuts himself in his bedroom with his video equipment. The blinds permanently drawn, the outside world intruding only through a surveillance monitor on the wall, bookcases stacked with video cassettes, Benny views and re-views the tape that opens the film - a home video of a farmer's ‘humane’ killing of a pig with a shock-stick. Not a bloody death, only an overdose of electrical current; not a trace of the act’s violence, just a squeal, then silence. Benny has stolen the instrument and, when he invites a girl of his own age back to his den to watch the tape, he tests the implement on her. With the first shot to her leg she col- lapses, screaming. A second shot to the head and silence. Benny's video has been recording throughout and it is these images that his par- ents see and to which they respond by covering up for their son, the mother taking him on hol- iday to Egypt while the father, unknown to Benny, disposes of the body.
“Video never lies” — but Benny's parents, faced with the evidence of their son's crime, conceal the truth of his act from the law and the truth of their own act from their son. But Benny has them taped — this time aurally - and the film closes with a surveillance-camera image of the parents being arrested following Benny's confession.
Benny's crime is the reflex action of an ado- lescent “glaciated” by his immersion in the video culture, and the film is as bleak and undemonstrative as Benny himself, this bour- geois European kid-with-a-camcorder, a video- somnambulist impassive as a Bressonian “model”. If this sounds damning, Haneke intends it to be. For while in Patriot Games and Trespass video is the ghost of other images and other events, Haneke casts video as the very incarnation of the evil demon or images.
The numerous fascinations of Benny's Video stem from the cinematic values it counterposes as alternatives to the video culture and its dis- contents, For Haneke employs a deeply Bresson- ian “cinematography” (a word used expressly in the director's statement on the film), one marked by a refusal of spectacle, a concentra- tion on gesture ~ particularly in the exchange of money, highly reminiscent of Pickpocket and LArgent — and a mostly static camera with the actors treated as “models”. He also stages what
; Boe
must now be the paradigmatic Bressonian reso- lution, where the possibility of salvation comes only through imprisonment and the judge- ment of the law. Haneke's turning to Bresson says a lot about the director's own vision of cin- ematic values. It is as though Bresson provides the strategy necessary to exorcise the demon evoked by video as well as a model of cinematic restraint available to film-makers who cannot trust the audio-visual but wish fervently to demonstrate the special status of cinema within it, and somehow apart from it.
From the opening camcorder images to the closing surveillance shots, the film reveals what it sees as the pernicious multiplicity of functions such technology makes possible - the camcorder that records the killing is also used to film mother and son's Egyptian holiday. While on one level it is a manifesto well in tune with current moral panics over video violence, and will no doubt be welcomed by those pan- icking as well as by those propagating the panic, it also stands as a kind of limit case of film’s incorporation of video.
Electronic nightmare
The surveillance camera represents the ultima ratio of the spectacle as defined by Debord, and cinema's incorporation of it has grown in paral- lel with its developments in scope and scale. From Lang’s vision of domestic surveillance in The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) to the inter- face between Hollywood and the Pentagon's 3Ci (control, command, communications, intelli- gence) operations portrayed in Patriot Games, surveillance has become the culminating state of the image, an essentially pornographic mise- en-scéne in which we are both actors and, thanks to the camcorder, directors. The pornographic is understood here as the reflex response of voyeuristic participation that surveillance entails and whose founding example is the genre of pornography itself. Or, as Frederic Jameson has put it: “Pornographic films are only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as if it were a naked body.” It only remains for a Cronenberg or an Egoyan to take the next technologically feasible step (and so fulfil the dreams of paranoid fan- tasists everywhere): that of making a film that incorporates the technology of fibre-optic cam- eras in a generic hybrid of body-horror and modernist cinemas to concoct a narrative of internal surveillance,
The vision of videophilia that Benny’s Video presents is qualitatively different from the cinephilia of a previous age, with Benny's room an electronic nightmare of Plato’s Cave. The severity of this vision and the moralistic posi- tion that underwrites it refuse to countenance the liberating possibilities of video. In Haneke’s schema the engagement with video repre- sented in the work of someone like Sadie Ben- ning cannot be acknowledged; video enslaves rather than liberates. But Haneke's is only one of the spaces permitted to video-in-film and beyond the polarities of video as either ghostly or demonic lie the more experimental hybridi- sations of Egoyan, Wenders, Godard. And bey- ond these...? Keep watching these spaces. ‘Benny’s Video’ is released at the end of August
History and cinema remain the obsession of Godard in his television programmes, ‘Histoire|s) du cinéma’, By Rod Stoneman
BON VOYAGE
“Tt is interesting to approach the
history of cinema as the last chapter of art, which itself is the last chapter of a certain kind of Indo-Euro- pean civilisation...” (Jean-Luc Godard on Histoire(s) du cinéma)
As the tectonic plates of Europe's cultures collide and slide into new configurations, and a particular idea of cinema, as well as of Europe, seems to be coming to an end, Jean-Luc Godard dissects and reshuffles fragments of world cinema in his Histoire(s) du cinéma. Godard conceived of Histoire(s) as five pairs of films, but only the first pair, 1A: Toutes les histoires (All the (Hi)sto- ries) and 1B: 1 Histoire seule (1 Single His- tory), has been made and shown on French television, in 1989,
In these programmes, long, com- plex montages are interspersed with recitatives in which Godard, at a book- shelf or typing, invokes a forest of texts, literary and cinematographic. In the montage sections, layer upon layer of audio and visual quotation are brought together with a startling den- sity of reference carried by multiple captions and voiceover. At one point a colour Western alternates with Mary Pickford in a silent film and Alexander Nevsky, all accompanied by dialogue from a French feature, Images combine and part — sliding through each other in slow dissolves, sometimes flicking backwards and forwards through sin- gle-frame alternation or rapid intercut- ting. In another sequence, with docu- mentary images, a young Yugoslav partisan in the Second World War smiles in the face of death as the proficient leathergloved hands of a German officer string him up by the neck. Godard’s caption tenderly, ironi- cally adds “Bon Voyage”.
Several sections of Histoire(s) du cinéma circle moments of European his- torical fission, often conflating or at least connecting cinema and history. In 1940, the programme tells us, at the time of The School for Wives (L'Ecole des femmes): “Max Ophiils falls upon Made laine Ozeray’s bottom just as the Ger- man army takes the French one from behind...” Another sequence has a cap- tion placed on Lenin as he lies ‘asleep’ in his coffin: “Lenine usine des réves/Lenin the factory of dreams,” The dream factory, a phrase usually applied to Hollywood, now encircles the engineer of Soviet socialist aspira- tion. The transposition suggests how much history in Histoire(s) is rewritten in terms of the history of cinema.
This is often articulated in terms of a European-US dynamic. As the com- mentary suggests: “So the First World War had allowed American cinema to ruin French cinema, but the birth of television and the Second World War would let it finance, i.e. ruin, the entire European cinema.” Of course Godard’s
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JLGFILMS
Characteristic signature: text and images collide in Godard’s material for ‘Histoire(s) du cinema’
preoccupation with the US is hardly something recent. He was one of the first generation of Cahiers du cinéma writers, who through the “politique des auteurs” critically validated popu- lar American cinema. Yet after the rite of passage of ’68 and a brief encounter with (a French fantasy version of) Mao- ism — “we should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the Holly- wood-Mosfilm etc. empire...” - he devel- oped a settled antipathy to Hollywood.
The active viewer
Unlike Hollywood's ‘industry of escap- ism’, Godard’s cinema has always wanted to produce an active viewer; the injunction at the beginning of the first programme to “Let each eye nego- tiate for itself” appropriately empha- sises the role of the individual viewer. Making sense of such a web of intertex- tuality is bound to produce different readings for each spectator. At worst it may facilitate the fetishistic activity of film buffs playing a version of ‘spot the clip. But Godard offers the viewer the same privileges he claims for himself — the endless resonant productivity of an open text, its meanings shifting upon repeated viewing.
In contrast to the aesthetic richness of the montage sections, the images of Godard at the bookshelf and type writer, ironically reciting myriad book and film titles, are more ascetic. The
production have given him legendary status: ‘Godard’, the figure in Histoire(s), is part of the history Godard interro- gates, Here ‘Godard’ dramatises him- self as a collector, lucidly manipulating the fragments and in so doing allow- ing new sets of relations to emerge. In such a productive ‘open text’, the movement between films dissolves dis- parate places, times and even cultures, creating unresolvable ambiguities and unstable meanings. Of course, this tex- tual play is but a new version of Godard’s familiar forms of thought. Whether in the discursive non-linear- ity of his film and television work, Introduction a une veéritable histoire du cinéma, the book and lectures out of which the programmes evolved, or in interviews or even public performanc- es, the same strategies are brought into play: digression, displacement, irony and imaginative ‘lateral’ logic.
The final irony of this incorrigibly ironic and seriously playful work is that a programme that explores the history of film does so through video
and television. Yet in both technical |
and institutional terms, it is impossi- ble to imagine the project taking place in any other way — now. The ability to slow down, dissolve, manipulate and re-articulate the material of Histoire(s) is conceivable only within the immediate plasticity of video - as is the ability to play with language through the elec-
several phases of Godard's own film | tronic facility of constant captions. His-
toire(s) du cinéma confronts the terms of cinema's metamorphosis: “though tele- vision has realised Léon Gaumont's dream — to bring the spectacle of the whole world into the most wretchedly poor of bedrooms — it has done so by reducing the shepherds’ gigantic sky to Tom Thumb’s size.”
Godard’s remark in reply to a Cahiers du cinéma questionnaire of 1965 - “I await the end of Cinema with opti- mism” - becomes the caption at the end of Week-end (1967): “Fin de conte/ Fin de cinéma.” In Histoire/s), made in a new electronic epoch, we have the twi- light of cinema and the end of its “art without a future’. Yet perhaps this sense of cinema's decay and decline is part of a bigger fall, tied up with the idea that, as is said in Histoire(s), “cin- ema has always been the act of white boys showing off for other white boys.”
At this end of the twentieth cen- tury, cinema lives in, on and through television. Whatever our vestigial affections for the focused experience, public space and the higher resolution of cinema itself, it should be recog- nised that the social experience of the audio-visual is now overwhelmingly in
| the home. The fragments Godard has | “shored against his ruins” do not posit
a cinema that is banned or abandoned, but that is seen lucidly in relation to its history and our future.
Who owns what? Godard’s eclectic borrowing in His- toire(s) raises questions of property and
propriety: who owns history, Europe, |
cinema? The programmes themselves are labelled like Situationist texts with an anti-copyright: “non {c) J-L G" And they certainly raise complex issues about international copyright, the ownership of film images and the dif- ferences between the various Euro- pean legal systems. The programmes had already been broadcast by French, German and Swiss television when a British screening was first proposed two years ago. The initial reaction was of considerable apprehension as, on first glance, it appeared that the pro- grammes were made almost entirely of images borrowed from a pile of VHS cassettes. All the film clips were appar- ently uncleared and unpaid for.
Under recent legislation the reason- able use of extracts does not infringe the copyright in them if its purpose is criticism or review, provided the use is “fair dealing” In Histoire(s) du cinéma the borrowed images and sounds speak largely for themselves and the narra- tive flows almost entirely from the in- terweaving of these fragments. With some ingenuity, Channel 4's lawyers proposed that the programmes could be shown under this fair dealing provi- sion. Although we hope this will not involve legal action, Godard on Cinema is likely to present the strongest cultural case for the argument that the spirit of an enabling law should be applied to permit the innovative or revolution- ary, just as its letter permits the tradi- tion of formal criticism.
Histoire(s) du cinéma’ will be screened on Channel 4 on 21 and 28 June
SIGHT AND SOUND 29|7
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VAMPYR
SEE OBSESSION
This classic film is now exclusively available on video from REDEMPTION FILMS.
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Obsession
I think of two faces in movies, from the early days of sound, They've haunted me for years, though they're not famous faces — I had to look up their names to write about them. The first is that of Sybille Schmitz in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). It’s not Dreyer’s greatest work, but it disturbs in the best sense — images. looks, few words, an atmos- phere you can't shake from your skull.
The story comes from an Irish writer, Sheridan Le Fanu, whose ‘Schalcken the Painter’ I made as a television film some years ago. For this, his first sound picture, Dreyer adapted a Le Fanu tale of a female vampire. The film titles say it’s inspired by ‘In.a Glass Darkly’, the title story in a collec- tion of short stories, but in fact it owes much to Le Fanu's masterpiece ‘Carmilla’ in the same collection.
The film is discomforting from the start. We see the moody hero, David Gray, come to the mysterious inn “after sunset, by the river, in the village of Courtempierre’ There's the cockerel inn sign silhouetted against the sky, then a shot from the inte- rior showing Gray approaching the glass door, tapping on it, going away unanswered to look for another way in. Then we see, in the same order, the very same shots, the same action all over again. Is it, | wonder rather shamefacedly, a mistake in the neg cut? No, it has to be Dreyer’s way of inviting us into a waking dream.
Our hero books into the unwelcoming hostelry; an engraving on a wall in his room shows Death with a huge knife approaching a bedridden patient. Next door a nutty professor mutters incantations. An elderly gentleman invades Gray's bedroom muttering “she must not die.” For a 90s viewer, time warps: the professor looks uncannily like Jack MacGowran in Polan- ski's Dance of the Vampires. And our hero will dream he’s encased in a glass coffin, as though he'd seen Ken Russell's Mahler.
Throughout the film Dreyer plays with pans and tracks, leaving a character, wan- dering restlessly across a room or along a corridor, finding the actor again. When we first see the young woman, Léone, Sybille Schmitz, the wonderful face, in her bed- room, Dreyer pans past her on the bed, fol- lows her nurse to the door, pans back to reveal Léone’s now empty bed.
She has gone for a moonlight walk, and is discovered draped insensible over a tree trunk in the pose of Fuseli’s Nightmare, glowered over by a grandfatherly vampire. She is taken back to be ministered to by a nun, and worried over by her sister, Clearly now she has an undead problem, This is confirmed when we get a glimpse of the professor's Teach Yourself Vampires manual.
We know there has to be a moment of truth when the lovely Léone is revealed for what she is become. We've had decades of experience in the classic moment of vam- pire revelation. But what happens here is so simple, so devoid of calculated effects, that it’s truly shocking.
I seem to remember it happening in one tracking shot, but when I check I find it’s done in a series of cuts. Léone’s sister walks across the bedchamber. Léone lifts her head
Revelatory and subtie film acting can befound inthe haunted facesin Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ and Max Ophiils’ ‘Liebelei’ says Leslie Megahey, whose firstfeature film ‘The Hour of the Pig’ will be released in late autumn
The wonderful face
on the pillow, opens her splendid dark eyes, and touches them with her fingers, as if she would weep, an innocent violated. Then, as her sister passes, Léone’s face changes utterly. Her eyes widen, pupils roll upwards, her mouth twists, she looks like evil incarnate, and the insatiable, bestial appetite of the undead is exposed.
It's all done through the face of the actress — no prosthetics, no dry ice, no bloodshot contact lenses, no plastic vam- pire fangs. For one brief moment, this woman simply and believably turns into a vampire in front of our eyes, and it’s petri- fying. Now somebody else, probably the nun, walks in, and Léone reverts to her sweet young thing look,
I do like special effects that work: the transformations in An American Werewolf in London, The Company of Wolves, The Terminator. But while I'm admiring them, | can't help thinking “how did they do that?”
I know precisely how Sybille Schmitz does it - I've just tried to describe it. All itis, is a human being, an actor, altering her expression. But it has the terrifying quality of a childhood dream: a loved-one’s face changing unexpectedly, inexplicably, so that we realise in that instant that we never really knew who they were. That chills the spine, That’s real horror,
In the same year, 1932, Max Ophiils directed Magda Schneider in his fine melo- drama Liebelei. Like Schmitz (and she’s very like Schmitz, could be sisters), Schneider radiates a superb open innocence in a strong, handsome face. The story, from Arthur Schnitzler, is about Christine, a poor but honest Viennese girl who loves a dash- ing, womanising cavalry lieutenant.
From having seen her as easy meat, he falls for her, and they are to be married. He has one last macho cavalry-officer task to fulfil; wishing to spare her anxieties, he doesn't tell her about it. His past has come back to haunt him - a cuckolded husband has challenged him to a duel and honour demands he see it through.
Ophiils had to create a climactic scene in which her friends must tell Christine
Metamorphosis: Sybille Schmitz as the young, troubled woman in Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’
about the duel and its outcome. When they come to her later on the fateful morn- ing, she has no idea what has happened, and we're not entirely sure either. For in the master stroke, Ophiils has let us in on the beginning of the duel, but not the end. We see the combatants arriving in their black carriages, see the line of fire being paced out. Then Ophiils’ camera whisks us away, unwilling, to join a couple of the officer's apprehensive friends as they listen for the shots. They hear only one: where's the second?
Now, behind a glass door (another glass door) Christine is told of the night’s events, But her friends can't get the words out — too fearful, too ashamed of knowing what she doesn't. The camera doesn't even look at them. We watch only Christine's face, for what seems like minutes, in one slow, gen- tle track in, and in it we see the dawning of the terrible truth,
The only dialogue comes from her; phrase by phrase, quietly, with no histrion- ics, she pieces together what must have hap- pened, looking only to her friends’ faces for confirmation, The dialogue is wonderfully simple, simply spoken, halting, repeating itself, correcting itself,
Like the revelation scene in Vampyr, it’s the simplest of ideas, Ophuls could have given it the full works - the stammered story from the fearful friends, the close-up reactions, the hysterical tears and attempts at consolation, the sympathetic symphony orchestra, But Schneider's face tells it all, and it’s marvellous. And that face confirms something I often forget — the fact that fine, subtle film acting was already well devel- oped years ago, from the very beginning of the talkies, indeed from the silent days.
Orson Welles said (about his character in Touch of Evil) that he wanted to create some- thing that was unreal and yet true. It’s a pretty good definition of what we should be striving for in fantasy films, all films per- haps. The two actresses I've written about achieve it, and the truth-telling of those faces stays to haunt more than half a cen- tury after the camera turned on them.
SIGHT AND SOUND 31/7
BAL STILLS, FOSTERS AND VESIGNS:
Method in her madness: Marilyn Monroe was saner than father figures such as Lee Strasberg, who belittied her while sponging on her success
32|7 SIGHT ANDSOUND
All about Marilyn
Claire Monk
Marilyn Monroe: The Biography Donald Spoto, Chatto and Windus, £17.99, 750pp
Norman Mailer, whose Marilyn was pub- lished in 1973, admitted that he did it for the money. Robert Slatzer — a “fan” whose sole known meeting with Monroe was a snapshot session while she was shooting Niagara in 1952 — went much further, ludi- crously claiming in his book The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe to have been married to her for a few days during her engagement to Joe DiMaggio and going on to fabricate a chat-show career as her “clos- est personal confidant” In the context of the babel of male Marilyn fictions, any new biography claiming, as Spoto's does, to give us “The Truth — Finally” faces obvious hur- dles of sceptical reception. Another story? Who needs it? And why has it taken 30 years for the “truth” to be heard?
The answer to this last question lies in Spoto's “exclusive” access (shared, one sus- pects, with a hardy researcher) to 35,000 pages of confidential documents from the estate of Milton Greene, Monroe's one-time photographer and lover and later partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions. These include Monroe's own writings and a day-to- day record of her life kept (at her request) by the company’s lawyer - plus perusal of (among other things) her psychiatric and gynaecological records, the pathologist’s reports on her death and_ recently declassified US government documents.
The result is a constantly surprising re- evaluation which makes Gloria Steinem’s feminist rescue attempt Marilyn look like another infantilising myth of the helpless victim. After the 70s masculinist myth-mak- ing of Mailer et al and Steinem's 80s fantasy of sisters in shining armour, Spoto’s biogra- phy is a post-feminist excavation of a pre- feminist icon that restores to Monroe the simple dignity of being treated as an active agent in her own life: a troubled adult who only sometimes appeared like a frightened child, intelligent and ambitious as well as self-doubting and scared.
One of the book's discoveries is that men- tal illness was not hereditary in Norma Jean's family — but the mistaken belief that it was became a contributing factor to her mother's disturbance {and to the adult Monroe's terrified and guilty avoidance of her institutionalised parent). With this new slant comes a subtle but significant shift in our reading of Monroe's story; the struggle which became the leitmotiv of her life was not against madness but against the fear of madness; her tragic end was not predes- tined after all.
Marilyn's own terrifying ordeal in a high- security mental hospital in 1961 emerges here as a blatant act of abuse by her (female) psychiatrist Dr Kris; Monroe knew it, too, and sacked the shrink immediately after- wards. (And we wonder why Marilyn lacked a sense of sisterhood.) Indeed, Spoto’s account makes Monroe seem far saner than the father figures who belittled her while sponging on her success (method-acting guru Lee Strasberg and third husband Arthur Miller among them) and the hypocrisies of Hollywood and her time are
much to blame for the fact that we all thought otherwise. “[Her| culture.” Spoto writes, “asked more of Marilyn Monroe than perhaps of anyone in its popular his- tory. And because she was a woman, she seemed to fail twice as badly.”
The surprises fly thick and fast. There is Monroe's canniness as a self-publicist (she herself planted the Hollywood rumour that she was the new Jean Harlow) and clear- sighted assessment of her career (“If I keep on with parts like the ones [Twentieth Cen- tury Fox] gives me, the public will soon tire of me,” she declared in 1954). Most striking is her detached and sophisticated relation- ship with her screen image (she referred to the contradictory icon of active come-on and helpless passivity named ‘Marilyn Mon- roe’ in the third person). Her reduced movie output in 1955-62 (five films compared to 24 in the previous eight years) came not from depression but, Spoto suggests, from a growing frustration with her giggling, wig- gling persona and a desire to discover other selves off screen as much as on. “If 1 can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?” she asked.
Spoto’s much hyped theory of her death cleverly integrates this quest for self-knowl- edge with the tale’s more familiar themes of submissiveness and vulnerability to exploitation. In this version, Monroe was killed not by the Kennedys, the Mafia or a self-administered overdose but by an enema of the hypnotic drug chloral hydrate admin-
istered by her peculiar housekeeper Eunice Murray (a plum role for Kathy Bates) on the instructions of Marilyn's megalomaniac psychiatrist Ralph Greenson. By the time of her death, Greenson had (it is claimed) insinuated himself into Monroe's dealings with Fox (he may even have been instru- mental in her sacking from her last, unfinished film Something's Got to Give), tried (with limited success) to annex her from more trustworthy colleagues and friends and installed Murray as his spy. But Marilyn had ceased to act the passive ‘good patient’ ~ and as her masseur and friend Ralph Roberts observed of her ‘treatment’ at the hands of Greenson, studio doctors and a needle-happy GP who wasn't above drag- ging her out of restaurants to administer unrequested ‘vitamin jabs’: “It was obvious, wasn't it? If you couldn't control Marilyn one way, there were always drugs.” As for the Kennedys, Spoto maintains that the rumours originated as right-wing smears: Monroe slept with JFK just once, and on the few occasions when she met Bobby (always in company) they talked about civil rights rather than sex.
Whether you believe it or not, Spoto's story is deliciously ironic - for while Dr Greenson was undoubtedly sick, the patient was struggling towards health. Neither sui- cidal nor washed up, at the time of her death Monroe had just been re-engaged by Fox on Something's Got to Give at two-and-a- half times her original salary and was (per-
haps rashly) about to marry Joe DiMaggio for the second time. Describing Marilyn's mood in her 36th and last summer, several of her friends choose the words “taking con- trol of her life.” It’s the last phrase one would expect to be associated with the cen- tury’s most vulnerable sex symbol - but after Spoto’s book, perhaps it will.
The buddy politic
Paul Julian Smith
Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema
Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Routledge, £35 (hb), £10.99 (pb), 272pp
Once there were high hopes for men’s stud- ies. Taking the lead from straight ‘men in feminism’ like Stephen Heath or gay ‘out- laws’ in feminism like Craig Owens, male scholars and theorists hoped to produce a new discipline, parallel and indebted to women's studies, which would displace men from their privileged position in cultural history and theory. Five or six years later the future looks less promising. Straight men fell victim to guilt and embarrass- ment; gay men discovered, with the rise of queer theory, that we had more in common with lesbians than we had supposed.
The central problem remains: how do you theorise a dominant term such as mas- culinity, one which (like heterosexuality or whiteness) is rendered invisible by its very pervasiveness? When Hollywood increas- ingly denies women any screen space, to focus on masculinity might simply be to offer more of the same. And with the much trumpeted return to history and retreat from the high psychoanalytic theory once championed by Screen, the critical climate has changed. The question of sexual differ- ence now demands a more inflected, less abstract treatment. If, as the editors of this volume suggest, to “screen the male” in Hol- lywood is both to project and to protect him (to place his image centre frame and to absolve that image from the perils of cri- tique), then there may be no way out of the male matrix.
This collection brings together essays by women and men, both established scholars (such as Lucy Fischer, Peter Lehman and Gaylyn Studlar) and younger critics from Britain, Australia and the US. Beginning with Steve Neale’s attempt to address “mas- culinity as spectacle” (the only essay not written for the volume), contributors adopt two strategies: either they project issues generally associated with the feminine (masochism or masquerade once more) on to the masculine, or they address female spectatorship and ask the question “what is masculinity for women?” Studlar’s essay on “optic intoxication” in Valentino is exem- plary here. Focusing on “woman-made mas- culinity” in the first decades of the century, she argues convincingly for a fantasy recon- ciliation of masculine and feminine which none the less responds to changes in US society in the period. What she calls “dance madness” offered unique possibilities of pleasure for an audience of women. In her subtle accommodation of psychic and social material and in her extensive archival docu- mentation, Studlar sets high standards not always met by later essays.
If it was actor-dancers such as Valentino,
Optical intoxication: Valentino’s image in films such as ‘The Young Rajah’ offered the exquisite pleasures of woman-made masculinity to female audiences
Astaire and even Cagney who first posed the problem of the feminised man (the last is the object of a fine essay by Fischer), in the 70s and 80s this “mal(e)-aise” was trans- posed from the dance spectacle of the male body to the perverse fascination of the male with his own ability to occupy the female position. Thus four essays address male hys- teria and masochism in Clint Eastwood, De Palma, Cronenberg and the horror and Tape-revenge genres. Here “men in women's places” experience both attraction and repulsion. Central is the fluidity of identification transcending assigned gen- der identities suggested by psychoanalysis and the process of projection whereby, in classical Freudian style, male homosexual desire is transformed into hatred and perse- cution delusion. For Barbara Creed and Helen W. Robbins such unpromisingly misogynist movies as Dressed to Kill and Dead Ringers reveal a complex symptomology of male abjection and womb envy.
But what happens when the boys get together? Three essays explore antique bonding in Spartacus, the interpenetration of gender and ‘race’ in Boyz N the Hood and “the buddy politic” in the Lethal Weapon series. In these disparate films male couples function as fault lines, tracing barely sub- merged contours of racism and homoerotic homophobia. Finally, in the action movies of the late 80s and 90s the fetishised body of the white male (Stallone and Schwarzeneg- ger) softens into a newly ‘feminised’ figure: as Susan Jeffords describes, in T2 the Termi- nator takes on an implausibly maternal function, even laying down its life like the mothers of Hollywood melodrama.
In their introduction the editors state that film theory since Laura Mulvey has tended to invoke the binaries of male/ female, sadist/masochist, voyeurist/exhibi- tionist, active/passive. They overstate the case. In Mulvey (and indeed Lacan), ‘mascu-
line’ and ‘feminine’ are precisely positions, in no sense reducible to the empirical sub- ject in the cinema seat or on the analyst’s couch. And a great deal of recent work has emphasised the fluidity of gender positions and audience address, from Studlar’s vindi- cation of male masochism in von Sternberg to Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws (uncited here).
But if their thesis is by no means as origi- nal as they seem to believe, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark are still to be congratu- lated for throwing light on the darker conti- nent of male sexuality. And with stills of Valentino as the Young Rajah stripped and draped with pearls, of Kirk Douglas as Spar- tacus, his torso daubed with paint, and of Kurt Russell and Stallone sharing an un- likely intimate moment, the illustrations alone are worth the price of the paperback.
Alow laugh
Andy Medhurst
What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound
Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic
Henry Jenkins, Columbia University Press, $37.50, 336pp
It is, perhaps, a commonplace of comedy criticism to point out that the comic mode has an inbuilt tendency towards the subver- sive, the ludic and the scandalous. More- over, when comedy wants to unsettle and confound, it targets textual norms as well as social ones, with the result that most standard accounts of narrative (cinematic or otherwise) omit or gloss over comedy, bypassing it with faintly anxious disdain. After all, narrative theory is a sober, often glacially exact business; it cannot afford to let comedy across the threshold in case it runs amok and craps on the carpet.
The particular value of Henry Jenkins’ extensive, assured and articulate book is that it takes that broad starting point but rigorously explores its workings in a specific historical time and place - Hollywood in the first half of the 30s. The industry was striving to come to terms with the new pos- sibilities offered by sound technology - the rules were not yet fixed, the dust had far from settled - which opened up a space for the comic styles and performers that had developed on the vaudeville stage. By the end of the decade an ostensibly more pol- ished set of comic codes had fallen into place, which ensured that the more disrup- tive, impolite, rough-and-tumble comedy of the first few sound years fell into critical disrepute. Jenkins’ quest is to rehabilitate those earlier films.
These were movies centred on the per- sonas and routines of vaudeville-trained comedians, which revelled in a blithe disre- gard for credible characterisation and nar- rative causality, thrived on transgression and parody, and frequently offered their audiences the opportunity to see figures of social authority ridiculed and humbled. The Marx Brothers are the most familiar exponents to us now, since their critical rep- utation did not undergo the eclipse suf- fered by most of their contemporaries. But that same reputation, Jenkins argues, has mistakenly led them to be celebrated as uniquely anarchistic, rather than acknowl- edging the depth and range of the tradi- tions on which they drew. Consequently >»
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4 Jenkins spends more time on neglected acts like Wheeler and Woolsey or Olsen and Johnson, though it’s interesting to note that the book's dustjacket, presumably for com- mercial reasons, rescinds this democratic impulse by spotlighting Groucho Marx.
In tracing the lineages and landscapes of early sound comedy, the book supplies a wealth of contextual, historical detail that is at times overwhelming — a full scholarly apparatus can be a fine and noble thing, but chapters with 108 footnotes do leave the reader feeling factually battered, ener- vated by reference-lag. Happily, Jenkins knows how to redeem himself with evoca- tive reports of comedians at work, prompt- ing a desire to seek out the films he describes, He also provides sensitive analy- ses of the dynamics of gender and ethnicity within these comic frameworks. Eddie Can- tor’s career, for example, is fascinatingly presented as a case study of Hollywood capitulation to anti-semitism, his Jewish- ness increasingly effaced or masked in order to placate audience resistance in an era when Variety could matter-of-factly blame the relative failure of Fanny Brice’s screen ventures on the limited appeal of her “Hebrew jesting”
What Made Pistachio Nuts? is an impressive, illuminating contribution to the history of film comedy. From my unrepentantly British standpoint, however, it would have been improved by the addition of a few transatlantic glances, if only because as 1 read through Jenkins’ accounts of come- dians who delighted in disgracefulness, who held hierarchies in clownish con- tempt, and who brought the dangerous kinetic urgency of stage comedy on to the stilted screen, | could not shift from my mind the image of the Crazy Gang, a British troupe whose delirium, daring and near- murderous ruthlessness would have given any of the Americans celebrated in this book a run for their money.
New kids on the block
Peter Biskind
The New Hollywood Jim Hillier, Studio Vista, £14.99, 192pp
Jim Hillier's fine, if misnamed new book, is a fascinating account of the career trajecto- ries of directors who are not Bob Zemeckis, Adrian Lyne or the Zucker brothers ~ that is to say, Hillier focuses on struggling white males, women, blacks and foreigners. The title is misleading, because though the phrase “New Hollywood" pops up predict- ably every five years or so as a friend to pub- licists and journalists at a loss to describe a new twist in the serpentine road of tinsel town history, it is usually applied to the movie brat generation of the 70s. Although good independent films continue to be made and distributed today, the New Holly- wood of the 70s — before the era of block- busters, before the elephantine, bottom line-oriented bureaucracies that now weigh on the studios, before agents gained a stran- glehold over talent, before test screenings and astronomical marketing costs - no longer exists. Hillier’s analysis of Hollywood trends and financial data is certainly on tar- get, but there isn’t much that is new about
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contemporary Hollywood apart from its recent openness to blacks and women and the handful of financing wrinkles that have appeared in the last few years.
But nomenclature and the first two chap- ters aside (heavy going for anyone but the Variety addict), Hillier presents a very read- able account, much of it in the directors’ own words, of the uphill struggle from film school (or wherever) to the $5 million house in Malibu - hopefully with values intact. The first few chapters focus on the exploita- tion market and television, both traditional ways of breaking into the establishment.
Exploitation has been relatively familiar territory since the 60s and 70s, when first American International and then Roger Corman’s New World became hands-on postgraduate training ground for aspiring directors, besting anything USC, UCLA or AFI had to offer, Hillier focuses on the post- movie brat generation of Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Kaplan, Joe Dante, John Sayles and Amy Jones, as well as lesser known directors such as Mark Goldblatt and Aaron Lipstadt. The Corman story, although often told, appears to be a bottomless pit of anec- dote and as the years pass it becomes increasingly clear what a serendipitous national treasure Corman has been.
Even today, with the proliferation of alternatives provided by cable purveyors like HBO and Showtime, television has rarely been examined as a halfway house to features, and the ups and downs of direc- tors toiling in the small screen vineyards furnish material nearly as interesting as that provided by the Cormanoids. Hillier interviews an array of directors ranging from the relatively successful, such as Miami Vice producer Michael Mann, who
Ludic and scandalous: the Marx Brothers drew
went on to direct a hit, The Last of the Mohi-2 cans, to the relatively unsuccessful, such as 2 Bobby Roth, who have been unable to make 2 the transition to features or have managed F it only intermittently. They noodle, albeit with some wit and eloquence, the themes = they might be expected to noodle: will it 4 hurt or help their careers to work in televi- sion; what is the best way to bounce back from a flop or string of flops; and how best can they maintain their vision in a climate