The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  A secondary character in Mean Streets, a nervy side-kick called Johnny Boy, was played by a young actor called Robert De Niro. De Niro and Scorsese had known each other as kids and met up in adult life in the house of a critic friend. In 1976, they would each become the most respected in their professions because of their collaboration on a screenplay about a Vietnam veteran driving around New York in a taxi – a metaphorical iron coffin. The screenplay was written by the author of a book on Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, who was banned from seeing films in his youth, who drank heavily like his main character, Travis Bickle, who lived in his car, whose self-obsession was festering, like Bickle’s. The screenplay leapt out of him, the writer, “like an animal”,6 as he put it, and was completed in a matter of days. The film was Taxi Driver, the writer was Paul Schrader.

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  “The story of a modern saint in his own society”, Mean Streets was directed by the most important new American filmmaker of the era, Martin Scorsese. 1973.

  In the introduction to this book we saw how Scorsese borrowed from Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Godard the image of a character looking at bubbles in a drink (see page 10). This expression of Travis Bickle’s loneliness and distortions is only one example of the rich schematic heritage of the film. Early on, Bickle walks along a New York street. Scorsese dissolves to a later part of the same walk. This is less disruptive than a jump cut, but is like a time lapse, a momentary loss of consciousness in his character. Later, as Bickle begins to unravel, an improvized scene with realistic sound has him talk to himself in a mirror. The technique is a standard one to indicate self-absorption and perhaps mental illness, but De Niro performs it with the intensity of Marlon Brando. At another point, when De Niro is making a phone call to a woman he has become infatuated with, but who does not reciprocate, Scorsese tracks his camera away from him to look down an empty corridor because, as he later explained, it was too painful to watch the scene. The horizontal move is again Godardian. Its emotional wisdom is closer to Mizoguchi’s clear withdrawal from his characters’ agony.

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  Scorsese’s ambition was to “open up the form” of American cinema. Few films did this more complexly than his underrated New York, New York. USA, 1977.

  Taxi Driver was a huge success with critics and public alike. The new directors’ storming of the Hollywood citadel seemed too easy. They were pushing at an open door. Never before had American filmmakers been taken so seriously as artists and, inevitably, fragile personalities like Scorsese’s were somewhat damaged as a result. He started taking cocaine and his health deteriorated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, self-destructiveness became the keynote of his characters. Two more would follow, each played by Robert DeNiro. The first was an artist like Scorsese, having difficulties sustaining a stable relationship with a woman, like Scorsese. Led on by his love of Hollywood, however, the director attempted a near impossible task: to implant such a man into an MGM-style musical. He would “open up the form” to accommodate him. Would this work? There had been curmudgeons and violent men in musicals before, such as James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, USA, 1955), but to take the most optimistic form of closed romantic realism and prise it open, to subject it to the repetitive and erosive style of De Niro’s acting seemed daring indeed. To intensify the contrast, Scorsese cast Liza Minnelli, the daughter of MGM’s star songstress Judy Garland and its most polished director Vincente Minnelli, opposite De Niro. The result was New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977), one of the most schizophrenic films ever made (252). It was an expensive flop and many critics hated it. His next feature, Raging Bull (USA, 1980) was about a self-destructive Catholic boxer on a downward slope who reaches rock bottom before finding redemption. At the end of it he added a quotation, “I was blind, but now I see.” Never before had there been such an explicit Italian Catholic theme in an American film. Ethnicity, it seemed, the specifics of ghetto life, was one of the things that closed romantic realism had disguised. Now they became one of the ways in which 1970s American cinema modernized.

  These white university-educated filmmakers got to know each other and went to the same parties, sharing actors and even girlfriends, their professional rivalries in some way spurring each of their careers. The second, perhaps more important ethnicity which finally entered mainstream American cinema at this time was not socially related to them at all. It began when a fifty-seven-year-old former baseball player and photographer made The Learning Tree (1969). Gordon Parks, the youngest of fifteen children, was born in Kansas and wrote novels in France. One of them was about growing up on farms in 1920s Kansas. Nothing strange in that, except that both the lead character and the director of The Learning Tree, the film based on it, were black and the 1920s idyll was plagued by racism. After years of protest, of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, mainstream American cinema – in this case Warner Bros. – had finally opened up to black experience. Gordon Parks was the first black director to direct a studio film, eighty-four years after the birth of the movies.

  There had been black directors before – Oscar Micheaux in the 1920s was one of the dissidents in Chapter Four. Black character actors appeared in Gone with the Wind and Casablanca (1942) and in films of the 1950s. Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and then Sidney Poitier were distinguished exceptions to the whiteness of closed romantic realism. By the end of that decade liberal white directors addressed black themes in issue and problem pictures but only in 1969, four years after Ousmane Sembene’s The Black Girl (Senegal, 1965) became the first film directed by a black person in Africa itself, did America follow suit. The gentleness of The Learning Tree did not detract from its historical importance, a fact acknowledged in its registration in the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress.

  Parks went on to great commercial success with Shaft (1971) but Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song of the same year broke more ground. Melvin Van Peebles was born in Chicago in 1932 and, in a strange echo of Gordon Parks’ route into the film industry, wrote novels in France – in English and French – before filming one of them as his second feature. Like Parks, Van Peebles was encouraged by the dynamic, low-budget autobiographical white films made in his adopted country and imported some of their techniques to the US. In order to film without union involvement, which was difficult in those days, he pretended that his third film Sweet Sweetback was a porn movie. Its central character, the ultra-cool Sweetback, sees white cops beating a black boy, attacks them, gets chased, meets women and escapes the law (254). The film’s amorality and violence were echoes of Bonnie and Clyde and Roger Corman films, but what was new was how black the behaviour was. It glamorized ghetto life and simplified its gender politics in a way that would later be denounced by black intellectuals, but in exposing white corruption and racism and celebrating black male sexuality, it set new schemas for American filmmakers, which would be built upon and then rejected in decades to come by Spike Lee, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and the studios’ first black woman director Euzhan Palcy. Sweetback cost $500,000 and grossed $10m.

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  The first film made by a black person for a US studio: Gordon Parks’ The Learning Tree. USA, 1969.

  Jewishness had not been so overlooked by American cinema. The first moguls were Jewish, there had been Yiddish comedies and dramas in the 1930s and 1940s, and directors such as Edgar G. Ulmer, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder used Jewish situations and character types, often around the edges of their stories. Then, in the late 1960s, came Woody Allen, a New York-born, well-educated fan of Jazz, baseball and Ingmar Bergman films, who did stand-up and had started in television. Where Scorsese “opened up” the forms of traditional American filmmaking like the musical and the boxing picture and Altman attacked America’s values in his scathing reworking of war movies and other genres, Allen inserted an explicitly Jewish comic character into the centre of genres and laughed at the result. The joke was that New York Jewishness is alien to just about anywhere except New York. This was inspired and ma
de Allen one of the most famous directors in the world.

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  Parks led the way for other black filmmakers such as Melvin van Peebles, whose grungy, low-budget Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was a real breakthrough. USA, 1971.

  Like Chaplin, he played the lead character himself. Take the Money and Run (1969) spoofed crime pictures. Sleeper (1973) was a parody of sci-fi movies in which Allen’s neurotic Manhattan musician is catapulted into the year 2174. Annie Hall (1977) was set in part in New York but Allen was an alien in it nonetheless because he fell in love with that most foreign of things, a mid-Western girl. In the first scene he shot he and Annie (Diane Keaton) are trying to cook lobsters (255). Allen, a typical New Yorker in that he seldom cooks and never boils lobsters, is terrified. The scene is a single take and the kitchen light is hit by mistake, but Keaton is laughing uncontrollably and the result is one of the funniest moments in American cinema. It began a period of less sketchy, more structured filmmaking for Allen. Manhattan (1979) would take nearly six months to shoot. Composition became central to his work. He became a filmmaker first and a comedian second. For a while he approached the rigour of Chaplin and the exactitudes of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. Then, in the late 1980s, he started to abandon this architectural approach. Despite his love of Bergman and Fellini, he started to film his screenplays almost in the way Maysles and his colleagues shot the Kennedy documentary Primary back in 1960, in long takes, with a camera following the action, using almost no rehearsal or reverse angles. As a result, his edits took just a few weeks.

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  Filmed in one shot, this hilarious scene from Annie Hall is Woody Allen at his best. USA, 1977.

  Hopper, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Parks, Van Peebles and Allen each in their way, and influenced to various degrees by European filmmaking, opened up the form and ethnic range of American cinema. They did not envisage an entirely clean break with the past, however, and at the same time that they were making their ground-breaking films, janus-faced movies were produced which were aesthetically ambitious but rooted in Hollywood traditions. The first of these, The Last Picture Show (1971) was like a funeral service for old Hollywood, a tale about graduating high school seniors set in a small southern town whose cinema was closing (256). It was not a New Wave film like those of Hopper or Scorsese; its most decent character was Sam the Lion, played by Ben Johnson, a regular actor for John Ford. The New Yorker magazine’s comment that “our recent films have been about self hatred … there has been no room for decency or nobility” captures its flavour. It is no surprise, then, to hear that it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who had made Targets for Corman, which was also about the decline of movies (see pages 320–21), and who had befriended John Ford and Orson Welles. To add to the elegiac tone, the film was shot in black and white.

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  Left: Not all American directors of the seventies were trying to break with the past: three years after Peter Bogdanovich made The Last Picture Show, an elegy for old Hollywood, often staged in deep space with Wellesian compositions. USA, 1971.

  The Last Picture Show was seen by veteran director John Huston, who cast its leading actor, Jeff Bridges, in a boxing film to be released the next year. Fat City (1972) is set in one of the poorest towns in the US, where the proportion of black people is so high that white fighters are novelty acts. Bridges plays such a fighter (258), dreaming of success but never achieving it. The film was politically far more radical than those of Coppola or Scorsese, and, just to show that New Hollywood directors weren’t the only ones to be stylistic innovative, Huston had it shot in a new way.7 He hired cinematographer Conrad Hall who filmed dark interiors and bright exteriors without changing the aperture of the lens. As a result the barrooms were gloomy and the streets blindingly white, just as in real life. He was influenced in this by French cinematography. Fat City broke down taboos of good lighting in the US.

  Also in 1972, a musical assimilated traditional panache with new sobriety beyond anything achieved by Scorsese’s later New York, New York. Its director Bob Fosse was born of musical theatre parents, steeped in Broadway and an athletic choreographer and dancer in the 1950s. Also like Huston and Orson Welles, he kicked his heels whilst film caught up with his ideas, so it was no great surprise that Cabaret, his bold film of a musical about Christopher Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles in decadent Berlin at the time of the rise of Nazism, seemed so modern (259). As performed by Liza Minnelli and choreographed by Fosse, the songs were exhilaratingly amoral celebrations of money, living for the moment and non-conformist sexuality, post-1960s in a way that Scorsese’s ideas about sex seldom were. The real coups in the piece – its intercutting of Sally’s underworld life amongst bisexuals with Nazi atrocities, the gear changes between fun and sobering numbers like the Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” – were in the original stage musical, but Fosse brought them to the screen with panache.

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  Striking compositions such as this one in Manhattan characterized Allen’s new interest in how his films looked and were constructed. USA, 1979.

  The decade’s most successful upgrading of another 1930s American genre also appeared in 1972. Francis Coppola at first looked down on The Godfather because it was an adaptation of a violent, popular novel. As his interest grew, he clashed with his producer over casting and hired cinematographer Gordon Willis, explaining that he wanted a simple style like an old movie, no 1970s long lenses, no helicopter shots. “It was tableau filmmaking”, said Willis, “where the actors move in and out of frame, very straightforward.”8 The film extended the range of the gangster film in several ways. Its story comprised five sections or acts rather than the usual three. It was based around a family – the Corleones – rather than a few individuals. Its profile was the rise and rise of the Corleones and the transfer of power from the Don (Marlon Brando) to his son Michael (Al Pacino) rather than the morally more acceptable rise-and-fall form of most gangster pictures. This failure to denounce, this accumulation of power, left the film open to charges of amorality – even fascism – in later years. Visually, Willis underexposed the imagery, rendering it darker than was the norm (260). He lit Brando from overhead to create shadows in his eye sockets like those in Franco Citti’s in Pasolini’s Accattone (see page 282). This was considered unsophisticated but prevented audiences from seeing the eyes of the Don. The low lighting levels also meant that focus was shallow, constraining actors to certain minimal movements, internalizing their performance. Though Coppola thought it would flop, the film was a vast success, the most influential gangster picture of the 1970s, if not of the entire post-war era.

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  Young directors were not the only ones pushing the boundaries of US cinema of the seventies. Veteran filmmaker John Huston saw Jeff Bridges in The Last Picture Show and cast him in his innovative boxing film Fat City. USA, 1972.

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  Another veteran, Bob Fosse, married vividly realized musical sequences with modern depictions of sexuality in Cabaret. USA, 1972.

  Over dinner one day during its shooting, The Godfather’s powerful producer Robert Evans commissioned another film about the lust for power. This time it would focus on the way that Los Angeles developers stole water from farmers in the valley to the north of the city. The film, Chinatown, one of the most important works of its era and a scathing attack on the American Dream, would be directed by Roman Polanski.

  It was nearly three years since Polanski’s wife had been murdered. He returned to the US and stripped the screenplay of Chinatown, which had been written by Robert Towne, down to a manageable length, adding a tragic ending. The result enriched the film noir tradition of Old Hollywood as much as The Godfather enriched the gangster tradition. The story weaves the land grab theme into a complex family drama about a detective who discovers that the woman he is investigating was raped by her own father who in turn metaphorically raped the farmers by engineering the theft of their water. Polanski was never attracted by the stylistic freedoms of th
e New Wave filmmakers and here, as in Rosemary’s Baby, he filmed with wide-angle lenses, bright lights and precise framing, the opposite of both Willis’ approach on The Godfather and the whole of the film noir cycle (261). Morally, however, this was noir: the world was corrupt, law was suspended, people were evil. So much so that in the end the father shoots his own daughter through the eye. “Most people never face the fact that at the right time, in the right place, they’re capable of anything,” says the father, played by John Huston. Polanksi had taken a key genre in closed romantic realism to its logical conclusion. Chinatown’s cynicism and despair was profoundly un-American. After the success of the film, he fled the US having been charged with unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. The case was unresolved so he continued his filmmaking career in France with the The Tenant/Le Locotaire (1976), in which he plays a paranoid, claustrophobic and transvestite tenement dweller. Its excesses were booed on release but it can now be seen as another masterpiece in one of the most singular of film careers.