by Mark Cousins
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Although the film was shot in widescreen, this frame grab still reveals how Antonioni and his cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo framed their actors (here Jeanne Moreau) unconventially in La Notte. Italy, 1961
This is just a starting point, however. Where Pasolini photographed people square on and mostly in close-up, Antonioni’s characters are often to the side of the frame or small in it, or half hidden. When they walk out of it entirely, the shot holds and we gaze at nothing, a concrete wall, the corner of a street, dying light in the sky. When he directs Moreau – the muse of the French filmmakers – he is very specific, treating her like a chess piece on a board. Her character’s feelings, her psychology, are not the centre of the film as were Brando’s or Steiger’s in America, for example. Space and dead time are as important. The imagery does not express what she feels but what the director feels about her isolation. As if to emphasize this point, the camera often films from way above eye level, looking down on the characters who wander through their lives like figures from Baudelaire. L’Avventura, La notte, and l’éclisse place their protagonists in a built landscape as Alain Resnais had done in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, made at the same time (France, 1961). But where Resnais was interested in the ambiguities of memory and time, Antonioni looks at the despair and meaninglessness of modern life with the eye of an architect. He takes the themes of dramatist Ibsen and films them with the uncluttered rigour of the buildings of Le Corbusier. Just a year or so after Godard’s breakthrough, Antonioni reduced the action in his films – what the characters do – to just one of many other spatial and temporal elements. His long, slow, semi-abstract shots paved the way for three great European directors of the future: Hungary’s Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr and Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos.
Italy’s fellow southern European country, Spain, was still governed by its right-wing dictator General Franco, so the cinematic celebration of lifestyle, freedom and ideas was somewhat curtailed. Nonetheless, powerful and original films emerged. The lightness of early Godard and Truffaut were unlikely to be replicated in a society with such repressions, yet the first historically important work is a comedy. Marco Ferreri’s El cochecito/The Wheelchair (Spain, 1959) is about Don Anselmo, a widower who in trying to buy a motorized wheelchair inadvertently ends up killing his whole family (215). Director Ferreri, an Italian working in Spain, took a social problem – the living conditions of old and disabled people – and mocked it. This unusual combination of realism and irony in Spanish culture, derived from theatre, was called “esperpento”. It is the wellspring of the approach of Spain’s premier post-Franco filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, to filmmaking. He said of The Wheelchair, “In the 50s and 60s, Spain experienced a kind of neo-realism which was far less sentimental than the Italian brand and far more ferocious and amusing. I’m talking about the films of Fernan Gomez … and The Wheelchair.” It is difficult to imagine his films Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain, 1986) or Todo sobre di madre/All About My Mother (Spain, 1999) without the influence of Ferreri’s work.
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Marco Ferreri’s influential Spanish comedy The Wheelchair. 1959.
Though sixty years old at the beginning of the decade, Luis Buñuel’s ability to unsettle authority was far from diminished. Viridiana (Spain, 1961) would become his most banned feature film. Franco himself had invited the director back to Spain from Mexico to make a film on any subject he chose, the first in his native land for three decades. The result? A knee in the balls to everything the dictator held dear. The set-up seems a morally sincere one: a young trainee nun, whose uncle abused her, invites homeless and disabled people into his house for shelter. They trash the place during a profane meal reminiscent of the Christian Last Supper (216) – this is pure, anti-clerical Buñuel. Viridiana, “rotten with religion”, serenely prays to a cross, nails and a hammer. Her uncle dresses in white high heels and a basque. Sexual images abound. He drugs her and lays her out on a bed. Hints of necrophilia, of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The uncle represents Franco, the niece is the naive or complicit church. Her gesture of goodwill to the beggars spectacularly backfires. She is patronizing and naive. Buñuel, who has no time for sentimental depictions of beggars, emphasizes their obscenity and deformity. They are just signs of how awful life is, indulging in an orgy to the strains of the Halleluiah Chorus. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, made just three years later, was as pro-Catholic as Viridiana was anti. Both were influential but it is questionable whether Buñuel’s film retains its power today.
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Thirty-two years after Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel was still shocking audiences. In this case, homeless and disabled people mock the Christian Last Supper in Viridiana. Spain, 1961.
Carlos Saura was thirty years younger than Buñuel but his third feature La caza/The Hunt (Spain, 1966) also took Franco as its target. Its story told of three friends who fought for the dictator during the Civil War. Together with a fourth they go rabbit hunting (217), a favourite pastime of Franco himself. The site of the hunt is the former battlefield where the three saw combat in the Civil War. They arrive and start drinking. The temperature rises and the men begin philosophizing. One man says, “The hunt is like life, the strong take out the weak.” The shootings of the rabbits are staged like bullfights. Gradually the hunters begin to bicker and themselves become hunted. One by one they die brutally. The Civil War is never mentioned – for reasons of censorship – but its savagery is attacked. Saura went on to become one of Spain’s great-est directors. Sam Peckinpah said that The Hunt changed his life.
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Carlos Saura’s brutal commentary on Francoism, The Hunt. Spain, 1966.
Finally, Sweden made an important contribution to the modernizing of film language and ideas in the 1960s. Mai Zetterling’s Nattlek/ Night Games (1966), Vilgot Sjoman’s I am Curious, Yellow (1967) and Jan Troell’s Here’s Your Life (1968) were all significant but one made in 1966 by the country’s towering director from the previous decade was in a class of its own. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966) was a real advance, as challenging to cinematic traditions as A bout de souffle, L’Année Dernière à Marienbad or Antonioni’s trilogy. Where Bergman in the 1950s had explored the relationship between social and Protestant truths, often using theatre as a metaphor, Persona was set in a world which was splintering, God was dead and human subjectivity was intangible. It opens with one of the most astonishing dream sequences in film history. Against a white background we see the death of a sheep, its guts; we see inside a projector, a nail going into a hand, a tap dripping, a phone ringing, a boy lying on a slab. Six minutes of this, then the flickering film titles, followed by the story: an actress (Liv Ullmann) dries up on stage, then goes comatose. She is filmed severely, like Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1927) or with the whiteness of the same director’s Gertrud (France, 1964). She moves to a house on an island and is tended by a nurse (Bibi Andersson), who is herself troubled. The actress becomes a silent screen onto which the nurse projects her thoughts. Eventually their identities seem to overlap.
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One of the great works of its era, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opens with an astonishing montage of violent (bottom), sexual and mysterious imagery. Later the film seems to stick in the gate and burn before our eyes. Sweden, 1966.
Then a shock. The film breaks down and in doing so seems to “release” a series of images which it has been repressing: Charlie Chaplin, the nail through the hand, an eye. Bergman has swapped theatre for a psychoanalytic metaphor for cinema. The ribbon of images is a pure surface of consciousness through which farcical, violent and disturbing sub-conscious images erupt. No director of the era more explicitly related the structure of cinema to the structure and workings of the human mind. By the end of the film there are hints that the actress’s trauma is related to the Nazi extermination of Jews and to the Vietnam War. These link Persona back to The Seventh
Seal (Sweden, 1957) which explored post-Hiroshima hopelessness, therefore Bergman had not completely liberated himself from the idea that cinema is a response to world events. Not until his masterpiece Viskningar och Rop/Cries and Whispers (Sweden, 1972) would he abandon this entirely.
THE TURNING OF THE TIDE IN JAPAN
So we have another theme in 1960s cinema: the extent to which filmmakers rejected history in their work or addressed its burdens. Like Ingmar Bergman, some Japanese filmmakers continued to engage with the tragedies of their age. The country’s economy took off in the 1960s. The 1950s “Bright Life” had become a roaring success. In 1959, the country renewed a political and trading pact with the US. This was opposed by leftist and student groups, as was consumerism in Europe and America.
Events in the film world paralleled those in France. Japanese cinema since the defeat in Second World War was seen as miserable, sociological, raking through the ashes of national defeat rather than personal and of the moment. An epic example of this was Masaki’s Kobayashi’s Ningen no Joken/Human Condition (1959–61) a nine-hour-plus study of the Pacific War and its effects on Japan. Something had to change and radical wannabe directors pushed for that change. Compare Truffaut’s demands for a more individualistic and autobiographical filmmaking with this quote from Nagisa Oshima, who would become Japan’s most famous New Wave director, “[Cinema] since the beginning of sound … held that the picture exists to tell a story.”14 Challenging this he argued that it was necessary instead to “create a cinematic method whereby picture and editing themselves would be the very essence of cinema.” Such films should reject “the traditional methods of Japanese cinema such as naturalism, melodrama, recourse to the sense of victimization, politicism….” Their demands were essentially the same.
Oshima was born in 1932, just three weeks after Truffaut. Like the Frenchman, he started in the film world as a critic. From an intellectual background, he became a radical spokesman for Japan’s younger generation. His second feature Cruel Story of Youth (1960) (219), contrasts an older sister whose generation demonstrated against America’s involvement in her country with her younger sister who “indulges in every kind of pleasure” to express her rage. “We have no dreams so we’ll never end up miserable like you”, retorts the younger sister’s boyfriend. The contrast is ambiguously explored. Oshima, who was only twenty-eight at the time, argues that the older sister’s idealism is naive but that the younger’s obsession with sex and empty passion is no alternative. The film ends viciously with her boyfriend murdered and her being trailed behind a car from which she has jumped. Oshima was against the conformism in Japanese society but his alternative was hardly a coherent critique of either it or of the cinema it produced. Eventually he would define his terms, attacking the conservatism of Japan and exploring the disruptive power of sexuality in Koshikei/Death by Hanging (Japan, 1968) and Ai no Corrida/In the Realm of the Senses (Japan, 1976).
In 1961, two years before Yazujiro Ozu died, a former assistant of his made his first significant film. Buta to Gunkan/Pigs and Warships was a brilliant portrait of gangsters and prostitutes living around an American naval base in Japan. Its director, Shohei Imamura, was more focused than Oshima from the start. Born into a medical family in 1926, he came out from under the influence of Ozu like a bullet out of a gun. His subjects, he repeated, were the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure: sex and the underclass. He shared the former subject with Oshima but his view of women was far more distinctive. His next masterpiece, Nippon Konchuki/Insect Woman (1963, 220) was again about that most regular of international New Wave characters, a prostitute, but unlike Lola Montes or some of Godard’s characters, she was wholly sensible, a bit overweight, not an icon of beauty or a man’s dream of what a woman should be. The rudeness of Sachiko Hidari, who played the prostitute, her survival instinct, her ability to understand dog-eat-dog is still astonishing. Decades earlier, Mizoguchi’s and Naruse’s women suffered for their men. Imamura’s say forget that. His Ningen johatsu/A Man Vanishes (1967) takes women’s relations with men into philosophically new areas. A documentary about a woman whose husband has disappeared, it mutates into a story about her lack of interest in him, her moving on and falling for the filmmaker. In the ending Imamura demolishes the room in which the filming is taking place, revealing everything as a set-up. Kamigami No Fukaki Yokubo/Tales from the Southern Islands (1968) was perhaps his best film of this period but in the 1970s, disappointed by fiction cinema, he moved into documentary. His Nippon sengo shi: madamu omboro no seikatsu/History of Post-war Japan (1970), as told by a bar hostess, is about a real woman in the mould of Hidari and the husbandless wife, looking at images of her so-called great country and reacting to them nonchalantly. Imamura’s was one of the most coherent and original careers in international filmmaking at this time. His radicalizing of documentary is still undervalued.
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Nagisa Oshima’s bleak account of rebellion in contemporary Japan. Cruel Story of Youth, 1960.
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Japanese filmmakers often used female protagonists to explore questions of modernity and conformism in their country, but few did so with more verve and insolence than Shohei Imamura in Insect Woman. 1963
RENEWAL IN BRITISH CINEMA
Back in Europe, the new British filmmakers were as dissatisfied as those in Japan. As we have seen, traditional productions in the 1950s were challenged by well-educated, leftist critics-turned-directors like Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. Their “Free Cinema” impetus did not follow the course of French filmmaking, however. British movies like Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) were clearly new and inspired by political ideas and changes in society and art. But the realities they attempted to bring to the screen were not those of Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Oshima or Imamura.
For a start the British directors were more interested in male characters than female ones. In the above films, for example, we follow a troubled market stall owner (Richard Burton, 221), a factory worker (Albert Finney), a miner turned professional rugby player (Richard Harris, 222) and a young runner from a borstal (Tom Courtenay). Secondly, despite their own middle-class backgrounds, Richardson, Reisz and Anderson made films about working-class life, mostly out of London, in the north of England. Not for them Godard’s capital city of Paris or the autobiography advocated by Truffaut. This was the most left-wing film movement politically that we’ve looked at in this chapter so far. Thirdly, most of this “kitchen sink” work derived from the theatre or novels of what were called the “Angry Young Men”: Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, John Braine and David Storey, and narrative remained central to it. Fourthly, these filmmakers looked to documentary filmmaking more than their European counterparts, especially the traditions of John Grierson in the 1930s. All of the above films were black and white, most had loca-tion shooting and a natural style of lighting, yet few used jump cuts, irises, wide-screen framings or references to other movies.
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Claire Bloom and a fiery Richard Burton in one of Britain’s first New Wave films, Look Back in Anger. Director: Tony Richardson, 1959.
Things changed in Britain around 1963, however. London had become the music and fashion capital of Europe. The Northern sociological seriousness of Anderson, Richardson, Reisz and others gave way to movies that tried to capture some of the playfulness of the new “swinging” capital. The first of these was by trendsetter Richardson himself. A bawdy eighteenth-century tale of illegitimacy and promiscuity, Tom Jones (1963) was the director’s sixth and most successful feature film to date. A year later A Hard Day’s Night (1964) was an exuberant mus-ical about Britain’s most successful pop group, the Beatles, travelling to London and appearing on television. As they weren’t actors, it comprised a string of semi-scripted sequences in which they did the sort of things they usually d
id – went to press conferences, played music, flirted, etc. It was directed by an American, Richard Lester, who’d come to the UK, got involved with two of its most inventive comedians, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, and made television commercials. He is the first filmmaker in this book to do so. Later, in Europe and the US, then on other continents, such directors would become among the most technically sophisticated of the televisual era. Some claim that Lester’s training showed in the visual style of A Hard Day’s Night. Taking his cue from the energy of the music plus the tradition of farce in American cinema, Lester filled his film with stylistic no-nos, things that grown-up films were not supposed to do, most famously filming into the sunlight so that a “flare” or band of light revealing the internal make-up of the lens, was clearly visible. Its success led directly to the jokey stylistic tricks in British caper comedies of the rest of the decade and, the next year, an extended follow-up, Help! (1965). Such was the lure of London in these days that Michelangelo Antonioni went there to make his first international film, Blow Up (UK–Italy, 1966). More important still, the most distinctive Western director of the time made two films there in flagrant disregard of current stylistic and thematic fashions. While most of the new filmmakers were taking cameras to the streets, revelling in cinematic freedom and the moment, a Polish director, Roman Polanski, was exploring claustrophobia, love triangles and the binding power of intimacy with the technical brilliance of the young Hitchcock.