Forman was set with an American career. He would win Best Picture again (with Saul Zaentz), for Amadeus (1984); he would do the icy wit of Valmont (1989); and he would provide one of our least-acknowledged defenses of American libertarianism, The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996). Alas, by then, the public did not welcome such appealing subversion in its films. The other Czechs had far less success, though we should make space for Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981), another film that failed to find its deserved audience. By the early 1980s the audience had lost its propensity for feeling alarmed at its own state and nation—it was the year of energetic escapism (Raiders of the Lost Ark), familial sentiment (On Golden Pond), and that curious example of a detached film about communism, Warren Beatty’s Reds. At the same time, 1980 saw Louis Malle working in America on Atlantic City, a nostalgic recollection of American crime films, in which Burt Lancaster was able to show how his toughs from the 1940s might have grown sad and wise, without giving up their act.
Not every crossover picture was worthwhile. Some people agreed with the solemn air of Luchino Visconti and his star Dirk Bogarde that Death in Venice (1971) was a masterpiece—what else could it be, unless you had room in your head for “lofty rubbish”? Bogarde would quote Visconti: “Bogarde and I made it for ourselves”; then the actor added, “which was true, but rather naughty and not to be at all encouraged!” Three years later, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) won more support in the masterpiece race, and received the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Fellini had won that prize before, for 8½ (1963), the first sign that self-awareness or self-centredness had become his subject. Fellini had rare success in his own time, and great support. I don’t think he’s watched with the same respect now, and that could be because we needed him in person to explain or embody his own charm. Fellini acted out the role of the helpless, chronic director, at a loss but somehow in charge. It might also be that there was often less there than some noticed.
Every Ingmar Bergman film in that era opened in London and New York, and the same applied to most of the films by the New Wave directors. Thus the six moral tales by Eric Rohmer became an art house staple, and My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Claire’s Knee (1970) were especially popular. No one bothered to think of Roman Polanski as limited by being Polish. He had flourished in London with Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), and when he came to America he not only grasped the smoke of witchcraft in Manhattan for Rosemary’s Baby (1968), he also helped turn Chinatown (1974) into one of the most American and Los Angeleno of movies musing on the real gold of the West, water.
It was Polanski who looked at the gentler ending to Robert Towne’s original Chinatown script and determined that the proper conclusion needed to have all mercy abandoned. So Jake Gittes, the private eye, a slicker version of Philip Marlowe, is led away a broken wreck and we have to accept that Los Angeles stays under the wicked thumb of John Huston’s Noah Cross. That didn’t stop Chinatown from being a hit when it opened, and a fond reference ever since. But it relied on an audience not deterred by the worst news, and aware that water meant Watergate, too. By common consent, with times needier now, a picture as dark as Chinatown would not be attempted today. Towne’s deepest hope—to follow Gittes and the city through the 1930s, the ’40s, and the ’50s—came adrift. He wrote the 1940s sequel, The Two Jakes (1990), and was about to direct it himself. Then chaos and mistrust intervened. The picture was shelved, and when it came back a few years later, Jack Nicholson was its director. That part two didn’t work, and we will not see a third film in the Jake Gittes series. In just a few years, Roman Polanski found his own exit from L.A., and he hasn’t been back.
A year after the original Chinatown, Nicholson signed on with Michelangelo Antonioni to make The Passenger in various parts of Europe and North Africa, but in the English language. Nicholson plays David Locke, an American journalist living in London, with a wife and a house. But he is disenchanted with his life in all respects. In a small African country, in a simple hotel, he meets a man one night and then finds him dead the next morning. With as little talk or reflection as slows Marion Crane in Psycho when she decides to take the money, he swaps identities with this dead man. In both cases, we know why the escapees do it: it is their longing for something better; it is a version of why we are at the movies.
“Locke” will discover that the life he has cast himself in is that of an international gun runner. Going back to London to spy on the ashes of his old life, he sees a girl in a public space. (It is Maria Schneider.) Then, following his new itinerary, laid out in the dead man’s diary, he meets her again in a Gaudí house in Barcelona. Is that coincidence? What is coincidence in a story except purpose? Is the girl following him as part of some intrigue, or is she just a chance encounter ready to become his witness?
Very soon he is being pursued by both his old and his new lives, and the film concludes—at the Hotel de la Gloria, somewhere in southern Spain, at the close of a day—in one of the most elaborate and beautiful sequences ever filmed. As Locke dies in his hotel room, the camera slowly passes through a window to the courtyard beyond. We have a feeling of being drawn up into the screen itself by the motion. It is one of those sequences that has to be felt on a large screen, with baited breath and alertness. You want to be there. Looked at again, thirty-five years later, it seems like a swan song to the cinema of rearranged actuality, of caméra stylo and mise-en-scène, the moment, presence, and the passing light. This is what cinema was. Just as with Blow-Up, the mystery story keeps a very straight face so that it can vanish under our eyes.
Another pleasant surprise in these years was the return of a director once regarded as a guarantee of outrage. After Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’ge d’Or (1930), Luis Buñuel did no films of his own until he turned up in Mexico in 1947. Los Olvidados (1950) brought him back to attention (it won Best Director at Cannes in 1951) when it seemed like a neorealist study of slum kids lit up with his old interest in dream. He worked steadily then in Mexico, and after that, in France and Spain. It was as if he had always wanted to be a filmmaker. But the mood of his surrealism had shifted from anger or nihilism to amusement.
In 1967 he made a masterpiece, Belle de Jour, in which Catherine Deneuve plays a respectable bourgeois wife, Séverine, who occupies her afternoons by working in a brothel. It was in chic color and as thrilled with the ambiguities in Deneuve’s persona as Polanski had been on Repulsion (1965): she was a very good girl, but a very naughty girl, too—she was the well-behaved person who imagines herself into something sensual, dirty but irresistible. In her own dream, Séverine is tied to a tree so that mud can be thrown at her—the dark brown on her white skin is passionate and revolting. Belle de Jour found an arousing chasteness in Deneuve, but the suggestions of depravity were more erotic than films that boasted of intercourse. The actress would say, “Physical scenes don’t bother me; on the contrary, they help me to overcome my withdrawn side, to get out of myself.” Perhaps the best screen performers have intuitions about us.
Buñuel was over seventy, but with Jean-Claude Carrière as his friend and screenwriter, he now made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which a group of socialites (played by classy movie stars) are endlessly thwarted in their desire to enjoy a good dinner together. Shot in polished color and Champs-Élysées clothes, The Discreet Charm is a taunt to anyone who resembles its characters—it says, what a shame you keep missing your meal, while letting everyone else see how absurd you are. The texture and tone are from magazine advertising as employed to make a teasing portrait of our neuroses. And the audience liked it: the movie was a hit and it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It is still timeless, pretty, and as pointed as a finger pressing on an old wound.
Could this be surpassed? In 1977, Buñuel and Carrière returned to a story von Sternberg had used for The Devil Is a Woman in 1935. Fernando Rey would be a man preoccupied with a lovely young woman who flirts with him but witholds her body. He goes politely crazy. The role of the woman was
meant for Maria Schneider, but she proved unreliable, or too ill at the time. So Buñuel calmly destroyed the sanctity of casting in one stroke: he would have the woman played by two actresses: the sensual Ángela Molina and the more reserved Carole Bouquet. The director told his worried producer to think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
How can a man be chasing two women and think they are the same person? He simply doesn’t notice the difference. (This had been suggested before, by Preston Sturges, in The Lady Eve.) Now you understand how, at the movies, on the screen, all people are alike—lovely shapes made alike by that white plane, the screen. The film is called That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a title that might easily refer to the whole of cinema, and the result is a comedy of unsurpassed intelligence and erotic pathos in which desire itself, that creaking old engine, is seen as fit for retirement.
Is this the last sublime comedy in the movies, made just six years before Buñuel’s death in 1983? That the director of Un Chien Andalou should have survived to do it is a touching lesson for film history and a reward to us for being the loyal audience the pictures relied on. That Obscure Object of Desire may seem like a dry testament of old age, but now we wonder if it was the medium itself that waited to be retired.
One year before Luis Buñuel took his last sigh (the title of his autobiography), Rainer Werner Fassbinder died, probably with a groan and a roar. He was thirty-seven and he had crammed his life with all varieties of sex, drugs, booze, theatrical productions, and movies. In appearance and his working life he was untidy, uncool, frenzied, and uncouth, in search of the ultimate overdose. Yet his camera style was simple, classic, and a recording device for teeming melodrama, and his compassion for all outsiders was driven by the sense of us all acting out our lives.
As an “artist,” he was beyond cataloguing or ordinary attention. At film festivals, he was ready to seem “disgusting” to the very people who fund such events. “I wanted to make them angry,” he said, “As angry as I was.” He defied the regular scale of such careers by making more films than audiences could keep up with—four a year sometimes, forty by the time of his death. Think of the opposed work rates of Kubrick and Fassbinder.
“I worked so fast,” he said. “The less shooting days you have, the cheaper everything is, and the more films you can make.” He was ready to start a film every day, and if it had to record his own exhaustion or breakdown, so be it. He made a nonsense of deliberation; he filmed as he might drink, or fuck, or breathe. When he finished making Alexander Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (fourteen episodes, more than nine hundred minutes of TV time), on which he came in weeks ahead of schedule, he was seriously prepared to do the whole thing again, with a different cast, for a theatrical movie!
He had anticipated the technologies that would permit unceasing work—being “on” without rest, letting it take over life? The measured pace of a professional career was something he disdained and defied, for he had seen that recording machines kept going until they stopped, like the human organism. Anyone who values his own moderated judgment should sample at least The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), and Veronika Voss (1982). (These are some of the declared “classics.”) But Fassbinder saw and did everything—if he ever bothered to take a second look. What he said about Douglas Sirk applied to his own struggle: “You can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living.” His headlong work has gone out of fashion since his death, but he guessed how soon young people would become more interested in making films or being in them than watching them.
Several of the films from this era address the nature of film itself: The Passenger, That Obscure Object of Desire, Persona, Point Blank. As film subsided as a dominant entertainment, it became more intriguing or necessary to ask how it worked and to be obsessed with reality and fantasy being woven together. Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (1974), directed by Jacques Rivette, was a rare, lyrical comedy about this self-reflective dance.
The setting is Paris in the summer, in a sleepy urban park where cats watch birds, and wait to pounce. Two women meet: Céline (Juliet Berto), a cabaret magician, and Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian. They are not suited at first, annoyed at misunderstanding, but they become friends, and then in their friendship they learn about a mysterious rather removed, or apart, house: 7bis rue de Nadir aux Pommes. They seek entrance, one by one, then as a couple, and while they cannot be seen by the occupants, they realize that a sinister melodrama is unfolding in the house in which three adults (Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Barbet Schroeder) are plotting against a child named Madeleine (Nathalie Asnar). How can they save this girl? It’s hard enough to get into the house, but can they enter its action? And do you notice how the action itself begins to look increasingly stylized and drained of color—like a black-and-white film running in a colored world?
Céline et Julie is a gradual film (three hours, thirteen minutes)—some call it slow, but only if they are out of the habit of looking and noticing. Once you begin to attend, the film grows shorter and quicker by the minute. The friendship between the two women enlists us, and unconventional female friendships are a treat in our pictures. In time you appreciate that 7bis is not exactly a movie house, but a house that has become a movie (like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining), and the Madeleine story is a show these two friends must watch in the mounting delirium of continuous performance. I will not give away the ending, except to assure you it is not unhappy. But you cannot settle for the happiness or trust it applies to life in a thorough way that will keep you ensured. The happiness works only if you can leave the house.
Céline et Julie was never meant to be a wildly popular film, yet its ethos comes from the oldest kinds of romance and adventure that made the motion picture business. The very title of the film is an allusion to those silent comedies where Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle did this and that together. The thought of rescuing a kid is as old as Chaplin. The mixture of thrills and farce is the history of the show. At the same time, this is the work of a fine, learned critic and a lifelong pursuer of movie narrative and its relationship with our dreams.
Rivette had made Paris Nous Appartient, a Parisian story about paranoia, thirteen years earlier. He had directed Anna Karina in La Religieuse (1966), taken from Diderot, and a great scandal in France. He had made L’ Amour Fou (1969), about actors, and in Out One (1974, a film of over twelve hours), he had encouraged actors to improvise and develop the story of conspiracy. He made Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau next as a distillation of his career and his love of cinema, but now paranoia had become bliss. The metaphor for the process of moviegoing is accessible and serene. But there are threats in its world, and I wonder if the little girl is named for the woman murdered and exploited in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a character we never meet. But “madeleine” also links Proust and the candies Céline and Julie need to suck before their movie starts to run. In its insight, its sweet analysis, its humor, and its faith in circling stories, and paying close attention, this is just one of those movies from the 1970s that let a cineaste feel he possessed life—until the candy ran out.
I have tried to show how our attitudes to love, identity, desire, and responsibility have been shaped by moviegoing. These topics come together in the large subject of acting: Of whether we are ourselves or someone playing ourselves. And whether the movies have been good for us. The influence of our movies is not just a cultural sidebar, like an evening a week set aside for our fun. It was the engine of our time, the signal of so many screens to come; it is a model for how we look and decide, whether we participate or are content to be spectators.
So I close this section with a comparison of a political leader who became the figure in an astonishing motion picture and a movie star who made it all the way to the White House. The movie is Hitler: A Film from G
ermany (1977), made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. The career is that of Ronald Reagan, one of the most mysterious and important Americans of the twentieth century. This comparison is not made with any sense that these two men were similar in personality, intent, or impact, or that they stand for some blunt contrast of evil and good. They are together because their public and their world regarded them as figures in history and media, actors playing on the largest stage, the anthology of their own screen moments. They are here because of the unholy mixture of politics and personality from which we suffer, and which is a comprehensive enactment of the technologies considered in this book.
Syberberg was born in Nossendorf in Pomerania in 1935 and was an adolescent in East Germany before settling in Munich at the age of eighteen. He made a few documentaries in the 1960s, notably on the performers Fritz Kortner and Romy Schneider, but then, in the 1970s, he entered on a period of intense activity such as no one could have predicted: he made Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), Karl May (1976), and The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (1978), all of which revealed his knowledge of and obsession with the cultural history of modern Germany and its stew of purpose, idealism, neurosis, and insanity. Syberberg is talented beyond doubt, but he often displayed an overweening arrogance that led him into grave troubles later. At the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, when he was there to show his film of Parsifal, he declared without irony that he thought one day the Goethe Institute might be renamed the Syberberg Institute. That was a warning of the man who would later damn himself with anti-Semitic remarks and frequent statements exposing his sympathy for some Nazi ideas.
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