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Cinematic Overtures

Page 8

by Annette Insdorf


  If neorealism was the seminal movement in 1940s postwar Italian cinema, the cinematography of Michael Chapman in Taxi Driver could be called “neon-realism,” an electric rendering that captures the 42nd Street of the 1970s. James Sanders, in Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, calls Scorsese’s city “an almost voluptuously lurid place, filled with old-fashioned neon signs … straight out of a 1940s movie—especially as reflected in the glistening rain-washed streets visible throughout the story.… The garish green and red light those neon signs emit, in turn, seems to bathe the entire city in a thick and expressionistic gloom, completing its transformation into a fully rendered night world.” He quotes Janet Maslin’s review from the New York Times, describing “a place at once ‘seductive and terrible … a physical manifestation of the forces tearing Travis apart.’ ”5 Scorsese’s opening suggests a 1940s-style film noir with a 1970s perspective, the protagonist again reflecting his particular time.

  Apocalypse Now (1979) shares with Taxi Driver the stylized depiction of a hellish landscape—internal as well as external—of a man marked by the Vietnam War. Both include the voice-over narration of a protagonist whose mental stability is in question. Francis Ford Coppola transposed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the backdrop of the Vietnam War; the focus is on Willard (played by Martin Sheen), whose mission is to find the elusive Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the jungle. The opening is anchored by superimposition: different layers of reality exist simultaneously—external and internal—with the disorientation created by a face upside down as well as in slow motion. The music of The Doors is hypnotic: the song “The End” not only identifies the time of the Vietnam War but also creates a feeling of doom. Instead of a linear approach, Coppola creates internal rhymes, like Willard’s face on the left and a totem on the right, or a ceiling fan and helicopter blades. These circular images introduce one of the film’s motifs: Apocalypse Now is not simply a voyage from civilization to the primitive jungle; in addition to a journey upstream, it is also a spiraling into madness. To quote Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, “The end is in the beginning” (and he wrote that line long before Jim Morrison would sing, “This is the end …”). Indeed, Coppola’s decision to open the film with a song that announces “This is the end” adds a temporal dimension to the circularity. Moreover, the trancelike experience of the opening is enhanced by Coppola’s choice of fading in and out rather than cutting.

  FIGURE 5.3  The superimpositions that open Apocalypse Now (see clip)

  The editor and sound designer of the movie was Walter Murch, one of the most gifted film craftsmen in American cinema history. (He won the Academy Award for the sound of Apocalypse Now.) His skills have graced such motion pictures as The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The English Patient, and he oversaw the reconstruction of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. About Apocalypse’s opening scene, he said:

  You’re looking at a character whose head is enveloped in flames, and then at slow-motion helicopter blades slicing through his body, superimposed upon a whirling ceiling fan, and strange sounds and music intermingling from different sources; you’re probably aware you’re watching a film, not an imitation of real life. Even dreams, despite their odd surreality, don’t look quite like that. Inevitably, the superimposed images in ‘Apocalypse Now’ betray a self-consciousness because they come at the very beginning and are intended to expose and explore Willard’s inner state of mind. If there had been no resonance between that scene and the film as a whole, the opening would have been a meaningless exercise, empty virtuosity.6

  The published screenplay Apocalypse Now Redux (which accompanied the 2001 release of the film’s expanded version) contains not only the script by John Milius and Coppola—with narration by Michael Herr—but also a revelatory foreword by the director. He recalls sharing office space in the late 1960s with buddies Milius, George Lucas, and Carroll Ballard, who had been planning to make Heart of Darkness. “There was a lot of cross-fertilization going on and … the description of John’s script-to-be included a soldier named Willard going upriver to find a renegade officer named Kurtz.” By the 1970s Coppola decided to film Milius’s script in the Philippines. “However, when I made the film,” he writes, “instead of carrying the script, I had a little green paperback of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in my pocket, filled with notes and markings. I just naturally started referring to it more than the script, and step by step, the film became more surreal and reminiscent of the great Conrad novella.”7

  But let’s compare the opening of the film to the first two paragraphs of Joseph Conrad’s tale (published in 1899):

  The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

  The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.8

  This is a description in long shot of an exterior space. The perspective is that of an omniscient high-angle camera representing the point of view of a participant (“stretched before us”) whose descriptive abilities are precise and evocative. The only words that seem to inform the visual introduction of Martin Sheen’s character, on the other hand, are “haze” and “mournful gloom,” while the song of The Doors provides “brooding motion.” In one of the most famous scenes from Apocalypse Now, music again provides a simultaneous emotional tone and distancing from the action: the American helicopters over Vietnam are accompanied by “The Ride of the Valkyries,” as Robert Duvall’s character, Kilgore, uses Wagner’s music on loudspeakers to propel his men’s attack.9 The music stops abruptly when we see Vietnamese children running from those who are out to destroy them.

  The opening of Apocalypse Now is ultimately closer to the first paragraphs of Dispatches, the nonfiction book by Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr. It is no surprise that Coppola had Herr write Willard’s voice-over narration, given that the book begins with this rumination: “There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.… The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the set Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted.… If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT.”10

  Foregrounding subjectivity in the context of war can be both immersive and dislocating. Whether one is making a film or fighting a war, the limitations define the possibilities. One of the greatest films in this context is Come and See (1985), director Elem Klimov’s harrowing Soviet recreation of 1943 Byelorussia. (Ales Adamovich, the film’s screenwriter, had been a teen partisan in Byelorussia.) The protagonist is an adolescent witnessing his country torn apart by war: Flor (Aleksei Kravchenko, who was thirteen at the time of filming and had not acted before) joins the partisans despite his mother’s plea that he stay with her to protect his little twin sisters. His experiences in a country where the Nazis destroyed over six hundred villages leave him as ravaged as the landscape: by the end of the film he looks like an old man even if only a few months have passed since the beginning. The cinematic style is breathtaking—not for the sake of self-conscious virtuosity but for a heightened storytelling appropriate to the scale of World War II. It opens with the camera placed behind an older man who yells for those hiding to come out. He turns to face the camera in close-up, the
angle that will be used for each major character—an in-your-face confrontation. A little boy walking toward the camera speaks in an old man’s voice—a disconcerting introduction to Flor’s impending transformation—and imitates his father’s exhortation to stop hiding. Flor laughs in the bushes and emerges: war is still a game. They run off together to dig in the sand for guns, as a weapon is needed to join the partisans. Pulling with the exertion required for the birth of a large animal, Flor gets his rifle. After his friend playfully says “Allo, Berlin” into an abandoned phone, a reconnaissance plane flies over them. It introduces the German “Deutchland Uber Alles” anthem, which plays over the credits in counterpoint with two other aural layers—percussion and the ominous drone of the plane.

  FIGURE 5.4  A boy plays at war at the beginning of Come and See (see clip)

  His first disappointment is mild: as a youngster, he is left behind when the partisans set out on a mission. With the beautiful young Glasha (Olga Mironova), he escapes from bombs and returns to his house. But they flee from its emptiness and from the pile of corpses Glasha glimpses outside the house while they are running away. His search for his family leads the two youngsters into a muddy swamp—both a visceral reality and a metaphor for the horrors of war into which they are being sucked. Flor is taken to a refugee camp and later hides in a village as the Nazis approach. But they round up all the inhabitants and herd them into a massive shed, to which they set fire. Hearing the screams of the dying, the Nazis applaud their work. The film’s depiction of their brutality is overwhelmingly graphic. As Washington Post film critic Rita Kempley put it, Klimov “taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Coppola found in ‘Apocalypse, Now.’ ”11

  When the partisans reach the Nazis, Flor—who has not fired a gun since the film’s opening—finally shoots, but at a framed portrait of Hitler in a puddle. This last segment is remarkable, formally and philosophically—a kind of coda inextricable from the film’s prelude. Every shot from his rifle leads to fragmented newsreel footage of Hitler and other Nazi images, including the concentration camps. Each moves to an earlier point in time, back to Kristallnacht, then to Hitler as a young man, ending on a portrait of baby Adolf. Where does evil begin? As these archival images rewind, destroyed buildings go back up, bombs ascend into planes, and crowds lower their arms from the Heil salute—an effect Columbia University student Simon Kessler likened to “a cancelling of history”—as Flor’s cathartic act of shooting enables him to move forward.12

  After the first bombing attack, subjective sound leads us to hear the distortions as if we were Flor, from a piercing screech to the sense of being underwater. Surreal moments abound, like his waking up on a dead cow or the Nazis leaving an old peasant lady in bed on the scorched earth of a village they burned. Flor’s loss of innocence coexists with the film’s acknowledgment that we are watching recreated images. At one point, Nazi officers hold a gun to his head—but only to take his picture. Once it is shot they let him go, having wanted only the image. At the end of Come and See Klimov suggests that images or representations can be manipulated—reversed, sped up, and fragmented—while history seems to be etched on Flor’s stern face. Columbia student Patrick Ford pointed out a similar description of footage in reverse from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was first published in 1969:13

  It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

  The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

  When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

  The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.14

  The exact translation of the Russian title Idi i smotri (from the book of Revelation 6:1, King James version) is “Go and look”; in either case, it includes an imperative to the spectator to watch closely. (Unsurprisingly, László Nemes cited this film as an inspiration for Son of Saul, his visceral and immersive Oscar-winning Holocaust drama of 2015.)

  In many ways, the heightened attentiveness to the natural world makes Come and See a companion piece to Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line (1998), as both filmmakers create a continuum between characters and their nonhuman environs during World War II. Not only are the rain and earth palpable, but the very landscape is assaulted by bombs. If a close-up of a stork in the woods is a reminder of the other inhabitants of the earth, a cow in an open field becomes one of Come and See’s most poignant victims: after tracer bullets hit the animal repeatedly until it falls dying, a close-up of one eye is rhymed by a falling flare and then the moon. And the last scene of Come and See includes a curious detour of the camera away from Flor’s unit marching: in a fluid movement it tracks left past trees, deep into the heart of the woods, before rejoining the men (see clip). Along with the gentle sound of the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem on the soundtrack, this wandering lens takes us through a piece of earth that has remained intact, still capable of sustenance. At this point, snow is visible on the ground, suggesting winter (and therefore the passage of a few months’ time since the film began). As all roads seem to lead to the same place, the camera’s tilt to a low-angle shot of the sky suggests the spiritually evocative title of the film directed by Klimov’s wife, Larissa Shepitko, Ascent. (She died in 1979.) Nature endures and regenerates, whether humans act nobly or destructively—a point made by another film released in 1985, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: it is also anchored in landscapes that no longer reflect the wartime horrors they witnessed forty years earlier. Roger Ebert interpreted the final scene of Come and See as a fantasy—“The Mozart descends into the film like a deus ex machina, to lift us from its despair. We can accept it if we want, but it changes nothing. It is like an ironic taunt”15—but Klimov might be elevating the frame to a pantheistic vision of the universe. The last word we hear from the choral voices of Mozart’s Requiem is “Amen.”

  If Come and See moves through varied landscapes and seasons, the time frame of Lebanon (2009) is twenty-four hours, and the space is within an army tank. Written and directed by Samuel Maoz, this intense and often disturbing Israeli drama—winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival—is set in 1982 at the beginning of Israel’s war with Lebanon. Its immediacy is fueled by spatial limitations: we see and hear only what the four soldiers in the Israeli tank do. The result is not only tense claustrophobia but also a self-conscious questioning of subjective camera. While the vantage point may seem i
nitially empowering—for both the gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat) and us—it becomes devastating, because to see through the sights of a gun is to prepare to shoot. Lebanon conveys a combination of heat, dirt, confusion, and fear experienced by Shmulik. The soundtrack heightens the tension by accompanying each internal camera movement with a mechanical sound: while we can see things magnified from a variety of angles, the noise of the manipulation is frightening.

  The film opens on a field of wilted dandelions, as if a truck had run them over: instead of rising to the sun, they droop downward. A breeze moves them slightly as we hear atonal music consisting of pong sounds. From the yellow dandelions, an abrupt cut to a black screen allows for a printed title: “June 6, 1982, the first day of the Lebanon War.” A dark circle is the appropriate introduction to the implacable enclosure of the tank. It reveals the reflection in a cistern as a soldier takes out water. A sign reads, “Men are steel. The tank is only iron.” The point of view is established through a green filter on the circular lens of the tank’s gunsight, moving through trees. It alternates with shaky close-ups of a soldier’s face—especially his eye—against this lens. When a drop falls into the cistern that was our introductory image, we again see the reflection of a face (see clip).

  Later, subjective camera is achingly visceral just after a battle in which one of the Israeli soldiers is hit. Shmulik, who was unable to fire at an oncoming car at the beginning, therefore shoots straight at another approaching one. The omnipresent whir of the stick (visually and aurally violent) conveys the inability to see the total picture. Shmulik constantly reframes—past chickens that are either in flames or wandering aimlessly before the tank—until he finds the true object of both his lens and that of the film’s director: an elderly man whose arms he has blown off repeating “Peace.” There are only two exterior shots—the long opening take of a field of huge dandelions and a closing shot of the tank in that field. They signify that the characters have gone in a circle: instead of advancing or progressing, these men have experienced a violent futility. The enclosure of the film resists any external explanation of the Israelis’ role in Lebanon or who the real enemy is.

 

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