View image Both images above from the opening credits of John Huston's "Under the Volcano" (1984), newly released on Criterion DVD.
Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado.Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trab y n nge ju pl g ma de l del y
View image Don't look now, little girl, but the children of rage (mummy's rage) are about to get you.
Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka "Halloween") through November 2 (aka All Souls Day -- and Tara Mulan Sweeney's birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Roman Polanski's "The Tenant," Neil Jordan's "In Dreams," and John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" ("The critics were horrified!!!!"):
Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy -- too easy, sometimes -- to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero's extravagantly gory Grand Guignol "Dawn of the Dead" is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy -- that suggest far more than they depict.
Now this is how to make a list. Richard Corliss writes for Time magazine, a mainstream publication, but that doesn't prevent him from slipping in those inspired, idiosyncratic Corli-cues™ of his. (I just made up that word, and I know it's not a very good one.) Argue all you like with RC's choices (that is the point), this list strikes me as a brilliant balancing of the expected and the unexpected, the mainstream and the marginal, from 1896 to 2004. I think it will thrill you. It might shock you. It may even... horrify you! So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to, uh, well, we warned you.
So, sure, you see "Red Dragon" (2002) on there and you immediately think, "The Brett Ratner Hannibal Lecter movie? Has he lost his mind?" Then you think, "Well, at least it's better than the Ridley Scott one. Although he also liked that." And then you remember that Corliss never much cared for "Silence of the Lambs" ("a competent but pallid version of Thomas Harris' soul-chilling novel"), so it kind of makes perverse sense.
And then, beyond the solid chunk of essential 1960s and '70s titles (which together account for 11 slots in the reverse-chronological list of 25 -- and that doesn't even include "Don't Look Now," although of course it should), you spot... "Bambi" (1942). Doe! Why didn't I think of that?! Disney's mommy-killing nightmare was surely the most traum-atic horror movie for every generation of children since it was released -- and one that parents still enjoy "sharing with" (or inflicting upon) their kids. (Compare and contrast with the "Baby Mine" scene of the previous year's "Dumbo," an excruciatingly protracted exercise in maternal separation anxiety that is the essence of emotional torture porn.)
The punchline, though, is the last (and oldest) title in the list, by the Lumiere brothers. I'm not going to give it away, but in its day it provided 50 seconds of terror that must have compared with the "Psycho" shower sequence.
(Full list and links after the jump...)
Be sure to read what Corliss has to say about each of his selections. It's fun...
A Scary History
Richard Corliss's "Top 25 Horror Movies": (in reverse chronological order)
View image Richard Harris as one version of Dumbledore, from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
First, let's get the quote right. When asked if the "Harry Potter" series character, Prof. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, a proponent of love as a power in the universe, had ever been in love himself, author J.K. Rowling said last week: “My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”
That's what started the whole rumpus, which Kristin Thompson analyses in splendid detail at "Observations on film art and 'Film Art'." I am particularly impressed by her post because I found it fascinating reading, even though I've never read a "Harry Potter" book or seen one of the movies.
Note that Rowling did not say Dumbledore was gay. She was explaining how she had always thought of the character she created, "probably before the first book was published." As Thompson reports, Rowling also said in a 1999 interview: “I kind of see Dumbledore more as a John Gielgud type, you know, quite elderly and -- and quite stately.” If I may resort to an idiomatic expression: Hello!?!?!
View image Kirk and Spock (or is it Denny Crane and Alan Shore?) from some "PG-13-rated" K/S fanfiction art: "The Ahn-Woon" (AU Amok Time koon-ut-kalifee kissing), by Gwenaille.
There was no uproar over the Gielgud remark. Others, it seems, had come to think of Dumbledore as more of a Richard Harris type and then a Michael Gambon type, although the movie role had originally been offered to Patrick McGoohan. But her point was that Dumbledore and his best friend Grindelwald had been in love, until the latter became his mortal enemy.
Last weekend, in a discussion about the work of David Cronenberg at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, I recalled that when Cronenberg's "The Fly" was released in 1986, it was widely interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS, and the pain of watching a loved one's body and mind ravaged by disease and transformed into something Other than what they once were. But, after the movie came out, Cronenberg said he'd thought of it simply as a metaphor for getting old, for the degenerative, transforming process of aging. Time and physicality themselves are the autoimmune virus, something to which none of us can develop a resistance.
Does that mean "The Fly" is about aging and not about AIDS? No. Cronenberg, like Rowling, was simply describing his thoughts during the process of creating the work in question.
It is the nature of serial fiction to create a world and let its characters move around in it, while leaving much of what happens to them off-page or off-screen, where we are encouraged to imagine them leading lives beyond what we actually witness as readers or viewers. Indeed, it's essential to the living illusion of the fantasy that we envision characters going about their business between scenes, and not just waiting around off-stage to make their entrances.
As Rowling said of the intense soul-mate relationship between the young Dumbledore and Grindelwald: “It’s in the book. It’s very clear in the book. Absolutely. I think a child will see a friendship, and I think a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation. I knew it was an infatuation.” Remember, too, that we're talking about a British boys' school here, a place where intimate same-sex relationships are supposedly as commonplace as schoolbooks.
So it's not like Rowling just made this up last week and then tried to slap it onto her seven-book series retroactively....
Perhaps Rowling's decision to make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit was born out of her frustration that few readers, screenwriters included, picked up on her hints, which were particularly heavy in the final volume. The clues were subtle enough, or maybe our expectations heteronormative enough, that -- although it was a question I talked about extensively with fellow readers this summer -- the topic did not seem to get a lot of national critical attention in the weeks after the book's release.
But a close reading would reveal that "The Deathly Hallows" was shot through with intimations about the headmaster's sexuality...
... the smarmy kiss-and-tell insinuations of [Rowlings'] gossip-mongering character Rita Skeeter, whose lurid biography of the apparently saintly headmaster — titled “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore” — is described in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
“Coming next week,” a newspaper article on Skeeter promises, “the shocking story of the flawed genius considered by many to be the greatest wizard of his generation.” Skeeter drops teasing hints about Dumbledore’s “murky past,” about his not being “exactly broad-minded” and suggests that in his mentoring of Harry there is an “unnatural interest,” something “unhealthy, even sinister.” As for the idea that Ms. Rowling suggested — that as a teenage prodigy, Dumbledore had a homoerotic infatuation with another prodigious young wizard, Grindelwald (who later went over to what in “Star Wars” is called the Dark Side) — Skeeter hints at this in coded allusions....
Traister also mentions "the lurid language of a scurrilous postmortem biography of Dumbledore" in which Skeeter
... wonders about the close relationship between the headmaster and his young pupil: "It's been called unhealthy, even sinister ... there is no question that Dumbledore took an unnatural interest in Potter." Here Rowling is aping the leering, speculative tone of news stories about gay priests, Cub Scout leaders, and teachers accused of inappropriate relationships with their charges.
Like I said, I haven't read the books, but how did anybody miss that? Or was it just dismissed because it was coming from the character of a sleazy tabloid reporter?
Thompson gets to the heart of the matter when she cites media scholar Jason Mittell's comparison to another massively popular fantasy-world serial, "Star Trek," and the "fans who 'claim their interpretive rights to open up ambiguities and subtext freely,' primarily by writing fanfiction." Beyond this mainstream fanfiction was the underground Kirk/Spock "slash fiction" phenomenon -- much of it explicitly erotic, even pornographic, and virtually all of it written by and for women -- described in Wikepedia this way:
Almost from the beginning, fans noticed the loving nature of the relationship. A few fan writers started speculating about the possibility of a sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock. The Kirk/Spock phenomenon eventually took on a life of its own, and became one of the driving forces in "Star Trek" fanzines during their heyday.
Kirk/Spock, also commonly referred to as "K/S," was the first prominent slash pairing to appear in English-language fan fiction. In fact, the term slash (as in slash fiction) comes from the expression "Kirk slash Spock"--as distinguished from "Kirk and Spock" (K&S), stories about the friendship between Kirk and Spock with no sexual component. The term was shortly thereafter applied to depictions of homosexuality in media fandom at large....
Many believe that the origins of Kirk/Spock lie in deliberate homosexual subtext in the "Star Trek" episode "Amok Time" (1967), written by noted science-fiction author Ted Sturgeon. There is good reason to believe Sturgeon's part in this is deliberate; Sturgeon was known for introducing homosexual themes to science fiction during the homophobic 1950s. He also wrote a scene in an earlier "Star Trek" episode, "Shore Leave" (1966), in which Captain Kirk apparently believes that Mr. Spock is giving him a backrub.
The K/S phenom was the first thing I thought of when I read of Rowlings' remarks on the (now deceased) Dumbledore's early same-sex love for Grindelwald. But Thompson writes, "The situation is different... I think, because most fans would not claim that their fics enter into and become part of the canon, even though they may meticulously obey its premises. Rowling seems to be claiming the right to expand the HP canon by her statements as well as by her writing."
Well, yes and no. Obviously the K/S fanfiction writers are playing with alternative universes and Rowling spoke as the author interpreting the one she created. But she wasn't expanding the canon, simply pointing out what she'd already put there, and explaining why. She wasn't writing about it officially, as an addendum to, or reinterpretation or, the canon itself (like, say, George Lucas's belated "Star Wars" prequels). She was responding to a question posed to her at a public appearance. [See her full remarks about Dumbledore -- thanks to ticknart via The Leaky Cauldron, below.]
Ridley Scott recently said about Harrison Ford's character in "Blade Runner": "Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.” These remarks would be largely irrelevant if they weren't supported by evidence within the work itself. But they don't change what's already there, and they don't make for any definitive reading (as the Scanners comments on "Blade Runner" will attest).
Rowling was telling her readers what she had in mind when she imagined and wrote one of her characters. (Thompson says Rowling is considering publishing an encyclopedic guide to her "Harry Potter" world that would include lots of background she used to write the books, but wasn't able to actually include in them.) The notion that she "outed" Dumbledore is just silly. He is who he always was.
The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?
JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!
Jo also said after revelation: "You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! ...Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?"
(This post is dedicated, with affection, to the late Sherry Laing, an adventurer in realms of imagination -- among them fantasy, science-fiction, horror and fanfiction.)
View image Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat." A film noir woodcut by Guy Budziak.
"The term itself is vague. For German Expressionism was less a unified style than an attitude, a state of mind."
-Horst Uhr, introduction, "Masterpieces of German Expressionism" (1982)
"Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white."
-Paul Schrader, 'Notes on Film Noir' (1972)
Guy Budziak makes film noir woodcuts in high-contrast black and white. He tops the "Roots of Film Noir Prints" section of his web site with the quotes from Uhr and Schrader above. I'm assuming Guy Budziak is the artist's real name, but even if it isn't, it's an appropriately noirish moniker. And he knows his stuff. Budziak writes: "My woodcuts reach back to the very earliest origins of film noir, insofar as it was the woodcut that most accurately conveyed the German Expressionist sensibility."
His love of noir is rooted in his love of black and white:
What's interesting about black and white as opposed to color is this: color more accurately depicts what we all see in visual reality. The same cannot be said of black and white, of course. So in a sense everything filmed in black and white is unreal, or perhaps can be construed as an alternative reality, but not one that we experience naturally.
See Budziak's gallery of prints, from such films as "Nightmare Alley," "Touch of Evil," "Out of the Past," "Ossessione," "Le Samourai" (a color noir!) at "Film Noir: Woodcuts by Guy Budziak."
Warning: This post (and the short film montage/hommage I put together to accompany it, above) may contain spoilers.
Jesus, Tom, it's the hat.
Take a look at the four shots from Joel and Ethan Coen's "Miller's Crossing" on this page: three close-ups of the same hat and a long shot of another one with a body under. The hat in all three close-ups, hat belongs to Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). The other one is on the head of his boss and friend, Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney). But let's re-wind a little bit.
The movie is set into motion with a close-up of three ice cubes plopped into a glass tumbler. We don't see Tom, our main character until the next shot, where he appears behind the bald head of a man (Johnny Casper, played by Jon Polito) who's delivering a lecture into the camera -- or just past it -- about friendship, character, ethics. Tom is the one who put the cubes into the glass and poured himself some whiskey. He crosses the room out of focus, moves past the camera, and when we see a reverse angle, he's standing behind and to the side of Leo. His tumbler of whiskey is in the frame, but his head isn't. When we finally do get a look at his mug, he's not wearing a hat. Meanwhile, Casper's henchman, the cadaverous Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman) stands behind his boss, holding his hat. And wearing one. It's a sign of respect.
When Tom leaves the room at the end of the scene, he puts on his hat. Then there's this strange credits sequence, like a dream in a forest, with a canopy of autumnal branches overhead. On the forest floor, a hat falls into the foreground of the frame, the title of the film appears (Figure #1), and the hat blows away into the distance. In the next close-up, Tom is roused from a stuporous slumber. He sits up and feels his head, for his hangover and for his hat.
"Where's my hat?" Tom asks.
"You bet it, ya moron," says the friend who woke him up. "Good thing the game broke up before you bet your shorts."
Turns out, the hat left with Mink and Verna. Together, they are the link between Tom's hat and his shorts. We've already heard, in the opening scene, that Mink (Steve Buscemi) is "the Dane's boy." Mink appears only in one brief scene at the Shenandoah Club, explains the whole movie ("as plain as the nose on your -- Turns out he's also involved with "the Schmatte," bookie Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro), who also happens to be the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Leo's twist and Tom's secret squeeze and the subject of Johnny Casper's opening rant.
Got that, or do I have to spell it out for ya?
OK, here's the deal:
Tom wants his hat. He goes to get it from Verna. Moon-lit close-up of the hat on the bureau. (Figure #2). Tom, is reflected, out of focus, in the mirror behind it. He's sitting in bed, smoking, just staring at the hat. There's a knock at the door. Tom answers. A man in a fedora stands silhouetted in the doorway. It's Leo, looking for Verna. He sits, hat in hand, pouring out his worries to Tom. When Leo leaves, Tom goes back into the bedroom and there's a figure under the sheets. Verna.
Later, Verna and Tom have a bedroom conversation at dawn about a dream Tom had:
TOM
I was walking in the woods, don't
know why. . . The wind came up and
blew my hat off. . .
VERNA
And you chased it, right? You ran and ran and
finally you caught up to it and picked it up but
it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into
something else--something wonderful.
TOM
No. It stayed a hat. And no I didn't chase it.
I watched it blow away.... Nothing more foolish
than a man chasing his hat.
Which brings us to the end of the picture. A lot of stuff happens, and you're just gonna have to figure it out for yourself about who does what and why they do it, but as Tom says, "Do you always know why you do things, Leo?"
Leo says he's got it all figured out now, in retrospect; that Tom made a "smart move"; that he wants things to be like they were between them: "As for you and Verna -- well, I understand, you're both young and, well, dammit, Tom, I forgive you."
Tom bristles. He blows off Leo. Tells him goodbye. And watches him walk away. Leo puts on his hat. (Figure #3.) Tom puts on his, and tilts it down over his eyes. The camera moves in for a close-up, peering under the brim. Tom looks up to watch Leo go (Figure #4). He doesn't make a move. Know it or not, this is where Tom has been heading all along. The moment has the inevitability of a dream.
Creating, assembling, integrating, asserting, and maintaining a personality is routine for most of us, but there's no denying it's hard work. Some of us have to do it from scratch every day. That's what so chillingly magnificent about the opening credits sequence for Showtime's "Dexter." It shows a man putting himself together (piece by piece, close-up by close-up) in the course of enacting his morning rituals. Yes, there are plenty of playful groaners about knives, flesh, and blood. Dexter is a serial killer -- albeit one who's trying to use his control-freak instincts to keep his habit manageable, within certain ethical boundaries, even as he daylights in forensics for Miami homicide. (He's a blood-spatter expert, naturally.)
We recognize his daily rites as things we all do every day, but they're rendered in such garish (Miami!) colors and macro-close-ups that they appear to us grotesque and purified, ultra-specific and abstractly universal, at the same time, like Pop Art. Even the messy parts look like Abstract Expressionism (like the blood spatters Dexter hangs as art above his desk at work), from the collection of Dexter Morgan. His most valued collection, however, consists of the blood slides of his victims, which he keeps neatly and discreetly filed in a box inside the air conditioner.
The credits gallery is accompanied by jaunty/menacing music that's both spicy Latin in flavor and creepy Gothic in sensibility. A guitar/kalimba/harpsichord sound. Sassy/sinister horns punctuate the mocking melody with bleats, cackles and growls. It's like the "Addams Family" theme played by a Mexican Day of the Dead band of mâché skeleton musicians. Who are, no doubt, Cuban immigrants.
The first time you see it (the titles sequence wasn't used in the initial pilot episode), it tells you everything you need to know about the character. Every time after that, it immerses you into the world of the show, like the best opening montages that took you by the eyelids and pulled you into "Twin Peaks," the New Jersey of "The Sopranos," the muddy shit-hole mining town of "Deadwood."
It begins with an extreme close-up of a mosquito (like Dexter, a blood-sucking predator). SMACK! Dexter swats it and we rack-focus down his extended forearm and notice his face -- still fuzzy, abstract, in semi-darkness, cheek against the mattress. The hint of a satisfied smile. Another kill, another day. Good morning! Time to rise and shine. Let's begin with a shave: Huge fingertips brush over wire stubble; the flesh beneath the bristles is elastic, alive. Shaving gel: Yes, it looks like semen. This is a show about bodily fluids. (And about performing.) A trickle of blood runs flows into the top of the frame and down the tender skin of the neck. A drop -- twothree -- splatters near the drain in the sink. (We have other Jungian -- er, Hitcockian -- memories of blood and drains, don't we?) A piece of tissue soaks up the red from the nick...
Breakfast. Knife blade slices through more tissue -- packaging and flesh. Ham. Eggs. Broken. Fried. Sizzling. A splash of Tabasco shoots across the screen like a spurt of blood. The cutting is jerky -- jumps and stutters. A maw devours the meat. Appetite.
A garrote. Exposed neck. No, just dental floss. Shoelaces threaded through eyelets, holes in skin. A rope pulled taut, as if to choke off a carotid artery. Extreme tension. A white t-shirt pulled tightly over a head, like a bag over a suffocation victim. The contours of a face appear behind the stretching fabric, suggesting a nylon stocking contorting the face of a criminal, or Freddy Krueger pressing his face from the wall above the bed in the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street." The collar pops over his nose and his lip (which flaps like rubber) and we get a clear view of Dexter's face for the first time. He looks us in the eye. For just a little too long. It's uncomfortable. For us, not so much him. He's pretty sure he can present a "normal" face to the world. He's been doing it all this life, every day.
Close-up of a deadbolt lock. The key turns. And then, the money shot: We see Dexter pulled together, the complete look, as he leaves his apartment and heads out into the world in the harsh light of day. His shoulders are a little hunched, held a bit too high. His walk, his taut expression, even his wardrobe -- something's off. They're all stiff. Over-determined, controlled. Dexter catches our eye and flashes an unconvincing but polite smile. Cordial without being warm. Sociopathic. He knows we know. But nobody else does. It's our little secret.
Imagine the "Psycho" shower scene without Marion Crane or Mrs. Bates. Alfred Hitchcock's (and Saul Bass's) rapid-cut sequence is renowned for its use of close-ups to suggest the slicing of flesh when, in fact, there is none on the screen. You create that illusion in the cuts.
View image The plumbing continues to function as it is designed to, without regard to Marion's trauma.
View image The ripping of a membrane, like flesh (keeps the wet inside), as Marion (below frame) reaches out, clutches at life while it slips from her grasp.
But what really makes the sequence work, I'd argue, is the way Hitchcock uses plumbing. Back in 1998, I published an extensive web article on Plumbing in the Cinema, in which I quoted from Stephen Rebello's book, "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho":
"The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America's sacred cows -- virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family... and the bathroom.'' Rubello quotes screenwriter Joseph Stephano on the subject of primal-screen plumbing: "I told Hitch 'I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and SEE that toilet. Can we do that?' A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, 'I'm going to have to fight them on it.' I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing -- we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures -- they'd be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], 'This is where you're going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We're going to start by showing you the toilet and it's only going to get worse.' We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet on-screen.'' Just the sight of the flushing toilet was considered shocking enough to mildly unsettle and disorient audiences of the day.
And the same is true today, though perhaps less noticeably so. In the same plumbing piece, here's the way I described what happens next:
Hitchcock's guilty fugitive protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having totaled the sum of her indebtedness, monetary and karmic, on a slip of paper, rips up the evidence of her culpability, flushes it down the water chute (although a telltale piece of it misses the bowl, as Detective Arbogast [Martin Balsalm] will later discover) and steps into the shower. Just as she's figuratively washing her the sins of her recent past down the drain, Mrs. Bates pays her a visit with a butcher knife. Marion pays for her sins in blood. And the image of her blood swirling into the blackness of the drain dissolves into an image of her now-lifeless eye. Her head lies on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. For what is a human body itself -- its arteries and intestines and organs and other viscera -- but an elaborate piece of organic plumbing?
View image Following the blood and the water down the drain.
That cold, hard biological reality underscores the whole scene, from the time Marion, looking for someplace to dispose of her accounting besides the wastebasket (where that nosy Norman would undoubtedly discover it), first glances toward the bathroom, hesitates, and then decides to take a shower. The hollow sound of the tiled room echoes through the scene -- and, of course, Marion's physical vulnerability is emphasized by her nakedness and the noise of the shower drowning out the rest of the world. She's even made a point of closing the door firmly before stepping into the shower.
View image Into the drain, and out of a lifeless eye...
You can make all the Freudian jokes you like about the phallic showerhead, but it works. Yeah, it's sexual, and Marion seems almost orgasmic when she slides under its spray. It's also cleansing, even cathartic after all Marion's been through since her furtive afternoon quickie (in bra and panties) with her boyfriend in the hotel room at the start of the picture: Since leaving work the previous day, she's made a rash and fateful decision to steal cash from her employer and skip town. She exchanged cars, had a close encounter with a cop beside the highway in the desert, drove in the dark and pouring rain, and then had that strange little talk with the young man in the back room full of stuffed and mounted birds -- the boy with the mean old invalid-ed mother locked up in that spooky house looming behind the motel. Who wouldn't like to take a nice hot shower after a day-and-a-half like that?
[images missing: insert your memory of Marion's murder here]
What you see on this page are just the close-ups of insentient bathroom fixtures in the sequence. All images containing organic matter have been stripped out. Marion is about to become one of these inanimate objects. The image of her blood swirling in the tub, and her dead face mashed against the white tile floor, shocks us even as it prepares us for the clean-up scene, where we will shift our identification from Marion onto Norman. To Hitchcock's perverse delight, we will soon be rooting for Norman to scrub away and dispose of the evidence of our (ex-) main character's murder. The drain is metaphorical, but it's also the abyss. Marion has been our surrogate; and now her pupil is as void and lifeless as that hole. We peer into it, unable to fathom where it leads, and the blackness beckons...
Words are linear. Movies not so much, even though they are encoded onto strips of celluloid or served up as streams or spirals of digital bits.
The web is not so linear, actually. Hyperlinks in all directions are more like the interconnected synapses of the human brain than any other technology or art form I can think of. But sometimes when I try to convey something about my experience of movies -- filtered, as always, through reflections and contrasts between images, memories, themes, styles -- what I really want to do is make a movie about it. That seems like the shortest, most direct way from imagination to articulation. The movie itself (as Godard famously suggested) is the criticism, the analysis.
When I put together the images and commentary for my previous post, "Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence," in celebration of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, that's what I was getting at. I just didn't have the tools to fully express what I wanted to say. Strike that. I had the tools, right here on my MacBook, but I didn't know how to use them.
One weekend and three long nights later, here's what I wanted to say. I will resist the temptation (you don't know how much I am tempted) to analyze my own cinematic essay, but I want you to watch it for yourself first. I'll translate it from web into movie and back into language later. This is a direction in which I want to move my film criticism.
Oh, and it's not a "literal" interpretation of the post. Some things just work differently on the motion picture screen than they do on the computer screen. Think of the first post as the original set of annotated storyboards, from which I felt free to depart whenever it felt right. The idea was not to overthink it, just to go with the flow and see where it led, like the ant-hole in hand / armpit / sea urchin / top of head sequence in "Un Chien Andalou." Enjoy -- and please leave comments, critiques, interpretations and questions! Just be sure to stay all the way through the end credits -- a minute or so of the six-minute running time....
UPDATED 10/19/07: While looking for a frame grab from "Black Narcissus" to honor the late Deborah Kerr, I discovered the source of an indelible mirror-image (you'll see) that I'd previously been unable to locate. It's now been incorporated into the movie.
View image Marlene Dietrich, "The Scarlet Empress" (Josef von Sternberg, 1935). A pivotal moment of (re-) birth after providing her country with a male heir -- though not one fathered by her husband, royal half-wit Grand Duke Peter.
View image "Scarlet Empress": "... one of those extraordinary women who create their own laws and logic..." Beds, dreams, filters.
Memory starts one image pinging off others across time and movies. Ruminating upon the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door (which, obviously, I can't stop doing), I see close-ups flowing into and out of one another, dreams within dreams within nightmares, on themes of memory, loss, identity, the process of consciousness and the end of consciousness -- you know, the stuff movies are made of.
View image "Once Upon a Time in the West" (Sergio Leone, 1968): Mrs. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Sweetwater to find her family slaughtered. After the funeral, she is alone in a big bed in a small room in a vast new land.
View image Final shot, "Once Upon a Time in America" (Sergio Leone, 1984): David "Noodles" Aaronson flops down in an opium den to smoke away his pain and drifts off into a narcotic dream...
In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies, here's a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards...) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory -- and my DVD collection. Looking back, most of them seem to be filtered, obscured, freeze-framed or reflected faces of characters reaching an impasse or a reckoning -- largely from the endings of some of my favorite movies. I wish I could actually cut the film together, so that I could show them in motion, control how long each shot remains on the screen and fiddle with the rhythms (flash cuts, match cuts, reversals of motion), but I don't know have the technology or the know-how for that at the moment. So, imagine this as a (sometimes perverse) little movie, a "found footage" montage sequence... Kuleshovian, Rorschachian, Hitcockian, Gestaltian, however you want to look at it. I suppose it's also a look in the mirror.
Hope you can see the associations, juxtapositions, oppositions, contradictions I was going for, although I'm not sure I consciously understand all the leaps myself. They just flowed together this way. Feel free to make your own connections. (And, of course, be aware that you may find spoilers surfacing. With a broadband connection all 38 enlarge-able images should load in about 10 seconds.)
View image Final shot, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (Robert Altman, 1971): The camera moves in on Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), in an opium den while snow drifts outside.
View image Flash cut to final shot of "Petulia" (Richard Lester, 1968): Petulia (Julie Christie), in labor, feels the hand of someone (husband? lover? doctor?) on her cheek just before she blacks out under anaesthesia.
View image Flash cut to final close-up, "Le Boucher" (Claude Chabrol, 1970): Drained and devastated after a long and harrowing night-trip to the hospital, Helene (Stephane Audran) drives herself to a dead end and stares across the impassible river in the cold light of dawn.
View image Flash cut to final freeze-frame close-up, "The 400 Blows" (by Chabrol's New Wave compatriot, Francois Truffaut, 1959): Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) reaches the ocean at the edge of the continent. Where to go from here?
View image Flash cut to final moment of final shot: "Nights of Cabiria" (Federico Fellini, 1957): Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) pulls herself together, puts her game face on, looks into the camera and smiles through tears in a tender moment of quiet triumph. Another of the most famous movie-ending close-ups.
View image "America" (cont.): Tail end of final shot, as Noodles breaks into an enigmatic grin.
View image Picking up the same shot where we left off, pushing in on Mrs. Miller in the opium den: "McCabe" (cont.)
View image Tail end of final shot, "Repulsion" (Roman Polanski, 1965): Into the eye of madness. Closing in on a family photo with the young Carol (Catherine Deneuve), reversing the movement of the titles/opening shot.
View image End credits, "Twin Peaks" (David Lynch, 1990): The late Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), beauty queen in the high school display case, frozen in time.
View image "Twin Peaks": Laura Palmer, unveiled as an exquisite corpse, "wrapped in plastic" and frozen in time. An indelible recurring image, like something from a dream. Presented throughout the series as a still image.
View image Re-wind to last moments of penultimate shot, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller": Frozen. A slow zoom that becomes an optical enlargement.
View image
Fourth-from-last shot, "The Shining" (Stanley Kubrick, 1980): Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), frozen in time at the Overlook Hotel.
View image Final shot, "The Shining": Jack Torrance frozen in 1921 at the Overlook Hotel, looking us (and himself) in the eye: "You've always been the caretaker here."
View image Flash to the extreme close-up of the back of the death's head moth, "Un Chien Andalou."
View image Flash to "Repulsion": Carol's beauty parlor client.
View image Flash to final shot of "The Tenant" (Roman Polanski, 1976): The scream, the recognition of the horror, the transference of identity.
View image Flash to "Persona" (Ingmar Bergman, 1960): Mirror-image close-ups and the transference of identity, Bibi Andersson on the left and Liv Ullmann on the right.
View image Final shot, "Safe" (Todd Haynes, 1995): Frozen in the mirror, Carol White (Julianne Moore), in a sterilized, hypo-allergenic underground bunker, confronts her mortality, face to face, in the mirror: "I love you."
View image "Un Chien Andalou": The Young Woman (Simone Mareuil) defiantly applies her face in the mirror.
View image "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979): Maria Braun (Hannah Schygulla, Dietrich's heiress), self-made woman and Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle, applies her face in the mirror: "I look like a poodle."
View image Reverse angle: "Maria Braun": "I'll bet Americans are just crazy about poodles."
View image "Scarlet Empress": In the process of becoming...
View image Final shot, "The Scarlet Empress": Catherine the Great climbs to the top, achieving her moment of greatest, loudest triumph and self-creation/realization with an ecstatic, power-mad smile and a kaleidoscopic overlapping montage.
View image Final close-up into final shot, "Psycho": Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and the triumph of Mrs. Bates, midway through the dissolve: "They'll see. They'll see and they'll know. Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly." THE END
When is a long shot a close-up? When it's part of an Alfred Hitchcock cliffhanger sequence on Mount Rushmore in 1959's "North by Northwest," that's when.
View image Full profile of Roger on right, as Eve drops right out of the bottom of the picture. The most prominent facial feature in the shot is Jefferson's schnoz (this could almost be microphotography, if you thought of it on that scale), with Abe Lincoln looking on in semi-Bergmanesque three-quarter profile from below his predecessor's nostril.
View image Mr. Washington is ready for his close-up now, with a teeny henchman standing to the left of his cheek and miniscule Roger and Eve hanging out between him and Jefferson.
View image Mr. Lincoln. And Leonard. (That would be a tiny Martin Landau.)
Hitchcock is having so much fun with scale and perspective here that I chuckle with delight (even as I tense up) every time I see the, uh, climactic sequence, which ends with an insertion shot -- both long shot and close-up, depending on how you look at it -- that's so naughty, so pornographic it will have to wait until after the jump....
Roger O. Thornhill ("ROT," played by Cary Grant) pulls Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) up the cliff and into bed, so that she becomes "Mrs. Thornhill" in a matter of seconds, in the course of two quick close-ups and a pull-back. The ever-tightening close-ups of Eve are used to disorient the viewer -- there are a couple seconds where you're in a confused into a sort of dream state -- and fuzz the transition from Rushmore into the train compartment (scene of an earlier dizzying kiss). But with each close-up we feel Roger and Eva getting closer (she tells him to "pull harder") until he pulls her right into the shot (and their honeymoon bed) with him. They are united within the same frame as man and wife. And they seem pretty tickled about it, too. Roger even gets a little halo above his head from a light fixture. Or is that just an "O" for his middle name, which stands for "nothing"?
View image Begin pull-back. The bluish background behind Roger is almost the same...
View image Eve: "Oh Roger, this is silly." Roger: "I know, but I'm sentimental."
We knew they were going to get down off of Washington's neck somehow. Hitchcock doesn't bother to show us because it really doesn't matter. Time to wrap things up. He left Jimmy Stewart hanging at the end of the opening sequence in "Vertigo," but this time the transition has a visual logic ("pure cinematics") intended to be emotionally satisfying, not unsettling -- plot details be damned.
Silly? Sentimental? Hitchcock seems to have something a little racier in mind. You can interpret for yourself what those arrows on the title lettering, the train, the tunnel, and "The End" signify. But if this final extreme "close-up" doesn't make you laugh, you're not getting into the cocktail spirit of the movie.
Someone is trying to kill Dr. Sidney Shaefer (James Coburn). Hell, it seems like just about everybody is trying to kill him -- or spy on him or abduct him or drug him or interrogate him or brainwash him or flip him or something. And it's no wonder. He knows too much. He's the president's analyst in Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 "The President's Analyst," one of the great unheralded movies of the '60s and one of the great paranoid political comedies ever -- part "Strangelove," part "Parallax View," part "Our Man Flint," part "Little Murders."
Poor Sidney -- or Sid, as his former patient and CEA (Central Enquiry Agency) agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) calls him. Even the President of the United States now has someone he can talk to. But Sidney can't trust anybody. So, for now, he has managed to slip away in the station wagon of the Typical American suburban Quantrill family of Seaside Heights, New Jersey: Wynn (William Daniels), Jeff (Joan Darling) and their son Bing (Sheldon Collins), tourists he picks up while they are taking a White House tour.
"Gee whiz, Dad. Why can't we take the FBR tour?" Bing whines. "I want to see the files."
"Sorry Bing," Dad replies. "We've got to get back to New Jersey as soon as we finish the White House.
"Now be a good boy and enjoy your heritage," says Mom.
The Quantrills are liberals. Not left-wingers or anything like that, but they're for civil rights. They've done some weekend picketing. As a matter of fact, they even sponsored the "Nigro doctor and his wife" when they moved into the development. Their next-door neighbors are fascists, though.
Stepping into the Quantrill's split-level home, Wynn flicks a switch on the living room wall and groovy Bacharach-esque Muzak begins to play. "Total sound," he explains with evident satisfaction.
"Want a draft beah?"
Dr. Sidney Schaefer slides off his sunglasses and beams ingratiatingly. "Yes."
I defy you to watch Coburn flash his killer pearly-whites here (can you tell Sid is maybe beginning to go a little off his rocker?) and not find yourself grinning, too. This is megawatt star-power, so bright you gotta wear shades.
Your piece could be as simple as a series of frame grabs with captions, or a blurb about a single close-up in a particular movie or television episode, past or current. Or it could be an essay about a certain performer's mastery of (or failure to master) the close-up.... Or your piece could fixate on a director or cinematographer who is especially adept at pushing in to capture emotion. Or if you're feeling contrarian, you could write about a memorable close-up that does not show a human face. Dealer's choice all the way.
So, I don't know what I'm going to write about quite yet (probably more than one thing), but thinking about it today triggered a recollection of something Alfred Hitchcock had said about the impact and intimacy of close-ups, and how they should not be used indiscriminately. They are the bazookas in a filmmaker's arsenal. ("Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as... close-ups!")
View image Kindly old man or dirty old man? Or both?
Hitchcock also liked to talk about how context gave meaning to close-ups, a compositional and editorial principle he liked to cite as an illustration of "pure cinematics" (but which also goes by the less exalted name of "montage," a basic element of film grammar). He told Francois Truffaut (in the interviews collected and printed in "Hitchcock/Truffaut" -- or is it "Truffaut/Hitchcock"?): ""Let's take a close-up of ["Rear Window" star James] Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that's being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he's seen as a dirty old man!"
Here's a clip of Hitch explaining it all for you -- and playing the lead role in a custom-made example:
What he's describing is, of course, the famous Kuleshov effect, which... oh, let Mr. Wiki provide the details:
View image The Kuleshov effect in six shots. Or four.
The Kuleshov Effect is a montage effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in about 1918.
Kuleshov edited a short film in which shots of the face of Ivan Mozzhukhin (a Tsarist matinee idol) are alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman's coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was identical, and rather expressionless, every time it appeared. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
So, there you go. Get closer. Check out the Close-Up Blog-a-thon and submit your own ideas. I've got to focus in on mine...
View image Woody Allen (foreground, center) in "Stardust Memories."
Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.
The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.
Adams later wrote in Time magazine:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'
Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."
Images of the execution were also used in "Head" (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson, written by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and starring the Monkees, Victor Mature and Annette Funicello. Reviewing "Head," Nick Burton wrote: "Indeed, there is much newsreel footage here of the Vietnam war, and the frightening image of a man being shot point blank in the head, execution-style, reoccurs in this G-rated film enough to remind the audience just what was at stake when people's attentions were distracted by escapism."
Who, if anyone, owns the rights to the image known as "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon"? Who owns the rights to the execution footage attributed to "NBC News" (taken by a South Vietnamese cameraman Vo Suu, who worked with NBC correspondent Howard Tuckner? Would such images ever be shown on television or in mainstream print or Internet outlets today? Do (or did) either of the men who were photographed have any rights (moral or legal) over how their likenesses were used? Are the images legally considered to be in the public domain -- and, if so, when did that happen? The pictures were taken by credentialed, professional news photographers. Does that make a difference? The infamous private photographs taken by and of American military personnel abusing captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released with the identities of the prisoners digitally obscured. Should the same standards be applied to other images -- say, of civilian or military casualties? Do those standards change at the official end of a war, or major combat operations?
An article in Famous Pictures Magazine reports: "After the picture and footage flashed across the world there were cries for Loan to be charged with War Crimes for his summary execution of Lem. Loan's execution would have violated the Geneva Conventions for captured soldiers or Prisoners of War (POWs) if Lem had been wearing a military uniform. Since Lem was caught wearing civilian clothes, plaid shirt and black shorts, Loan was only restricted by the laws of the South Vietnamese government, which allowed the use of such harsh measures." So, this may have been documentation of a war crime. How do such considerations affect the rights or responsibilities of those who reproduced the photograph? Do the rights associated with the images vary after the fact, depending on whether the usage is journalistic, commercial, non-profit, political, satirical, comedic, sensationalistic, or otherwise?
The Bush administration has tried to prevent the press from photographing even the coffins of unidentified US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do government censorship efforts change our view of war images? Are the legal or ethical standards for showing victims of accidents or natural disasters different from those for showing casualties of war? How? Given that "Head" was released the same year the execution occurred and "Stardust Memories" twelve years later, does the passage of time change how journalistic images are used in fictional contexts? Would you rather not think about this? I don't have definitive answers to these questions. Do you?
NOTE: Errol Morris writes a New York Times blog called Zoom: A Fillmmaker Uncovers the Hidden Truths of Photos in which he examines photographs and the stories behind them for evidence about what we think we see in them and what we think we know about them.
Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:
I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.
How much more meta do you want to get?
Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.
Far from Vietnam: Internet technology as used, parodied and, yes, redacted in Brian De Palma's "Redacted."
But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie
