Search for ‘Richard Brody’ (7 articles found)
Handmaiden to an idea
But Hollywood has a glut of young actresses who have more than that to offer—they have talent, and that talent isn’t being put to full use in Hollywood movies … The problem brings to mind Kierkegaard’s great 1847 essay “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in which he contrasts the gifts of the young actress (“luck,” “youthfulness,” “soulfulness,” and being “in the right rapport with the tension of the stage”—which I take for the theatrical equivalent of “the camera loves her”) with the “dialectical” element of acting, the “metamorphosis” that she undergoes when, no longer young, “in full and conscious, well-earned and dedicated command over her essential powers, she can in truth be the handmaiden of her idea.” I think immediately of Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, and many others—actresses in an age when the idea was dominant, above all, the idea of adulthood. Now, the very question of the passage from youth to adulthood is the crucial issue of art—that’s why Hollywood has such trouble dealing with it, and why these actresses haven’t really had the roles they deserve.
Hollywood in the Fifties
Take, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s run of films from “Strangers on a Train” and “Rear Window” through “The Wrong Man,” “Vertigo,” and “Psycho”; films by Nicholas Ray, including “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Bigger than Life“; Anthony Mann’s run of Westerns with James Stewart, plus his “Man of the West” and the graceful, poignant “The Glenn Miller Story“; Douglas Sirk‘s melodramas, including “All that Heaven Allows,” “Magnificent Obsession,” and “There’s Always Tomorrow“; Fritz Lang’s later works, such as “Human Desire,” “The Big Heat,” and “While the City Sleeps.” Otto Preminger created such sharp, ambivalent treasures as “Angel Face,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “Bonjour Tristesse,” and “Anatomy of a Murder”; Allan Dwan, who started in 1911, was still in business, making such jarring films as “Slightly Scarlet“ and “Tennessee’s Partner.” Ida Lupino made incisive melodramas, including “The Bigamist“; Jacques Tourneur made “Stars in My Crown“; Robert Aldrich made the ultimate film noir, “Kiss Me Deadly“; Joseph L. Mankiewicz made such sharp and discerning films as “All About Eve,” the medical comedy “People Will Talk,” and the inside-Hollywood melodrama “The Barefoot Contessa,” and got Brando and Jean Simmons to sing, splendidly, in “Guys and Dolls.”
There were Westerns, films noirs, and bullfighting dramas by Budd Boetticher; there were exhilaratingly violent yet tender-hearted films by Samuel Fuller, such as “Pickup on South Street“ and “Park Row” and “Forty Guns”; there were the great comedies of Frank Tashlin (”Susan Slept Here,” “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?“), the many musicals, melodramas, and comedies of Vincente Minnelli (“An American in Paris,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “The Cobweb,” “Designing Woman,” “Some Came Running”), the musicals of Stanley Donen (“Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Pajama Game“). John Ford had a run of masterworks that included “The Sun Shines Bright,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Searchers,” and, in 1962, he made the greatest American political film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance“; in 1960, Jerry Lewis got his start as a director with the wildly inventive “The Bellboy“; Orson Welles made “Mr. Arkadin“ and “Touch of Evil”; and Howard Hawks bracketed the decade with, at one end, “Monkey Business“ and “The Big Sky” and, at the other, “Rio Bravo.”
[Louis Menand on Dwight Macdonald:]
Before 1962, an educated cultural consumer might understandably have concluded that there was not much in the world of popular entertainment that demanded serious attention. Hollywood was in the doldrums…
This is simply not so. The nineteen-fifties were, rather, something of a golden age of American cinema. It was a time when Hollywood directors, liberated aesthetically by the example of Orson Welles and practically by the court-mandated rise of independent producers, let loose with a profusion of widely varied works of remarkable emotional and visual audacity and originality.
World on a Wire
The career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the wonders of the modern cinema—of the entire history of cinema—but it would be hard to assess on the sole basis of the few of his films that are available here on DVD and the peculiar relative rarity of screenings of his work (a complete retrospective is called for, but it would occupy a screen for quite a long time—he made forty-one features plus the fifteen-hour mini-series “Berlin Alexanderplatz” in fifteen years, and died at thirty-seven in 1982). He didn’t undo and recompose the elements of cinema, as did his immediate precursor in the prolific—namely, Jean-Luc Godard—but he delved deep into the world of his time as it was informed, even formed, emotionally and socially, by the cinema, as in his 1973 science-fiction thriller “World on a Wire,” which is only now getting its American theatrical premiere, at IFC Center. This belated release is cause for celebration as well as for a serious shaking of the head: where has it been all these years? At the time of its “advance” screening at MOMA this April, I wrote about it in the magazine with astonishment:
Fassbinder’s brilliantly sardonic approach decks the future out in high-gloss seventies kitsch (Plexiglas and mirrors, lacquered wood and chrome) and ubiquitous video screens, which reflect, distort, and multiply identities as readily as his panoply of zooms, pans, tracking shots, and shock cuts….
What I just learned, from an article on the film at the French site Le Post (it came out there on DVD last year), is the extraordinary way it was shot, according to its cameraman, and frequent Fassbinder collaborator, Michael Ballhaus:
A large part of the film was shot in Paris, where, moreover, the screenplay was worked out in a little bistrot. The difficulty was how to represent the future. A near-future. The search for an architect of the future. In Paris, everything was changing. The new neighborhoods greatly interested us. No little gardens, it had a futurist point of view, with big cubes. Shooting also in shopping centers, which didn’t exist in Germany at the time. Subterranean ones, where we could already find everything, shops, restaurants … snack bars, refreshment stands….
The shoot took only six weeks; the astounding virtuosity with which Fassbinder conjures material and virtual worlds with both a concrete plausibility and a disturbingly precise yet diverse display of inner agitation suggests his profoundly ingrained assimilation of the cinema, classic and modern; a shocking familiarity with psychological extremes; a ferociously clear anger at the corporate verities of the West German “miracle”; and a wildly sardonic sense of visual and dramatic excitement, of pure and ecstatic B-movie fun.
A Talk with Peter Falk
In memory of Peter Falk, the French newspaper Liberation has posted an interview with the actor by Marie Colmant that first ran there in 1996, and it’s a good one. He talks about the time when he was both playing Columbo and acting in the films of John Cassavetes, and compares it to “City Lights,” in which Charlie Chaplin “was a millionaire by day and a drunkard by night.” He speaks revealingly of working with Cassavetes:
To act under his direction, I first had to manage to forget everything I knew, all my points of reference when I got to the set. Not what I had learned, because I never really learned this craft, but all the ideas I had on how to act, to rehearse, to learn the text. With John, I had to get rid of all that. It didn’t interest him. There was a struggle under way between my instincts as an actor and what he wanted. But he never said what he wanted. Not a word. And I understood nothing of what he was saying. He did that deliberately. Because he was afraid of words, because he didn’t trust them. He created spontaneous acting, spontaneous behavior by playing on the nuances. He made me discover a whole palette of discomforts, a huge variety of shynesses, of annoyances. That’s what he was looking for, not what you usually see in movies…. It did me good to meet him, I was beginning to become a cynical actor.
He talked about his long period of gestation as an actor (“I wanted to become an actor but I didn’t want to admit it”) and his world fame as Columbo, saying that, when he was shooting a film in rural Ecuador, the bus he was riding in stopped in a mountain village and “children ran up to me shouting ‘Columbo!’ At first, it gave me great pleasure, but later I said to myself that those children should have had their own heroes instead of admiring a cop from Los Angeles.” And he admitted enjoying the fame the role brought him: “when I go see a basketball game, I’m always in the front row; I always have a table at a restaurant, I never have trouble getting a taxi” but “to be totally sincere, I’d surely be a better actor today if I hadn’t played Columbo all these years.”
It’s a good discussion with an extraordinary artist who remained a regular guy; there may be something to be said for his long gestation.
Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman
The indispensable online archive UbuWeb offers a wondrous document for download: a 1997 interview of the crucial modern-jazz musician Ornette Coleman by the crucial modern philosopher Jacques Derrida. (The original English text was lost; the document is translated back from a French translation.) They were, as Derrida notes, born in the same year, 1930 (as was the other key figure of philosophico-artistic late modernity, Jean-Luc Godard), and Derrida does a remarkable job of eliciting the substantial connections between their ideas, which come through in surprising ways.
Coleman tells a story of his early days as a professional musician and a lesson he learned about the bitter practicalities of artistic creation:
I was in Texas, I started to play the saxophone and make a living for my family by playing on the radio. One day, I walked into a place that was full of gambling and prostitution, people arguing, and I saw a woman get stabbed—then I thought that I had to get out of there. I told my mother that I didn’t want to play this music anymore because I thought that I was only adding to all that suffering. She replied, “What’s got hold of you, you want somebody to pay you for your soul?”
For Coleman, the rise of bebop, which he considered “an instrumental music that isn’t connected to a certain scene, that can exist in a more normal setting,” was a redemption, but he found the New York milieu uncongenial, even hostile, as well: “Obviously, the state of things from the technological, financial, social and criminal point of view was much worse than when I was in the South.”
Coleman denies any express intention of bringing about social change by way of his music, but, in a fascinating exchange, he evokes the higher philosophical thought that’s implicit in his work—and racial politics, unsurprisingly, are central to his ideas.
JD: Have you felt that the introduction of technology was a violent transformation of your project, or has it been easy? On the other hand, does your New York project on civilizations [the pretext of the interview] have something to do with what they call globalization?
OC: I think that there’s something true in both, it’s because of this that you can ask yourself if there were “primitive white men”: technology only seems to represent the word “white,” not total equality.
JD: You mistrust this concept of globalization, and I believe you are right.
OC: When you take music, the composers who were inventors in western, European culture are maybe a half-dozen. As for technology, the inventors I have most heard talk about it are Indians from Calcutta and Bombay. There are many Indian and Chinese scientists. Their inventions are like inversions of the ideas of European or American inventors, but the word “inventor” has taken on a sense of racial domination that’s more important than invention—which is sad, because it’s the equivalent of a sort of propaganda.
I’m reminded of Edward O. Bland’s film “The Cry of Jazz,” from 1959, in which he presciently contemplates the role that modern jazz (embodied, in the film, by Sun Ra and his band) would play in the civil-rights movement—and the inevitable breakdown in musical form and function that would result. Jazz is, of course, a creation and a reflection of African-American life and politics. In the sixties, modern jazz often converged with black radicalism and sought alternatives to Western culture, and by decade’s end those forms became (as Bland foresaw) styles that lost their radical content to, on the one hand, aestheticism (including an amiable multiculturalism), and, on the other, the more practical forms of exhortation and mobilization that popular music could provide.
Derrida and Coleman have had something of the same experience: both found themselves the fathers of movements, “deconstruction” and “free jazz,” that threatened to swallow up their individual achievements. Derrida, whose anti-systematic work was born in academic institutions that are explicitly based on structured discipleship, became the core of a new system. As for Coleman, the world of jazz changed before his eyes, from a club-based to a recording-based to a concert- and conservatory-based system, and what it is to be a working musician is drastically different from when he got started. He may have added technology to his music (and, from time to time, subtracted it again); he may have recreated a traditional form of transmission by working with his son, Denardo, who is his drummer (and has been since he was a child, in the late sixties) and manager; he may have recorded with joujouka musicians and Asian singers and challenged, with his concept of harmolodics (which he discussed with David Remnick in a Talk of the Town piece from 2000, again delivering his mother’s aphorism), the settled ways of Western music; but Coleman’s brilliant and daring musical inventions somehow, and quickly, opened the doors to an eclectic musical playground that, like modern Hollywood (under the influence of the French New Wave and, in particular, of Godard) both makes room for a surprising range of individual and personal modes of expression and often uses them to repackage familiar and unchallenging material.
Yet, ultimately, it may well be that the very notion of art, as a way of life and of experience, as it has been for millennia, is both more resilient and more intrinsically radical than the ideas with which some (and even some artists) would challenge it. Here’s Coleman, describing to Derrida the personal origins of his most famous composition:
Before becoming known as a musician, when I worked in a big department store, one day, during my lunch break, I came across a gallery where someone had painted a very rich white woman who had absolutely everything that you could desire in life, and she had the most solitary expression in the world. I had never been confronted with such solitude, and when I got back home, I wrote a piece that I called “Lonely Woman.”
The music’s mournful yet ecstatic refraction and recombination of the blues raises its implications of class, race, and gender to something powerfully universal—yet perhaps universal in a new way (an artistic equivalent of a different order of infinity), a way that, in breaking through the limits of the categories that gave rise to it, may well fulfill Coleman’s philosophical vision.
Godard on E-Books
Last week, Macy Halford, my colleague over at The Book Bench, wondered “What Kindle Wants,” in which she expressed her preference for physical books over the electronic kind. She wrote, “What I as a reader need and desire is a technology with pages and a cover and heft that can be marked up and placed on a bookshelf and kept forever.” She’s in good company. In June, 2000, when I interviewed Jean-Luc Godard at his office in Rolle, Switzerland, for a Profile of him that I wrote for this magazine, he spoke to me of his dissatisfaction with something that did not yet exist: e-books. The subject came up when he explained that he preferred to edit video with analog rather than digital technology, because, he told me, with digital technology, “time no longer exists.” And the example he gave me came not from the cinema but from literature and what he called “the electronic book.” He got up from his chair, brought a book from his bookshelf, and brought it back to his desk.
“What I call time is this,” he said, as he opened the book and flipped its pages back and forth. “For the electronic book, there’s this”—he pretended to press a button on the table. “If you want to go backwards, you do this”—he flipped pages. “With the electronic book if you go backwards you do this”—he tapped the table.
“And even this will be a problem,” he said, “because you’ll be on this page, O.K., and then you’re reading, I don’t know, ‘War and Peace,’ by Tolstoy, then you’re there at the battle of Borodino, or at the battle of something-or-other, you’re at the death of Prince Andrei, and then he remembers when he was at Austerlitz. You’re there, and then you want to take another look at the page where he was at Austerlitz. O.K. With an electronic book, how do you do it?”
I said, “You type it in.”
“You type ‘Austerlitz’ and you see it immediately. But first you have to remember ‘Austerlitz,’ right? Because if you remember a thought or an emotion that is a little vague—right? If you do this”—he flipped pages—“it’s something else altogether. Because when you do this”—flip—“you’re here; you want to go to Austerlitz, which is there, so you do this”—he flipped pages again. “Then suddenly you stop, you see something else, then you forget Austerlitz and you start to read that other thing, but with this”—he tapped the table—“you won’t do that. Thus the entire past disappears—something disappears. O.K., is it good, is it bad, I don’t know. But in practice, it’s not good.”
The “in practice” part he was referring to, of course, is cinematic practice. “There’s less thought, there’s more time, therefore there’s less cinema,” he said. “There’s less cinema, and all movies resemble each other, they’re all made like this”—he tapped the table. “So there may be some very beautiful images, some very beautiful things, but it’s harder to make good movies than before.”
Which may, in part, explain why it takes Godard longer to make films now—there were three years between the completion of “In Praise of Love” and that “Notre Musique,” six years between the latter film and “Film Socialism“ (which was at the New York Film Festival last fall). He’s using digital technology now—and, filling the time that’s saved with thought, making the past reappear.
Plucked from Obscurity
The “hapax legomenon,” as classicists among us know, is a word that appears only once in a language’s (or an author’s) texts. If Google video is the closest thing we’ve got to the great Alexandrian video library, there are worthies who turn up only a single, precious visual record, a “hapax phenomenon”; one such treasure is the clip above, the only one, it seems, that features the great jazz guitarist Grant Green (1935-1979), from 1969. (And this clip puts it into context.) The era’s other great jazz guitarist, Wes Montgomery (1923-1968), is seen on many videos (as here) because he was featured on television during his European tour of 1965. Montgomery has the more original, rounded tone (due to his thumb-plucking technique); Green’s tone, with the pick, is closer to the classic, pointed jazz-guitar sound of Charlie Christian—but, when push comes to shove, I listen more often to Green, who, to my ear, dances a little more abstractly over the harmonies. (But I’d like to hear from the experts.) He was a member of one of the great trios of the mid-sixties (with the organist Larry Young and the drummer Elvin Jones), of which, sadly, there’s no video record; he recorded copiously (for Blue Note) in the ‘sixties; among his greatest recordings are “Standards,” “Matador,” and “The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark“.
P.S. Extraordinary footage—perhaps another hapax—of Larry Young, here with Tony Williams, from 1971.
