Search for ‘Tom von Logue Newth’ (2 articles found)
The most intriguing recent experiment with the form and effectiveness of silent cinema occupies the whole second half of Miguel Gomes’ strange and beautiful Tabu (2012). A voiceover relates the events of 50 years previously, in the shadow of (the fictitious) Mount Tabu, in an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa. Black and white 16mm photography provides a silvery sheen of agedness; the story of forbidden love evokes the Tabu of F.W. Murnau (1931); and grasses rustle, cicadas cheep, but the characters’ lips move soundlessly. The project is not one of recreation, nor a nostalgic evocation of silent cinema, but an attempt to use characteristics of silent cinema to evoke nostalgia itself, the bittersweet mourning for a lost time (in this instance, labeled “Paradise”). This is pretty much a case of saudade, as Portuguese as can be, an emotion to feel but not describe, just as one cannot quite describe how the distance of years, and the absence of sound, makes silent cinema feel like a dream.
Direct and synch sound make us feel present; their noticeable absence is an immediate distancing device; and more complex relationships to the film before us can be conjured by a mixture of the two. Withholding of dialogue aside, Tabu is free from an over-strict schema, either literal or symbolic. It is as though Gomes is feeling his way in each scene, deciding which sounds, dialogue aside, will best bolster the images. It’s disarming enough when, half way through the film, words cease to emerge from the characters’ mouths; more so even, when the splashes of a swimming pool suddenly go unheard. In fact, Gomes might have benefitted from further erasures of direct sound; the more we hear of the world around them, the less comfortable the characters’ silence becomes.
Still from Miguel Gomes's ‘Tabu’ (2012)
But this is an experiment – there is no correct formal approach. In straight recreations of silent cinema one can point out cheats, but here the cheats are the point. No self-regarding replication, the wonder of Tabu is how it investigates the formal properties of pre-sound film in an attempt to channel its particular emotional power. The sense of distance in time comes easily, of course, but less so the emotional relationship between audience and characters whom they cannot hear. In Blancanieves, for example, that step of removal is a barrier; in Tabu, as in the best silent films, it is wonderland looking glass – we can both see though it, and see ourselves reflected in it.
Gomes’ smartest move, in fact, is relating his formal decisions as much to silent cinema as to home movies. His characters’ 16mm footage is made to look distinct from the story around it, but there’s no incontrovertible reason why it should. There is a built-in nostalgia to this too, for most people’s experience of home movies is direct-sound video; but the form of the home movie, from mid-century to mid-1980s, is recognizable and familiar – a less pristine image than that which we expect on a cinema screen, and an absence of sound. There’s a sense of intimacy, and a sense of loss – the faces can straddle the distance of years, but where have the voices gone? They were so sweet once, but they remain beyond our reach, locked away in the past. It sounds a lot like silent cinema.
The career of Monte Hellman
When the Venice Film Festival awarded Monte Hellman a Special Lion for his entire body of work last year, it was on the occasion of his triumphant return to the screen with the rich and personal Road to Nowhere (2010). In the 21 years since he made his last feature, Hellman’s name has passed before more filmgoers’ eyes as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs (1992) than as the director of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), the epitome of that lonely American cinema of the 1970s; never mind his pair of eerie metaphysical westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (shot back-to-back in 1965); or the oft-suppressed Cockfighter (1974). He is the secret auteur of American cinema, too infrequently spoken of, his films even less frequently seen.
‘I don’t think a lot about the movies that I’m making and I kind of take the script at face value and deal with it’. Monte Hellman rolled into Hollywood at the tail end of the studio period, in a climate that discouraged a view of director-as-artist. Most seemed happy that way, professionals at work. He got a thorough apprenticeship in Roger Corman’s back room, re-editing and re-shooting, and has undertaken for-hire ever since, with a hand in everything from Head (1968) to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973); he even directed second unit on Robocop (1987).
For his most significant outings as director, however, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him to do what he wanted with the westerns and with Cockfighter; and whilst Two-Lane Blacktop may be the real-life Easy Rider (1969) (shot sequentially as the unit made its way across the country), the freedom afforded Hellman would not have been permissible without the earlier film’s success. He prefers to take an anti-intellectual approach to his own filmmaking, but his Laurel Canyon home is lined with books and movies and art, and the craftsmanship is mingled with the instinct and emotion of a poet. He may not be the director to run around declaring that his vision must be seen, yet a personal vision is exactly what has emerged in his films, through one of the clearest and most consistent authorial voices in anything like mainstream American cinema.
The title of Hellman’s latest film, which opened in the US earlier this year, is as neat a summation of his philosophical outlook as any, and returns once again to man’s powerlessness in a world of dubious purpose. Even in his debut, the likeable, low-rent Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), Hellman allowed the two young leads to discuss whether we humans make our own luck, or if our luck makes us. In his next two films, shot back-to-back in the Philippines, he has one of the soldiers of Back Door to Hell (1964) offer the observation of human beings that ‘they get born, they stumble around in life for a while, they die’; this is then perfectly epitomized by the second film, the shaggy dog chase Flight to Fury (1964). Ever-wary of over-intellectualizing, he rejects the significance of the lines however: ‘They might sound like (authorial statements) but I didn’t write those lines. I didn’t cut them out, but I think a lot of that stuff is really sophomoric: it’s what we talk about late at night when we’ve finished cramming our books in college, you know. And I don’t think you can take any of it too seriously apart from the fact that everybody thinks that stuff, it’s out there.’
