The Power Of Image In Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik

            Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992) presents itself as a film about Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (best known for the feature film Happiness), but if one goes beyond its promotional materials and synopses The Last Bolshevik is, in reality, a cine-essay concerned not just with a single film director but the political environment that dictated the construction and composition of that director’s, as well as his peers’, images.  Chris Marker’s career was dedicated to the investigation of images, their circumstance, context, politics, content, composition, poetry, etc.  And what better subject is there to quell Marker’s appetite than a film dealing with the career of one of the most obscure yet iconoclastic filmmakers working in Stalinist Russia?

            Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is right in pointing out in his book Movies As Politics that Marker’s relationship and understanding of Medyedkin’s career is dependent on Marker’s radical left-bank activities in Paris during the summer of 1968 when the two filmmakers first met.  As evidenced by William Klein’s film Mr. Freedom (1969), the radicals of the left bank were obsessive in their investigation and perverted appropriation of communist slogans and other forms of propaganda.  But the desired ends for the revolutions of October and May were not entirely the same, other than a similarly idealistic hope for positive reform.  Yet, if one assumes a perspective subjective to that of Chris Marker and his film’s subject one is immediately struck by just how close the two ideologies are to becoming identical.  Both Marker and Alexander Medvedkin believe in Utopia and, through their affected approach to montage, launch investigations as to why Utopia has not yet been achieved.  From this standpoint The Last Bolshevik must be read as a personal inquisition on Marker’s part as to what mechanisms, both political and uniquely filmic, allow for revolution to become so quickly derailed by the revolutionaries themselves.  Of course there is no answer to Marker’s inquisition, only the refining of his questions and an achieved understanding that, given it is afforded only through second hand testimony, is not totally reliable but absolutely as subjective as it is illustrative.

The majority of The Last Bolshevik is composed of the testimonials of persons who either knew or studied Alexander Medvedkin.  The subjects who have only academic experience with Medvedkin are as dependent on the testimony of the persons who knew Medvedkin as Marker is, and their remembrances can be, at times, as contradictory as the testimonials in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).  For Chris Marker these inconsistencies and minor continuity errors in memory are of little importance because he is able to supplement their errors with images.

            Upon watching The Last Bolshevik one is immediately struck by how long Marker must have sifted through the many archives that survive in Russia to assemble his footage.  Then one is struck again by how carefully he has observed it, at one time freezing on a frame of an aerial view of a reenactment of the storming of The Winter Palace and citing that a photograph exists from standard eye level that is often passed-off as being contemporary to the real event being re-made for the camera in the air.  The obsessive approach Marker has taken is further evidence of his aesthetic link to the Soviet directors of the twenties and thirties.  In one instance, during The Last Bolshevik, Marker quotes Alexander Medvedkin’s retelling of how he wept the first time he cut two images together for one of his newsreels, that he (Alexander Medvedkin) was overwhelmed by the power those two images possessed when coupled together.  This exemplifies the connection between Marker and his subject while at the same time revealing how far more dependent The Last Bolshevik is on its images rather than the remembrances that play on its soundtrack.

            It is therefore important to contextualize The Last Bolshevik within the moment of its production in 1992 (five years after Alexander Medvedkin’s death at the age of 89).  Documentary film and historical cine-essays had adopted the Errol Morris aesthetic popularized by his film The Thin Blue Line (1988) where the content of the film would not exist without the soundtrack of testimonials and remembrances.  The Last Bolshevik, and arguably Peter Watkins’ The Freethinker of the same year, calls for a return to an image based communication in non-fiction filmmaking.

            However, unlike most non-fiction films, The Last Bolshevik is as determined to display and investigate the relationship between juxtaposed images as it is to bringing factual information to its audience.  With elaborate montages Chris Marker shows his audience as much about Alexander Medvedkin and his socio-political environment as his subjects tell the audience.  This strategy, even if it had failed, would have at the very least demonstrated the aesthetic theory behind the works of Soviet Cinema that the film is all about.

-Robert Curry

What About Bob? & The Perverted Family Film

I have written about the influence of Frank Tashlin before, but in 1990 his influence couldn’t have been more heavily felt than in the films What About Bob? and Clifford (though both films were slated for release in 1991, Clifford would not show in theatres until 1994).  Tashlin’s work with Jerry Lewis seems to be the key jumping off point for these two films stylistically.  However, my primary concern will be What About Bob?, saving a more in-depth analysis of Clifford for my “forgotten films” series.

Frank Oz’s film What About Bob? barrows heavily from the classic comedies of not just Jerry Lewis, but of Red Skelton’s films Neptune’s Daughter (Buzzell, 1949) and Texas Carnival (Walters, 1951).  Like the Lewis and Skelton characters in these films Bill Murray’s character of Bob functions as the catalyst of all the narrative’s action, a man-child if you will, whose naïve ignorance and self-serving behavior antagonizes a character of authority (in this case the Richard Dreyfuss character Dr. Leo Martin).  The key narrative device of What About Bob? and its predecessors are that the man-child protagonist’s half-witted actions are somehow responsible for resolving the problems of the supporting characters.  For instance, it is Red Skelton’s problem of mistaken identity that brings Esther Williams and Howard Keel together in Texas Carnival as much as Bob’s “fun and sensitive” presence gives a new sense of structure to the otherwise dysfunctional and discontented family of Dr. Martin.

The Tashlin and Lewis influence on What About Bob? can be found in the art design of the film.  The picture perfect environment of the grounds in Tashlin’s The Disorderly Orderly (1964) are reflected in Frank Oz’s locations in What About Bob? in Dr. Martin’s perfect little house, the ivory white asylum, and the well manicured grounds of the entire town (beautifully photographed by Michael Ballhaus).  Just as the chaos instigated by Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly contrasts to comic effect with his “perfect” environment so does the wake of destruction left by Bob juxtapose with his surroundings.  This contrast is only effective when the actors play their parts to high camp, consider the caricature nature of both Murray and Dreyfuss’ performances.

Where, in other genres, such performances could ruin a film, in Frank Oz’s very specific world of What About Bob? such bold choices make perfect sense and even pass as believable.  A part of this believability can be accounted for by the fact that Bob so obviously suffers from a myriad of psychological conditions.  This simple implication of mental illness is more than adequate, for better or for worse, to explain Bob’s behavior (a tremendous performance by Murray heavily indebted to Jerry Lewis).  The other two reasons caricature is acceptable are directly linked to the character of Dr. Martin.  At first, Dr. Martin appears to be an unflattering satire of psychoanalysts.  But as Bob continues to push himself into Dr. Martin’s life, his behavior becomes more and more exaggerated, eventually matching Bob’s but in direct opposition in so far as content and motivation are concerned.  Secondly, Dr. Martin’s family is so eager to except Bob, just as the locals of Dr. Martin’s vacation spot are.  This willingness to accept Bob suggests to the audience that they too embrace the character, focusing their attentions on the positive effects his presence has over the negative.

To reinforce this acceptance of comical artifice Oz has arranged the film so that as Bob’s behavior becomes more acceptable, Dr. Martin’s behavior becomes more and more bizarre.  There are the big moments like Dr. Martin’s meltdown after his Good Morning America interview, his car troubles, and the attempted murder of Bob that standout as part of the opposition I mentioned above.  But more disturbing are the little reveals about the Dr. Martin character peppered throughout the second act of the film.  First, we learn that Dr. Martin bought an elderly couple’s dream house out from under them.  This point isn’t particularly psychotic on its own, but does suggest a streak of selfishness.  The primary reveal of note is that Dr. Martin and his family each have a hand puppet of their likeness, which Dr. Martin employs to casually reprimand or at other times psycho analyze his family.  This suggests Dr. Martin is a career obsessed control freak, a point Oz establishes to use as motivation for Dr. Martin’s meltdown on television later in the film.

What About Bob?, upon close examination, is a very disturbing film with an almost terrifying premise.  Bob, Dr. Martin’s patient, fakes his suicide, impersonates a cop and then, after obtaining Dr. Martin’s address, travels to where Dr. Martin is living.  Bob doesn’t leave it at that, he stalks Dr. Martin until enough chance encounters with Dr. Martin’s family enable him to remain close to Dr. Martin while at the same time enjoying the family connections he needs (a point made by Dr. Martin during his interview with Bob at the start of the film).  Of course this sociopathic behavior becomes the stuff of comedy in Frank Oz’s hands just as it does in Paul Flaherty’s hands in the case of Clifford.

What About Bob? and Clifford, along with Barry Levinson’s Toys (1992), represent a trend in American family films that can be seen as a direct reaction to the films of John Hughes and similarly sentimental films that dominated the same niche during the eighties.  What About Bob? attempts to make the film more adult both in theme and in content.  The film focuses, thematically speaking, on the possibilities of fatherhood as a kind of psychological trap (a perspective also propagated by Clifford).  In this scenario the father is the victim of his own well-intentioned ignorance, forced to learn some painful lessons at the hands of our simpleton protagonist.  In terms of content, What About Bob? is full of humor pertaining to psychology and parenting that would be lost on children, and maybe even a few adults.  But it is a balance between all these elements rather than an imbalance that prevent the film from ever feeling like a genuine family film like say John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).  This accounts for the small number of films that were made following this archetype.  Yet as a film, in terms of narrative structure and the clarity of its message, What About Bob? is the most successful film of its kind, even if it doesn’t feel like a family film.  It marks the beginning of the most prolific period of Frank Oz’s career and the beginning of a series of boxoffice flops for Bill Murray.

-Robert Curry

Coonskin

In 1946 Walt Disney released Song Of The South, a musical adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories.  The structure of Song Of The South, live action scenes of the storyteller bookending animated sequences of the stories told, provided the blueprint for Ralph Bakshi’s film Coonskin (1975).  But Bakshi’s purpose is to satirize the Disney film by focusing his narrative on three anthropomorphic principle characters (Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear, and Preacher Fox) in a uniquely contemporary setting.  This correlation between Bakshi’s film and an earlier work, which it is his intention to subvert, recalls the basis of Bakshi’s most accomplished film Heavy Traffic (1973).  Where Heavy Traffic satirized Mike Nichol’s The Graduate (1967) and the element of American culture it sought to represent, Coonskin endeavors to lampoon the Black Power movement of the seventies by way of Song Of The South.

Coonskin’s controversy stems from the crudeness of Bakshi’s social commentary, a crudeness that was, at the time of the film’s release, unheard of to be the perspective of a Jewish-American animator.  Bakshi does not even shy away from satirizing the Black Power movement itself if one recalls the “Black Jesus” scene.  Of course, this particular sequence ridicules the militancy of such radical groups as The Black Panthers.  Similarly Bakshi designs specific sequences that expose both the ridiculousness and the harmfulness of racial stereotypes such as black face, the exploitation plot device pitting Black gangsters against the mafia (prevalent in both Dolemite and Black Godfather), the rumors policemen used heroin to control African Americans in Harlem, and George Herriman cartoons.

The crudity of Bakshi’s satire was well established with Fritz The Cat (1972), but it is the grotesque nature of his character designs that could perhaps suggest racism on the part of the filmmaker.  The best argument against these allegations is that the film’s stars (Barry White, Charles Gordone, Philip Thomas and Scat Man Crothers) stood by the film long after it had been released and eventually buried.  Today, if one wants to get to the social and political heart of Coonskin, one need only look so far as the scene where Preacher Fox takes Brother Bear out to dinner.  In this scene, a live action white couple attempts to compliment Brother Bear’s girlfriend Pearl on how “nice it is that black people can really dress different, I mean we, we always have to dress the same”.  Just as Coonskin epitomizes the “Black Experience” in modern America, Heavy Traffic epitomized the Jewish-American experience.  To further dispel and clarify the misapprehensions associated with Coonskin, Bakshi’s even field satirization of so many social demographics (including his own) makes it more than evident that personal racism is not a motivating factor behind Bakshi’s films.

However it would be the Coonskin controversy that pushed Ralph Bakshi away from socially conscious films and into the fantasy genre, spawning his two most popular films The Lord Of The Rings (1978) and Wizards (1977).  Coonskin’s producer Albert S. Ruddy, who began the seventies producing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), would go on to strictly commercial fare such as the Burt Reynolds hits The Longest Yard (1974) and The Cannonball Run (1981).  By 1976 the milieu of exploitation films that sparked initial interest in Coonskin had dissipated as a result of absorption into the mainstream with films like the Shaft franchise (1971-74), thus ending the hey day of a distinctly American sub-genre in filmmaking.

-Robert Curry

Forgotten Films: Harry & Walter Go To New York

Typically I try to balance my writing for Zimbo Films between all kinds of cinema, American, foreign, and avant-garde.  However it occurred to me that there are a number of American films that have drifted into obscurity over the years that I have enjoyed very much.  So I have decided to begin writing a number of pieces on these films.  The first film I am going to write about, as part of this informal series, is Mark Rydell’s film Harry & Walter Go To New York (1976).  The criteria for this series will be films released after 1960 but before 2000.  The idea being to rediscover some of the most unique films modern American cinema has produced.

Rydell’s film follows two performers Harry and Walter, who regularly scam their audience out of their money.  Once apprehended by the police, Harry and Walter are sent to prison where they are made valets to Adam Worth, the world’s greatest bank robber.  Harry and Walter soon escape prison once they have stolen Worth’s plans for a robbery.  On the outside, they are assisted by radical reporter Lissa Chestnut and her colleagues in the heist.

Mark Rydell began his career as an actor in lead roles for television in the late fifties.  Though he would continue to take supporting roles for the remainder of his career, Rydell made the transition to directing in the mid-sixties.  As a director Rydell would not find critical acclaim until the seventies when he directed a number of popular films including The Cowboys (1972), On Golden Pond (1981) and James Dean (2001).  Like Harry & Walter Go To New York, Rydell’s three most successful films listed above each have a definite pre-occupation with classic Hollywood.  The Cowboys subverts John Wayne’s position in the Western genre by having him murdered in the second act by Bruce Dern.  On Golden Pond works the same way, subverting Henry Fonda’s image as a soft-spoken family man by casting him as a grumpy, foul mouthed, and bitter father opposite his daughter Jane Fonda.  The relationship between father and daughter in On Golden Pond mirrors their real life relationship and sparked some minor controversy before Henry Fonda took home the Oscar for the last time.  James Dean is the most overt exercise in subverting a Hollywood propagated image.  James Franco’s turn as Dean won tremendous critical attention and shattered much of the mythos surrounding the twentieth century’s most enduring cult icon.  The tactics that made these films successful are employed more subtly in Harry & Walter Go To New York, though the effect remains as strong.

John Byrum co-wrote the screenplay to Harry & Walter Go To New York with Robert Kaufman.  Before penning the script to Bill Murray’s ill-fated production of The Razor’s Edge (1984), Byrum established himself as a considerable talent with his film Inserts (1976), which has gained quite the cult following over the years.  Though Harry & Walter Go To New York was conceived before Inserts, both reveal Byrum’s interest in the 1920s and his fascination with the narrative tropes of silent comedy features.

Coupling Byrum and Rydell ensured Harry & Walter Go To New York’s indebtedness to silent comedies just as surely as it ensured that the film would be able to exist outside of any pre-established historical narrative, a necessity for the biopic.  If one compares Harry & Walter Go To New York with James Ivory’s 1975 film The Wild Party (a film about silent films that attempts to incorporate their filmmaking style) one is stuck by how much more modern Harry & Walter Go To New York is despite the fact that Ivory’s film has much more character development and visual finesse, two standards of modern cinema.  The difference is in the success of adopting silent film technique.  Rydell’s film has little character development in the dialogue, relying instead on the constant visual gags perpetrated by its stars James Caan and Elliott Gould to ensure the audience’s association with them out of nostalgia.  Rydell also prefers static wide shots and two shots to the bold camera moves of The Wild Party, and is in effect able to create his film in the visual vernacular of a Harold Lloyd film.

The other component to Harry & Walter Go To New York that makes the film work so well is it’s casting.  Michael Caine plays Adam Worth, the world’s greatest bank robber.  At the time Caine was the ideal actor to play a suave scoundrel, who, keeping true to the style of silent comedy, is also completely evil and self-serving.  Casting James Caan as Harry and Elliott Gould as Walter is another story.  Gould and Caan are cast against type as grifter vaudevillians, who are called upon by the script to sing, dance, and perpetrate a variety of physical gags and stunts.  This casting against type draws the audience’s attention to the ludicrous nature of slapstick nature in a believable narrative arc.  Rydell’s subversion here is not meant to dispel the romanticism of Keaton or Chaplin’s films, but to reinforce it.  By revealing slapstick’s impracticality in American films of the seventies by making a slapstick comedy Rydell proposes the necessity for such a comedy in Nixon’s America while at the same time granting that American audiences will only greet such romanticism with bitterness despite the necessity.  To balance the cast, a pre-Annie Hall (1977) Diane Keaton plays the love interest of Harry, Walter and Adam Worth as Lissa Chestnut.  It is from Keaton’s character and the part she plays in the film that Harry & Walter Go To New York derives its modernity.  Though her scenes intentionally lack narrative sophistication, the focus of the comedy is removed from the arena of vaudeville to that of the British sex comedy, where every gesture is an innuendo and every line is delivered tongue in cheek.  What’s truly remarkable is that Rydell’s direction of Keaton creates a kind of proto-Annie Hall before Woody Allen had even begun developing his Oscar winning film.

However, despite the cast, the level of filmic sophistication and self-awareness of Harry & Walter Go To New York prevented the film from ever finding its audience.  The film was not a success for Columbia pictures, and has only enjoyed minor re-evaluation the few times its been issued for home entertainment.  Initially Columbia thought they could cash in on the success of the Robert Redford vehicle The Great Gatsby (1974), just as MGM believed they could with The Wild Party and Paramount with its production of Elia Kazan’s film of The Last Tycoon (1976).  This revived interest in silent cinema would not survive into the eighties, and most of these films are all but forgotten today.

-Robert Curry

The Making Of Our First Feature

An Atrocious Woman (2013) first began as an idea Charlette Hove and myself tossed around as a vehicle for Jessica Mockrish after her performance in my film Two Days In The Unremarkable Life Of Parker Rappaport (2012).  The plot hadn’t yet been formed, just a series of now discarded scenarios we’d like to have seen Jessica perform in.  At the time, Charlette and I were working on installing a video triptych at Crane Arts that we put together with Holly M. Smith under the moniker Third Sunday Films.  Between mounting the installation, OPHELIA: 2012, and a full time job, Charlette slowly faded out of the creative process for about a month and a half at the beginning of the new year, 2013.  So I set about writing a film based around several real life experiences of my own as well as a couple of French newspaper stories from the sixties that I found collected in a literary journal.

The script was written while I shot the highly reflexive short film The Murder Of The Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich (2013).  That film was put on hold when pre-production on An Atrocious Woman really got underway.  Pre-production began with a shoot unto itself, filming material that would become the film within An Atrocious Woman.  The idea was to frame the narrative of An Atrocious Woman within the disjointed narrative of a film that would always be showing on the television.  This would not only unify the characters with a single shared experience but also allow for some commentary on the importance placed on media in today’s society.  The style of this “film within a film” was based on two earlier films I made while I was still producing films under the banner of Curry/Tomlinson Productions.  These two films, Harrington Strange (2009) and Happy Birthday Erik Lemprecht (2011), represent a highly stylized aesthetic focused on domestic violence of a sexual nature.  Thus, when it came to casting, I selected two players who were permanent fixtures from the days of Curry/Tomlinson Productions, Marissa Harven and Jon Tomlinson.  Eventually it became clear that I was criticizing my own artistic development as much as I was analyzing the relationship television plays in our daily lives.

While that material was being shot, I brought Emma Arrick on as a second producer to supplement Caroline Boyd, whose side projects kept her from ever being able to become truly involved in the creation and organization of the project.  Emma had recently worked as an assistant director on Two Days In The Unremarkable Life Of Parker Rappaport, and had demonstrated a talent for producing equal to her talents as an actress.  Through Emma, Robin Friend Stift joined my cast of regulars, and all the essential locations were procured.  Madeline Kolker joined the cast around the same time after I approached her upon observing her work in one of her classes at The University Of The Arts.  The remainder of the cast would be rounded out with actors with whom I have worked before such as Annie R. Such, Ellie Marissa Ruttenberg, and Emma Arrick.

For the soundtrack I turned to Mac Kennedy to write the music for the end credit song.  Mac has done almost all of the music for all of my films since In The Wake Of Death (2011).  After working together on a dozen or so short films, it’s safe to say that Mac has become one of the central collaborators on my films.  But I brought new talent on board as well.  Through my assistant director Thomas Lampion I met Stephen M. Macready, the force behind the band Hidden Lights.  After a couple of meetings and establishing a friendship of which I am very fond, I asked Stephen to work on the song for the opening of An Atrocious Woman as well as a piece of instrumental scoring, both of which he has supplied.

Once all of those details were taken care of production began.  Due to scheduling conflicts between actors a shoot that was meant to last two weeks took three months, often only shooting one scene per week.  The upside to these circumstances was that it allowed me to prepare each scene to near perfection before hand.  More than ever before I had a distinct idea of every shot and every cut I would make to each shot.  This also allowed the actors to prepare in equal detail, so that every scene unfolds naturally, exceeding my expectations exponentially.

Writing this now, I have completed a cut of the film, and have screened it to a number of persons for feedback.  A majority of the reactions have been positive, which is surprising since it was only during production that I realized I was shooting a feature and not a short film.  However, this will be my first feature film, and the first feature Zimbo Films has produced, so I do not believe anyone can access the success of An Atrocious Woman until it is screened for the public. 

-Robert Curry

Uncovering Subversion In From Here To Eternity

Director Fred Zinnemann is one of a handful of German directors, including Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk and Robert Siodmak, who relocated to Hollywood in the thirties.  In terms of political perspective, Zinnemann is the most like Douglas Sirk.  Both men arrived in Hollywood with expectations of a sort of filmmaker’s Eden and got something completely different.  By the end of WWII, Zinnemann and Sirk had become disillusioned with the so-called “American Dream”, and would, in the fifties, begin to subtly subvert American society in their films.

Zinnemann’s most critical film of his adopted home is his adaptation of the James Jones novel From Here To Eternity (1953) scripted by Daniel Taradash.  For Zinnemann the army, that organization to which Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) has sworn his unwavering devotion, represents almost literally the conformity of the American middle class in the fifties.  Prewitt’s principal motivation is to belong.  This desire is made impossible by his unwillingness to perform as a boxer, for which he is repeatedly abused.  Regardless, Prewitt refuses to relent, attempting again and again to belong to G-Company.

It’s reasonable to assume that for Zinnemann Prewitt represents a close approximation of his own experiences in Hollywood.  Like Prewitt, Zinnemann desired to belong to his adopted studio system, but found obstacles in the differences in production from the German studio UFA.  Unlike in Germany, in Hollywood the producer was king, not the director.  This is the classic frustration of every immigrant film director of this time, when the control promised them to bring them to Hollywood is with held, and they are forced to work on films in which they have no interest.

The film’s other male protagonist, Sgt. Warden (Burt Lancaster), runs G-Company, and is therefore at the center of American conformity.  But Warden is willing to throw his position away when he begins an affair with the married Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr).  To enjoy his blossoming romance without losing his position, Warden is forced to sneak around, to elude detection.  Yet, all of this evasion is eventually in vain when Warden chooses his career over his lover.

In many ways Warden is the most tragic character in the film.  From the start of the film it is clear that his own self-identity is linked to the army, a notion reinforced by his reaction to Karen Holmes’ suggestion that he apply for a promotion.  Warden’s life, in the context of the film, has gone as far as it’s going to.  Rather than demonstrate any personal growth or triumph, Warden’s character arc peaks when he begins his affair and flat lines again when he ends it, his life unchanged.

Karen Holmes has an almost mirror trajectory of her lover’s.  She proposes to Warden that he apply for promotion (a promotion to the rank of her husband’s) while she gets divorced and then they can be married.  Like Warden, her happiness is in embracing the status quo.  Perhaps this is why the infamous beach love scene is so famous, it is the only moment in the film where two romantically attached characters shed their inhibitions and embrace non-conformity as a necessity to love (which seems to by Zinnemann’s intended message).

If that truly was Zinnemann’s intended reading of the Warden-Holmes relationship, it certainly helps illuminate the fatalism Zinnemann has attached to successful non-conformity, where individuality in the fifties is something to be met with violence and ultimately destruction.  Maggio (Frank Sinatra) represents non-conformity as its purest in From Here To Eternity.  Maggio always says what he thinks and often does what he wants, regardless of army protocol or social mores.  Of course, this puts him at odds against “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine), the Sergeant of the Guard at the stockade.  Once in the stockade, “Fatso” beats the insubordinate Maggio to death.  Hearing of this, Prewitt kills “Fatso” in a knife fight, and after being wounded himself, goes AWOL.  This is Prewitt’s turning point away from the army and conformity with Maggio serving as the martyred catalyst.  However, Prewitt is soon racing back to the army as bombs drop on Pearl Harbor.  Like Maggio, Prewitt is killed by that to which he belonged but could not accept when he is shot by a G-Company picket line.

What’s strangely paradoxical about our society and the army in From Here To Eternity is that in male dominated society the individual, along with individuality, are met with admiration from individuals and hostility from the group.  Warden’s relationship to Prewitt epitomizes this paradox, which seems to have frustrated Zinnemann about American culture.  Time and again Warden condemns Prewitt’s stubbornness as “hard headed”, yet he praises Prewitt upon finding his dead body as “being a good soldier”.  This demonstrates the general admiration of certain virtues (strength, resolve, ambition) and the rejection of certain means of expressing those virtues.

From Here To Eternity, like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), manages to gloss over its critical subversions so successfully that it’s difficult to see beyond the superficial aspects of either film.  Zinnemann, like Sirk, was a masterful artist capable of burying his political and sociological messages deep in high quality drama, rarely becoming preachy or two dimensional in his presentation of concept.   It becomes ironic, all things considered, that From Here To Eternity was so popularly described using the two words “patriotic” and “romantic”.

-Robert Curry

Cinema Of Opposition: The Shooting Wall Film Festival

Yesterday I screened my film How Is One To Live? (2012) at the Shooting Wall Film Festival. All and all it was a success of one sort or another. But after the screenings, when all the filmmakers mix and mingle, I got into a conversation about film literature, more specifically texts that deal with film history during the twenties and thirties. The consensus I reached with my fellow filmmaker was that the literature which is most readily available on that time period in the history of cinema deals almost exclusively with the Hollywood studio system.
I personally cannot fault the historians or the publishers of these texts their concentration on Hollywood, it was a fascinating era in cinema for both quality and innovation. However, the neglect or perhaps even the ignorance of these texts of the cinema occurring in Germany at the time is a tremendous oversight for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the German studio UFA represents a distinctly European “dream factory”, whose financial set-up and mode of production illuminates by contrast its American counterpart. Secondly, some of the greatest talent in Hollywood began their careers at UFA; Josef Von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, Fritz Lang and Edgar G. Ulmer being among the most infamous.
Secondly, UFA was a studio that was financed and partly controlled by the state, the exact opposite of Hollywood’s capitalist center of industry. This had a polarizing effect on the kinds of productions mounted by UFA. These productions fall into two unique camps. The first are the highbrow works of art spear headed by the visionary directors listed above. The second is more akin to the B-Movies of Hollywood, quick, cheaply made works of superficial escapism (though not without aesthetic merit). The involvement of the state colors the films at UFA with a political agenda far more overt than that in your standard Hollywood film at the time. It was believed in Hollywood that a politicized cinema would create divergences in their already sensitive audience demographics, a point made all the more clear by the subtleties with which Andrew Sarris would be able to asses Hollywood directors as true auteurs.
Which brings us to the present, where Hollywood still fears diversity in its demographic reports and has, as a result, remained non-political with very few exceptions. Hollywood hasn’t changed very much since the thirties; only the economic mechanisms of their various systems of production have metamorphosed. But there is no UFA in today’s world. Nowhere on Earth is there a state run studio committed to “high art” and political commentaries. Instead one must look to the anarchistic realm of underground film.
Access to film and video equipment has empowered underground film beyond all expectations, allowing underground films to flourish as the only direct opposition to the Hollywood mainstream. The influence of underground film today is a far more subtle and painstaking process than the work produced at UFA before the rise of Nazism.
As the lack of literature on UFA and its relation to Hollywood suggests, opposition against the dominant powers of commercial production is often relegated to the most obscure corners of the cinema. Those readers familiar with the video store culture of the nineties can recall the once difficult task of locating the films of Kenneth Anger and Nagisa Oshima on VHS. Even on DVD, a number of films that represented alternatives to the standard are often difficult to locate, for instance there are no Mark Rappaport titles currently in print any more.

Underground film has suffered the same fate, not because of a lack of aesthetic unity, but because audiences do not know that underground films exist due to a lack of physical unity. Consider the regional cinema that took the Independent film scene by storm in the late seventies as a prime example of physical unity amongst filmmakers as a kind of opposition. The Regional filmmakers found a marketable novelty out of their unique circumstances that enabled their films to begin to enter the mainstream consciousness. The failure of the Regional filmmakers wasn’t due to quantity or quality, but to a lack of aesthetic growth and stylistic diversity (remember that it was stylistic diversity that set the UFA films in a much higher regard than those films made in Hollywood).
The Shooting Wall film festival attempts to accomplish a kind of hybrid of the aforementioned approaches to Hollywood opposition. In one respect the filmmakers who dominated the screenings were all-local to Philadelphia, and are in a state of almost constant collaboration with one another. But each filmmaker represents a unique aesthetic, and each film inhabited a distinct approach to film, either as a video, a video essay, a film narrative, or as a documentary. That all of these films are shown together represents uniformity in interest and in cause. In this respect the lack of conformity becomes a kind of conformity in and of itself. Shooting Wall implements no genre categories or any means of critical assessment other than to present all of the works as “films”. The refusal to adhere to common festival practices, with all of their labels and awards, has an equalizing effect on the audience’s assessment of the presented works.
If one wanted to decipher the exact purpose behind the Shooting Wall film festival, to locate the motivations behind the opposition to Hollywood and the mainstream, one need only look to Joshua Martin’s film Unavoidable Spectacles Or The End Of Time (2013) that screened yesterday. But of all the film’s shown, it is only Joshua Martin’s film that addresses the necessity of opposition not just for aesthetic development, but to literally put quality cinema in the hands of the people, allowing the people to dictate what kind of cinema is produced with what kind of political commentary (a perspective Martin advocates almost as efficiently as Peter Watkins in his film The Freethinker). Heath Schultz addresses the politics of images in his Society Of The Spectacle (2013), which also screened yesterday, but Schultz’s film relegates its own “call to arms” to the subtext of the film. In contrast, a majority of the films, including my own and of course Marc Dickerson’s satirical “documentary” Agony (2013) address the cinema from a less urgent and more scholarly approach. But this has only been the second Shooting Wall film festival. In the next couple of years it seems highly plausible that, like the Regional filmmakers of the seventies, the Underground will find a physical unity that is coherent enough to usurp the power of the mainstream within Philadelphia, much like the DIY music scene did about a decade ago.

-Robert Curry