by Mark Cousins
In my introduction I promised three adjustments to conventional movie histories. The first was that this would be a story of world cinema, not just Western filmmaking. The second was that I would describe – somewhere between the emotionally excessive films of Hollywood and Bollywood and the minimalist films of Bresson and the like – a uniquely balanced body of classical work, that of Ozu. My third challenge to conventional wisdom has been to argue that since 1990, the films of directors such as Kiarostami, Luhrmann, Sokurov, González Iñárritu, Von Trier and David Lynch have shown the global film world to be in better health than at any time in its history.
The medium of film crashed into the lives of Western people at the end of the nineteenth century like a precocious, attention-grabbing, quickly exhausted child. It had the heart-breakingly beautiful confidence of something without history. Then, as the late 1910s, the 1920s and 1930s passed, as filmmakers tried and failed and had insights and saw those insights enter the medium or being forgotten by it, so cinema began to be aware that it had a history of its own, the stuff of this book. When it looked back it discovered that it already had pioneers, legendary figures, and rightly became ambivalent about that past. Some filmmakers became too fond of the old ways of doing things, the tried and trusted methods. Others – in the 1960s and 1990s – felt that the medium that was running through their cameras at twenty-four frames per second was beginning to feel old. It needed to be renewed. This explains Bresson, Godard, and Trier, but not Mambety, Ghatak, Rocha and Kiarostami. Film history has more than one line of narrative. African, Asian, South American and Middle-Eastern cinema simply does not relate to that precious nineteenth-century child in any direct way. Each began later and, like a younger, alienated sibling, had consciously to find its own voice. Nonetheless, the young cinemas influenced the old. Southern and Eastern ideas about form flowed into the West, and vice versa.
There are other ways in which the story of film has not been a slow, steady progression along a single road. Take the invisibility of Ozu and Muratova, for example. A filmmaker in Japan conceived film as aesthetically and philosophically balanced in a way not to be found in Western cinema, yet his classicism had no influence on most film cultures until the mid-1950s, when he belatedly found recognition. Imagine how Western closed romantic realism might have developed had his example been felt earlier. As for Muratova, her work was shelved by the Soviet regime and, even after its belated release, she remained underrated. The absence of female filmmakers for much of film history has damaged the artistic claims of the medium.
Inside this history of deferred starts, absences and oversights, is the real substance of this book, the grass roots: lying in bed at night, pacing the sound stage floor, sitting at a keyboard, talking with other filmmakers, watching films for inspiration – the nature of invention in cinema itself. This is where E.H. Gombrich’s schema plus correction, which I modified to schema plus variation, came in. The proof that Gombrich was right, that ideas about form zigzag through a medium, building on or keeping their distance from what went before, can be seen in those rare times in film history where creativity seems to go up a gear. Look at what I have called the Soviet think tank of the 1920s. Under the tutelage of Lev Kuleshov, a group of ardent young people who were new to the medium got their heads together, bounced ideas off each other, determined to reject what went before, and accelerated the rate at which film form was invented – yes, invented – in their country, beyond anything that happened there before or since. A similar process took place in the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma in the mid- and late 1950s. Through talking and writing about and eventually making films, critics who became directors accelerated formal growth and introduced the medium to a set of new stylistic ideas which would sweep across the world. Likewise, to a lesser extent, in Copenhagen in the mid-1990s, when a group of filmmakers prohibited certain stylistic techniques for ethical reasons. They varied the schema, created a whole new set of possibilities and became the most influential filmmakers of their day. In each of these three situations, the young men were acting out of self-interest; their manifestos propelled them into film production. When will conventional filmmakers and public-sector film bodies around the world realise that in order to get themselves notices, to refresh cinema, they must ask the question this book started with, “How can I do this differently?”
To do so is to engage in risk. The best line in Preston Sturges’ very funny book about his career underlines the point: “It was the enormous risks I took with pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely”.1 These weren’t the words of a maverick newcomer but a filmmaker at the end of his life. Kuleshov’s soup and freedom editing experiments risked professional disapproval (see page 104). Paradjanov’s challenging of ideological conformism by filming folk tales in a baroque style were so risky that they led to his imprisonment. Scorsese’s idea of “opening up the form” risked alienating audiences, Fassbinder’s use of the American form but moving “the content onto other areas” ran the risk of making a dog’s breakfast. The sustained stasis in the films of Akerman, Tarr and Kelemen must have tried the patience of producers and distributors. In each case they did something new and splendid.
So many films in this book are good because of thought and of courage. But as David Lynch’s talk about ideas “just popping” (see page 396) suggests, invention in cinema, as in other art forms, also relies on pure, unthought out, unheralded inspiration. The purest – and funniest – example I know is American novelist and critic James Agee’s detailed essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era”, where he’s talking about the silent comedy producer Mack Sennett:
Sennett used to a hire a ‘wild man’ to sit in on his gag conferences, whose whole job was to think up ‘wildies’. Usually he was an all but brainless, speechless man, scarcely able to communicate his idea; but he had a totally uninhibited imagination. He might say nothing for an hour; then he’d mutter “You take …” and all the relatively rational others would shut up and wait. “You take this cloud ….” Thanks to some kind of thought-transference, saner men would take this cloud and make something of it. The wild man seems in fact to have functioned as the group’s subconscious mind….”
The example Agee gives of a contribution by the wild man concerns Laurel and Hardy moving a piano across a very narrow bridge over a plunging ravine. What could happen that was really funny? The wild man suggests that halfway along they meet a gorilla (363).
363
An opportunity for wild comic invention: what would be the funniest thing that could happen to Laurel and Hardy as they carry a piano across a bridge over a ravine?
Rational invention, determined invention, surreal invention. These are the traits that drive great cinema. They exist between two poles: on the one hand what could be called the difficulty of film, Kuleshov’s proof that a shot couldn’t even say a simple thing like “this man is feeling hunger” or this man is feeling freedom”; on the other, the ease of cinema, Its innate, effortless, precocious (back to that child again) ability to capture the splendour of the real world. Look at these two images, one of Jean Pierre Léaud (364 top) and one of Sharmila Tagore (364 bottom), two of the greatest actors in the world. Look at the intelligence in their eyes, the keenness of mind of each. Cinema can show this in a heartbeat, and then enlarge it onto a big screen.
The earliest histories of film argued, understandably, that the greatest were those that pushed to the fullest possible extent the editing, focus, composition, lighting, and tracking possibilities of the medium. After the Second World War critics such as Andre Bazin dismissed this, arguing instead that the realist films, compelled by history or filmmaking instinct to be morally serious, were the most valuable and cinematic. Then in the 1950s came Alexandre Astruc’s argument that the worth of a film should be measured according to how closely it expresses its director’s vision of life. Astruc emphasized this by comparing the camera to a novelist’s pen. Finally, in the 1960s and 1970s, more philosophical
ly inclined film writers began to see in Dreyer, Ozu, Bresson and Antonioni the essence of a more metaphysical or abstract aspect of cinema. It is difficult at first to square these four mutually exclusive visions of cinema: formalism, realism, expressionism and transcendentalism. Until, that is, it is realized that all films can be placed within the square which they form. Very few only contain any one of these qualities and so exist outside the square; most can be plotted in relation to its corners.
It is commonplace to be pessimistic about the medium of film. Certainly cultural globalization, whilst in theory opening up major film markets to a trickle of films from minor ones, exacerbates the standardisation of film form and movie-going. Hollywood’s totems of release, freedom, achievement, competition, self-actualization and expansion are winning on screen at the expense of co-operation, balance, anti-materialism and contraction. Yet, as the last chapter argued, creativity in film is more equally distributed around the planet than ever before.
364
Cinema’s greatness derives in part from the way it can capture the thoughts and beauty of great performers such as Jean Pierre Léaud (top) and Sharmila Tagore (bottom). Domicile Conjugal. Director: François Truffaut. France, 1970. Devi. Director: Satyajit Ray. India, 1960.
If this is indeed so, the timing could not be better. The digitization of the film process, which began properly in the early 1990s, is more than a trickle now. The most striking comments from this come from film editor, director and sound designer Walter Murch in a New York Times article “Digital Cinema of the Mind”. He compared film at the beginning of the twenty-first century to painting in the Renaissance and early modern periods. In moving from painting frescoes using pigment in wet plaster to painting in oils on canvas, artists went from an expensive, collaborative process requiring patronage and dedicated to “public” subjects, to a cheap, individual process depicting more personal situations and themes. So it is with film, Murch argued. The slow digital revolution opens the doors to what Dogme called “the ultimate democratization of cinema”, in ways that Scorsese could only dream of. The need for crews of forty people, budgets of millions of dollars, and the qualified, restricting approval of the providers of that money, are removed.
Whilst a period of modest cinema, made possible by this, would perhaps have a detoxifying effect, it can not be argued that digitisation would mean the end of grandeur in films. As if to prove this point and also to refute those who argue that cinema is inevitably in creative decline, in 2002 a Russian director made a film as revolutionary as The Jazz Singer or A Bout de souffle. Alexander Sokurov was born in Irkutsk in 1950 and taught by Andrei Tarkovsky, who called him “a cinematic genius”. He first came to my attention in 1995 at the Berlin Film Festival, where his five-hour, trance-like documentary Spiritual Voices played to an almost empty cinema. A year later he released an even better film, Mother and Son (Russia, 1996), an overwhelming study of the relationship between a dying mother and her attentive son. Featuring the visual equivalent of what mathematicians call shearings (the distortions of a fixed shape as if it were elastic), shrouded exposures, photography through glass and lenses painted with Chinese brushes, the visual originality of the film was matched by the sober intensity of the love it portrayed. The mother looks up to a sky or thunderclouds and says, “Is there anyone up there?” When she dies, a butterfly lands on her hands. Paul Schrader called it “seventy-three heart-aching, luminescent minutes of pure cinema”. Sokurov had made a work as great as Dovzhenko’s Arsenal.
Then he surpassed even that. After films on Hitler and Stalin he made Russian Ark (362). On the day that it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, there were rumours that it contained not a single edit. In a ninety-minute film? That is impossible. No digital video tapes run that long. The lights went down. The film started. Whispered voices of actors back-stage at a theatre. Compositions like Von Sternberg’s. Then the film broke. Lights went up. The projectionist rewound the film and we began again. What played on the screen in the next hour and a half was the single most dramatic variation of the schema of cinema that I have yet witnessed in my lifetime. As we have seen in this book, the question of the long-held take – its suspense, beauty and intensity – has engaged filmmakers from Mizoguchi to Minnelli, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Tarr and Kelemen. In Russian Ark, Sokurov outdid any of them. Shooting neither on film nor on tape but directly onto a computer hard disk, he invented a film in which a civilized nineteenth-century European travels through the Hermitage art gallery in St Petersburg, debating the nature of nineteenth-century Russian culture, arguing with the drowsy, dreaming, off-screen voice of Russia itself. His minstrel-like journey covers 1,300 metres of ground, through thirty-three galleries of Rembrandts and da Vincis, and the like. And Sokurov had indeed filmed it in a single unbroken shot.
Sokurov’s single shot, achieved on the second take, took place on 23 December 2001 and it shows that, far from being at an end, the history of this great art form is only beginning.
The purpose of this book was to chart the creative highlights of cinema, a singular and seductive focus, and in some ways an old-fashioned one, which will have alienated some, but so be it. The simplest reason why this book is valuable is that it distills between its covers more great films than most chronological accounts of the medium. If you have followed me to the end you will have learned how ambiguous the filmmaker’s relationship with the real world has been, how fraught the role of personal expression in such a public medium has been, how there has been a tug-of-war between those who love the medium and those who love the industry. Like Lauren Bacall, I am on the side of the former, yet am immensely proud of the great flickering art from of film when it gets onto the front pages and enters what Hélène Cixous called “the arena of contradiction, where pleasure and reality embrace”. I may have missed important films along the way, or overstated a work or a director that excites me, but in the end this book has been about how cinema, more than any art form, is capable of portraying that embrace: in other words, despite her glaring absence, about Shirley Maclaine running down that street.
1. Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, ed: Sandy Sturges, Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 294.
GLOSSARY
Academy Ratio: The standard shape of movie screens before the mid-1950s: one-third wider than it is high.
Avant-garde: Individual artists, movements or ideas that are ahead of the mainstream.
Blimp: Any kind of insulating box or jacket that is mounted around the camera to reduce the whirring noise it makes.
Boom: The pole on which sound recordists’ microphones are mounted in order that they can be away from the action.
Cinema Nôvo: A new, politically informed and stylistically ambitious trend in Brazilian cinema of the 1960s in which Glauber Rocha was the most significant figure.
Cinema Verité: A parallel French trend to Direct Cinema, which did not try to be as “invisible” as its American counterpart and laid more emphasis on interviewing and the way in which the presence of a film crew can help extract the truth from a situation.
CinemaScope: The first commercially successful, copyrighted widescreen filming process in which a panoramic scene was squashed horizontally to fit onto a 35mm negative then stretched again on the projector in cinemas.
Cinematographer: The craftsperson who – on instruction from the director – plans the lighting and exposure of a scene and oversees the camera moves.
Classicism: The period of, or tendency to, balance and order in an art-form. Work that is neither highly decorated nor stylistically spare, neither emotionally excessive nor minimalist.
Close-up: An image that enlarges the thing it photographs in order to emphasize or reveal more detail about it.
Closed Romantic Realism: The dominant style of mainstream cinema in Hollywood and elsewhere. The films are “closed” in that the actors seem to inhabit a parallel universe and don’t look at the camera, and the stories are seldom open-ended. “Romantic” because emotions in such films ten
d to be heightened and the protagonists are in some way heroic. “Realism” because, despite these artifices, the people in such movies are recognizably human and the societies depicted have problems similar to our own.
Continuity Editing: The convention in mainstream filmmaking which allows action to appear to flow from one shot to the next, particularly in relation to the direction.
Cutting: see Editing
Deep Focus: A technique, often involving very bright lights and sensitive film stock, which allows filmmakers to keep things close to and far away from the camera in focus.
Deep Staging: A technique in which the action in a scene takes place on planes at a wide range of distances from the lens. These actions need not be in focus.
Direct Cinema: American and Canadian documentary films shot in the late 1950s and 1960s, which largely eschewed conven-tional lighting and interviewing. Its main exponents were Robert Drew, the Maysles brothers and D. A. Pennebaker.
Dolly Shot: A move created by mounting the camera’s tripod on a specially designed trolley.
Edit/Cut: A single join between two shots.
Editing: The joining of shots to establish pace, rhythm and, where appropriate, narrative flow.
Establishing Shot: An image used at the beginning of a sequence to show the location of the ensuing action. Often an exterior, it seldom involves dialogue and often shows little more than a location.
Expressionism: A technique of exaggerat-ing acting, make-up, lighting and produc-tion design in cinema to express the dreams, nightmares and psychoses which lie beneath the surface of human behaviour. The German film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) was the first to employ the technique. It was most consistently used by filmmakers in that country in the ensuing decade.