2013 Manhattan One-Week Premieres

Took me a while to see everything I'm likely to see, but here's a list of my favorite films that played at least one week in Manhattan for the first time in 2013.

In order of preference:

1. Old Dog (Pema Tseden)
2. All the Light in the Sky (Joe Swanberg)
3. The Wall (Julian Pölsler)
4. Il Futuro (Alicia Scherson)
5. Exit Elena (Nathan Silver)
6. Porfirio (Alejandro Landes)
7. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
8. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino)
9. Viola (Matías Piñeiro)
10. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais)
11. Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl)
12. Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl)

Notes for a Retrospective of the Network TV Movie

After a recent discussion on Twitter in which Bilge Ebiri and I agreed that an impressive retrospective could be mounted in celebration of the network TV movies that flourished from the late 60s through the 80s, I thought I'd try my hand at programming said retrospective, with of course no consideration of availability or commerce, and without the opportunity to reconsider decades-old evaluations.

The Pantheon:

Daniel Petrie: SILENT NIGHT, LONELY NIGHT (69); A HOWLING IN THE WOODS (71)

Lamont Johnson: DEADLOCK (69); MY SWEET CHARLIE (70); DANGEROUS COMPANY (82)

John Korty: GO ASK ALICE (72); CLASS OF '63 (73); A DEADLY BUSINESS (86)

John Badham: THE LAW (74)

William Hale: RED ALERT (77); MURDER IN TEXAS (81)

Joseph Sargent: GOLDENGIRL (revised 3-hour version) (79); AMBER WAVES (80)

Subjects for Further Research:

Richard Colla: THE OTHER MAN (70)

Fringe Benefits:

Don Siegel: STRANGER ON THE RUN (67)

George Cukor: LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (75)

George Armitage: HOT ROD (79)

Abel Ferrara: CRIME STORY (86)

William Friedkin: C.A.T SQUAD: PYTHON WOLF (88)

Because the interest of such a grouping is the specific cultural and functional context into which the movies were delivered, I've omitted PBS productions (THE MUSIC SCHOOL [John Korty, 74]; BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR [Joan Micklin Silver, 77]), episodic TV (ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: ENOUGH ROPE FOR TWO [David Chase, 86]; THE SOPRANOS first episode [David Chase, 99]), cable TV movies (PARIS TROUT [Stephen Gyllenhaal, 91]; THE WRONG MAN [Jim McBride, 93]; PRONTO [Jim McBride, 97]), and even movies broadcast outside the major networks (BLOOD TIES [Jim McBride, 91]), not to mention all TV work in countries other than the US.

A Girl in Every Port

A Girl in Every Port commands attention as the first Hawks film in which the filmmaker asserts the personality that we know from his later work. It’s not Hawks first completely successful film: Paid to Love, one year earlier, offered Hawks a Lubitsch-like story and genre that he was able to use as a springboard for continuous invention. But A Girl in Every Port feels to the modern audience less like a genre film than like a fantasia sprung from Hawks’ unconscious.

The film probably seems more weirdly personal today than it did to audiences of the time. Contemporary viewers would have noted the film's considerable debt to the success of the 1926 What Price Glory? (also starring Victor McLaglen), another story of two tough guys whose friendship takes precedence over the women for which they compete. Certainly Hawks dials up the “love story between two men” angle (Hawks’ phrase) by having his male protagonists enact a number of the dramatic conventions of love stories. (Robin Wood long ago noted Hawks’ willingness to give the same dialogue or situations to both men and women in different movies.) Yet, without being able to provide citations, I have the impression that cinema culture was, more then than in recent decades, permeated with a sense that the heterosexual love story was a concession to the commercial, and that reducing or eliminating the feminine aspect was a mark of integrity. Perhaps Hawks was able to hide his polymorphous perversity in plain sight. In any case, no contemporary review that I’ve read is fazed by the fervor of the protagonists’ friendship. (Here’s a review from Screenland that’s of particular sociological interest.)

For the modern viewer, the Hawksian tropes pile up quickly. McLaglen pulls on Robert Armstrong’s finger after fistfights to put it back in joint, as Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin would do in The Big Sky; McLaglen lights cigarettes for Armstrong, as, to pick one celebrated instance, Bacall would for Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Like Hardy Kruger and Gerard Blain in Hatari!, McLaglen is “broke out all over in monkey bites” – Hawks’ strange slang for being in love. Louise Brooks takes Armstrong’s pants so he can’t dress, as Monroe and Russell do to Tommy Noonan in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Intriguingly, Hawks wrote a script a little before his death for a loose remake of A Girl in Every Port called When It’s Hot, Play It Cool, a comedy about world-traveling oil-riggers with protagonists named Spike and Bill, after the heroes of the original. Hard to imagine the material playing as smoothly for audiences in 1977 as in 1928.

One of the pleasures of A Girl in Every Port is seeing Hawks successfully take on the silent tradition of physical comedy. The first half of the film is essentially one bar fight or drinking scene after another, and where a Walsh or a Wellman would let show some of their identification with the emotional intensity of the physical life, Hawks gravitates naturally to a Keaton-like comic distance. His typical reliance on long shots with a margin of space around the human figure lends itself well to physical comedy, and the roughneck subject matter encourages in him a comic cruelty that is perhaps closer to Arbuckle than Keaton. One funny bit of business has Spike (McLaglen) slamming into a cop as he flees a jealous husband: he picks the cop up off the ground, but impatiently lets him drop to the pavement when he sees that the man has been knocked out by the impact. A more elaborate comedy routine, based upon the use of extreme long shots, has Spike and Bill (Armstrong), who are looking for a place to fight, accidentally and unexpectedly walk off a pier and into the ocean. It turns out that Spike can’t swim, and Bill expends considerable effort to save him, after which the two bond over cigarettes. When a cop wanders by, the new friends’ only thought is to contrive a ruse to push the cop into the water, after which they walk away happily in long shot, the possibility of the man drowning not on their minds or on Hawks’s.

Despite the number of Hawksian signifiers in A Girl in Every Port, it still belongs to the period of Hawks’ career in which he made use of preexisting character structures instead of creating films around the kind of character relationships that he favored. Sometimes this relative lack of control over the story leads Hawks into barren terrain, most notably at the climax, where Spike’s pop-eyed, expressionist anguish as he learns the truth about his love affair with the circus performer Mam’selle Godiva (Brooks) is far away from any aspect of people with which Hawks can engage. (A sentimental scene in which Spike and Bill are deflected from an erotic mission by the pathetic story of the woman’s young, orphaned son is equally uncongenial material for Hawks, but in this case he acquits himself as well as can be hoped for.) But often enough the slight mismatch between Hawks’ usual interests and the story archetypes demonstrates pleasantly that Hawks’ imaginative approach to characterization is not restricted to the pet configurations that he would repeat throughout his career. Brooks’ character, functioning in the scenario purely as a gold-digger, is reimagined as a self-possessed and self-aware presence, communicating with small and decidedly unvillainous glances and knowing smiles. Her relationship with Bill, her former lover, is pitched somewhere between story-based antagonism and behavioral collusion, as if Hawks preferred to bring her over to our side by letting her in on the joke of pretending she’s a bad guy. A more unusual (for Hawks) but quite affecting idea is the depiction of Bill as an overgrown, amoral child vying for Spike’s somewhat more diversified attention. Armstrong, considerably smaller than the massive McLaglen, has a rather inexpressive face that is turned to the film’s advantage, as he often resembles an adolescent hoping for affection or punishment from an idolized older boy. At the film’s emotional climax, Bill lies unconscious on a barroom floor, his arms splayed and twisted like a rag doll, reproaching the vengeful Spike with the childlike innocence of his martyrdom.

Air Force: Museum of the Moving Image, October 19, 2013

My piece on Howard Hawks' Air Force, playing this Saturday in the Museum of the Moving Image's Hawks retrospective, is now up at the MUBI Notebook.

Antoine et Antoinette: Film Forum, through Thursday, October 3

I wrote a short piece on Jacques Becker's wonderful 1947 comedy-drama Antoine et Antoinette at the MUBI Notebook.  If you drop everything and run to Film Forum right now, the movie is in the last night of its one-week run.

I Hate Myself :)

Joanna Arnow’s remarkable I Hate Myself :) presents as a diary film about Arnow’s attempt to document and thereby understand her bumpy relationship with her larger-than-life, serially provocative boyfriend James. The comparison that came to mind immediately was Jim McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary, which is a fiction film in documentary clothes. And Arnow too includes enough signifiers of fiction – most conspicuously the editing-room debates with her friend Max, who is accurately introduced as “The Naked Editor” – that we can’t comfortably regard the film as a pure document. But it seems impossible as well for it to be completely fictional: setting aside a host of practical considerations, James’s character is so extreme and so coherent in subterranean ways that one has difficulty imagining it as an actor’s or writer’s construction. Ultimately the film wends its way to on-camera display of erections and penetration, where the distinction between fiction and documentary loses relevance.

However we choose to frame them, the human issues that I Hate Myself :) deals with are unusual and compelling. James has a wide streak of rebellion in his personality that is directed against our values, the values of the presumed audience of the movie. As is often the case, his rebellion partly is channeled in constructive directions – his racially confrontational interactions with the residents of his Harlem neighborhood are clearly based on his conviction that liberal assumptions about race and class need to be broken down – and partly floats free to inflict collateral damage on Arnow and others. By contrast, Arnow is mild in demeanor, a good-girl type who tempts us to an early assumption that she is James’ masochistic subordinate. But we quickly see that she admires James’s rejection of societal niceties and counts herself as one of his tribe, even as his jagged social interface takes its toll on her peace of mind. The couple seems to split as the film-within-a-film she is making approaches the rough-cut stage, but the film itself, the one we watch, remains a record of her journey toward him and away from us. The scarlet letter that Arnow dons by including footage of her on-camera sex with James, and the outrage of showing the footage to her parents, are gestures of solidarity with the transgressive mode of being that comes so naturally to James.

This journey, which can reasonably be called spiritual, is expressed via increasingly wild formal play that blurs the distinction between film-within-a-film and film-we-are-watching, to witty effect. Arnow’s first rough cut, already topped with the cherry of unsimulated sex, is subjected to a hall-of-mirrors effect, as she screens the film repeatedly for its cast of participants, each time photographing their reaction and inserting the footage into subsequent cuts. The trick is more than mere play, as the repetition creates a crazy centrifugal effect that latches onto and accelerates the transgression that Arnow rather joyfully embraces. I especially liked the clever way that Arnow excerpts the film’s soundtrack as we watch the faces of her perplexed preview audiences. At one point we think that a piece of dialogue has accidentally been repeated, only to realize that the cut we are listening to has already looped back on itself with multiple iterations of the same dialogue. And it gradually dawns on us that the unfamiliar music we hear during the rough cut screenings is surely the end-credit music that we’ll be the very last to experience.

I left before Arnow’s question-and-answer session at Rooftop Films last week, not because I didn’t want to hear what she had to say – she’s clearly an intelligent and aware artist – but because her post-film commentary was necessarily going to add yet one more layer of reflexivity to the viewing process, and I found myself deciding arbitrarily to stop the merry-go-round at the point when the projector was turned off.

Notes on the Extant Films of Mikio Naruse

I've been writing short blurbs on Mikio Naruse's films as I've been seeing them over the last eight or so years, and recently I came to the end of the pile and compiled the blurbs of all extant Naruse works into a 35-page document.  Sadly, I wrote much shorter and sketchier blurbs at the beginning of the project than at the end, and the compilation is way too inconsistent to be publishable, but Naruse buffs may want to use it as a reference.