Periodical #2

H O P E L I E S AT 2 4 F R A M E S P E R S E C O N D

PERIODICAL

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PERIODICAL

EDITORIAL “You can learn more from John Sturges' audio track on the 'Bad Day at Black Rock' laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

It may only be the second issue of Periodical but I like to think that our humble digital film journal has already gone through a significant stage of it’s own evolution.

“Evolution” is a key piece of terminology this month, as too is it’s closelyworded relative ‘revolution’. In writing on New Waves in cinema one resorts to such language with regularity. The distinction, it might be assumed, of being able to separate the old from the new, is of the utmost importance.

There's something very precise and definitive about the use of the word "new".

It exists solely to allow for an acknowledgement of a separation from the past, but in our exploration of the place of New Waves and disparate trends in cinema we argue that such occurrences are not that far removed from their own national cinemas as flippant definitions might have you believe.

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“New” is also a word that is obviously rather relevant to Periodical as a publication, and while this might sound a little bit obtuse, or even a little bit counter-intuitive, in this edition we’re looking to the past as a means to go forward. New Waves are the order of the day, with a focus on the international cinema landscape from across the ages, from 1950s France through to modern day Iran.

This issue started out with the intention being to produce a tome solely on the French Nouvelle Vague, but as the team came together and ideas developed, the emphasis slowly evolved in to something very different. The perceived importance of Waves of cinema is difficult to ignore, with even the slightest hint of a geographical renaissance or a coming together of filmmakers declared a Wave of some kind by the critical community. The French New Wave is arguably the most notable and important Wave in the history of cinema, not least in part because of the legions of other movements in world cinema that it inspired in the 1960s. It’s a notion that remains relevant too, with the influence and legacy of its happening celebrated and revisited on a regular basis. One might even suggest that it is remembered all too often, with many trapped inside the mere idea of a Nouvelle Vague. Indeed, a recent edition of Paris’ Cahiers du Cinéma, the literary (and literal) home of the five key filmmakers involved in the Nouvelle Vague boasts of a burgeoning youthful cinema, declaring on the front cover in faux-scrawled, faux-graffiti on a faux-wall that “Jeunes cinéastes français on n'est pas mort!” (Young French Filmmakers Are Not Dead!). Inside current Cahiers editor Stéphane Delorme sets out a manifesto of sorts that serves to encourage a specified group of young French filmmakers whom he claims will reinvigorate his national cinema. Comparisons have, naturally, already been drawn to the Nouvelle Vague, while the follow-up edition of the magazine is said to be even more of a polemical call to arms for a new French cinema.

This issue is very much a work of collaboration. While Periodical #1 was little more than a glorified tech showcase, issue 2 features an array of original articles, essays and reviews from a team of writers from across the world, some of whom you will already be aware of, and others whom it’s only a matter of time before you do. Each piece has been submitted by someone whose work I have a deep respect for, and with whom collaboration has long being desired. I think it’s an immensely strong line-up, and I’m grateful for the effort that has gone in to each section.

The response to the first issue of Periodical has been nothing short of overwhelming. The title climbed the bestsellers chart, and has reached a larger audience than was ever expected, for which I can’t thank you enough. I have no doubt that this edition will fare even better, thanks to the infinitely superior nature of the contributor led material.

Adam Batty - Editor-In-Chief

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ANDROID & DESKTOP USERS PLEASE NOTE - This version of Periodical is one specially produced to be read on non-iPad platforms. As such, not all content will be viewable in this iteration of the solution. The interactive elements have been abandoned, and we hope to have a more satisfying user-experience as time goes along. Web links in relavant articles will take you to online versions of affected pieces. Each of the core articles are perfectly viewable on any platform though, which is the important part. Interactive articles will be uploaded to the website with time. We can only apologise for this inconvenience.

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S TAFF E DITOR -I N -C HIEF - A DAM B ATTY C ONTRIBUTING E DITORS

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The Periodical “P”signifies the presence of an interactive element on a page. Click on it for further details. iPad-version only.

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A THOUGHT ON THE NEW WAVE, WRITTEN IN AN EDIT SUITE DURING A 15 MINUTE COFFEE BREAK, WITH ONE JAFFA CAKE MARK COUSINS

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The phrases “New Wave” and “Nouvelle Vague” are so often used by movie fans and film historians that, sometimes, we skip over them in sentences, to get to something new. “New Wave” has become old hat. But pause at rather than skip over the phrase and it begins to excite and reveal, like Roland Barthes “dancing cone” of light.

For starters, cinema itself was a new wave. Of course it grew out of other things (magic, theatre, lantern shows, technological advances, etc) but it quite clearly brought something new to the perceptual shores: A conjoinment between reality and dream, there and not there, me and not me.

The term ‘new wave’ is usually applied to the late 1950s and the 1960s, but if we step outside that moment and ask when, in film history, was there not a new wave, when was the cinema sea static, a mill pond, it’s hard to answer. Or, rather, it’s hard to answer if you are looking around

But oceanographers know that there’s something deceptive about a wave. Until it crashes on the shore, what looks like forward movement of water isn’t. Waves are churns.

the world. The fact is that film history has been a constant succession of new waves of filmmakers, attitudes, accepted realisms, and radicalisms. There has been a cacophony of “look what it can do!” calls from filmmakers holding film in their hands, or up to their eyes, all the better to glimpse through it the world and the human heart. Nations have been new waves (Italy in the 1940s, Romania in the 1990s), as have people (Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu), studios (Shokichu), technologies (16mm), archives (YouTube), critical fashions (Douglas Sirk’s rise through the canon), viewing conditions (mobile cinemas) etc. As waves do in physics, so they do in cinema: in overlapping, they form interference patterns, meshes of newness, ripples of activity.

But oceanographers know that there’s something deceptive about a wave. Until it crashes on the shore, what looks like forward movement of water isn’t. Waves are churns. In them, water circles upwards, forwards a bit, then down beneath the surface of the sea and back again to where it began. The stylistic-political new waves in the movies have some of this deception about them, too. Take the most obvious example of a new wave director, Jean-Luc Godard. The jaggedness of his editing style, sound cutting, story jumps and discursive linkages was, indeed, a change in texture in film style and thought but, as if it counterbalance this forward move, his sense of gender, for example, of how men and women should be photographed, where the agency lies, who holds

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Godard and Imamura, churn and crash, out to sea and on the shore.

the gun, who has to show their genitals, who gets to have all the thoughts was, to put it simply, backward. A wave is an ebb and flaw at the same time.

Jump to Japan in the 60s, however, and this point is harder to sustain. A filmmaker like Shohei Imamura seems to be constantly crashing on the shore. He worked with Ozu and came out of that world of balance like a bullet out of a gun. He sensed what Japan didn’t want to talk about – the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure – and, throughout the 60s, trained his camera on both. He made films about people who were straining, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who were at the bottom of the heap but who refused to be crushed or be interested in good taste. Then, when he started to feel co-opted by fiction filmmaking, or found it constraining, he lurched into messy, radical, playful documentaries about prostitutes and missing soldiers, documentaries which now look like some of the best ever made.

Godard and Imamura, churn and crash, out to sea and on the shore. They are two types of waveform, of kinesis. What’s good about holding each up to the other like this is not to say that one is better, or even that they are opposites. What’s valuable is to be reminded that things can and do have dual natures. Cinema, the art that conjoined the apparently un-conjoinable (me and not me) has adopted the idea of a wave to describe its moments of newness. Godard-Imamura reminds us that newness isn’t new, or combines with old, or pulls in the opposite direction. Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

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2.A

LA NOUVELLE VAGUE DEMYTHOLOGISING THE FRENCH NEW WAVE

ADAM BATTY

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One of a great number of quotes aligned to Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the pre-eminently quotable filmmaker this side of Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Ford Coppola is that “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. In keeping with the sprit of Godard's musings, join us as we attempt to demythologise and understand the French New Wave in two relatively simple steps. First up, part two - The Wave.

There has long been much debate as to precisely who qualifies to be deemed worthy of being considered a bona-fide part of the Nouvelle Vague. Some take a freewheeling approach, and are accepting of any number of individuals, from Louis Malle and Agnes Varda, to Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Rouch and Roger Vadim. In the period roughly defined as that of the Nouvelle Vague, which is in itself debatable, with some arguing for any number of combinations of dates between 1958 and 1968, over 120 films were made in France befitting the manner that many would closely associate with the New Wave; innovative methods of funding, location shoots, non-professional actors, light camera rigs and naturalistic lighting. Militancy rules in our own definition though, with the core handful the only "true" members of the movement: the Cahiers du Cinéma film critics turned filmmakers. The focus on the 'Cahiers Five' is itself problematic, in so much as though the ‘Cahiers Five’ are limited to that very number. What of the seemingly ignored Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, a founding editor of Cahiers du Cinéma before working as a filmmaker, only to be forgotten by large sections of the critical and historical community of the 21st Century? Or other figures in a similar position? The nature of legacy is an unusual phenomenon. For the purposes of this article we’ll be referring to the films of five filmmakers; Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut.

In their criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma the ciné-journal founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca a group of writers nicknamed the “Young Turks” brought to the fore the notion that a filmmaker could be considered a great artist, and an author of a work (an auteur). While it was the writers of the Cahier du Cinéma were the ones to overtly celebrate it, the notion of the cinema as art was one which stretched back far within the French cinema itself. From the early days of the country’s film industry there existed an artist/writer/filmmaker fusion.

See, for example, the work of Jean Cocteau, the writer-turned-formidable-figure-ofthe-cinema, or Salvador Dali's work with Luis Buñuel in the early 1930s. The stage was accepting of cross-arts collaboration, and, perhaps most importantly (and argua9

André Bazin, one of the chief architects of the Nouvelle Vague.

bly separating it from the American film industry) encouraged such merging. Ricciotto Canudo declared the cinema to be “The Seventh Art”, while Jean-Luc Godard would write some 30 years later that “Robert Bresson is to French film what Dostoevsky is to the Russian novel” and “what Mozart is to German music” (This moment would later be echoed in comments made by Susan Sontag in which Godard was compared to Picasso).

The traditional path to filmmaking in the French movie industry involved a person serving an apprenticeship for a production company. Over a period of time they would climb the ladder of the profession, with a lucky few deemed worthy of being a bona-fide filmmaker. Instead of following this order, the filmmakers of the Cahiers du Cinéma went in an altogether different direction, although one that is in many ways as much of an “apprenticeship” as the traditional route. The very nature of the film criticism being produced by the Cahiers group makes for as apt a primer as any number of days on an old-fashioned film set. As Truffaut once joked, in a way it was almost as though they had worked on a number of films even before cameras spun on their debut shorts, through their criticism and analysis, which sought to put things right, even when it was too late to do so on any literal level.

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On-Screen Autobiographia - Life As Cinema/Cinema As Life

The Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) ensured that only those permitted to do so could make films that would receive any kind of real exposure. A movie could only be exported with their permission, and a filmmaker had to apply to the board for a director’s card. The relaxing of the CNC was one of the major hurdles for the young aspiring filmmakers of the age, and was almost as big a plight as the more abstract, creative debate that too stood in their way. The French tradition of a cinema of perceived quality was the preferred option of the industry, with films largely based upon classic literature, albeit by filmmakers deemed to be creatively uninteresting by many of the contemporary audiences of the early-1950s. The influence of the international cinema, and specifically that of the United States had begun to really take hold in the years following the German Occupation of the Second World War, which had seen a bottleneck of American movies build up. When Hitler moved on, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles stepped in, and inspired a generation of Gallic moviegoers in to seeking something different from their own national cinema. This troubled the CNC, albeit not as much as the young film critics for whom a resentment of their national cinema was reaching tipping point.

The whole debate is encapsulated in François Truffaut’s 1954 essay, Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français (A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema). Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français was a passionate, unrelenting diatribe on the state of the mainstream French cinema. Truffaut takes no prisoners as he criticises the “Tradition de qualité" school of filmmaking, singling out filmmakers like Claude Autant-Lara for what those involved with the Cahiers du Cinéma deemed to be an unethical approach to cinema. Truffaut and his colleagues at Cahiers would regularly expose the French film industry for the crimes they perceived to have 11

been committed, and strove to overthrow the old guard in the most fitting way possible; from the inside. They strove to make their own films, works that set out to deconstruct and understand the filmic medium in as brilliant and affecting way possible.

In many ways François Truffaut’s Les Mistons is the L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat of the Nouvelle Vague. As with the Lumiere film, Truffaut’s 1957 short is a relatively unassuming feature, but one which the impact of would be felt across the whole spectrum of the medium. While not the first production by the Cahiers critics (Truffaut had already shot a short with Jean-Luc Godard, while both Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette had already made shorts themselves), Les Mistons is the first to bear the hallmarks of the works that would follow. An unreal, anatomically-obsessed cam-

“In many ways François Truffaut’s Les Mistons is the L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat of the Nouvelle Vague”

era traces the outlines of Truffaut’s richly sketched characters, while the form of the picture itself is addressed, with overt, diegetic over-dubbing and the tangible film itself manipulated, with it played at different speeds (and in different directions) to emphasise specific moments of incident. The structurally playful tone anticipates the shape of Truffaut’s later The 400 Blows clearly, and sets the scene for the form shifting sensibilities of Godard’s À bout de souffle and Rohmer’s The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The hyper-personal motif for which Truffaut would become to be associated with is first glimpsed here too, with Les Mistons playing like a fond memory being recalled.

While this no doubt serves to further demythologise the immediate landscape of the New Wave, it might be suggested that in many ways Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol produced their most important and interesting work outside of the period. While Chabrol may have been the first of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd to produce a fully fledged feature film, stylistically and tonally his early work is only loosely recognisable as a product of the actual movement. In much the same way that 12

Jean-Pierre Leaud as François Truffaut’s on-screen analogue Antoine Doinel, in the pair’s first collaboration, The 400 Blows.

Jean-Pierre Melville and Agnès Varda helped to redefine the financial route and methods of production Chabrol drew the two elements together in a further development of the film industry. Aware of the eagerness of the (CNC) for the French cinema to rise again on the international landscape, in the wake of a post-World War Two lull next to concentrated efforts from the Italian and Japanese cinema, Chabrol sought to exploit tax loopholes and other related CNC rulings (revolving around unions etc). The resulting popularity of the early films, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, and the response abroad dictated that the CNC were ecstatic with the results, which the organization essentially saw to be France's burgeoning international reputation. Alongside exploiting tax allowances, Chabrol also sought funding via other innovative means, including an inheritance bestowed upon his wife and from going to subject appropriate charities: Le Beau Serge deals with a protagonist with an alcohol problem so, naturally, Chabrol sought financial support from alcoholism charities. It was a method that paid off, quite literally, as both Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins were vastly profitable before even reaching audiences. Chabrol’s approach paved the way for other aspiring filmmakers to make films; in challenging the CNC’s strict rules he set a precedence that could be exploited by others (for example, in the number of union-connected techni-

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cians one must employ on a set, immediately, and vastly, reducing the costs of a production).

And Truffaut Looked To America! An Essay About Shoot The Pianist.

The films themselves are solid affairs, if not a tad uninspiring. The Vigo award-winning Le Beau Serge plays like a straight Nicholas Ray film, with it’s emphasis on the fatalistic, it’s most noteworthy element, while the second of the films introduces the playful tone that would come to be considered one of the core ingredients of the Nouvelle Vague. It’s intertextually rich, with the two headline performances from Le Beau Serge inverted so that that naïve figure of the earlier film becomes the hardy one in the second, and vice-versa. Such intertextualisation hints at things to come with the New Wave, in which many of the same people appeared across films and directors, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to how the repertoire’s of Hollywood old would play.

Jean-Claude Brialy, one of the stars of the two Chabrol features, actually makes for the perfect case study of an actor whose presence can be spotted throughout the New Wave, and the wider French cinema of the period. An anchor of intertextuality, if you will. Brialy appeared in works by all five of the core Cahiers filmmakers, in films such as Paris Belongs To Us, A Woman Is A Woman and the later Claire’s Knee, while he also collaborated with the likes of Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Luis Buñuel, Bertrand Tavernier and Julien Duvivier. Brialy also appears in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, albeit in a cameo performance, Truffaut’s feature debut and the call to arms for a generation.

Truffaut and co. saw the success of The 400 Blows at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival as nothing less than a victory for the revolution on the home ground of the establishment. Truffaut the filmmaker won the Best Director award at Cannes, just 12 months after Truffaut the film critic had been banned from attending the festival. The film amounts to being a dramatised retelling of the director’s own youth, with the 14

Breathless also introduced the world to Jean-Paul Belmondo, who would go on to become one of the most beloved icons of the French cinema.

stark similarities between the two as emotionally distressing as they are creatively neat. Opening with a declaration to André Bazin, the grandmaster of the movement who passed away from leukemia prior to the completion of The 400 Blows, and featuring a path that forms a literal spiral around that most famous of Parisian landscapes the Eiffel Tower, Truffaut’s movie takes the familiar and presents it in a different manner to how it had been done so before.

While Truffaut would continue the adventures of his on-screen analogue Antoine Doinel long after the glow of the Nouvelle Vague had faded, in the years following The 400 Blows he continued to push the discourse forward with Shoot The Piano Player, a film which in many ways encapsulates the mood of the time, with it’s jazz riffing, post-modern gangster-subverting tale of a wrong man (a narrative hook borrowed from his beloved Hitchcock), and the intimate epic of Jules et Jim. If Chabrol is the letter of intent, and Truffaut delivered the battle cry, then JeanLuc Godard sealed the fate of the French cinema.

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Godard was Truffaut’s greatest companion during this period. In many ways, companion might be an overstatement, with competitor perhaps maybe more appropriate. The two were great friends in the years leading up to the first shots of the New Wave, but as the revolution developed the pair soon For Nick, Sam, Nixon and Karina.

Made In U.S.A.

drifted apart from one another. The whole situation came to a head with a letter. One might be tempted to declare such a thing as “unassuming”, but when one understands that the letter in question ran to 20 pages and several thousand words the weight of the situation gains perspective. In the wake of the release of Truffaut’s 1973 film Day For Night Godard declared the film to be a “lie”. His outburst provoked the aforementioned letter, from a Truffaut fed up of dealing with what he deemed to be Godard’s post-radicalisation hypocrisy. The two would never speak to one another again. In typical fashion, Godard has always maintained the stance that he merely wished to produce a cinematic response to contextualise the accusations he was directing at his former colleague, such was the nature of the man and his relationship with the cinema process.

Where Truffaut drew from the cinema for inspiration and hope, and cited his own life as source material, Godard’s own relationship is far more intricate. To Godard everything was the cinema. It is fused to the psyche of the man. It’s how he thinks, and how he works. It’s this distinction between the pair that explains the divergent paths that the two would take; Truffaut towards a more traditional form of cinema, derided as “bourgeois” by Godard, and the alienating, more experimental and polemical route taken by the latter as the 1960s drew to a close.

Godard’s films are visceral, emotional experiences. An increasing emphasis on the cerebral can be plotted should

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Godard and Truffaut,

one follow the filmmaker’s path chronologically, from the relatively traditional À bout de souffle (within the director’s oeuvre) through to his latter-day output, which has proven as divisive and as controversial as any picture produced during the New Wave period.

His À bout de souffle came a year after Truffaut’s first strike. Godard’s film is an inverted take on the Hollywood gangster film, inspired in equal parts by the movie studios of old (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel constantly refers to Humphrey Bogart) and the philosophical questions ensnaring France at the time of production. Jean Seberg, the first of Godard’s strong female characters is as great an icon of the era as any other figure, with her Patricia’s touting of the “New York Herald Tribune” on the Champs-Élysées perhaps challenged only by Truffaut’s final freeze-frame for the title of the Nouvelle Vague’s most memorable moment. Over the course of the seven years that would follow Godard would produce no less than 15 remarkable feature films, each one as impressive as the last. With 1967’s Weekend Godard would close out this period of his career (and in turn, the wider movement of the Nouvelle Vague itself) with a title-card declaring the “end of cinema”. It’s a poignant and note perfect final frame of a most important stage of cinematic (r)evolution.

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2.B

A POTTED HISTORY OF THE FRENCH CINEMA OR, AND LUMIERE’S BEGAT MÉLIÈS, MÉLIÈS BEGAT GANCE, GANCE BEGAT L’HERBIER, L’HERBIER BEGAT VIGO, VIGO BEGAT RENOIR, RENOIR BEGAT BRESSON, BRESSON BEGAT TATI, TATI BEGAT MELVILLE, MELVILLE BEGAT VARDA, VARDA BEGAT VADIM, VADIM BEGAT MALLE, MALLE BEGAT CHABROL. 18

It's important to note the distinction that the projected moving image is a French invention. Sure, the entity known as "the movies" is a mongrel of technological development, with bits done in Europe, bits done in America, and bits done in the USSR. But the act of beaming a film, the crowd-pleasing act was first done in France.

Paris, December 28th, 1895, and Auguste and Louis Lumière step out on to the modest stage of the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Over the course of an evening the duo present ten films, of varying length but none any longer than 50 seconds long, and in doing so changed the face of both popular entertainment and art forever.

In their quest to present spectacle the Lumière brothers were as concerned with the artistry and craft of producing works to display, unlike their greatest competitor, the American Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope,

“Paris, December 28th, 1895, and Auguste and Louis Lumière step out on to the modest stage of the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris”

and as shrewd a businessman as he was anything else. A distinction between the creative and the moneyman that would stand to this day was forged in that competitive route to the projected image in the closing years of the 19th Century, and actually serves as a brief (and largely reductive) analogy for the relationship between the mainstream American cinema and the rest of the world.

And thus was born a certain tendency in the French cinema for the artist to prosper.

In Georges Méliès France produced the cinema’s first bona-fide magician. Understanding that timely cuts of celluloid resulted in unfathomably unreal results Méliès was empowered by the might of the jump-cut some six decades prior to Jean-Luc Godard mastered the same trick from the inside out. In the decade or so that would follow Méliès‘ fellow countryman Abel Gance split the other side of the narrative atom 19

Abel Gance’s Napoléon remains a significant work of the period.

fused by Griffith in Hollywood and helped to define the shape and tone of the longform feature film, with epics the like of which have not been seen since, in movies such as J’accuse, and his inarguable masterpiece, the day-long, three-screen wide Napoléon. While the 1920s in part saw the French cinema struggle to compete with the might of a Hollywood empowered by leads gained during the First World War, iconoclasts such as Marcel L'Herbier and the Belgian born Jacques Feyder (who would himself be a major figurehead of (Poetic Realism) ensured that the Gallic screen remained an international heavyweight throughout a decade shaped and informed by the Americans and Germanys powerful UFA film studios. With the onset of sound though, came some formidable voices, each of them true mavericks, and characters who would inform the French cinema to this day.

Jean Renoir, son of Pierre Auguste, the painter, first turned to the cinema in 1924, but it wasn’t until the sound era that the filmmaker truly came of age. An early sound film, Boudu Saved From Drowning, saw Renoir working with Michel Simon, one of the great talents of the music halls, and in the years between that and the breakout of the Second World War Renoir would shape the French cinema with such major works as La Grande illusion, Une partie de campagne, La Bête humaine and La Règle 20

du jeu, the latter of which is the film most consistently declared to be the greatest in all of the French cinema. While the war saw a sojourn amongst the Beverly Hills for Renoir, the filmmaker soon returned to France completing a trio of beautiful exposés of the stage and screen in The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena And Her Men, as well as the Technicolor landmark that is The River. Upon hearing of the 1979 death of Renoir Orson Welles wrote of a man he considered to be a kindred spirit, of a man who valued the integrity of the tale and technique at hand over commercial success, and of a man who believed in the power of cinema. To contextualize Renoir in to the wider realm of the “complete” French cinema is no chore nor is it a wasted task; his ethos and his intentions formed the backbone of the attitude towards cinema adopted by those who followed.

The rise of Renoir coincided with, and was actually a part of, a drive towards a Poetic Realism cinema that engulfed much of the French cinema of the 1930s. Filmmakers such as Jean Vigo and Marcel Carné stood out, with works such as Le Quai des brumes, L’Atalante and other tales of fatalism through a prism helping to bring the French national cinema to the fore on the international set. In many ways the period of the Poetic Realists acts as a neat pre-curser to the New Wave itself, with it’s unit of as21

sociated filmmakers each purporting to represent a tenuously connected line of ethics through cinema. There’s a distinct sense of the director as author throughout each of the key films too, a tendency that had long stemmed far back in the French cinema, but is emphasised perhaps most clearly here. It’s no accident that a figure like Jean Cocteau straddled the entirety of the French cinema of the mid-section of the century, with the pedestal placing of creative mavericks such as he a common sight throughout history.

The period of and around the Second World War ran concurrently with the rise of homegrown filmmakers like Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati and HenriGeorges Clouzot, and others that too rode against convention. From the Lumiére brothers, Méliès , Gance and Cocteau to Bresson, Tati and Clouzot there runs a deep bloodline through the creative heart of the French cinema. To refer to these as the grandfathers of the revolution might appear to be a little patronising, but it’d be somewhat apt.

In the wake of the Second World War Paris was besieged by a number of film clubs. Figures such as André Bazin, Henri Langlois and Alexandre Astruc led the charge for a nation catching up with a decade of international cinema, a pleasure long withheld by the occupying Ger-

Cahiers du Cinéma, which would become the literary HQ for a generation of young French filmmakers.

man forces of World War Two. A generation of young French moviegoers was wallowing in masses of foreign (predominantly American) films they'd been denied from seeing during the years of the occupation. To supplement the curated film clubs that spring up during this period (groups such as Objectif 49 and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin) a culture of film appreciation developed within magazines and journals, and dedicated sections of newspaper space, with the figureheads and enthusiastic participants becoming involved in a wider and inspiring discourse. The likes of Revue du Cinéma and Positif sprung in to life in the wake of all of this, with the former eventually evolving in to the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma, the literary headquarters for the eventual Nouvelle Vague. André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca founded Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, with their intentions being to produce provocative, challenging film criticism, with a particular emphasis and appreciation of the Hollywood cinema that was being rediscovered in Europe at the time. They were early champions of Orson Welles for instance, a man who had struggled to find appreciation in his homeland, while Alfred Hitchcock is another such figure who was celebrated and recognised in a manner akin to how the grand masters of painting were, or the classicists of literature. Film was recognised as an art; the seventh art.

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Jean-Pierre Melville, the “Godfather of the Nouvelle Vague” was one of five filmmakers who influenced the shape of the French cinema in the run-up to the New Wave era.

This Gallic appreciation of the Hollywood cinema over their own national one was was actually systematic of a wider international problem. While a film culture was a-booming within France, the French cinema itself was performing badly overseas, and floundering next to the more innovative likes of the Italian Neo-realists, and the Japanese cinema of the time. Something needed to be done, and to do so the French government, traditionally very protective of its film industry, as it was the wider arts and culture, would ultimately choose to relax rules in an attempt to encourage younger filmmakers in their attempts to put the once-mighty French cinema back on the map. The French cinema has long revolved around the Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC), an agency of the ministry of culture that controls the country’s filmic output. In order to be eligible for screening a film must be certified by the CNC, who in turn exist to protect and support the national cinema. While the intentions of the agency are honourable enough, one can appreciate how living to the law of such a group may tamper with the intentions of a young filmmaker aiming to produce a film as quickly and for as little money as possible. Should a filmmaker choose not to work with the CNC on a given project they risk the ire of the organisation. In short film production sans CNC involvement was incredibly difficult.

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The road to the glory days of Godard and Truffaut runs quite complex, and in many ways serves as a demythologization of the lofty reputation of the Nouvelle Vague itself. While it serves the narrative to view Truffaut’s conquest of the 12th Cannes Film Festival as the immediate moment of revolution, as is the case with many things the reality and the run up to the situation is far less immediate.

The bridge between lands old and new is one held up by a number of filmmakers, five of who provided the core elements for what would come to signify the nouvelle vague. The three key elements of style, means and intention are evident in these filmmakers at various stages from the late 1940s through to the dawn of the wave. JeanPierre Melville would be the first cited in any attempt at a chronology, with his 1949

“The three key elements of style, means and intention are evident in these filmmakers at various stages from the late 1940s through to the dawn of the wave.”

feature debut, the remarkable Le Silence de la mer earning the filmmaker the title of “Godfather to the Nouvelle Vague” from his younger contemporaries. Melville was incredibly cine-literate and a true outsider; he shot the film cheaply, essentially proving how such economical filmmaking could be achieved. He worked on location, relying on a narrative voice-over to disguise the use of post-synchronization for the sound, over a number of months. Rather amazingly Le Silence de la mer was shot in just 27 days albeit across a period of five months, and with no less than 19 different film stocks, due to accessibility to film stock (By shooting illicitly, and outside of the CNC’s system, Melville risked the ire of a number of parties, such as unions and other film organisations). Make up was also abandoned, as was artificial lighting. The resulting film is one of the most impressive of the period, and acts as an early blueprint for the major changes that would see the film landscape of France shift within the course of less than a decade. So affecting was his finished film that it began a productive debate on the role of the CNC and the future of the French cinema, ultimately paving the way for the conditions to enable the likes of Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette to actually be able to make their own films.

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Le Silence de la mer - In Detail

Melville’s closest literal association to the films of the New Wave comes in his performance as the writer Parvulesco in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, with his own work always sitting on the edges of the movement, as opposed to being a fully-fledged part of it. Agnes Varda stands as a similar pre-Nouvelle Vague practitioner whose work paved the way for the “young turks” at the Cahiers du Cinéma, with her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte, of which André Bazin wrote of in Cahiers du Cinéma that Varda used “People and locations as found footage”. While Varda would find fame later as a part of the Left Bank cinema movement that coincided in Paris with the Nouvelle Vague, any attempts for the filmmaker to capitalise on the quality of her debut feature were quelled by restrictions placed on the film by the CNC thanks to Varda’s unorthodox methods of production. While also a prolific filmmaker, Alexandre Astruc is best known for his written work. In ‘The Birth Of A New Avant-Garde - Le Camera Stylo’ Astruc penned one of the defining texts of the era, with an essay that sits alongside Bazin’s ‘The Evolution Of Film Language’ François Truffaut’s ‘A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema’ as a nicely defined canon of film criticism that defined an era and encouraged a sea change.

The fourth foundation shaping filmmaker is Roger Vadim, who set the tone for the trend towards youth movies.

Coming to the fore alongside his then wife, and instant icon of the French cinema Brigitte Bardot, Vadim revitalised the Gallic film industry for an international audience with a pair of movies, And God Created Woman and Les bijoutiers du clair de lune. And God Created Woman is particularly noteworthy for broadening the international demand for the kind of youth-driven, hyper-contemporary pictures that would come to define large portions of the French New Wave, which stood at odds with the stuffy, literary-sourced weighty pictures that the young rallied against in the early 1950s. The film was a major success, and proved to be a more profitable 25

venture in terms of exportation tax than the whole of Renault when released outside of France in 1957. Shot in CinemaScope and featuring dialogue that revolved around popular culture, And God Created Woman was a fully-fledged cultural phenomenon (and one to which Jean-Luc Godard would pay direct homage to during the height of the New Wave period with his own Le Mepris).

The Curious World Of Brigitte Bardot & Roger Vadim

What Vadim was to the international set, Louis Malle was to France itself. It's something of an unofficial tradition for anyone examining the interlinking relationships of the filmmakers of the pre-Nouvelle Vague era to place Malle in their own bracket: a consensus agreement as to where he fits can not be agreed upon. Some see him as an already commercially successful filmmaker by the time the Nouvelle Vague happened, who borrowed from the emerging trend as and when he wanted to, while others discredit him entirely. Others consider him to be a bona-fide member of the core set.

While achingly contemporary (Malle adopted jazz and Jeanne Moreau in 1957, while the Cahiers gang were still writing on film, as opposed to scripting their own), Malle maintains a timeless edge, tying him neatly to a similar spot as fellow almost-Wavers such as Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati, or even Melville (Indeed, the trailer for Elevator To The Gallows displays a keenness on the behalf of the unknown party behind the piece of marketing material to associate the young filmmaker with the greats that had followed before him (specifically Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, Robert Bresson and Jacques Becker). Class also comes in to the picture with Malle.

Stemming from a very privileged background, thanks to an inherited wealth from a sugar dynasty, Malle’s own upbringing contrasts greatly to many of his contemporaries, and afforded him the opportunity to attend a formal film school, as opposed to the cineaste approach adopted by the Cahiers five.

Malle had already won the Palme d’Or and an Oscar before any of the Cahiers crowd made their debut features, with his 26

Malle’s Elevator To The Gallows introduced Jazz and Jeanne Moreau to the French cinema.

Jacques Cousteau collaboration The Silent World a formidable world cinema entry upon release in 1956. Undeniable similarities between Malle and “the others” are evident in one particular area though for certain: that of choice of source material.

Malle’s personalised breakthrough came with the pulp fiction crime novel inspired Elevator To The Gallows, which is perhaps the pre-eminent influence on the early films of the New Wave outside of the Hollywood picture. It’s not only in their adoption of pulp fiction as source material in which similarities can be found, but also in the widespread tendency to deviate greatly from, and take liberties with said source material, with the auteur of a specific movie choosing to replace the original authors voice with their own.

Thanks to the developments pursued by Melville, Varda, Vadim, Astruc and Malle the stage was set for great revolution to sweep through the French film industry.

Already an industry shaped by creatives, artists and cineastes, the New Wave would seal and define the perceived emphasis of a national cinema, and affirm the identity that persists internationally to today; that of an auteuristically driven, cine-literate and thoughtful cinema that had the power to inspire and prompt change in every facet of French society.

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3

THE GROUPE RIVE GAUCHE/LEFT BANK GROUP MARCELLINE BLOCK

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Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda (b. 1928, Brussels) is often hailed as the ‘grandmother’ or ‘mother’ of the Nouvelle Vague. Varda’s first feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), which inaugurated her signature aesthetic blending documentary and fiction—called an ‘ambitious experimental work’ by François Truffaut and edited by Alain Resnais—‘was very well received by the group [Les Cahiers du Cinéma], especially by [André] Bazin…[and] has been cited as one of the most important precursors of the Nouvelle Vague’. This, along with the fact that Varda is the only female New Wave filmmaker—for whom there is ‘a continual interchange between historical context and issues of the female self in society at every stage of [her] work’— serves to explain her moniker.

Yet the French New Wave is not the only filmmaking group with which Varda is associated, as she, ‘along with Resnais and Chris Marker, formed part of a subset of the Nouvelle Vague which has sometimes been called the ‘Groupe Rive Gauche’ or the ‘Left Bank Group’”—named for the area of Paris in which the three filmmakers resided: the Left Bank represents a bohemian, intellectual, and supposedly antibourgeois mentality and way of life (although, in fact, there is a classical haute bourgeoise element dwelling around Saint-Germain-des-Prés). The ‘Left Bank Group’ is a term often attributed to American film critic Richard Roud, who published his 1962 article, entitled ‘The Left Bank’, in the film journal Sight and Sound. (Although according to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, it is Claire Clouzot who ‘developed the concept of the group and named it in her 1972 book, Le cinéma français depuis la Nouvelle Vague’).

Roud considered that Marker, Resnais, and Varda were more invested in the documentary tradition and concerned with problematics of film form, expressing ‘an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking’ thus distinguishing them from the Cahiers du Cinéma group (including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut, among others). Moreover, for Steven Ungar and Ryan Watson, ‘the Left Bank group…had broader cultural ambitions than the Cahiers group. Rather than concentrating on cinephilia and auteurs, the members of the Left Bank group engaged social and political issues with a humanist sensibility and personal points of view.’

At the forefront of Marker, Resnais, and Varda’s cinematic preoccupations is the intersection of socio-political concerns and issues with experiments in film form (Varda is ‘an avowed feminist’ whose films frequently foreground female protagonists 29

Agnès Varda, the ‘grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague.

such as in Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) or Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985)).

Their productions are often documentaries about historical, socio-political and/or current events such as Marker’s Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat (1977), which, in exploring ‘the tumultuous political and social landscape of the New Left activist movement in the 1960s and 1970s…weaves together a global story shaped by figures like Castro and Allende and by events like the French 1968 protests and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.’ Varda’s 2000 Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I, about the contemporary practice of ‘gleaning’ for food, simultaneously functions as a meditation upon her own aging and mortality, a subject she revisits in celebrating her 80th birthday onscreen in her César award winning documentary, the cinematic autobiography Les plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnes (2008).

The Left Bank Group fiction films are also often marked by documentary aesthetics. For example, Varda’s Golden Lion winning 1985 Vagabond, a nonlinear narrative about a free spirited young woman who refuses to abide by society’s conventions—ultimately leading to her death in a ditch in the frozen winter landscape of South of France—creates ‘a new discursive form that blends fictional construct with documentary research in a unique articulation which defies traditional categorization.’

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Marker’s only fiction effort, the dystopian/postapocalyptic 1962 La jetée/ The Jetty, a black and white ‘photoroman’ composed entirely out of still photographs (except for one shot) plays with concepts of history, memory, time and time travel, whose setting is the ravaged, post-World War III society of the near future. For Kristiina Hackel, this 28 minute science fiction film, ‘created with strong images…is about the power of the image, and how an image can mark and determine destiny’.

atrocities committed there (as narrated in voiceover by French actor Michel Bouquet). That the film was written by the poet and novelist Jean Cayrol, himself a concentration camp survivor, and is only ten years removed from the end of World War II and the liberation of Europe, makes it all the more powerful. In his later fiction films Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour/Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963)—again, like Night and Fog, scripted by Cayrol—Resnais (re)examines the horror and atrocity of war. In Hiroshima, it is the lingering memory of World War II into then-contemporary France and Japan, haunting the film’s protagonists, a Japanese man and a French woman, as they struggle to resolve their traumatic experiences of the war, confronting lifelong losses now central to their identities. Central to Muriel is its absent-present, titular figure: the Algerian woman whose horrific, brutal torture at the hands of French soldiers haunts one of the film’s characters, now living in a provincial French seaside town, Boulogne-sur-mer; his obsessive, recuperative quest for justice culminates in his shooting a fellow soldier whom he blamed for Muriel’s torture and death.

Resnais’ seminal 32 minute documentary Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955; with Marker serving as an assistant director) is one of the earliest and most significant films about the Holocaust: ‘it is almost impossible to speak about this film in the vocabulary of cinematic criticism. It is not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the 20th century…it absolutely must be seen. When the lights go on at the end, no one dares applaud. We stand speechless before such a work, struck dumb by the importance and necessity of these thousand meters of film’. The film’s slow tracking and panning shots of the now empty concentration camps (filmed at Auschwitz and Majdanek, including the interior of the gas chambers), set to Hanns Eisler’s score, take on a haunting, lyrical quality that is juxtaposed with the

While Alison Smith maintains that the Rive Gauche filmmakers ‘never formed anything like the coherent group 31

based at Cahiers’—a sentiment expressed

by Varda herself, for whom ‘there was never anything more shared by the [Left Bank] group than friendly conversation and a love of cats’—Claire Clouzot asserts that the Left Bank is ‘a distinct group in opposition to the New Wave’ which is ‘inspired by artistic eclecticism. As creators they are interested in the flow of mental processes, rather than in a cinephilic fanaticism. It is not theoretical criticism which draws them to the cinema, but an interest in filmic writing, and the relations this might have with literary production’.

The Left Bank Group’s interest in ‘filmic writing’ is exemplified by Varda’s concept of cinécriture or ‘cinematic writing’/‘ciné-writing’, which, from the earliest days of her cinematic practice with the ‘cinematic essay’ La Pointe Courte, demonstrates an ‘authorship that presented a series of “laboratories” in which she blended the dual concerns of film language and feminism in order to arrive at a concept of feminine cinematic writing (filmer en femme),’ or cinécriture feminine which ultimately ‘goes counter to the established canons of western filmmaking practices’. Varda defines cinécriture as follows:

but does not film, and of the director who does the mise-en-scène, back in their respective boxes. The two may be the same thing, but there’s often lasting confusion. I am so fed up with hearing: ‘It’s a well-written film’, when I know that the compliment is meant for the scenario and the dialogue.

A well-written film is also well filmed, the actors are well chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc.

In writing it’s called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture.”

The Left Bank’s relationship to literary production is evidenced not only in Varda’s notion of cinécriture, but also, in Resnais’ frequent cinematic collaborations with authors, whether Jean Cayrol or practitioners of the ‘nouveau roman’ such as Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet—both of whom took a highly innovative approach in their literary as well as their own cinematic oeuvres—in his iconic New Wave films Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), written by Duras, and the oneiric, surreal L’année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad (1961), whose screenplay is by Robbe-Grillet.

“I invented the word and now I use it to mean the film-maker’s work. It puts the work of the scriptwriter who writes 32

Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, starring Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada.

The Left Bank filmmakers’ influence continues to be felt. Varda, whose 85th birthday is coming up on May 30, 2013, was recently the subject of a March 2013 conference at the University of Pennsylvania and Slought Foundation, under the direction of its founder and curator Jean-Michel Rabaté, featuring leading film critics discussing her work as well as screenings of her films, at which she spoke and gave a master class. Moreover, these events coincided with the U Penn symposium paying tribute to Chris Marker, who died in July 2012 at age 91, at which Varda was a guest speaker.

Resnais is now approaching his 91st year (on June 3, 2013) and his latest film, Vous n’avez encore rien vu/You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (based on Jean Anouilh’s plays Eurydice and Cher Antoine ou l’amour rate) was screened at Cannes in 2012 and in the fall of 2012 at the 50th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

Notes.

1. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), ebook version.

2. Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester University Press, 1998), 7

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4.A

A STORM IS THREATENING NEW HOLLYWOOD AND THE AMERICAN CINEMA REVOLUTION 1967 - 1980 CRAIG WILLIAMS 34

Depending on how one frames the history of New Hollywood, it is tempting to venture that, with Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Heaven’s Gate (1980), it began and ended with two pieces of historical Americana. For a movement that came to define the future of the American cinema, the country’s own new wave was as steeped in reflection as it was in youthful fervency. From the late sixties to the end of the seventies, the rich tapestry of American history was appropriated and reconstituted by filmmakers to shed light on contemporary malaise, both social and artistic. The cultural and economic dominance of cinema in 20th century America had always hinted at a level of socio-political significance hitherto unknown in any other Western country, but the rare instance of institutional insecurity on behalf of the major studios coupled with the blazing force of the counterculture resulted in a decade where the movies were ascribed a degree of

“To this end, the seeds of New Hollywood were sown over many years, with films like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) ushering in a new sensibility in American cinema”

importance which American cinema would never recapture.

Of course, cultural movements elude strict demarcations; they are not discrete historical narratives with clear delineations. To this end, the seeds of New Hollywood were sown over many years, with films like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) ushering in a new sensibility in American cinema, but it took Arthur Penn’s electrifying Bonnie & Clyde to demonstrate the revolutionary zeal for critics to seize upon and christen as the birth of a new wave. Penn’s masterpiece was only the beginning of the first of what can be seen as three distinct but overlapping periods of New Hollywood.

The first wave belonged to the trailblazers; the days of Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper and BBS. Then followed the time of the movie brats, cine-literate film school 35

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, a key text from the New Hollywood

graduates who came of age at the beginning of New Hollywood and would define its future; directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino. The third wave was the quiet tsunami. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were the humble B-movie directors, the genre-men unconcerned with the creative achievements of their peers. But with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), they created the first true blockbusters, changing the face of distribution and putting the final nail in the coffin of New Hollywood.

A Fire is Sweeping The counterculture came late to Hollywood. In the late fifties and early sixties, the film studios were still churning out costly musicals and historical epics, blind to the revolution occurring around them in other art forms. The studios were wounded leviathans, still big enough to dominate the industry, but smart enough to recognise that their inability to adapt to shifting audience demographics was causing them to rapidly lose money. The baby boomer generation was coming of age in the 1960s,

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meaning cinema audiences were, on the whole, younger, better educated and more politically engaged than their parents.

The studios’ desperation led to an unprecedented period of risk-taking and innovation in film. Younger directors who were enamored with contemporary European cinema were afforded a level of control over the films they made that was unheard of in Hollywood. The dismantling of the notoriously stringent Production Code and the introduction of a new ratings system proved fertile ground for a social and artistic revolution.

The painful process of transition from the moral absolutes and unwavering patriotism of the postwar era to the liberalisation of the sixties created a ruptured political landscape and an intergenerational chasm. It also brought pessimism to the American cinema. Films like The Conversation (1974), Don’t Look Now (1973) and even Dirty Harry (1971) were phalanxes of negativity. There appeared to be a fracture in the collective American psyche that caused audiences to respond strongly to these pictures.

Lord, I’m Gonna Fade Away Critic and film historian David Thomson said that the first New Hollywood movies of the late sixties demonstrated that the industry “had found a taste for un-American pictures”. Films started to look and feel different as directors began to make their presence felt, by manipulating visuals and narrative structures to great effect. Films like John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967) emerged, using conventional genre structures, but handled in such a way that simple dialogue became freighted with philosophical insight. More importantly, the movies started to reflect the struggles and complexities of real life.

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The origination of this disenchantment is one of the reasons that the delay in the counterculture reaching Hollywood was a positive thing for audiences.

By the early seventies, the heady days of the Summer of Love were over. The debris of the hippie revolution became the source of the reflective pessimism of New Hollywood. While there is undoubtedly anger in the American films of the seventies, the separation from the early days of the counterculture allowed directors to draw on history and experience to understand the changes that had occurred. The great liberalising measures of the sixties had been more difficult to propagate and maintain than the optimists had imagined; civil rights legislation was a step forward, but racism was still rife and segregation had effectively continued, albeit along economic lines.

Peter Fonda, the Captain America of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider.

In much the same way, despite the flicker of hope afforded by the presidency of John F. Kennedy, America still invaded Vietnam, bearing its hubris and the limits of its perceived omnipotence for the world to see. The war became a powerful psychic blow to the country as well as the battleground of youth, with tensions infamously flaring at Kent State University and the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The movies began to reflect the younger generation’s acknowledgment of just how despised America had become globally. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), for example, showed a disillusioned and withdrawn military, uncomprehendingly sleepwalking through a war they did not understand.

The perspective also meant that the radical notions of the sixties were left exposed by the visible consequences of the period; people saw the dark side of free love, political activism and wanton drug use. Violence had become a prominent signifier of the national discourse; the JFK assassination may have shocked the nation but, as Thomson pointed out, it was Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald that captured the “infectious disease” of violence and melodrama in America, played out in the news on television and held up as a mirror in the movies. But it was Altamont and the Manson murders that brought the sixties to a crashing halt, and New Hollywood projected 38

the hangover onto celluloid. In particular, the shadow of Charles Manson hung heavy over the seventies work of Roman Polanski, whose wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the occultist and his “family”.

that, at the right place and the right time, they’re capable of anything”.

In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), the nihilism was pushed so far, that some saw it almost as a right wing polemic. By “Hollywoodising” the more experimental elements with Michael Chapman’s slick cinematography and Robert De Niro’s magnetic charisma, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called it an “apocalyptic wish-fulfillment fantasy”.

But holding Taxi Driver out solely as a socio-political treatise is to overlook the complex cinematic traditions it incorporated and amplified. The connectivity between the film’s admittedly harrowing political discourse and intertextuality is merely a by-product of two cine-literate artists tackling that particular subject. Beyond the guns, the neon, the grime, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader demonstrate a forceful plea for purification; a return to innocence. Taxi Driver quivers throughout with the implicit threat of violence, but the final bloodbath has a purging effect; it’s a twisted moral crusade for the soul of Jodie Foster’s child prostitute Iris, and perhaps even the nation.

The director’s 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown, became emblematic of the disenfranchisement with both conservative and liberal values. Political skepticism turned into nihilism, with Chinatown representing a dramatic rejection of the social order and the abandonment of hope. Structurally and thematically, the film carried many of the tenets of noir, but the amorphous, unwieldy plot broadened the film’s gaze far beyond genre homage. It appropriated history to show the uselessness of civic progress; society is rotting, and the people at the bottom are helpless to change it – “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”.

If Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes was a surrogate for the contemporary audience – curious, cynical but imbibed with the final vestiges of optimism – then John Huston’s Noah Cross represented the order of the day; corruption, amorality and greed. Cross is, like so many New Hollywood villains, the logical end point for the pioneering spirit of the Old West, where money has replaced morality. “You see Mr Gittes”, he says at one point, “most people never have to face the fact

The dual paradox of violence as a cleansing act and a need to return to innocence underpinned a lot of the Westerns of New Hollywood. Films as disparate as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) 39

and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) showed the Old West as the dawn of the modern age, with the pioneers and prospectors setting the narrative of capitalist America in motion. In many ways, the Westerns of the late sixties and seventies were concerned with the country’s wrong turn; money and greed were the catalysts of social unrest, leading to an epidemic of violence which lodged itself in the nation’s psyche and set the roots of the disenchantments of the 20th century.

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), arguably the last film of New Hollywood, was also mournful for the initial promise of the West; its freedom, its innocence. While the production troubles and catastrophic box office performance which resulted in the bankruptcy of United Artists may have been a significant factor in de-

“New Hollywood did not only reflect the socio-political history of the period, it revolutionised 20th century cinema with its passionate and studious approach to film history.”

mise of the auteur and the rise of the producer-led blockbusters in the eighties, Heaven’s Gate provides a fitting epitaph for the socio-political narratives of New Hollywood; after the fire and the fury, a quiet realisation of innocence lost. It was the slow, deliberate wake for the most tumultuous of decades.

It’s Just a Shot Away New Hollywood did not only reflect the socio-political history of the period, it revolutionised 20th century cinema with its passionate and studious approach to film history. Noel Carrol called the period a “cinema of allusion”, by which he meant “a mixed lot of practices including quotations, the memorialisation of past genres, homages, and the recreation of “classic” scenes, shots, plot motifs, lines of dialogue, themes, gestures, and so forth from film history, especially as that history was crystallised and codified in the sixties and early seventies”. This process of cinematic citation resulted in a newly textured form of genre film defined by the incorporation of European elements into the traditional American pictures.

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Heaven’s Gate, from Michael Cimino represents the culmination of the artistically driven American cinema of the New Hollywood period.

In the fifties and early sixties, many of the directors who are now considered the greats were seen as nothing more than entertainers. The great reappraisal began when the writers of French film journal Cahiers du Cinema initiated major critical reassessments of directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. This reevaluation was given additional credence when the Cahiers writers began including references and homages to American cinema in their own films. Directors like Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol were appropriating influences from across the breadth of Hollywood history, from the Marx Brothers to John Ford. The French New Wave reconstituted American film, not only creating a new movement, but also a canon from which to pilfer and pay tribute.

By the time the New Hollywood directors came to include European influences in their own films, a cyclical practice of cinematic citation was falling into place. The great American genre pictures had been given a new lease of life by films like Godard’s Bande a part (1964) and Truffaut’s Shoot The Pianist (1960), through the way in which the New Wave directors ascribed poetry to the pulp and found existentialism beneath the surface of tight structural conventions.

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Critic Pauline Kael saw a gulf between French and American sensibilities in the dominance of the New Wave influence on New Hollywood. Kael argued that the “French may tenderize their American material, but we shouldn’t…[because that] would turn into another way of making “prestigious”, “distinguished” pictures”. This passage should be read within the context of the era; Kael was simply defending American grit against what she saw as snobbery among New Hollywood practitioners and critics towards European cinema. It’s a fair, but simplistic point, and one that overlooks the extent to which parallels existed between American and European film from the late fifties and early sixties. Kael may be astute in her observation of the overvaluing of European influences but, regardless of whether the directors of the time were inspired by Godard or Alain Resnais, they created a very American body of work, albeit driven by the stylistic force of European cinema.

The importance of the European influences on New Hollywood has frequently led many to discount or overlook the impact of experimental film on the movement. The experimentalists, led by directors like Jonas Mekas, Robert Breer and Stan Brakhage, were not as widely seen for many reasons. Rosenbaum notes that the art houses in the major cities would only show European cinema, leav-

ing experimental film to become relegated to “the ‘safer’ confines of various institutional venues” like museums.

However, experimental cinema still had a key impact on New Hollywood in two ways. Firstly, the contexts in which the more popular examples were screened (“carnivalesque” midnight screenings according to Rosenbaum, aligning them with the sixties counterculture) brought some of the more iconic imagery into the public consciousness. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) is a key example, with its hallucinogenic framing, homoerotic and phallic symbolism and the fetishisation of motorcycle iconography. While the influence is inevitably superficial, it is evident to varying degrees in New Hollywood films like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969).

Secondly, Rosenbaum argued that experimental film was important in the way it loosened the public’s sense of what was acceptable in cinema, from subject matter to technical standards.

Along with cinematic citation, the advent of film schools meant that the directors of New Hollywood were more knowledgeable and arguably more appreciative of film history than their predecessors. Take Taxi Driver as an example, the film is simply awash with references to

42

numerous films spanning eras and continents; from Robert Bresson and Fritz Lang to Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford.

Mad Bull Lost Its Way The excesses of New Hollywood auteurism, conveniently encapsulated in Heaven’s Gate and the demise of United Artists, along with the astronomical success of Jaws, are frequently cited as the reasons for the movement’s demise. But they were simply catalysts; the studios had been waiting to reassert control throughout the seventies. They had given directors freedom while the money was coming in, but expensive failures and volatile personalities (luridly but compellingly documented in Peter Bisk-

“But all is not lost. New Hollywood remains the benchmark for artistic, integral American cinema. The best American films of the last decade – Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)– all demonstrate New Hollywood sensibilities.”

ind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) gave them grounds to step in and return to the era of studio vehicles.

“The movie business, perhaps American culture, has never recovered from that electric media weekend [when Jaws opened]” claimed David Denby. Thomas Schatz elaborated, stating that Spielberg’s runaway hit had given the studios the means by which to created “a cultural commodity that might be regenerated in any number of media forms”. This is the blockbuster mentality that prevails today.

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Bob Rafelson’s The King Of Marvin Gardens makes for an enlightening alternative to many of the other New Hollywood features.

But all is not lost. New Hollywood remains the benchmark for artistic, integral American cinema. The best American films of the last decade – Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)– all demonstrate New Hollywood sensibilities. The practice of cinematic citation continues as the canon grows, and new directors will still turn to the American films of the seventies for guidance and inspiration. As Kris Kristofferson’s James Averill says to John Hurt’s Billy Irvine in Heaven’s Gate after being asked if he remembered the good old days, “clearer and better, every day I get older”.

Suggested Viewing.

The Essentials Bonnie & Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola, 1979) 44

4.B

FREEDOM TO GO TO HELL THE DIALECTICS OF MALE RAGE AND FEMININE VIEWING PLEASURE IN THE HOLLYWOOD NEW WAVE

CHRISTINA NEWLAND

45

Christina Newland here presents an original academic text exploring Richard Brooks’ 1977 film, Looking For Mr. Goodbar.

Extensive notes can be found at the end of the piece.

The variance and heterogeneity of the Hollywood New Wave - with all the inconsistency of its political allegiances - has come to be understood as many things, simultaneously. These include, in short order: a relatively brief flowering of creative talent in the space before the consolidation of corporate studio power; an aesthetically and thematically revolutionary movement, unrivalled in its influence; and a movement whose films were potential vehicles for the subversion of established American norms and values.

Beginning in 1967 with The Graduate and roughly considered to be over by the mid-seventies, (though many watershed New Hollywood films were being made up until 1980), the canonical texts of the movement - Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, et al, were masculine fantasies depicting the rebellion and alienation of the counterculture, while still adhering to the myth of the individualist male, with little inclination to allow women the same new freedoms or self-determination. Many of these films reflect the spirit of the age – its cynicism, its distrust of authority, its indictments of violence and the American war machine – yet the Feminist movement of the 1960's and 70's went largely undocumented by Hollywood filmmakers. The women's liberation movement and its aims – equal pay for equal work, access to contraception and abortion, protection from domestic abuse and rape, sexual freedom as alternative to the patriarchal family – were gaining political and social power. Potentially, male filmmakers found it was 'more difficult for them to embrace a movement which saw them as oppressors' – nonetheless, Hollywood's silence on the issue is telling, particularly in light of the overall politicization of movies during the decade.

In fact, the primary response to the women's movement within Hollywood – along with the new laxity of censorship codes – led to a general attitude of hostility toward women in the earlier films of the decade. This hostility was 46

crystallized in the conservative backlash against liberalism and the restoration of the traditional family by the late 1970's.

Ambiguous attitudes toward rape abounded (Straw Dogs, early in the decade, was certainly leader of the pack for the morally objectionable); women became reduced primarily to sexual objects and one-dimensional vessels for male projection; of lust, suspicion, and as the late seventies in America regressed into a deeply conservative, pro-Reaganite feeling, of a general form of 'male rage'.

There was a 'redoubling of Godfather-like machismo to beef up man's eroding virility […] The closer women came to claiming their rights and achieving independence in real life, the more loudly and stridently films tell us it's a man's world.'

This is roughly the context for Richard Brooks' 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Starring Diane Keaton (as Theresa Dunn), and based on a bestselling novel inspired by true events, the story takes place in contemporary New York, as a middle-class Irish-Catholic schoolteacher becomes increasingly bohemian and sexually promiscuous. She suffers a stifled, stunted relationship with her father and eventually meets her demise at the hands of a casual lover, who brutally rapes and murders her. Tellingly, perhaps, Goodbar was written and directed by a classical Hollywood director; Brooks was most famous for Cat on a 47

Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Blackboard Jungle (1955). Consequently, the film, late in the period in many ways, could not be said to strictly belong to the Hollywood New Wave, but it is contextually closest to the movement in its response and tone. The contrast between its apparent conservative overtones and its discreet feminine viewing pleasures put it in a strange position in comparison to other films of the 1970's – somewhere between ultra-regressive horror flick (with its predominance of violence toward women), sympathetic 'woman's film', and belonging to liberal New Hollywood. Its paltry psychological justifications, and its ultimately retrogressive conclusion, point to patriarchal fears about sexually independent women, casting Theresa as the stereotypical harpy with psychological aberrations, a destroyer of the traditional family. Yet Goodbar retains a mysterious power for its long-overlooked capacity to draw in the female viewer; to capture one's interest, sympathies, and identification beyond the circumscription of a supposed male gaze. The dialectics between attraction and repulsion, between conservative and progressive boundaries, allow the film to espouse a right-wing social message with startlingly effective force – as if, to descend to the colloquial, it were a proverbial worm in the apple. Discussing body horror, Linda Williams suggests, 'The point is not to admire the “sexual freedom” of this new fluidity and oscil-

lation – the new femininity of men […] and the new masculinity of women […] the more useful lesson might be to see what this new fluidity and oscillation permits in the construction of feminine viewing pleasures once thought not to exist at all.' In other words, Terry's sexual liberation is not designed to empower the feminine viewer, although her swaggering, attributed typically to the male, is unique: 'the novelty of her situation is ultimately reduced to a matter of degree'. Nonetheless, Goodbar so closely mimics progressive films of the period, allowing men and women to engage in perceived gender-opposite behaviours, that strange and deeply paradoxical opportunities for feminine subjectivity present themselves.

I contend that while the film remains a troubling representation of reactionary conservatism and is intended as a cautionary tale, it also provides a surprising disruption of the male gaze, and places men in a surprisingly fluid role. Goodbar offers a compelling revision of power dynamics in gendered behaviour before withdrawing completely and reinforcing those very same dynamics.

this vein, Goodbar could almost appear corrective. Most films that focused on women's struggles used divorce, adultery, or abusive, unhappy marriages as their focal point - as in Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1978), Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), and Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Marriage and romantic relationships serve as an organizing concept in most women's films of the period. As Molly Haskell notes, even 'in their desperate flight from love, these women attest to its continued importance in their lives.

As women, they had been […] conditioned to think of romance and marriage and child-bearing as the central facts of their lives...' Again, Goodbar is lacking in any serious romantic entanglements; Theresa is unproblematically free of marital history, with no desire to burden herself otherwise. If marriage was not the organizing scheme, then another historically patriarchal institution was used to safely interrogate women's sexuality: prostitution. In the European New Waves of the early sixties, many of the sexually 'liberated' women - the Italian and French, especially – appear defiant and free-wheeling by comparison; several are enabled to flout social norms through the device of prostitution. These films, too, vary in their capacity for progressive portrayals; notably, Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film, Vivre sa vie, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's early work, Mamma Roma (1962),

In the context of the Hollywood New Wave, precious few of the oftdiscussed films of the seventies situated women in empowered roles; fewer still adopted a specifically feminine, subjective promiscuity – or portrayed sexually liberated women in a positive light. In 48

portray the tragic trajectories of 'fallen women'. With Godard's almost angelic Anna Karina serving as metaphor for meaningful contemplation of art; the woman's body is a battlefield for philosophical ideas instead of representative of womanhood on a whole. Pasolini's Anna Magnani, on the other hand, is woman incarnate, almost; in no small part due to Magnani's personal ferocity and her character's unidealised vulgarity.

Interestingly, Keaton's Terry is an amalgamation of these influences; she is woman as metaphor, as vessel for the director's ideology; but she is also unashamedly sexual, without the qualifiers of marriage or prostitution to delineate her as essentially good or essentially doomed. And nonetheless, Terry meets her terrible fate in much the same manner as many of the European 'whores' might; violently, tragically, with the sense that the 'fallen woman' has received her due punishment. Brooks' essentialist, seemingly simplistic message is that a woman must never exist in the dangerous margin of sexuality where neither slapdash Freudian analytics explain her nor some sort of cautionary punishment await her. Goodbar justifies its' moralistic conclusion by sketching every character and motivational aspect as if it is coloured by pseudo-Freudian psychology; Terry is subjugated and ignored in equal turns by her patriarchal father; the 49

love she cannot receive from him she desperately seeks in random lovers. He sees no wrong in her equally libidinous sister, but places blame squarely on her shoulders for being a part of the 'bra-burning crusade'. She rejects the 'good' Catholic boy, James, because he reminds her too much of her father, and actively pursues rebellious, dangerous men like Tony (Richard Gere). Brooks' directorial vision thus gives Terry the surface appearance of freedom; but she is in fact tightly circumscribed by Brooks' definition of her sexuality; essentially, as a psychological flaw. Ultimately, Terry's nymphomania leads her to dabble in drugs, and eventually to cross paths with a psychotic repressed homosexual, George (Tom Berenger), who rapes and kills her.

In Sarah Projansky's survey of the history of rape in American film, she asserts, 'Films that use rape to understand […] women's relationship to independence and vulnerability […] articulate anxiety about these social categories. In this context, rape functions as a narrative tool to […] articulate an apocalyptic perspective on shifts in these social categories that suggests the worst will happen if one (whether a character or a spectator) does not remain in one's designated gender and class position.' In this respect, Goodbar fits an 'apocalyptic' description in both tone and content; a sense that the women's movement, the hedonism of the

decade, and the degeneration of traditional social values had gone too far to allow Theresa to be reconciled with the status quo. It must be rid of her in order to preach its moralistic cautions to liberated women. Yet, the exploitation of progressive New Wave aesthetics permeate Goodbar. It opens with a montage of black and white stills and ends with a hallucinogenic flashing strobe-light; its camera is subjective and constantly roaming.

Its frankness about sexuality and drug use paired with its disco soundtrack - a sub-culture largely consisting of women, gays, and blacks – all give the impression of a film which belongs to youth culture.

In much the same manner, the majority of Goodbar seemingly belongs solely to Terry's subjective viewpoint, and thus, on the side of womanhood. She repeatedly rejects James, is fully sexually satisfied with Tony but makes herself unavailable to him when she chooses, and is overwhelmingly in control of her own sexuality.

notion of the “active male” and “passive female” find definitive expression […]' yet this hypocrisy does not seem readily apparent. Theresa is not, as Mulvey defines it, a 'visual presence (to) […] freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation' While the film does offer much in the way of low-lit, sensual sex scenes, they only 'freeze the flow of action' inasmuch as they are the action the central part of the narrative; they heighten the extent to which Terry is freely enjoying her sexuality. Novick nonetheless reiterates his view of Terry as a 'passive object': 'Theresa, even bespectacled, becomes a curious creature of sexual complexity on whom the male viewer, like the post-coital Tony […] can project his own sordid schoolboy dreams.' The argument that Brooks stigmatizes sexual women while covertly fetishising them seems to support a cohesive analytical understanding of a film which offers no cohesive answers. Diane Keaton's star persona, Goodbar's relative lack of nudity, and the lingering fixation on the male body rather than the female are particularly unusual.

In his recent article which partly discusses the film, Peter Andrew Novick attributes Brooks' contradictory impulses to a hypocrisy which both 'entices the male viewer' while condemning the pursuit of casual sex. In doing so, Brooks employs the active male gaze, taking scopophilic pleasure in witnessing Terry's most intimate moments. Novick goes on to say that in Goodbar, 'Mulvey's

Terry as object of male desire seems misguided in light of the fact that several critics cited Keaton's 'charming but inappropriate innocence', saying, 'Keaton is simply too innocent-looking, too sweet, to portray convincingly the energized desperation and drive that her 50

character suggests [‌]'. 1977 was the year Keaton starred in Annie Hall, thus immortalizing her image as neurotic, hyperintelligent, decidedly anti-sexy and knowingly 'cute'. Keaton was and is, in many ways, a woman's woman; her persona is geared for feminine identification rather than male fantasy. Her star-image conundrum represents Richard Dyer's 'problematic fit': her onscreen (and off-screen) image almost directly contradicts that of the role, nearly to the point of miscasting. Diane Keaton is Annie Hall; the wide-eyed, gawky Midwesterner with an almost precocious intellectualism – and also Terry Dunn, the street-smart, cynical maneater, drug taker and disco-nightclubber.

Annie cries at a spider in the tub; Terry shrieks and laughs when she finds roaches crawling on her things. Considered in passing comparison to costar Richard Gere, who in three years was to star in his own iconic role in American Gigolo (another film revelling in feminine viewing pleasure, with Gere as the frequently-undressed object of the camera's gaze), and Keaton's image seems especially problematic and certainly unfitting of the 'bombshell' role. In fact, she is the much less sexualised of the two stars.

This 'miscasting' certainly lends itself to the perplexing and unstable identity Terry is ascribed.

The men in the film are primarily split in binary terms between the patri51

archal, fatherly 'good' - James and Terry's actual father - and the workingclass, dangerous lovers Tony and George, the latter a handsome gay man (Tom Berenger) who eventually kills her. If, in keeping with Mulvey's theory, these stars are 'screen surrogates' for the male spectator's scopophilic gaze, then Terry's lovers are the most likely candidates for 'articulating the look'. Yet, the look of the camera, for all its inherent patriarchy, lingers instead on the bodies of these young men. It revels in their physical beauty; fit, hard bodies, naked chests, pouty lips, and an almost effeminate sensuality.

When Terry strips off for the camera, which is both infrequent and brief, the same scene presents lingering shots of Tony's backside, as he does push-ups and dances around her apartment more or less exposed. This apparent gearing to feminine sexual desire is cited by Nystrom in that it can 'nostalgically embrace a certain kind of masculinity while also making its disappearance seem both necessary and salutary'. In other words, there is a contradictory element to this portrayal; a fondness for working-class masculinity as something vaguely rustic, and a simultaneous revulsion for it, a demonisation which becomes all-too-clear in the delineation between the middleclass and the blue-collar. Although the middle-class men aren't excused completely – they, too, are capable of pathological inclinations toward violence and

an overwhelming desire to control Terry – they lack the uniform psychosis and dangerous sexuality that Terry's lovers embody.

of the Lambs, as something negatively coded in an atypically feminine fashion and used to denigrate homosexuals. The concept applies well to the men in Goodbar. While we do get glimpses of female performance – Terry primping and spraying perfume on herself in the mirror; telling her troubled sister (Tuesday Weld) she has 'perfect hair, perfect teeth...' - the women's concern with appearance is banal, and far less sinister, than the theatrical aspects Gere and Berenger embody.

They both play psychotic, violent men with fractured identities; they are not only associated to an emasculating representation as objects of female desire, but to a duplicitous, unpredictable performativity. Tony, high on cocaine, does pushups, runs around Terry's apartment, and threatens her vaguely with a knife. His behaviour is outlandish and perverse, though perhaps less so in comparison to Brooks' view of George, who we are introduced to as he is cross-dressing with his gay lover. When George assumes the mantle of women's clothes, and then rips them off in self-disgust, it can be read as an expression of revulsion with 'womanly' traits.

Combined with the fetishisation of the feminized male body, the young male characters in Looking for Mr. Goodbar represent a certain form of typically feminine gender performativity; they dance, preen, pout, and dress up, suggesting that they are in some way disingenuous to atypically male gendered behaviour. This is an extension of Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity: In spite of the performative dimension of gender that Butler discusses, Hollywood cinema most often emphasizes and highlights the performativity of only certain categories of characters, while coding others as authentic.

Through a filmic foreground of femininity in terms of body parts, costume, makeup […] women far more often than men have been explicitly aligned with the performative. This is significant from a feminist perspective because performativity tends to be negatively coded as duplicitous, fragmented, and unstable, whereas the depiction of the “real” is coded as strong, unified and stable – the more desirable identity category.

Of course, if these young men are categorized as unstable and effeminate, subverting their traditional gender performances – they are engaging with deeply un-masochistic feminine viewing pleasures; ones which allow the female

Here, Barton is discussing male performativity in reference to The Silence 52

spectator to occupy a space as maker of meaning. These paradoxes allow for disruption of the male gaze while remaining, as Barton asserts, negatively coded.

These men are clearly 'abnormal'; working-class, promiscuous members of the counter-culture who have dragged middle-class Terry into their amoral undertow. The vilification of certain types of 'feminized' manhood further cements Goodbar's conservative stance, but to complicate matters, the so-called 'good', respectable men – Terry's father and James - are not particularly heroic, either. They repeatedly attempt to subjugate Terry through verbal abuse, threats, and emotional manipulation, and in spite of this, it is them – the ones who 'know best' for Terry – that Brooks ultimately sides with. When Terry has an argument with her father, the angry judgement he imparts on her foreshadows her fate, and perhaps reveals the overall view the film takes on the women's movement: 'Freedom to abort your own kids […] freedom to go to hell. Freedom? How do you get free of the terrible truth?'

tence with women and can only consummate his relationship with Terry by simultaneously raping and stabbing her to death. It seems unusual that a director as apparently fascinated with Freud could deny the phallic impulse necessitated by such an attack; Theresa's sexual desire is aggressively phallic, masculine in nature; and George, her murderer, cannot resist from shouting at her, “That's what you want, bitch, right? That's what you want!” From Brooks' view, it seems muddled to use psychoanalysis to place women in relation to the Law of the Father, but to simultaneously punish them with a form of metaphoric phallic violence so brutal. In light of this, it seems, as Kaplan notes, there are 'gaps through which the underlying rage against Theresa for refusing domination bursts out unconditionally. These moments are over-determined in that they go beyond any narrative need'.

Such rage finds its full expression in George, who, being a homosexual, 'masks the sexual rage that many men have [….] but by locating the rage that leads to murder in a homosexual, the film permits the dominant class of men to avoid identification with the final, most brutal act.' By scapegoating the repressed homosexual as the ultimate cause of Terry's death, Brooks excuses the behaviour of the men who came before, all of whom were to some extent

Again, Brooks returns to the righteous indignation of the anti-feminist Right. However, when Terry is brutally murdered at the conclusion of the film, he undermines his own Freudian 'best intentions' argument – through an unaccountable degree of male violence.

George becomes enraged at his impo53

guilty of domination, but could articulate 'male rage' and disapproval of Terry's sexuality without making literal the extent of their anger. When this anger is allowed full expression, 'the need for a metaphoric medium of representation for such violence' becomes apparent; that is, the slasher flick or 70's horror genre more generally. If 'male rage' against women who flouted social norms could not be made metaphorical in horror narratives, the risk ran that 'their representation indicated what they really thought should be done with women'. In this way, Goodbar muddies the waters of definition with its pre-emptive horror film conclusion.

the late seventies: 'The conservative war on sexuality, therefore, relates to the fundamental power dynamics of a society that programs one half of the population to be aggressive and domineering and the other to be passive and weak.' If Brooks was helping to wage the war on sexuality in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, this power dynamic is upheld and actualized through representational misogynist violence; the conclusion implies the consequences of subverting a long-ingrained social structure. Yet it also opens doors to the suggestion that this very same 'programming' of gender – 'male socialization to aggressivity and competitiveness – in the economic marketplace, in military matters, in politics' – is the catalyst and vehicle for male violence against women. While this provides a margin of possibility for a critique of male domination, Goodbar's words of intent ultimately come from Terry's father: the only freedom Terry has, and concurrently, all sexually promiscuous women have – is to go to hell. In Terry's case, the hell of an ignominious death in a seedy apartment, made an example of not only by the rage of her male lovers, but by Brooks' narrative itself.

Considered along with its disruption of the gaze and the inconsistencies of its moralising, the conclusion to Goodbar suffers from the same contradictory impulses as much of 1970's American cinema. Its' apparent reactionary conservatism – certainly an undue amount of 'male rage' – paired with its highlighting of feminine subjectivity - create a uniquely ambiguous film, one which unfortunately reneges on its early potential with its insidious ending. Ryan & Kellner invoke the political climate of America in Notes;

1. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film.(Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988) p. 28 2. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New 54

5

FAR FROM ARGO IRAN ON-SCREEN IN THE 21ST CENTURY

PHILIP CONCANNON

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The Academy Award for Best Picture at this year's Oscars ceremony went to Ben Affleck's Argo. Like most recent winners of Hollywood's big prize, Argo wasn't short of detractors, with many critics dismissing the film as little more than an average thriller while others were angered by its perpetuation of negative Iranian stereotypes. It was this second criticism that stuck in my mind as I watched the filmmakers receive their Oscars, and my thoughts drifted back to the previous year's ceremony. On February 26th 2012, the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi collected the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and as he stood on the stage he delivered these words: "At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country Iran is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."

Farhadi's A Separation felt like a breakthrough moment for Iranian cinema. An extraordinary success with critics, audiences and awards voters, the film reached a wider audience than any Iranian film had managed before. For many of those audience members, it was the first Iranian film they had ever seen, and it succeeded in the way all great films succeed, through being simultaneously culturally specific and universally resonant. But for people who had been monitoring the development of Iranian cinema for the past two decades, the brilliance of A Separation didn't come as a surprise. The country's output in the 21st century thus far is comparable with that of any country for its complexity, richness and formal artistry.

The roots of Iranian cinema's 21st century successes lie in the 1990s, where the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf raised the profile of Iranian cinema worldwide and established a filmmaking approach that would have a huge influence on a later generation of directors. Films such as Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy (Where Is The Friend’s Home, Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees) and Close-Up and Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence allowed fiction and reality to co-exist, with real-life events often disrupting the anticipated narrative flow in surprising and fascinating ways. Given the restrictions and censorship imposed upon Iranian 56

Samira Makhmalbaf, who follows in her fathers footsteps as one of the key filmmakers of the Iranian set.

filmmakers by the Khomeini regime throughout the 80s, it's perhaps unsurprising that many directors were encouraged to experiment with form and find inventive ways to brings complex ideas into their work. In 1998 (one year after the election of the liberal former Cultural Minister Mohammad Khatami as President), Mohsen Makhmalbaf's daughter Samira made her directorial debut at the age of 17. The Apple told the story of two children who had spent their lives locked away by their family and had never experienced the outside world, and Makhmalbaf made her film in a way that blurred the lines between narrative and documentary, clearly showing her father's influence as she hired the family to be actors in their own story.

When Samira Makhmalbaf was invited to address a seminar at Cannes in 2000, she identified one of the key factors in the Iranian cinema boom – the digital revolution. "Cinema has always been at the mercy of political power, particularly in the East, financial capital, particularly in the West, and the concentration of means of production, anywhere in the world," Makhmalbaf said, "The individual creativity of artists throughout the 20th century has much suffered from the whimsical practices of this odd combination of forces. The situation at the threshold of the 21st century seems to have altered radically. With astonishing technological innovations now coming to frui57

tion, artists no longer seem to be totally vulnerable to these impediments." The new freedom afforded to filmmakers by digital technology quickly became apparent in a number of the key Iranian films of the decade.

newfound freedom to be more experimental in their approach, to boil down their storytelling to the essentials and, in some cases, to be even more subversive.

In 2002, Abbas Kiarostami made one of the first great films of the digital era with Ten. A small camera was affixed to the dashboard of a car, and from this vantage point it recorded ten conversations between the driver and passenger.

In the great tradition of Kiarostami's films, the conceptual simplicity of the project gradually revealed hidden depths, as the humorous, angry and touching chats between the various inhabitants of the car offered an engrossing examination of male-female relationships and the role women have to play in contemporary Tehran; one of the central themes of this country's recent cinema. Another notable instance of an Iranian director taking advantage of new technologies occurred a few years later, when Jafar Panahi utilised digital cameras to film Offside. His superb film told the story of young female football fans refused entry to an Iranian World Cup qualifier, and the small handheld cameras Panahi used allowed him to shoot inconspicuously amid the crowds at a football match, having been denied a license to make the film by the Ministry of Guidance. These new means of filmmaking gave Iranian directors a 58

Subversion and dissent does not go unnoticed in Iran, and the action taken against Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof is a horrible stain on the Iranian cinema success story. In late 2010, the two directors were convicted of conspiring "to commit crimes against the country's national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." The charges came about when it was discovered that the two men were working on a film about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hotly disputed 2009 election victory.

Panahi had been a troublesome thorn in the regime's side before, refusing requests to re-edit films that were seen as being critical of the authorities, and this affront was the final straw. Both men were sentenced to six years in prison and two-decade bans from writing or directing a film, and they were confined to house arrest while their appeals were heard. Their arrest caused an outcry in the international film community, with filmmakers and actors from around the world signing a petition that demanded their release, but Panahi's artistic spirit and creative urges remained undiminished even as his tools of expression were taken from him.

Panahi's This is Not a Film – filmed inside his own home, and smuggled out of the country by co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb – is one of the most important works of art made by anyone in recent years. It is a vital act of defiance from a filmmaker who is being punished for simply having an independent voice. Many of the notable films in recent Iranian cinema have a strong political theme at their core, but that content is often layered into the picture as subtext beneath an engaging human drama, as in Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly or Asghar Farhadi's About Elly, for example.

The arrest of artists who dare to directly comment upon the state of things sets a dangerous precedent, and one that may have troubling consequences. Will Iranian filmmakers now think twice before standing up for freedom of expression and human rights, or railing against state interference in their work? One recurring theme in films such as A Separation, Nobody Knows About Persian Cats and Goodbye has been young Iranians' burning desire to leave their homeland. Is Iran at risk of driving away its most exciting and intelligent young talents, and either arresting or clipping the wings of those who remain?

In a year in which Iranian cinema enjoyed its biggest success, thanks to A Separation's global recognition, the arrests of Panahi, Rasoulof and Behrouz Ghobadi represented its greatest shame, and the country currently sits at a crossroads. Abbas Kiarostami has now left Iran to make Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love, while Farhadi's Le passé is a European co-production that stars a number of acclaimed French actors, but what of the young Iranian talents who are following the trail that those filmmakers blazed? Promising debut films such as Negar Azarbayjani's Facing Mirrors, Massoud Bakhshi's A Respectable Family or Kiarostami protégé Morteza Farshbaf's extraordinary Mourning have given us hope for another generation of intelligent, daring, empathetic Iranian filmmakers, but it remains to be seen how fully they will be willing or able to engage with the issues faced by contemporary Iran. Iranian cinema has given us an astonishing array of riches in the past two decades, and one hopes that the "heavy dust of politics" referenced by Asghar Farhadi in his Oscar night speech doesn't stand in the way of its full potential being realised.

Selected Viewing.

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000) The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Makhmalbaf, 2000) Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001) 59

6

CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE JAPANESE NEW WAVE CRAIG SKINNER

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The Japanese New Wave of the sixties is one of the most difficult movements in cinema to discuss when one attempts to pin it down to a particular group of filmmakers, or even a specific time frame. The New Wave that Japan experienced in cinema in the sixties was not the work of a group of determined individuals focusing on creating a movement, there was no manifesto and many of those involved in what academics consider to be the New Wave deny that any such movement existed. When one surveys the cinema of Japan between the early fifties and the early seventies there is a very identifiable shift though, what could conservatively be called a gradual sea-change or perhaps more generously a bona fide New Wave.

This somewhat amorphous movement is nonetheless a fascinating insight into a

“There was no manifesto and many of those involved in what academics consider to be the New Wave deny that any such movement existed.�

specific period in Japanese cinematic history and it also provides us with a window into contextualising the preceding years and how its influence rippled into the following decade. Many academics, such as David Desser and Donald Richie, have defined the New Wave rather strictly but the following piece defines the Wave, which is already somewhat easily debated, more loosely in order to better understand it’s gradual ascent from the fifties and descent into the seventies.

Also, in an effort to tell this rather complex story of the Japanese New Wave in the sixties this piece omits any reference to the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) which, although started in 1961, mostly intersected with the directors discussed here later that decade once the New Wave was already fully in motion, and even in decline to some degree. Most of the films related to the ATG also differ in many ways to the films discussed here and are, in many ways, a separate and just as interesting movement. To do justice to the ATG, a highly important movement and organisation, would take more space than is available. I do urge you though to look into the ATG if you are not 61

Pigs And Battleships, from Shohei Imamura

already familiar with the films that it spawned and it would make an excellent addition to any exploration of the Japanese New Wave.

One filmmaker that dominates any discussion of the Japanese New Wave, and with good reason, is Nagisa Oshima. Perhaps best known in the West for the controversial 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses and the David Bowie starring 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Oshima was originally hired by Shochiku studios after studying political history at Kyoto University. His début feature film, A Town of Love and Hope, produced in 1959, was a bold effort but it would be the following year’s electric Cruel Story of Youth that would cement Oshima as a bold new voice and it would also go on to be considered the first film of the Japanese New Wave. Making use of handheld cameras and location shooting Oshima painted an intimate and intense portrait of youthful vitality, drawing on a recent trend in films about teenagers but infusing his with far more political insight and raw drama than was common.

The film was in many ways a natural continuation of the groundwork laid by the highly influential 1956 Nakahira film Crazed Fruit and a trend of so-called Sun Tribe films; Oshima even wrote a piece about Crazed Fruit entitled ‘Is it a Breakthrough?’ in 62

which he answers his own question in the affirmative. Crazed Fruit was released in the same year as the incredibly popular Season of the Sun (both films were based on novels by Shintaro Ishihara) but it is the deftly handled darker elements of Crazed Fruit that make it stand out above the far fluffier Season of the Sun. Characterised by beach locations and rebellious teens these Sun Tribe films represented a new, more liberated generation in Japan and whilst there are examples, such as Crazed Fruit, that dealt with more serious subject matter, many of these films are very throwaway and unmemorable.

Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth was something different. Even more serious than Crazed Fruit and more formally experimental, it’s this film that helped launch a younger, more radically political cinematic trend that continued throughout the sixties.

both the form and the subject matter.

The sixties New Wave was about youth and this particular group of young people were angry about the past, idealistic about the future and increasingly interested in radical political action.

In the late fifties and early sixties Japan was a country in which many members of the younger generation clearly had a distrust for the generation that had gone before, stemming largely from an unease over the events that had defined Japan in the preceding twenty years. This distrust and unease turned into political rebellion and students, organised into multiple factions under the name Zengakuren, began to publicly protest those actions by the government that they strongly disagreed with. The most controversial decision that solidified this movement amongst students was the renewal of The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (generally shortened to ANPO).

The renewal of ANPO in the first few months of 1960 - originally signed in Washington in January, it was hotly debated until it was finally passed by The House of Representatives in May - led to demonstrations by students and trade unions and the forcible removal of the Japan Socialist Party from the House.

Political subtext and outright overt political messages dominated many of the most interesting films in Japan in the 1960s, with directors such as Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Masahiro Shinoda picking up the reins from the more traditional but still very left wing fifties work of directors such as Masaki Kobayashi.

Whilst Kobayashi continued to direct throughout the sixties (Harakiri in 1962 and Kwaidan in 1964 being two of his greatest achievements), his films were still very rooted in an older tradition, in

Oshima directly addressed the ANPO protests of 1960, whilst looking 63

Crazed Fruit, perhaps the most famous Japanese Sun Tribe film directed by Kō Nakahira.

back on the opposition that also existed in the fifties, with Night and Fog In Japan.

Even more politically charged than Cruel Story of Youth, Night and Fog In Japan was an incredibly topical piece that would become even more controversial following the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma by the 17 year-old Otoya Yamaguchi. Notably the assassination was actually of a far-left politician by a far-right extremist but the link to youthful political radicalism was too much for Shochiku, who had funded the film as part of their ‘Shochiku-Ofuna New Wave’ (a strategy which focused on promoting the work of young directors), and they pulled the film just three days after it was released.

Oshima wrote an angry letter to the studio, publicly stood against their decision and eventually left Shochiku to begin making films independently. Shochiku may have helped launch the New Wave, but it and Oshima would continue without them.

Directors Masahiro Shinoda and Yoshishige Yoshida also cut their teeth at Shochiku, making their debuts in 1960, but would also leave the studio to begin making films independently. Both directors could also be considered very much part of the New Wave and both also made films in 1969, Double Suicide and Eros Plus Massacre, that represented some of the finest filmmaking and powerful political statements that the New Wave had to offer.

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What may be so surprising about these filmmaker’s contributions to the New Wave is the extent to which their careers were, despite their later moves away from Shochiku, the result of a studio financing these new and often highly polemical films. It was not just Shochiku that fostered such controversial and thrillingly political talents though. Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest studio reopened their doors in 1954 after a fallow period prompted by WWII and began hiring young assistant directors at very competitive salaries.

Notably both Shohei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki, a pair of young and enthusiastic assistant directors, jumped ship from Shochiku to Nikkatsu, most likely influenced by the higher salaries that Nikkatsu were offering. Although Nikkatsu initially pushed Imamura into maker lighter films, such as the Wilder influenced Nishi Ginza Station, they eventually let him stretch out and flex his more radical tendencies with Pigs and Battleships in 1961. Imamura truly arrived with this film and it is one of the most remarkable Japanese films of the sixties and stands out even amongst Imamura’s hugely impressive filmography.

Set in the U.S. Navy occupied coastal town of Yokosuka, Pigs and Battleships comments directly on the contemporary situation in Japan for those on the 65

fringes of society and offers a deeply rich allegorical viewpoint of Japan through its parallels between the characters and Japan in general. The film is thematically rich and also hugely entertaining and with it Imamura first cemented his ability to tell a gripping story and express strong political views, all without simply lecturing an audience. Imamura went on to make The Insect Woman in 1963, a continuation of the thematically rich filmmaking that he started with Pigs and Battleships but to this he also added a more stylistically expressive approach that would become more and more distinct throughout his career. Like most of his contemporaries Imamura also left studio filmmaking in 1965 to form his own production companies and continued making films until shortly before his death in 2006.

In 1961, as Imamura struggled at Nikkatsu to make the more politically and formally radical films that he was clearly destined to make, Seijun Suzuki had a reasonably successful career directing a number of B-movie pictures. Whilst Suzuki was less politically radical in his films than his New Wave contemporaries he was possibly the most stylistically flamboyant director working in the early sixties and his disregard for traditional cinematic conventions was perhaps as radical a development in Japanese cinema as the political leaps of his contemporaries.

As the roots of political radicalism in the Japanese New Wave led to a continuation of left-wing politics and sexual liberation in Japanese filmmaking in the seventies, albeit with a darker and more exploitative edge, the lineage of Suzuki’s stylistic anarchism and expressive freedom can be seen in the seventies work of filmmakers such as Toshiya Fujita, Shunya Ito and Yasuharu Hasebe, who worked as Suzuki’s assistant for many years.

Suzuki delivered the ultimate stylistic one-two punch in 1966 and 1967 with Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. The former a deliriously candy coloured Pop art tale of a roaming hitman and the latter a startling black and white masterpiece with a story that is almost impossible to unpack. Branded to Kill’s nearly impenetrable plot would

“As the roots of political radicalism in the Japanese New Wave led to a continuation of left-wing politics and sexual liberation in Japanese filmmaking”

prove too much for audiences, the film reportedly emptied cinemas, and for Nikkatsu, who fired Suzuki. Since then Suzuki has made very few films, by comparison to his very prolific period throughout the fifties and sixties, but he has lost none of his stylistic inventiveness and his 2005 film Princess Raccoon was a dazzling visual feast.

Imamura and Suzuki weren’t the only ones exploring new ground and producing radical films at Nikkatsu. Two filmmakers also making fascinating new forays in filmmaking, challenging traditional attitudes and helping advance the New Wave were Koji Wakamatsu and his frequent collaborator Masao Adachi. Wakamatsu began working at Nikkatsu in 1963 and following the success of Tetsuji Takechi’s mainstream pornographic film Daydream in 1964 Wakamatsu turned his attention to the popular Pink film trend (Pink or pinku eiga being the broad name given to adult films in Japan).

Wakamatsu’s early to mid-sixties films can be seen in many ways as the ultimate culmination of everything that made the Japanese New Wave such a thrilling period, his films being filled with youthful rebellion, stylistic anarchism, very free attitudes towards sexual liberation (albeit still with often unsettling tendencies towards female 66

subjugation that were not always obviously negative portrayals) and a very strong line in radical left-wing politics.

What is perhaps most surprising to anyone new to the work of Wakamatsu is that he was predominantly a mainstream filmmaker and his films were generally financially successful.

of will and directness. As a director Wakamatsu would later go on to make even more daring films that clashed sexual themes with political allegory, such as the blisteringly bold Ecstasy of the Angels in 1972, and he also even helped to produce Oshima’s controversial In the Realm of the Senses in 1976.

In the West it is hard to imagine

His frequent collaborator during

films such as Secrets Behind the Walls,

the mid to late-sixties was Masao Adachi,

The Embryo Hunts in Secret or The Vio-

who also co-wrote Oshima’s Three Resur-

lent Virgin being anything like the suc-

rected Drunkards and Diary of a Shin-

cess they were in Japan, even with mod-

juku Thief. The end of their working rela-

ern liberal Western attitudes, let alone those held in the sixties. Wakamatsu managed to have a surprising amount of crossover success into the mainstream though

tionship (and the direction in which Adachi and the student movement went) signaled the end of the New Wave and a noticeable shift in Japanese cinema. Adachi

and thanks to his ability and willingness

also worked at Nikkatsu and in addition

to shoot his films incredibly cheaply he

to writing for other directors he also di-

was very good at turning a profit. Unsur-

rected his own features. Like Wakamatsu

prisingly he moved into self-production

he tapped into the trend for sex films and

in 1966 and continued to make films un-

with films such as Sex Play he mixed poli-

til shortly before his death in 2012. Many

tics and sex, but with markedly less suc-

of Wakamatsu’s early films were filled

cess than Wakamatsu or any of the other

with hot button topics and a great deal of

New Wave filmmakers.

sex and violence, but they were also brimming with radical politics and radical

As the sixties progressed Adachi became increasingly more political radicalised and the films he was writing also began to become more politically charged (echoing the path taken by Jean-Luc Godard in France at around the same time).

In 1971 he and Wakamatsu released

views of sixties Japan. In Secrets Behind the Walls, released in 1965, Wakamatsu tackles sexual frustration and political frustration in one deft blow and manages to threaten to one-up almost everyone else in the new wave through sheer force 67

Nagisa Oshima on set.

PFLP: Declaration of War, a film which was made between the two but it seems clear was something that Adachi was more involved in than Wakamatsu. PFLP: Declaration of War was the result of somewhat off the cuff decision between the two friends to go to Palestine, following a trip to Cannes where Wakamatsu’s Sex Jack had just been shown as part of the Director’s Fortnight.

Sex Jack had, unsurprisingly perhaps, attracted some controversy at Cannes. The film, written by Adachi and directed by Wakamatsu, began filming in the spring of 1970 but political events in Japan that year led to significant changes to the script. On June the 14th the ANPO treaty was renewed for a second time and the reaction was similar to that ten years earlier both on the streets and in the films of the time. But attitudes had hardened in the intervening decade and many protesters were taking a more militant approach. Earlier that year the Red Army Faction (a left-wing revolutionary group that would later spawn the Japanese Red Army aka JRA) had hijacked Yodo, a Japan Airlines plane. Whilst the high jacking did not lead to violence and deaths (despite the presence of samurai swords and pipe bombs) it marked the end of the more peaceful protests that had gone before and the beginning of a new era of hi68

jackings and highly motivated radical po-

ing example of propaganda filmmaking

litical groups who considered violent pro-

but it holds none of the well thought out

tests to be an important part of affecting

content or depth of something like Octa-

change (‘The Lod Airport Massacre’ in

vio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ The

1972, for instance, involved members of

Hour of the Furnaces.

the JRA and led to many deaths). WakaAs was mirrored in films such as

matsu, with the quick wit of an exploitation master perhaps more than a politi-

PFLP: Declaration of War the sixties pro-

cally motivated filmmaker, seized on the

test movement became more and more

recent protests over the ANPO renewal

radicalised as it moved into the early

and the recent hijacking and adapted Sex

1970s and the aforementioned move to-

Jack, including real footage of the ANPO

wards violent action became more preva-

protests and a plot in which students

lent. This came to something of a head in

head to the airport in order to hijack a

February of 1972 with the Asama-Sanso

plane to fly to North Korea, which was

Incident, in which members of The

also the final destination of the hijacked

United Red Army (a unified group made

Yodo plane.

up of The Red Army Faction and a Maoist wing of the Japanese Communist

Shortly after the Cannes screening

Party) laid siege against police in a moun-

of Sex Jack, Wakamatsu and Adachi ar-

tain lodge. The siege lasted ten days, was

rived in Palestine, where members of the

televised and avidly watched throughout

Red Army Faction were supposedly to be

Japan. Koji Wakamatsu would go on to

found, and began filming a travelogue

make a fictional film about this incident

which would ultimately become PFLP:

in 2007 entitled United Red Army. If

Declaration of War. The film is a very di-

there was any doubt left, the Asama-

rect call to arms, with an opening that de-

Sanso Incident made clear that the youth-

clares that it is “A news film to build a

ful idealism of the sixties had long since

worldwide Red Army”, but it is an oddly

passed.

factually flimsy film for all its strong decMany of the New Wave directors

larations and severely lacking in detailed insight. Adachi seems to view the Pales-

changed course somewhat and there was

tinian struggle from a somewhat roman-

a sense that many began to follow trends

tic point of view and the film is a fascinat-

rather than set them. Filmmakers such as

69

Tokyo Drifter, from director Seijun Suzuki.

Oshima and Imamura also embraced their more artistically dense tendencies and found great success globally as Japanese arthouse favourites. Wakamatsu continued to make darker, more violent films but as the pinku genre moved more towards straight up exploitation, broader, less politically charged films overtook his in terms of popularity. In the early seventies, following the release of PFLP: Declaration of War Adachi joined the Red Army and in 1974 he left Japan to move to Lebanon, where he lived for over twenty years. Following a number of passport issues Adachi was deported back to Japan in 2007, at which point he made a film entitled Prisoner/ Terrorist about the Japanese Red Army member Kozo Okamoto and in 2010 he once again collaborated with Wakamatsu on Caterpillar, one of Wakamatsu's final films before his death in 2012.

Selected viewing.

Crazed Fruit (Ko Nakahira, 1956) Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960) Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964) 70

7

THE INTERNATIONALIST THE ROMANIAN NEW WAVE PATRICK GAMBLE

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Ever since the French Nouvelle Vague, critics and cinephiles alike have been scavenging through the archive’s of film festival programs in search of the latest movement in film. With the advancement of digital filmmaking and distribution the cinematic horizon has become unencumbered and these new waves in cinema which have been arriving more regularly and becoming increasingly eclectic.

Fluctuating from Middle Eastern directors fighting against the constraints of censorship to East Asian provocateurs attempting to push the boundaries of appropriateness, the cinematic atlas has never felt so vibrant. However, in recent year’s one country’s cinematic output has managed to shine brightest in a contemporary treasure trove of far-flung filmmaking gems – The Romanian New Wave.

The seeds of the Romanian New Wave began to bare fruit in 2004 when Catalin Mi-

“The seeds of the Romanian New Wave began to bare fruit in 2004 when Catalin Mitulescu’s short Traffic won the award for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival.”

tulescu’s short Traffic won the award for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a relatively small splash in a gigantean pond of independent filmmaking, yet it somehow lured the critical gaze from the glamour of the croisette to the economically improvised boarders of a country not normally associated with a burgeoning film industry.

Whilst Traffic may have evoked an interest in Romanian cinema from festival programmers it wasn’t until Cristi Puiu’s gritty expose of the health system in communist era Romania, The Death of Mr Lazarescu won the Un Certain Regard that critics began to wonder if Europe’s next big prospect could be bubbling away on the western bank of the Black Sea. Since then a inexorable barrage of low in budget, yet high in quality films have sprung forth, such as Corneliu Porumboiu’s droll post-communist comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest, Radu Muntean’s dark retelling of the pivotal 1989 revolution The Paper Will Be Blue, and ultimately climaxing with Cristian Mungiu and his 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days winning the Palme d’Or (coincidentally on the fiftieth anniversary of Romania’s first Cannes success – Ion Popescu-Gopo’s animated prize winner Short History). Since then the momentum of 72

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the film that would be many’s first encounter with the Romanian New Wave

Romanian cinema has remained at a steady upward trajectory, most recently with the near universal acclaim achieved by Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, Radu Jude’s festival favorite Everybody in Our Family (voted as the third best undistributed film of 2012 in Criticwire’s end of year poll) and Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose, which recently walked away with the prestigious Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale.

Unlike most ‘New Waves’ which tend to mirror the political and social concerns of the era in which produced, the large majority of Romanian New Wave films can be divided into two categories; those set prior to the revolution of 1989 and those that are a clear reaction to the censorship imposed during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s self proclaimed ‘Golden Age’. Indeed the novelty of the Romanian New Wave is that it’s less of a revolutionary movement in film, and more a cinematic celebration of a revolution and the resulting artist freedom it created, marking a shift in identity during an era of monumental change both politically and culturally.

12:08 East of Bucharest and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days are perhaps two of the most well known examples of this stylistic divide. Porumboiu’s black comedy presents us with a TV chat show in a rural Romanian town where the anniversary of the 1989 revolt raises a question of whether a revolution really happened. This humorous example of politi73

cal satire attempts to ask a far more serious question than its droll veneer would suggest regarding whether the populace is truly any better off now whilst simultaneously tackling the lingering post-communist dilemmas of struggling country. In comparison 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days uses this newfound creative freedom to instead look back on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ and tell a story that would never have been possible under the communist censorship of Ceausescu’s rule. In 1966 Ceausescu put forward an edict restricting abortion and birth control in an attempt to boost the population and in turn give the country’s economy a much-needed shot in the arm. Mungiu’s gritty tale of illegal abortion is shot in a gruelingly realistic way, traversing the subtle metaphors of earlier Romanian cinema and painting a harrowing and upsetting historical piece or realism. Indeed, whilst most countries awakening from periods of artistic suffocation look to celebrate their newfound freedom and liberty, Romanian cinema has used emancipation as the perfect opportunity to clear out the closet and tell the stories that have remained hidden for so many years. This approach has also transferred to contemporary set films, such as Tuesday After Christmas and Child’s Pose which both use this stripped back approach to illuminate how this transition from a police state ruled under communist conformity to the economically struggling ways of the West has culminated in a country still baring the scars of the past whilst attempting to fight of the ills of modern life - with all these films undoubtedly sharing a common

theme of the struggles to adapt to the ever changing landscape of modern-day Romanian society.

The key to a successful new wave is more than just a shared geographical location, there must be something indicative of the movement visible within the aesthetic make-up of a film, a shared tone, style or approach to film making. Whilst each film in the Romanian New Wave has its own unique identity, there are, as to be expected, a myriad of similarities, namely the Political turmoil and economic instability of an era told through a series of deeply personal struggles, each presenting us with the everyday hardships of life before and after 1989.

Often raw and unflinching in their methodology, there’s an undeniable desire to escape the metaphor heavy, censorship traversing stylistics of their predecessors. The aesthetics of a quasi documentary, with harsh, revealing unadorned lighting and sparse sets, framed by overcast skies and a genuine sense of persecution, Romanian cinema basks in long-takes, each immersing us in the monotony of this futile existence of almost paralyzing oppression. Creating a genuine sense of disquiet this style of minimalist filmmaking presents us with a world devoid of fairytales, fantasy and quite dishearteningly – any hope.

Unlike the contemporary Russian cinema, where filmmakers are happy to revere the intelligent counter-political approach of their peers, Romanian cinema appears intent on making up for lost time. Yet, behind 74

Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose won the prestigious Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale.

this almost voyeuristic approach to storytelling, each film contains its own bleak sense of humor. In some cases it’s pushed to the foreground as a veneer attempting to mask an overriding sense of cultural despondency. In other cases, such as Beyond the Hills and Child’s Pose it’s evoked through an awkward sense of unease, intended to break the melancholy of what appears on the screen and often arriving with the magnitude of an inappropriate joke told at a wake.

Far removed from the stark and gritty storytelling techniques associated with most Eastern European cinema, the films of the Romanian New Wave are often full of life, in spite of their languid exterior, with soft lilting dialogue that, though ground in realism appears almost lyrical, like the prose of a war poet paradoxically caught in the most ugly extremes of human existence yet still able to find the beauty which resides in the world. This ethereal realism culminates in a brutally honest world where individuals are indistinguishable from the archetypes of conventional character development. There are no villains or heroes on display, just brutally candid characters whose truth and honesty paints a fascinatingly sincere canvas of human life. The viewer is often denied the luxury of cinematic detachment, instead thrust into the very situation the film’s protagonists are experience, forcing us to empathize in a far more personal and affecting manner and allowing us to observe

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their situation, examine their motives and deconstruct their actions in a deeply subjective way.

films only accounting for 2.5% of the market share.

When Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in 2007 his victory was front page news in Romania, evoking a sense of national pride rarely experienced. However, much like in Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, which asks the question “Was there, or was there not a revolution?” the same could be posed about whether the recent success of Romanian cinema really equates to a ‘New Wave’.

Some put this down to the gritty realism of their subject matter, with Romanian audience, much like those of Western Europe, uninterested in wallowing in the misery that litters their streets, preferring instead to immerse themselves in the escapist fairytales of modern blockbusters as a form of cultural distraction. Others cite the remarkable lack of screens within the country. In 2010 the number of cinema screens in Romania came to a rather paltry 194 which, when compared to the UK’s 3741 screens in the same year, partly explains the lack of opportunity for small domestic films to flourish. In the UK strong, critically revered homegrown films still fail to make a splash at the box-office, with many limited to one or two London screens, so it’s easy to see how domestic fare in Romania is perceived as being rejected in favor of mainstream tent-pole films.

Romania’s film industry remains to this day a rather meager operation, with films fighting for miniscule grants collected from TV, DVD and theatrical profits, plus a small revenue created by the countries cheap studio rates which for years have been attracting Hollywood filmmakers striving to scrimp on production costs. Perhaps the most fascinating point is just how detached this ‘international movement’ is from its country of origin. The box office figures for these prize winning Romanian films are staggeringly low – with domestic

So with no homegrown audience and relatively modest worldwide sales, it would be fair to question whether or not there actually is a ‘Romanian New Wave’. Disenfranchised film critics who were keen to reject the literary period pieces being made in France started the French Nouvelle Vague and the same could be said of each New Wave experienced since - albeit in a far less proactive manner. In recent times, new waves have been created almost solely by a small collective of prominent film critics scouring the festival circuit in search of the

However, in spite of this engaging direction there remains an unmistakable political dimension to this minimalistic, almost neo-realist type of filmmaking and its in this underlying agenda that we find ourselves drawn back to these intimidatingly gritty movies, desperate to retrace our steps and deconstruct the building blocks of these distressing tales.

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Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest was something of a breakout hit upon release in 2006.

next ‘big thing’ or the savior of a ‘tired and uninspiring’ industry. From interviews with key Romanian directors such as Puiu and Mungiu its clear the filmmakers are keen to separate themselves form such a simplistic blanket term, whilst the Romanian cinema-going public aren’t so much uninterested, rather more unaware or unable to reveal in their own burgeoning industry. Therefore, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the Romanian New Wave is little more than an organized movement created by and sustained by film critics. It’s a delicate and incredibly fragile foundation from which to build a sub-genre of cinema, however, almost 12 years on from Puiu’s Stuff and Dough (considered by many as the first ‘true’ Romanian New Wave film) it would appear that this Romanian renaissance doesn’t look like slowing down, which, for the meantime at least, should keep the culturally wandering eyes of pioneering film critics firmly focused on the neoclassical boulevards of Bucharest’s resurgent film industry.

Selected viewing.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) The Paper Will Be Blue (Radu Muntean, 2006)

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8

TAKING OFF

THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE, MILOS FORMAN AND NEW HOLLYWOOD

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The early 1960s in Czechoslovakia saw a new generation of literate, educated filmmakers emerge, largely Film School graduates from the national film school FAMU, influenced not only by the politics of home but by trends in European cinema. The Czechoslovak New Wave period was so incredibly fertile that it was dubbed “The Czech Film Miracle”. In just five years between 1963 and 1968 it flourished; 60 films were produced and the country was put on the map of World Cinema and both The Shop on Main Street (Klos and Kadar, 1965) and Closely Watched Trains (Menzel, 1967) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film before the cultural liberation was ended by the Soviet invasion of 1968.

The Czechoslovak New Wave wasn’t defined by a singular aesthetic; Surreal, avant-garde films were produced alongside humanist realism and the country’s tradition of animation remained strong. However, the films of the period were united by a

“The films of the period were united by a rebellion against the restrictions of Socialist Realism under the conditions of the slow de-Stalinisation of the country”

rebellion against the restrictions of Socialist Realism under the conditions of the slow de-Stalinisation of the country. The allowance for greater creative freedom, along with a collective educated mind of intelligence, insightfulness and ingenuity combined with favourable economic conditions. Allegorical and Satirical commentaries on the political situation such as Jiri Trnka’s short film The Hand (1965) or Jan Nemec’s notorious The Party and the Guests (1968) were the most direct and apparent opposition to the system. Elsewhere, Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966) rebelled by opposing previously dictated standards of form and content.

Perhaps the key director of the movement was Milos Forman. Forman’s debut feature Peter and Pavla (1963), as well as his early short films helped to kick-start the movement, while his films Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967) were nominated for Academy Awards and he would later emigrate to Hollywood, and with Taking Off (1971), forged the most successful and lasting career of the New Wave’s directors. Success and importance aside, the content and themes of Forman’s 79

Milos Forman, a filmmaker who successfully made his mark at both home and abroad.

films still resonate today as their focus was upon the human experience and though specific to their location and time, the themes remain universal. It is not the purpose here to try to give an overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave or illustrate the politics of Forman’s work in great detail but to analyse and compare the chosen films as an auteur study. The four previously mentioned features are the focus as Forman’s most significant films of the period and as those on which he also worked on the screenplay.

Forman’s debut, Peter and Pavla is the story of a young boy passing into adulthood as he takes on his first job as a store detective and begins a relationship, again a first for the boy, with the object of his desires, Pavla. Dealing with the apathy of contemporary youth and the sexual awakening of the adolescent, Forman’s film is notably influenced by the Nouvelle Vague. The criticism of past cinematic tradition in France was a key influence upon the new generation of cine-literate filmmakers in Czechoslovakia and alongside Francois Truffaut’s critical rhetoric, the imprint of Truffaut’s films can also be seen.

Forman and the other Czechoslovak New Wave directors were able to follow the guidance of Europe’s revolutionary directors and the depiction of Peter’s blossoming 80

desires is reminiscent not only of Truffaut’s short Les Mistons (1957) but also Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) (The latter even causing controversy for his depiction of nudity, something Forman would come to know himself with Loves of a Blonde). Bergman’s film was also a key influence on Truffaut and his debut feature, The 400 Blows (1959), the influence of which is clear on Peter and Pavla. Not only is Peter’s arc of work and desire something of an expansion of Truffaut’s short Antoine et Colette (1962) but the film takes aesthetic cues from the Nouvelle Vague with the use of handheld camera movements, cinema vérité location shooting and the use of nonprofessional actors in the lead roles. Notably, the ending of the film is a stylistic play on the famous freeze-frame finale of The 400 Blows as Peter’s sanctimonious Father is frozen in time by the film and Peter reacts with shock. Forman’s debut was an attempt to communicate directly with the youth of the country and it is worth noting here that the British New Wave of ‘Kitchen Sink’ realism and the literary Angry Young Man genre ran parallel to the Czechoslovak New Wave and thematically similar films such as John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963), another tale of avoidance of responsibility, were produced alongside Peter and Pavla.

The emergent thematic trend of the generational relationship between parent 81

and child, the ultimate personal commentary on the clashing of generations, is one that is prevalent in Forman’s work.

Whilst it has been suggested that this can be attributed to Forman’s loss of his own parents in Nazi concentration camps, it is also strong indicator of the National psychology and the Czechoslovak New Wave’s insistence on grappling with the outdated ideas of the past. Peter’s Father is presented as a somewhat bitter hypocrite who is tied up by his own ideologies into contradicting himself; he criticises and praises Peter for the same actions, changing sides between wife and Son at will and ultimately is frozen by his own confusion at the end of the movie.

Satirical comedy surrounding petty bureaucracy runs throughout Forman’s films of the period. The Firemen’s Ball is Forman’s most directly critical film, using biting humour to mock the incompetence, indecision and depravity of men in power. The attempts of the Firemen’s Committee to organise a celebration of their former chairman and present him with an honorary gift are farcical and chaotic from the outset, outlined by the device of repeated theft, which ends with the disappearance of the Chairmen’s presentation axe. “Everyone’s stealing here and you only watch, you idiot” is shouted as items from the lottery disappear and the line recalls Peter’s indifference to the theft he witnesses in Peter and Pavla.

Taking Off, Forman’s Hollywood breakthrough.

Again, morality and indifferent attitudes are questioned. Perhaps some of the most effective commentary in The Firemen’s Ball is the quickest; the chairman is dying unknowingly of cancer whilst everyone else around him knows yet they are unable to tell him whilst elsewhere waiting staff attempt to get people to pay their bills as they rush to attend a fire. These are two examples of well-written moral dilemmas, on screen too briefly to be questioned at length but directly incisive and critical.

The bungled beauty pageant in The Firemen’s Ball is a key element not only in terms of ineptitude and humour but also in terms of gender politics and female representations in Forman’s films. The objectification of women and the male gaze is apparent throughout. Undressing and nudity are fetishised but are never used gratuitously.

The voyeuristic point of view camera of Peter’s spying on Pavla’s legs as she changes, close shots of Andula’s naked flesh in Loves of a Blonde, the undressing of the beauty pageant contest in front of the Firemen’s committee and the strip poker scene in Taking Off all serve as part of larger themes, whether to deride the men gazing, represent longing or outline the liberation of the women in the films. The pathetic lechery on young girls of both the Soldiers in Loves of a Blonde and the Firemen in The Firemen’s Ball can be seen not only to represent the establishment as bumbling, impotent and 82

morally corrupt but also portrays them with endearing humanism. In someone else’s hands, such criticism may revile audiences but Forman’s deft touch is empathetic.

Thus, as with generational representation, Forman is able to take male and female characters and present them all as rounded characters, their flaws presented honestly and empathetically, with the writing aided by the ‘honesty’ of the realist style.

Before The Firemen’s Ball, Loves of a Blonde had inverted Peter and Pavla by taking the love, work and home life of Andula, a young female, as its focus, as she falls in love with a visiting pianist from Prague amongst small town alienation. Again, the Czechoslovak New Wave parallels trends in Britain, as films like A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961) were showing the sex lives of female protagonists and films such as

“Taking Off can be seen to continue themes and the style developed by Forman in Czechoslovakia”

Alfie (Gilbert, 1966) and Poor Cow (Loach, 1967) were to follow in portraying their potential consequences in more frank a manner.

In Loves of a Blonde, perhaps the most famous line is the remark to Andula “You look like a guitar too… but one made by Picasso” and this is a line that represents Forman’s portrayal of women throughout his films. Miroslav Ondricek’s cinematography in Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen’s Ball and Taking Off is notable for profiling effectively Forman’s casting of remarkable and often unconventional faces, particularly marked in his depiction of females. This is prominent in the aforementioned beauty pageant scene but it’s something he returns to later in Taking Off, the audition sequences are a montage of headshots of interesting faces, the sort seldom seen in conventional cinema and they are presented refreshingly and sincerely, without mockery.

Forman does the same with men, though to a lesser degree, his male characters often cast as representative of a ‘type’. However, an actor such as Vincent Schiavelli is of note, beginning his career in Hollywood in Taking Off and later, continuing to collaborate with Forman. It’s also worth mentioning here that Miroslav Ondricek, would go on to serve as cinematographer on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968) and O Lucky Man! 83

(1973) as British film took on some of the European avant-garde influence.

lack thereof, could be interpreted by filmmakers both domestic and foreign. Forman’s later One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) continued his own preoccupations with institution and bureaucracy, whereas elsewhere Polanski examined the American Dream and political corruption with Chinatown (1974).

Forman himself had a brief period in England before migrating to America with the coming of the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Forman was amongst a number of European immigrants to impact on American filmmaking and the 1960s saw Eastern Europeans such as director Roman Polanski, as well as cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs precede Forman, bringing their aesthetic to New Hollywood. A New Wave of filmmakers had broken into the mainstream two years earlier, spearheaded by the seminal Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), which by the time of Taking Off had paved the way for new artistic freedoms and an appetite for adult cinema dealing with mature themes. Speaking in 1969, Forman had said:

Taking Off can be seen to continue themes and the style developed by Forman in Czechoslovakia. The film again deals with the problems of a young girl, Jeannie, who runs away from home and her situation is contrasted with the lives of her parents. Forman represents the parents not only as concerned for their missing child but with also with the darkly comic turn that the absence leaves them free to live their own lives. The film explores the loneliness, alienation and absurdity of the actions of both generations and Forman develops the same sly humour of his earlier films. Jeannie’s Father, for example, is vainly reluctant to carry an overly large photo identifying his daughter. As with Loves of a Blonde, Jeannie falls for a musician and the film progresses toward the couple meeting with parents, again a chance to contrast generational values. Neatly here, Jeannie’s hippie boyfriend is actually hugely financially successful, much to the shock of her father, and the commentary about the profiteering on protest songs is yet another example of Forman’s incisive writing.

“American wants brains, not a heart, feelings, problems. To hell with that. Sentimental or not, America’s tears don’t come from the heart. It doesn’t cry for the love of its neighbor, but for love of itself” The statement made is an interesting precursor to the thematic impact made by filmmakers in New Hollywood and by those of its European filmmakers.

The influence of the counterculture and the same anti-establishment attitude of the previous New Waves towards America’s political oppression, or comparative 84

With One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest Forman cemented his burgeoning reputation as a major player in the American film industry.

Music is important throughout the director’s oeuvre. A stunning musical performance from the young Kathy Bates much like the one that opens Loves of a Blonde, as well as the inclusion of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in Taking Off are continuations of the inclusions of contemporary music weaved throughout Forman’s Czechoslovakian films. Dancehalls and brass bands are regularly featured and pop music is featured in Forman’s films from the very opening of Peter and Pavla. The two are mixed in The Firemen’s Ball as the band play a rendition of The Beatles’ From Me to You, again another reflection on the meeting of generational tastes and values. The way Forman uses pop music throughout his films is comparable to the later use by Martin Scorsese, a key figure in New Hollywood, his own breakthrough feature Mean Streets (1973) using similar songs, style and settings to Forman. The use of music is something that Scorsese would become renowned for and his use of pop songs is something that has been regularly been credited as an influence by other filmmakers, though Forman’s great range of musical use is something that preceded Scorsese’s career. The influence of Forman’s work could be said to be present in the director Alan Parker’s work. An audition sequence in Bugsy Malone (1976) and the style of Fame (1980) are heavily reminiscent of Forman’s work. The musical interest of his career has continued throughout, directing the musical Hair (1979) acclaimed Mozart biopic Amadeus 85

(1984) and even working with R.E.M. on the Andy Kaufman film Man on the Moon (1999).

ing star in Jack Nicholson marks a major turning point in Forman’s career. Of his Oscar nomination for Loves of a Blonde, Forman said in 1967:

If the influence of the Czechoslovak New Wave on New Hollywood can be seen in the style and themes of the films, it might be as a product of similar circumstances in America too; the new generation of Film School graduates with a brief period of cooperative studio backing in a country with a strong countercultural movement. The European influence and that of America’s own pioneers like John Cassavetes is apparent and filmmakers like Scorsese, Robert Altman and Hal Ashby are perhaps those most notably comparable to Forman in the early 1970s.

Of his own beginnings in America, Speaking in 2002, Forman remarked: “My first film in America, Taking Off, I tried to make the same way I was making my Czech films, and it just didn't work. I didn't feel comfortable, although I am proud of that film, for whatever reasons” Despite winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, Forman’s apparent dissatisfaction with his American debut might have been what motivated his movement toward a more classical studio filmmaking style. Although stylistic elements and themes remain in the director’s work, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a major departure and the casting of a ris86

“Hollywood, though part jungle, is at the same time very loyal. The French film A Man and a Woman, by Claude Lelouche, was being distributed by Allied Artists, which was on the verge of going broke. Five hundred people would have been out of work. And an Oscar means a million dollars in additional box-office receipts.”

Hollywood was indeed loyal and Forman’s two previous defeats were later honoured, winning twice as Best Director for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and later, Amadeus, which won a total of eight Oscars.

The Czechoslovak New Wave was a key movement in film and one that was of massive cultural importance to the nation, the novelist Jiri Mucha stating that it did more to attract international attention to the country than any previous industrial or cultural endeavor. Within the history of cinema, as I have tried to outline, the influences of New Waves and trends in global film are not clear cases of chronological cause and effect but have the ability to influence concurrently, cyclically and enduringly. Forman’s films also are not specifically tied to the New Wave as much as they are, their themes, style

The chaotic nature of The Fireman’s Ball would prove a stark prediction of the work to come from Forman.

and execution are open to the casual viewer without knowledge of the social conditions of their production. The films have heart and are concerned with people, for all their flaws and idiosyncratic behaviours, the portrayal is always fair and empathetic, with the director’s work being a great study of the reality of human nature.

One of Forman’s great influences, Francois Truffaut, died on the eve of the premiere of Amadeus and had met with him just prior, asking Forman for information about his Czechoslovakian and American films and colleagues, outlining not only Truffaut’s own creative curiosity but also the relationship of influence between artists, the lasting importance of great films and the desire for a continual, wider study of cinema history.

Notes 1. Pg. 9. Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews, Buchar.

2. Pg. 4. The Czechoslovak New Wave, Hames.

3. Truffaut’s 1954 essay A Certain Tendency in French Cinema was critical of old-fashioned, empty prestige films, comparable to the modern Czechoslovak attitude toward Social Realist 87

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AN INTERVIEW WITH BRUNO DUMONT French filmmaker Bruno Dumont is one of the most arresting and singular voices in cinema, and a figure very much in the tradition of the creative voices of his national cinema’s illustrious past. Martyn Conterio recently had the opportunity to sit down with the filmmaker to discuss his latest film, Hors Satan, released on home video this month.

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Android & Desktop Readers, click here for the whole of this article.

Tell me about the inspiration behind your film and how that developed into Hors Satan.

Dumont: After Hadewijch [2009], the idea was to try to realise the new world; the profane world–if I can describe it as such, and to try and tell a simple story that could be the myth of this new world. So it’s the new world, but at the same time, it’s archaic.

How long does it take you to write and go through this process of exploration?

I took over a year to write it and I had to work on the world and the sensations it brings. Also, to find the style of the film and how that comes from the literary style I write in.

I’ve heard your writing process is very different from employing the traditional script format and you, essentially, write a novel. Is that true?

Yes.

Does this approach allow you better access to your ideas and a better feeling for your story?

Absolutely. The film script, as a format, is very cold and when I write I go into the world [of the story] and understand it. I get indications on light, on sound. It also enables me to talk to the actors and the technicians. It’s a need for me to write in this style. I need to prepare this knowledge of an interior world that one is trying to reach cinematically.

Have you always worked this way?

Since the beginning.

How do financiers and producers deal with your method? Does it put them off when they’ve got to read a novel-length treatment and not breeze through a script?

Yes, they react very badly [laughs]. I put it into a script purely for the people who see the financiers.

A key element in all your films is landscape. It plays such an important role–it’s almost there as another character–and in Hors Satan you use it much more mythi89

10 . A

IN REVIEW

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES ADAM BATTY

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Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Dane DeHaan

The place beyond the pines. Where no man ought to tread. Traditionally the domain of the haute tension horror movie, the backwoods form an integral part of Derek Cianfrance’s latest film, an ambitious follow-up to his wellreceived sophomore effort, Blue Valentine (his debut feature, 1998’s Brother Tied remains thus far unreleased on either side of the Atlantic). If the audio recordings of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits provided the symphonic-madeaesthetic stylings of Blue Valentine then there’s no more apt a musical comparison to The Place Beyond The Pines than Axl Rose’s early 1990s double-album Use Your Illusion. Released in two parts, the Guns N’ Roses album is ambitious to the max, and full to bursting the kind of pomp and ceremony that one might expect from an act at the top of their game and influence.

Overblown and operatic, and recalling wider narrative forms such as the novel and episodic television serials, The Place Beyond The Pines plays out across a multi-generational period in the life of a small town, with an allegorical tale of family and the hereditary underlining three interrelated sections that come together to form a wider tapestry. The film opens with the focus being on Luke (Ryan Gosling), a carnival stuntman who discovers that he’s fathered a son with an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes). Luke turns to a life of crime in an attempt to support the child, before crossing path’s with Avery (Bradley Cooper), a beat-cop whose run in with Luke results in his climbing up the ranks of the local police outfit.

The latter half of the movie examines the relationship between the two children of Avery and Luke, as they form a volatile friendship in high school, some fifteen years later.

By employing this double-sided approach to telling his story Cianfrance evokes the likes of Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler, and even Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, so sudden and unexpected are the shifts in focus. In spite of this 91

abruptness the whole thing does generally feel rather organic an experience, even if a purposeful heavy-handedness does hang over much of the film in terms of it’s use of symbolism: Gosling’s arc in particular sits somewhere between Schrader-esque reformist and The Motorcycle Boy, of Rumble Fish fame, with the proto-mythological notion of the mysterious biker deconstructed through long-takes and ice-cream stands.

The film opens with a particularly notable long-shot, which traces the footsteps of Luke as he steps out of his dressing room and in to the arena where he recreates a number of death-defying stunts on a nightly basis. Tracking the actor in a manner befit of one of the most famous men in the world, it’s interesting to read in to Luke’s

If the audio recordings of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits provided the symphonic-made-aesthetic stylings of Blue Valentine then there’s no more apt a musical comparison to The Place Beyond The Pines than Axl Rose’s early 1990s double-album Use Your Illusion

walk of fame as a cursory glance at the level of celebrity afforded Gosling in between outings with Cianfrance.

The director soon strips away the veneer though, and places the emphasis purely on the real. He returns to the long takes in the third-person a number of times, not least when in charting Luke’s adventures as a bank robber, with the intensity of the earlier sequences a constant reference point by association. It’s a dangerous situation, be it in the mans turn to crime to feed his young, or in his place at the front of a circus looking for cheap thrills and the demanding the adoration of a different girl in every town. No more is this accentuation of Danger with a capital D more clear than in the symbolic destruction of our hero’s bike, the tool that aids both dangerous lifestyles.

It’s in moments like this that one is reminded of the great allegorical filmmakers, figures such as Robert Bresson and Carl Th. Dreyer, with their sweeping, multistatement producing works. While Cianfrance can nary hold a candle, pun intended to the grandmasters of the silver screen, he’s certainly a filmmaker to keep track of.

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10 . B

IN REVIEW

TO THE WONDER ADAM BATTY

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Directed by Terrence Malick

To The Wonder is the first contemporaneously set drama from American filmmaker Terrence Malick.

Over the course of his four-decade and six film long career the director has charted the landscape of America, with Days

Starring Olga Kurylenko, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams , Javier Bardem

Of Heaven exploring the first act of the 20th century, The Thin Red Line examining the involvement of the country during the Second World War, and the 1950s set Badlands charting the notion of the celebrity murder spree, while The Tree Of Life placed a similar baby boomer period tale bookended by the birth and death of the Universe itself *. It is perhaps The New World though, Malick’s majestic 2005 retelling of the first wave of the colonisation of the Americas, that makes for the starkest comparison piece to the kind of tale at the centre of To The Wonder, with it’s story of a Parisian émigré (Olga Kurylenko) wandering the stark landscape of rural Oklahoma making for a hyper-cinematic take on the fish-outof-water trope, albeit one in the vein of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, or Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. Charting notions of a loss of faith, and a loss of love that may not have ever been there, To The Wonder makes for an existential take on territory ordinarily the domain of the manipulative romantic drama.

The abstract narrative code honed by Malick on his post-1998 work comes full circle in To The Wonder, with a piece that almost wholly rejects traditional cinema storytelling conventions and language. It’s his most focussed film since Days Of Heaven, but such a simplistic description downplays the extent of the experimentation in other areas. Ambiguity reigns, and yet it’s a welcome ambiguity.

Thoughts turn to works such as Alain Resnais’ early 1960s double-hander of Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour, with their achingly romantic visions passing

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through a structural entity theoretically unfamiliar from the mainstream cinema. The film, which was shot using a combination of celluloid and digital photography, opens with a playful home movie, before the picture proper ‘snaps’ in to place. Unusually for the director, our first port of call is a land other than the USA, with Paris welcoming the viewer in the same way that it welcomes the film’s male protagonist (Neil, portrayed by Ben Affleck). Perhaps it’s simply the infinitely more relatable use of Paris as his canvas (relatable that is, compared to a historically-ground space in America, as per the rest of his movies), but there is something incredibly raw and moving about being placed within such a scenario.

Thoughts turn to works such as Alain Resnais’ early 1960s double-hander of Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour, with their achingly romantic visions passing through a structural entity theoretically unfamiliar from the mainstream cinema.

To The Wonder also presents a central transcendental summation similar to that of it’s immediate predecessor, in that to achieve happiness one must, in a way, dismiss religion. Faith (in religion) is filtered via a parallel strand in which a priest (played by Javier Bardem) is coming to terms with his own place within the organised church. While it’s difficult to second-guess or predict the extra-textual intensions of a filmmaker like Malick, due to the incredibly private nature of the man’s relationship with his audience, if one were to take the liberty of applying such tactics with this movie then it would be upon focussing on the casting of the central male protagonist of Ben Affleck. There’s a neat bit of intertextuality in the decision to employ the heroic figure at the centre of Michael Bay’s Armageddon, a film concerned with it’s titular prophecy, as a man who is charged with tackling a very real threat to the world in which he (and in turn we, thanks to the films contemporary leaning) lives in, in the form of landslide management. The “real” world of the Oklahoma that plays home to To The Wonder is being destroyed by reasons unexplainable, while it’s made clear on a number of occasions that Affleck’s Neil is a man incapable of fixing a problem, be it 95

in his marital affairs, his profession as a structural engineer, or a broken antique clock. The use of Affleck, and the associations one might hold with him, recalls the director’s employment of Brad Pitt in Tree Of Life. (It’s possible that therein also lies a relationship between the events of To The Wonder and the Old Testament end times of Tree Of Life, should one choose to believe that the films share the same cinematic universe.)

That a film from Terrence Malick is a visually satisfying exercise will nary come as a surprise to many, with the director’s regular post-millenial DoP Emmanuel Lubezki lensing the picture.

From the hyper-real, almost extrasensory, pawing to beautifully patient representations of nature (the tide coming in at Mont Saint-Michel is particularly noteworthy) there is nary a doubt that this is very much a “Terrence Malick Picture”.

Iconography of Americana steps in to the frame once the story reaches US shores, with perfectly composed shots of unlikely totems such as industrial machinery (which brings to mind Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces) and supermarkets clarifying that the contemporary is very much an affable match for Malick’s distinctive aesthetic. In one of the film’s most remarkable shots, an air-conditioning unit attached to the side of a house proves to be one of the wholly compulsive, while elsewhere it’s the paintings of Norman

Rockwell that provide Malick with his over-riding visual tone. In a similar way to how the work of Edward Hopper informed his Days Of Heaven, the unassuming portraits of Rockwell provide a platform with which to play subversive for Malick’s representation of the modern world. Shotgun weddings presided over by prisoners bearing witness, the archetypical drive-in diner and the motel all form sequential reference points, with these outsider icons of Americana the natural home for a film concerned with the tale of a stranger in a strange land.

In keeping with this recurring notion of a “pure” cinematic approach, the breathless cut of the movie, which was achieved with the help of no less than five editors, combines to create a rich, allconsuming tapestry. Moments of relatable empathy follow scenes of intense conflict (see, the sequence in which Neil paces around his empty house, Marina having returned to Paris, or the way in which an aggressive sexual moment jumps to scenes of a funfair). It’s masterful work, if not at times beguiling, and serves to remind that Malick is one of the true greats of the American cinema. *It’s worth noting that Tree Of Life does feature a section set in the contemporary now, but, apartment block and office aside, it’s a chapter set very much in a philosophical space that doesn’t resemble any familiar period.

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10 . C

IN REVIEW APRÈS MAI

A.K.A. SOMETHING IN THE AIR ADAM BATTY

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Directed by Olivier Assayas

Starring Clément Métayer, Lola Créton, Felix Armand, André Marcon

Après mai, the latest film from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas has been bestowed with a very different title in English-speaking markets. Deemed Something In The Air outside of the director’s homeland, presumably named for the Thunderclap Newman song that closed out the final year of the 1960s, this retitling of Après mai is thought to take in to account the unfamiliarity with the events of May ’68 (to which the original title, a straight translation of which is After May, refers) with non-Gallic audiences. That very idea in itself poses an interesting question – were the events of May ’68 on the streets of Paris really that ineffectual that a film some fifty years later is forced to come attached with an explanation? And if so (or even if not), what does that say about the people who were involved with the street protests and purported radicalisation of the everyman?

Assayas’ film acts as a post-script to the student riots and general strikes that swept through Paris in May 1968, a situation which, let’s not forget, had it’s very own cinematic epilogue in the shape of the less discussed events just two months earlier in March 1968. The firing of Henri Langlois, the patron saint of the French cinema and archivist at the Cinémathèque Française that Spring placed the cinema amidst the burgeoning civil unrest that followed in May, with some of it’s key figures heavily involved as a result. The events of May ’68 actually serve as the ideal closing date for the period marked the Nouvelle Vague in many ways too, with an already politicised Jean-Luc Godard pushed further outside of the mainstream filmmaking set by the protests, which he saw as a creative awakening and a call to arms.

The events of May ’68 also form a formidable and important part of Assayas own youth, with the character of Gilles (Clément Métayer) an analogue for the director. Obsessed with notions of Dissolution, and confused and bewildered by the spectrum of the political leftist youth groups, Après mai sees the filmmaker exploring his own formative years, and makes for a fasci-

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nating counterpart to Carlos, Assayas’ most recent examination of the period of revolution that swept across the world through the second half of the 20th century. There are a number of startling parallelisms between Assayas and some of the filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague. Not only did Assayas actually work at Cahiers du Cinéma (albeit a generation later), but the manner in which his own personal life interweaves with the images projected on-screen also recalls the autobiographical nature of the work of François Truffaut.

The film is at it’s most interesting when it acts as a discourse on the syntax of a revolutionary cinema. Within the film the characters discuss the approach towards bringing their argument to the everyman, with Gilles apprehensive about the groups decision to use the language of what they deem to be “le petit bourgeois” as the best vessel with which to deliver their message. Instead Gilles proposes that a new way of thinking deserves, nay de-

It poses an interesting question; Were the events of May ’68 on the streets of Paris really that ineffectual that a film some fifty years later is forced to come attached with an explanation?

mands, it’s own language, with progress triumphing over convention. It’s telling that in retelling his own story, Assayas has chosen to use the traditional cinema language to which he has since grown accustomed. In this sense Après mai acts as a confessional of sorts, on the futilities of youth. Assayas has since admitted that he himself took very little from the more complex and esoterically constructed political films of the early-1970s, and has specifically singled out the work of the time of Jean-Luc Godard as being particularly impenetrable.

The director remains uncompromising in his cinematic prejudices elsewhere though, which in turn plays out as being hyper-sincere thanks to the Catholic tone of the rest of the picture. Commissaire Jules Maigret, Georges Simenon’s Belgian detective acts as a recurring punch line for all that is traditional, uninspired and repetitive, and channels Assayas’ own creative beginnings. Aesthetically the film carries with it the beat of a visceral, urgent alarm bell. From the film’s opening moments, in which the solemnity of the classroom gives way to the urban battlefield, Assayas recreates the vicious energy of the time with a dramatic kick that can compete with the finest action cinema the establishment has to offer.

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HOME VIDEO The home video market is constantly evolving, with the shifting landscape of movies-ondemand and streaming services seemingly set to soon eclipse the utopia of the DVD and Blu-ray catalogue. An art unto itself, the importance of a physical media-based ought not be underestimated.

In this edition of Periodical, a pair of landmark titles from Claude Chabrol, eventual icon of the Nouvelle Vague, come under scrutiny, and we launch Criterion Collected.

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Notable upcoming home video releases.

May

Two Films From Claude Chabrol Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins Android & Desktop users please click here for this article.

With this pair of reissues comes the opportunity for Claude Chabrol to be reconsidered as a part of the Nouvelle Vague. The accompanying marketing material informs the reader that Le Beau Serge is the “first feature film of the French New Wave, one year before Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows”, which is a contentious statement at 101

Criterion Collected #1 - The Adventures Of Antoine Doinel Android & Desktop users please click here for this article.

Spine #185 François Truffaut, 1959 - 1979 5-disc box-set What better a choice for the inaugural Criterion Collected than the esteemed US home video label’s release of François Truffaut’s The

The Adventures Of Antoine Doinel contains the following;

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GODARD 1960 - 1967 It’s arguable that no filmmaker, nay, no artist has ever had as staggeringly prolific an eight years as that afforded Jean-Luc Godard in the almostdecade from 1960 to 1967. Over the course of those few years Godard produced no less than 15 feature films, and a number of shorts. Join us as we explore this remarkable period in cinema.

This section is fully interactive: swipe through the selections, pinch and zoom, Click on an image to enter full screen mode. When in full screen mode you can continue to swipe through to the next image, in landscape or portrait orientation.

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The Work Of Jean-Luc Godard In The Period Marked 1959 to 1967

À bout de souffle, aka Breathless – In Godard’s debut feature the Nouvelle Vague cemented the intent teased by Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and affirmed a sea change for the French cinema. The tale of love on the run pausing for breathe, as a hood hides out with his American [beau] in Paris, Godard’s film is loosely inspired by the story of Michel Portail, a minor celebrity terriblé that filled the gossip pages of Paris in the late 1950s. This looseness of inspiration would endemic of the director’s liberal approach to adaptation, with Breathless‘ own 1975 “sequel” Numéro Deux possibly the most explicit example of the filmmaker’s abstract intensions.

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DECONSTRUCTING THE SOCIAL NETWORK In Deconstructing we examine a sequence from a movie in great depth. In this edition of Periodical we take a look at the opening scene in David Fincher’s The Social Network.

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A well-spaced two-shot from the side on establishes and re-establishes the opening sequence of The Social Network

An interactive excerpt from Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network.

The Social Network is about communication.

Be it in the effects of communication, through a lack of communiqué, or through the very concept of the invention at the cen-

FROM THE BLACK WE HEAR --

tre of the film, the concept stands at the very centre of the film. The opening scene is the

MARK (V.O.) - Did you know there are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

only time in the movie in which which direct contact is made between two people, with no distraction. Generally speaking, something,

ERICA (V.O.)- That can’t possibly be true.

be it telephone’s, paternal influence, emo-

MARK (V.O.) - It is.

tional sway, or the MacGuffin that is Face-

ERICA (V.O.) - What would account for that?

MARK (V.O.) - Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China. But here’s my question:

book, stands between every other act of communication within the film.

The rapid-fire, almost forgettable dialogue (Or at least forgettable in the sense that there 106

By focussing on the face of Rooney Mara’s Erica Fincher quickly outlines his protagonist Zuckerberg’s key failings.

is so much of it, some inevitably gets lost in the fray) reminds of one of the key lines of dialogue in the script; later in the picture, when Erica Albright and Mark Zuckerberg cross paths at a restaurant Albright refers to the digital rant of Zuckerberg as “written in ink”. That some viewers have taken issue with a lack of audible comprehensibility within this particular scene, due to the quick fire nature of the delivery, and the sheer amount of information contained, but surely that’s the point? The overarching positive of the post-Facebook digital “revolution” is that such devices made communication easier, more black and white and wholly digestible in the manner most befitting the user (one could take five minutes or five hours to reply to a retort on-line time is not of the essence). In turn, communication lost the nuance and character, what might be best described as “personality”, which reflects in the portrayal of Zuckerberg for the majority of the running time of The Social Network. Indeed, its only in the final sequence of the film that the Zuckerberg of the opening sequence returns.

The editing of the sequence reflects the tone of the dialogue. Fast cuts, usually removing the a particular character from within the frame before they’ve even finished speaking tell as much as the dialogue itself. As a technical exercise the scene is a mar107

The third key shot in the sequence is a reverse shot from the Erica one, focussing on Mark Zuckerberg.

vel, with Fincher drawing from 99 takes to put the scene together. This opening sequence is made up of a staggering 114 shots, fit in to a relatively slender running time of five minutes and six seconds (and equally slender number of camera set-ups with only five). That’s a cut every 2.7 seconds. That the pace of this sequence is never matched, not even in one of the films several montage sequences (the Henley sequence aside, but that’s a whole other beast entirely) is significant, especially given the major innovations being constructed within those sequences. That the most human moment in the film is also the most exciting thing cinematically lays out Fincher’s true intensions wholly.

The use of the track Ball & Biscuit by The White Stripes to score the sequence is further evidence of Fincher’s meticulous attention to detail. What may appear to be little more than background noise provides several layers worth of information and subtext to the scene. The organic, pre-digital sound created in the song was recorded on antiquated equipment, including an eight-track tape machine and pre-1960s recording gear. This resonates with the fact that this scene marks the only semblance of an “old world” within The Social Network. Every other scene takes place within the post108

The sequence closes where it begins, albeit with one key element missing: Erica.

Facebook age. The song itself is the centerpiece of a concept album, charting with the “death of the sweetheart” in American culture, which itself draws allusions to the central act at the heart of the film.

Erica Albright is the most important character in The Social Network. Contact between Albright and Zuckerberg bookends Fincher’s film, providing it with the emotional undercurrent that gives the film the all-important hook required to sell it to an audience skeptical of “The Facebook Movie”.

There is something primordially affecting about a well-constructed break up scene. Nary one of us has not been caught up in similar affairs ourselves, so when done well it’s difficult not to feel caught up in the pain too. As Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg wince’s in response to Albright’s actions, one of the few genuine reactions garnered from the “character” throughout the whole film, the viewer cannot help but be caught up in the moment, having been swept up through the engrossing dialogue that has brought them to that point.

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Periodical is published 4 times a year. Contact the editor at adam@hopelies.com.

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second is a British-based film website concerned with all corners of the cinematic spectrum. The digital/print divide is a key thesis for the website’s meanderings, which also ties in to essentially what it is that we're attempting to do here with Periodical, applying a permanent adaptation to what is all so often written off as the temporary.

Bazin, Hoberman and de Baecque inform our thinking, while the cinema of Bresson, Godard and Scorsese inspire our minds. Š Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second. All images and multimedia elements remain the sole property of their respected owners. cx