by Mark Cousins
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Scorsese’s inspiration for the unusual Pesci shot was an example of schema without any variaton: George Barnes’ emblematic scene in The Great Train Robbery. Director: Edwin S. Porter. USA, 1903.
One last point about the emblematic shot. It is hard to imagine now, but at the time such images as Barnes shooting into the barrel of the lens were designed to be shown either at the beginning or the end of the movie. They floated free of the story. They were not part of it. In GoodFellas, Pesci meets his demise by being shot in the back. No piece of the story fits with the last image of him shooting. It is not a flash-back. It floats free.
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Luhrmann and Scorsese both used film in a post-modern way, but Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction played so complete-ly with the norms of, for example, assassin scenes in gangster movies, that the performers were able, knowingly, to slip out of character to talk about foot massages. Tarantino regularly photographs, or refers to, feet in his films, a case, perhaps, of work expressing the fetishism of its director. USA, 1994.
Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), another gangster film of the 1990s, took Scorsese’s experiments with postmodernism so much further that it became one of the most influential films of the decade. Its innovations are among the most striking examples in modern cinema of Gombrich’s idea of varying schemas. Take this situation from the third section of the film, for example, where two hired killers are going to do a hit (336). Such scenes are familiar from hundreds of crime B movies and film noirs from the USA in the late 1940s and 1950s. The killers typically talk tersely, if at all. They are functions of the plot. Here, however – and this reveals how 1990s post-modern cinema transformed the movies which inspired it – they converse as follows:
VINCENT: Have you ever given a foot massage?
JULES: Don’t be telling me about foot massages. I’m the foot massage master.
VINCENT: Given a lot of them?
JULES: Shit yeah. I got my technique down an’ everything.
I don’t be ticklin’ an nothing.
VINCENT: Would you give a guy a foot massage?
JULES: Fuck you.
VINCENT: You give ’em a lot.
JULES: Fuck you.
VINCENT: I’m kinda tired. I could use a foot massage myself…
JULES: You, yo, yo man. You best back off. I’m getting a little pissed here. Now, this is the door…
And with that they revert to generic killers again; Jules is saying, “let’s get in character” as they do. Pulp Fiction was full of such digressions and atypical discussions of minutiae. Borrowing a phrase from Scorsese about the 1970s, it “opened up” the world of US genre cinema to feminized disquisition. One critic commented that in films such as Pulp Fiction the “verbal set-piece takes precedent over the action set-piece”.3 This effect became known as “Tarantinoesque”, after the writer–director of Pulp Fiction Quentin Tarantino, who was just thirty-one-years-old at the time. His second feature, Reservoir Dogs (USA, 1992), a reworking of Ringo Lam’s Long hu feng yun/City on Fire (Hong Kong, 1987), was such a success at the Sundance film festival of independent cinema, that his co-written screenplays for True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994) quickly got made. He had breathed new life into the cardboard characterization of American genre cinema and for years afterwards, ardent young male directors copied his approach.
While Tarantino influenced the structure and dialogue of American screenwriting in the 1990s, he was less innovative when it came to camera placement and visual style. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, taken from Tarantino’s screenplay, illustrates this point. Where Tarantino wrote innovatively and shot classically, former US infantryman and screenwriter Stone, who was born in New York City in 1946, went a great deal further, experimenting with visual texture in several of his 1990s films. Collaborating with cinematographer Robert Richardson on most of his work from the mid-1980s onwards, he shot on amateur 8mm film, the black-and-white 16mm stock that used to be employed for TV news, and various video formats, and combined these with pristine 35mm widescreen imagery (337). More traditional filmmakers, such as Steven Spielberg, had long accepted the maxim that the grain of film imagery should not be visible to audiences because it would remove the illusion that they are actually experiencing the events onscreen, reminding them that they are only watching moving imagery. Richardson and Stone smashed this conceit, portraying the violent rampage of a young couple as a mosaic of media and film footage. As a result, mainstream American cinema was cautiously separated from a single, unified photographic style throughout the course of a film.
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While many questioned the morality of Natural Born Killers’ content, its variety of film stocks and visual textures was highly influential. Cinematographer: Robert Richardson. Director: Oliver Stone. USA, 1994.
A fourth strain of 1990s postmodernism was to be found in the kooky, technically brilliant films of Minnesota-born brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. Starting in 1984 with Blood Simple, Joel directed, Ethan produced and both of them wrote. The success of Raising Arizona (it cost $5 million and took $25 millino) in 1987 afforded them, by the beginning of the 1990s, a rare position as semi-mainstream filmmakers working for Hollywood studios who retained right of final cut for their films and who created, in each, a highly distinctive world. Miller’s Crossing (1990) was typical: it was set in the past, reworked a movie genre (here, a gangster picture in the spirit of Dashiell Hammett), revealed a fascination for iconic imagery (in this case a trilby hat of the type worn by Humphrey Bogart), and was laced with black humour and explosive violence.
As a respite from writers’ block as they worked on its screenplay (whose plot they claim not quite to have understood) they wrote and later directed Barnton Fink (1991), a striking mood piece about a worthy screenwriter who wants “to do something for one’s fellow-man” but who is, himself, suffering from writer’s block. Photographed by the Coen’s regular DP Roger Deakins in shades of putrifying green and yellow, it featured hilarious scenes such as that where Fink’s producer responds to his intellectual script for a boxing movie with “We don’t put Wallace Beery in some fruity movie about suffering”.
In the second half of the 1990s the Coens honed their comic-discrepant world view further by focussing on what used to be called in Frank Capra films he “little man” caught up in events and social changes in modern society which he barely understands. In The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) a novice mailroom worker, Norville Barnes, is installed as the Chief Executive of Hudsucker Industries. Together with the lead characters in The Big Lebowski (1998) and O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000), Barnes can now be seen as a Coen archetype: a gormless, rather asexual man who has strayed into the closed, romantic realist world of Hawks, Capra or Preston Sturges, who doesn’t understand its strangeness and who is all at sea. The lackadaisical Dude in The Big Lebowski in particular captured the slacker mood of his times, but the Coens’ affection for these men – together with their instinctive surrealism – made their films amongst the most singular of their times.
Beyond traditional films like L.A. Confidential and The Silence of the Lambs, and the innovators of the post-modern mainstream such as Scorsese, Tarantino and Stone, and the Coens, American cinema of the 1990s developed a lively independent production sector. Stimulated in part by actor Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival and Institute (found in 1981) and the Miramax distribution and production company (launched in 1979), which together helped create an American cinematic middle-brow in reaction to 1980s, low-brow teen cinema, key directors such as Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderbergh, Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch emerged. Harley’s breakthrough film The Unbelievable Truth (1989), funded by a series of bank loans, set the pattern for his work in emphasizing rich dialogue over innovative shooting techniques. Jarmusch came to attention as early as 1983 with his beautiful pre-slacker study in boredom and friendship, Stranger Than Paradise. His infrequent 1990s work continued to find intrigue in inactivity. Soderbergh’s sex lies and
videotape (1989), a landmark reworking of La Ronde for the video age, launched its director in an astonishingly diverse career, ranging from experimentation in Kafka (1991) to mainstream success in Erin Brokovich (2000) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a remake of a 1960 heist movie of the same name.
Just as diverse and equally interested in remakes was Gus Van Sant, the Kentucky-born son of a travelling salesman who was inspired by the work of Andy Warhol while studying at Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s. In 1985, Van Sant released his first film Mala Noche, about the love affair between a Mexican immigrant and a gay liquor store salesman. The success of this led to Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and then his most innovative film, My Own Private Idaho (USA, 1991). This is the story of the relationship between two male hustlers, one of whom (River Phoenix) has narcolepsy, the other (Keanu Reeves) who will inherit a fortune on his twenty-first birthday. The first fifteen minutes of My Own Private Idaho are among the most original American filmmaking of the decade. Using Phoenix’s character’s sleeping sickness as a starting point (338), Van Sant films the landscapes through which his characters drift with time-lapse photography, as if a gear had been suddenly thrown and real time had become dream time. Van Sant’s career developed into one of the most curious in modern American cinema, veering between sentimental mainstream films about the education of young men, such as Good Will Hunting (1997) and strangely conceptual works such as his act of worship of Psycho (1960), where he remade Alfred Hitchcock’s film scene by scene, departing from the original in only a few, tiny, but surreal, details.
The career of Matthew Barney was just as unconventional. He made a series of five films between 1994 and 2003, each of which was named after the cremaster muscle in the human body which makes the testicles rise and fall. Barney, like Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and Jean Cocteau, was an artist first and a filmmaker second, and conceived his Cremaster cycle as an innovative elaboration of the idea of male bio-determinism, presenting them, eccentrically, in the order 4 (1995), 1 (1996), 5 (1997), 2 (1999), 3 (2003). The last of these further flaunts the norms of mainstream film sequels by being 182 minutes long, featuring the lower leg-less actress Aimee Mullins wearing glass prostheses, a phallic Chrysler Building and a vaginal Guggenheim Centre. David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982) were reference points for Barney’s elaborate biological symbolism; The New York Times called him “the most crucial artist of his generation”.
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In My Own Private Idaho director Gus Van Sant reflected the narcolepsy of the character played by River Phoenix (right) in the form of his film. USA, 1991.
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION BEGINS IN AMERICA
In the year of the release of My Own Private Idaho, Silence of the Lambs and Barton Fink (1991), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) demonstrated, more dramatically than ever before, the startling potential of imagery which was created digitally. As the image overleaf shows (339), a photographed image of an actor changed into a “liquid metal” version of him and that version continued to move through space. The filmmaker, James Cameron, had his design and technical teams scan the photographed image into the computer, transforming photochemical information into the digits – an immensely complex pattern of zeros and ones – which computers understand. Thereafter they manipulated those digital patterns, drawing in shiny surfaces, movements and reflections to simulate the effect of a human being turning into a mercury-type substance. Live action and animation had been combined before, as far back as Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry mouse in Anchors Aweigh (340) and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion work in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, USA, 1963), but this was crucially different. Whereas in the latter the animated figures were models that were made to look as if they were alive, the liquid metal men were drawn figures with the same degree of volume, movement and menace. The technique became known as Computer Generated Imagery, CGI. For the first time in movie history, animated imagery did not need to appear cartoon-like or artificial. Live and drawn action could converge. Any conceivable image could be rendered in photographic reality. In films like Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) and Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) the main elements of the film (the ship, the dinosaur, the trace of a bullet, ancient Rome, the living toys) looked real, or, in the case of the latter, wholly three-dimensional and mobile. Want See became Can See.
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The combination of live-action (background fire) and computer-generated imagery (the 3-D, photographically real “liquid metal” assassin) in Terminator 2 demonstrated the possibilities of CGI and began a process where photographed and “drawn” imagery in mainstream cinema would become difficult to distinguish.
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It had long been possible to combine live-action and animation but until the early nineties the latter seldom had the same visual detail, volume, or complexity of movement as the former, as this moment from Anchors Aweigh demonstrates. Director: George Sidney. USA, 1945.
Despite the impact of Terminator 2’s liquid metal sequences, they represented only a minor aspect of the revolutionary potential of digital filmmaking. The film was still shot on film, for example, at a time when it was becoming possible to shoot entirely on digital video-tape, bypassing film altogether. And Terminator 2 was still sent out to cinemas as reels of 35mm film and projected onto a screen, when some had already talked of eschewing film prints and beaming digital films directly into cinemas.
Inventors had foreseen the revolutionary impact of some kind of electronic cinema decades earlier. As early as 1921 a young electrician called Philo Farnsworth was ploughing a field when he realized that an image could be captured by fast-moving electrons scanning in rows. Other inventors had used more cumbersome methods of generating the earliest electronic imagery, such as spinning discs. Farnsworth demonstrated in 1927 that his ploughed field-inspired approach worked but it was not until 1949 that independent Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn suggested that the film industry should install large-screen televisions in cinemas, so that films could be sent down cables electronically, directly onto those screens.
In the 1990s, the production and transmission of digital cinema advanced neck and neck. In the year following Terminator 2 Goldwyn’s dream of transmitting films electronically was realized when Bugsy (Barry Levinson, 1992) was sent by Sony Pictures Entertainment from Culver City to a Convention Centre at Anaheim, not far away. Three years after that, Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-generated feature film. In 1999, George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, was shown digitally in four cinemas, and in the same year a low-budget horror film, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was not only shot on low-tech digital video, but marketed on the internet. In the same year digital cinemas opened in Korea, Spain, Germany and Mexico and in 2001–02, George Lucas shot Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones entirely digitally.
The question for a history of the creativity of cinema is how such innovations would affect the aesthetics of the medium. In mainstream American cinema new types of shots emerged. Directors used CGI to simulate a camera floating over the recreated Colosseum in Rome in Gladiator (341), and around the Titanic in mid-ocean. These magic carpet rides, or “fly arounds”, were crane shots for the digital age, the can-see logical conclusion of the innovations of R.W. Paul, and Pastrone. Yet these were weightless and point-of-viewless moves, exhilarated by the possibility of CGI but devoid of feeling. America had again raced into the future of cinema technology but, as before, others such as Abbas Kiarostami in his film Ten (see page 441) thought through the implications of the new technology more rigorously.
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CGI recreated the drama of Rome’s Colosseum in Gladiator, but did the technique capture the physical mass of the building, and from what point of view? Director: Ridley Scott. USA, 2000.
The most influential use of CGI married the new digital fluidity of “fly ar
ounds” to a technique from Asian cinema called “wire fu”. Woo-ping Yuen was born in China in 1945, and became an action director in stunt films in Hong Kong in the 1970s. He helped evolve the graceful style of the Shaw Brothers’ fight scenes and, when the equipment became available, started attaching fine wires to the waists of his actors, the wires being suspended from a pivoting circular head on a crane. When the crane head was raised, the actor would seem to levitate, when it moved, they seemed to fly, when the head rotated, they seemed to spin. Thus a form of actor puppetry was born which, when rigorously practised and mastered, afforded a kind of on-screen movement that Gene Kelly could only dream of.
Yuen’s wire fu masterpiece from the 1990s is Iron Monkey (1993), a simple story set in China in 1858 about a folk hero who robs warlords to feed peasants. In its loveliest sequence, Dr Yang and Miss Orchid glide through space to catch papers snatched by a gust of wind. Soon after the film was released in the East, two young California-based filmmakers, Andy and Larry Wachowski, took an idea for a movie to big budget producer Joel Silver. Since childhood the brothers had been interested in both comic-strip fiction and myth and their script, called The Matrix, melded both. Silver loved their story of a computer programmer who is told by an underground figure, Morpheus, that the world around him is merely a simulation – the matrix of the title. The Wachowskis wanted Yuen to choreograph the fight sequences, and Silver had him tracked down in China. He trained Keanu Reeves and the other actors for five months in Kung Fu techniques, then taught them the craft of the wire. Gradually they learnt to jump, spin, kick, somersault and glide through space. These movements were so striking to Western mainstream audiences who had never seen them before that, as with morphing, wire fu quickly became fashionable in films like Charlie’s Angels (McG, 2000), and pastiched in Dimension Films’ teen horror movie spoofs.