Motion Studies: Kinski smiles

   
(Cobra Verde, dir. Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog film Production and Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1987)

      Suddenly, out come the choir of young African nuns. Each one is a skinny girl wearing only beads, leighs and tribal skirts. Six stand in a circle around one in the middle; all sing a call and response anthem in their language that consists of two repeated phrases. The choir leader, in the middle, nods to the camera, smiles like a pop star who knows she's the hottest sensation, and vaguely points in our direction to let us know each of her solo lines are directed at us. Each girl has a blissful expression on her face. They look in our direction as if indifferent to the fact that they live in a conflict-torn country, in a palace where they are the king's property. Like most other Africans in the film, they are slaves, but they are content, image-conscious, ebullient slaves. They are a presence which contradicts the entire notion of slavery, and tells off the solemnly romantic tone of the film surrounding them.
       Cobra Verde sees what we see, though he is out of the frame, to the left. After a minute or so of their song, he quietly slides in to the middle of the group, glancing at each girl with an affection that Kinski the actor wants to downplay. But just as the girls know the camera is their audience, Cobra Verde knows Kinski is the real person. This is hardly an instance of breaking the fourth wall. Herzog's films often contain moments of direct address to the audience, never for the purpose of self-reference. It is too obvious that this film is about both Kinski and his character from the beginning. Both are nearing the end of their careers, lives and sanity. Both are tired of working, but still mustering considerable ambition. Yet in this one shot, Kinski is finally mellow; he looks almost like a fond uncle figure to these signing girls. Just before the choir finishes their song, Kinski smiles.

        This window of playfulness in the film-- Herzog's last collaboration with Kinski-- comes before the final blow that ends Cobra Verde's authority and symbolically ended Kinski's career. The film plays as a sort of elegy to something that is not quite over; hence the presence of sunsets and the vast expanse of ocean. Exactly what we needed to see was a long shot of a group of singing girls, there for just this moment, for our pleasure. Most importantly, they bring out the humility left in Kinski, no small feat.

Two in the Wave

(Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut in Two in the Wave/Lorber Films, 2010)

Anybody unfamiliar with Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard and the New Wave will sympathize with the child Jean Pierre-Leaud as he runs in to the dying waves on a beach in a remote location in France, turns to the camera, and looks confused, directionless and numb. Two in the Wave is a documentary for the initiated, and those who want so much as an introduction will feel stranded.

            In fact, it is not so much a documentary as an obligatory response to various information on Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc-Godard that has recently been published. Richard Brody published a biography of Godard last year, and previous to that, wrote a New Yorker article illustrating the breakdown of his friendship with Truffaut. Emmanuel Laurent, who has produced several television series, directs this film. What one can say of his film is that it tries, as hard as it can, to be a document. It does not succeed at this ambition. Two in the Wave can best be described as a lumpy film; it is yet another recent French film waxing nostalgically over the glorious past of French cinema that has now been reduced to tired gestures. Yet it has such major digressions in to archival footage of New Wave cinema that it views more like a collection of fragments than a narrative documentary. It wants to be chronological, yet zigzags back and forth in time (usually between the years of 1960-1963) so frequently, that we become lost in footage of Godard and Truffaut, rather than their friendship.

What Laurent is trying to illustrate is that their relationship was defined by movies. But this assumption is dishonest, considering how little he seems to care about the two as people. He briefly sketches the contours of their childhoods; Truffaut’s poor and neglected, Godard’s prosperous and cultured.  Truffaut’s adolescent experiences of constant movie-going, jail and the army were the inspirations for The 400 Blows. But Laurent’s passive, hurried way of inserting interview footage of Truffaut talking about these autobiographical leanings makes him guilty of a sin worse than audience condescension. He assumes we know all this information and will simply get a kick out of hearing it from the man himself. What is mainly interesting in the footage of Truffaut is how honest he is about the autobiographical nature of his work, as compared to other directors who dance around these aspects. Laurent did not stop to explore why Truffaut might have been so honest, and whether that was a sign of nobility or attention craving. He assumes we know the facts and want nothing more, so he’ll keep it brief. His is a sin of skittishness, or wimpy-ness.

But his faults bring to mind a very clever experimental film recently given limited release earlier this year, called Double Take. That film was about one of the New Wave’s idols, Alfred Hitchcock. Except that it was really about “Alfred Hitchcock.” The film interspersed archival footage of Hitchcock’s appearances with footage from his films, recreations of scenes from his films and a narrator who posed as a Hitchcock-like figure wandering through a paranoid sixties mystery, encompassing all the lunacy of the immediate postwar decades. In being a study of Hitchcock’s aura—his imagery, his deviancy, his themes—and by not taking itself deadly seriously, that film was a loving tribute to Hitchcock’s films and the persona he created, as opposed to the person he really was. If Two in the Wave took the same approach, it could have been a similar study of the films of the New Wave and the perceptions of Godard and Truffaut. There are moments when it almost gets there. Archival footage from several rare New Wave films—Jean Rouche’s I, a Black Man (1958), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961)—is a pleasure to see for pure cinephile value. So is footage of the articulate film curator Henri Langlois, a film patriot if there ever was one. But it is only at one point, when the film trails off and becomes lost in toying with footage, when we see that Laurent really does care about assembling motion picture imagery. He finally gets inspired and speeds up a series of still photographs of Truffaut conversing with Alfred Hitchcock. Across a jerky series of photographs, Truffaut’s finger wags back and forth as if to lecture Hitchcock about the hip new generation of artists. It’s a scene that could have come from Double Take. But here, it is only an ephemeral moment of amusement.

Throughout the film, a mysterious red haired girl makes her way through various Paris locations and flips through a book of photographs of Truffaut and Godard. She at one point seems to be narrating, as a woman talking about Truffaut’s filmmaking methods. Yet she is too young to have an obvious place in the story and her sad eyes look sad for no clear reason. Is she Truffaut’s granddaughter? Is she sad to know that Godard and Truffaut would later exchange angry letters and never speak again? For the record, she is the young actress Islid Le Besco. It feels as though this is another thread Laurent toyed around with, but was too afraid to complete. This young woman has nothing to be sad about. Though she has a good reason to get angry at that camera, almost poking her face one minute, then discarding her for uncertain black and white frames in the next.

The Better of the 'Oughts

Nobody knows what to call these past ten years, either as a decade or a personal experience. All we can be sure of is that they were troubled. This column is not going to get in to that trouble; we all saw it. But nobody will know what to call the films that came from the oughts (as some prefer to say), either. From the short distance we are at, we can say some looked a little bit like a rehash of sixties cinema without the freshness or sincerity, while others remained trapped in the all-is-irony mode that filmmakers--at least in America--don't plan on escaping from any time soon. In the purely mainstream realm, technological advancements including more and more CGI animation and 3-D movies diluted the moving image instead of enhancing it. Equally distressing as it was sometimes marvelous was the continuation of static-take driven, music-absent, "contemplative" cinema. This kind of cinema could come off as a cheap reaction against the perceived junk of Hollywood cinema, thereby defeating its own integrity.
If this opinion on the past decade sounds bitter, that's because no decade is a geyser of fantastic cinema and the majority of films produced will always fall from our memories in due time. So as a way of showing the bright side of the decade-- the decade as a whole, why not-- here is a personal list of the memorable parts from five of its best films. At nine months in to 2010, the distance is good enough to make a foggy judgement.

1. Cache (2005): In what theater did audiences not leap out of their seats when the coldest, most nonchalant most shocking suicide scene in film history occurred? While Daniel Autiel paced back and forth, the dead body slumped against the wall with a streak of blood behind it, we were as directionless as he was. We waited for him to leave that room, knowing that he wouldn't, with the static camera that may or may not have hidden recording it all for us.
2. Tropical Malady (2004): This was a film where watching  the structure develop was more rewarding than any single image. But that structure-- a two part film, first a contemporary narrative, then a jungle folk story-- gave us its greatest distance with a shot on top of a sunny hill overlooking the Thai jungle. The hunter (the boy)stepped to the top and surveyed the scene, pausing for some moments as if finally wondering, like us, just what kind of story he belonged in.
3. There will be Blood (2007): The sight of something gushing uncontrollably has long been one of the most dizzying and perverse images a film can offer. It happened with blood in The Shining and it happened with oil in The Wages of Fear. Here, it happens literally with oil and figuratively with blood.
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000): At the dawn of the decade, before we thought anything cataclysmic might happen, Bela Tarr knew better.
5. In this World (2002): This is one of the better films of the past ten years, though most people wouldn't know it. Part of the reason is that its director, Michael Winterbottom, makes so many films, that he has lost us by now. This one--sentimental at just the right times, a quintessential journey film, a sly blend of fiction and documentary, and a truly worldly movie-- is one that he shouldn't have let us forget. Jamal shoving his way through a nighttime crowd of refugees, staged to middle eastern vocal music, is one of the better shots Herzog never captured.

Internal Monologue in Taxi Driver

              (from the Taxi Driver Screenplay, 1976/written by Paul Schrader)

Despite the fictional screenwriting teacher’s declaration in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation that “God help you if you use voice overs,” Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver is one of many highly successful and popular films to utilize such methods for the expression of interior monologue.

In Taxi Driver, interior monologue is used specifically to guide the audience through the psychological issues that protagonist Travis (Robert DeNiro) battles with throughout the film as he expresses them in his personal journal. As Schrader wrote of Travis in the screenplay itself, “His deformities are psychological, not physical.”

Travis early on expresses his indifference towards working his taxi shift in the seedy parts of town and with the “spooks”, but this attitude slowly degenerates into one of intolerance and believing that “they’re [the people he sees at night] all animals anyway.” As Schrader puts it in his screenplay, “Travis believes he is cursed and therefore he is.”

The main issue here is a man who isn’t properly taking care of himself besides monetarily (he works 70-80 hours a week)—his apartment is in disarray, he eats pie, sugar cereal with added sugar, white bread, drinks coffee and brandy, works nights, and complains (via voice overs) of his sleeplessness. Here is a man who could benefit from some holistic health advice, but instead he frequents porno theaters, then nonchalantly brings his new and beautiful friend named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), without any thought of possible repercussions, to a porn movie. She quickly walks out, which is the end of their relationship. This only exacerbates Travis’ psychological tailspin.

Travis writes in his journal after the botched movie outing, “May 8, 1972. My life has taken another turn again. The days move along with regularity...“ He then proceeds to be rejected by Betsy on the street, send her flowers which she “doesn’t receive”, and call her with no response. Fed up, he barges in on her at work and causes a scene, which is broken up by the straight-shooting, normal, harmless-seeming male coworker of Betsy’s. This experience is particularly harmful to Travis because he projected onto Betsy all that he wanted her to be: a serene fountain of beauty and perfection amidst a chaotic urban jungle of filth and despair. He thought she was “different” in the same way he considers himself to be. Instead, she is just an average (except, perhaps, by her beauty) young woman working in the normal, daytime, workaday world. Travis writes in his journal, which the audience hears as voice over, “I realize now how much she is like the others, so cold and distant. Many people are like that. They are like a union.” It is classic “Me against the world” mentality, which explains his perpetual internal monologue about loneliness

So he buys guns and practices aiming and shooting them with no bullets at the mirror, slipping them out of his sleeve, and he gets in shape through push-ups and pull-ups. “Every muscle must be tight”, he writes. He goes to see a prostitute whose name, after much prying, is Iris. Then he attempts to assassinate a senator who is also a presidential candidate, but fails. The audience is left to assume that the senator’s campaign slogan, “We are the people” is meant to explain the otherwise elusive reason behind Travis’ motivation to do such a thing. In other words, if the senator “Is the people”, and the people are who Travis hates, then perhaps that explains Travis’ motivation to kill the candidate. Otherwise, why would Travis assault a senator who is, by all intents and purposes, above “the people”, especially the miscreants that Travis despises?

Schrader utilizes voice over towards the end of the film when Travis writes to his family and lies about the happenings in his life. This marks the beginning of what Travis intends to be the end of his life and his life’s purpose, but, as we all know, life doesn’t always unfold as planned.

He visits Iris and gets in a gun fight with her pimp and co., which ends in three men dead, Iris severely rattled, and Travis pulling the trigger on an empty gun to his head. The police come, and Travis is heralded as a hero by at least Iris’ family.

In the final scene, all of the internal monologue and Travis’ emotional transformation comes to a head when Betsy rides in his cab and makes a vague pass at him, but he just drives away with his classic slight grin on his face. This scene can be interpreted multiple ways. Was it a figment of his imagination? Was it a dream? A hallucination? Was it real? If it’s real, has Travis learned to embrace his lifelong loneliness? Has it dissipated? Does he view Betsy as too much of a conformist for his taste? Is he bitter that he finally reached out to one of “the people” (simply because, let’s be honest fellas, she was beautiful) and got rejected? Or, perhaps, as every man has wanted to do at one point or another, Travis was reveling in the slightly twisted satisfaction of rejecting someone who formerly rejected him.

(Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, 1976/ Columbia Pictures)