Cinematic Overtures

by Annette Insdorf

  The role of music in creating a film’s tone is equally crucial to Knife in the Water (1962), the first feature directed by Roman Polanski. Given that the Communist regime dismissed jazz as a form of Western imperialism in his native Poland, the percussive and syncopated score by Krzysztof Komeda constitutes a sensually defiant opening. (Censors initially shelved the film, partly for its nihilism.) Offering no identifiable hero or even forward progression, this portrait of three individuals—a bourgeois couple and a hitchhiker—on a boat is permeated with frustration and futility, similar to that of Polanski’s later films such as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist. The first shot is slightly above the windshield of a Mercedes moving on a Polish road (see clip). Because this internal frame is both a window and a mirror—reflecting the trees and therefore blocking our view of the man and woman inside the vehicle—we are made aware of our thwarted voyeurism. And since we cannot hear the dialogue as their lips move, the tension between the couple informs our own entrance into the film. Instead, the saxophone of Komeda’s score invokes film noir (consistent with the black-and-white cinematography) and later adds a syncopation that expresses the film’s offbeat relationships. The jazz score renders Knife in the Water a departure from traditional Polish cinema, closer to the experimentation of the French New Wave.

  Polanski’s compatriot Krzysztof Zanussi—a superlative director whose work explores political as well as moral compromise in a corrupt society—provides numerous examples of heightened credit sequences that create an edgy atmosphere. Camouflage (1976) is one of the best, opening with paintings of mammals and birds that adopt protective coloring (see clip). The tone of both the reptilian images and of Wojciech Kilar’s score is simultaneously playful and ominous in introducing a linguistics conference being held by a provincial university at a summer retreat. The drawing of a snake is appropriate to the wily character of Jakub (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz), first seen setting traps and photographing birds. When he later dangles a real snake, Jakub seems to incarnate the figure of the devil. The object of his machinations is younger teacher Jarek (Piotr Garlicki), who is still idealistic about the system and his ability to navigate it. Jakub tempts him with the power that comes from cynical lucidity. The credit sequence prepares for the recurrence of animals throughout the film, suggesting a Darwinian vision rooted in the physical universe beyond the immediate frame of politics. The fact that Camouflage was not exported for almost two years means that censors understood Zanussi’s use of metaphor and his own “protective coloring”: if the animals of the opening represent politicians who mask their exterior, the turtle that accompanies Zanussi’s title card as director illustrates the strongest protective surface.

  To appreciate the primal role of a film’s score, try watching the opening sequence with the soundtrack muted. In the case of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), to not hear Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song”—as Warren Beatty’s character rides slowly into a wintry landscape on horseback—is to lose the movie’s poetically poignant tone. Cohen’s lyrics of melancholy and stream of minor-key guitar melodies merge with the fluidity of Vilmos Zsigmond’s sweeping camera (in wide-screen Panavision); Altman thus prepares the viewer for a stylized and personal tweak of the western genre. Similarly, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns are unimaginable without Ennio Morricone’s sinuous music, which sets the stage for their breathless action as well as playful self-consciousness. For example, his theme for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly whisks together whistling, twanging guitar, and a man’s “wa wa wa” sounds—filtering the epic quality of an American genre through Italian irony. In a different register, his score for The Mission (1986) is an exquisite aural expression of the counterpoints and resolutions between Jesuit priests and Guarani Indians in the mid eighteenth century.

  The films of Federico Fellini derive much of their emotional impact from the music of Nino Rota. In Amarcord (1974), for example, his whimsical score functions as a literal overture accompanying the credit sequence, introducing the director’s nostalgic and fantastical invocation of his childhood in the seaside town of Rimini. And the exuberant visual storytelling of Emir Kusturica is inseparable from the brassy, percussive rhythms of Goran Bregović: they vigorously set the tone in the opening sequences of Kusturica’s memorable Time of the Gypsies (1988), Arizona Dream (1993), and Underground (1995). Finally, one of the most justly celebrated examples is the title sequence designed by Balsmeyer & Everett for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989): on a hot Brooklyn street at night, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” provides the kinetic pulse of Rosie Perez’s defiant dance moves and introduces the film’s incendiary quality.

  Given the eclectic taste on display in the following pages, it might be useful for the reader to know my criteria, even for films that are not part of this book—whose focus is on motion pictures made after 1959 and does not include such masterpieces as Citizen Kane, Rules of the Game, and On the Waterfront. I search for the internal coherence of the cinematic text (whether the movie succeeds on its own terms, as established by the opening) and for the film’s resonance beyond the frame, which can be political, psychoanalytical, or cultural. When I was on the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival, our disparate group of artists and critics needed shared criteria for judging excellence. With the support of jury president Ben Kingsley, I proposed the following standards, which we adopted:

  A meaningful or entertaining story, worth the proverbial price of admission

  A cinematic language appropriate for the tale being told and, in the best of cases, a stretching of form that widens cinematic storytelling

  A resonance that continues after the film is over—a philosophical or spiritual illumination of behavior that (forgive the potential corniness) makes us better human beings

  Most mainstream films fulfill the first category; many art films expand on the second (a perfect example being Hiroshima, mon amour, whose fragmentary, elliptical editing style influenced countless motion pictures); and a precious few manage to stimulate us via the third as well. These include the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (especially The Decalogue and Three Colors), Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence, and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Of course there are countless masterpieces from other geographical areas—notably China, India, Japan, and Scandinavia—that merit inclusion in a book of this kind, but I selected the countries and languages with which I have the greatest familiarity.

  It might also be useful for readers to know what my critical tools are. Since my background is in literature, adaptation provides a point of departure. However, comparison to a novel can also cause derailment. When reading a book, each of us assumes the role of filmmaker. As words turn into images in our minds, we become not only the characters but also the camera eye. Perhaps that’s why we rarely find a filmed version of a novel as satisfying as the book: the mental movie we make is necessarily more personal than the highly selective and condensed version of the director. Moreover, the very elements that make a novel shine—rich prose, tone, rhythm, and subjectivity—are the hardest to transpose to the cinematic medium.

  In 1999 I attended a screening of the almost-final version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, introduced by writer-director Anthony Minghella. Since he also adapted The English Patient for the screen, Minghella had a solid basis for proclaiming, “The nature of adaptation is that it betrays as much about the adapter as about the source material.”6 Those seeking fidelity to beloved novels in the film versions are bound to be disappointed. Film adaptations betray a great deal about gifted filmmakers—namely their concerns, from stylistic to thematic and moral. If we use literature and literary criticism as a model—for questions of narrative structure, character development, imagery, rhythm, and authorial point of view or intrusion—we can then develop a vocabulary appropriate to film criticism.

  There has always been a symbiotic relationship between books and movies, and many of the greatest literary wor
ks are indeed “cinematic.” Those who appreciate the parallel tales of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia should be aware not only of the pioneering work of Jean Renoir and Robert Altman with collective protagonists but also of D. W. Griffith; he, in turn, was influenced by the parallel montage in the literature of Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. On the one hand, the novelist E. L. Doctorow wrote, “Film de-literates thought; it relies primarily on an association of visual impressions or understandings. Moviegoing is an act of inference. You receive what you see as a broad band of sensual effects that evoke your intuitive nonverbal intelligence. You understand what you see without having to think it through with words.”7 On the other hand, criticism is a function of returning these perceptual processes to conceptual or articulable ones. And, ultimately, don’t all narrative films adapt a verbal tale? Isn’t there always a story set in words—an idea, a treatment, a script—before the images overtake linguistic constructs?

  2

  The Opening Translated from Literature

  The Conformist, The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, All the President’s Men, Cabaret

  In studying the opening of masterful adaptations like The Conformist, The Tin Drum, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we begin to explore the complex relationship between motion picture and viewer. Rather than being superficial or didactic, this relationship invites us to question how we see, especially when the director uses voyeurism self-consciously. And if the film is set in the past, it often leads us to see memory—or to visualize history—in a fresh way.

  The students in my Senior Seminar in Film Studies at Columbia University read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being after the first viewing of the movie made by Philip Kaufman in 1987; this permits us to better comprehend how the author and the director exploit the full resources of their respective art forms. Our vocabulary becomes descriptive rather than judgmental; instead of saying, “I liked the book better,” we discuss how the film compresses the novel’s narrative, shifts the point of view, and expands the frame. We accept that filmmakers treat a novel as raw material for a cinematic translation—a process of elucidation from one language (verbal) to another (audiovisual).

  The technique of the flashback renders film the most supple medium to suggest causality from past to present—that our previous behavior and experiences determine our destiny (in a Freudian sense). The flashback structure implies fate: already “printed,” events cannot but transpire as they do.

  I begin with an Italian filmmaker, taking my lead from Millicent Marcus, who writes in Filmmaking by the Book: “Since postwar Italian film history is largely auteurist (in reaction to Fascist cinema, which presented itself as an authorless product of a system), I believe that a study of adaptation must concentrate on the filmmakers themselves.”1 She is particularly incisive when speaking of “umbilical scenes” through which “filmmakers teach us how to read their cinematic rewriting of literary sources.” One of the supreme examples of a film shaped by flashbacks is The Conformist (1970), whose director, Bernardo Bertolucci, tells the story through uniquely cinematic means. Instead of falling back on the literary crutch of voice-over narration, he exploits expressive camera angles and movements, as well as color, visual texture, music, and contrapuntal editing. The author of the source novel is Alberto Moravia, whose work has been adapted by other major directors as well: Vittorio De Sica filmed his Two Women, and Jean-Luc Godard turned his Ghost at Noon into Contempt. If Moravia’s novel unfolds chronologically via third-person narration, the film moves back and forth in time through the subjectivity of its protagonist. In December 1995 Bertolucci spoke at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater during a retrospective of his work. About adapting The Conformist, he said, “I was flying over Moravia’s pages as if they were a landscape, words like architecture.”2 Bertolucci’s flashback structure transforms the book into the first-person tale of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who joins the secret Fascist police in Italy, partly to atone for what he thinks was a homosexual flirtation and murder in his youth. Marcello is assigned to kill his former professor Quadri—a Leftist in exile in Paris—while on his honeymoon there. But when he finds his old teacher, he is deeply attracted to Quadri’s wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who seems drawn to both Marcello and his bride, Giulia.

  The day of the assassination is the point of departure for a film about memory and desire. The opening sequence prepares the viewer for a vigorous engagement with the entire movie. During the credits, intermittent light makes us aware that we can’t see everything. We discern a man sitting on a bed, but at moments the screen is black. The light—an evocative red—turns out to be a reflection from a neon movie marquee across the street: the title is La Vie est à nous (Life belongs to us), Jean Renoir’s film of 1936. For those familiar with this celebration of the French Communist Party, the action of The Conformist unfolds in Paris before World War II and under the sign of self-conscious homage. We hear the lyrical melody of Georges Delerue’s score as the man on the bed, fully dressed, becomes more visible. This will turn out to be Marcello, first glimpsed with his arm over his eyes. Bertolucci thus introduces the theme of sight, which will be developed throughout the film (see clip).

  When Marcello gets up, the camera moves back a bit to reveal a hotel room as well as another person in the bed, naked and face down. Marcello approaches a bag in the left foreground and removes a gun: in front of a mirror, the close-up of his hand holding the weapon separates it from the rest of his body—just as subsequent scenes will display his discomfort with a revolver. Is the other body we glimpsed alive or dead? A sleepy moan suggests the former. Male or female? Sexual ambiguity—one of the film’s prominent themes—is thus introduced. Marcello removes his hat from a female posterior and covers the woman with a sheet. We subsequently learn that this is his bride, Giulia. The first scene suggests she is merely a physical prop for him and that Marcello is not comfortable with nudity; this impression is confirmed in a flashback where he visits his mother and covers her undressed body with a sheet. Throughout this opening sequence, Bertolucci acknowledges how he will reveal information only gradually, not allowing us to take anything for granted. We cannot ignore the indispensable contribution in this regard of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who collaborated with Bertolucci on subsequent films like The Last Emperor as well as with Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now, Warren Beatty on Reds, and Carlos Saura on a series of vibrant films about dance.

  Accompanied by tense strings on the soundtrack, Marcello goes out to the dawn light and waits for a car. Again Bertolucci withholds information, forcing us to watch more attentively: we do not see who is speaking next to him, and we realize only afterward that Marcello is seated beside the chauffeur Manganiello, a tough, cigar-smoking, Italian-speaking Fascist. As they speed through the wintry landscape on this October day in 1938, flashbacks permit entry into Marcello’s mind via a stream-of-consciousness narration. The first is to a recording studio, where he is superimposed on glass: we are seeing a reflection—a theme that will be developed explicitly and implicitly.

  The most significant flashback takes us further back in time, to Marcello’s childhood. He gets out of the car, takes a few steps ahead of it, and then holds up his arm to stop the car again. Suddenly we see a boy repeating the gesture in another time and place. The child Marcello gets into a lavish vehicle after being surrounded and perhaps attacked by other children. We cut to his confession to a priest—“I was thirteen,” says the adult—before returning to his seduction by the handsome young chauffeur Lino in his room. The boy takes Lino’s gun and finally shoots the chauffeur before fleeing through a window that magically opens. It is unclear whether he has killed Lino, but back in the confessional, Marcello says that Quadri’s assassination will be the price he pays to society: he will kill “tomorrow” because “blood washes away blood.”

  Flashbacks within flashbacks render The Conformist a cinematic poem with internal rhymes. We keep moving from present to pa
st because Bertolucci sees them as inseparable. Marcello is intent on becoming a conformist and Fascist in the present out of fear of what he might have done as a youth in the past. Sexual deviance and the possibility of being a killer exist both then and now. Marcello understands the connection between time periods only at the very end of the film, after the parade celebrating the downfall of Mussolini: upon hearing the voice of Lino, he realizes that he did not murder the homosexual chauffeur. He therefore sits down near a gay man in the Colosseum area. Marcello turns his head to the light from this prostitute’s little bonfire—the flickering flame recalling the red reflection of the film’s opening sequence—with a look that suggests both passion and illumination.

  The Conformist is therefore, on a secondary level, a film about seeing. Its concentration on voyeurism leads to larger themes of blindness versus lucidity, shadows versus reality, and fascism versus individual morality. The theme of sight, introduced by the intermittent light of the very first shot, is developed through a few key scenes. In the first flashback, to the radio station, Marcello is with his friend Italo—a Fascist who happens to be blind. For Bertolucci, fascism equals blindness and Marcello sees only reflections rather than “reality.” When he later visits Quadri in Paris, they reenact Plato’s myth of the cave, the famous parable about prisoners who are limited to perceiving reflections. The scene ends with the professor opening a window shade, letting in the light and erasing the shadows. The antifascist is thus the agent of illumination.