by Mark Cousins
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A third genre modernization was Francis Coppola’s brooding and amoral The Godfather. USA, 1972.
Our final straddler of Old and New Hollywood in these days is also its most reclusive figure. Terrence Malick was more academic than any of the other new American directors. Born in 1943 into an oil family, he studied philosophy and worked on screenplays before debuting with the Bonnie and Clyde-like Badlands (1973). His follow-up was Days of Heaven (1978), a story about a migrant worker (Richard Gere), and his sister and soul mate who flee industrialization and end up on the estate of a wealthy Texan landowner (Sam Shepard). Malick saw this landowner as a pharaoh-figure and the ensuing passions as versions of biblical stories. He hired cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who had worked with Truffaut and the great French directors, to shoot it. They did so in Canada, taking the films of D.W. Griffiths as their visual model, using sideways window light for interiors and, like Conrad Hall in Fat City, over-exposing exteriors. This went against the “professionalism” of the day and Almendros had to convince his crew that it was okay to have the sky too bright but faces in shade. Here was the clash between Old and New Hollywood in microcosm. Some crew members resigned in protest.
To achieve a flowing sense of movement Almendros sometimes filmed with the camera attached to his own body in an elaborate cantilevered brace called a Panaglide. This was the first time this was done; Panaglides would soon evolve into the rather similar Steadicams which have given a floating feeling to much of cinema of the 1980s and since. Malick insisted that key scenes were shot at the so-called magic hour – after the sun has dipped below the horizon but before its glowing light has died from the sky. This hour lasts in fact about twenty minutes, so there is always a panic to capture it, but Malick and Almendros managed to and the images have a unique delicacy. To simulate a locust swarm they dropped peanut shells from a helicopter whose rotor blades made them into a whorl. This had been done before – their innovation was to shoot these scenes normally but have the actors walk backwards, then reverse the footage so that the actors were moving forwards and the whorls appeared to swarm upwards. The climax of the film occurs when wheat fields are set on fire. These were shot for two weeks at nightime, using only the light from the sometimes distant flames as illumination. The resulting images have the shallowest focus of almost any filmed for cinema. The delicacy of this cave-like darkness worked brilliantly with the film’s mythic ambitions.
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Whereas the crimes in forties film noirs were usually committed under cover of darkness, many of the offences in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown – including the sale and flooding of Owens Valley farm land – take place in blinding Californian sunlight. USA, 1974.
NEW GERMAN CINEMA
More than any film Days of Heaven reveals the central role that cinematography – especially European cinematography – played in America’s cinematic modernization in the 1970s. With the exception of the new ethnicities which came to the fore, much of this modernization involved taking traditional subject matter but expanding it with new ideas about shooting, acting and editing. To switch from Hollywood in the 1970s to Munich, is to find the opposite. For the first time since the 1920s, German filmmaking was reviving artistically. As in the earlier decade, public subsidy played a key part in the revival. A new liberal political regime had come to power and filmmaking became its public confessional. But where America took old content and applied new form, West German directors took some of the form of the American cinema they had grown up with and applied it to new psychological, national and formal questions of daunting complexity.
This had its roots in the 1960s. Under the influence of the European New Waves, a group of filmmakers at a 1962 short film festival in Oberhausen launched a manifesto which rejected the “the conventional German film” which, under the threat of TV, was in free fall. “We declare our intention to create the new German film”, they wrote, “This new film needs new freedoms.” A generation gap had opened up between German baby boomers and their parents who had either voted for Adolf Hitler or had endured him. An economic boom in West Germany began to numb the guilt felt by the country over the atrocities of the Holocaust. New right-wing tabloid news-papers pasted contentment over everything. There was a TV news black-out about left-wing terrorism. Mainstream cinema continued to churn out “heimat” films, homey regional stories which dodged the big issues in German life and reinforced nationalism. The feel-good factor was everywhere. It disgusted many young creative people on the left. So was born a national cinema of unease. This comprised a network of filmmakers whose astonishing body of work over a twelve-year period would come to be known as the New German Cinema. Alexander Kluge, Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe Von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Edgar Reitz and others together made films “about a world of false images and real emotions, public failures and private fantasies”.9 No national cinema in this chapter was more driven than Germany’s. None answered the question “Why make movies?” with more passion.
This national cinema needled at the false optimism of the times. Its leading members were a disparate band of formal, political, sexual and feminist outsiders who took issue with their country’s ostrich-like behaviour about its own past. Like filmmakers in Japan, they saw their history being written all around them, by the Americans who occupied both countries after their defeats at the end of the Second World War, by the conservative politicians of their parents’ generation, by the fogey filmmakers who went before them. Fassbinder, Wenders, Kluge and Sanders-Brahms had, like Imamura and Oshima in Japan, been lectured too much about the past, but told too little. They wanted to be free to get on the road, to have sex with whomever they desired, to play loud music, as their occupiers did, but also to push all that away and inspect what it was to be modern and German and thoughtful in the 1970s, but not tainted by the Nazis.
It was one of the youngest and the most prolific of the New German Cinema directors who best captured this ambiguous relationship with the US. “The ideal is to make films as beautiful as America’s,” said the self-destructive, gay theatre and film obsessive Fassbinder, “but to move the content to other areas.” Whilst Kluge and Sanders-Brahms did not play this game, Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlondorff did so almost obsessively. In 1970 and 1971, Fassbinder saw six films by the German master of the swollen cinema of the Eisenhower era, Douglas Sirk. A leftist German anti-Nazi in Hollywood, he used melodramatic stories to deal with the questions that absorbed the then twenty-five-year-old Fassbinder about his own country – repression and despair. This discovery changed Fassbinder’s life.11 He travelled to Switzerland where Sirk was then living in retirement and remade his gleaming, impotent, melodrama All that Heaven Allows (USA, 1956) as Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul(West Germany, 1974). Jane Wyman suffered because of the complacency and intolerance of her friends and family when she began an affair with her gardener, Rock Hudson, in All that Heaven Allows. In the remake, Wyman’s character is now an ageing cleaner who falls in love with a Moroccan immigrant. In the first film a television set is the only companion that Wyman’s disapproving friends will accept her having (see pages 231–32); in Fassbinder’s version it is kicked to pieces in an expression of racist rage. It was the thirteenth cinema film he had directed in five years, some derived from US models, others influenced by Godard, radical theatre and German literature. Throughout his career Fassbinder’s pessimism and Marxist political beliefs led him, like Visconti, to portray closed worlds from which people could not escape. Trapped by capitalism and mired in desire, they self-destruct.
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Right: A love affair across the divides of race and age: Fear Eats the Soul. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany, 1973.
Two years older than Fassbinder, the Düsseldorf-born and Munich-educated Wim Wenders also found a starting point for his own films in the beauty of American cinema. In his unforget
table road movie Alice in den Stadten/Alice in the Cities (West Germany, 1974) he has his main character arrange to meet a potential lover at the top of the Empire State Building, just as Leo McCarey did in the US romantic melodramas Love Affair (1939) and An Affair to Remember (1957). Wenders’ main character, played by Rudiger Vogler, is a photo-journalist who travels down the East coast of America with a nine-year-old girl searching for her grandmother (264). Vogler, like his nation, is drifting and numb. His photographs capture nothing of the past. When Wenders stages the possible encounter up the Empire State Building, those who have seen Leo McCarey’s American films immediately remember their emotional directness, their optimism, their sense “what utopia would feel like”.12 A post-war German like Vogler’s photo-journalist cannot feel such optimism, of course, but the bigger question is whether he is capable of feeling at all. It’s as if by quoting the earlier films Wenders is saying “remember what it was like to feel?” What is so beautiful about the film is that Vogler becomes attached to the little girl and the thought of her grandma. These are small feelings for a grown man, but at least a start. That he makes pictures is also relevant. Wenders has often said that the anti-Jewish and nationalistic cinema of the Nazi period destroyed German image-making. No filmmaker in the 1970s could find inspiration in those films. So they looked elsewhere, to America, in one of the richest exchanges in the history of cinema. As Fassbinder found in the anguish of US Eisenhower-era cinema a model which he could rework according to his own passions, so Wenders later drew on another US filmmaker of the same era. Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders didn’t finally meet until 1976 but thereafter they became even closer than Fassbinder and Sirk. Ray acted in Wenders’ Der Amerikanische freund/The American Friend (West Germany, 1977) and they co-directed Lightning Over Water (West Germany–Sweden, 1980).
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Fassbinder’s model: a relationship threatened by class barriers in All that Heaven Allows. Director: Douglas Sirk. USA, 1955.
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Wim Wenders used elements of An Affair to Remember in Alice in the Cities, his drifting study of a photographer and his relationship with a nine-year-old girl who is looking for her grandmother. West German, 1974.
New American Cinema was very much a boy’s game, but the same cannot be said of its German equivalent. Helma Sanders-Brahms, for example, was born in 1940, and worked as a TV presenter and assistant to Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. She made her first film in 1969 but her best is the moving Deutschland, bleiche Mutter/Germany, Pale Mother (West Germany, 1979) (265). Based on her mother’s own experiences, it tells of a woman during the Second World War who sees her husband go off to fight in Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Left alone with her daughter she struggles through the war before dealing with the return of her damaged man. The focus of the story here was the key: not on the public life of the country but its invisible years of domestic hardship. The title of the film was taken from the country’s radical playwright Bertolt Brecht; Sanders-Brahms’ film, along with those of Von Trotta and Helke Sander, did nothing less than place women into the complex and broken history of their country.
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American cinema, the possibility of recovery after the iniquities of the Nazis, and gender and sexuality were three of the main themes of New German Cinema. Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany, Pale Mother was one of the best films of the time to look at the Second World War through the prism of gender. West Germany, 1979.
Where Fassbinder, Wenders and Sanders-Brahms struggled with the history of their country and its relationship to America, Werner Herzog left behind such matters and, in a way, the problem of Germany itself. Born in 1942, he hated school but was drawn to epic landscapes and romantic dreamers. At the age of eighteen, inspired by German Romantic poetry and ideas about the Sublime, he ventured across the Sudan in Africa, holing up when ill in a shelter for weeks, being nibbled by rats. This was the first of many journeys in which he threatened his own life. After studying in America but being expelled for running guns from Mexico, his fourth film, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes/ Aguirre, Wrath of God (West Germany, 1972), was a sixteenth-century tale of a Spanish Conquistador in Peru. Filming was predictably fraught: the cast and crew of 500 people had to trek into the Peruvian jungle to film (429); People rebelled and Herzog’s leading man, Klaus Kinski, agreed to complete the journey only when the director pulled a gun on him. Artistically what was important about this approach is that the physical feat and dangers of the production process became absorbed into the emotions that appeared onscreen.
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Aguirre, Wrath of God was typical of Werner Herzog’s work in that, unlike many of the films of his contemporaries, it was set neither in Germany, nor in the present, nor did it explore the emergent themes of gender politics or national identity. West Germany, 1972.
In Herz Aus Glas/Heart of Glass (West Germany, 1976) Herzog took Robert Bresson’s ideas about paring down acting to an almost absurd degree when he hypnotized his performers to render them zombie-like. Ten years after Aguirre, he made an even more intrepid film with Kinski, Fitzcarraldo (Germany, 1982), about a man who hauls a ship over the Amazonian mountains. To make the film, Herzog and his crew did just that. He was as uninterested in people in ordinary domestic situations as Sanders-Brahms was passionate. So his life and work were a series of movements away from Germany, from balanced bourgeois life, to mountains and deserts to look at people under pressure, on the edge, staring death in the face. After John Ford he is the most important landscape filmmaker to appear in this history of film. Like Pasolini, he was interested in the primitive aspects of human life and the primitive aspects of the art of film. It was the German who said, “My heart is close to the late Middle Ages”,13 but it could equally have been the Italian.
Many of the great German films of the period did little at the German box-office. Their radical forms and disquieting content bored or unnerved audiences. 1978’s US TV series Holocaust fared better and caused a national debate in Germany. Edgar Reitz’s 924-minute Heimat (1983), about a German village between the years 1919 and 1982, also brought the question of recent German debates about the Second World War onto the front page of the newspapers. By this time, the Christian Democrats were in power and their minister of the Interior had called New German Cinema elitist and immoral. Wenders was about to make one of his best films, Paris, Texas (West Germany–France, 1984). Fassbinder was dead at the age of thirty-six, from a drug overdose, having made forty-one films. His ultra-fast cinematographer Michael Ballhaus had just gone to America and would soon be working with Martin Scorsese.
CHANGES IN FILMMAKING IN THE UK, AUSTRALIA AND SOUTH ASIA.
Fashionable London lured international directors to Britain in the 1960s, but well before the turn of the decade this flow had almost dried up. British filmmakers in the 1970s did not have the impact of their German colleagues, but major talents emerged. Whilst some of the influential ones from the 1960s went to work in America, directors like Ken Loach broke new ground at home. Loach had a working-class English Midlands background, like many of the men portrayed in British films in the 1960s, but was educated at one of the country’s top universities, like those who made those films. After studying law and directing innovative television drama at the BBC, he adapted his evolving techniques for the cinema. His second feature Kes, based on a novel by Barry Hines (UK, 1969) (267) was, like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, about a lad from a broken home, but was much more rooted in social realities. Loach filmed with few lights, made the acting process as true-to-life as possible for the boy, and filmed on real locations. The boy learns to train a kestrel but his background prevents him from making a decent life for himself. The result was heartbreaking. Loach developed his techniques, telling his often unprofessional actors less and less about the script and story so they would react naturally as events unfolded. His techniques have changed little over the years, and some have criticized this, but he was one of the 1970s great realist directors and was particularly influential
in France.
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In Germany, state organizations funded innovative directors; in Britain they tended to emerge from the BBC. Ken Loach was the great realist amongst them, and the most political. Kes. UK, 1969.
Ken Russell also evolved his style at the BBC, but that style was more Federico Fellini than Robert Rossellini. Born in the south of England in 1927, Russell served in the Royal Air Force, became a ballet dancer – a rare segue in itself – then made extravagant television films about composers. His third feature, Women in Love (UK, 1969) continued his interest in artistic and bohemian milieux by adapting a novel by D.H. Lawrence. The film’s portrayal of decadence and bisexuality pre-dated Cabaret. It was visually inno-vative in a number of ways, for example in the scene where Russell turned his camera on its side to film actors Alan Bates and Jennie Linden walking naked through a field (268). Two years later the director trumped Fellini in sexual display at least in his orgiastic The Devils (UK, 1971). Based on a novel by Aldous Huxley about the demonic possession of nuns in a convent in the 1600s in France, it was as irreligious as Satyajit Ray’s Devi (India, 1960), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957) and Buñuel’s Viridiana (Spain, 1961), which it resembles most closely. The masturbatory and burning scenes in The Devils scandalized polite opinion as much as Buñuel’s sacrilegious ending in Viridiana had, so much so that the film was cut and even banned in some quarters.