The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  One film that captured the complexity of the New Wave’s decline was La Maman et la putain/The Mother and the Whore (France, 1973). Directed by troubled young cineaste Jean Eustache, it was a three-and-a-half-hour dissection of a love triangle between Truffaut’s and Godard’s iconic actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, his girlfriend (Bernadette Lafont) and a nurse (Francoise Lebrun) with whom he begins an affair. Its settings were the cafés and apartments where Godard’s philosophical dreamers of a decade or more earlier had debated love. By now the debate has become an unstoppable torrent of words. The life of talk in cafes and drifting love affairs has become not only an addiction for young Parisians of the early 1970s, but almost a disease. Léaud’s hyperactive performance and Eustache’s bravura writing and directing turned La Maman et la putain into an epic of disquiet and regret.

  Another French-language film that extended the ideas of the new wave was Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium, 1975), the third feature of the Belgian director Chantal Akerman. Born in 1950 to Jewish parents, she studied in Paris, made her first film in 1968 and worked in a porn theatre in New York in the early 1970s, later incorporating elements of sexual abasement into her films. Jeanne Dielman was like the dedramatized kitchen scene with the maid in Umberto D (Italy, 1952) (see page 192) extended to well over three hours in length. It recounted two days in the life of a divorcée who sleeps with men for money and finally kills one because she is beginning to enjoy the sexual experiences. Unlike Godard or Buñuel with their prostitutes, however, Akerman never eroticizes Dielman. Instead the scenes with the men are treated in the same way as those of making beds and peeling potatoes: they are shot rigorously frontally like the Assassination of the Duc de Guise (France, 1908) (see page 38) without reverse angles. Akerman was taking the stripped-down stylistic ideas of Bresson, Godard and Pasolini. The resulting tableau approach to staging a scene was radical and haunting.

  SEXUALITY AND NEW CINEMA IN ITALY IN THE 1970S

  La Maman et la putain and Jeanne Dielman both sounded notes of pessimism about the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It seemed that the new freedoms created their own problems. However, boundaries continued to be rolled back: France’s president said on television that there should be an end to censorship; European, American and Japanese cinema became more sexually explicit than ever before; Indian film featured its first ever on-screen kiss in Satyam Shivam Sundaram/Love Sublime (Raj Kapoor, 1978); and in Italy, two of the countries most important directors each delivered a trilogy of films in which sexual freedom was a measure of national health. Where the religious rigour of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Italy, 1964) had impressed the Catholic authorities in his country, his “Trilogy of Life” scandalized them. Decamerone/The Decameron (Italy, 1971), Il Racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales (Italy, 1972), and Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notta/The Arabian Nights (Italy, 1974) are like three frescoes about the bawdy lives of peasants in pre-modern Europe and the Middle East. Full of sexual japes, scatological mishaps, nudity and phallic symbols (244) the films seemed to argue that only in the past, before consumerism and capitalism, were people genuinely uninhibited. Said Pasolini at the time, “Enjoying life and the body means precisely enjoying a life that historically no longer exists.”1 His own attempt to live outside modern Italy’s sexual and moral norms ended tragically when he was murdered by a male prostitute in 1975.

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  The third in Pasolini’s epic, joyous Trilogy of Life: The Arabian Nights. Italy, 1964.

  Luchino Visconti also lived outside those norms. Where Pasolini focused on times and people who he felt were untouched by sexually repression, his aristocratic fellow-director did the opposite. The Damned/Götterdämmerung (Italy–Germany, 1969) (245) Death in Venice/Morte a Venezia (Italy 1971) and Ludwig (Italy, 1972) each use a German theme or source material to find something fatal in repressed homosexuality. “To put the eyes on beauty”, said Visconti in faltering English in a TV interview, “… is to put the eyes on death.”2 This could be his testament, the key to his pessimism. Visconti died just one year after Pasolini, in 1976.

  A generation younger than either, Bernardo Bertolucci’s view of human sexuality was less bleak. His first contributions to the story of film were his absorption of Godard in Before the Revolution (Italy, 1964) and his mythic screenplay for Leone’s bravura Once Upon a Time in the West (Italy, 1968) (see page 288). In 1970, he released his greatest film yet, The Conformist/Il Conformista (Italy) (245). Set in 1938, during Italy’s fascist regime, it told of a man trying to prove that he is normal and heterosexual. His way of doing so is to marry and join the Fascist movement. Under their instruction he assassinates his former professor, a father figure and a decent man. Exploring the relationship between sexual and political repression, this film of ideas was shot like a Gene Kelly musical or a film by Max Ophüls. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, an intellectual with theories about the meaning of different colours, became as central a figure here as Raoul Coutard did with Godard and Truffaut a decade earlier. He took the choreographed style of the musicals and melodramas that Bertolucci so admired and applied them with rigour to the director’s story. In one scene the camera sweeps upwards on a crane as leaves blow in a whorl before it, just as it would on an MGM sound stage. In another, it dances with the actors. Bertolucci’s central character, the repressed fascist, was psychologically, as imprisoned as Bresson’s characters. Bertolucci and Storaro’s exhilaratingly liberated filming style was the embodiment of what he had lost.

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  Visconti’s trilogy was as grand as, but far more pessimistic than, Pasolini’s. Beauty, decadence and despair in The Damned. Italy–Germany, 1969.

  The Conformist was not only a major intellectual and aesthetic achievement, but one of the most influential works of the early part of the decade. Godard had used dance numbers in films before The Conformist but by introducing such visual pleasure into his work, Bertolucci made New Wave filmmaking seductive. The film was widely seen in America and became a touchstone for young directors like Francis Coppola who would later hire cinematographer Storaro for Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979). His fellow Italian-American Martin Scorsese saw its mix of thematic complexity and visual utopianism as a breakthrough, a double act of seduction and repulsion. This idea that the surface of a film, its form, could express the fascination we feel for brutality and self-destruction became central to his seminal film Taxi Driver (USA, 1976). That film’s writer, Paul Schrader, would imitate The Conformist in American Gigolo (USA, 1980) (246). Two years after The Conformist, the two-way flow between US and European cinema resulted in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris/Ultimo Tango a Parigi (France, 1972) in which the director made what he called a “documentary” about Marlon Brando meeting Maria Schneider in a room and having anonymous sex with her. Once more, it was exquisitely photographed by Storaro, who this time took visual cues from the paintings of Francis Bacon.

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  Bertolucci’s stylized account of how repression leads to fascism, was his greatest to date and widely admired by American directors. The Conformist. Italy, 1970.

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  Paul Schrader hired The Conformist’s production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and had his cinematographer John Bailey emulate the film’s lighting (by Vittorio Storaro) in American Gigolo. USA, 1980.

  AMERICA IN THE 1970S

  In America itself, the deaths of Malcolm X, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, had a sobering effect on what some saw as the excesses of the 1960s. Four hundred colleges went on strike in 1970 in protest at the Vietnam War and at one, Kent State University, four were shot dead. The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 showed that the US Republican Party and the CIA were involved in bugging the Democrats Party’s offices. As a result, President Nixon was forced to resign. The artistic influence from Europe, the decline in attendance amongst older filmgoers, feminism and the debates about Vietnam together produced a film community more divided
than at any time since perhaps the witch hunts of the House UnAmerican Activity Committee in the late 1940s. Even families were split. Actress Jane Fonda went on hunger strike to protest at, amongst other things, Western icon John Wayne’s Vietnam film The Green Berets (John Wayne, Ray Kellogg, USA, 1968) in which the Vietcong were vilified and the Americans ennobled. Her father, Henry Fonda, took his friend Wayne’s side against his daughter.

  Cinemas at the end of the 1960s were closing at an unprecedented rate. Warner Bros. was bought by a company that owned car parks and funeral parlours. United Artists was acquired by a car rental and insurance business. In the early 1970s, 15.8 million movie tickets were sold per week in the US, compared to 78.2 million in 1946. The movie industry was more “on its ass than any time in its history.”3 20th Century-Fox lost $77m in 1971 alone. MGM survived only because its string of Las Vegas hotels were profitable. Just one in ten films was making money. A sign of how insecure the studios were is that when two of the major television stations, CBS and ABC, started making what would soon be called “TV movies”, industry leaders tried to sue them claiming that they were monopolizing by making and showing films, exactly what the moguls themselves had done until they were forced to sell their cinemas.

  As far as what actually appeared on cinema screens goes, 1970s American cinema challenged some of the norms of traditional filmmaking. The new films had few heroes or romances, their endings were often ambiguous or left open. The insecurities, social upheavals and new creative influences produced three interwoven trends out of which emerged some of the best American films ever made. The first of these was the dissident trend: the direct continuation of the New Wave challenge to conventional cinema. The second was assimilationist: many filmmakers found a way of applying new ambitious filmmaking schemas within traditional studio genres. The third, was a revival of the pure entertainment of the 1930s and 1940s, and changed not only the American film industry, but much of Western production and exhibition.

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  Bertolucci’s account of two people who meet in an apartment for anonymous sex took its visual inspiration from the paintings of Francis Bacon. Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. France, 1972.

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  The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider, was a modernist Western in which local people in Peru fashion film equipment out of bamboo (left) to emulate a film shoot which has just taken place in their community. This most Godardian of American films flopped at the box office and was critically mauled. USA, 1971.

  The standard bearer of the dissidents was Dennis Hopper. The success of Easy Rider (USA, 1969) convinced people that he had the Midas touch, that he more than anyonecould judge what the new young audience wanted. Hopper lived the life of the dissident, growing his hair long, drinking all day, moving to the desert in New Mexico. His follow up to Easy Rider, the prophetically entitled The Last Movie (USA, 1971), was a hate letter to American film. It had a brilliant premise: after a Western is filmed in Peru, a stuntman stays on, and gets involved with the local community (248). They, in turn, deal with the legacy of the filming by treating it almost as if it was a god which visited, making iconic models of the equipment out of bamboo and, eventually, emulating the staged violence that they witnessed. If it were not for the credits at the beginning of the film, one might have assumed that it was directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Hopper fragments his story, starting at the end, making scenes within scenes, even doing the most Godardian thing of splicing in a caption saying “Scene missing”. The critics called the result “hateful”, “a fiasco”, “a disaster”, “pitiful” and “an embarrassment”. It went too far for them. They had to rearrange the film in their heads after seeing it. Hopper had blown it. One journalist claimed that as a result he – Hopper – cried every night.

  Dissidence did not have to be box office poison, however. M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970) was as bitter about war films as The Last Movie was about Westerns, but was a huge box office success. Set during the Korean War, it tells of a group of front-line surgeons who perform grisly operations while behaving like aristocrats. Between bouts of bloody surgery they mix cocktails, play golf, converse wittily and avoid entirely any emotional engagement with the tragedies that surround them (249). It deflated the hauteur of real officers but also expressed the audience’s more general disdain for the world of the military. Its irreverence derives from its screenwriter, Ring Lardner Jnr, who had been blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies. It was the first mainstream American film to ridicule religion and reputedly the first to use the word “fuck”. Its forty-five-year-old director, Robert Altman, was, like Dennis Hopper, born in the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) mid-west of America. Having served in the Second World War, he worked on industrial films, made an exploitation movie and became interested in sound. What is striking about M*A*S*H, his first successful film, is how detached his style was from the influence of most other filmmakers. He may have used Claude Lelouch-style long lenses, but this was only a start. He give actors individual microphones, had them deliv-er lines randomly and talk over each other; he also allowed them to wander around the set or location, while he followed them surreptitiously with those long lenses as a zoologist might follow animals roaming around a cage. Weaving all these layers together in the editing suite, the result was like being far away from events yet eavesdropping on them. This aesthetic of voyeuristic irony was entirely new and established Altman as the most distinctive stylist in America at the time. He developed it further in a Western setting in McCabe and Mrs Miller (USA, 1971) and in the world of country music in Nashville (USA, 1975).

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  Robert Altman’s view of American culture was as bleak as Hopper’s but his comic-caustic M*A*S*H, adapted by Ring Lardner Jr, from Richard Hooker’s novel about military surgeons during the Korean War, was sonically innovative, captured the public’s imagination, and led to a TV series of the same name. USA, 1970.

  Francis Coppola, the third great Europe-influenced experi-menter in American cinema of the early 1970s, was less oppositional than either Hopper or Altman. An Italian-American who was born in Detroit, he studied film at the influential University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and got his leg up into the industry through maverick producer Roger Corman. From the start there was something of Orson Welles about him. He was prodigiously talented, interested in all the arts, not just film, flamboyant in his ambitions and, latterly, not averse to self-destruction. After his time with Corman he made mainstream but unsuccessful films for the Hollywood studios. His Wellesian interest in power and hubris won him an Oscar for his screenplay for Patton (1970), which led to him being hired to direct the film of a bestselling book about an Italian-American mafia family.

  The Godfather (1972), a gangster picture shot like a Rembrandt painting, synthesized old and new techniques, so will be dealt with in the next section (see pages 348–50). Its massive international success won Coppola the freedom to direct a more experimental film, one he had written in the 1960s and which was clearly derived from European New Wave filmmaking. The Conversation (1974) took the long lenses of Lelouch and the implied voyeurism of Altman and stretched them to their logical conclusion. More than any film of the 1970s it enquires philosophically into the nature of such lenses by telling the story of a professional surveillance expert who accidentally captures on audio tape a conversation between apparent lovers (250). The expert, played by Gene Hackman, lives alone and interacts little with human beings so becomes obsessed with a mystery on the tape. In doing so he becomes more inward still and almost has a breakdown.

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  If long lenses and directional microphones marked Western cinema of the 1970s, few films were more aware of this than the prescient. The Conversation. Director: Francis Coppola. USA, 1974.

  Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni has addressed similar themes but new, highly directional microphones and ultra-long lenses made plausible Coppola’s idea of getting so lost in the fragments of o
ther people’s behaviour that your own life dissolves. Only a filmmaker who has spent hundreds of hours in an editing suite would understand the dangers in such absorption, perhaps, so The Conversation did not initially engage large audiences and was at first a flop. But it was released just as the Watergate political surveillance scandals were coming to a head and soon was seen as an essay in the paranoia which ensued.

  In 1970 Coppola had met a passionate, nervy young filmmaker at the Sorrento Film Festival in Italy. Martin Scorsese had studied at the film school in New York University, NYU, and had seen European films there and on television. In a single phrase, he expressed more clearly than anyone the aims of New Hollywood, “We were fighting to open up the form.”4 Nowhere nearly as radical as Hopper or Altman, nor as Wellesian as Coppola, Scorsese, our fourth 1970s dissident, would nonetheless become the most respected of them all.

  It is not difficult to see why. He knew more about film than the other three, was more ardent, and used film to express more directly than any other US filmmaker of the time the rituals, violence and excitement of the world in which he grew up. Born in 1942 and brought up in New York City’s Little Italy, frequent childhood illnesses detached Scorsese from participating fully in the life of the streets but increased his opportunities for observing it. His film school shorts registered these observations and, after a period working with Roger Corman, he made Mean Streets (USA, 1973) a layered anthropological work which transcribed onto the screen the behaviour of the men Scorsese knew. We saw in the last chapter how its Catholicism derived from Pasolini’s Accattone. It starts with its main character Charlie (Harvey Keitel) holding his finger in a flame in a church and confessing his sins, then follows this with a jump cut sequence of Keitel’s head falling onto a pillow. Said Scorsese, “The whole idea was to make a story of a modern saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters.”5 At one point Charlie gets drunk. To represent his disorientation, Scorsese had a camera attached to the end of a board and braced to Keitel’s chest. As he walks his head remains in the same position, but the room floats. He eases himself to the ground but it is the room that seems to tip over. Such impressionism had not been popular since Abel Gance in 1920s France.