Breakfast at Tiffany's and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

It was 1961. Blake Edwards directs Audrey Hepburn who plays an American geisha based on a story by Truman Capote. For Hepburn, it is a defining role, for the other players, like George Peppard, Buddy Ebsen, and Martin Balsam, it would be one of their best roles before moving on to the new upcoming medium of TV.

Blake Edwards who had funny ideas about what is funny, had asked Mickey Rooney to pretend he was Japanese, created a typical surreal party scene, and later regretted and apologized for the former and repeated the latter with Peter Sellars playing an Indian gentleman in brown-face.

Detail from Dancer - copyright 2014 - A. Barake

Despite all the Hollywood crassness and foibles and the watering down of the very moving story, the movie is a classic, and is moving. Some scenes are exactly true to the book, and their power undiluted. The undercurrent of tragedy is always there, the sadness of men's lust for youth, the hurt of youth abused, and the exploitation that derives from these circumstances is played though the central character.

The pattern of a party girl that knows that sex is power yet that feels trapped by it and yearns for something more permanent than the puppet strings that the pull of Eros provides is classic. Marilyn's appeal comes from there. That Hepburn was able to transcend it while still providing the sadness is genius.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, although ostensibly playing with Chandler themes, does provide a nod to the same story (to be fair, so did Chandler in his own misogynistic way in "The Little Sister"). There is the sad back story of childhood abuse, and the party girl in Hollywood plot line, and the sympathetic "friend" who wants her but cannot "have" her.

The pattern of friendship that becomes love is a Hollywood staple, watered down in Doris Day - Rock Hudson movies, and used and abused even today. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang hints at it, but the boy and girl do not get together, the boy finally admits to not being good with girls. It plays all the cliches and then twists them into something that says "I know all about this bullshit".

Breakfast at Tiffany's could not do that. It was shot on a budget of $2.5 million and earned 15. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was shot on a budget of $15M and made 16. Draw your own conclusions on what sells.

How Downton Abbey is the M*A*S*H of our times

Copyright 2014 - A. Barake

Robert Altman shoots high. He made indie movies through mainstream distribution mechanisms, his way, with no apparent compromises. Actors loved to work for him. He got the best and he got them to be their best.

His breakthrough M*A*S*H film was made more or less at the same time as other mainstream war films like Catch-22 and Patton, but his had a humanistic twist, not as black as Catch-22, not as jingoistic as Patton. The characters were iconic, and the setting eternal. So much so that the TV series that followed used the same set, ran for a record time and was much loved. Altman did not see much or any money from the series.

It is interesting to compare the movie to the series. It is a good example of how movies could go further, were more adult, in the real sense than TV. The sentimentality was absent, the self-censorship not there.

Fast forward to about ten years ago. Altman, in his mature years, make the perfect manor mystery: Gosford Park. The threads of social change in post Victorian England are captured. The futile snobbery, the emergence of movie making, the dark side of robber barons, and the unfairness of class, are all wrapped in the tropes of the genre, with a wink at the detective, hammed up by Stephen Fry, the upstairs downstairs, the shooting party, the sumptuous settings. The movie works, like all Altman movies, on so many levels that it almost becomes a documentary.

The script credit goes to Julian Fellowes, who afterwards, said that Altman took his script as a starting point, in the same way that Kubrick took Clarke's "2001 a Space Odyssey"  as a starting point (my interpretation, not Fellowes').

Fellowes got a hefty fee with which he bought one of the manors used for the set. He then famously went on to write the TV series Downton Abbey, with many of  the same characters and settings. It is a lavishly produced soap opera. Sentimental, full of short intertwined plot lines, but ultimately apologetic to and for the upper classes. Completely unreal, completely different than Gosford Park, hugely successful and profitable.

Downton Abbey is to Gosford Park what the M*A*S*H  television series was to the original movie. Altman's career was framed by two very similar show trajectories. 

Last Year at Marienbad and Kubrick lovers

Resnais/Robbe-Grillet's movie could have never been made by Kubrick, by any American. It is a gulf that cannot be bridged. It is a great film that defines the distance between two cultures. A defining artefact.

But let's look at the commonalities first. Formalism, cinematography, music, all these are components of the medium, mastered by both sides. Influences are acknowledged, Marienbad left its mark that way.

The difference is in the extreme surrealism, if that is at all a possible term. Resnais does not hesitate to go all the way, and manages to get it made as a mainstream film. Cultural considerations could never trump commercial ones that way in Hollywood. Never.

It was panned by American critics. It was a challenge to their perceived cultural hegemony. I am not sure what the current critical status is, other than it being something which has taken place, that exists and that cannot be taken back. This is the advantage of reproducible media over museum pieces, stone temples, things that can be annihilated in war. It is also the curse of the commercial interests who want to charge toll, but who at the the same time want mass consumption.

There are others like it, Tarkovsky's Nostalghia comes to mind, but very few that speak universals without compromise or banality.

Marienbad tiptoes and steps on formalism, uniqueness, understanding, ambiguity, misunderstanding, romance, and pretentiousness, and succeeds in being unique, beautiful, and influential.

Lars Von Trier, green screens, and the edge of Reality

I want to talk about why I think all this "virtual movie making" is happening and why Lars and his buddies wanted to put an end to it and why all this may be misunderstood.

First why all the green screen effects, backgrounds, characters? Is it because  there may be the feeling that what can be captured on film as reality has become banal, overly accessible? Is it because we can travel much anywhere quite affordably, and so locale is losing its novelty appeal, it is no longer only the rich that can visit Petra or Goa, or the Forbidden City?

So maybe we make things up. Other planets, other systems, alternate reality, dystopia, and fantasy. There even seems to be a trend to recreate the destruction of skyscrapers that marked the start of this decade. Abuse breeds abuse, and we are repeating the behaviour of the Japanese post-nuclear monster movies, on a different scale, with transformer planes and spaceships crashing into futuristic cities. 

 Lars seems to object to this, and rightly so. There are interesting and real (in the non-CGI sense) experiences and associated beauty to be mined still. We are thrill seeking entertainment consumers but we don't have to be just that. So his solution is  to make movies about thing we usually do not see, the intimacies and extreme moments, sex of others. I am not sure this is any better. It may even be  the same, cheap thrills. 

Has the mining of multi-layered human experience ended, has the Nouvelle Vague covered all that territory? Soderberg and Nichols are still doing good stuff on the North American side of that vein are they not? Why not build a bit? Stories and scripts are risky, it is easier to assume that the middle of the bell curve wants the opening weekend escapism, but then I  think there is an opportunity to quell the angst of the consumer culture and the futile lust for the new and special with the quiet calming, dare I say Zen, reality that a focused lens can bring to life. It is a bit like writing about the everyday to make is stand out to make it special, a diary of life as it could be as it is.

Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes

(picture by mistermeta)

To follow-up on yesterday's post about criticism, here is my critique of Wim Wenders' 1990 documentary on fashion.

He was commissioned by Le Centre Pompidou to do a film about the fashion industry, and he initially thought it too shallow a subject, but went ahead, and found depth. In fact there are so many layers here that it opens up all kinds of cultural avenues for exploration.

On one level, he covers the Paris show of Yohji Yamamoto's fashion design firm, from his workshop in Tokyo to the courtyard of the Louvre where the runway is set up. On another level, he explores the ephemerality of video versus film, the film uses both media, sometimes simultaneously. On another level, he does a character study of Yohji through interview and observation. He draws out his attitude towards women, his father, the 2nd War, creativity, death, aging, cities, and most importantly identity.

The theme of the movie is Identity. Clothes are one way to begin to address the subject, but it goes far beyond this, into history and the moment of design, and why we strive to capture things that are in decay - as in film. Wenders makes analogies between film making and fashion design as well, and throughout, this jamming with ideas resonates into a coherent whole.

Wenders has said that he is not an intellectual, and I think this means that he is concerned with the surface of things, uses them to draw out emotion. He is sensual, and the themes, although abstract, are not part of the rational discourse we associate with intellectual thought. I have a feeling he said that as a subtle boast.

Wenders seeks harmony. This makes this subject - Yohji - particularly suitable for his vision. He draws out the deep value of doing with the senses, using material and images to make identity. In the end, he captures a place in the imagination, a stake of humanity.

His idea emerged while making the film I think, and the editing is subtle. The DVD I have shows outtakes, and he left out some central stuff, like Yohji's mother, who plays an important thematic role in the interviews. The omissions are not gaps, because the rest of the film makes these ideas emerge more powerfully than if they were explicit.

There is a sense of melancholy mixed-in with deep harmony and longing in this film, a present that cannot be captured, but that is somehow being put into the clothes and vision of this designer, in a subtle and gentle way. His history as a war orphan, his urge to recapture the comfort of his childhood surrounded by women, his perfectionism all merge and are captured in one of the scenes where we see the models' shoes walking along the runway, back and forth, and in the obsessive cutting and drawing of patterns before the show.


The rapport established is Wenders' achievement, his usual seeking of harmony, like a comfortable couch that he is compared to by Yohji.

Tree-in-the-forest

Saw Antonioni's Blow-up again after so many years, and his central idea - that reality is created by multiple observers still resonates nicely. His notion of abstract film making is also quite well explained through the dialog the main character has with his painter friend. Also, Sarah Miles represents his muse, the unattainable yearning. Some scenes are dated, like the record-listening with Vanessa Redgrave, but the composition of each frame is beautiful and redeems much of the flaws. His mode of creation is also part of the film: spew-out and then edit.

Wonderful stuff.