The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  305

  In Spain, new director Pedro Almodóvar also used bright colours and garish production designs in his films, but his heightened characterization and absurdist plotting made his work more subversive – though less popular – than that of his French contemporaries. Labyrinth of Passion. Spain, 1980.

  306

  Law of Desire continued Almodóvar’s interest in narrative and gender reversal. Spain, 1987,

  Where the new leftist-liberal political climate in Spain created a creative boom in cinema, a shift to the neo-liberal political right had a similar effect in the UK. Like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, who was elected Prime Minister in 1979, felt that business should be vigorous and even iconoclastic but that art and culture should reassure and bolster a traditional sense of national pride. Many agreed with her, as the success at home and abroad of the nuanced literary adaptations The Bostonians (UK, 1984, novel Henry James), A Room with a View (UK, 1985, novel E.M. Forster), and Howards End (UK, 1992, novel E.M. Forster) showed. Each was directed by an American James Ivory, written by a German-Polish-Jewish novelist married to an Indian, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and produced by the Indian Ismail Merchant. Merchant–Ivory films found in Britain’s past, whether in its colonies or in its stately homes, an ambition to be a tolerant and civilized nation which it did not always live up to. Their films were dignified and intelligent in the manner of Claude Autant-Lara or David Lean and were a showcase for actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but they always exalted at some level the high-bourgeois worlds they explored, unlike for example, the films of Luchino Visconti, and they sat rather too easily with Thatcherite anti-modernism.

  307

  The title character (John Gordon Sinclair) makes tentative advances to Dorothy (Dee Hepburn) in Bill Forsyth’s delightful Scottish comedy Gregory’s Girl. UK, 1981.

  To their credit, other British directors fought against the tide. The Scot Bill Forsyth captured the embarrassments of adolescent love in the hilarious Gregory’s Girl (UK, 1981) in which the title character covers his nipples in a school changing room when girls arrive (307). Working-class life was not exactly to the fore in 1980s Britain yet Glasgow-born Forsyth found in Gregory and his coterie of friends a gentle surrealism and goofy optimism which was in the mode of Milos Foreman and which was successful internationally.

  308

  Burt Lancaster plays an oil billionaire who ruthlessly plans to buy up an entire Scottish village but is distracted by the beauty of the Northern Lights and of local beaches in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. The film revived the surreal comic spirit of the Ealing comedies and established Forsyth as the most successful Scottish filmmaker of his generation. UK, 1983.

  His follow up, Local Hero (UK, 1983) developed the mystical elements of Gregory’s Girl into the story of a Texan oil executive who goes to Scotland to buy a complete town in order to drill for oil. The town is quite willing to be bought but the executive’s tycoon boss’s interest in astronomy scuppers the plans (308). Not since the films of Powell and Pressburger (see page xxx) and Whisky Galore (UK, 1948) had the eccentricities and mysticism of Scotland been so beautifully married.

  If Forsyth captured aspects of life ignored by the ideologies of the time, Stephen Frears, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Alex Cox and Bruce Robinson attacked those ideologies head on. Frears assisted leftist directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz in the late 1960s and 1970s and, marrying their vision to his own egalitarianism and BBC-trained pragmatism, he adapted a brilliant script by British-Asian novelist Hanif Kureshi into the defining British film of the 1980s. At a time when there was an attempt to bolster traditional white middle-class identities and there was talk of a return to Victorian values, Kureishi wrote a screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, about an out-of-work young Asian man who runs a launderette in London with a white fascist punk (309). To tackle racism head-on was daring enough, but in having his lead characters become lovers, Kureishi spiced his story with a second provocation – homosexuality. The ironies were numerous. Because they ran their laundrette business well, these characters were model Thatcherite entrepreneurs. Yet their identities were as far away from those approved as is possible to imagine. The whole thing could have been an implausible anti-Thatcherism by numbers disaster, but Frears by this stage had become a master of sincerity and emotional flow, directing like a documentarist at one moment, then like Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain (USA, 1952) the next.

  309

  Daniel Day-Lewis’s Nazi-inclined Johnny and Gordon Warnecke’s entrepreneurial Omar in Stephen Frears’ elegant film of Hanif Kureishi’s anti-Thatcherite screenplay My Beautiful Launderette. UK, 1985.

  The literary critic George Steiner has argued that at times of oppression, art often flourishes. Britain was still more free in the 1980s than most countries but their detestation of the political scene gave filmmakers their best stimulus in years. Derek Jarman shifted from the classical world of Sebastiane (UK, 1976) to The Last of England (UK, 1987), which suggested nothing less than that his native land was under-going an apocalypse. Having temporarily abandoned 35mm filming for his new combination of super-8, video, slow-motion, layered imagery and complex modernist soundtracks, he filmed an anguished heterosexual wedding, homeless and starving people and a soldier and a naked man having sex on Britain’s national flag (287, see page 388).

  310

  Terence Davies transformed his painful childhood experiences into a series of gracefully choreographed tableaux in Distant Voices, Still Lives. UK, 1988.

  The Welsh-born former information film editor and painter Peter Greenaway was as experimental. Few directors in the history of the medium have more completely invented their own schema than him. Though he conforms to avant-garde cinema’s practice of rejecting traditional storytelling in nearly all of his films, he passes all boundaries when he builds numerical, alphabetical or categorizing systems into them. His first feature The Falls (UK, 1980) lists names that begin with the word “fall”. His third, A Zed & Two Noughts (UK–Netherlands, 1985) intertwines an alphabetical listing of animals by the daughter, Beta, of a woman, Alba, who has her second leg amputated after she loses her first, for the purposes of symmetry. Drowning by Numbers (UK, 1988) features a count up to, then down, from 100. The Baby of Macon (UK–Netherlands–France–Germany, 1993) features 113 rapes of a female character. The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1. The Moab Story (UK, 2003) lists the contents of the 92 suitcases of its Welsh title character, a repeatedly imprisoned young fop who is humiliated throughout the film. Intellect, in this way, dominates the story elements of his work, tyrannizing them with its superior order. Said Greenaway, “My cinema is better understood in terms of criticism generally applied to the pictorial traditions and the history of art.” This is borne out by the way painting influences his films – especially that of R.B. Kitaj who uses words extensively of the painted surface just as Greenaway does. But systems theories need also be applied to them. Greenway’s work, although uneven, is unique and can be understood as an attempt to illustrate his point that we haven’t “seen any cinema yet. I think we’ve seen a hundred years of illustrated text.” The cinematographer Sacha Vierny who shot Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (France), said to him, “you are not a director, you are a Greenaway.”

  311

  Davies used the rosy familial optimism of Hollywood and the dreamlike mood of tracking shots such as this one as a counterpoint to the bleakness of the events he depicted. Young at Heart. Director: Gordon Douglas. USA, 1954.

  The last significant 1980s British director, Terence Davies, preconceived his films as meticulously as Greenaway, but with the opposite effect. After a trilogy of bleak shorts,8 he wrote and directed Distant Voices, Still Lives (UK, 1988) to enormous acclaim. Set in his home town of Liverpool in the 1950s, its subject is a working-class family intermittently terrorized by its brutal father. The film itself is a flashback but, as a work of au
tobiography, it is also a depiction of what Davies feels like when remembering his difficult childhood. Thus it stands out at a double distance from the past. Nearly every painful scene is perfected, as it were, by exquisite framing and lighting (by William Diver and Patrick Duval) (310), and crane shots are choreographed with as much grace and even joy as any Hollywood or Bollywood musical number. Davies has often cited the crane shot near the end of Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas, USA, 1954) where the camera glides through the window of a family home after the husband of one of its daughters appears to have killed himself (311), as a perfect cinematic moment, a depiction of heaven or the kind of utopia written about by Richard Dyer (see page 355). Such scenes became the central formal-emotional device of his own work. Like the early work of Martin Scorsese, Distant Voices, Still Lives surveys remembered experience through an aesthetic that brings about a kind of recovery for the filmmaker and audience. The ugliness of the human situation is transformed by the beauty of its presentation. As in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, Davies’ female characters represent moments of emotional release. Since the late 1950s, British cinema had been interested in the nuances of social class. None captured the working, urban, cinema-going class better than Davies’ masterpiece.

  NEW TALENTS IN AUSTRALIA AND CANADA.

  Right at the end of Australia’s first decade of indigenous filmmaking, the 1970s, a New South Wales-born former doctor, George Miller, poured his emergency ward experiences 136 into an apocalyptic low-budget sci-fi film, edited it in his bedroom, and rang the box office bell so much with it that in Australia more people saw it than Star Wars. Mad Max (Australia, 1979) and its sequel Mad Max 2 The Road Warrior (Australia, 1981) told of a good cop, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), in a future world where the rule of law has deteriorated and road rats and somewhat effem-inate druggies terrorize people then walk free from the courts on technicalities. This staple B-movie scenario proceeds, predictably enough, with the cop’s wife and child being viciously murdered by a psychotic gang and Gibson, as a result, turning into a mad avenger. Miller’s vision of society had the simplicity of Reaganite Republicanism, while his vision of masculinity was pure Rambo: First Blood, Part II, but both films, while square in line with the new Western video-influenced cinema, were dazzlingly made. When Gibson’s child is murdered, we see only his (or her – i’ts very impersonal) shoes flying through the air. In the sequel Miller mounted some of the most thrilling chase sequences ever filmed. Gibson is by now a drifting loner, petrol is scarce, he and a group of good people protect a refinery, but various desert rats in complexly designed high-speed vehicles (312) and in desperate need of fuel, attack. The schema of cinematic chase, first established in the 1900s, was enlivened by such sequences but, despite Miller’s attempts to dignify his film with references to the Iliad, his ideas remained those of 1980s conservatism: simplistic moralism, fear of outsiders, endorsement of the nuclear family, and a sense that the judicial system has failed society. The first film by an Aboriginal director, Brian Syron, Jindalee Lady (Australia, 1992) would not appear for another decade.

  312

  The use of wide-angle lenses and baroque vehicle design made Mad Max 2 The Road Warrior a vivid, if dystopic, experience. Director: George Miller. Australia, 1981.

  It is perhaps unsurprising that Canadian cinema took a more dissident attitude to 1980s conservatism. In fact, for the first time in film history, that country produced cinematic voices that gained international recognition. The most distinctive, David Cronenberg, a mild-mannered Torontonian intellectual who studied literature, released a series of metaphorical films about the nature of the grotesque. Like Britain’s Peter Greenaway, he was fascinated by what happens to the human body when it decays or is invaded, and became the centre of a group of directors exploring Western society’s anxieties about this. Commentators at the time called this tendency “body horror” and connected it to the fears about illness and physical contact resulting from increased awareness of AIDS. “See the movies from the point of view of the disease”, was his radical inversion of the anthropomorphic norm. “You can see why they would resist all attempts to destroy them. These are all cerebral games, but they have emotional correlatives as well.”10 His tenth movie, The Fly (USA, 1986) demonstrates this approach most clearly. A remake of a 1958 sci-fi movie of the same title, it reverses the values of the original, find-ing liberating positives in its story of a scientist (Jeff Goldblum) whose biochemistry becomes combined with that of a fly when it accidentally flies into a telepod, which Goldblum has invented to transport his body through space. The new adjunct creature is more sexually able and more powerful than mere man. Cronenberg’s best films have been chamber works set in small microcosms with few actors and, despite being an American studio film, this one is too (313). It is basically two characters in a room, which looks like a cellar, with dust constantly in the air. Only the music is epic. The claustrophobia is reminiscent of the films of Roman Polanski, but Cronenberg’s portrait of a man losing his humanity and gaining fly-like qualities is an unexpected work of optimism.

  313

  Jeff Goldblum’s grotesque metamorphosis in David Cronenberg’s moving satire on ageing, The Fly. USA, 1986.

  Released in the mid-1980s, it was widely taken to be a film about AIDS. In fact, what attracted the director was the way that Goldblum, in love with a woman who is repelled by his looks, ages before her eyes. “We’ve all got the disease,” he says, “the disease of being finite”. This explains why the film is so moving. In the original script, the fly-man loses the power of speech. Cronenberg changes this so Goldblum can explain how he feels as his flesh falls away.

  314

  Cronenberg had for some time been interested in the idea of the mutability of human beings and how they might morph into something else. In Videodrome, for example, James Woods’ body starts to combine with TVs and video players – a very eighties anxiety. Canada, 1983.

  Videodrome (Canada, 1983), was one of the first films of the 1980s to explore the imaginative implications, rather than simply borrow the aesthetics, of the new video culture. It is about the possible mind- and body-altering effects of a mysterious TV signal called Videodrome. Cronenberg says the idea came from his own late-night TV watching as a kid. He wrote the script in his usual “uncensored” way, as he puts it, letting all his fantasies play onto the page. “The first draft would have been a triple X”, he says, but even what remains is disturbing, sometimes absurd; Cronenberg admitted at the time to being attracted to images of sexual violence. One Canadian politician organized pickets against it, and a political debate followed. If Cronenberg is showing how dangerous video signals can be, people said, isn’t he playing into the hands of the political right who want more censorship, something he’s always been against?

  What troubled the film’s objectors is that Cronenberg used public money to show how sex and fantasy can creep into everyday life. One night James Woods’ character sees Deborah Harry’s character burning herself with a cigarette, the next day he can hardly concentrate on lunch because the woman he is with lights a cigarette and he is entranced by its erotic force. Cronenberg perfected this in his film, the trance-like Crash (Canada, 1996), an adaptation of a novel by J.G. Ballard. Where the objects of the erotic imaginatings in Videodrome are television sets, in Crash they are cars and scars.

  The other significant Canadian director of the 1980s was a social ironist in the tradition of Jean Renoir. Born two years before Cronenberg in 1941 in French-speaking Quebec, Denys Arcand made documentary and fiction films throughout the 1970s, but his first distinctive international success was the provocatively entitled Le Déclin de l’empire Américain/The Decline of the American Empire (Canada, 1986). Intercutting scenes of a group of male history professors talking about their sex lives with their wives talking about theirs, this was a sparkling, screenplay-driven exposé of the hypocrisies of personal politics. Seventeen years later most of the actors reappeared in Les Invasions Barbares/The Barbarian Invasions (Can
ada, 2003), all gathered because one of the men is dying. Few comedies of ideas attempted such a clear-eyed account of middle-class romance. Besides, Arcand’s respect for intellectuals and radicals was as unusual in the mid-1980s as it was in the new century.