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2014
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GUEST DIRECTORS
8 Guy Maddin and Kim Morgan
TRIBUTES
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12 Apocalypse Now: 35 Years Later 4-17 Volker Schlöndorff 1 Will Diplomacy save Paris? Baal: Brecht’s forgotten TV adaptation Billy Wilder talks shop 18 Hilary Swank 19 The Homesman, away from home 21 Gian Luca Farinelli
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REVIVALS
24 Orson’s lost Too Much Johnson 25 Magician 28 27 Tracy and Young live in a Man’s Castle 28 Ballard’s brilliant lost shorts 31 Hawks’ forgotten Glory 32 Segal and Gould gambling in California Split 33 A neglected Wicked Woman 35 A short, great Land Beyond 37 Documenting Children of No Importance 39 Burton and Eastwood go Where Eagles Dare
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NEW FILMS
40 Look of Silence holds terror accountable 44 The New York Review of Books on film 47 Red Army: on thin ice 48 The Salt of the Earth: illuminating photos 51 Grim serial killer of South Central 53 ’71: A chronicle of the Troubles 55 Foxcatcher wrestles with class 57 Leigh’s radical artist: Mr. Turner 59 Barthes remakes Madame Bovary 61 Strength in unions in Two Days, One Night 62 Alone and Wild, hiking the West Coast 65 99 Homes: low finance 67 Dancing Arabs: coming of age 69 The Merchants of misinformation 70 A Leviathan of a protest story 73 Terror smelled like Rosewater 74-77 Wild Tales • The Decent One Mommy • Imitation Game The Price of Fame • The Gate • Birdman
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BACKLOT
79 How to Smell a Rose: the good taste of a life well lived 81 Seymour: The actor and the piano guru 83 Quincy Jones says Keep on Keepin’ on 84-85 Bertolucci • Socialism • Forbidden Films I Stop Time • Night Will Fall
SPECIAL PROGRAMS
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88 Filmmakers of Tomorrow: Great Expectations, Calling Cards, Student Prints
COVER ARTIST
91 Christian Marclay’s time-stopping work
92 Peter O’Toole 93 Stanley Kauffmann 93 Robin Williams
IN MEMORIAM
FOR SHOWTIMES, VENUES AND TICKET INFO, SEE THE OFFICIAL TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL 2014 PROGRAM GUIDE OR VISIT TELLURIDEFILMFESTIVAL.ORG EDITOR: Jason Silverman ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jonathan Silverman DESIGNERS: Barbara Kondracki, Casey Nay, Nate Moore, Rick Bickhart CONTRIBUTORS: Jeremy Arnold, Rolf Aurich, Sheerly Avni, Peter Becker, Peter Bowen, Gunilla Bresky, Meredith Brody, Rachel Cooke, Geoff Dyer, Chaz Ebert, Roger Ebert, Mara Fortes, Scott Foundas, Franck Garbarz, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Jacobsen, Fabien Lemercier, Todd McCarthy, Kim Morgan, Geoffrey O’Brien, Joshua Oppenheimer, Jonathan Robbins, Jonathan Romney, Peter Sellars, Krista Smith, Cheryl Strayed, David Thomson, Kenneth Turan, Fyodor Urnov, Steven Zeitchik ADVERTISING DIRECTOR: Anna Korn ADVERTISING: Tammy Kulpa, Melissa Lonsbury COPY EDITORS/EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Seth Cagin, Gus Jarvis, Jessica Newens, Marta Tarbell, Jessica Wexler COVER ART: Christian Marclay WATCH NEWSPAPERS | PUBLISHERS: Seth Cagin, Marta Tarbell EDITOR: Gus Jarvis 125 West Pacific Avenue, Telluride, Colorado, 81435 970-728-4496 watchnewspapers.com
THE TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL | 800 Jones Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 510-665-9494 www.telluridefilmfestival.org
doubling down
KIM MORGAN & GUY MADDIN: GUEST DIRECTORS ately. It wasn’t two people getting together; it was two people and their favorite decades getting together. We’ve known each other less than four years, but this programming represents kind of the Arthur Murray numbered dance steps of our relationship. You can lay them out on the floor and follow the programming through our first heady days together. Is that too schmaltzy?
BY TODD MCCARTHY
Former Telluride tributee Guy Maddin, creator of fantastical films including The Saddest Music in the World, Careful and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and film noir specialist Kim Morgan (“one of the best writers on the Internet,” according to Roger Ebert) met and married four years ago. They are Telluride’s first Guest Director duo. TODD MCCARTHY: You are the first
couple to serve as Guest Directors. To what extent do your tastes in film overlap? How did that affect the way you approached this task for Telluride? GUY MADDIN: Wouldn’t it be great if we had some sort of adversarial husband and wife relationship? The Bickersons? One of the things that made me fall in love with Kim was not just the number of movie obsessions we already shared but the ones she introduced to me. We don’t have many deal-breaking obsessions.
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KIM MORGAN: Guy introduced me to things, too. We are voracious in all eras, any type of films and any genres of film. We go on obsessive jags. The last one was Frederic March, watching every dirty sweaty movie from the 70s. It can be anything and everything. GM: There was a Lon Chaney jag, a William Talman jag, a Ralph Meeker jag. It feels we should be checking in to a fleabag motel and throwing the empty bottles of corn out the back window. KM: We don’t agree on everything. But I’m trying to think of a disagreement … GM: When I first met Kim, I clung to my last few prejudices before I could call myself a cinema omnivore. I knew you were supposed to be in awe of 70s American cinema, but I never felt the urge to put the DVDs in. She can’t go too long without looking at something from that era, road pictures in particular. She turned me on to Monte Hellman, and French Connection. I liked Altman, but she introduced me to California Split—I fell in love immedi-
No, it’s a wonderful new direction for the guest directors. Your program is limited to a period between the early 1930s and 1970s. It excludes the silent film era, which is of some interest to you, Guy. KM: We were trying to get a silent in there … we both love The Unknown and are both obsessed with Erich von Stroheim, but we were trying to find films that hadn’t been revived as much. GM: When I go to Telluride, I come home feeling like I’ve seen something that none of my friends back home have seen. I wanted to give that feeling to this year’s visitors. So our picks were rarely seen. California Split was briefly available in DVD, but in a pan-and-scan version with footage missing. It hasn’t been seen this way since 1974. Man’s Castle was never available, even on VHS. It’s on my Sight and Sound ballot for sure. It’s fun to be able to show a movie I consider almost perfect. That scene on the stilts …
GM: I got goosebumps just with you
mentioning it. I love Frank Borzage’s silent masterpieces. To get someone like Spencer Tracy, who is an amazing alpha force, to slow down and simmer—it’s amazing how playful and loving and delicate he gets.
It’s admirable to show films that are hard to see. How did you whittle it down to six? GM: We picked the first five, and had another title, a Mexican film, Crepusculo. But at the last second, we asked if we could swap in Wicked Woman, which is the kind of film that should be rediscovered. It’s a Detour-like film, one of those marvels of Poverty Row, or one block over from Poverty Row. It was the first film Kim showed me. It’s the kind of film viewers will come away feeling they were having an experience. KM: There were so many movies! I
was holding out. It was stressful picking just six. We were trying to cover each era, just to help us curate it, to give some rhyme or reason. As Guy said, there are so many films that are rarely seen. Il Grido is not screened often and never revived and never discussed. I think it’s a masterpiece. I want to see it on the big screen. That one was haunting us. We put it aside. Should we show it? Or not? We keep watching it and thinking about it. GM: I really always wanted to like Antonioni more. I was saying, “If only he had cast Steve Cochran. Or Raymond Burr.” You got some noir on my Italian arthouse. KM: We didn’t get any Joan Crawford in. GM: Until Wicked Woman went in, we didn’t have a gynocentric film. And boy, is that one gynocentric. It really is from the women’s perspective. [And Joseph Losey’s] M is a film that really needs to be seen. KM: It was the first film I thought of, and it had finally been restored. I had only seen murky grey-market copies. It was a Holy Grail for me, to see it in a restored, pristine copy. Joseph Losey is such an interesting filmmaker, and to think of it as a remake is ridiculous. It’s the same story, but it is set in L.A., and the performances are so different. How many have even seen it? GM: Or even know it exists? How about Road to Glory? It’s not singled out as one of the great Howard Hawks films. GM: I know its not one of your favorites. I’m crazy for the romance of films set in the Great War. It’s the most romantic of wars. I first came to Telluride in 1991 with my World War I film Archangel. It was too distant for it to seem as horrifying as it really was, so it became a backdrop for a romanceadventure. I like the presence of William Faulkner, even just the idea that he and Hawks are in the same credit roll. I know how darkly mischievous Faulkner can be. I love how the film has Hawks’s sense of fraternity and camaraderie along with that lurid Faulkner undertow. Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, is author of numerous books including Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood.
Guest Director selections
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1. A MAN’S CASTLE U.S., 1933, 75m Director: Frank Borzage Starring: Spencer Tracy, Loretta Young and Marjorie Rambeau
A Depression-era romance of profound intimacy, tenderness and hilarity, as well as a revelation of Spencer Tracy’s astonishing range. 2. THE ROAD TO GLORY U.S., 1936, 103m Director: Howard Hawks Starring: Fredric March, Warner Baxter and Lionel Barrymore
One of Howard Hawks’s least shown and known films, a World War I drama ripe for fresh evaluation.
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3. M U.S., 1951, 88m Director: Joseph Losey
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A long-unavailable remake, terrifically shot on the streets of Los Angeles, that stands as a virtual last collective gasp of pre-blacklist Hollywood, featuring a cast all but drawn from an underground communist cell meeting. 4. WICKED WOMAN U.S., 1953, 77m Director: Russell Rouse
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This wild card, from the future director of The Oscar, features Beverly Michaels doing what bad girls do best when they show up in a small town. Expect tawdry sleaze at its delirious, noir-ish best.
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5. IL GRIDO Italy, 1957, 116m Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni’s last film before L’avventura changed everything, and, thanks to Hollywood tough guy Steve Cochran, has an element of American noir to it. 6. CALIFORNIA SPLIT U.S., 1974, 108m Director: Robert Altman Starring: George Segal, Elliott Gould and Ann Prentiss
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Jumping into color and more recent times, this Altman film—yet to be considered among his official classics—has made addicts of a select few. — Todd McCarthy
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GUEST DIRECTOR
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TRIBUTES
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R E V I VA L S
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NEW FILMS
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BACKLOT
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SPECIAL
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IN MEMORIAM
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FW2014 • 9
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APOCALYPSE NOW
35 YEARS L AT E R
I think there was another way to make it, and it was exactly the way that George Lucas had intended to make it when he was thinking of doing it, which was to make it up in Northern California in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta region, and to shoot it in a quasi-documentary style. But my idea was the opposite of George’s, which was to make it as a big Bridge on the River Kwai or Guns of Navarone type of movie, as a Hollywood war epic.
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BY SCOTT FOUNDAS
When Francis Coppola walked into the jungles of the Philippines in the spring of 1976 to begin production on his Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, he could scarcely have imagined that it would be a long 14 months before he would finally emerge. When he did, after a shoot plagued by rampaging typhoons and egos, a screenplay in search of an ending, and assorted near-death experiences, it would take even longer in the editing room to find the movie in the more than 200 hours of footage Coppola had shot—delaying the film’s premiere by an entire year, from its originally scheduled May 1978 release to its eventual debut, in a still unfinished work-in-progress version at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it went on to share the Palme d’Or with Telluride honoree Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum. Thirty-five years later, Apocalypse has become an incontrovertible classic synonymous with filmmaking risk and reward of the highest possible stakes, of the madness that so often goes hand in hand with genius, and of art imitating life a touch too close for anyone’s comfort. On the occasion of the film’s historic anniversary and its Telluride tribute, Coppola still has much to say about how he willed his extraordinary magnum opus into being. SCOTT FOUNDAS: When you reflect
back today on the making of Apocalypse Now, what remains most vivid in your mind? FRANCIS COPPOLA: One thing that always occurs to me is how my nature was so blind to the reality of what it would take to actually do it, compared to my enthusiasm that said, “Oh, of course we can do it.” I seem to have often gone into projects with that kind of enthusiasm. Even though I logically understood that it would be difficult, I didn’t focus on the difficulty, but more on the fun of the challenge. There is a disconnect in my mind, which follows me to this day as I contemplate new things that are extremely difficult if not impossible, but I don’t seem to see the impossible part. Do you think there was another way of making the film that would have been less arduous but still resulted in an experience as powerful as the one we’ve come to know?
But it seems that the obsessiveness of being in such a remote place, under such intense conditions, for such a long period of time, fed directly back into the film itself. There’s no question that my technique seems to be to put the actual production of a movie in the same vicinity as the theme of the movie. By paralleling the American experience in Southeast Asia, we sort of found ourselves in our own Vietnam, with all of the logistical issues that an army would have. By doing that, we forced the film to be like what it was about, and that often means that you inherit the same difficulties that the thematic or narrative material would have. And by having the same problems, in an uncanny way you occupy a kind of reality. You made Apocalypse after the incredible run of the two Godfather films and The Conversation—the very movies, perhaps more than any others, that embodied this much-mythologized idea of the 1970s “New Hollywood,” where it was possible to make personal, character-driven films with the backing of major studios. And yet, despite your great success, Apocalypse was a movie you ultimately had to finance yourself. I was frustrated and angry that having made these three films, nobody would get behind me to help me make Apocalypse Now. None of the actors I knew would easily agree to go with me. No studio would agree to finance it. I thought, “Gee, what do I have to do? Am I so much not in the club down in L.A. that they don’t want to back me to any extent?” I ultimately had to hock everything I had in order to get the film made, and I was very resentful that, even with the successes I’d had, I was out of the club. Did you ever get into that club? Never. Warner Brothers backed Stanley Kubrick to the hilt right to the end of his life, and other filmmakers had that kind of support. I was always an outsider and it was always very hard for me to get backing. I once met Larry Ellison, who said, “You know why I own so much of Oracle? Because no one wanted it.” That’s how I got stuck with the ownership of Apocalypse Now. Nobody else wanted it. This was the first of your many collaborations with the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and the look of the film was much bolder, more surreal than the style you’d employed with Gordon Willis on the Godfather pictures.
My approach has always been to make a film in a style that’s appropriate for the film’s theme. The Godfather was a classic story of succession—almost a Shakespearean story of a king and his family— and so the camera didn’t move, the camera was always four-and-a-half-feet from the floor, everything was shot with a 40mm lens. It was a very classical-looking film. Vittorio’s attitude is that the camera is like a pen and can write all over the place and soar in the air. Gordy Willis used to argue with me if I wanted to have a high angle shot, because, he’d say, “Well, who’s up there looking from that point of view?” You always discover the style of a film in the first few weeks: you try some things and say, “Oh, isn’t that great? Let’s do more of that.” As we went up the river with Apocalypse, the film became more and more surreal, and that took us into a difficult situation—as Marlon Brando said to me, “You’ve painted yourself into a corner.” I allowed the film to become more surreal, encouraged it, and got great pleasure out of the unusual choices we were making and the phantasmagorical quality of it, because that’s what I thought the war must have seemed like to the young Americans on a river patrol. But the ending of the script was like The Guns of Navarone—there was a big battle—but the way we were shooting the movie no longer supported that kind of ending. The film had to end on a more enigmatic, philosophical note, and God only knew what that was going to be. How did you get yourself out of that corner? I asked many people to help me, and that’s when the glimmer of how to end it was suggested by the now-infamous Dennis Jakob, who said, “Well, this is the story of the Fisher King. If the murderer is sent up to kill the old king, that’s what he’s got to do, and then he’ll be the new king. That’s the story of man.” That’s when I started to read T.S. Eliot and From Ritual to Romance—those books which I then included in the film to signal that that’s where we were going—and ultimately came up with what was a very philosophical, strange ending, and which, when the movie first came out, was criticized. There was no question that the helicopter battle was fun and cinematic and like a big movie, but the ending, with those discourses of Brando …. How did you work with Brando to arrive at those scenes? The first week of the three weeks I had with him, we just sat in his houseboat and talked. He was something of a genius, aside from his acting, and he would talk about philosophy, termites, this and that. Then I would go home and take the conversations, which I had recorded, and write them up into these monologues, which I then brought back to him. At the end, when we finally shot the stuff, he actually had a little tape recorder with an earphone. There’s this idea that he was improvising; he was never improvising.
He always had a distillation of those initial conversations together, which I had put into a format that he played back into his earphone and would repeat. It was an odd process. There was then a lot of editing of this mass of material. Ultimately, since Vittorio’s photography featured these moving shadows across Marlon, which would obscure his mouth and face, I cut these little segments and would add in an additional optical shadow or two to cover the cuts. In fact, those last speeches of Kurtz were made of little sections from these earphone monologues. Apocalypse met with a mixed critical reception, led by Frank Rich’s famous dismissal in Time. The film was a very unusual film, to say the least, in its time, and it didn’t get unanimous praise by any means. Of course, Kramer Vs. Kramer won all the Oscars that year. It was only over time that people just kept going to see it. I thought it was going to be a financial disaster, because I was responsible to the bank. But the film never stopped gaining audiences, and then over the years what was considered unusual became less unusual. The film finally becoming something of a classic happened over time. Scott Foundas is chief film critic at Variety. A TRIBUTE TO APOCALYPSE NOW The elements of the Apocalypse Now Tribute program include: A Close-Up on Apocalypse Now Director James Gray hosts an evening at the intimate, historic Sheridan Opera House featuring four of the key members of the film’s creative team: Oscarwinning producer Fred Roos (The Godfather); Oscar-winning editor and sound editor Walter Murch (The English Patient); Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor, Reds) and the legendary Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now screenings and post-film interviews An onstage interview with Coppola, Roos, Storaro and Murch will follow a screening of a new DCP version of the film, supervised by Francis Ford Coppola. Hearts of Darkness The revelatory behind-the-scenes film, with co-director Eleanor Coppola in person A Conversation with Dennis Jakob, a creative consultant on Apocalypse Now and one of cinema’s essential behind-the-scenes visionaries, with Errol Morris and Guy Maddin. Check the official program for times and further details.
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 13
VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF
The Internationalist C E L E B R AT I N G V O L K E R S C H L Ö N D O R F F Volker Schlöndorff has been making daring, literate and often eye-opening films for 50 years. He is a fearless, committed warrior of cinema, whether working in France, Germany or the U.S. Telluride celebrates his career with its highest honor, the Silver Medallion. He spoke to Peter Becker about his career. PETER BECKER: You really started out as a film watcher, right? In the Cinémathèque Française? VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF: That is absolutely true. I first watched from the projection booth. I knew the guy who was running the machines. When I came to France, it was precisely to learn about filmmaking. When I arrived in France I pretended to study anything else, but the real reason I was there was to go every night to the Cinémathèque and to see the
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three movies that were screened. It was not just a cinema, it was also a community. It was a very strong community. It was 1957, the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague. I had advanced to be the simultaneous translator for the movies that were either in German or had German subtitles or whatever, sitting with a mic in the front row of the Cinémathèque and putting it into the best French I could muster. Next to me in the first row you had the hardcore Cahiers du Cinema crew: (JeanLuc) Godard, always in the dark coat, collar up and shoulders forward as if to hide either his face or his entire persona and next to him (Claude) Chabrol and (François) Truffaut. It was the same community of people you met every night. Once you joined the group who was
watching these films, it was like the early Christians in the catacombs. You became part of a brotherhood. That’s a natural progression to what seems like ideal entry into the world of film—you worked as an assistant with Alain Renais on Last Year at Marienbad, and Jean-Pierre Melville and Louis Malle. I met Louis Malle through a friend of Bertrand Tavernier’s. I met Melville at a cine club after a screening of Johnny Guitar, which he found horrible. He warned us against such degenerate American films. It wasn’t very long before you made your own first film, Young Törless (1966). It came out of an accidental reading of Robert Musil’s novel, which my own
FILMOGRAPHY
years in the French boarding school somehow reflected. There’s always a power struggle within every institution and especially within boarding schools, when you get all these strongheaded young men together. They’re like dogs fighting.
Volker Schlöndorff b. March 31, 1939 in Wiesbaden, Germany
DIRECTOR
A lot of your films are adaptations of unfilmable novels. In Telluride we’re going to have another surprising literary adaptation with Baal (1970). I felt very much at ease with literature. I discovered that I was good at translating literature. I thought it’s better to do what I’m good at than what I really like to do. Baal is word for word, more or less, of the first draft of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, written when he was 19 years old, which seemed to reflect what was going on in our generation. We shot this 50-year-old piece of literature as if it was social reportage. What kinds of films were showing in Germany in the 50s? How did the New German cinema come about? Why was it needed to shake things up? This was before television and movies had millions of spectators. And there were no German films we could relate to. On the other hand, there were the French and the American movies. My revelation was On the Waterfront. Elia Kazan is more of a role model for me, more than even the French directors I worked with. We had a complex of deficiency. We were wondering, with hurt pride, why isn’t anybody doing this here? Did the exodus of Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder finish off German filmmaking once and forever? Let’s touch on what was the breakthrough film from the German cinema, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. This was the first movie that really got through to a major audience. It has a timeless way of capturing an anxiety that we all should feel about state power and how fragile our situation is. Peter, that’s exactly what the big surprise was. We toured the world with it and whether it was in Quebec, in Argentina or even in Russia, people thought that the movie was made about their situation. This was Berkeley; this was Chicago. It was everywhere at the time. The Tin Drum (1979), let’s talk about bringing that to the screen. The book is so huge and, unlike Joseph Musil, Günter Grass was still around. I was at first intimidated by him, but I liked the challenge. At the beginning I was looking around for advice. I asked Günter, I asked Jean-Claude Carrière about his early work with (Jacques) Tati as well as with Buñuel. The gestation took at least a year before we actually started writing. I was extremely insecure. Sometimes when you’re really challenged, the best in you comes out.
Diplomacy (2014) Calm at Sea (2011) Ulzhan (2007) Strike (2006) Billy Wilder Speaks (1992, 2006) Enigma—Eine uneingestandene Liebe (2005) The Ninth Day (2004) Ein Produzent hat Seele oder er hat keine (2002) The Legend of Rita (2000)
Then you turned the corner into Hollywood. But the things you took on in your supposed Hollywood career are the most un-Hollywood films imaginable: Swann in Love (1984) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1990). I never had a Hollywood career. I had an American career, but it was strictly a New York career. Was that a significantly different experience or was it just a change of language, a change of scenery or the same independent filmmaking that you were always doing? Well, funny enough, I felt like I was coming home. I grew up in the heart of the American zone of Germany. I fed on American films and on American culture. I was totally Americanized between ages 6 and 12, including by Mark Twain and later by (Ernest) Hemingway and (William) Faulkner. If we ever heard radio, it was always American Forces Network. Telluride is showing your film on Billy Wilder. What possessed you to sit down with Wilder in the first place? Billy Wilder was a fan of Katharina Blum and wrote me a letter. We became friends. I was curious to know how, while still being such a European, he could still be such a totally American filmmaker. You’ve made 30 or so films. What’s changed in you as a filmmaker? And what are the biggest changes in the industry itself? Well, certainly the industry changed totally. I didn’t change too much. Let’s put it this way: I’m neither capable nor willing to make the necessary adaptation. The subjects I choose and the way I film them are still old school. With digital technology, you don’t have to get as involved with pure technical craft. You can spend so much more time with the actors and focus on just that.
This is a liberation. It is much easier to work in a free and even improvising way. In the editing, we finally have overcome all the old syntax and grammar of filmmaking, because now everything goes. At the same time, the storyline becomes so much more important, because the only way today to hook people is through a story and characters. The industry—the way producers and filmmakers come together—certainly changed a lot. It’s exploded into millions or thousands of participants. When we started, in all of France, there were maybe a dozen producers; (now), we’re in an atomized universe.
Palmetto (1998) Le parfait soldat (1996) Der Unhold (1996) The Michael Nyman Songbook (1992) Voyager (1991) The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) A Gathering of Old Men (1987) Death of a Salesman (1985) Swann in Love (1984)
It’s very exciting that you’ll have a new film at Telluride. What would say to an audience about it? It’s literally the title: Diplomacy. It is about the power of the word and of convincing somebody to do the right thing, what the conviction of one man, through talking and tricking, through lying and through being honest, can achieve. Wherever you look in the world, you have a feeling that most conflicts are totally stupid and unnecessary. They’re not even about territorial conquests; it’s all about the idea of an enemy. And so, I think, words can change reality. Peter Becker is president of the Criterion Collection, which was the recipient of the Telluride Special Medallion in 2005.
War and Peace (1982) Circle of Deceit (1981) The Candidate (1980) The Tin Drum (1979) Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel (1977) Coup de grâce (1976) The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) Übernachtung in Tirol (1974) A Free Woman (1972) Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972) Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) Baal (1970)
A TRIBUTE TO VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF Clips, presentation of the Festival’s Silver Medallion and a screening of Diplomacy (see opposite page)
Michael Kohlhaas — Der Rebell (1969) Degree of Murder (1967) Young Törless (1966)
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Films by Parisian Countdown BY FRANCK GARBARZ
It was an incredibly barbaric order: as the Allies approached France in the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler instructed General Dietrich von Choltitz to raze Paris. Choltitz placed mines on the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame and the bridges, ready to destroy these icons of culture, when a Swedish ambassador snuck into the German headquarters in attempt to convince him to spare the City of Light. The Film Watch talked to Volker Schlöndorff about his adaptation of Cyril Gély’s hit stage play. FILM WATCH: What drew you to the
project?
VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF: War places
men in extreme situations and brings out the best and worst in humanity. These days a conflict between France and Germany is so unthinkable that I found it interesting to recall the past relationships between our two countries. If, God forbid, Paris had been razed, I doubt that the Franco-German bond would have formed or that Europe would have pulled through. What does Paris mean to you? I’ve hung around the city since I was 17, and I know each and every bridge and monument. I think that during all those years when I was an assistant to Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville, I explored more streets than a Paris cab driver! Being asked 50 years later to celebrate its survival was a real privilege. It’s a true story but with fictional elements. At what point did fiction take over? Fiction plays quite a big part in the film. This is what most interested me. However, one element is historical: the two men did know each other and had talked about the ultimate fate of Paris. We based the narrative on the few historical facts, and tried to figure out the German general’s state of mind. We didn’t intend it to be true to facts. How did you develop the characters? Von Choltitz was in a difficult predicament: he was one of the Führer’s loyal soldiers. He allegedly participated in the
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massacre of the Jews in Eastern Europe and of the destruction of Rotterdam, which are war crimes at odds with the traditions of Prussian soldiers. But the general embodies the third or fourth generation of a long lineage of officers and his identity is epitomized by such military rules as obedience—the basis of an effective army—and the love of one’s country and family honor. In August 1944, even though all the German generals had stopped believing in victory, von Choltitz received the order to destroy Paris and responded by having an asthma attack: he was incapable of carrying out the order, but he didn’t know how to shun his duty. It was a question of free choice, yet he had no choice. He knew what he ought to do, but he didn’t have the strength to do it. He couldn’t make up his mind, and his body took over instead. It was at that point that Consul Nordling showed up, almost as a savior, even if the general regarded him at first as an intruder sneaking into the suite like a burglar. The two characters face each other gingerly, as if they were playing a game of chess.
It is even more like a five- or sixround boxing match. Each contender carefully prepares the next blow, but there are no knockouts. The actors Niels Arestrup and André Dussollier are inhabited by their characters. During the rehearsals, I immediately realized that not only is Niels an amazing actor, he also has a strong personality that he brought to the role. He had become unreservedly this German general more than any German actor could have been, with his conflicting feelings, his stubbornness and his loyalty to the traditions of the army. He was so inhabited by the role that he seemed almost hypnotized, as though he was not in control of his acting. Opposite him, Dussollier is a great artist who has everything under control and whose acting became more sophisticated take after take. Sometimes it was a little difficult to synchronize the two types of approach, each with its own dynamics and pace. How did you direct them? Without any psychological premises. As a happening. The consul was my accom-
plice, helping me to bring the general out of his shell. The latter’s reactions are unpredictable. I shot with two mobile cameras and booms to capture the astounding voices of my actors. What is the role played by Paris? Paris is by no means the backdrop of the story; it is the third character! When the general makes his final decision, which is the climax of the film, the camera is on the rooftops of Paris—the splendor of the Louvre comes into full view, and so do the imposing Grand Palais, and the Sacré-Coeur and Opera House in the distance. Only then do we discover this third character and feel its compelling presence, which is what the movie is all about: Paris. Interview courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.
DIPLOMACY Germany, 2014, 88m Director: Volker Schlöndorff Based on a play by: Cyril Gély
Volker Schlöndorff A lost teleplay, rediscovered BY DAVID HUDSON
World of Wilder BY JONATHAN ROBBINS
In 1988, director Volker Schlöndorff brought a camera crew into Billy Wilder’s Los Angeles office. The goal, as Schlöndorff put it, was to record “an improvised conversation between friends.” It all started with an effusive letter from Wilder that Schlöndorff initially thought was a hoax. Surely, he reasoned, the great Billy Wilder doesn’t send fan mail to young directors, telling them that their films (The Tin Drum, in this case) are the greatest to come from German cinema since Fritz Lang’s M. But the letter was genuine and the two men became friends. The resultant Billy, How Did You Do It? is mostly set in Wilder’s office. Schlöndorff peppers Wilder with questions that he answers from behind his desk while multitasking—chewing on pills, fiddling with a backscratcher and answering the phone in French. We learn that Wilder started out as a journalist and press agent for a Berlin jazz band, and at one point, according to Schlöndorff, may have worked as a male “go-go dancer at a club for lonely hearts” to make ends meet. Jewish, he fled Germany as the Nazis gained power, first stopping in France and then coming to Hollywood, where he would go on to write and direct Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, winning six Oscars along the way. Wilder seemed to have a wise quip for everything. When Wilder faced a situation for which he lacked a rule, he consulted a sign on his office wall that read, “What would Lubitsch do?” Wilder’s grumpy exterior masked
a magnanimous spirit and a fecund mind. Drafted into the U.S. Army at the end of World War II, Wilder was perhaps the first filmmaker to turn footage of the concentration camps into a film. As part of the Army’s effort to reeducate the German public, he organized screenings of his 1945 documentary Death Mill about the Nazi atrocities in the camps (where his own mother had been gassed). As Wilder tells it, before one screening, paper and pencils were distributed to the audience of German civilians with the request that they write down their responses to the film. By the time the movie ended, Wilder recalls with a pregnant smile, “Barely anyone remained, not one card was filled out and all of the pencils had been stolen.” As Schlöndorff’s film demonstrates, Wilder often spoke in parables that exploded into confetti when you touched them; everything was a gag because, well, everything was a gag at some level. Fond of remarking that “a beautiful woman verges on the edge of ugliness,” Wilder used movies to articulate the knife’s edge on which laughter and tears were inextricably bound. Jonathan Robbins writes regularly for Film Comment, where this article was originally published in longer form. Reprinted with permission. ©Film Comment.
BILLY, HOW DID YOU DO IT? Germany, 1992, 61m Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, with Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the title role, was made for West German television and broadcast just once, on April 21, 1970. Until earlier this year, it had not been seen since. Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel, who held the rights to the playwright’s work, watched the broadcast that night on the other side of the wall in Berlin. She was so horrified by Fassbinder’s “dreadful” performance (“If he thinks that a leather jacket and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth makes him like Brecht…!”) that, on that very same evening, she demanded that the film be stashed away in the vaults. It remained there for more than 40 years, while Siegfried Unseld, whose legendary (and currently deeply troubled) publishing house Suhrkamp managed the rights to Brecht’s work in the West, struggled to lift
the ban. Helene Weigel died in 1971, leaving the matter in the hands of her daughter. Barbara Schall-Brecht decided to honor her mother’s wishes. When the wall fell in 1989, Schlöndorff gave it another try. Schall-Brecht stood firm. Two decades later, Juliane Lorenz of the Fassbinder Foundation took another approach, as the keeper of one legacy to another. A face-to-face meeting went well, but still: Nothing. Until, out of the blue, in 2011, Schall-Brecht sent an email to Lorenz: “The reputation of W. Fassbinder is indeed very big. I would now allow the film to be released on DVD.” Schlöndorff’s reaction: “Hallelujah, Juliane! … For Fassbinder, yes; for Schlöndorff, never! Fine, I’ll happily play the black sheep. Now there’s work to do.” Baal, now restored, was shot in August and September 1969 in the back rooms
of the Hackerhaus, a Bavarian restaurant in Munich. The budget: 160,000 German marks, less than half what was usually spent on a television production. Schlöndorff was 30. He’d taken Young Törless (1966) and A Degree of Murder (1967) to Cannes, but The Tin Drum was still nine years ahead of him. Taking on the role of Baal the poet, Fassbinder was all of 24 and had just finished his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969). Margarethe von Trotta, who plays Baal’s pregnant mistress Sophie, was 27; she and Schlöndorff were already an item but wouldn’t marry until the following year. Hanna Schygulla, who would eventually become one of the most internationally recognized faces of the New German Cinema, took on a minor role. Fassbinder appeared on set at sunrise every morning and stood in front of the camera “as if in a trance” and yet never forgot or botched a single line of the challenging text Brecht wrote in 1918 when he was a 20-year-old student. Nights, Fassbinder was editing Katzelmacher. Oh, and writing a radio play, too. At the end of the shoot, he surprised everyone by marrying Ingrid
Caven—and then spending the money he was paid for Baal on a new sports car for his lover at the time, Günther Kaufmann. Fassbinder would make nearly 40 more films before he died just 12 years later at the age of 37. David Hudson, the keyframe daily editor for Fandor, has contributed to a wide variety of American and German publications. Originally published on Fandor; reprinted with permission.
BAAL West Germany, 1970, 87m Director: Volker Schlöndorff Starring: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Based on a play by: Bertolt Brecht
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Class Act
H I L A R Y S W A N K D O E S I T H E R W AY BY KRISTA SMITH
talk to you, you know he doesn’t think you have much of anything useful to say. He uses vey specific adjectives, which gives you specific actions. Working with him is like taking a master class. I tried to just sponge it up.
Largely self-taught and with a personal story that itself seems the stuff of Hollywood, Hilary Swank has emerged as one of cinema’s most gifted, committed artists. She will receive the Silver Medallion at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival.
How do you think you’ve grown as an individual through your work and your characters? I’ve had the opportunity to see life through many different eyes, and it’s given me a great ability to be more open-minded and less judgmental. Age does that, too.
KRISTA SMITH: I met you when you
came up to my office. It was a meetand-greet, and it was before the release of Boys Don’t Cry. I remember it vividly because … HILARY SWANK: I looked like a boy?
Can we talk about Million Dollar Baby? It was your second Oscar. What was it like to work with Clint? My eyes just swelled up thinking about it. It has such a strong place in my life. I was 29 and ready to enter a new stage. Clint had this quiet belief in me that reminded me to believe in myself. It’s something that I’ll always carry. It was a potent moment in my life, not just as an actor but as a woman.
No! Because you brought me to tears just by telling me the story. Did you have any internal indication when you got cast in Boys Don’t Cry what kind of ride this would be? No way! People talk about an overnight success, and it was. I felt I was shot out of cannon. It was overwhelming in every way, even though had been working for nine years, since I was 15. I walked around with a deer-in-the-headlights look on my face. It was the little movie that could. That the film was so accepted—with the Oscar nomination and the win—said so much about where we were as a society and how ready we were for change. It allowed me to continue to tell stories about people who inspire me. I love that phrase, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.” You were 15 years old. You moved here, lived in your car, cold-called agents using payphones. I had a big birthday two weeks ago. I turned 40. Finally! You’ll always be 25 to me. Thank you! I was thinking about it as a milestone, and how blessed I am, but also how much I like to work hard and it brings me such a sense of accomplishment. It feels good to wake up and challenge myself every day, in one way or another. It’s gratifying. Your quote brings me full circle to work with Tommy Lee Jones. I especially like working with other people who push me to my limit and sometimes beyond. Tommy directed this and also stars in it. How did you get the chance to work with him? I have a great agent. He’s always reading. When he sends something, I know I’ll love it. He said, “You’ve got to read this.” I sat down and read it. I was born in Nebraska, I’m from Iowa, I come from a long line of farmers. I was intrinsically involved with the story, just from my roots.
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Did you ever feel insecure that you hadn’t gone through a traditional training program? Absolutely! Partly because all of my learning process is out there for everyone to view. You can see movies where I’m really, really trying to figure out how to do it. To this day, when I am in a room with people who are trained, I still feel like I cheated the system.
So I reached out to Tommy. We met, and he just said, “I look forward to working with you.” I wish it was always that easy! The movie is extremely haunting. I haven’t been able to shake it. One of the things that moved me the most is how honest it was. You really feel your loneliness, your sense of loss, your fears. How do you keep your performances so honest? I find one sentence that helps me define the performance. I extract it when I’m developing the character. I write it on the front of my script, and everything has to come from that sentence. For this movie, it was something like “Mary Bee goes where angels fear to tread.” That’s her essence. She was fearless in the way she lived her life, and also in her integrity, her morals, her selflessness. She’s someone I wish I had in my life. She does the right thing, and doesn’t do it to be kind. She does it because it’s right. She has values. As a society, I worry that we’ve lost our values. Someone who isn’t afraid to tell it how it is and risk making the person they are talking cringe—those people earn my respect.
How did the physical scenes happen? There is a lot of physicality in the film. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to steer a plow being pushed behind a mule and how hard the work is. Any farmer is in better shape than any bodybuilder. You use every single muscle, from your little toe up. We did it slowly. First I walked behind the mule, then I pulled a railroad tie and then a plow. It was so fun. All the while in a corset, too! Exactly. And those bonnets don’t do anything! They don’t even shield you from the sun. Every era has its useless accessories. What was it like to work with Tommy as a director and as an actor? That’s one place [where] Tommy has a lot to say. He’s very specific. It’s that specificity that makes movies shine or not. Real humans are specific. And Tommy brings that specificity, and a rhythm, to his directing. He loves music, and his script has a musicality to it. He doesn’t say much, but what he says is smart. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve met. He doesn’t suffer fools. If he doesn’t
What would you tell the 15-year old Hilary Swank now if you were to run into her? Don’t worry as much. I don’t consider myself a worrier, but I was concerned about what people think. I finally understand the saying that youth is wasted on the young. We have to live our authentic lives for ourselves and understand that not everyone is going to understand us … With The Homesman, I put less pressure on myself, and had more fun than I ever had. That’s maybe just about growing up and feeling more comfortable in my own shoes. Krista Smith is Vanity Fair’s senior West Coast editor.
A TRIBUTE TO HILARY SWANK This program includes a selection of clips followed by the presentation of the Silver Medallion, an onstage interview led by Scott Foundas (Saturday) and John Horn (Sunday) and The Homesman (U.S., 2014, 120m), shown in entirety.
FILMOGRAPHY Hilary Swank b. July 30, 1974 in Lincoln, Nebraska
ACTOR You’re Not You (2014) The Homesman (2014) New Year’s Eve (2011) The Resident (2011) Conviction (2010) Amelia (2009) Birds of America (2008) P.S. I Love You (2007) The Reaping (2007) Freedom Writers (2007) The Black Dahlia (2006) Million Dollar Baby (2004) Red Dust (2004) Iron Jawed Angels (2004) (TV) 11:14 (2003) The Core (2003) Insomnia (2002) The Affair of the Necklace (2001) The Gift (2000) Boys Don’t Cry (1999) Heartwood (1998) Beverly Hills, 90210 (1997-98) (TV) Quiet Days in Hollywood (1997) The Next Karate Kid (1994) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
Wild West
TOMMY LEE JONES’ U N T O L D S T O RY O F FRONTIER WOMEN BY DAVID THOMSON
Far from society and comfort, the women who traveled west as pioneers found life tougher than they could have ever imagined. Writer-producer-actor-director Tommy Lee Jones adapted Glendon Swarthout’s book, long a hot property in Hollywood, with an all-star cast. DAVID THOMSON: When did you first
find the book? Did you know the history it? There have been several attempts to film it. TOMMY LEE JONES: (Producer) Michael Fitzgerald sent it to me and asked if there was a movie in it. I read and said, Yeah, there’s a movie there.” The news of the history of the book came across to me in bits and pieces as we went along, in the form of gossip. Was your first instinct “I want to direct this,” or “I want to play the part?” Or the two at the same time? That’s just two-thirds of the motivation. I also wanted to write it. The book needed help to make it a screenplay. Taking on those three jobs required me to become a producer, as well. I didn’t have any preference at all. Doing any of the three makes the fourth pretty easy. Does the movie end like the book? I don’t remember. I read the book once and made an outline. I whacked away with a red pencil, and after the first draft, I forgot the book. We had gotten all the good out of the book we were going to get. Did you feel you had to play the part? I didn’t have to play the part, but it would be very convenient if I did. I’m capable of playing it, as capable as anyone else. And it’s in the mood of what you do so well, in No Country for Old Men and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: this tough, honorable, begrudging, nonself-dramatizing kind of character. It’s a character that you’ve virtually defined in recent years. I’m not a person who looks for what my characters have in common. I’m not interested in what makes them alike. I’ve
dedicated my life trying to make each one different. I’m going to bite and claw and scratch before I’m put into any category. Oh, I don’t want to put you in a category! You seem to me to be an old-fashioned Western hero who expresses discontent with the world. In No Country for Old Men, there seems a sadness and a regret about the world, particularly the West. Well, that sounds nice. It’s a nice thing to say. But honestly, that’s more analytical than I’ve ever been. With each character, I try to play them as best as I can. The qualities you describe in No Country for Old Men were called for by Cormac McCarthy’s novel and Joel and Ethan Coen’s screenplay. My labor is to make them different and unique. I hope to offer something that hasn’t been seen before everything I go to work. You certainly do! When you read the book, did you immediately have a sense of where and how you would film it and how the landscape would work in the film? Yes, sir, I did. The movie is set in Nebraska, and I know what Nebraska looks like. But it’s a long way to go with a film crew, and there is not a lot of infrastructure or a big labor pool there. All of those things exist in northeastern New Mexico. I felt pretty sure I could convince the camera that northeast New Mexico could stand in for Nebraska grasslands. It’s the same country. And New Mexico is far better geared for filmmakers than Nebraska. I have a residence in New Mexico and a long history here and have made a lot of movies here. It was immediately clear to me we should shoot here. Can I ask about the three women? They are presented as being crazy. And I wonder, what happened to them in the West to make them crazy?
OK, let’s stop and think about that. These are Victorian women who have been raised to be beautiful, to be mothers and housekeepers. They were raised in a long tradition of being trivial objects whose purpose in life is to be pretty. And of course this requires an umbrella above and a safety net below. That’s the role of the man, the proud, successful man who is part of the imperialist tradition. But those imperialist ambitions didn’t work out in Nebraska. There were no trees, so no lumber. Houses had to be made of dirt. There were no quilting bees or choral societies or poetry societies for these women to form for themselves, because they were separated by 50 or 70 miles from each other. It was very lonely. The weather was quite hostile. There were no doctors, of course, so pretty close to a 75 percent infant mortality, and constant work from daylight until dark, physical hard work, the work of a field hand. All of their expectations of life were dashed. Their support system they had been bred to expect was dashed. And yet the objectification and trivialization remains constant, and maybe even grows. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. David Thomson is a film critic and author of books including The Biographical Dictionary of Film and Have You Seen?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. He received Telluride’s Special Medallion in 2006.
THE HOMESMAN U.S., 2014, 122m Director: Tommy Lee Jones Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank Adapted from a novel by: Glendon Swarthout
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G I A N L U C A FA R I N E L L I A N D T H E R E C L A M AT I O N OF LOST CINEMA
BY NEIL MCGLONE
“You can’t be good in the archives world without generosity. Gian Luca is one of the most generous, open and nicest men in our world. And it’s one of the keys to his success. The way he laughs is one of the best things in life. A second reason is because he’s a real cinephile; he knows what cinema is. In less than 30 years, Bologna has became one of the best archives in the world. Its model goes beyond the rules.” —Thierry Fremaux, director, Cannes Film Festival Born in Bologna in 1963, Gian Luca Farinelli studied film restoration at the University of Urbino, started work at the film library in Bologna in 1984 and then at the tender age of just 23, and with Nicola Mazzanti, co-created Il Cinema Ritrovato, one of the world’s most prestigious celebrations of film preservation and restoration. Soon after, he oversaw the creation of the first Italian film restoration school and laboratory, L’Immagine Ritrovata, which works with the major film archives of the world. Farinelli played a leading role in the creation of the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes and since 1992 has been the director of Bureau Recherche des films perdus, which has helped rescue more than 600 films. He sits on the board of directors for the World Cinema Foundation and has directed 400 restoration projects. Since 2000, he’s served as the director of the Cineteca di Bologna. NEIL MCGLONE: Where did your
love of film come from? Were there are any defining cinematic moments in your childhood that made you want to study film? GIAN LUCA FARINELLI: My parents were literature teachers and cinema was part of my cultural education. Very soon I started waiting for those special moments, like when the new Fellini or Buñuel films were released. When I was young, during the 60s, Italian television had only one
channel, where two times a week the best film critics introduced a great selection of film classics. That’s how I developed my own taste for movies. But it was silent cinema that changed my life. It was 1978, I was in my first year in high school in Bologna and we students were commemorating the death of a boy killed for no reason by the police the year before. The demonstration arrived in Piazza Maggiore, the major city square, where on an improvised screen they showed 16mm print of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). It was a shock, both aesthetic and political. I had never seen such a powerful film, able to convey the very same feeling of injustice and oppression we, as students, were experiencing in that exact moment. That screening, though totally inadequate from a technical point of view, taught me everything I needed to know: that classic films can still speak an unknown truth, that silent cinema has that kind of beauty that overcomes times and fashion, that a single screening can be an incredible social experience for a community. What was it specifically about film restoration that interested you? The first restoration I saw was that of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, with the three screens and all, and I must say, it was a hell of a start! The idea of restoration, of bringing back the beauty, now faded, and the truth, now forgotten, of an artistic oeuvre is something quite normal for someone who lives in Italy and loves art. While all Europe, particularly France, the U.K. and Germany, had developed serious work on restoration, with research studies and incredible technical achievements, Italy was, at the time, incapable of making a restoration worthy of the name. Italian archives simply lacked the sensibility towards restoration. In order to level up to the European archives we had to build a specialized laboratory from scratch, with little money and with no experience at all.
It was a foolish goal, but it seems that our foolishness has been rewarded.
I understand that the key to guarantee a film’s life is preservation.
What were the goals when you set up Il Cinema Ritrovato in 1986? Nicola Mazzanti, who now runs the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, and I were just two young guys working at the Cineteca di Bologna with short-term contracts. I discovered the Cineteca’s small but promising film collection and convinced Vittorio Boarini, the founder of Cineteca, of the importance of studying and cataloguing those films. I got Mazzanti involved in this project, as I was sure he was absolutely perfect for the job. When we finished, we wanted to tell everyone what we discovered, and that’s how Il Cinema Ritrovato was born. Since the beginning we wanted to create a festival where “ancient” and rare films could be shown, and where through films, their different versions, their restored versions, one could understand the importance of archival work.
With Kodak being the only major company still producing motion-picture film, how do you see the future for film as a medium? This is a really hard question. We live in a transition era, between two centuries, between two very different worlds. When I started there were plenty of conferences about cinema’s imminent death. Thirtyfive years have gone by. Cinema still breathes and, compared to other art forms, it seems to me that it’s still in very good shape. True, it’s not the center of the media universe anymore, but thousands of films are produced every year and seen around the world. For 100 years, cinema has been on film, but the current trend is that of destruction and forgetting old technologies and expertise. What we lose today will be extremely hard to recover.
You have been involved with more than 400 restoration projects in Bologna. Can you talk briefly about the work that the Cineteca di Bologna does and the importance of its role in cinema today? The field of restoration is now completely different from when I started. It’s a different approach, with new technologies and a new sensibility of public opinion. When I started I thought that a restoration was all that was needed for a title to be available for future generations. Now
Neil McGlone is an advisor and researcher on Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film and a contributor to Sight & Sound and Vérité magazines.
Special Medallion Presentation
GIAN LUCA FARINELLI AND THE CINETECA BOLOGNA Includes screening of JOYFUL LAUGHTER Italy, 1960, 106m Director: Mario Monicello
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 21
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The Prodigy
WELLES’ ‘TOO MUCH JOHNSON’ REDISCOVERED
BY GEOFFREY O’BRIEN
More than that of any other filmmaker, Orson Welles’ oeuvre trails off into films withheld from view, films unfinished, films lost or stolen or destroyed and films not made at all. And anyone who loves Welles has doubtless spent time staring at the surviving fragments—the sketches for Heart of Darkness, the script with the missing scenes from The Magnificent Ambersons, the remnants of It’s All True or The Merchant of Venice, the fragments of a proposed adaptation of Moby-Dick—attempting to conjure up a further glimpse of what has gone unseen or was never there in the first place: all those spaces from which we’ve been barred forever. Rarely has the process worked the other way, with the lost coming back into view. So it was already exciting to learn that Too Much Johnson—the filmed prologues, designed to form part of the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 revival of William Gillette’s antique farce, that supposedly perished in a fire at Orson Welles’ villa in Spain—had been discovered in a warehouse in Por-
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denone, Italy and restored by the George Eastman House. And Too Much Johnson turns out to be a much more extraordinary piece of work than might have been anticipated. The recovered reels constitute a partially edited work print, 66 minutes long, of something that was never meant to be a freestanding work, and was never completed in any case. (The play went on without the prologues and closed after a very brief run.) While the footage is broadly sequential, there are multiple takes of a number of scenes. Not precisely a film, then, but without a doubt one of the most exhilarating and moving chunks of recovered cinema imaginable. Gillette’s play was evidently a perfect touring-company vehicle, one of those hyperactive farces that once carried the tonic of silliness from one end of America to another until the movies began to erode the franchise. Welles undertook to cut the script drastically and relegate much of its elaborate backstory to the film segments, and in the process pay homage to the silent-comedy traditions of Sennett, Chaplin and Keaton.
The most fully realized portion of Too Much Johnson consists of an extended chase scene—a philandering Joseph Cotten pursued by Edgar Barrier as his mistress’s irate husband—tearing through a succession of Manhattan locations. It’s a period piece, and the straw hats, bloomers and outsized mustaches are all designed to foster the uncomplicated exhilaration of a dress-up game. From the start—in the interrupted bedroom rendezvous that sets the action going—Welles captures the look of a 1912 movie with the same precision he would bring, with much greater technical resources, to the newsreel footage in Citizen Kane. But Cotten and an impossibly young Arlene Francis are no sooner framed with Biograph theatricality than the interpolation of extreme close-ups breaks the illusion. In a moment the lovers are engaged in a sex scene that, although fully clothed, is a good deal friskier than anything one would have been likely to see on a movie screen in 1938. Then the husband intrudes, and the long chase is on.
From the outset, the mood of freewheeling improvisation gives Too Much Johnson the effect less of any commercial film of the period than of home-movie clowning by a 23-year-old novice filmmaker just having fun. Indeed, by the time we get to the final “Cuban” sequence— Cuba being represented by an upstate New York quarry with rented palm trees—the production looks to have devolved into fairly disorganized horsing around, with Cotten and Barrier flailing in a large pond while Ruth Ford and Virginia Nicolson (Welles’s wife at the time) mime screams of horror from the shore. But in an atmosphere loose enough to try anything, Welles pushes beyond pastiche or parody, and as the chase scene stretches on, it seems to become the catalyst for an astonishing succession of inventions. The re-creation of the atmosphere of old-time filmmaking may have begun in the spirit of an easily grasped joke, but it becomes something like a New Wave movie arriving quite a few years ahead of schedule. Some of these inventions are homages to traditional gags. The one-shot sequence
in which pursued and pursuers (a crowd of policemen and onlookers having now gotten into the act) continually exit and re-enter on one side street or another is a device worthy of Keaton. Even better is the business involving Barrier knocking men’s hats off, one after another (he only knows Cotten by the top half of his head), which culminates in a gorgeous shot of scattered straw boaters. The circuitous game of hide-and-seek among the baskets and barrels of Washington Market is executed with similar elegance, topped off with a burst of tumbling chaos. Some of Cotten’s daredevil moves, as he notably risks his neck lugging a ladder along a narrow ledge or leaps from one building to another only to hang precariously from the far roof, are breathtaking in the manner of the earliest movie thrills. The locations in which Welles set up these exploits hark back too, as he sought out neighborhoods, in West Washington Market (today’s Meatpacking District), Battery Park and a section of the area leveled for the construction of the World Trade Center, that evoke an (even) older New York. Too Much Johnson becomes a city movie like Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s 1921 Manhatta, reveling in architectural forms even as it exploits their comic potential. These forms are enlisted not as a means to static pictorialism but as dynamic arenas for dramas yet unstaged. It is like looking at a notebook in which Welles is sketching out visual ideas for later use, so that we recognize little pieces of The Lady from Shanghai or Othello or Mr. Arkadin taking shape amid the antics. The Wellesian compositional space— that enthralling maelstrom of sprawling angles and beckoning abysses—is already fully apparent, constructed out of the
found materials of roofs and fire escapes and alleyways, demonstrating how few resources Welles needed to create effects of such depth and complexity. He did not require Hollywood’s electric train set to turn lower Manhattan into an abstract maze. There is a piercing nostalgia for New Yorkers in this footage, since so many of these places have vanished or been utterly transformed, but the nostalgia was already there for Welles. The care with which he evokes a pre-World War I New York prefigures the sense of the past that pervades Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and goes well past the farcical limits of his source material. Some haunting shots taken on the Hudson and intended to stand in for a Cuban sunset likewise transcend the comic business at hand. Perhaps Welles lost interest in the prologues for Too Much Johnson because they were finally too fragile a vehicle to support the kind of exploration they elicited from him. But even in their unfinished state they offer the remarkable and unexpected opportunity to experience the first blossoming of his filmmaking art. Geoffrey O’Brien is a poet, essayist, historian and editor in chief of the Library of America. His most recent book hadows: is Stolen Glimpses, Captive S Writing on Film, 2002—2012 Originally published in Film Comment. Reprinted with permission of the author.
TOO MUCH JOHNSON U.S., 1938, 66m Director: Orson Welles Starring: Joseph Cotten, Virginia Nicholson, Edgar Barrier
MAGICIAN
U.S., 2014, 96 minutes Director: Chuck Workman
Even Orson Welles couldn’t have invented Orson Welles, the writer-director-actor-impresario who best characterized the phrase “larger than life.” A wunderkind (a stage star at 20, the auteur of Citizen Kane at 26) who continued working until his death at age 70, Welles left a deep impression on American theater, radio and cinema. Fragments of his first film, Too Much Johnson, play at this year’s festival. The Oscar-winning documentarian Chuck Workman revisits the Welles legend, exploring his work and life.
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 25
LOVE, DEPRESSION STYLE
BORZAGE MAKES ROMANCE WITH TRACY AND YOUNG BY JEREMY ARNOLD
Man’s Castle (1933) may on the surface be a simple story of a down-on-their-luck couple finding love amid the Great Depression, but it’s also a remarkable gem from the all-time great romantic director Frank Borzage, and it features unforgettable turns by Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young. It’s one of many movies made in the 1930s that acknowledges the dire economic straits of the era, and in this case it provides escape from harsh reality through transcendental love. How romantic for a movie to suggest that true love could lift a couple of ordinary souls out of something as devastating as the Depression! Tuxedo-clad Bill (Spencer Tracy) meets Trina (Loretta Young) on a New York park bench, and he takes her to dinner at a posh restaurant even though he has no money. He is wearing the tux, we discover, because it has an advertisement that lights up on the chest; Bill earns a couple of bucks a day just by walking around and flashing the ad. He lives in a Hooverville shanty and takes Trina in, and they soon fall in love. She cooks and cleans for him while he takes on odd jobs like walking on stilts (another advertising gig), serving court summons and the like. Bill treats Trina quite harshly, but underneath the gruff exterior he is sensitive and even fearful. Trina, innocent almost to the point of naiveté, sticks with Bill, showing that she is able to see his true, loving nature. In this sense, she is actually the stronger of the two. The word ”Depression” is never uttered in Man’s Castle, but it is there, prominently displayed. Through the other residents of the Hooverville, we get a strong taste of what life must have felt like. There’s also a comedic 30s flavor to this episodic movie, as in a scene where Bill plays baseball with a bunch of kids. Watching Spencer Tracy get chewed out by a pint-sized Little Leaguer is entertaining. More memorable, however, are images including a masterful scene of Bill presenting Trina with a new stove, something she has longed for. Her reaction is touching, and then his reaction at seeing her reaction is even more so. Whoever thought that a stove could come across as so romantic? Well, Frank Borzage, for one. The director (whose name is pronounced “Bor-ZAY-gee” with a hard “g”) was a veteran of the silent era, and the coming of sound did not diminish his gifts for creating unusually strong romantic emotions on screen. His visual approach
often consisted of isolating his lovers in the frame from the world around them—through soft focus and other means—thereby generating an intensity of romance and longing that few other filmmakers have ever realized. Frederick Lamster, author of a book on Borzage’s career, wrote about this concept as it applies to the movie’s restaurant scene: “They are in the frame together, the rest of the crowd being blurred, indistinct, and unimportant ... It is only when the two must face the consequence of their action—Bill cannot pay for the meal and must explain his plight—that the crowd comes into focus, and the couple’s world is recognized as being part of the larger world.” According to film critic Andrew Sarris, “Borzage never needed dream worlds for his suspensions of disbelief. He plunged into the real world of poverty and oppression, the world of Roosevelt and Hitler, the New Deal and the New Order, to impart an aura to his characters, not merely through soft focus and a fluid camera, but through a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity.” Man’s Castle could not have been
made as-is a year later, when the Hays Code began to be enforced. Among the “sins” on display here are unmarried cohabitation and pregnancy, a killer not being taken into custody, and, in some prints, a brief nude shot of Spencer Tracy jumping into a river. It was 33-year-old Tracy’s 19th film in three years; Young, all of 20, had already appeared in 50 movies (including a few as a child). The two stars fell in love during production, and their chemistry on screen is undeniable. The problem with their real-life romance was that Tracy was married, and both he and Young were Catholic. He wouldn’t divorce his wife; she was beset by guilt. The relationship was public knowledge and lasted about a year. Ultimately, Young broke it off in a heartfelt letter; he never mentioned it or called her back, and that was that. Two years later, Young had a passionate romance with Clark Gable that resulted in the birth of an illegitimate daughter. Tracy, of course, eventually started a lifelong affair with Katharine Hepburn, but his deep affection for Young never faded. Decades later, after Tracy’s death, his daughter Susan found Young’s breakup letter in her father’s things. It was one
of only three letters he had kept, and even though it was signed simply, “Me,” Susan knew it must have been from Young, considering how her father had talked about her over the years. She returned the letter to Young, who was touched beyond worlds. She had considered Tracy the great love of her life , and perhaps Tracy had felt the same way. Jeremy Arnold is an author, film historian, award-winning filmmaker who has written more 500 articles and reviews for the Turner Classic Movies website. He is the author of Lawrence of Arabia: The 50th Anniversary. Reprinted with permission of Turner Classic Movies.
MAN’S CASTLE U.S., 1933, 75m Director: Frank Borzage Cinematography: Joseph August Starring: Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young Presented by: Kim Morgan and Guy Maddin
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 27
Off the Map
L O S T W O R K S F R O M A M E R I C A’ S G R E AT E S T U N S U N G D I R E C T O R BY SCOTT FOUNDAS
It’s fitting that the remarkable work of Carroll Ballard is being honored in Telluride in the same year as Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Ballard and Coppola were classmates at the UCLA film school, and Coppola produced Ballard’s Oscar-winning debut feature, The Black Stallion, a movie whose production and editing were, in their own ways, as Sisyphean as those of Apocalypse itself. Ballard was already 42 years old—“a little long in the tooth for a wunderkind,” the critic Sheila Benson observed in an otherwise admiring profile—and he had spent the decades between UCLA and Stallion in steady employ as a director of short- and medium-length documentaries and educational films made for a wide variety of employers ranging from the U.S. Information Agency to the Pasadena Humane Society. That may sound like a forlorn task, but Ballard’s films are anything but, taking their seemingly mundane assignments and transforming them into wondrous, inspired experiments in sound and light, whether Ballard is immersing us in the everyday life of swine on a farm (the appropriately titled Pigs!)
or a housecat navigating the gauntlet of suburbia (The Perils of Priscilla). But of all Ballard’s pre-Stallion work, the most remarkable is Seems Like Only Yesterday, a 45-minute portrait of a dozen elderly Los Angeles residents who, in one lifetime, have born witness to the remarkable evolution of the city from a veritable one-horse town to a space-age metropolis. Unseen in many years, now (along with the other films in this program) newly restored, it is a masterpiece awaiting rediscovery and due celebration. SCOTT FOUNDAS: Let’s start by
talking about Seems Like Only Yesterday, since it’s the centerpiece of this program, and a film that’s barely been shown since it was first made. CARROLL BALLARD: It was just a very odd film. It was made for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I got a grant to do it, and when they saw it, they just kind of froze up. They felt there were so many problems for them in it, the main one being all the copyrighted material that’s in the film. They were ready to take me to court over it, they were so upset. And I felt that if you took that stuff out, you’d lose the meaning of the film. So they just deep-sixed it, and
when I tried to get back the negative, it had disappeared from the lab. We never knew what happened. What we see now is just what’s left over from the old work print that I had, which we digitized. Where did you find your subjects? The State of California, at the time of the Bicentennial, made a list of all the oldest people living in California, and we got hold of that list and called these people. Three or four of them were just people who I knew. One of them was my own grandfather—he’s the guy who talks about the Chinese building the railroad. Then there was a next-door neighbor of mine—she’s the old chorus girl. What it all came down to was that I had $10,000, which meant 24 rolls of film. That gave me two rolls of film to interview each person. Once I’d talked to the people on the phone, I would just go there with the camera and a sound recorder, and I had a wire hooked up that allowed me to turn them on remotely. I would sit down near the people, so it wasn’t somebody across the room talking at them, and when I thought they were about to say something important, I would turn on the equipment. Of course, I lost probably half of what happened, but I did manage to get a few things.
How did you arrive at the concept of intercutting the interviews with these images of the L.A. freeways, billboards and TV commercials? I had gone out to visit my grandfather when I was in college, and he started talking about when he first came to L.A. He was 15 years old, he was living in Chicago, he had tuberculosis and he’d been told he had six months to live. So he stole money from his father, and he hopped on the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had just been completed. He talked about the town, how it was about three blocks long, and they piled up ashes across the street so women could walk across when it was raining and not get their skirts dirty. All kinds of stuff. He described this place that he knew when he was 15 years old, and now it was 15 million people and all these cars. This incredible change happened in his lifetime! So I just had that in my mind. Is there a way I could actually make a film about this? Was it possible to make it something people could understand on a visceral level? I just simply reached at whatever realities I thought were the strongest in L.A. at the time, and that included traffic, the omnipresent television playing all the time, and the endless
RODEO
28 • FW2014 • G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M •
Personal Appearance & Trunk Show
day, because it never gets to be night in L.A. The lights are always on. You’ve said that someone who was very helpful to you in the editing of the film was Dennis Jakob, whom Coppola also credits with helping him to create the ending of Apocalypse Now. Francis and I went to UCLA together, and at that time the enfant terrible of the film department was Dennis Jakob. He was making a Civil War movie that was the biggest thing the department had ever done. We all got to know him, and over the years both Francis and I have hired Dennis to work on various films, because he’s such a fount of ideas. Two of the films in this program, Pigs! and The Perils of Priscilla, are ostensible educational films that transcend those somewhat drearysounding parameters. With Pigs! the idea was that we could make a colorful little movie about pigs, and the kids might find it interesting and entertaining. With Priscilla, the money became available because the Pasadena Humane Society wanted to have a film made about animal regulation. So I came up with the idea of making a film
PIGS!
about the cat that gets lost and terrible things happen to him. He ends up in the pound, but you don’t know that. The concept of the film, for me, was to create the desire to learn something. That seemed a reasonable way to make an educational film, because the hardest thing is to motivate kids to learn. W.C. Fields famously advised against working with children and animals, but you’ve made a whole career out of exactly that. I grew up back in the Sierras. I’m a hillbilly. That’s the world I grew up in. I had a great childhood and it’s been kind of downhill ever since and that has upset me. Those feelings find their escape in some of the films I’ve made.
SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY U.S., 1971, 45m Director: Carroll Ballard Program includes: PERILS OF PRISCILLA (1969, 17m) PIGS! (1965, 11m) RODEO (1969, 20m) and CRYSTALIZATION (1974,10m) Carroll Ballard in person
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DARK HORSE
LIONEL BARRYMORE, JUNE LANG AND FREDERIC MARCH IN ‘THE ROAD TO GLORY’
Lost Glory
A FORGOTTEN FILM BY AN ESSENTIAL DIRECTOR BY TODD MCCARTHY
None of the many critical champions of Howard Hawks have ever included his 1935 World War I drama The Road to Glory among the director’s major films. Some, including Robin Wood and Gerald Mast, scarcely mention the film at all, despite the involvement of such important collaborators as screenwriter William Faulkner and cinematographer Gregg Toland. Respectfully, if unenthusiastically, received in its time, the film then essentially vanished from sight and mind, leaving it to Telluride audiences this year to make a fresh reassessment and decide if its neglect is undeserved, as this year’s guest artistic directors Guy Maddin and Kim Morgan strongly suggest. Made just before the director launched upon his decade-plus run of
sensationally good films, The Road to Glory came into being because Darryl F. Zanuck, production chief at the newly born 20th Century Fox, had bought the American rights to a big 1932 French film about World War I, Raymond Bernard’s Les Croix de Bois (Wooden Crosses), not to release it but to use its massive battle scenes in a Hollywood adaptation. As Toland worked hard—and successfully—to match his work to the nocturnal blacks of the French epic, Hawks once again mined the vein of moody fatalism that marked his previous Great War dramas, The Dawn Patrol (1930) and the last section of Today We Live (1933); the director spoke of them as siblings, with Patrol his flying film and Glory his trench film. They are not anti (or pro)-war, but rather a picture of men waiting to die who will,
in turn, be replaced by more men destined for the same fate. While what might be the film’s dramatic highlight—the tension that builds among the French soldiers as they realize that the Germans are tunneling beneath to blow them up—is a direct lift from the French original, for Hawks watchers there are striking elements of note: The older man/younger man/young woman dynamic had recently been used in Tiger Shark (1932); the climactic suicidal mission familiar from Today We Live and Ceiling Zero (1936); an unusual indulgence in symbolism and religious motifs; and Bacall-like frissons in the appearance of 19-year-old beauty June Lang, whose career soon took an irreversible dive upon her marriage to Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli. And then there is leading man Fredric March. He has far from
his best role here, and the overall grimness of the piece channels the performances toward the theatrical. But this once-hallowed actor has fallen into an undeserved state of neglect from which he should be rescued by connoisseurs of first-rate film acting. Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, is author of numerous books including Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood.
THE ROAD TO GLORY U.S., 1936, 103m Director: Howard Hawks Starring: Fredric March, Warner Baxter and Lionel Barrymore Presented by: Kim Morgan and Guy Maddin
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Tumbling Dice
F R I E N D S H I P A N D G A M B L I N G I N A LT M A N ’ S L O S T C L A S S I C
BY KIM MORGAN
When Robert Altman made a picture about gambling, he did not hit you over the head with one of the most obvious and easiest ways to sap “meaning” out of a movie—the overdrawn, bathos-ridden addiction story. The sadness of lost lives, lost money, destroyed relationships, underscored, twice, in ink. But he did not make it all Rat Pack glamour, either. The complexity and sorrow are all there, but Altman allowed these feelings and concerns to creep up on you as you observe, laugh and, in the end, feel a little blue for two characters you grow to love. There is a melancholy to winning and Altman got that. But there is also a whole lot of fun in a life unfettered, especially when you’ve just met an exciting new friend. He got that too. There is a reason people do things like gamble excessively—it can be thrilling tossing the dice, staying out all night and drinking in bars where some women do not even bother to wear pants. How can we not get it? And how can we not, with Elliot Gould and George Segal as our guides? Paired with the wise words within screenwriter
Joseph Walsh’s autobiographical screenplay, based on his own gambling predilection, Altman crafted one of those movies so special it’s hard to even write about. It’s just so alive and breathing and real and charming and sad. Segal, as magazine writer Bill Denny, bonds with Gould’s Charlie Waters, the more experienced gambler. It is something like a love affair. Their relationship is one of camaraderie, but Altman doesn’t let that become cliché. These men have mutual mysteries. They are their own men. Gould is the fast-talking, charming rouge; Segal is the more pensive, lonely and wary of the two. Their friendship always contains an edge— and since the movie feels so real and unexpected, you are never sure what that precipice entails. Bill finds himself circling further and further into a money pit, which leads to a trip to Reno. At a game in which former world champion Amarillo Slim (who plays himself) is one of the participants, Bill wins and wins and wins and … what does that do for him? You have to think about it. And wonder if he will be OK. And if these two guys will ever be friends again.
In reviewing Karl Reisz’s The Gambler (written by another gambling enthusiast and addict James Toback), Pauline Kael made a point of mentioning California Split’s wonderful inclusiveness: “The big difference is … not just that Altman’s allusiveness is vastly entertaining while The Gambler seeks to impress us, but that California Split invites us into the world of its characters, while The Gambler hands us a wrapped package and closes us out.” Walsh fought to maintain his voice every step of the way. The performances have such freshness that no matter how many times you watch the movie, you feel a little disarmed. On top of that, Altman cast many real-life addicts as extras, carpeting the movie wall-to-wall with livedin faces. Gould and Segal are central, but everyone has a part, and even, at times, a voice, in California Split. Altman places us in this unbalanced world of gambling addicts and eventual friends, with their varied adventures, games, female friends (or prostitutes), goons, oranges and conversations—conversations that veer from betting on the names of all seven dwarfs (“Dumbo wasn’t in that cast?”) to the fantastic statement, “Everybody’s named Barbara.”
It all comes together so naturally that, at times, you cannot believe you are watching a movie. And yet, it doesn’t feel like a documentary or something so real that you could view it all on your next jaunt to Reno. It’s pure Altman. He is working in a universe that knows it is human, knows it is cinematic and knows it is meaningful, but is not going to tell you what to think or even what it all means. You must decide that for yourself. Along the way, you spend time with two effortlessly natural actors playing such different men, but ones who give you so much fun that when you feel the movie’s underlying sadness, it makes it all the more aching; all the more human, all the more bittersweet. And utterly inimitable. Kim Morgan and Guy Maddin are the 2014 Telluride Film Festival Guest Directors. CALIFORNIA SPLIT U.S., 1974, 108m Director: Robert Altman Starring: George Segal, Elliott Gould and Ann Prentiss Shown in an uncut version.
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Kitchen-Sink Pulp BY KIM MORGAN
The title is deceptive because, really, Beverly Michaels is not wicked; she is just sick of it all. That whole bit about being a woman in this life, unmarried, down on your luck and, oh, sure, gorgeous, but how far will that lead you? You have seen and heard it all: the thrill or disgust of a catcall (depending on the day, or the man), the joy of one’s own beauty commingling with the bitterness that comes when people think that is all you are made of, the creep next door who will not leave you alone, because, in a moment of desperation, you were nice to him once; all of those day-to-day indignities are so viscerally felt when Michaels just slumps across a room. That room being her dingy dive in a boarding house, the type of place her landlady hollers is “respectable” (which always means it’s not). It’s the dump where she reads her horoscope, drinks beer and dreams of her new love (and she really does love him), Richard Egan. There is only one problem: Egan’s wife. White-clad drifter Michaels (always white— Michaels tops Lana’s lily-clad faux purity in Postman with her getups) sashays into town and nabs a job as the hot waitress at an establishment run by hunky Egan, but owned by his wife, a blowsy and sad drunk (a terrific Evelyn Scott). What to do? Probably something pretty crooked, but surprisingly, when viewed against other devious noir couples, not as evil as you’d imagine. Russell Rouse (New York Confidential, The Oscar) directs this B-grade pulp with A-plus panache. He allows his actors to take over their sordid surroundings with such power that you feel for them, particularly Michaels. The characters might be over-drawn, but are, in fact, very real—so real they are almost freaks. Michaels is not just leggy; she’s six feet tall. Neighborly creep Percy Helton is such a letch he’s a bona fide hunchback. Egan is so obnoxiously handsome, he has managed to grow a dimple between his eyes. Rouse crafts a dirty jewel with
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T e l l u r i d e
A H
F i l m
H A A G A L L E R Y O P E N I N G
this one, a masterpiece that not only speaks vividly of human nature but also understands women, from the so-called floozies to the sad carping drunks (who often carp for good reason). It should be taught in every Women’s Studies class on every college campus in America.
WICKED WOMAN U.S., 1953, 77m Director: Russell Rouse Starring: Beverly Michaels, Richard Egan and Percy Helton Presented by: Kim Morgan and Guy Maddin
c l o s e u p A E L A B . M O R G A N D R A w I N G s
&
P H O t O G R A P H Y
Au g u s t 2 8 - s e p te m b e r 1
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1 1 a m to 8 p m
o p e n i n g r e ce p t i o n | Th u r s d ay, Au g u s t 2 8 f ro m 6 - 8 p m ah haa school for the arts 300 south townsend | 970.728.3886 www.ahhaa.org
Beyond Wildest Dreams
PA O L O C H E R C H I U S A I ’ S FAV O R I T E D I S C O V E R Y BY JASON SILVERMAN
It took just 12 minutes for Paolo Cherchi Usai, Telluride’s resident curator and a legendary film preservationist, to fall deeply, irrevocably in love. The lucky film? A 1912 silent short, Land Beyond the Sunset. FILM WATCH: I understand this film
is especially important to you as a film lover and as a preservationist. PAOLO CHERCHI USAI: Let me set the scene. I am a young curator, just arrived at the George Eastman House. It was a treasure trove—it has one of the largest collections on the world, thousands of titles. So I start with the classics: some Stroheim, Swedish films, German films. Sometimes Jim Card, the founding curator, would invite me to his private theater where he’d show 16mm prints. I’m seeing as much as I can. It was a time when I could stay around the clock. I could spend all night, and I did, greedily going through film after film on the Steenbeck. My colleagues realized how much I am into silent film, how hungry I was for discovery, and one of the curatorial assistants, Robin Bolger, says, “You’ve got to see this film. Jim showed it to me and it is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen.” It was called The Land Beyond the Sunset. What was your response? I asked, who directed? Harold Shaw. Never
heard of him. Who produced? Edison. Well, Edison wasn’t known for producing quality films. But since it was a one-reel film, why not? I pulled the 35mm film and started running it, and within minutes, there were tears going down my cheeks. What was it about the film that you connected with? The utter beauty, perfection, humility. It was a completely unknown anonymous masterwork—it struck me like a thunderbolt. It was proof that cinematic miracles happen, even from people who haven’t made great films before and might not again. It was also proof that there is only one way to make discoveries: to watch as much as you can, without listening to the canon, without studying the textbook, and by listening to your independent judgment. There may be a masterpiece around the corner. You need to remain open to the magical coincidences. As François Truffaut said, “You must deserve coincidences.” Did you discover more about the film’s origins? No. I looked at the early literature, and there is no mention of the film at all. For some reason, Eastman had the original camera negative. It was in beautiful shape, other than a few feet of degradation. Why was it there? How did James find it? Those early preservationists didn’t take notes of the
provenance of the films. They had other priorities. But it struck a chord for James as well. I didn’t agree with him on a variety of levels, but that film bonded me with him at a deep level.
put together a program of early shorts. Sight and Sound asked me to participate in their list of greatest films. I included it in my best 10. I didn’t go for Vertigo or Citizen Kane.
I’d imagine most short films from that era would now have disappeared. Somehow, this one survived. For the Edison company, this would have been a little film like many others, of no major consequence, with its own release, a brief description in the trade journals, and then it would have disappeared, eclipsed in the ocean of the thousands of films that were being made.
You’ve also gotten some significant musicians to accompany it. The Belgian experimental composer Wim Mertens embraced it and gave a live performance that included the film and then included the song on a CD. Before Laurie Anderson was the guest director at Telluride, she visited Eastman to look at our collection. She didn’t pick the film for the festival, but asked for a copy, so she could perform with it in New York City. She and Brian Eno performed with the film.
The film itself is startling. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but the ending is very provocative. The way the film is edited—it goes back and forth between the grim reality of a social issues drama, the realm of fantasy and fairy tale, into the deep psychology of a child. And then the ending … we probably shouldn’t give it away. But I’ve never seen what I saw there since.
So is the film finally on the way to immortality? Will The Land Beyond the Sunset ever become iconic like Un Chien Andalou? In a way it doesn’t matter. I would give up many iconic films for those 12 minutes that make my heart beat faster every time I see it, or even think about it.
In the years since you first saw Land Beyond the Sunset, you’ve been an evangelist for it. It’s been a slow, almost subliminal campaign. I would show it to as many people as I could, I didn’t miss an opportunity to show it—at Pordenone, at Eastman, whenever I
PORDENONE PRESENTS: THE LAND BEYOND THE SUNSET U.S., 1912, 12m Director: Harold M. Shaw Plays after Children of No Importance
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Child Welfare
A L O S T H U M A N I TA R I A N M A S T E R P I E C E F R O M T H E 1 9 2 0 S BY ROLF AURICH AND WOLFGANG JACOBSEN
Gerard Lamprecht’s concern for children can be seen and understood in many of his films. Die Unehelichen (Children of No Importance), produced in 1926, is based on an official report of the Association for the Protection of Children against Exploitation and Abuse. Welfare documentation shows how sensitively Lamprecht approached his young actors, and how he was able to avoid overburdening them, instead respecting their childish seriousness. “It’s unheard of, what he gets out of the children,” enthused Heinz Michaelis in the left-wing Die Welt am Abend. “Never, not even in America, the land of child stars, has a film director immersed himself so lovingly in the psyche of the child and created so lovingly from it. These children move with such naturalness that one can here speak of a transfiguration, that psychological process in which the actor is completely possessed by the figure being played, a grace that can belong only to the most naïve or to the most sensitive people, and which one has seen so far in films to the greatest effect in Jackie Coogan and Asta Nielsen.” Lamprecht himself provided a summary of its content: “Three illegitimate children, 4-year-old Frieda, 6-year-old Lotte, and 13-year-old Peter, are in foster care with a couple named Zielke. Zielke, a notorious drinker, maltreats the children; his wife exploits them. When the police step in, it is too late. Lotte has succumbed to a heavy cold. Frieda is taken to a miller’s family, where she will have it good, and Peter is adopted by a woman who takes pity on him. One day his father, who had never concerned himself with him, shows up—a bargeman who can now use a young worker. It is not the hard work that causes Peter to flee, but the fear that, under the influence of alcohol, his father will turn into another Zielke. Peter is sought by the police, but is brought back by his benefactress. She must deliver him to his tough father. Only when Peter’s desperation sends him into the water does the bargeman realize that he cannot keep him and he lets the rescued child go.” This may read like naïve pulp fiction, and yet it was very near to the director’s heart. Lamprecht told Gero Gandert that he came upon the material because
his mother’s house, and especially her kitchen, was always full of little children. The family lived on Schönhauser Allee, in a typical Berlin neighborhood, and the children were always hungry. Apart from that, he learned from his parents, “very early on, that life is not the way one read about it in children’s books. Rather, I learned to know realism, and my clever parents, especially my mother, gave me answers about this early on. If I read stories or novels in which the bad, rather than the good, won, then I was told, yes, that’s what life is like, one has to get used to it. Good is not always rewarded—and that left its mark already very early.” He started looking at things more closely; he became, as he said “clairaudient.” He felt sorry for people “who flogged themselves to death and still had no success, like it said in the children’s books. A new world … intruded into the world I had painted for myself as a child.” And he extended this early childhood experience into his later life and his films.
“Often, in my films, this children’s world still came through, and I then was happy to do what I could in order to feel something like compensatory justice.” In this way, films became for Lamprecht a social corrective, a means “of exposing the social damages of our age,” as a critic of Montag, the Monday edition of the national Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, put it. At least that’s what Lamprecht may have thought. The education reformer and psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld, one of the founders of modern research into youth, took on the film in the cultural periodical Das Tagebuch. Bernfeld claimed to have found nothing but a gulf between reality and film, stating that it was “a moving entertainment” that “extorts tears without obligation, that is, aesthetic tears, from the misfortune of a few children.” The film campaigns for “the pernicious illusion of education for youth welfare.” However, Bernfeld continued, “The numbers of these children are so frighteningly great that it would never be possible to allocate all of them to good parents.”
Lamprecht admitted he was never “a socially critical person.” He made his films based on “the way I really was, and didn’t force myself in order to get the effect: Aha, he’s attacking society.” Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen have written and edited numerous books on German and international cinema, including Fritz Lang: Life and Work and Otto Preminger. They are editors of the Film & Script series on the history of German film criticism. Originally published in the catalogue of the Giornate del Cinema Muto. Reprinted with permission.
CHILDREN OF NO IMPORTANCE Germany, 1926 Featuring a live original score performed by Donald Sosin Introduced by: Paolo Cherchi Usai Director: Gerard Lamprecht
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PRESENTING SPONSOR
MacLean’s Machismo
BURTON AND EASTWOOD IN A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC machine-gunning and doing all that the boys are doing. MB: She’s a force of nature. She’s a goddess. She’s gorgeous, and she has this one-of-a-kind voice. There’s nothing stereotypical about her. Even when she’s blowing people away, and acting like one of the guys—though there is a great kissing scene—she adds a dimension just by being her. It’s amazing we even notice her, as she is given no character or lines to play. But then you have Burton, whose voice is so important to the success of the film. GD: It is definitely commanding. It’s
“Eastwood, do this; Eastwood, do that.” Eastwood becomes his bitch. MB: Absolutely! I think it’s important to mention that the action director was Yakima Canutt, who did the action scenes for the chariot race in Ben Hur, and a lot of early Westerns, like Stagecoach. His skills bring a lot to the table.
MARY URE AND CLINT EASTWOOD
While talking shop at the Telluride airport after the 2013 festival, Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, and Geoff Dyer, acclaimed writer and former Telluride Film Festival guest director, realized they shared an obsession: the 1968 adventure film Where Eagles Dare, directed by Brian Hutton. They’ll co-present the film at this year’s festival. GEOFF DYER: When you were born,
Michael?
MICHAEL BARKER: 1954. GD: I was born in 1958, the exact
right demographic for this movie. I wonder if you were maybe a few years too old—odd though that may sound in a conversation between two guys with a combined age of 110! It was an adventure movie made for kids. Where did you first see it? MB: I was in Dallas, Texas, going to high school, in the ninth grade. I was 14, and I saw it on a huge screen. I was crazy for the Alistair MacLean books. And when I saw the movie it was, wow, those books suddenly came alive for me. Did you know he wrote the screenplay before he wrote the novel?
GD: Yes, I did. Like you, I was al-
ready an Alistair MacLean nut. In fact, his name on the poster was more of a lure to me than Clint Eastwood or Richard Burton. MB: Not for me! Clint Eastwood was the king of cool for me, from Rawhide to the Fistful of Dollars trilogy. Where Eagles Dare was the first time I’d seen him not being a cowboy. Boy, did he have a screen presence! That’s pretty much all he had here, as I think he has only maybe two lines in the entire movie. GD: Initially in the script, he had a lot
more lines. They decided that Richard Burton, with that famous voice, would be better doing the dialogue. And Burton said that Clint, with what he called his “dynamic lethargy,” would be better off as a silent presence. MB: I saw it five times in two weeks. It was the perfect movie for a kid. Technically, it was unbelievable. The score was overpowering. Every aspect of the film was big. A complete world filled with danger, but a boy’s life kind of danger. There is none of that Dirty Dozen nastiness or brutality here. The action scenes are awesome. It was before CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), and you real-
ly felt these guys were hanging from that cable car over those massive mountains. GD: We are of the generation that doesn’t like CGI. Though it’s more seamless—we just don’t like its inherent unreality. You know, I can see other movies from that era and enjoy them, even with the knowledge that they are a bit crap. With this movie, I’m still caught up in it and convinced of its greatness, even at my advanced age. Though, of course I’m quite youthful compared to you. MB: Yes, you are (laughs). What I find remarkable is the screenplay. It has all of the intricacies, the twists and turns, all of the richness, as a novel does. It takes its time, like the novel. Even today, when you see it—it’s one of the few DVDs that remain near my TV set—it has the surprises that it totally earns. GD: What’s different is that there is no romantic interest in his novels. He felt it would slow them up. But in this movie: well, there are babes! It looks ahead to more recent thrillers, where the role of the women is no longer to scream and wait to be rescued by the men. Mary Ure—she’s
GD: I loved it when, in those cowboy movies, a bandit would jump from a horse to a train. The famous cable car sequence is very much in that tradition. MB: I hope to watch it in Telluride with the mountain behind it, and the cable car going up. This could be the most memorable screening in the life of this film. I just hope I don’t see someone dangling from one of those cable cars behind that outdoor screen under the stars. GD: Maybe they should show it at
the cinema at the top of the mountain. And you and I should ride atop the cable car, not in it. MB: Let’s do it. It will be one of those Telluride moments one never forgets. Interview by Jason Silverman
WHERE EAGLES DARE U.S., 1968, 158m Director: Brian G. Hutton Writer: Alistair MacLean Starring: Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and Mary Ure
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Generations of Terror BY JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER
A companion piece to his shattering The Act of Killing (Telluride 2012), which includes the testimonies of perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide, Joshua Oppenheimer’s new documentary follows the story of a family of survivors who discover who killed their son. Oppenheimer describes the genesis of the film, and the dangers the filmmaking posed to the subjects who agreed to participate. I first went to Indonesia in 2001 to help oil palm plantation workers make a film documenting and dramatizing their struggle to organize a union, in the aftermath of the U.S.-supported Suharto dictatorship, under which unions were illegal. In the remote plantation villages of North Sumatra, one could hardly perceive that military rule had officially ended three years earlier. The conditions I encountered were deplorable. Women working on the plantation were forced to spray an herbicide with no protective clothing. The mist would enter their lungs and then their bloodstreams, destroying their liver tissue. The women would fall ill, and many would die in their 40s. When they protested their conditions, the Belgianowned company would hire paramilitary thugs to threaten them and sometimes physically attack them. Fear was the biggest obstacle they faced in organizing a union. The Belgian company could get away with poisoning its employees because the workers were afraid. I quickly learned the source of this fear: the plantation workers had a large and active union until 1965, when their parents and grandparents were accused of being “communist sympathizers” (simply for being in the union), and put into concentration camps, exploited as slave labor, and ultimately murdered by the army and civilian death squads. In 2001, the killers not only enjoyed complete impunity; they and their protégés still dominated all levels of government, from the plantation village to the parliament. Survivors lived in fear that the massacres could happen again at any time. After we completed the film (The Globalization Tapes, 2002), the survivors asked us to return as quickly as possible to make another film about the source of their fear—that is, a film about what it’s like for survivors to live surrounded by the men who murdered their loved ones, still in positions of power. We returned almost immediately, in early 2003, and began investigating one 1965 murder that the plantation workers spoke of frequently. The victim’s name was Ramli, and his name was used almost as a synonym for the killings in general. I
came to understand the reason this particular murder was so often discussed: there were witnesses. It was undeniable. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of victims who disappeared at night from concentration camps, Ramli’s death was public. There were witnesses to his final moments, and the killers left his body in the oil palm plantation, less than two miles from his parents’ home. Years later, the family was able surreptitiously to erect a gravestone, though they could only visit the grave in secret. Survivors and ordinary Indonesians alike would talk about Ramli, I think, because his fate was grim evidence as to what happened to all the others and to the nation as a whole. His death verified for the villagers the horrors that the military regime threatened them into pretending had never occurred, yet threatened to unleash again. And so, when I returned in early 2003, it was inevitable that Ramli’s case would come up often. The plantation workers quickly sought out his family, introducing me to Ramli’s dignified mother, Rohani; his ancient but playful father, Rukun; his
siblings—including the youngest, Adi, an optician, born after the killings. Rohani thought of Adi as a replacement for Ramli. She had Adi so she could continue to live, and Adi has lived with that burden his whole life. Like children of survivors all across Indonesia, Adi grew up in a family officially designated politically unclean, impoverished by decades of extortion by local military officials, and traumatized by the genocide. Because Adi was born after the killings, he had courage and was not afraid to speak out, to demand answers. He gravitated to my filmmaking, I think, as a way of understanding what his family had been through, a way of expressing and overcoming a terror everybody around him had been too afraid to acknowledge. I befriended Adi at once, and together we began gathering other survivors’ families in the region. They would come together, tell stories, and we would film. For many, it was the first time they had publicly spoken about what happened. On one occasion, a survivor arrived at Ramli’s parents’ home, trembling with fear, terrified that if the police discovered what we were doing, she would be arrested, forced
into slave labor, as she had been throughout the years of dictatorship. Yet she came because she was determined to testify. Each time a motorcycle or car would pass, we would stop filming, hiding what equipment we could. Subject to decades of economic apartheid, survivors rarely could afford more than a bicycle, so the sound of a motor meant an outsider was passing. The army, which is stationed in every village in Indonesia, quickly found out what we were doing and threatened the survivors, including Adi’s siblings, to keep them from participating in the film. The survivors urged me, “Before you give up and go home, try to film the perpetrators. They may tell you how they killed our relatives.” I did not know if it was safe to approach the killers, but when I did approach them, I found all of them to be boastful, immediately recounting the grisly details of the killings, often with smiles on their faces, in front of their families, even their small grandchildren. In this contrast between survivors forced into silence and perpetrators boastfully recounting stories far more incriminating than anything the survivors could have told, I felt I’d wandered into Germany 40
T R A C I N G A M U R D E R , A N D I T S D E C A D E S - L O N G A F T E R M AT H
years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power. When I showed this material back to those survivors who wanted to see it, including to Adi and Ramli’s other siblings, everybody said, more or less: “You are on to something terribly important. Keep filming the perpetrators, because anybody who sees this will be forced to acknowledge the rotten heart of the regime the killers have built.” From that point on, I felt entrusted by the survivors and human rights community to do a work that they could not safely do themselves: filming the perpetrators. Every perpetrator I met was boastful. All of them would invite me to the places where they killed and launch into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed. They would complain afterwards that they had not thought to bring along a machete to use as a prop or a friend to play a victim. One day, early in this process, I met the leader of the death squad on the plantation where we had made The Globalization Tapes. He and a fellow executioner invited me to a clearing on the banks of Snake River, a spot where he had helped murder 10,500 people.
Suddenly, I realized he was telling me how he had killed Ramli. I had stumbled across one of Ramli’s killers. I told Adi about this encounter, and he and other family members asked to see the footage. That was how they learned the details of Ramli’s death. For the next two years, from 20032005, I filmed every perpetrator I could find across North Sumatra, working from death squad to death squad, up the chain of command, from the countryside to the city. Anwar Congo, the man who would become the main character in The Act of Killing, was the 41st perpetrator I filmed. I spent the next five years shooting The Act of Killing, and throughout the process Adi would ask to see material we were filming. He would watch as much as I could find time to show him. He was transfixed. Perpetrators in film normally deny their atrocities (or apologize for them), because by the time filmmakers reach them they have been removed from power, and their actions condemned and expiated. Here, I was filming perpetrators of genocide who won, who built a regime of terror founded on the celebration of genocide, and who remained in power. They
have not been forced to admit what they did was wrong. It is in this sense that The Act of Killing is not a documentary about a genocide 50 years ago. It is an exposé of a present-day regime of fear. The film is not a historical narrative. It is a film about history itself, about the lies victors tell to justify their actions, and the effects of those lies; about an unresolved traumatic past that continues to haunt the present. I knew from the start of my journey that there was another, equally urgent film to make, also about the present. The Act of Killing is haunted by the absent victims— the dead. Almost every painful passage culminates abruptly in a haunted and silent tableau, an empty, often ruined landscape, inhabited by a single lost, lonely figure. Time stops. There is a rupture in the film’s point of view, an abrupt shift to silence, a commemoration of the dead and the lives pointlessly destroyed. I knew that I would make another film, one where we step into those haunted spaces and feel viscerally what it is like for the survivors forced to live there, forced to build lives under the watchful eyes of the men who murdered their loved ones and remain powerful. That film is The Look of Silence.
Apart from the older footage from 2003-2005 that Adi watches, we shot The Look of Silence in 2012, after editing The Act of Killing but before releasing it, after which I knew I could no longer safely return to Indonesia. We worked closely with Adi and his parents, who had become, along with my anonymous Indonesian crew, like an extended family to me. Adi spent years studying footage of perpetrators. He would react with shock, sadness, outrage. He wanted to make sense of that experience. Meanwhile, his children were in school, being taught that what had happened to them—enslavement, torture, murder, decades of political apartheid— all of this was their fault, instilling them and other survivors’ children with shame. Adi was deeply affected—and angered— by the boasting of the perpetrators, his parents’ trauma and fear, the brainwashing of his children. Rather than pick up where we left off in 2003, gathering survivors together to recount their experiences, Adi wanted to meet the men involved with his brother’s murder. By introducing himself to them as the brother of their victim, he hoped they would be forced to acknowledge that they killed human beings. For a victim to confront a perpetrator in Indonesia is all but unimaginable—as one can see from The Act of Killing. Indeed, I cannot think of any film, from anywhere, where victims confront perpetrators while the perpetrators still hold power. The confrontations were dangerous. When we’d meet more powerful perpetrators, we would bring only Adi and my Danish crew, cinematographer Lars Skree and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen. Adi would come with no ID card. We would empty all numbers from our telephones, and bring a second car we could switch to minutes after leaving, making it harder for the perpetrators to send police or thugs to follow us. But none of the confrontations ended violently, largely due to Adi’s patience and empathy, and the fact that the perpetrators were not quite sure how to react to us, because they’d known me from years before. Still, the confrontations were tense. Again and again, Adi says the unsayable, leaving the audience to feel what it is like to live as a survivor, and to perceive the contours of an oppressive silence borne of fear. Joshua Oppenheimer is the Oscarnominated director of The Act of Killing.
THE LOOK OF SILENCE Denmark, 2014, 90m Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 41
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ROBERT SILVERS, EDITOR OF ‘THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS’
The Review, Reviewed
S C O R S E S E E X P L O R E S A L I T E R A RY I N S T I T U T I O N BY RACHEL COOKE
Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, once told a journalist rather wistfully that he doesn’t have “a very full sense of time.” What he meant was that he is one of those rare people for whom the passing of the years is almost an irrelevance; the decades don’t pile up behind him, burdensome and melancholy, for the simple reason that he’s apt only to look forward. Silvers, who is 84, has been at the helm of the NYRB, the paper he helped to found, for more than 50 years and yet every issue—every article—remains as important to him as the last. His engine is, and has always been, a compulsive curiosity, and it just so happens that his job—what an amazing piece of luck—can take him from the West Bank to cutting-edge developments in neuroscience to the Booker prize in the course of a single, head-spinning morning. But perhaps this quirk of character applies to timekeeping in the more usual sense, too. In New York, people tell me in slightly awed tones that Silvers works such long hours that he has two assis-
tants, one to work the day shift, the other to stay on late into the evening. There is talk of a bed he reputedly keeps in a cupboard, and a newspaper cutting reveals that he has been known to telephone his writers with queries — “On column six of the third galley, there’s a dangling modifier”— on Christmas Day. When I meet him, he is bearing what we might call the sacred texts around which the religion of the NYRB is built: a facsimile of the first edition in which its editors announced their intention not to waste space on reviews of books “which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud,” and a copy of the famous piece—“The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which appeared in Harper’s in October 1959—by Elizabeth Hardwick, a critic and novelist, which was its (the NYRB’s) inspiration. In one paragraph she calls the New York Times Book Review a “provincial literary journal” full of “flat praise and faint dissension” and “light, little article[s].” “Sometimes,” Silvers says, “I say to
myself: is this a light, little article we’re doing?” There is surely no danger of that. In a recent issue of the NYRB, you will find Claire Messud on Albert Camus, Joyce Carol Oates on Larry McMurtry, John Banville on Edward St Aubyn, Ahmed Rashid on America in Afghanistan and an essay on Ukraine by Anatol Lieven. The first issue included pieces by Auden, John Berryman, Mailer, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
The paper that in the 60s famously ran a cover featuring a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail still reserves the right to question the activities of Israel and to read congressional reports as closely as if they were Victorian novels. The offer of such an embarrassment of riches is wholly amazing in a world where print journalism increasingly operates in the most threadbare of circumstances. But what truly makes the NYRB aston-
44 • FW2014 • G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M •
ishing are the numbers. Its readership is healthy (around 150,000); it has been in the black since 1966; it has spawned a marvelous literary imprint (NYRB Classics) that has put hundreds of wonderful books back on our shelves. No wonder it is held in such great, almost preposterous, esteem. How great? Martin Scorsese’s next picture, The 50 Year Argument, is an hour-long documentary about the paper. How did this film come about? “It was unexpected,” says Silvers, who has delicious old-school manners, but whose voice is surprisingly loud. “When we were facing our 50th year [in 2013], we had a number of people who wanted to make documentaries. We talked to them and they were extremely nice. But the question was: what did they really know about the paper? Then someone told me Marty might be interested. I didn’t know him, but I know his wife. So I wrote him a note. He said he was interested. He’d been reading the paper since 1963, when he was at NYU. He knew the articles extremely well, and he had a big pile of the paper sitting in some room. Fortuitous! He’s a marvelous fellow. His staff did many interviews with our writers, and they came to a party here, and to a confer-
film. But I think it is a very interesting take. I don’t have any quarrel with it. There’s a fairness to it.” Why has the NYRB thrived when so many have faltered? “I don’t know!” Silvers said. “That is a big mystery. When we started, our publisher said we should have a survey to find out what readers want. But Barbara and I both said, no, we must pick the subjects and writers we believe in; we won’t take dictation. If it’s interesting, people will go on subscribing. If it’s not, they’ll say: to hell with it.” Rachel Cooke is an award-winning journalist, the television critic for The New Statesman and author of Her Brilliant Career. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
MARTIN SCORSESE
ence we had in Oxford on Isaiah Berlin, and they got some footage of Mary McCarthy going to Vietnam [the paper sent her to report from Saigon and Hanoi in 1967] and of Occupy Wall Street, which we covered, and they put together their
conception of the Review.” Does it match his? “It can only be, for me, a slice of the paper. We have had about 15,000 articles. Philosophy, physics, art, ancient history, poetry: all this could not come into a one-hour
THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT U.S., 2014, 96m Directors: Martin Scorsese, David Tedeschi
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AMBITION ON ICE
THE WORLD’S MOST FEARSOME HOCKEY TEAM Slava Fetisov remembers the knock on his U.S. hotel room door when he was visiting the country as captain of the Soviet hockey team. Outside stood Lou Lamoriello, the New Jersey Devils general manager, with an offer of freedom that seemed irresistible. “He said, ‘You can get in a car now, and we’ll give you a nice house and a nice contract and also take care of your family, and you don’t have to live like this anymore,’” Fetisov recalled in an interview. “It really would have been easy to defect. But I couldn’t do it. It was illegal, and I couldn’t turn my back on my country.” Fetisov’s dilemma is featured in Red Army, Gabe Polsky’s documentary about him and the punishing system in which he played. Several years after that moment with Lamoriello, the star defenseman endured a lengthy, painful negotiation with the Kremlin to become one of the first Russians in the National Hockey League, playing for the Devils beginning in 1989. In the quarter century since, Fetisov has, willingly or (more often) not, become a symbol of the Cold War and its aftermath. He is claimed by both the U.S. and Russia as a symbol of their respective ideological righteousness, even though he never quite did what either side wanted. Fetisov’s complicated story is told in large part by the complicated man himself in Red Army, which makes clear that Russia saw the team as a crown jewel of its central-planning approach and a reflection of its collectivist mentality. How the U.S. and the Russians played the game—the U.S. focusing on individual achievement and Russia emphasizing the team—reflected their divergent ideologies. “I didn’t intend to make this about Fetisov or about politics,” Polsky said in an interview. “But the story of the Cold War is the story of Russian hockey, and the story of Russian hockey is the story of Fetisov.” A gifted defenseman who was as skillful heading to the net as he was clearing pucks out of his own zone, Fetisov played for two decades on the team considered the best in the world, winning gold medals at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. Indeed, one thing the film reminds us of is how the Soviets recovered their dominant form after the humiliation at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, when they lost to U.S. in the semifinals in what many termed the “Miracle on Ice.”
And Fetisov, after bringing medals and glory to his home country for years (often while playing with the team abroad under the watchful eye of KGB agents), became a symbol of a new era of freedom in 1988 when the Soviets said they would allow him to play in the NHL as part of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) initiatives. But the regime was toying with him, privately telling him they were never letting him out. Fetisov pushed back— to limited avail. Despite being one of the most successful and public figures in the Soviet Union, he was denied and insulted, and in at least one instance even beaten, as his wife recalls in the film. The Kremlin finally said that he could go but that he had to bring most of his million-dollar salary back to the motherland. “You have to understand what Fetisov went through,” Polsky said. “He was being used up by the Soviets and then sold like a slave. It’s hard to imagine what that feels like.” An independent-film financier and producer, Polsky grew up playing hockey in Chicago before eventually winning a spot on Yale’s Division I team. He grew up with Russian parents and said he felt
the shame of being different whenever his parents spoke Russian. Fetisov pushed back against the Kremlin’s demands, saying he would not go if he could not keep the majority of the purse. “It’s not easy to take on the whole Soviet system,” he said. He eventually won many of his demands and soon after arrived to play with the Devils. Not that it got easier when he arrived. NHL players shunned him, he said, fearful on multiple counts. “If you hear a player is coming from the Soviet Union, and he could take your job, and he’s part of the ‘Evil Empire’ and he doesn’t speak your language, you’re going to look at him like an enemy when he walks into the locker room,” he said. “And I felt that. For the first few years I kept saying to my wife, ‘Let’s go back. This is not healthy.’” He stuck it out, despite the frustrations of a hockey system that emphasized individualism over team play and physicality over the Russian approach of chess-like passing and creativity. The stats and wins dried up. But it grew easier when other Russians arrived. Fetisov and his former teammates were vindicated when the Red Wings’ Scott Bowman reunited a number of them, and brought the Stanley Cup to Detroit
in 1997 and 1998. Despite his success in the U.S., Fetisov returned to his home country in 2002 at the request of President Vladimir Putin, who appointed him the minister of sport. In the six years since he left the position, he has become a member of the upper house of the Federal Assembly of Russia and helped found the KHL, the Russian-oriented hockey league. “They say the Soviets were really good at propaganda, but look at how the Miracle on Ice is taught: It’s ‘the good guys won; we beat the evil Russians.’ How is that not propaganda? There are people on all sides of politics who will use things like hockey to their advantage,” he said. Steven Zeitchik is a Los Angeles Times staff writer who has been covering film and the larger world of Hollywood for the paper since 2009. Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times
RED ARMY U.S., 2014, 76m Director: Gabe Polsky
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 47
THE MINERS OF SERRA PELADA — BRAZIL, 1986. © SEBASTIÃO SALGADO / AMAZONAS IMAGES
SHINE A LIGHT
S E B A S T I Ã O S A L G A D O I L L U M I N AT E S H I D D E N T R U T H S
Longtime Telluride favorite Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Faraway So Close, Kings of the Road, Pina) returns with an exploration of one of modern photography’s greatest heroes. FILM WATCH: For how long have you known Sebastião Salgado, and were you already struck by his work before you met him? WIM WENDERS: I have known Sebastião Salgado’s work for almost 25 years. I’d acquired two prints, a long time back, which really struck a chord with me and moved me. I framed them, and ever since they have hung over my desk.
What was the catalyst for the film? We met in his Paris offices. He took me on a visit round his studio, and I discovered Genesis [a project to document communities untouched by modernity]. This was an exciting new departure in his work, and as always, a project of huge scope that would unfold over a long period. I was fascinated by his involvement in his work and his
48 • FW2014
determination. One day, he asked me if I would be interested in accompanying him and his son Juliano on a journey without any precise goal on which they had started out, and for which they thought they needed another point of view, that of an outsider.
graphs that you discuss together? We chose the photographs together, and those choices were mainly dictated by the stories that Sebastião told me, and which are in the film. We had hours and hours of rushes at our disposal.
Once you’d decided to codirect the film with Juliano, Sebastião Salgado’s son, did you have to resolve any problems? The biggest problem was, in fact, the abundance of material. Juliano had already accompanied his father on several trips around the world. So there were hours and hours of documentary images. I’d planned to accompany Sebastião on at least two “missions”—in the great north of Siberia and in a balloon expedition over Namibia—but we had to cancel that because I fell ill and so I couldn’t travel. So instead I started to concentrate on his photographic work, and we recorded several interviews in Paris. But the more I discovered his work, the more questions I had.
Did you encourage him to comment on his photographs by taking him back to the time and place where they were taken? They are, for the most part, tragic images. A Brazilian gold mine, famine in the Sahel, the genocide in Rwanda and so on. Did you ever find them “too beautiful,” as some have reproached him? We ran through Sebastião’s entire photographic oeuvre, more or less in chronological order, for a good week. It was very difficult for him—and for us, too, behind the camera—because some of the accounts and journeys are deeply disturbing, and a few are genuinely chilling. Sebastião felt as if he was returning to these places, and for us, these internal journeys “to the heart of darkness” were also
What governed the choice of photo-
overwhelming. Sometimes we’d stop and I had to go out for a walk to get a bit of distance on what I’d just seen and heard. As for the question of whether his photographs are too beautiful, or too aestheticized, I totally disagree with those criticisms. When you photograph poverty and suffering, you have to give a certain dignity to your subject, and avoid slipping into voyeurism. It’s not easy. It can only be achieved on condition that you develop a good rapport with the people in front of the lens, and you really get inside their lives and their situation. Very few photographers manage this. The majority of them arrive somewhere, fire off a few photographs and get out. Sebastião doesn’t work like that. He spends time with the people he photographs to understand their situation, he lives with them, he sympathizes with them and he shares their lives as far as possible. And he feels empathy for them. He does this job for the people, in order to give them a voice. Pictures snapped on the hoof and photographed in a “documentary” style cannot convey the same
‘I think that Sebastião offered real dignity to all those people who found themselves in front of his lens.’ things. The more you find the right way to convey a situation in a convincing way, the closer you come to a language which corresponds to what you’re illustrating and to the subject in front of you, the more you make a real effort to obtain a “good photo,” and the more you give nobility to your subject. I think that Sebastião offered real dignity to all those people who found themselves in front of his lens. His photographs aren’t about him, but about all those people! The documentary offers the portrait of a man and brings to life his work. It also offers a touching study of the father-son relationship. Was this dual undertaking obvious from the start? Yes, from the outset, our film had several dimensions. The father-son relationship was also clearly part of it from the start. It could have turned out to be a pitfall for the film, and I think that the Salgados—father and son—were right to bring me in to avoid any risk of that happening. But ultimately, it’s a very moving side of the film. One of Salgado’s trademarks is his exclusive use of black and white. In your own films, you use it to great effect. Did this bring you closer? Yes, I can totally identify with his use of black and white. What’s more, the part of the film that I filmed myself is also in black and white so that it sits better alongside his photographs. At one point, we touched on this question in our interviews. But we ended up not keeping that segment in the final edit. I felt that this aspect of his work could be understood without needing any additional explanation. You yourself are known and acknowledged as a photographer and many of your movie characters have a link with photographs or photography. Did Salgado know your work the way you knew his? Sebastião took quite a lot of photographs while we were filming, including of the crew. So I might have the honor of appearing in some of his photographs. But
I don’t think he knows my films as well as I know his photographs, which was the very reason behind me making this film. He was the subject of my film and not the other way round. Throughout the film, the presence, and the importance of his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, in the life and work of Salgado is tangible. They’ve been working together for 50 years. Lélia brings a real energy to Sebastião, which he needs for his works and his exhibitions, and they undertake his biggest photographic projects together. As such, it was obvious that she too would appear at the heart of the film. She’s an amazing woman, very strong, very forthright, honest and adorable. And very funny. The Salgados do laugh a great deal! The last part of the film is an unexpected journey: the Salgado family’s return to the family ranch in Brazil, where they are replanting two million trees. From the start, it seemed essential for us to take into consideration the fact the Salgados have another life besides photography: their commitment to ecology. And from the outset, I knew that I had to tell two stories at the same time. One could say that the reforestation program they have set up in Brazil, and the nearmiraculous results they have achieved, concluded in a happy ending for Sebastião, after all the misery he has witnessed and the depression into which he slipped when he came back from Rwanda for the last time, and after the unbearable episodes that he has lived through. He not only dedicated his latest monumental work, Genesis, to nature, but one can also say that it is nature which allowed him to not lose his faith in mankind.
SALT OF THE EARTH Brazil/France, 2014, 110m Directors: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders
SEBASTIÃO SALGADO
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 49
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On the Loose
H O W C O U L D L . A . I G N O R E A S E R I A L K I L L E R F O R 3 0 Y E A R S? BY SHEERLY AVNI
Nick Broomfield’s training as a lawyer has always informed his investigative documentaries. In Kurt and Courtney (1998), Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) and Battle for Haditha (2007), Broomfield exposed the human stories behind international headlines, as well as attempts by the powerful to obscure those very stories. This time he explores one simple but enraging question. How could a serial killer torture and murder so many of South Central’s most vulnerable women— and for so long—while the police did little or nothing to protect the community? FILM WATCH: Lonnie Franklin, the in-
famous “Grim Sleeper” of South Central Los Angeles, is finally in custody, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Why were the police so unwilling to answer your questions about their victory? NICK BROOMFIELD: There was a complete collusion between the mayor’s office, the police chief and the forensic people working in the labs. Everyone involved seems to have been instructed not to have anything to do with my production. They wanted to claim the kudos of hav-
ing caught Lonnie Franklin, so they organized an enormous press conference at the time of his arrest, claiming that their intrepid police work had gotten this guy, when in fact it was quite the contrary. But when questions started to be asked, they didn’t want to answer. How was it possible it took 25 years? Why didn’t you release various details, like the fact that you knew as of 1988 that there was a serial killer operating in South Central? I think the police want this conviction so the f***ups of the past would disappear. Their biggest concern is damage control.
ing pool of unused talent. You just think, wow, these people are incredible: articulate, funny, savvy. And they are still stuck in a situation they can’t get out of. The film is definitely a portrait of a community, but I don’t think it’s unique to South Central, or even American apartheid. It could have happened in D.C., in Chicago, anywhere where entire neighborhoods of people are simply considered disposable.
Their refusal to cooperate didn’t keep you from telling an incredible story. These kinds of stories are so seldom told. When they are, the media usually do a few interviews in the neighborhood, and then go on to journalists, pathologists, the police, etc. We made the decision that we were going to tell the story from the streets through people who were directly involved: victims, people who knew Lonnie, people from the black advocacy groups.
How was it that Franklin’s friends seem to have known that there was something terribly wrong with his behavior towards prostitutes and female drug addicts, and were able to turn a blind eye? When you have a ghetto community that is so estranged, weird behaviors are allowed to exist. People are not accountable to any other part of the city, and they are very loyal to each other. Lonnie was a “good guy.” He could get people cheap TVs, fix their cars. He was regarded as a kind of Robin Hood figure. In the day-to-day, people were encouraged to get along with Lonnie.
What did you learn? In South Central, there are lots of things that amaze you, starting with an amaz-
In that community, it seems women are the most disposable of all. Yes, there is a war going on. Part of
it is the impact of crack. Kids became addicts, and there was no way their parents could control them. Marriages went in the same direction, and there was very little attempt on the part of the authorities to stem this plague in any significant way. Rather like the murders, crack has been allowed to continue to destroy South Central. That’s a pretty damning statement, and you refrain from making statements in the film. Instead, you ask questions, and let us draw our own conclusions. Filmmakers are almost always asked to provide a script before they start filming. I believe in letting events unfold and having faith in the process, in the magic of the moment and of the unknown. It creates stories that you would never have the brains to think of on your own! Sheerly Avni is a writer based in Mexico and New York.
TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER U.S., 2014, 205m Director: Nick Broomfield
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 51
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The Troubles We’ve Not Seen
A F R E S H L O O K AT T H E N O R T H E R N I R E L A N D C O N F L I C T BY LAURA SWINTON
Already a hot commodity in the world of advertising and television, Yann Demange captured the world’s attention with the premiere of his potent ’71, a film about the Troubles, the Irish conflict between Catholics and Protestants. He spoke about the challenges and rewards of his first feature. LAURA SWINTON: Do you remem-
ber the first time you picked up a camera and thought, “This is what I want to do with my life”? YANN DEMANGE: I don’t have a Spielberg-like anecdote that I can reel off about a Super 8 camera when I was little. I mean, I liked films. They crept up on me. I made my first short in my late teens or early twenties. I was a runner already on music videos at a production company but I always liked long form. I was always trying to tell stories. Before studying film you spent some time assisting on music videos and editing and shooting live music gigs. How do you think this helped you? It informs the way I behave on a set. I’ve made the tea and coffee; I’ve worked in most departments. It can’t help but influence the way I am with people. I very much feel like I’m part of a team because I’m used to carrying the boxes. I was also an edit assistant for a while and working in post really helps you get a feel for how images work together and how to shoot a scene. How do you work with the actors to get naturalistic and vulnerable performances? I don’t really have an approach or a modus operandi—it’s not one-size-fitsall. Each piece is different, and every actor has his own process. I don’t want to impose my process. When you’re working with children, you make sure that they understand the process. I almost take them to film school. I’m not trying to exploit them for a reaction. I almost find kids easier to work with than adults; they’re more fun. They’re courageous and they’ll go for it. How does the experience of topnotch TV compare with the longer format work? I think it’s healthy to cross-fertilize. I don’t specialize in one thing. I’m constantly turning my hand to differ-
ent genres. Directors with a genuine passion for technical filmmaking, for example, can go on to become “the car guys,” and it’s an easier trajectory to follow. My path is a bit all over the place, but that’s how I enjoy it. I go towards what attracts me at the time. I’ve just been sent 17 films since the Berlin Film Festival. There’s a sci-fi film, Westerns, a couple of period films … now it’s getting interesting. When did you start having conversations about ’71, and what was it about Gregory Burke’s script and the Troubles setting that intrigued you? I was sent scripts and scripts and scripts, but I couldn’t find anything I really cared about. You often hear that a lot of people don’t get to make a second film. The first film might be your only one so you have to love it. There’s no money in it; you spend at least two years of your life on it and then you go on the road to sell it. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do for ages. I had never had a burning desire to do anything about the Troubles, but the script knocked me for six. It transcends the Troubles, it’s so universal and personal and relevant. It could be talking about Afghanistan, Syria or any modern con-
flict. It was about the civil war and the fallout: children growing up in the conflict and young men looking for somewhere to belong. They were exploited on all sides and they were just kids. Did you feel that you were able to bring a fresh pair of eyes, an objectivity, to a contentious and still very raw subject? I’m not Celtic or Anglo-Saxon in any way, shape or form. I had an outsider’s eyes. I’m half Algerian and it made me think about the Battle of Algiers. I could see so many shades of grey. It wasn’t about taking a specific side. It was a visceral, human story. I’m not taking anyone to school. We’re not a voice for any side’s political views. We try to show everyone’s point of view and try to humanize everyone. How did you develop the look of the film? I knew exactly how I wanted the night scenes to look, but it took a while to find a look for the daytime. We decided to mix formats, so we shot on 16mm during the day and digital at night. My references were early Walter Hill films: The Driver, The Warriors. In Melville’s The Army of
Shadows, a film about the German occupation of Paris, there’s an amazing scene where the group find a collaborator in their midst. They take him to an outhouse to execute him. They can’t shoot him so they’re discussing how to kill him, with him sitting there in the room. He’s their friend, and he understands that he’s got to go because he’s been collaborating with the Germans. They choke him to death, and it’s an extremely harrowing scene that will always stay with me. I used that as a reference because there is so much humanity in it. It shows people in extraordinary circumstances, who would never have chosen to get drawn into a war and who are trying to work out how far they will go for their cause. Laura Swinton is global editor at Little Black Book. Originally published in Little Black Book. Reprinted with permission.
’71 U.K., 2014, 100m Director: Yann Demange
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To the Mat W R E S T L I N G ’ S U N L I K E LY V I L L A I N BY KENNETH TURAN
“I hardly read fiction. I mostly read nonfiction; I like to examine material things,” said Bennett Miller, the 47-year-old director of Capote and Moneyball. “My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena. A nonfiction subject challenges you; it keeps you honest.” Miller’s latest film Foxcatcher, with Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and an unrecognizable Steve Carell in the starring roles, is his most ambitious and most successful work. It is a particularly American horror story, the real-life tale of super-rich John Eleuthere du Pont (Carell) and how his quixotic financial sponsorship of the U.S. Olympic wrestling team in general, and of gold medalist brothers Dave (Ruffalo) and Mark Schultz (Tatum) in particular, draws everyone involved into a maelstrom of seduction, rejection, betrayal and murder. It was a story the thoughtful and articulate Miller had never heard of but was drawn to immediately. “A stranger [eventual producer Tom Heller] came up to me at a DVD signing at Tower Video in New York and gave me an envelope of newspaper clippings,” the director says, remembering back to 2006. “Months later, I was throwing stuff out,
I opened the envelope and the first paragraph just grabbed me. The first thing was the absurdity of it: One of the wealthiest guys in America had decided to build a training facility for wrestlers and become their head coach with no knowledge of the sport whatsoever. It just seemed comical.” But Foxcatcher, named after the training facility, turned out to be “the kind of story that’s funny until it’s not funny, and then it’s not funny at all. I’m attracted to stories of people who don’t belong together, who embark on something and find themselves in places they don’t belong.” “In some ways it’s a small story, but yet it really felt familiar and it had resonance. For me the more micro you look at it, the bigger it becomes. Within it are themes of wealth, power, class, decline and entitlement. To me, as a story it’s really fascinating and expansive and the kind of thing that could intrigue me throughout the process of making it.” That process took longer than anyone anticipated, some eight years, a familiar story when films this smart, complex and adult try to get financed. Eventually, Megan Ellison (American Hustle, Her, Zero Dark Thirty) agreed to produce the film. Staying with the project for all those years was co-star Tatum, who was “the first actor cast, before I had a script.” Miller saw Tatum in 2006’s small independent
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and was captivated. “He was amazing, dangerous, animal and electric, an unhinged character and scary. I thought the filmmakers had plucked someone out of Queens and typecast him. Then I found out that he was from the South, the sweetest guy in the world, with something of Mark Schultz’s quality. As the landscape of his career completely changed, I looked the other way and held on to what I’d seen and knew about him.” Cast next, in an unflinchingly dramatic role, was Carell. “Everyone’s description of du Pont, and I spoke to more than a dozen people who knew him, was that he was benign; nobody could believe he would do what he ended up doing,” Miller said. “I had no interest in putting a guy in there who on first glimpse you know is going to kill somebody. You want someone where you don’t believe it until it happens.” Alone among the three actors, Ruffalo had experience with wrestling—he and his father each had been accomplished in the sport in high school—and the fidelity with which it is depicted is one of the strengths of Foxcatcher. In fact, the practice session between the brothers that starts the film is so impeccably done that Miller was able to cut an entire dialogue scene. “More often than not, I go into a scene without a definitive text. During rehears-
als things come up; there is a lot of improv. The process really is an exploration, one of discovery, a way to keep the acting fresh and intimate and present,” Bennett said. “My films are inquiries. I’ve chopped down all the signposts; I really resist taking moral positions. There’s a natural human tendency to judge things before we understand them. That simplifies things but deprives us of insights that could be taken from looking more carefully, being unflinching, taking a hard look at something we have an aversion to looking at.” Kenneth Turan is film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. His most recent books are Never Coming to a Theater Near You and Free For All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. Copyright the Los Angeles Times.
FOXCATCHER U.S., 2014, 130m Director: Bennett Miller Starring: Steve Carrell, Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum
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Visions of a Visionary
T H E D R A M AT I C L I F E O F R A D I C A L A R T I S T J . M . W. T U R N E R BY FABIEN LEMERCIER
Telluride tributee Mike Leigh returns to the festival with his Cannes-winning feature and second historical drama, exploring the complicated life of the visionary artist J.M.W. Turner. FILM WATCH: What motivated you to
make a film about Turner?
MIKE LEIGH: He’s obviously a great art-
ist, one of the best painters of all time, but also a radical, revolutionary painter. I thought that a fascinating film could be made about him. There is a contemporary tension between the mortal Turner and his inspiration, his epic and spiritual work, his way of capturing the world. And the inspiration that you feel when you look at his paintings, we all shared that while making the film.
Did you work as usual without a script when you began filming and with lots of rehearsals and improvisations, or did the fact that you were dealing with an historic figure and recreating an era change your approach? This film was no different in the making. Remember Topsy-Turvy (1999) and its Victorian-style theater. Mr. Turner has one thing in common with that film: We had to present the characters and recreate the atmosphere of the time, but freely, without it becoming a documentary. We did some research, but then, you have
what happens in front of the camera. You need to create a real character when filming. And without a script, as always! Mr. Turner is an artist’s film about an artist. Do you feel close to the character? And how do you reconcile spirituality, which is very present in the film, with sickness and death? I’ve already been asked on several occasions if this film was a type of autobiography. That’s not the case. But when you make a film about someone, you need to feel close to that person, of course. Then, when you’re an artist, you understand naturally the film’s territory. As to defining spirituality, that’s difficult. I would say that a painter paints what he sees. If he’s on a cliff, he paints the sky, the sea. Many people do this, including with cameras. But when Turner paints, he sees beyond the sea and the sky, and he shows us in his paintings the experience he lives, an experience that travels beneath the surface. And that relates also to life and death. The theme of the film is artistic expression but also the character’s emotional expression. How did you balance the two aspects? In all of my films, I worry about this tension, which we all know, between what we are, what we want to be, and reality compared to these dreams. That tension,
a type of yin and yang, is the theme of the film. Was the lighting in the film inspired by specific Turner paintings? When you start to research topics, be it superficially or in-depth, that ends up penetrating the psyche. We all absorbed information and when we made decisions; we did so unconsciously, without thinking about any painting in particular. Do you consider this film as very different from those that you directed previously? When you look at my films as a whole, there’s consistency, a style, a concern.
What I like is to try each time to make a different film while staying in the same genre. Fabien Lemercier is a Paris-based correspondent for Cineuropa.org. Reprinted with permission from Cineuropa.org, a website specializing in European film and audiovisual production.
MR. TURNER U.K., 2014, 149m Director/writer: Mike Leigh
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F o r t i c k e t s , i n F o a n d d i s c o u n t e d l o d g i n g v i s i t w w w. t e l l u r i d e h o r r o r s h o w. c o m
The Flaubert Inside Us REINTERPRETING A CLASSIC
BY MARA FORTES
French filmmaker Sophie Barthes has a background in philosophy and a film degree from Columbia University. Her work explores existential anxieties and psychic conflict, sometimes treading surrealist terrain and absurdist comedy (Happiness, Cold Souls). Her adaptation of Madame Bovary demonstrates the lasting and subversive impact of Gustave Flaubert’s debut novel. Barthes discussed her admiration for Flaubert, the challenges of adapting his singular aesthetic to the screen and the joys of working with Mia Wasikowska. MARA FORTES: How did the project
emerge?
SOPHIE BARTHES: Well, Flaubert
is one of my favorite writers, and Madame Bovary is part of our DNA. But the project came from the William Morris agency. When they sent me the script, I thought I shouldn’t even read it. I thought it would be foolish to measure myself to [Claude] Chabrol and [Vincente] Minnelli and [Jean] Renoir, who all made versions of Madame Bovary. But then it was a little bit like Pandora’s Box. You are possibly the first woman director to adapt the novel. After two years of research, I came to the conclusion that even though he’s a male
writer, he had a very androgynous sensibility. There is a well-known phrase attributed to him: “La Bovary, c’est moi”— “I’m Madame Bovary.” And I think, what he was really saying—if he in fact said it—was: “La Bovary is us; it’s all of us.” Your film starts from the moment when she has ingested poison, and then goes back to track her story. How did that come about? We experimented a lot with Mikkel Nielsen, the Danish editor. He has a very audacious and bold take on the material. This idea of beginning with the poisoning, for the people who know the book, is not surprising. There is a theme of poison throughout—in its atmosphere, in its symbolism. In literary terms, I think it’s called a line of horizon—where every act, everything Emma will do after that, even the most simple act of her daily life, will be interpreted in the light of this poisoning. What governed your stylistic choices? I wanted to achieve two things: authenticity and modernity. I wanted the audience to feel that they had spent two hours in Normandy in the 19th century. But at the same time I wanted the cinematography to be modernizing. And Andrij Parekh has an incredible sensibility, he is very much at the service of the story and the film—it’s never a show-off of flashy cinematography. He did a lot of hand-held
and a lot of natural lighting. So the visual approach is very modern, but the costumes and the production design and the locations are all very authentic. I chose Valérie Ranchoux and Christian Gasc for the costumes and Benôit Barouh for the production design. I let them talk a lot, beginning almost a year before shooting, so they developed a language together. And although the costumes are magnificent, you’re not distracted by them. Because Christian and Valérie did so much psychological research on the character, every dress is telling something about Emma’s inner life. Every color they choose, every pattern, every silk, every fabric, is actually telling us Emma Bovary is feeling this at this precise moment. The material world and the dresses almost become the register for sensuality and all the things lacking in Emma’s life. And when you read Flaubert’s correspondence, he was a fetishist himself. He had a little shoe from his lover, a silk blue shoe that he would touch every night before sleeping. He would go to Egypt and bring back fabrics. He was very much in touch with sensuality and beautiful things. I think he was truly an aesthete. And how did you come to cast Mia Wasikowska in the title role?
She really wanted to play the role. And even though she’s only 24, she’s extremely mature and very well read. Her performance in Jane Eyre was incredible, so I knew she could do a period film. What is so remarkable about Mia is her capacity to express ambiguity and ambivalence. She’s very naive and pure and has an angelic side to her—and at the same time she can be extremely scary … as an actress; I’m not talking about her as a person! What did making this film mean to you? When you start making movies, it becomes your life. You can’t dissociate anymore. It’s not work; it’s a passion. For me, it’s about the aesthetic pleasure involved in making a movie, the collaboration, the people that you meet, the fact that you create something together and then go through a post-partum depression when it’s finished. Then you just hope you can recreate this magic again. Mara Fortes is programmer at Ambulante Documentary Film Festival and curator at the Telluride Film Festival. MADAME BOVARY U.S., 2014, 130m Director: Sophie Barthes Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti and Ezra Miller
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Divide and Conquer
W O R K E R V E R S U S W O R K E R I N T H E D A R D E N N E S ’ L AT E S T
The former Telluride tributees JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne return with another rigorous and deeply moving investigation of working-class life. Two Days, One Night follows a woman (Telluride tributee Marion Cotillard) who is forced to fight for her job in ways that threaten her co-workers. FILM WATCH: Under what circum-
stances did you conceive of Two Days, One Night? LUC DARDENNE: Within the framework of the current economic and social crisis Europe finds itself in today. For several years we thought about a film featuring a person about to be fired with the approval of a majority of his/her colleagues. Two Days, One Night was really born when we imagined this couple, Sandra and Manu, united in adversity. JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: What took us in was to portray someone excluded for being considered weak—not high performing enough. The film is a testament to this underachiever who rediscovers her strength and courage from the fight she mounts with her husband. Sandra’s colleagues have voted for a reduction of workload and her firing in exchange for a bonus. Have you ever heard of such a situation actually occurring in the working world? JPD: Oh yes. Several. Even though
they weren’t exactly the same. Every day here in Belgium and elsewhere we are confronted with this culture of “performance” and “violent competition” among salaried employees. You don’t judge any of your characters … LD: The workers have been placed in a competitive situation engendering permanent rivalry. Their story is not a “good guys vs. bad guys” one. This is what is interesting to us: to avoid looking at the world in a “good guy/bad guy” way. JPD: A film isn’t a courtroom. Sandra’s colleagues all have good reasons for telling her “yes” or “no.” One thing is certain: The bonus offered isn’t a luxury for any of them. They each need the extra money to pay rent, bills, etc. Sandra understands this, particularly as she faces her own financial difficulties. How long did you work on the scene to arrive at this result? JPD: We’ve been talking about this subject for a dozen years, and so we had the time to prepare ourselves. LD: The writing went pretty quickly. We began building the script in October 2012, and finished it in March 2013. We wanted the action to happen in a short time period, like the title indicates. JPD: The urgency dictated by this time frame was meant to impose a certain
rhythm to/in the film. LD: We met Marion when we coproduced Rust and Bone, which was filmed in part in Belgium. From the moment of our meeting at an elevator’s exit, her baby in her arms, we were smitten/taken with her. Driving back to Liege, we couldn’t stop talking about her … her face. Her look. JPD: Hiring such a well-known actress added a challenge for us. Marion understood how to find a new body and a new face for the film. LD: She never wanted to show herself as an actress. Nothing of what she’s accomplished stood out in the performance or the protest. We worked with a mutual confidence in each other that allowed us to try everything. For Manu’s character, you found Fabrizio Rongione, who’s been in several of your films. JPD: Yes. In Rosetta, L’enfant, Le silence de Lorna, and Le gamin au velo. We thought of him right away for the role of Manu. It was fabulous to reconnect. LD: In this film in particular, his role is more important, as the film also tells Manu’s story. Fabrizio succeeded in giving this man vitality and the enthusiasm needed to support Sandra. We also get a glimpse of your favorite comedian, Olivier Gourmet. LD: We hear a lot about his character
throughout the film without ever seeing him, and then, you’re right, he appears for a moment like a wild boar from the mountains. How did you work with all of your actors? JPD: For a month we reviewed their film clips with them. And prior to that, for two months, Luc and I prepared for the production on location, filming with our video camera. LD: This review period was necessary before the actual filming began in order to find the rhythms and to create a feeling of total confidence with the actors where we could dare to try/attempt the simplest things. JPD: We filmed throughout, which was important to us, but also to the actors. Sandra’s path was as physical as it was mental, and it was essential for Marion, Fabrizio, and the other actors to fully insert themselves in the chronology. Reprinted courtesy of Les Films du Fleuve.
TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT Belgium/Italy/France, 2014, 95m Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne Starring: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione and Pili Groyne
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Lost and Found
A N E X C E R P T F R O M T H E B E S T- S E L L I N G ‘ W I L D ’ BY CHERYL STRAYED
I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I’d told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world. My father left my life when I was six. My mother died when I was twenty-two. In the wake of her death, my stepfather morphed from the person I considered my dad into a man I only occasionally recognized. My two siblings scattered in their grief, in spite of my efforts to hold us together, until I gave up and scattered as well. In the years before I pitched my boot over the edge of that mountain, I’d been pitching myself over the edge too. I’d ranged and roamed and railed—from Minnesota to New York to Oregon and all across the West—until at last I found myself, bootless, in the summer of 1995, not so much loose in the world as bound to it. It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope.
A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long. A world called the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d first heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in Minneapolis, sad and desperate and on the brink of divorcing a man I still loved. I’d been standing in line at an outdoor store waiting to purchase a foldable shovel when I picked up a book called The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California from a nearby shelf and read the back cover. The PCT, it said, was a continuous wilderness trail that went from the Mexican border in California to just beyond the Canadian border along the crest of nine mountain ranges—the Laguna, San Jacinto, San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Liebre, Tehachapi, Sierra Nevada, Klamath, and Cascades. That distance was a thousand miles as the crow flies, but the trail was more than double that. Traversing the entire length of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, the PCT passes through national parks and wilderness areas as well as federal, tribal, and privately held
lands; through deserts and mountains and rain forests; across rivers and highways. I turned the book over and gazed at its front cover—a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags against a blue sky—then placed it back on the shelf, paid for my shovel, and left. But later I returned and bought the book. The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my
finger on a map. I would walk that line, I decided—or at least as much of it as I could in about a hundred days. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Minneapolis, separated from my husband, and working as a waitress, as low and mixed-up as I’d ever been in my life. Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well. But from that well, I set about becoming a solo wilderness trekker. And why not? I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and an adulteress.
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A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer who hopped from one meaningless job to the next while dabbling dangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many men. I was the granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner, the daughter of a steelworker turned salesman. After my parents split up, I lived with my mother, brother, and sister in apartment complexes populated by single mothers and their kids. As a teen, I lived back-to-the-land style in the Minnesota northwoods in a house that didn’t have an indoor toilet, electricity, or running water. In spite of this, I’d become a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen, and then I went off to college and became a left-wing feminist campus radical. But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl. It seemed like years ago now—as I stood barefoot on that mountain in California—in a different lifetime, really, when I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next. Such as my boots sailing irretrievably off the side of a mountain. The truth is, I was only half sorry to see them go. In the six weeks I’d spent in those boots, I’d trekked across deserts and snow, past trees and bushes and grasses and flowers of all shapes and sizes and colors, walked up and down mountains and over fields and glades and stretches of land I couldn’t possibly define, except to say that I had been there, passed over it, made it through. And all the while, those boots had blistered my feet and rubbed them raw; they’d caused my nails to blacken and detach themselves excruciatingly from four of my toes. I was done with those boots by the time I lost them and those boots were done with me, though it’s also true that I loved them. They had become not so much inanimate objects to me as extensions of who I was, as had just about everything else I carried that summer—my backpack, tent, sleeping bag, water purifier, ultralight stove,
and the little orange whistle that I carried in lieu of a gun. They were the things I knew and could rely upon, the things that got me through. I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them waving gently in the hot breeze. They could keep my boots, I thought, gazing across the great green expanse. I’d chosen to rest in this place because of the view. It was late afternoon in mid-July, and I was miles from civilization in every direction, days away from the lonely post office where I’d collect my next resupply box. There was a chance someone would come hiking down the trail, but only rarely did that happen. Usually I went days without seeing another person. It didn’t matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone. I gazed at my bare and battered feet, with their smattering of remaining toenails. They were ghostly pale to the line a few inches above my ankles, where the wool socks I usually wore ended. My calves above them were muscled and golden and hairy, dusted with dirt and a constellation of bruises and scratches. I’d started walking in the Mojave Desert and I didn’t plan to stop until I touched my hand to a bridge that crosses the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border with the grandiose name the Bridge of the Gods. I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking. Excerpted from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. Copyright © 2012 by Cheryl Strayed. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
WILD U.S., 2014, 120m Director: Jean-Marc Vallée Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Gaby Hoffmann and Laura Dern Based on the memoir by: Cheryl Strayed
R FO E L
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• BEGINNING THURSDAY, AUGUST 29TH AT 9AM Will call for pass pick-up at the FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE and LATE SHOW PASSES: $60 each, grants access to the last film of the day at the Palm or Chuck Jones’ Cinema, Friday through Monday. Passes can be purchased at our FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE (near Brigadoon, in Oak Street Gondola Plaza). Once the theatres open for the first program, the Late Show passes can also be purchased at the Palm Theatre or Chuck Jones’ Cinema Box Office.
• BEGINNING FRIDAY, AUGUST 30TH AT 9AM Will call for pass pick-up at the FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE and LATE SHOW PASSES - $60 each, grant access to the last film of the day at the Palm or Chuck Jones’ Cinema, Friday through Monday. Can be purchased at our FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE and at the Palm theatre or Chuck Jones’ Cinema Box Office once these venues open for the first program at these theatres. Payment can be made by cash, check, or credit card.
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Underwater
T H E H I D D E N S T O R I E S B E N E AT H T H E F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I know from Man Push Cart that you do your research. Can they really take away your house for missing three payments? If I brought you to the foreclosure courts, you would be shocked. If I showed you the hundreds of people who have lost their homes, you’d be in tears. Normal middle-class people are finding themselves in this position every day. I did a lot of research, and spent a lot of time with real estate brokers. The scams: those are all real. There are some I didn’t include in the film. Chaz, we’ll talk about them later and make a lot of money.
BY CHAZ EBERT
Ramin Bahrani (At Any Price, which played at the 2012 festival) returns with a film exploring the street-level impacts of the 2008 U.S. financial crisis. He spoke with Chaz Ebert about working with two great actors, the sense of hopelessness the members of working class have about their futures and the potentials for action. CHAZ EBERT: I’m so happy I got the
chance to see your film. To help set the background: Our nation went through a housing bubble where the regulations were eased, and banks encouraged people to take loans who couldn’t afford to pay them back. They then packaged these bad loans into jumbo derivatives. They took us to the edge of financial collapse. We bailed out the big institutions, but no one took a look at the individuals, the people who suffered. That’s what your movie does. RAMIN BAHRANI: That’s certainly the backdrop of the film. Even larger than that, there is an underlying current that is in all of the films that is becoming more and more palpable and potent and visceral. For people around the world, not just in America, hard honest work gets you nowhere
today, because the system has been rigged by a handful of very wealthy corporations and individuals. It seems that average people have no real chance of making it. That’s very sobering: Hard honest work gets you nowhere. Even in the face of this, the human individual has the choice of how to behave. The film explores what happens when the victim becomes the executioner, when someone shifts from one side to the other. What are the choices each human can make? One thing that cannot be underestimated is the power of the action of one individual. If everyone decided to do it, we could theoretically change the system. We’ve seen that many times in cultures around the world, when people reach a breaking point. How did you find this story? Is there someone in Florida who, like Michael Shannon’s character, says, “I made more money during the crash than after”? What a horrible thing to say! Before I answer, I have to say it’s the best performance in Michael Shannon’s career. Everyone knows Michael Shannon is one of the best actors working today. But it’s
also Andrew Garfield’s best performance. He’s the best of a new generation of actors. Andrew is marvelous in this. What made you think he could have this everyman quality? When we first met, he was shooting Spiderman 2, and the script just struck a chord with him. He connected with it. I had seen him in Death of a Salesman, directed by Mike Nichols. I knew he was a great actor. It was the best theater I had ever seen. He seemed a very engaged young man and really focused on his craft and wanting to do something good with his work in film. I showed him an early draft, and it had a meaning for him. He said he wanted to do it. I was able to craft the character for him. It was rewritten for him. I’ve never seen Michael Shannon like this. He is a well-dressed, handsome man. He’s not a bogeyman. I told Michael, “You are my golden god who has descended from the sun.” He had the best scenes. I made him tanned, and gave him the best suits. He’s my Humphrey Bogart. This is a deal-with-the-devil film, like Wall Street. I have great sympathy for Michael’s character. He has no choice but to behave this way.
The scene with the old man is extremely painful. How many of our old people are being fooled by these reverse mortgages and getting documents they don’t understand. I’m going to have to stop using the word shocking! But what is wrong with this picture! They are being evicted during the years we should be taking care of them. It will break your heart to know that’s based on a real story. It’s a good moment to say that we mixed the professional actors with non-professional actors. People won’t believe how seamlessly they fit together. You forget these are movie stars. When Roger [Ebert] saw Man Push Cart, he said it embodied the soul of neorealism. The situations when they are doing these evictions felt authentic. There’s a bit of On the Waterfront. It feels real, but also has very fast pace. It has a lot of plot, a lot of stories. This is new in my work. Is this an intentional evolution? It is. I don’t want to make the same film over and over again. If you take a step back and look at the film, it’s really a Hollywood plot. But not in the way Hollywood would tell it. Chaz Ebert is the publisher of RogerEbert.com and a regular contributor to the site, writing about film, festivals, politics and life itself.
99 HOMES U.S., 2014, 112m Director: Ramin Bahrani Starring: Laura Dern, Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 65
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One Nation, Two Peoples L O V E A N D H I S T O RY I N R I K L I S ’ I S R A E L I F I L M BY SHEERLY AVNI
Dancing Arabs is a coming-of-age saga, a love story, a meditation on the relationship between people and history, a universally relatable chronicle of what it means to be young, angry and torn between two worlds. In the context of the most recent tragedies in Gaza, however, this particular coming-of-age story also emerges into a prophetic and personal reminder of the prices Palestinians— including the ones with Israeli citizenship—pay as they try to find their way in a Jewish country. Director Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree, The Syrian Wedding, Zeitoun) based this film on a script by the popular ArabIsraeli writer Sayed Kashua, a weekly columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, and showrunner of the award-winning half-hour comedy Arab Labour. Kashua adapted the script from two books he wrote about his own experiences growing up, first as a child in the Arab village of Tira, then as a scholarship student in a prestigious Israeli boarding school and finally as a young adult seeking acceptance in somebody else’s promised land. The film is fictional, and the main character is named Eyad, not Sayed. But it closely mirrors Kashua’s own journey: rock concerts, battles with teachers and a love affair with a beautiful classmate. Even more importantly, the film stays true to the belief Kashua shares with his Jewish director: if the two peoples do not learn to share the country they both love, they will suffer dire consequences. The production of the film followed the spirit of this shared vision. Riklis instructed his actor Tawfeek Barhom, who was born in the same village as Kashua, to draw from his own life in developing the character of Eyad. Ali Suleiman, whom Telluride audiences will remember from his starring role in The Attack, plays Eyad’s nationalist father. Even some of the smaller players reinforced Riklis’s urgent sense of a need for opening lines between the two cultures. “The man who plays a customs agent is an Arab from East Jerusalem,” said Riklis in a phone call from his home in Tel Aviv. “And I loved his performance, so I asked him, ‘Why don’t I know your work?’ and he answered ‘Because you don’t know us.’” “And here’s the thing,” Riklis said. “Not knowing each other is both our faults. And we both suffer for it.” The collaboration between the Jewish
director and his Palestinian writer was exactly what one might expect from two passionate artists: exhilarating, respectful, at times contentious. “I warned him that that would be the case,” said Riklis. “Because at the end of the day, a director is a tyrant, and he just does what he wants to do.” The two men remained friendly. “We love each other; we hate each other. One minute, it’s ‘This is great, I love it!’ The next minute, it’s ‘I can’t shoot this scene,’” said Riklis. At one point during the process, Kashua sent him a text paraphrasing writer-director Woody Allen’s quip about ruining his own script by filming it. But then Kashua found himself forced to let go of something even more essential than his screenplay: The dream around which he’d built his life’s work. In early July, just as the film was set to open the Jerusalem Film Festival in a 6,000-seat outdoor theater, the Israeli government accused Hamas of killing of three Jewish teenagers. An angry Israeli mob retaliated by lynching a young Palestinian. Both the premiere and theatrical release were postponed, in part for fear that the film being lost in the noise. It was a blow to both men, but especially to Kashua, whose disappointment was exacerbated by a sense that he and his family would not be safe in a country that was preparing for war. He made a decision that ran counter to everything
for which he had argued and published a Haaretz column announcing that he would be moving his with his wife and three children to the United States. The Arab peacemaker was leaving his promised land for good. On paper, Kashua found the words he’d been unable to say in person to his enraged wife: “I wanted to say to my wife that this is really the end; it’s finished,” he wrote. “That I’d lost my small war, that everything people had told me since I was a teenager was coming true before my eyes ... That all those who told me that I have no place other than Tira spoke the truth.” Four weeks and thousands of casualties later, Kashua was grappling the horrors of the Gaza invasion. “I always said that I know both Arabs and Jewish people live in the land,” he said from his new home in Illinois. “And I always said I know that we are stupid in exactly the same way. That there is no reason we cannot live together.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And I think I realized during this war that maybe it was a mistake; that as soon as a war or clash happens, you immediately become the enemy.” Dancing Arabs has yet to open in Israel. On July 17, one day after Kashua took his family to Chicago, and three days after he published his heartbreak-
ing op-ed, the movie did screen in a smaller theater for an audience of 600. Riklis described the more intimate screening as a reminder of how cinema can heal, even in dark days. “I’ve never seen the country in such an edgy state before,” said Riklis. “But I felt a bond with the audience. I think at times like these, we need an antibiotic.’” And laughter. One of the challenges of the director-writer collaboration was to blend the many tones of the film, which shift from comedy to drama to a sobering conclusion. “The audience was laughing almost nonstop for the first 20 minutes of the film,” said Riklis. “And that’s important to me, because yes, we always want to explore difficult issues, but we also want to make sure that we entertain. Otherwise, how can we communicate?” Where there is communication, there is hope. Just a few moments after saying that he thought his life’s work was a failure, Kashua stopped to consider his future one last time. “And maybe in a year I’ll feel differently, and I’ll want to go back home. Who knows?”
DANCING ARABS Israel, 2014, 105m Director: Eran Riklis
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 67
False Positive
HOW PSEUDO SCIENCE UNDERMINES AMERICA
BY PETER SELLARS
During the Cold War, a group of military scientists used facts and logic to overwhelm resistance to the expansion of our nuclear stockpile. After winning the battle for public approval, a handful of these scientists turned to the next frontier: environmentalism. Using a logic that generally contradicts scientific evidence, these “merchants of doubt” went on the attack against anyone who might interfere with the free market. For example, these “merchants” labeled scientists doing legitimate research on the ozone hole as having “hidden agendas of their own—not just to ‘save the environment’ but to change our economic system … [with] a great desire to regulate—on as large a scale as possible.” This frightening trend, documented in the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, has reached its apex in this era of global climate change. USA Today described the book as “an unflattering picture of why some scientists continue to stand against the overwhelming scientific consensus on issues at the center of public discussion.” Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., has adapted the book into a new documentary. He was interviewed by Telluride Film Festival curator Peter Sellars. PETER SELLARS: What made you
decide to start on this topic? ROBERT KENNER: it’s a topic that always interested me. On my first day of filming on Food, Inc., I interviewed peo-
ple saying, “We shouldn’t label cloned meat because it’s not in the consumer’s interest.” I’m thinking, “This is bizarre. These Orwellian groups want to stop you from knowing what you’re eating.” [Fast Food Nation author] Eric Schlosser was always sending me books about propaganda. And then I read Naomi and Erik’s book.
asking, “How do I make [our response] funny?” It was horrifying.
The film tells an amazing story. It’s sort of a comedy about the end of the world.
What’s amazing is how you present the deniers in the context of being themselves. It’s totally shocking! The goal was not to do only “gotcha.” I tried to be as true to them as possible.
The film engages us for 90 minutes. What’s really discouraging is that Obama can’t talk about this. People are just numb to that conversation. So Jon Stewart and Colbert have to do it every day.
[Climate change denier] Jack Bonner says, “Of course, humans contribute to climate change.” Six months later, he says, “The thought that carbon dioxide is harmful is frankly comical.” We have been living for 40 years in a total counter-revolution that does not want to look to the future. It’s no longer about facts or information. It’s about tribalism. I tell people every ExxonMobil fullpage ad in The New York Times replaces the articles that you’re not reading. It takes money to reach the public. Therefore, the people with money reach the public with their version of the universe. The Koch brothers put up money for NPR. But they’re doing it for their own personal benefit. [Merchants of Doubt] producers Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar are out there trying to fund things they believe in that are not going to personally benefit them. They feel that films have a potential for change, a way of reaching people. That’s their goal.
Comedy may be the only thing that can cut through all that self-importance. You’ve reversed the playbook of the right wing. You’re the first person to actually shine the mirror back to them. Well, it’s really hard to do issue films straight on. It’s very hard not to be dull. And people don’t remember facts. Facts become invisible. If we had an inspiration for this film, it was Thank You for Smoking, which we could never quite equal but we could try to emulate. It is such genius. You need to at least have a twinkle as you’re going through, otherwise it’s too sad and depressing.
Your use of the soundtrack and of animation sets up a genre film, a detective thriller: “How do you locate the killer?” This is not the usual public affairs movie. We first had it as a comic detective piece, uncovering the culprit of climate change. At the same time, we wanted to ask, “Is there transformation that can happen if we have a will, if we believe in a future?” These guys are ultimately hanging onto a dying past. You think about the slave South, and how fast that changed, from 1855 to 1865.
Peter Sellars is an acclaimed theater and opera director and a Resident Curator at the Telluride Film Festival.
It’s fighting fire with fire. Fact-based evidence does not reach a new audience. What will help us reach a new audience or at least convert the middle? It’s no longer about facts. It’s no longer about science. It’s about being part of a tribe. When the new EPA regulations came through, [climate change denier] Marc Morano put out a memo
How do you talk to America when it is in this red and blue mode, when the red is not interested in anything factual and when the main thing to do is to laugh at your opponent? Nobody ever gets serious. As filmmakers, can we create something to helps us imagine a country that can talk about difficult things?
MERCHANTS OF DOUBT U.S., 2014, 96m Director: Robert Kenner Inspired by Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 69
God and Man
JOB-LIKE TRIALS IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA BY FYODOR URNOV
The acclaimed Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s award-winning films, including The Return (2003), The Banishment (2007) and Elena (2011), have established him as “a seer of the social and spiritual divides in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia” (The New York Times). His latest, Leviathan, a black comedy and winner of the best screenplay award at Cannes, follows a man who, trapped in a smalltown bureaucracy, tries to fight back, only to get himself more deeply in trouble. Zvyagintsev spoke to the Film Watch’s Fyodor Urnov. FYODOR URNOV: In your film,
icons and religious frescoes appear in extended close-up: on the walls of a nearly demolished church; on the dashboard of a policeman’s car next to pictures of naked women; on the wall of a newly erected cathedral. What was your vision for their role in the film? ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV: The Christian triptych next to a picture of a naked pinup girl in the traffic cop’s car was an observation from real life—I did not make this up—that stuck in my mind.
Man is largely a pagan. He fails to understand the distinction between the two sets of images and can display a pinup girl next to an icon. This fit perfectly the world of some of the characters in Leviathan. Theirs is a world of darkness that searches for the light, but fails to find it. The cathedral is over 200 years old, but it had not been not used as a church for many years—it was a mill, then they showed movies in there. It was a local recreational center. It collapsed by itself in the middle of the night some 10 years ago. The locals said they thought a war had started because the thunderous sound of its crash was so terrifying. The fresco, which shows the beheading of St. John the Baptist, is original and miraculously survived the crash. We did not restore it or retouch it in any way. You open and close the film with majestic, austere images of nature. Other than purely visual, what was your intent? Without them, the basic storyline of the film would drown in mundane details, would appear banal. To make this private, personal tragedy of just one little person, who is just a grain
of sand, I needed to set points of reference at the start and the end of the film. As the film opens, we descend from the heights of divine creation, arrive in the life of this little person, God’s creation as well, live with him these few days that will prove so tragic to him, and then again leave for the silent beauty of creation. Your movie has essentially two soundtracks. Philip Glass starts and
ends the film, and awful pop songs are played during key scenes. The contrast is both stark and incredibly effective. It was clear that Glass’s music does not belong in the body of the film. It is majestic, powerful and creates a picture frame inside which unfolds the story. The people who inhabit the space of the film cannot listen to any other music than bad pop. It’s as the saying goes—“the songs are like the people are.”
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The film is brilliantly cast throughout— from the lead actors to the bit parts. Let me tell you this: When you’ve written a given character you can close your eyes and have a mental image of that person, both what they look like to some extent, and of course of their inner world. During casting, you look for a match to that mental image. And when you find an actor who is very close to what is shimmering in your mind, there is a gap between the two. At the moment you cast the actor for the part, you eliminate your own image of the character so as not to drag the actor in that direction, not to stretch the actor towards the image. You hand the rights to the part over to the actor. There is this gadget in Men in Black, the Neuralyzer, which lets you forget everything up to the present moment. I try not to impose on an actor a mode of acting, i.e., “I want you to act out the following personality type.” This is absolutely out of the question. Humans are natural and act their own organic selves in the circumstances they find themselves in. Several of the most dramatic narrative moments occur off-camera. How do you decide whether or not to show a scene of physical violence or sex or death on screen? The less said, the better. This is an ascetic approach. Let me compare this to the way people read works of fiction. I have noticed long ago that if a person reads a certain book first, he’ll reject the movie version of it. Why is that? Not because the people who made the film lack talent, but because we all have our own theater in our minds. Literature assumes an enormous space for your imagination, for you to fill in the gaps, for your own vision. You read a novel, and you have this imaginary space about it, what color is the wallpaper, what color is her dress, the misen-scene the characters are in, what do they look like. When a work of fiction is moved to the big screen, you convert everything into a fixed solid: No, folks, the wallpaper is actually this color; the table is not an oval shape but rectangular; and, sorry, but the lampshade over the table is not green but actually orange. And thus I think that the not-fully-shown, the unseen, but rather the hinted-at, the barely started is more powerful. I think unseen conflict can be more scary than if we showed, say, a banal fistfight. Can you talk about the story of Marvin Heemeyer, who used his bulldozer to destroy part of a Colorado town in an act of revenge? In 2008, I was in New York filming a short for New York, I Love You. My interpreter told me about Heemeyer during a lunch break, just by way of making small talk. And when she said, “This man drove out of his ga-
rage in this armor-plated bulldozer and started demolishing buildings,” I was stunned by the power of this image of a standoff, a revolt, a protest against the unfairness of the world. I was captivated by this. I told her right there and then: “It would be great to make a movie out of this.” With time it became clear that if we do make a film, we have to move it to Russian soil and tell the story of this man, Nikolai, who finds himself the victim of injustice. The revolt itself, the furious revolt, the measured, planned-out revolt—Heemeyer spent months welding the armored plating for the bulldozer that he then welded himself shut into, and was planning to commit suicide— was not a desperate act of fury; it was a measured move. It was clear to us that this was not in the Russian character. (Instead), people commit suicide. In my home town of Novosibirsk, a woman in her late 50s grew so tired of visiting the offices of city officials to find justice that she brought gasoline with her and self-immolated. A wellplanned revolt like Heemeyer would not be typical for Russia, because Russians are patient and can bear things out to the point of obedience. In our initial screenplay we did write an ending where the main character would destroy the city offices. But in the end, through some wondrous means, we decided that such an ending would not be right, that we have to do this completely differently. The seed is the story of Marvin John Heemeyer, but once it landed into [Russian] soil, it just melted into this soil; it just vanished. You can no longer identify that story in our film. Your film is a majestic accomplishment of film as an art form. It is also a powerful statement about the world around you. Are the artist and the citizen in you colleagues, or antagonists? My film is wholly a work of art. Art evokes thoughts that are deeper than a civic declaration. Such a declaration can be powerful if it’s sincere, if it’s intelligent. But it does not have this penetrating power that art has. Art encompasses all aspects of your being. Art gets under your skin, and then, there, what starts to ferment is your own spirit of a citizen, your own righteous anger, your own experience of conflict and what you know about the world. Dr. Fyodor Urnov, a geneticist in Berkeley, grew up in Moscow obsessed with films by Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexei German.
LEVIATHAN Russia, 2014, 140m Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Creative Food & Catering Telluride, Color ado
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41st
EXTENDS OUR SINCEREST GRATITUDE TO THE FOLLOWING DONORS FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF TELLURIDE’S HISTORIC NUGGET THEATER
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MAJOR SUPPORTERS Anonymous The BEAM Foundation The Burns Family The Roger & Chaz Ebert Foundation George & Pam Hamel Kayne Foundation Jeffrey Keil & Danielle Pinet
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The Prisoner
G A E L G A R C Í A B E R N A L O N A C T I N G A N D T O TA L I TA R I A N I S M BY SCOTT FOUNDAS
When expat Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari returned home in 2009 to cover the presidential race between the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, he could scarcely have imagined that he would end up serving 118 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison—much of it in solitary confinement— on charges of being an American spy. Those days, during which Bahari was questioned repeatedly by a nameless interrogator he came to call Rosewater (due to his preferred scent), formed the basis for his bestselling 2011 memoir, Then They Came for Me. And now there is a film, Rosewater, adapted and directed by Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show played its own small but crucial role in Bahari’s imprisonment. To play Bahari on screen, Stewart turned to the chameleonic Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, who in the 14 short years since making his film debut in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros has become a lauded international star at home and abroad; he has collaborated with Jim Jarmusch, Walter Salles, Michel Gondry and Alfonso Cuaron (on the now classic Y Tu Mama Tambien). But Bahari is a role unlike any Bernal has played before: a pressure-cooker study in oppression and resilience that requires the actor to appear onscreen in nearly every frame of the film, catching Bahari’s nightmare odyssey in all its harrowing and absurd details. It is a remarkable performance, void of vanity, self-pity or actorly grandstanding that cuts to the heart of an extraordinary man pushed to the brink of human endurance.
SCOTT FOUNDAS: How did you first become involved with this project? GAEL GARCIA BERNAL: I was in the middle of shooting a film in the jungle in the north of Argentina, and I got a call saying that Jon Stewart was interested in meeting with me about the part. As soon as I finished shooting, I went to New York to meet Jon; I read the book on the plane, met with Jon, read the script, and we were shooting the film one month later. That’s more or less how it went.
When you’re playing a real person like Maziar Bahari, and that person is alive and available to you as a resource, does it affect how you prepare for the role? Do you want to spend time with that person? Do you want to keep a certain distance? There are many things that are undeniable while interpreting a character. In this case, one of them was that I’m Mexican and I’ve never been to Iran. I couldn’t draw from firsthand personal experiences of the setting. So one has to grab all the anecdotes and the imagery one can from any source that gives insight into the situation and the character. In the end, the Maziar of the film is definitely not the Maziar of reality—if it was, Maziar would have played the role himself. It’s an interpretation that’s taken from Maziar’s experience. During the shooting, I talked with many people from Iran, spent time with Maziar, saw many hours of movies about Iran—some of them having nothing to do with political issues. Film gives you an interpretation; it doesn’t portray reality. You as the audience connect the dots and build up another reality. This film is not really about Iran. It’s the story of a person who’s being challenged by a big
mythology that fears that person, that innocent civilian. It could be Iran, but also many other countries. Even though you’re not Iranian, and have never been in prison, were there things in your own life you could draw on to prepare emotionally for the extreme demands of the role? As an actor, how do you take yourself to that place beyond all your technical preparation? Through empathy, which is maybe the psychological explanation of what acting is about. The reason we watch a film or a play is that we want to see something interpreted with empathy and to get some new insight into that issue. Maziar Bahari has done a great job in telling his story, and at the same time working on the defense of many journalists all over the world. That is not the movie. That is something that exists, and if you want to know about that, then Maziar is the best person to approach. But if you want to see something that gives you another interpretation, on a dramatic level, then there is this film. It doesn’t matter where we come from. It’s a cast of people from all over the world—Jon is from the United States—but everyone feels the same empathy. This is Jon Stewart’s first time directing a movie. What were your impressions of him as a director? What’s crazy is that it didn’t feel like his first film at all. He was very much in control. He did what one would expect from any good director, which was to make you feel welcome and wanted. We were shooting in five weeks, very fast, in the middle of the summer in Jordan, during Ramadan, but even with those difficulties Jon had this amazing natural
talent to make everyone feel comfortable and confident and excited about the project. Not to mention that he’s a very talented and intelligent person. It’s incredible how quick he is, how wise and how curious he is about certain things. Maybe he was discovering the nature of filmmaking in many ways, but on many other levels he was incredibly at ease, like it was his tenth movie. As both an actor and a producer, you seem drawn to material with a very strong social or political dimension, movies like No, Sin Nombre, Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries, Cesar Chavez and now Rosewater. It’s not the main thing that attracts me, but it’s definitely one of the many dimensions to a story. Politics is a language of interaction, of building societies, and it’s undeniable in any human experience, the same as you can’t deny the spiritual or the sensual. It’s a great point of departure. There are many countries where politics, or the language of politics, is much more at play on the surface. I’ve always said that in Latin America, it’s very difficult to stray too far from politics, because we’re a very political people. Our day-today lives involve a lot of politics. It’s not an activity that’s done only occasionally, like playing tennis.
ROSEWATER U.S., 2014, 96m Director: Jon Stewart Starring: Gael García Bernal, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Golshifteh Farahani Adapted from the memoir by Maziar Bahari, Then They Came for Me.
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I CELEBRATED MY MOTHER
A
At the ripe age of 25, Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan completed his fifth feature ... and fourth to premiere at Cannes (after I Killed My Mother, Laurence Always, Imaginary Loves and Tom at the Farm). Mommy won the Grand Jury Prize (Dolan shared the award with Jean-Luc Godard) at Cannes. “Should there be one, just one subject I’d know more than any other, one that would unconditionally inspire me, and that I love above all, it certainly would be my mother. And when I say my
THE PRICE OF FAME
France, 2014, 114m Director: Xavier Beauvois
Xavier Beauvois (Of Gods and Men, 2010) returns to Telluride with this fanciful tale of two beaten-down, unlikely schemers who hatch a grand plan: to steal the corpse of Charlie Chaplin for ransom. The result? A surrealistic, madcap Chaplinesque comedy. The cast includes Roschdy Zem (Cannes award winner, Days of Glory, 2006) and Benoît Poelvoorde (Telluride favorites, Coco Before Channel and Aaltra). 74 • FW2014
mother, I think I mean THE mother at large, the figure she represents. Because it’s her I always come back to. It’s her I want to see winning the battle, her I want to invent problems so she can have the credit of solving them all, her through whom I ask myself questions, her I want to hear shout out loud when we didn’t say a thing. It’s her I want to be right when we were wrong, it’s her, no matter what, who’ll have the last word. Back in the days of I Killed My Mother, I felt like I wanted to punish my mom. Only five
years have passed since, and I believe that, through Mommy, I’m now seeking her revenge. Don’t ask.” —Xavier Dolan, May 2014 Excerpted with permission from the Mommy press kit.
MOMMY Canada, 2014, 139m Director/writer: Xavier Dolan
THE GATE
Cambodia/France/Belgium, 2014, 95m Director: Régis Wargnier
Years after being captured by the Khmer Rouge and tortured, a French ethnologist faces his Cambodian captor, now being tried for war crimes. Régis Wargnier (Indochine) explores the complex moral issues of war and its aftermath. Telluride 2013 guest Rithy Pahn (The Missing Picture) produced.
Birdman Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-nominated director of festival favorites Babel and Biutiful, returns to Telluride with his latest, a tale of a haunted Hollywood star trying a comeback on Broadway. He spoke with Geoff Dyer about the film.
THE IMITATION GAME U.K./U.S., 2014, 113m Director: Morten Tyldum
As many know, Alan Turing was one of the most influential thinkers of his generation, a visionary in the concept of artificial intelligence and an essential figure in the computer revolution. He was also, behind the scenes, a World War II hero, and a gay man in an intolerant era. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing, and Keira Knightley his friend and confidant, in Morten Tyldum’s science thriller, set during the most dramatic moments of World War II.
GEOFF DYER: It’s ironic that Raymond Carver, a writer whose style is famously stripped down, should have ended up as the basis for two quite elaborately cinematic films: Altman’s Short Cuts and now Birdman. How integral was Carver to the conception of the film?
ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU: There were three reasons I
chose Carver and that particular short story. First, I have been a Carver fan since I was an adolescent. Second, I thought it was a very bad idea. As I write, I always try to think from the point of view of the characters. In this case, this story was very challenging for somebody who did not belong to the theater. And the last reason is that I wanted a story where the main theme will be projected in the story and the main character. That’s love and the need of it.
At what point did the notion of doing it in one, long fluid take, Russian Ark style, take hold? It came to me at the germination stage of the idea. I didn’t want to create reality through fragmentation, but from a linear or monolithic reality, basically the way we live our lives. No cuts. We just open our eyes and there we go, floating in a continuous Steadicam all day. … The challenge is that there is no room to improvise. The writing, design, blocking, rehearsals plus all of the technical aspects—lighting, camera movements— have to be conceived, thought out and prepared in advance in order to flow with naturalness, truth and honesty. It’s a process that demands the total awareness of the actors and all of us. It possesses the fear and adrenaline of the moment. You can’t fake it. What happens will last forever and never change or be manipulated. The drum-only soundtrack by Antonio Sanchez really drives along the narrative. I met Antonio 10 years ago at a sublime Pat Metheney concert. He is a Chilango (a Mexico City native) like me. I was in awe listening to this octopus man playing drums and expressing an overwhelming amount of rhythms, ideas and emotion. The heart of comedy is rhythm,
so I realized very early that doing a comedy (if Birdman can be called that), in a continuous shot was a very stupid and irresponsible experiment. I thought a drum score would help me to inject a rhythm and pace. We got together one week before I started shooting and Antonio recorded 60 amazing tracks that he improved as I described the scenes and the emotions needed. He is just like Gene Krupa. Finally, the moment when Keaton telekinetically moves the jar along the table and over the edge: Is that a little nod to the end of Tarkovsky’s Stalker? That is such a cinephile observation! Yes, I love Stalker. Ghosts of Ophuls, Wilder, Altman and Lumet are floating through the Birdman dressing room, too.
BIRDMAN
U.S., 2014, 118m Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan and Naomi Watts
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WILD TALES Damián Szifrón, on the inspiration for his portmanteau film, featuring six tales of rage and revenge: “I have problems with authority. I don’t like being told what to do or not to do. I’m a writer and a director so I can express myself through films, the situations that I dislike, and do something with that. But normal people, regular people, I think they suffer a lot because of repressing emotions and instincts.
We live in a society where we’re not ourselves. So yes, I think that this film gave me the freedom to collect tiny things that make me mad or angry.” —As told to Filmmaker Magazine
WILD TALES Argentine, 2014, 122m Director/writer: Damián Szifrón
THE DECENT ONE Germany, 2014, 94m Director: Vanessa Lapa
“I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses, Yours, Heini.” So wrote Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, to his wife Marga. This letter, along with 700 other pieces of personal correspondence and a trove of family photos, are the basis for Vanessa Lapa’s documentary that demonstrates the Jekyll and Hyde duality of a man who may be responsible for more human suffering than any human before or since. “I felt so sorry that I forgot our wedding anniversary for the first time,” Heinrich wrote to Marga. “There was quite a lot going on these days.” A typical response from Marga: “This thing with the Jews, when will this scum leave us so that we can lead a happy life?” • G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 77
41st
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PALM
CHUCK JONES’ CINEMA
GUEST DIRECTOR PROGRAM
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“THE SOUND OF TELLURIDE”
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This event is sponsored in part by the Town of Telluride Commission for Community Assistance, Arts and Special Events.
Cooking with Ricky
T H E G R E AT TA S T E O F A D O C U M E N TA R Y V I S I O N A R Y
LES BLANK AND RICKY LEACOCK (ABOVE); GINA LEIBRECHT AND LES BLANK (RIGHT); RICKY LEACOCK (BELOW, PHOTO BY PACO RIVERO)
BY MEREDITH BRODY
The first Les Blank movie I saw, Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, made me hungry. The most recent one, How to Smell a Rose, did, too. But not just hungry for food. Blank’s films celebrate full, rich lives in which music and passion and food are intertwined. Blank had a long friendship with Ricky Leacock, another legendary documentary filmmaker, and not just because he admired his films: “I was very impressed with his ability to cook great meals and also to tell great stories about food.” A famed screenwriting teacher once said all screenplays should begin EXTERIOR: SOUTH OF FRANCE. Blank goes one better by opening How to Smell a Rose with EXTERIOR: NORMANDY, FARMERS’ MARKET, where Leacock is determining what to cook for dinner. “Should we have a poule au pot or should we have a leg of lamb?” is the primary question, and the rest of the shopping determined by what looks best: “The endives look lovely … oh, the beautiful radishes!” And a thick wedge of lusciouslooking local blue cheese is cut. Over the course of several days at the family farm where he lived with partner Valerie Lalonde before his death in 2011, Leacock cooks meals both homey (hachis parmentier, the French version of shepherd’s pie) and elegant (little French oysters, salmon seared on a layer of salt in a cast-iron pan), in a charming kitchen with French-blue-painted open shelving and racks of enviably sharp knives. Leacock’s history as a filmmaker emerges as the two chat, and clips of his
films are woven throughout, beginning with Canary Island Bananas (1935), a 16mm short shot on his father’s banana plantation. He worked with Robert Flaherty on Louisiana Story in 1948. “He wasn’t like any director I’ve met before or since … he used the camera as a way of exploring, searching … You never knew quite what you were looking for ... You looked for movement, you looked for light, you looked for beauty.” Flaherty also provided the film’s title: When asked how do you teach somebody to film, he replied, “How do you teach somebody to smell a rose?” Leacock shot for Robert Drew, often called the father of cinema vérité, on Primary, about the 1960 campaign between Humphrey and Kennedy in Wisconsin, working with Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker, with whom he formed Leacock-Pennebaker Films. “We were the only people who had portable equipment at that time,” Leacock said. “We had an incredibly strict set of rules. No tripod, don’t light anything, don’t interview. Never ask anybody to do anything.” Leacock made close friends through filming. Nehru, filmed in 1961, “treated me like a son.” For Louise Brooks, the subject of Lulu in Berlin, Leacock gave a sigh and “enough said,” implying their close relationship. And Leacock “absolutely adored” Igor Stravinsky. “We became friends for life.” They shared a love of drinking, a pastime Leacock eventually abandoned. Leacock was enchanted with digital cinema. He first shot L’oeuf à la coque (1991) over a two-year period, with
Film Arts Foundation. After filming Leacock, she edited All in this Tea, about sourcing organic tea in China. Leibrecht tempted Blank into traveling across the bay to her San Francisco editing room by promising him home-cooked meals: “I’ll have a lunch waiting for you—soup, salad, cold cuts—and then I’ll cook you dinner, maybe lamb chops with herb butter. And afterwards Les would say ‘That was a restaurant quality meal. I would have been glad to pay for it, Gina.’” Leacock died in 2011, Blank in 2013. “I never in a million years thought that I would be finishing this film by myself,” Leibrecht said. “But I really thought there was magic happening in that blue kitchen, between those two guys.” Magic indeed. Lalonde, who says, “It’s a movie about him falling in love with me.” And he never looked back. “For me, it’s the most exciting period in my life as a filmmaker! I can do it at home, don’t have to deal with bureaucrats.” But work wasn’t everything, “especially if you like cooking, and living in the country, and walking the dog on the beach, and being in love with a lovely person.” Still, Blank points out, between 1989 and 2011, Leacock made 11 films “that give the feeling of being there.” How to Shoot a Rose was the first collaboration between Leibrecht and Blank, who had met in 1998 when she attended a weekend seminar he was giving at the
Meredith Brody has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and written about film for everything from Cahiers du Cinéma to The New York Times. She now writes about film festivals for Indiewire and food and film for EatDrinkFilms.
HOW TO SMELL A ROSE: A VISIT WITH RICKY LEACOCK AT HIS FARM IN NORMANDY U.S., 2014, 64m Directors: Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht
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The Zen of Piano Instruction ETHAN HAWKE PROFILES SEYMOUR BERNSTEIN The actor-director-writer Ethan Hawke was in a funk when, in a moment of synchronicity, he met a wise mentor. Seymour Bernstein, a classical pianist and accomplished songwriter, has a reputation as New York’s Yoda of piano instruction. Hawke discussed the film with The Film Watch. FILM WATCH: How did you meet
Seymour?
ETHAN HAWKE: I had been doing a
tremendous amount of theater and was suffering from a weird bout of stage fright. I went to a dinner party and was sat next to this 85-year-old piano teacher. I never came across someone who was powerful in his gentleness. He was so open and moving to me. My stage fright had become a terrible secret, but it came out of me when I met Seymour. He helped me so much in a matter of minutes. He said, “Most people aren’t scared enough. It’s terrifying, life. You don’t need to be cured of your stage fright. It’s probably a good sign. You care about what you are doing.” And I realized, I was taking it as a sign of weakness, that I wasn’t as good as I thought I should be, that I was a fraud. What happened to your stage fright? The moment he gave me permission, when he told me it was OK—that there was no shame in not being as strong or powerful as I wanted people to believe I was—I was better. I still have the stage fright, but I have a different relationship to it. Bill Russell threw up before every game, preseason or NBA finals. I know! Because he cared! The thing I took away most from the documentary is the importance of forgiveness, of forgiving myself. Even Seymour can’t accomplish all that he wants to. You have to have a sense of humor about that. Can you articulate what is special about Seymour? We see it and feel it in the film. He’s a fully actualized human being. He is who he is. In that opening scene, he’s trying to work out a chord progression, but out of curiosity, not obsession. He wants to figure out the best way to make this song. You hooked onto what I think is radical
about Seymour. It’s subtle. He says he’s not sure that it’s a good thing to have a successful career. Our culture is driven by this notion of success. We see it destroy people, over and over again, and yet we covet it for ourselves. It’s toxic. If we had released Boyhood [the new film by Richard Linklater filmed over 12 years] in intervals, it would have destroyed Ellar’s performance. River Phoenix does The Explorers, and then Stand By Me, and so much gasoline is thrown on that fire … Seymour isn’t practicing that chord progression because he’s neurotic or obsessed or wants fame. He’s doing it because it’s fun. He prefers to hear it done better. It amazed me to see him coaching his students. His critiques were on the surface level about their playing, but they also obviously reveal the musicians’ psychology, and maybe their demons. He gives an honest interpretation of who they are. He talked freely about how arrogance would impede their performances, how arrogance can
mask insecurity and also can manifest as not practicing. He sees whatever is holding them back. In 30 seconds. “Oh, her, she obviously has a problem with her mother.” How can you know that? “She is so tight. She plays because her mother loves piano.” You include Glenn Gould as the antiSeymour. If people know one piano player, it’s Glenn Gould. He’s the most famous and successful. But that success eroded his quality of life. Seymour seeks integration. You can’t succeed as an artist if you aren’t succeeding as a human. The world might give you credit, but you are failing. He says, “I go to war for my art.” It’s a fierce and purist statement. I’ve used that ever since he’s said it. You have to integrate your belief system in your work. Seymour let his professional career go in the name of teaching. He knew he needed to continue on his evolution, and that the restless pursuit of superficial success
would keep him stagnant. It’s not really about piano playing, then. I hoped I’d make something useful to artists. When Seymour talks about playing piano, he could be talking about acting, or about raising children. There’s something profound about it. Will you have butterflies when you get in front of the Telluride crowd for the premiere? I think Telluride is the right spot to show it. My friend Pawel Pawlikowski got so fed up with the movie business. But when he showed Ida in Telluride last year, it gave him back his love. There are people out there who love movies and who get it. Interview conducted by Jason Silverman.
SEYMOUR U.S., 2014, 84m Director: Ethan Hawke
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The Power of Song
QUINCY JONES ON THE POWER OF MUSIC This award-winning documentary follows two unlikely friends and collaborators: the 93-year-old trumpet player Clark Terry, who is suffering from diabetes, and the 27-year-old piano prodigy Justin Kauflin, who lost his vision as a boy. Quincy Jones, a producer of and subject in the film, spoke to the Film Watch about the their friendship.
GEOFF DYER: It’s a great honor to speak to you, Quincy. I’m a great admirer of your music. QUINCY JONES: Thank you so much. It’s been almost seven decades. I can’t believe it. How the hell did it all happen? It’s amazing.
Well, there’s that great line, I can’t remember who said it: “Growing old— it’s the most extraordinary thing to happen to a little boy.” That’s right. Johnny Mandel called me last month and said, “We’re gonna be the first guys to go from infancy to Alzheimer’s and not pass grownup.” I never want grow up. That’s one of the things about this terrific film. We’ve got this older man, Clark Terry, who, in spite of the considerable physical trouble he’s faced, still has the energy and the enthusiasm of a kid. That’s right, and he plays his ass off. Jesus Christ, he’s one of the greatest trumpet players that ever lived. Were you involved in the production of the film from an early stage? No, nobody was, even [director] Al Hicks. Al was a drumming student with Clark, from Australia. He wasn’t a filmmaker. He started shooting, and he eventually ended up with 450 hours of film. Damn, this is a powerful movie. There’s no bullshitting in it, Geoff. Everything there is just pure truth, man. You couldn’t plan that if your life depended on it. That accounts for the quite incredible intimacy of the film, doesn’t it? Exactly. And it’s way beyond just music. You know, it’s about humanity, really. I couldn’t have put all that together. It really happened. Everything there happened. There’s a lot of young kids who are fantastic piano players. So what is it about Justin that makes him something special? Well, number one is the sight thing. The
sight. You know, Ray Charles had vision until he was six. When he first taught me, he was teaching me how to read music in Braille. Justin had exactly the same thing. He had vision, and then it went away.
world. It’s still ongoing, all over the world. You can believe it.
Are there any things that you feel particularly characterize Justin’s style, his way of playing, that set him apart? Absolutely, because the music tells on you. You can’t get away with a damn thing with music. He’s got such an adventurous spirit. That’s what kills me. He’s so adventurous and at the same time so sensitive and warm and mellow. I know when he does those clusters, those sustained clusters, he plays them very softly. He loves the dynamics. He’s just like a painter. He takes lots of chances. As we were recording, he was rewriting everything, all the time. I said, “I get it, man, I know why you did that.”
One of the things that struck me— it’s a film about Justin, who is blind, but it’s also a beautiful film about color blindness. Absolutely. I’ve always said that music is what holds us together. There’s only 12 notes. Everybody from Bach and Beethoven to Basie, Bo Diddley, Bird, all of them. It’s the same 12 notes. You know, a good friend of mine, Frank Gehry, always teases me. He says, “Quincy, if architecture is frozen music, then music has got to be liquid architecture.” Emotional architecture. When you orchestrate for brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion, it’s like architecture, but it’s emotional. My daddy wanted me to be an architect, but this is as close as I could get.
It’s a film about the last days of Clark Terry. Do you feel it’s an elegy for the era of kids learning music not in university but by playing out in the world? That’s the era of big bands. The big bands are the greatest schools in the
There’s an amazing scene when Clark reads a passage from his memoir about having been beaten up by a bunch of rednecks. He talks about that lovely handshake with a white guy who helps him to his feet after.
Oh, it’s a killer, man. I remember the first trip with Lionel Hampton’s band down to the South. You can’t even imagine what it’s like. 1951. Every place in the South had white and colored water fountains, all the bathrooms were white and colored. The hotels we’d have to stay in? Funeral parlors with bodies in the coffins. We had a white bus driver because that was the only way we could eat in the South. In Dallas, the biggest church had a steeple with a rope around a black dummy. We kept on moving, man. We kept on moving. Geoff Dyer is a former Telluride Guest Director and the author of four novels and seven books of nonfiction, including Zona.
KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON U.S., 2014, 86m Director: Alan Hicks Quincy Jones will present a free concert featuring Justin Kauflin and his trio before the Sunday night screening of the film.
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Mikosha’s Testimony BY GUNILLA BRESKY
”When people once will see my films, when they see what war does to humanity, there will be no more wars.” These words by Russian filmmaker Vladislav Mikosha never became a reality. They remained a wish from a man who hade seen and filmed too much death and horror. At a young age, while working as a cinema projectionist, Mikosha saw the silent film Nanook of the North. He realized that he had to become a cinematographer. When, on the night of June 21, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Mikosha was sent to the Black Sea, where he documented the heroic defense of Sevastopol. After the war, he took his films to the Western capitals—London, New York and Los Angeles—where he met famous actors like Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper. He danced one whole night with Hedy Lamarr, then one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Charlie Chaplin invited him to his studio for a film screening, and was deeply moved by the footage from the front. I Stop Time is based on Mikosha’s own photos and films, including those never before seen of the crimes the Nazis committed in the East. And it documents the Nazis’ downfall. We also used words Mikosha recorded in his diary during the war. His language is figurative, precise, and beautiful. When Mikosha once told a colleague that he didn´t know how to go on filming all the horror, the colleague said, ”Cry, but continue to film.” Gunilla Bresky, journalist and director, lives in Luleå in the north of Sweden. She has made many award-winning films about the unknown history of World War II.
I STOP TIME Sweden, 2014, 81m Director/writer: Gunilla Bresky
BERTOLUCCI ON BERTOLUCCI Italy, 2013, 105m Directors: Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino
BERTOLUCCI ON THE SET OF ‘LAST TANGO IN PARIS’
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Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, is one of world cinema’s most curious, diverse and visionary filmmakers. This documentary traces his arc from poet to director, exploring his influences, collaborations, relationships and passions.
Night Will Fall U.K., 2014, 75m Director: André Singer
American and British cameramen filmed the liberation of concentration camps in Germany and the horrors they found there, and prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, set about to turn the footage into a documentary of Nazi horrors. But as André Singer recounts, the the Allies, squashed any potential film, hoping to avoid controversy as they embarked upon their efforts to rebuild Germany as a peaceful nation. In this compelling and disturbing documentary, Singer intertwines the story behind the filmmaking with the film itself.
Socialism Finland, 2014, 68m Director: Peter von Bagh
FORBIDDEN FILMS Germany, 2014, 94m Director: Felix Moeller
In the first half of the 20th century, filmmakers dreamed, in their films, of a more collective society. From the Lumiere Brothers to Chaplin to the Italian neorealists, cinema became a potent canvas for ideological musing and aspiration. In 18 chapters, former Telluride Guest Director Peter Von Bagh shows how cinema has, over time, explored one of the 20th century’s defining ideologies.
The Nazis, knowing full well the power of cinema, made dozens of feature films—disturbing examples of propaganda designed to convince their viewers to accept the regime’s genocidal policies. Those films remain intact, but, due to German law, cannot be shown in public because of their offensive nature and the presumed potential for them to inflame fascist and racist activity. Director Felix Moeller explores the history of the films, using clips and interviews with viewers who were shown the films at special screenings in Germany and Israel.
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filmmakers of tomorrow G R E AT E X P E C TAT I O N S
DOMINGA SOTOMAYOR
Age: 29 Name of my film: La Isla (The Island) City: Santiago, Chile My film, eight words or less: Family reunion on an island, memories and deaths. Favorite comedy: A Swedish Love Story Favorite documentary: El sol del membrillo Favorite drama: L’Avventura Key moment during the making of your film: The key was not to have a key. I had fun for four days with my family and friends. Dream mentor: Michelangelo Antonioni
LENDITA ZEQIRAJ
Age: 42 Name of my film: Balcony City: Pristina, Kosovo My film, eight words or less: A tragedy beyond the skies. Favorite comedy: Dr. Strangelove Favorite documentary: Close-Up Favorite drama: Tokyo Story Key moment during the making of your film: The balcony boy accidentally spit on my head; I was so happy that it was spit and not the rain. Dream mentor: Abbas Kiarostami
MATTHEW J. SAVILLE
Age: 37 Name of my film: Dive City: Auckland, New Zealand My film, eight words or less: A man’s reflection turns its back on him. Favorite comedy: Groundhog Day Favorite documentary: When We Were Kings Key moment during the making of your film: 1. Never let your Key Grip pick up the fish bowl! 2. Always have a spare fish bowl… Dream mentor: Spike Jones
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CALLING CARDS JASON WISHNOW
Name of my film: The Sand Storm City: New York City My film, eight words or less: A secret sci-fi film. Made in China. Favorite comedy: The Big Lebowski Favorite documentary: Man on Wire Favorite drama: The Conversation Key moment during the making of your film: Ai Weiwei may be a tremendous artist—but he’s a terrible barber. I learned that the hard way. Dream mentor: Tarantino—because he killed Hitler.
JONN HERSCHEND
Age: 47 Name of my film: Discussion Questions City: San Francisco My film, eight words or less: A PowerPoint presentation that becomes a cathartic dance party Favorite comedy: Sullivan’s Travels Favorite documentary: Grizzly Man Favorite drama: Sister Key moment during the making of your film: When I discovered that the Whitney Museum wanted me to create a new film for the 2014 biennial. Dream mentor: Billy Wilder
JOSH GIBSON
Age: 41 Name of my film: Theoretical Architectures City: Durham, N.C. My film, eight words or less: Shadow landscapes on hard plaster secure the days. Favorite comedy: This Is Spinal Tap Favorite documentary: Siddheshwari Favorite drama: The Mirror Key moment during the making of your film: Young leaves in early spring blown by a gentle morning wind sculpt light the best. Dream mentor: Vittorio Storaro
JERZY ROSE
Age: 29 Name of my film: En Plein Air City: Chicago My film, eight words or less: A painting instructor involves himself in student romance. Favorite comedy: The Exterminating Angel Favorite documentary: Gates of Heaven Favorite drama: Happiness Key moment during the making of your film: Filming lasciviousness in the backyard of a vacation home was tricky—we told our hosts we were plein air painters. Dream mentor: Ovid
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filmmakers of tomorrow STUDENT PRINTS
KEVIN MCMULLIN
Age: 26 Name of my film: First Prize City: New York City My film, eight words or less: A boy finds a dinosaur, but no one believes him. Favorite comedy: The Apartment Favorite documentary: Hoop Dreams Favorite drama: Shawshank Redemption Key moment during the making of your film: We filmed days after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast. So we embraced the idea of just having fun. Dream mentor: Steven Spielberg
DAVID ADLER
Age: 29 Name of my film: No Man’s Land City: Copenhagen My film, eight words or less: Two soldiers find hope in each other while WW1 explodes around them. Favorite comedy: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Favorite documentary: My Best Fiend Favorite drama: Rust and Bone Key moment during the making of your film: Everything had to be imagined by the actors and the team, like machines guns, gas attacks and enemies. Dream mentor: David Lynch
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EINAR BALDVIN
Age: 29 Name of my film: The Pride of Strathmoor City: Los Angeles My film, eight words or less: Oppressive Favorite comedy: The Band Concert Favorite documentary: Pumping Iron Favorite drama: Raging Bull Key moment during the making of your film: My first time sparring as I learned boxing for the film; the intense adrenaline rush really informed the fight scenes. Dream mentor: Tom Cruise
MARK COLUMBUS
Age: 29 Name of my film: Guests City: Los Angeles My film, eight words or less: A son protects his father against all odds. Favorite comedy: This Is the End Favorite documentary: Exit Through the Gift Shop Favorite drama: A Separation Key moment during the making of your film: Directing Rico Rodriguez (Modern Family) during the fight scene and realizing, “This. Kid. Is. Bad. Ass.” Dream mentor: Mike Leigh
REINALDO MARCUS GREEN
Age: 32 Name of my film: Stone Cars City: Brooklyn My film, eight words or less: Teenagers in love growing up in abject poverty. Favorite comedy: The Breakfast Club Favorite documentary: Searching for Sugar Man Favorite drama: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the original) Key moment during the making of your film: Ironically, the highest paid actress on set had one line that was eventually cut from the film. Dream mentor: The Coen Brothers
Pieces of Time
P O S T E R A R T I S T C H R I S T I A N M A R C L AY
BY PETER BOWEN
Structurally, Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour video installation in which film clips from across the history of cinema are meticulously edited together so that the fictional time inside each clip matches exactly the time at which you are watching it. Culturally, The Clock is an art-world sensation. In areas around the world, visitors have waited in long lines for the chance to watch part of it. Die-hard fans skipped the lines by coming in the middle of the night. Cinematically, The Clock is a tour de force exploration of how time—or more precisely timepieces (wristwatches, grandfather clocks, pocket watches, alarm clocks, sun dials, TV banners, radio updates, blinking microwave LEDs, and the like)—structure film narrative. And at the most practical level The Clock is just that—a clock. If you were to remount the show in your kitchen, you need only glance over to see Susan Hayward being executed in I Want to Live to know that it is 11:36 a.m., a warning that you better hurry up or you’ll be late for your lunch meeting. Marclay, a Swiss-American artist, started his artistic career in the late 1970s working in sculpture as well as the emerging field of turntablism. As a musician, Marclay collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth. As an artist, he uses collage techniques to explore what music means. Marclay transformed physical representations of music (album covers, cassette tapes, record players, posters, etc.) into strange, witty and often beautiful sculptural pieces. At the same time, he used the structure of music to rethink film language. His 15-minute Video Quartet (2002) uses four screens, each playing a different montage from films about musical performance, to orchestrate a sort of video chamber suite. His Telephones (1995) sampled clips of people answering, talking on and hanging up telephones so as to create one very long party line. In The Clock, Marclay extends his exploration of time-based media to time
itself. Marclay told The New York Observer, “Time is at the center of everything we do. As much as it is an artificial construct—in some ways it’s pretty abstract—it is a reality that we all sync to, and we conduct our lives to that rhythm.” Indeed in many ways The Clock is less concerned with the metaphysics of time than with its grammar, the universally recognized laws that regulate its passage. As a piece of entertainment, The Clock provides a wildly amusing ride through cinema history, sometimes testing your knowledge of film trivia, and at other times resurfacing a long-buried movie memory. Marclay often plays with our common film knowledge, revisiting a single film, building up tension by constantly returning to watch the clock hand. Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones repeatedly appear waiting for the 8:30 a.m. train that will separate them forever in Indiscretion of an American Wife. But Marclay also defies those expectations. High Noon, for example, appears only at noon, despite the film’s obsessive counting down to its titular showdown. As one watches The Clock, one becomes sensitive to the common rhythms of life— waking up, getting to work, eating lunch, going to sleep, dreaming—as well as the movie events that demand clock watching—airport check-in, train departures, blind dates, hidden bombs. Even more remarkable is how you soon discover the hidden drama of time-telling itself, how certain emotions coalesce around certain times of the hour, be they the mounting sense of anticipation, hope and excitement that stirs in the minutes before the hour and half-hour or the depleted sense of sadness or regret that permeate the seconds after the hour. Soon you begin to suspect that every second has a story to tell, one that is revealed only in its many appearances throughout the history of film. Peter Bowen is a writer and editor whose work has been published in Filmmaker Magazine and on the Sundance Channel. Originally published in longer form in Filmmaker Magazine. Reprinted with permission.
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Peter O’Toole
Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stuntman and My Favorite Year. What do these seven films have in common? You were nominated for an Academy Award for all of them. And you have not yet won an Academy Award. There are people in this audience who have a lot of influence on Hollywood and I would just like to put a bug in their ear that it’s time for an honorary Oscar for Peter O’Toole. Thank you very much indeed. That’s a very kind thought. However, I’m not dead yet.
In 2002, Peter O’Toole (1932-2013) accepted the Telluride Film Festival’s highest honor, the Silver Medallion. After the screening of a selection of clips, O’Toole sat down with Roger Ebert for a memorable onstage interview. ROGER EBERT: We saw some won-
And just as well. If you were, they wouldn’t give it to you. Posthumous Oscar!
derful clips this evening. I don’t know where to start. PETER O’TOOLE: Nor I. Your head-to-head with Katharine Hepburn in Lion in Winter is astonishing. And I know that you were a particularly good friend of hers. You said it. I was playing in a play in London and there was no lavatory in my dressing room. After the show, I was pissing in the sink, which one does. And a voice said, “Hello, my name is Kate Hepburn and I’ve come … Oh, dear. Oh, dear!” And we met. As many of us were a little bit tired in the morning, she’d give you about 60 seconds in which to recover. If you weren’t there— ZIP!—she’d cut your head off. Kate is still alive. She is in her 90s. A great, great, beautiful woman. I adore the girl. . You’ve played many teachers, including in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in Pygmalion and in The Last Emperor. This seems to fall naturally to you. Oh, dear. I’ve heard many things in my life. It’s the first time I have heard I might have made a good teacher. I am a teacher. I am a professional teacher. I teach cricket. I am a professional cricket teacher. How’s the pay? Buttons in the pocket, but vast amounts in the heart. Lawrence of Arabia was recently voted one of the 10 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound poll. The length of it, the ambition of it, the breadth of it, the depth of it the fact that it had the patience to tell its story without having to blow something up every five seconds: It’s a masterpiece. One’s life did tumble before one’s eyes watching that on the screen. Yes, it is a beautiful film. I never tire of it. The script demanded those things. The circumstances demanded all those things. David had the courage to do all those things. We were the right people to do all those things. And we took two years and I don’t think there’s one boring second of it. Some disagreeable seconds, but never boring. I read that Albert Finney was originally considered for the role? That’s right. So was Marlon Brando. I think probably Groucho Marx and Greta Garbo … who I hear performed on this stage. The Marx Brothers performed on this stage in the 20s and 30s. I also hear
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Never been done. We could be a first.
PETER O’TOOLE AT TFF 2002 (PHOTO BY LEONARD MALTIN)
that Sarah Bernhardt performed on this very stage. You should have seen some of the people they had here for the Telluride Film Festival. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Groucho Marx as Lawrence of Arabia. Frankly, you and Lawrence of Arabia are such a perfect match that it’s impossible to consider any other conceivable casting, and yet David Lean had to find you when you were essentially unknown and then trust you for two years with this great undertaking. It must have been a leap of faith on both of your parts. I had a phone call at Stratford-on-Avon, where I was playing Shylock, and it was David Lean. Would I be able to come to London and have a chat with him? So I did. He said, “I’ve seen your film The Day They Robbed the Bank of England in which you play a young English army officer, and you didn’t put a foot wrong. I really want you to do my film.” And I said, “Who’s the producer?” He said, “Sam Spiegel.” I said, “Not a chance.” Because Sam Spiegel and I, for years before Lawrence of Arabia didn’t get on at all. David said, “You’re going to hear everybody in the world is about to play this role, but please have faith. Please trust me.” Spiegel, of course, said, “No. You can’t have him. For God’s sake, David, you can’t have that awful man, that dreadful actor.” But David stuck to his guns. Two years later we finished it. Here is a question that may even be politically incorrect, but I don’t care, and I’m sure you don’t. You are Irish. In addition to being a great actor, you are also an ac-
complished writer and speaker. And it seems that those sorts of things go with the territory if you are Irish. A good Irish friend told me it’s because they didn’t have money to entertain themselves any other way so they had to go the pub and sing and then tell stories. The Gaelic language, the Irish language, wasn’t killed stone dead; it was slowly strangled from about the 16th century until the present day. However, the tunes and the rhythms of the Irish language are in the consciousness. This is my own version; whether it bears any relation to the truth, I have no idea. But it is true that in Ireland the metaphor is as natural as breathing. The word. Oral tradition. Don’t forget most of the Irish writers that you know of began in the 20th century. Joyce, Yeats …Where would English theater be without the Irish? Oscar Wilde, Sam Beckett, J.M. Synge, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Shaw … I’m sure there are more. I understand you do the world’s greatest impression of John Huston. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do it for us. (As John Huston) “Don’t worry, kid, everything will be fine.” Once, I was staying with John in Ireland and it came the morning and there was John in a green kimono with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses and he said, “Pete, this is a day for gettin’ drunk.” We finished up on horses, the pair of us. He in the green kimono, me in my nightie, in the pissing rain, carrying rifles and with a Shih Tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound. John eventually fell off the horse and broke his leg. And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him. I have a list here: Lawrence of Arabia, Beckett, The Lion in Winter, Goodbye, Mr.
Some actors have trouble staying in character for two hours; you did it for two years in Lawrence of Arabia Did you have rushes in the desert? How did you keep on top of a project that lasted that long? I’ve never looked at a rush in my life. For me, the beginning and the end of everything is the script. It’s the words. It’s the situations. It’s the people. The short answer is if you watch that film very, very carefully, you can see the decomposition of the flesh. I began when I was, what … 28? And finished when I was 30, and I can see it. Nothing really, just concentration, I suppose. I’ve no idea. Did your relationship with Sam Spiegel get any better? Not at all. He turned up at one point, on his yacht, and he summoned me on board. He’d seen the rushes for the nine months we’d done in the desert. As ever, destruction was his game. I left the yacht feeling dreadful. I couldn’t bear the man. When I came off the yacht, there was a little bar, and I wandered in and there was the artistic director, John Box, who’s alive and well. I was about to tell him what had happened and he said, “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. I was there for an hour before you.” So—this is so pathetically boyish—we climbed up the anchor chain onto the yacht and stole all his cigars. That is the best answer I can imagine to that question. It obviously doesn’t matter what we ask you because we are going to get a great story anyway. Did you, or have you ever considered directing? Films? I have considered it, but that’s about as far as it went. No … I am an actor. That’s what I like to do. When 50 years ago this year I took my first uncertain steps on the stage as a professional actor, had anyone suggested to me that half a century later, I would be up a Rockie, in a Grand Old Opry, being festooned with medals, wandering and relaxing with old and new friends, watching the better part of five decades of my life tumble on the screen in Bill Pence’s startlingly good compilation, in the company of the new generation O’Toole, my son Lorcan, I might have said that that would be unlikely. I am deeply grateful and highly honored. Thank you very much indeed.
TOM LUDDY AND STANLEY KAUFFMANN AT TFF 1998
Stanley Kauffmann Stanley Kauffmann was in his seventies, his eighties and then his nineties. He had started as film critic at the New Republic in 1958. But he wrote like a young man, or like someone capable of falling in love once a week as he disBY DAVID THOMSON covered some fresh glory. Stanley was born in 1916 (the year For decades, film lovers could not com- Griffith’s Intolerance opened). As a boy prehend that their beloved and trusted he saw silent movies as they played New
One of the world’s most perceptive critics, Stanley Kauffmann, Telluride’s Special Medallion recipient in 1998, died at the age of 98. The 2014 Festival is dedicated to his memory.
York. And there he was, at 95, writing about new films with the old awe and delight. Not that he was a one-track person: he adored his wife of many years, Laura; he watched theater and wrote about it as well as he handled films. More than that, he had been a publisher’s editor, and among his coups there was one that embodied Stanley’s life and passions—he found a new novel and worked with the
author and believed in it: The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. Stanley did not found a theory or make a cult out of his opinions. He had a steady and firm belief that amid so much commercial fodder the cinema could produce works of art and imaginative reach to live beside the best of the other arts. Over the years, he became a famous seeker-out of lesser-known pictures, often in foreign languages, and unafraid of small, local subjects. He knew that the educated and creative eye is never impressed by size or locality. He saw aspects of the human spirit whether delivered by Nicholas Ray or Satyajit Ray, by Ingmar Bergman or Ingrid Bergman. This is not the easiest or most glamorous path for a film critic to take, especially in a culture that knows far too little about India, Eastern Europe, Iran, Cuba or what lies beyond the Hudson River. Stanley was a New Yorker through and through: you could hear it in his reasonable, dry but edgy writing. But he was a citizen of a wider world that was opened up in his lifetime by cameras and screens. When Stanley Kauffmann was born, Intolerance was a daring and naive flight of American show business. By the time he died it was clearly a condition of the world from which there was no hiding. Stanley was one of a great generation that urged us to look and see: to watch and try to understand. David Thomson is a film critic and author of books including The Biographical Dictionary of Film and Have You Seen?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. His latest is The Big Screen: The Story of Movies. He received Telluride’s Special Medallion in 2006. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Robin Williams
ROBIN WILLIAMS AT TFF 1986
After becoming a legend on TV and for his stand-up routines, the actor Robin Williams shifted to more serious work, including Seize the Day, adapted from a Saul Bellow book and featuring Williams as a tortured soul. “There aren’t going to be any toys out of this movie,” Robin Williams told an audience in Telluride, where the film premiered in 1986. “Or maybe a Tommy Williams doll: you wind him up and watch him fall apart.” After showing the world his range in Telluride, Williams would be nominated for his first Oscar, for Good Morning Vietnam, less than two years later. He died in August at the age of 63.
• G U E S T D I R E C T O R • T R I B U T E S • R E V I VA L S • N E W F I L M S • B A C K L O T • S P E C I A L • I N M E M O R I A M • FW2014 • 93
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7/31/14 3:38 PM
LIKE NO OTHER
H BAR H RANCH, WEST MEADOWS Offered at $4,950,000 ocated just across the highway from Mountain Village, the 35 acre H BAR H Ranch at the West Meadows offers low density, gated privacy, and the most diverse big mountain view corridors Telluride has to offer. The custom designed fully furnished 3 bed/3.5 bath guest house (sleeps 9) is move-in ready. Adjoining is the heated 4 stall horse barn, 2 different corrals, a nice pond, and trail access out to the National Forest. The primary home site overlooking the pond directly to Mt. Wilson & Sunshine has yet to be built on. Included in the sale is a deeded Mountain Village Core parking space for quick easy access to the ski slopes and the Gondola over to Telluride.
THE H BAR H RANCH IS EASY TO SEE – PLEASE CONTACT ME TO ARRANGE YOUR TOUR
JASON K. RAIBLE 970-729-0720 Jason.Raible@SothebysRealty.com w w w . We s t M e a d o w s Te l l u r i d e . c o m
Telluride
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