Lebanon is rooted in the filmmaker’s own experience. A gunner like Shmulik, Maoz spent thirty days in a tank. And he did receive an order to shoot at the Arab driver of an approaching truck. He told the Guardian,
“I could not escape the fact that I had pulled the trigger, that I was a kind of executioner, that I was the last person in the death link.… I wanted to make a film that might save a life. I took a life; now I could save a life. It’s no coincidence that there have been three Israeli films about the Lebanon war in as many years [the others are the Oscar-nominated Beaufort and the Golden Globe-winning Waltz With Bashir]. When the pain is only affecting you, you can ignore it. When it’s affecting your children, this is a red light.” Maoz does not believe in good wars and bad wars. “War is not the last solution. War is no solution at all. War is a beast which, once released, cannot be controlled.” …
… “In a way, the tank is the fifth character. It’s like an animal. The men are in the stomach of a wild animal.”
This is exactly right. In the gloom, unidentifiable liquids seep from mysterious pipes and gather on the tank’s floor in foul, viscous pools. Meanwhile, as the turret swings laboriously from this direction to that, it makes a sound so raw and agonised, it could drive a man insane. This, too, is deliberate. “When we created that noise, we tried to mix the sound of a hydraulic mechanism with the sound of a wounded animal.” (Point of information: the inside of the tank is not, in fact, a tank; it is the chassis of an old tractor, which two stage hands would violently shake up and down as and when Maoz required.)16
J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review provides a rich context for Lebanon: “Maoz’s cine memoir is at once political allegory and existential combat movie—Sartre’s No Exit as directed by Sam Fuller,” he wrote, referring to the American director of the World War II film The Big Red One.17 Hoberman went on to compare Lebanon to the 1982 German submarine drama Das Boot as well as Anthony Mann’s Men in War in highlighting its immersive experience. “Lebanon may be the movie’s title,” he concluded, “but, blindly plowing through everything in its path, the beleaguered tank is Israel.” During the Vietnam War almost no American films were produced on the subject. By contrast, many Israeli films about war have been made in the midst of an ongoing, perpetual wartime mentality. Lebanon—a graphic critique of Israeli warfare—was not only allowed to be made but was supported by state funds.
We can compare Lebanon with The Hurt Locker, another war film of 2009; directed by Kathryn Bigelow, its focus is on a few American soldiers in 2004 Iraq whose job is to detonate bombs. The film’s narrative strategy mirrors the soldiers’ experience—fast-paced action using a handheld camera and with limited information. Both movies convey the painful chaos of war, where it is impossible to identify enemies and survival is the only goal. The Hurt Locker was superbly shot by Barry Ackroyd, who was also the cinematographer of Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matt Damon: an exciting war drama made in 2010 and set in 2003 Iraq, it displays a tense style similar to the films mentioned above. In each case, the handheld camera conveys visceral incertitude while the sound design suggests an accelerated heartbeat.
Whereas those films explore the intense experience of soldiers on the ground, Good Kill (2015) is a superb drama that raises provocative questions about contemporary drone warfare conducted from afar, primarily through the use of subjective camera. Like the previous films of writer-director Andrew Niccol—including Gattaca (1997) and Lord of War (2005)—it moves along the fine line between the human and the mechanical, between staged manipulation and free will. Through the perspective of Tommy (Ethan Hawke), Good Kill addresses a particularly dangerous voyeurism—surveillance that leads to remote-control murder. The opening sequence follows titles stating that after 9/11, the US military began using UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, recalling George Orwell’s warnings about language that removes human consequence). “Based on actual events,” the film is set in 2010. The first shot, a high angle of a sun-drenched landscape in Afghanistan, turns out to be from the point of view of a pilot on a military base in Nevada (see clip). As in Lebanon, we alternate between what he sees through his surveillance device/weapon and extreme close-ups of his eye. There are also cuts to close shots of his mouth and the objects he controls, all in a green-grey monochrome. The fragmentary introduction of Tommy is appropriate: the film deals with the guilt and psychological fragmentation experienced by a pilot for whom war has become a video game. In voice-over, he and his commander, Jack Jones (Bruce Greenwood), prepare to take the shot. As in American Sniper (2014), the weapon sights a woman in a chador with a child, but here she is not the enemy, and the “good kill” that follows is of a member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, courtesy of a drone manned by a pilot from a desk in a trailer. The camera moves right to a gradual reveal of Tommy only after the explosion. When he goes home for a barbecue with his wife (January Jones) and two children, a close-up of coals on fire rhymes visually with the incendiary result of his drone attacks.
Like Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker or Bradley Cooper’s in American Sniper, Tommy itches to go back into combat, far from a comfortable home life where he consumes copious amounts of vodka. New coworker Suarez (Zoë Kravitz) questions their work when they have to report to the CIA. The strikes ordered take little heed of collateral damage, including children. The film’s wry moral center is commander Jack Jones: he has seen it all, acknowledging to those who work “above our theater of operation … we’re killing people.” He is a real leader, telling Tommy, “We all pulled the trigger,” when the latter feels guilt for a strike after which a follow-up was immediately ordered, resulting in the deaths of the local rescuers. He adds, “They knew there would be kids killed around the Twin Towers.” Jones refers to the CIA as “Christians in Action” and later says, “It’s a lot easier to kill these people than to capture them.” Greenwood’s rich but understated delivery makes a key line resonate beyond Good Kill: “Don’t ask me if it’s a just war. It’s just war.”
Tommy battles his demons throughout the film, admitting about flying, “I miss the fear,” and “I feel like a coward every day.” Suarez is visibly affected by their increasingly cold killings too, asking, “Since when did we become Hamas?” Tommy’s redeeming act is one of voyeurism turned protective rather than fatal. Because he and coworkers have seen an Afghan man raping the same woman twice in a compound, he secretly engineers a strike on him before the rapist enters a third time. But it is horrifying to watch through his eyes as the woman moves closer to the entrance: because of the drone’s ten-second lag, it is unclear if she will be killed as well. This rogue action gets Tommy fired. The film ends with a high-angle shot of his car on the road to Reno, where presumably he will make up with his estranged wife. The clicks we hear convey that he, too, is being watched and probably not just for potentially speeding. Niccol’s implication is that we are all being observed in one form or another. When I asked Ethan Hawke why such a fine film was ignored—during an onstage interview at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y in March 2016—he said the Right dismissed it as antimilitary, and the Left disliked it because it seemed to criticize Obama’s policies, resulting in the fact that “nobody saw Good Kill.”
FIGURE 5.5 From the opening of Good Kill
The openings of all these films invite an immediate complicity between the viewer and the flawed or morally compromised hero. Bringing us into his singular—and often limited—point of view, the filmmakers acknowledge the overlap between external warfare and internal battlegrounds.
6
The Collective Protagonist
La Ciudad, 3 Backyards, Little Miss Sunshine, Le Bal, Day for Night, A Separation, Where Do We Go Now?
While motion pictures tend to focus on a single character’s trajectory, collective protagonist films utilize an intricate narrative structuring to convey interdependence. They present individuals who exist primarily in terms of a larger community: within such ensemble pieces, resolution emerge
s from group dynamics in a way that acknowledges the insufficiency of a single hero. Superb examples of this narrative strategy include Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Robert Altman’s Nashville, Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me and Remember My Name, Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, John Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus 7 and Matewan, Paul Haggis’s Crash, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros and Babel. As with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterful Decalogue, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Densely populated, these films express pluralism and inclusiveness. In the words of Philip Kaufman—whose own ensemble films include The Wanderers (1979) and The Right Stuff (1983)—“Living in this more collective time, we are trying to redefine the hero. We’re so used to believing there’s one way to confront things; but in a complex world, there are a lot of ways. It’s not so clear that one person can have all forms of heroism.”1 A. O. Scott perceptively described a tenet of this kind of filmmaking in his New York Times review of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s Ajami: “The film has an ingenious and carefully worked-out structure. Dividing their story into chapters that are presented out of chronological order, the filmmakers embrace the multi-stranded, decentered narrative strategy that has become one of the prevalent conventions of contemporary world cinema. There are no coincidences, only hidden connections among apparently random events, some of which happen more than once so that the deeper patterns can be revealed.”2
Among the lesser known but highly recommended collective protagonist films is Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), written and directed by Rodrigo García. The five intersecting vignettes of this Los Angeles canvas focus on compelling women—played by Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and Cameron Diaz, among others—and explore female identity shaped by loss as well as caring for another person. This first feature by García—who previously worked as a cinematographer—uses close-ups not only for intimacy but also to give actors a chance to build emotions, fulfilling the awkward title. The East Coast counterpart is 13 Conversations About One Thing (2002), directed by Jill Sprecher from a script she cowrote with Karen Sprecher. They intertwine the lives of New Yorkers who are dealing with guilt while searching for meaning. The film begins with quiet tension between John Turturro, playing a Columbia University physics professor, and Amy Irving as his wife. In a bar a cynical insurance man (Alan Arkin) tells cocky lawyer Matthew McConaughey a cautionary tale about a coworker who won the lottery and then lost everything. Luck becomes a major theme, as a domino-effect structure binds all the characters together.
La Ciudad (The City, 1999) is an inspirational ensemble piece written and directed by David Riker. A Spanish-language, black-and-white, neorealist depiction of life in “the city,” it explores the lives of undocumented immigrants in Manhattan. All four vignettes begin in a photographic studio with a pose, a flash, and a whiteout: each episode is indeed framed, a composed snapshot that must be developed in the viewer’s mind. From the beginning La Ciudad focuses on faces, whose authenticity makes the film seem like a documentary; however, the stylized shots and stirring music remind us of how crafted the stories are (see clip). In part 1 we see a male day laborer reading a letter from his beloved; her voice-over in Spanish then accompanies close-ups of other workers, evoking how each one might have similar affective ties in his native country. Part 2 concentrates on young Raphael, who has just arrived from Mexico and is a bit lost. He wanders into a wedding party where he is attracted to Maria, and after he walks her home, she lets him sleep on her living room couch. Raphael goes out to buy them breakfast but cannot find his way back to the apartment complex. Despite his eagerness to return to her, he is poignantly suspended in the anonymity of New York housing. In Part 3 a man with a nagging cough puts on puppet shows and cares for his little daughter. He tries to enroll her in school but is refused because they have no rent receipt or phone bill (as he cannot afford any dwelling but a car). In Part 4 Ana, who sews in a factory, learns that her six-year-old daughter is ill in her native country. Since the workers have not been paid, she is desperate. Solidarity is enacted on two levels: some of the female workers donate to her what they have; and when the Asian-American boss tries to throw Ana out for not sewing, a potent silence grows until everyone stops working. At the end, as in the previous segments, the camera pulls back to a long shot: we contemplate the building’s exterior, which hides what we normally do not see. In all four segments, no family unit is together: one person must remain in New York (like Maria), making money for the family back home. As La Ciudad closes with a myriad of individuals—some of whom we have not seen before—posing for the studio photographer, the scene not only ties the vignettes together but also suggests all the untold stories.
FIGURE 6.1 From La Ciudad
For a different kind of contemporary ensemble piece, Eric Mendelsohn’s 3 Backyards (2010) is a sparse, poetic, evocative, and riveting movie, which won the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award. Over less than twenty-four hours, three simultaneous stories unfold on Long Island, connected by mistakes, miscommunication, and missed chances. The opening shots reveal details gradually and cumulatively: with leaves in the foreground, it is hard to “read” the image (even the title is whited out), which prepares us to be more attentive. It is well worth the viewer’s effort, as rich images, creative sound, and beautifully nuanced performances express the characters’ hesitations and frustrations. The stories have simple plotlines: John (Elias Koteas) leaves for a business trip before he and his wife (Kathryn Erbe) have had a chance to talk seriously about their relationship. Christina (Rachel Resheff) steals her mother’s bracelet just for a try-on but can’t get it off before running for the school bus—which she misses. Peggy (Edie Falco) is flattered when a famous actress (Embeth Davidtz) asks her for a ride to the ferry. Throughout the film, foreboding details generate emotional tension. Although the tales do not intersect directly, there is coherence through the repetition of detail. Voyeurism links all three, including Peggy stealing glances at the actress in her car. The camera’s narrative presence—always pushing in with quiet determination—is almost lyrically predatory. For instance, a shot begins with Christina’s high-angle point of view at school before moving down and finally into the close-up of the man’s hand holding her bracelet. The sound design is affecting as well: the plaintive flute at the beginning seems to be joined by a harp when Christina’s story moves into the foreground (appropriate to the interweaving of a second tale), while the score becomes piercing and jangling as John drives away.
FIGURE 6.2 Kathryn Erbe and Elias Koteas in the opening of 3 Backyards (see clip)
Music is a crucial bridge in connecting disparate characters, especially in an opening sequence. Little Miss Sunshine (2006), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from Michael Arndt’s Oscar-winning screenplay, provides a fine illustration, introducing six characters in separation (see clip). A young girl (Abigail Breslin) watches a TV recording of a beauty pageant and imitates the gestures of the contestant announced as the winner. A man (Greg Kinnear) talks about “winners and losers” in a motivational speech that seems to be in a big hall—but we then see just a few people clap in a classroom. A teenager (Paul Dano) pumps iron alone in his room. Oldster Alan Arkin snorts cocaine in front of a bedroom mirror. A woman (Toni Collette) talks on the phone while driving on the highway and lies about the cigarette she is smoking. A man in a wheelchair (Steve Carell) stares out a hospital window. In this truly collective introduction, the violin-based score connects individuals—each in isolation—who will turn out to belong to one family.
The score also plays a primary narrative role throughout Le Bal (1983), a film unique in narrative construction, telling a story of transformations from 1936 to 1983 in western Europe through the single location of a dance hall. Directed by Ettore Scola, it is based on a theater piece origina
lly created by Jean-Claude Penchenat for the Théâtre du Campagnol. The Italian filmmaker turned it into a stimulating musical motion picture with almost two dozen unnamed characters inhabiting eight time frames over half a century. While a script existed of the dialogue the characters might have spoken, the movie has no dialogue, and in this sense it reaches back even further, to silent film. The title refers not only to a ball that would take place in a dance hall but also to the shiny overhead orbs hanging in the opening shot.
FIGURE 6.3 From Le Bal (see clip)
The film opens with the camera tilting down from shiny disco balls to the floor. An aged bartender shuffles over to the window to close the shades and then turns on the lights. Will this space be a self-enclosed refuge from the outside world or a stylized microcosm? By the end of the film the dance hall represents both. Women enter one by one. The second woman walks toward the camera and checks her appearance; looking directly at us, she renders the lens a mirror. After the third woman assesses her reflection, a reverse-angle shot reveals the large mirror at the other end of the hall from the entrance—the locus of assessment for females who know they will be objects of a male gaze. When the men arrive in a group, they do indeed line up to look the women over. Close-ups begin to individuate the ensemble as women raise their eyes tentatively from their chairs toward possible invitations to dance. Awkwardness dominates. The looks exchanged by one couple in particular suggest not simply physical attraction but a shared past: because they seem older, the possibility of a personal history informs Le Bal’s overarching theme of social history. As each of the eight time frames unfolds, the characters take on a more resonant existence: rather than being lonely individuals seeking dance partners, they—like the dance hall—accumulate meaning through memory and continuity. The French song “J’attendrai” (I will wait) is merely a pop dance number in the first scene (with no lyrics), suggesting the nervous anticipation for an invitation to dance. By the fourth segment—set during the 1944 German occupation of Paris—the original rendition of this song in a female voice provides deeper historical resonance: two women dance sadly together, exchanging photos of their men, waiting for them to return from World War II.
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