Mildred Pierce Scene Analysis

The opening scenes of Michael Curtz’s Mildred Pierce are marked by a tense narrative ambiguity, heightened by classic noir visual techniques that entice the audience. Mildred Pierce is dominated by the melodrama form, but the opening scenes are striking in their noir atmosphere of shadow, moral complexity and surprising characterizations.

The opening credits feature a looping shot of waves lapping onto a sandy shore, washing away the names with a dramatic score. The beaches of California will be an important setting in the film, as the place of life-changing events; the waves can then be seen as a metaphor as to the constant changes we experience over time. The credits fade to black before we are throttled directly into the story in classic noir style. Gunshots ring out, a darkened beach house is lit in shadows, and we see a man collapse muttering his final words: “Mildred.” As he calls out this name, we are not sure of the tone - is it an accusation? Is he looking at this Mildred with a tinge of damning regret, or is he fondly recalling her as he dies? Tantalizingly close views of the killer refuse an answer, as the camera cuts between the broken mirror behind him and a car escaping. Questions are immediately raised, and the following shot is one that seems to suggest an answer. A darkened, humid pier with seedy neon lights appears, and we begin to follow a beshadowed female figure. She is a regal-looking woman with a devastated face, one that appears to be strain with guilt. We instinctually know this to be Mildred, but we do not know her role quite yet. The score swells with harps and pathos. With her tears and her determination to drown herself, we are still not sure of her motives. When she heart-breakingly mutters to the policeman that stops her “leave me alone”, our sympathies are established, but our suspicions are raised.

Meandering back from the pier, she is stopped by her apparent ex-business partner into his shabby club, a crowded, smoky joint. The following conversation between the two is a terse, hard boiled affair, yet full of melancholy and apology. When she says that he can “talk his way out of anything,” he responds with a casual, almost flippant, “In my business you have to be.” The exchange is marked by a tinge of accusation on her behalf, and forced aloofness from him. When he blatantly makes a sexual approach to her and we learn that this is a common occurrence, his profile in the audience’s mind is diminished into sleaze. Our impression of Mildred becomes more complex when she downs her drink in a single gulp, sighing that she has ‘learned a lot these last few months’ and invites him to her home, the scene of the murder. “Is that a dare?” he asks coyly, and we realize that we do not trust either of these characters.

The beach house is enveloped in angular, flickering shadows, and the camera follows them from low angles. Mildred is painted as a black widow, leading Wally into her trap - but with a striking tinge of melancholy. In their conversation, she flimsily explains that her husband is ‘away’. Wally begins to suspect that something is awry. We anticipate him to accuse her of malice, but instead he continues his pathetic sexual approaches. The screenplay is playing with the audience, and it is delicious. The atmosphere becomes even more tense after she throws his glass when he attempts to kiss her and she announces that she wants to change her dress, coded language for sex. He seems aloof as ever, but when she ducks into her room she is panicked. Is she regretting her actions? Is she nervous about what she is going to do?

The following sequence is one of claustrophobia and classic noir technique, with heavy nods to German Expressionism. Realizing that he is locked in the house, the score picks up and the editing quickens. Shadows dominate, and a striking shot of Wally running up the stairs creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and panic. The ‘elephant in the room’ is literally illuminated when he knocks a lamp over, revealing the body, and a revealing shot of character occurs when he unplugs a ringing phone. Police pull up to the house and hit it with a spotlight, just as Wally breaks through a window. With little warning, the police shoot at him. First impressions, it seem, can have undesirable consequences.

Mildred pulls up to a mansion, and the connection is obvious; wealth is always to be met with suspicion, especially from women. The police are waiting for her, and we are introduced to her daughter, dressed in virginal white complete with flower in her hair, contrasting her mother’s lavish fur coat. The relationship between mother and daughter which features so prominently in the film is already evident, as Mildred eloquently attempts to protect a shrill Veda. The role of the femme fatale is dissected between the two characters. Mildred is lead out of the house, where the reason for their visit is announced: her husband is dead. Her reaction is one of genuine concern, and we still do not know what to make of her as she drives off into the blackness.

The opening scenes of Mildred Pierce play with the audience and revel in ambiguity. Any possibility seems as likely as the next, and whenever we are lead into one conclusion about a character, an alternative is suggested. This sense of intrigue submerges the audience into the world of Mildred Pierce, where melodrama and noir collide with delightful results.

Touch of Evil Scene Analysis

The Apartment

In Orson Welles’ 1958 masterpiece Touch of Evil, a deadly incident reveals the tensions bubbling just beneath the surface of an American-Mexican border town. The threat of violence is ready to present itself in the ominous, confusing atmosphere that is elegantly constructed through a single five minute long shot. A classic exercise of film noir, this scene in Sanchez’s apartment displays the Wellesian sense of innovation with visuals, sound and dialogue that is so well respected today.

The shadows that are so integral to the noir atmosphere are in full display here; sunlight filters through blinds and light glows from low-set table lamps resulting in shadows that cut across the actor’s faces and loom on the wall behind them. The stark contrast between black and white results in menacing doppelgangers, creating a claustrophobic sense of police dominance. Actors’ faces are hidden by shadows; intentions are uncertain, as all appear to be concerned with their reputations rather than with the carry-through of justice.

The question of race is clear in Touch of Evil, but perhaps nowhere as obvious as here. Sanchez, in his panicked state, reverts to Spanish to communicate his frustration. Vargas appears to be the only other Spanish-speaking individual in the cramped apartment and acts as a translator for the xenophobic Captain Quinlan, who declares that he doesn’t “speak Mexican”. Confusion emerges as the characters begin to speak over one another in an Wellesian/proto-Altmanesque fashion, each one trying to gain dominance in the conversation. The frustration of bilingual communication reaches its peak as Quinlan slaps Sanchez across the face for speaking in Spanish - who merely told Vargas in a polite tone where the telephone was. Quinlan’s reaction is perhaps the only time we see a sliver of remorse cross his face.

The differences between Manolo Sanchez, Marcia Linnekar, Ramon Vargas and their legal situations powerfully depicts the themes of race and class. Linnekar, as the wealthy daughter of a white American, is able to hire an attorney, speak when she desires (she absent-mindedly answers an officer’s question with little concern) and leaves early to “rest” with only a few questions, most of which are easily dodged by her lawyer. Sanchez, as a Mexican shoe clerk, cannot afford such luxuries. He is brutally questioned, beaten and framed. Quinlan openly floats various theories in front of him, each more condemning than the next, and Sanchez is never treated with even a morsel of respect. Even Vargas is treated with more civility than Sanchez; he too is a foreigner, but he is a man of influence and wealth. Quinlan may despise both of them, but the questions of class and power mean that Vargas can not be openly harmed.

An interesting dichotomy between visuals and sound emerges as the camera follows Vargas to the bathroom, in what initially appears to be a meandering move away from the central action. We can still hear the escalating exchange between Quinlan and Sanchez, but it becomes muffled and distant, and our attention is visually focused on Vargas washing his hands. However, our attention is truly on the events unfolding off-screen through sound, as Quinlan punches Sanchez in the gut as to not “leave a mark”. The camera carefully focuses on the (empty) shoe box that Vargas knocks over into the bathtub, but it seems to be such an uneventful action that we hardly notice. Later, when the importance of the box is revealed, we are left to search our memories over what we saw. We doubt our recollection, and the atmosphere of tense confusion strengthens.

Quinlan’s vile aura comes into full bloom within this scene. While we have already been introduced, here his unkempt appearance contrasts greatly against the suave Vargas, dressed in an elegant dark suit, slicked back hair and handsome sunglasses. Quinlan waddles into the room with a protruding stomach, sweaty brow, unbuttoned jacket and messy tie. It is a clear and obvious juxtaposition, but an effective one nonetheless. Quinlan’s officers are almost pathetic in their reverence. When Quinlan finally enters the apartment, he asks if anyone has touched anything. “We know better than that, Captain,” replies one of the officers. “We were waiting for you.” He goes on to send one of his inferiors to fetch him coffee, and then reacts with gluttonous disappointment when he doesn’t bring back a donut or sweet bun, too. He is overtly confident that he will charge Sanchez with the crime: when asked about the lack of any real evidence, he smugly responds with “Oh, we’ll get it.” His vocal mannerisms recall an aged ‘gumshoe’ from early gangster films, tinted with tired vanity; his monologues are lengthy yet terse, and as mentioned previously, he has little hesitance to speak over others. It is a startling contrast to the eloquent Vargas, the cosmopolitan anti-drug official from Mexico, a rising star in a new wave of educated, sympathetic law enforcers. Yet when the tension explodes in the final act of Touch of Evil, even Vargas has not been able to escape the treacherous, back-stabbing schemes as perfected by Quinlan. His touch radiates evil.

Capote's Cold Blood

CAPOTE’S COLD BLOOD

“On the night of November the 14th, two men broke into a quiet farmhouse in Kansas

and murdered an entire family.”

While Bennett Miller’s 2005 film Capote may not initially appear to fit into the noir pantheon, a careful analysis of the film through the noir lens reveals surprising results. Truman Capote fits into British film critic Raymond Durnat’s description of the noir anti-hero as a Detective-Murderer-Executioner, in addition to his status as an homme fatale. Capote betrays everyone around him in his attempt to gain narrative closure for his “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, which ultimately becomes a source of personal grief. The lack of trust integral to noir is spread throughout the film as the urbane invades the rural and the quest for Art trumps human relationships. Morality is ambiguous and damning, as both Capote and the audience demand the carrying of justice while having an increasingly sympathetic view of Perry Smith.

The desaturated visual scheme of Capote is striking in its subtlety. At points the film almost mimics black-and-white, with only the occasional splash of emerald green whiskey bottles, dusty pink overcoats and the clear blue Spanish sky. Otherwise the film is dominated by neutrals, blacks and greys, all set in natural light and often in deep-focus long shots. Along with the minimal score of echoey piano, minor chords and thin, dissonant strings, the mood is tremendously mournful. The sure yet slow pacing of the film is tense, and the stretches of near-silence are remarkably absorbing. The noir atmosphere of dread is in full swing, tainted with a clear sense of sorrow.

Where Capote firmly establishes itself in the noir tradition is within the characterization of Truman Capote, who can be seen as a noir conglomerate. As a journalist, he is an astonishing detective, with a self-proclaimed 94% recollection of all conversations. Stopping at nothing to see the completion of his book, he is a murderer and executioner, delaying the inevitable to extract as much information as he can from Perry Smith and Richard Hickock before he sends them to their death. He is even an homme fatale: a seducer of knowledge, using his charm and wit to manipulate his way through his investigation. Capote is above all a performer; on his quest to “blaze a different path” and invent “an entirely new kind of writing, the non-fiction novel”, his persona of aloofness begins to come apart at the seams, and those he casually betrays begin to abandon him. He cannot sustain his performance, as it has become much more than that: it has become his entire life.

Death’s impact is Capote’s motivation to create. While he never commits a physical act of violence, he is unspeakably drawn towards it. In an early scene, Capote is sitting in his apartment searching for a new topic to write about, when he comes across a small story in the New York Times. It is the brutal murder of a family of four - the Clutters - in a small Kansas town. We see a close-up shot of him slowly cutting out the story with elegant black scissors, the black-and-white photo of Mr. Clutter juxtaposed with the blade. Real-world violence is reduced to paper and ink, and Capote is visually equated with the blade. The analogy is apt: he is sleek and urbane, cutting straight through the town with little effort while irreparably changing the very nature of the story, the crime, and the people involved. He is cutting out a piece of their lives for his own purpose. Little does he know is that this small act will forever change his life. It is important to note that the only images we ever seen of the family are either in smiling photographs, or silent recollections of the crime. Only remnants remain, and they will be reduced to little more than macabre wallpaper in Capote’s eloquent and hauntingly descriptive prose.

The honesty of the journalist are the first audible words from Capote in the film, at a smoky, jazz-fueled party in New York: “Exactly. But at least be honest about the facts.” He continues to say that “being true to who you are is important. I’m not saying that you need to be psychoanalytic about the whole mess, but don’t be afraid.” It is obvious that this is part of his social performance; in fact, as the conversation continues he contradicts himself by stressing that he doesn’t “think you actually need to be honest”. What he is implying is that it is the appearance of honesty, that being convincing to your audience that you are indeed speaking truth, is what creates compelling writing. In Cold Blood will appear to be an honest telling of the story, but it will also be an exaggerated account. Art may be proclaimed as Truth, but the reality is that they must meet at a compromise.

As Capote begins his investigation, one of the first people he meets is Detective Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Greeted with looks of disdain from the officers for his flamboyant postures and clothing, Capote requests an interview from Dewey - before saying casually “I don’t care one way or the other whether or not you catch whoever did this.” It is one of the few mistakes he makes. Dewey responds, simply and gruffly, “I care.” The interview is over before it even began, and Capote has been exposed for his true nature: aloof and self-interested.

However this does not stop Capote from reaching his goal, as he simply seduces Dewey’s wife Marie, a fellow Southerner and avid reader of literature. His role as seducer presents Truman Capote as a more expansive noir conglomerate than Durnat’s trifecta of Detective-Murderer-Executioner; he is also the homme fatale, seducing those around him into revealing information. Unlike the femme fatale who seduces with her sexuality, Truman Capote uses his flamboyant wit and his exuberant charm; but like the femme fatale, he uses his perceived weakness to gain the upper hand, tricking people into believing him. Both the female and the gay male are seen as weak when compared to straight white male, but fatales use this to their advantage. Capote presents himself as a dandy, emphasizing his status as an Other.

Throughout the film, Capote is able to easily seduce those who are also perceived as outsiders, and through these people, seduce those in power. He is able to create a perversion of the bureaucratic rules that surround him; he twists them, bribes the officials, and uses the Law as his pawn, all in the name of Art and Truth. When he is unable to reach Inspector Dewey, Capote simply lures the wife instead. As Laura Kinney shuts down in her interview with Nelle Harper Lee, presumably because she perceives Capote as a male threat, he convinces her of his Otherness in his high-pitched, droll voice: “Oh, it’s the hardest thing when someone has a notion about you and it’s impossible to convince him otherwise. Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged because of the way I am. You know, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong. You know what I mean?” Suddenly, Laura smiles at him. He has seduced her into revealing more, and even giving him Nancy Cuttler’s diary. Nelle shakes her head with knowing disbelief. She sees right through him. To gain access to one of the killers, held in the women’s cell in the Sheriff's residence, Capote goes through the Sheriff’s wife Dorothy Sanderson, bringing her “breakfast, news and literature” one morning when she has been “left all alone by that hardworking husband of [hers]”. The literature he brings is his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms inscribed with the following: “To the maiden of the Midwest, the priestess of the plains, the queen of the kitchen, my first novel. Truman.” It is a resoundingly successful move. He has gained the trust of the Sheriff’s department, and has gained access to one of the killers.

Yet, the single most important person for him to seduce also proves to be the most difficult. Not because of the subject’s resistance, but because of Capote’s increasing attachment to him; Perry Edward Smith will turn out to be the ultimate source for his novel, but will also be the undoing of Truman Capote himself. Having gained access to Perry through his dual-purpose attack on Mrs. Sanderson, Capote begins his seduction by bringing him Aspirin. Throughout the rest of the film, the seduction continues but becomes muddled as Capote begins to fall in love with the intellectually astute, articulate and artistic Perry Smith. Suddenly Capote’s role as aloof journalist and Executioner becomes much more personal than planned. In order to complete some sense of traditional narrative, Capote must have closure. In this case, it means the hanging of Perry and Edward - yet he pays for their appeal process, nurses Perry to health from the point of suicidal starvation, provides him with literature, and visits them incessantly. Why does he do this? He claims it is to extend the process of the interviews, and to coax the lurid details of the murders out of Perry. Eventually Capote’s ambitions eclipse his emotional attachment to the killers, but the effect almost destroys him. He slips into depression and alcoholism. Only those closest to him see the toll which the moral dilemma behind In Cold Blood has taken on him. Yet their is little sympathy for the man who brought this upon himself. The final words in the film are definitive.

Truman Capote: There wasn’t anything I could have done to save them.

Nelle Harper Lee: Maybe not; the fact is you didn’t want to.

The atmosphere of distrust that is so prevalent in the film is reinforced through two noir staples: the invading of the rural by the urban and the American distrust of the artist. Truman Capote represents both of these themes in a singular figure. He is a controversial novelist, a rural transplant, a member of the New York social elite, and an openly gay man. When he arrives in Kansas, his presence is an overtly urbane shock. Resistance is inevitable, but Capote does not back down; he tackles their distrust head-on with caustic wit. In an interview, Capote tells a magazine writer that “two worlds exist in this country. The quite, conservative life, and the life of those two men. The underbelly, the criminally violent. And those worlds converged that bloody night.” It is obvious which of these two worlds Capote belongs to, and the townspeople intuitively feel it.

There is a final element in Bennet Miller’s Capote that establishes the film as part of the noir pantheon. It is the humanization of villains. Perry Smith is painted in such a fashion that we can’t help but ache for him, despite his horrible crime. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance encapsulates the persona of Truman Capote so much, it goes beyond mere imitation into the realm of pure personification; he is able to allow the audience to truly understand Capote, ultimately humanizing a role which in a lesser actor’s hands would turn into pure monstrosity. We understand both of these men’s upbringings, their regrets, and their tattered souls which they hide under a veneer. The film’s most memorable line establishes their connection, blurring the line between artist and murderer. Speaking to Nelle, Capote says of Perry: “It was like we grew up in the same house. Then one day, he left out the back door, while I went out the front.”

Rewriting the Top 20

Recently, I was updating a list of films that I have seen via the wonderful website icheckmovies.com. Given the huge influx of films I have seen over the last 3 months, thanks to time off between my one-year role at the Federation of Students and school in September, I thought it was probably time to re-do my Top 20 list.

Which got me thinking: how do people rank films? FlickChart has a pretty good system of ranking movies by direct comparison. The concept is simple. Two movies will pop up, and you are asked which one you prefer. Eventually, a list is created based on these preferences.

But that got me asking more questions. What am I basing these preferences on? The film I think is better, the film I find more entertaining, the film that I would rather watch? Let's be honest here; Raging Bull is awesome. But would I voluntarily put it in my DVD player for movie night? It's a harrowing, uncomfortable experience, one that I would rather not repeat if I have other options available. Is it better crafted than most films out there? Probably. But are other films more watchable? Yes. So what happens when I'm presented with the choice between something that is expertly crafted but difficult to watch, and something that is flawed but accessible? It's like comparing a really dry champagne (full of depth, but sometimes harsh) and a spumanti (a bit thin, but delicious). Do I choose Persona or Finding Nemo?

Another question to ask, and one that I find really ponderous, is how much my current list is influenced by canon. I'm bordering on obsessed when it comes to film rankings. I compare lists, print them out, cover them with highlighter, and gawk in horror at the IMDb Top 250. I am fascinated with how they have evolved over time. I am ashamed when I see a complete lack of films from anywhere other than Europe and Hollywood. I understand when I see a lack of films from beyond 1980. But since I spend so much time with these lists, how are my choices influenced by them? Do I really think that The Godfather is a better film than Videodrome? Are they part of the reason why I've seen so few African films?

Perhaps.

And so, I'm going to start afresh. I'm going to reconsider some "lesser" films, not be afraid to include very recent selections, and critically look at some exalted canonical entries; but that's not to say that I haven't done that in the past. I finally saw Lawrence of Arabia in the winter, and I hated it. I would give Star Wars a mere 7/10. I consider The Red and the White one of the finest films I have ever seen, and I simply adore Children of Men. So I'm using FlickChart to start me on my path of rewriting my list. There are huge problems with the site, however --- it's missing a pathetic amount of films, especially foreign. Breathless is nowhere to be found. It's difficult to keep track of all the films you have seen, and you can't force showdowns between films. If I want to raise a film to a higher level, I must compare it to three random selections; it's taken me more than a dozen of these triple-showdowns to raise Rashomon into my Top 20.

You can see my current profile here.

"Remember My Forgotten Man"

It would be easy to criticize Gold Diggers of 1933's "Remember My Forgotten Man" from a contemporary viewpoint: it's a bit jarring when Joan Blondell declares that every woman's "got to have a man", the curtain cuts are a bit off, and the marching silhouettes don't quite line up at the climax. But it still gives me chills.

It strikes me that we rarely hear about the First World War, as the focus has been shifted almost exclusively to the hyperbolic horrors of the Second, rife with Nazis, Auschwitz and Pearl Harbour. The 1920s have been reduced to little more than romantic visions of gangsters, the Charleston and boozehounds. The Depression is a dusty visual metaphor of food lines. M. Kieth Booker and Frederic Jameson's versions of the 'death of history' are highlighted when viewing this number, as it depicts a historical relic that we have morphed into an alternate edit, or indeed forgotten. Our veterans are Private Ryans or Oliver Stoned, WWI is merely an event that led to WWII in our high school history books, and the waves of feminism in the later half of the 20th century make a statement such as Blondell's cringe-worthy. But if we are in a period that lacks a proper culture and chronology of history, we must task ourselves to be in a 1933's audiences 'shoes'. The times were-a-changing, but the pathos that we see here is indeed heart-breaking; once glorious war heroes are now street urchins, and the women, taught to be good housewives, have been abandoned. The sequence is at once an auteurist spectacle of geometrical chaos, actors to be directed and patterned, yet it feels deeply human. It is universal, yet personal. The fact that the silhouettes don't line up quite right reminds us that the figure made anonymous by shadow and Berkeley is actually an actor who is having difficulty fitting into the grand scope of marching. He becomes a real person, not a pawn. And for a contemporary audience, he moves beyond a role of moving wallpaper; he becomes our double. What was going through his mind at the time? Was he trying to speed up to fix the spectacle, or did he even realize that he became out of sync? Did Bubsy Berkeley scold him afterwards, along with the other dancers, for not lining up perfectly?

Gold Diggers of 1933 breaks the illusion of the stage right from the get-go, when "We're in the Money" gets cut off by the financial reality of Depression-era theatre. The performances range from the self-reflexive to the downright transparent (compare Aline MacMahon to Ruby Keeler), and the tongue-in-cheek melodramatics are obvious for what they are, a necessity in Hollywood narrative. But for a film advertised as "The Biggest Show on Earth", it doesn't shy away from the realities just outside the darkened theatre. "Remember My Forgotten Man" sticks out in the song roster, combining harsh reality with its theatrics. Joan Blondell becomes an actress playing an actress playing the role of women she probably knew. The men who play the Forgotten Men may have been in a food line just the day before. There is no disguising here. It may be an escape, but it's not naïve or ignorant. We can thank Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck for insisting that "Remember My Forgotten Man" end the film, rather than "Pettin' in the Park". The film could have ended on a purely fantastical note of sex and silliness. Instead, we follow the happy ending of all the gold diggers getting their men with a sombre shake of what's waiting outside the door. But that doesn't mean it can't be fantastic, too.

Five Films

Five Films that I Find Endlessly Fascinating

Five films that I have seen over and over again, and still feel the same rush of excitement from when I first saw them. I note my own bias towards English-language cinema, as well as the 1960's and 2000's. Suggest any of these films at a movie night and I'll happily oblige.

1. Bonnie & Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Why?

• Violence that still shocks 32 years later.
• Clear influences from the French New Wave, and one of the first New Hollywood films.
  
• Critically panned when first released, until Pauline Kael forced the rest of the critical world to take a second look.
  
• We feel for these killers.
• Early use of jump cuts in an American film.
• The love story: totally bizarre, totally adorable.
  

2. West Side Story (Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise, 1961)

Why?

• The score: complex, dissonant and brash, yet completely memorable and fun.
  
• The choreography: geometric, expressive, thrilling.
• The sheer use of colour.
• Romeo & Juliet for the 20th century - yet it still engages.
  
• Modernist touches throughout.
• Rita Moreno.

3. Week-End (Jean Luc Godard, 1967)

Why?

• The final film of Godard's groundbreaking first period.
• Self-reflexive to the point where our protagonists decide to kill the references.
• The bourgeois apocalypse before our eyes.
• Tries to irritate the audience, and it often succeeds - yet I find this Godard's most entertaining film. (Yes, even the 10 minute traffic jam.)
  
• FIN.
  
• ...de cinema. Derrida was late to the party here.
  

4. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

Why?

• The camera. The cinematography. The mise-en-scene. The art direction. Every shot is chock-full of goodness and yields a plethora of information.
• Hopeful or hopeless?
• Mysteriously empty, yet so full.
• A premise that we take at both face value and as pure device.
• Daring use of character.

5. Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

Why?

• Filmmakers' giddiness over their own use of shredded pop-culture.
• Hallucinatory editing, cinematography and colours.
• Synthesis of Bollywood and Western archetypes.
• The cast: Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, Jim Broadbent, Richard Roxburgh, John Leguizamo...
• The heart-breaking, guaranteed-sob-inducing finale.
  

Gone Too Far: The Death of New Wave

Final essay for New German Cinema class, Winter 2008.

GONE TOO FAR

The death of new wave cinema.

“This much idiot no one has ever been in the world.”

-Klaus Kinski, on Werner Herzog¹

The ego of the auteur has been responsible for some of the greatest artistic works of the late 20^th century cinema; an uncompromising vision that will stop at nothing to see ambition explode onto the screen with admirable shock and awe. Auteurism took its greatest form in New Wave cinema. Borne from the creative storm of the likes of Godard and Truffaut, the spirit of their French nouvelle vague was adapted worldwide, resulting in the evolution of such movements as the New Hollywood and the New German Cinema. The focus on the director’s creative vision was influential and prolific, but the seemingly unlimited freedom granted to these minds was politically volatile and ultimately self-destructive. Neophilia, ego and blockbuster commercialism collided spectacularly with two notorious films that epitomized the masturbatory excesses of New Wave auterism: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Sprawling epics of incredible length, both may be seen as icons of the New Wave collapse of the early 1980’s. The difference between the two is that where Heaven’s Gate is an unqualified disaster, Fitzcarraldo is a masterpiece.

A cinema of the auteur, New Wave highlighted the role of the director in the film process. Films were to be seen as a form of individual expression, and so a proper New Wave film bears the stamp of its director and their personality. A Fassbinder film can be recognized as such easily. The directors of the various New Wave movements were united in their encyclopedic knowledge of film history and their drive to reinvent what they saw as a stagnant cinema. Drawing from a number of sources, a key signature was that of genre inversion, especially within the New Hollywood. Seeking to exploit formula, they would shock audience’s expectations, mix genres together, and create ironic effects. Successful examples include the neo-noir of Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the French New Wave musical Une femme est une femme (1961) by Godard, and Fassbinder’s Sirkian melodrama Angst essen Seele auf (1974).

The New Wave directors of many countries were decidedly anti-commercial in their tastes. As such, the New German Cinema would not have survived without the aid of government grants and thus “almost totally dependant on public money for its existence”, and there was little interest in making financially successful films². Their films were oftentimes too 'highbrow' for the average audience, despite the fact that it was the intention of the New German Cinema to speak of the German experience as told by the everyman. “The economic background of the New German Cinema has meant that it is preeminently a ‘cinéma des auteurs’, an ‘Autorenkino’, where each film, in content and technique, bears the unmistakable stamp of its director. This has been the inevitable result of a system where young, unestablished film-makers have had to be scriptwriter, director, and producer in one, realizing their visions on low budgets, with small teams and tight schedules, yet free of many of the constraints of a commercial production company demands and trade union regulations familiar in the more developed film industries of Britain and the USA. It has been both the strength (artistically) and the weakness (commercially) of the New German Cinema.”³ The New Hollywood directors, in contrast, were initially the darlings of American cinema. Producers realized that these young, rebellious directors created films that spoke directly to the upcoming counterculture audience, earning plenty of profit on generally low-budget films, all while winning awards and pleasing critics. The enormous success of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) cemented this trend of audience appeal and artistic integrity, and by the early 70’s a pack of young auteurs dominated the American scene. The New German directors did not have this same commercial success; their films were far too demanding on audiences, forcing Germans to come face to face with their past and with current issues. The films were not mere entertainment, but bold statements: the urban terrorism of Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) or Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978).

Unfortuately, it was inevitable that the cinema of the auteur could not last, and by the end of the 1970’s it was evident that the end was nigh. Speaking from 1979 and as a witness to the collapse of New Wave cinema, John Sandford stated that “the rosy view of the New German Cinema that is widely held abroad does not tally with the view from the inside. The ideal conditions that may have obtained a few years ago in a period of cultural liberalism and economic expansion have faded away”⁴. The limitless freedom afforded to the directors can be seen as a direct influence on the eventual decline of the New Wave. In Germany the enfant terrible, Fassbinder, began to tarnish his reputation after his lovers and co-workers alike grew tired of his abusive antics. His output began to suffer and although he would see one of his greatest successes with Lola (1981), his self-destructive lifestyle took its toll when he was found dead at the age of 37 in 1982. “Indeed, by the mid 1980s innumerable critics had pronounced the demise of the New German Cinema. This was partly due to the fact that many of the directors most closely associated with it had moved abroad. Herzog, Schlondorff, von Trotta, Wenders, Straub and Huillet had either spent periods working in other countries or emigrated.”⁵ The New German Cinema’s relentless individualism meant that directors simply were not interested in doing the same thing repeatedly, and directors began to evolve in different directions, often working outside of Germany. (Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo was filmed in the Amazon jungle over a long, strenuous shoot.) Furthermore, by the early 1980’s a change in government removed most of their funding, and many were forced to go these directions in order to remain filmmakers. Never having built a commercial audience and relying on grants to survive, New German Cinema simply weathered away as money dried up, auteurs moved on, and Germany thirsted for commercial American cinema.

Whereas New German Cinema can be seen as imploding onto itself, the New Hollywood suffered from changing audience tastes. Early New Hollywood films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and Mike Nichol’s The Gradate (both 1967) were box office smashes, building egos and making huge profits for production companies, who began to pour money into these young filmmakers. Unlike the New German filmmakers, The New Hollywood was dependent on a mainstream audience to survive. Unfortunately, with the one-two punch of the massively successful thrill-makers Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), audiences flocked away from the genre inversions and counter-culture irony of New Hollywood to the increasingly mindless joy of the blockbuster. The situation was not helped the directors themselves. By the late 1970’s the New Hollywood auteurs were becoming increasingly ambitious and began to make extravagant demands, spending large amounts of resources on pet projects that increasingly became more obscure. The New Hollywood alienated the very audience that it depended on for its survival. It was this combination of ruthless ego and commercialism that killed the New Hollywood, epitomized by the massive failure of Heaven’s Gate.

It may thus be argued that both movements were the victims of the increasing commerciality of global cinema. German administrators effectively destroyed New German Cinema, the refuge of politically scathing art films, by removing funding. The New Hollywood was destroyed when audiences became no longer interested in the indulgent style. It may be further argued that both movements were also victims of complacency. New German Cinema destroyed itself by simply becoming too obscure and difficult for the new administration to handle. The New Hollywood destroyed itself by becoming far too egotistical to see that it was no longer self-sustainable, or attractive to the audiences on which it depended. But here is where we see the fundamental cultural difference between European and American cinema: the European strive for artistic development, and Hollywood’s goal of making profitable entertainment. New German Cinema remained to the very end a challenging artistic statement, while the final act of the New Hollywood was artistic disaster after another. Both were guilty of endless ego, with Fitzcarraldo and Heaven’s Gate being prime examples in the death of New Wave; but Herzog’s film is a testament to his startling creative vision, as opposed to Cimino’s embarrassing hedonism.

Werner Herzog gained respect from critics and international audiences alike with his wild, intense films that documented the extremes of environment and humanity. No one, however, was expecting the sheer scale of Fitzcarraldo. Filming proved difficult at every opportunity. A three hour epic in the Amazon jungle, it underwent numerous changes during its long production. After lead actor Jason Robards fell ill, he was replaced with Herzog favourite Klaus Kinski, who was apparently so volatile that a native chief offered to murder him. Supporting actor Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones left production to go on tour, leaving Herzog to start filming over again. The environment was obviously challenging, but Herzog’s stubborn style of direction did not make filming any easier. He insisted that a massive 340 ton steam ship, the focus of the film, be dragged over the hill using no special effects⁶. He “wanted Mario Adorf as captain of the ship, but Adorf refused to do the takes that involved the ship drifting throughout the rapids. Eventually, six men besides Herzog himself volunteered to do it. Of the six, three were wounded; one had two broken ribs.”⁷ Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) depicts the chaotic production, showing Herzog’s obsessive drive to complete the film regardless of cost – not even political strife between Ecuador and Peru, where filming took place, would cancel production. Herzog himself appeared to realize the sheer absurdity of the project when he declared “I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.”⁸

Michael Cimino, in comparison, appears to have been the victim of sightless pride when he made his three-hour epic, Heaven’s Gate. His 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, was a deeply personal project and a massive success, winning five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. United Artists with their new star director budgeted $11.6 million for his follow-up film, a low-key Western featuring well-known actors⁹. What Cimino finally presented to them was a 5 and a half hour, $40 million dollar project, an extraordinary sum at that time¹⁰. Stories abound of Cimino’s perfectionism. “At one point during filming, Michael Cimino decided that the spacing of the buildings on one of the sets didn't look right, despite it having been built to his exact specifications. He ordered both sides of the street razed and rebuilt at a cost of $1.2 million over the objections of his crew, who reasoned that it would be easier to knock down one side of the street and rebuild it twice as far away, for half the cost.”¹¹ The film features scenes of glorious excess – a yard full of fully costumed waltzing couples; an extended sequence of period-accurate roller skating; agonizing, repetitive battle sequences that used horse meat for extra gore. An attempt at realism resulted in cinematography that featured endless shots of smoke and dust infused sepia, while purposely muddled sound mixing often made key dialogue difficult to understand under the ambient noises of trains and wind. Cimino was out to create his magnificent vision of the anti-Western, regardless of how much money it cost, how long it took, or how many crew members he had to fire.

The masturbatory excesses of the films are obvious to even the most aloof viewer. Both feature long, drawn out, somewhat thin plots that intentionally left the audience bewildered. Their demanding directors insisted on accurate, over-the-top production design. Their difficult locations resulted in chaotic productions. Both filmmakers shot much more film than they could ever possibly need, with Herzog starting filming over again after troubles with the cast and Cimino shooting over 1.5 million feet of film¹². The question that strikes this author however, is that despite the films’ similarities of obsessive auteurs who had little regard for any one else, what makes Fitzcarraldo so good, while Heaven’s Gate so poor?

The fundamental difference between the films also reflects the differences between their respective movements. As a primarily commercial trend, the New Hollywood was ultimately slave to mainstream tastes and what producers thought that taste was. Had Heaven’s Gate been allowed to run its full length of five and a half hours, what appears now as a sloppy, meandering and confusing narrative may have come into clear focus. As it stands, the bastardized edit is a boring mess with half-stories and characters that lead nowhere, with only self-indulgent sepia left to entertain the audience. Fitzcarraldo enjoys a narrative focus that Cimino simply wasn’t allowed to depict. The fault though lies entirely on Cimino, who should have been fully aware of his limitations, and should have never spent more than four times his budget when it was unnecessary. Fitzcarraldo remains true to European art cinema as a unique and astonishing vision, and one that is completely unapologetic. Heaven’s Gate is merely another genre inversion, and an auteur film made in a period when audiences were sick of auteurism – and when a movement relies on mainstream audiences to keep funding a creed of individualistic creative thought, alienating your source is none too wise.

It is tempting to link this narcissistic blindness of the late New Hollywood to what could be interpreted as a fundamental American characteristic. Chalmers Johnson, whom postmodern culture critic Cintra Wilson describes as a man with “outrageous smartness” and “possessor of one of the world’s sexiest brains”, recently wrote a scathing criticism of American imperialism and what he believes is its inevitable collapse¹³. “It's evident that Nemesis—in Greek mythology the goddess of vengeance, the punisher of hubris and arrogance—is already a visitor in our country, simply biding her time before she makes her presence known.”¹⁴ Michael Cimino paid respect to this goddess when he, many years after the disaster of Heaven’s Gate, took full responsibility for its failure. Nemesis struck when Francis Ford Coppola, auteur of The Godfather, followed his 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now (which could be compared quite successfully with Fitzcarraldo) with One from the Heart (1982). The New Hollywood musical cost an estimated $26 million to produce, and was known during filming for its massive, perfectly rendered sets and Coppola’s trademark perfectionism. Nowadays it is better known as the film that grossed $636,796 and nearly bankrupted a creative genius, who to this day is apparently still paying off the debt¹⁵.

Nemesis is a cruel goddess, but it appears that she will pass by some filmmakers. Werner Herzog may have been guilty of incredible hubris and arrogance when he made Fitzcarraldo, but perhaps staggering creative achievement is a suitable sacrifice to her. If we compare the post-New Wave careers of Herzog and Cimino, it becomes evident that this sacrifice is self-serving. Fitzcarraldo is remembered as the film directed by the brilliant eccentric that still makes masterworks to this day. Cimino is forgotten, and Heaven’s Gate will forever be known as the film that killed a studio and sealed the final nail into the New Hollywood coffin.

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References

"Fitzcarraldo." Internet Movie Database. <http://imdb.com/title/tt0083946/trivia>.

"Heaven’s Gate." Internet Movie Database. < http://imdb.com/title/tt0080855/trivia >.

Johnson, Chalmers. "Empire v. Democracy." [Weblog TomDispatch.com] January 30, 2007. <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/160594/chalmers_johnson_nemesis_on_the_imperial_premises>.

Knight, Julia. "New German Cinema, 4th edition." Routledge. <http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415409285/resources/newgermancinema.pdf>.

"One from the Heart." Internet Movie Database. <http://imdb.com/title/tt0084445/business>.

Sandford, John. "The New German Cinema." German Life and Letters 32 (3)(1979): 206-228.

"Werner Herzog." Internet Movie Database. < imdb.com http://imdb.com/name/nm0001348/bio >.

Wilson, Cintra. "Dregublog." <http://www.cintrawilson.com>.