Peggy Ahwesh
b. Pittsburgh, Pensylvania, USA, 1954

by John David Rhodes

John David Rhodes teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of York in
York, England.

 
All serious art presents a challenge to its interlocutors, resists paraphrase and frustrates
interpretation. The strange richness of Peggy Ahwesh's filmmaking throws us up against
the paucity of our own language. “Do I have words for what I am seeing?”: watching and
re-watching her films provoke this question – the spectre of ineffability. This experience
seems ever more curious when we consider the place granted to language in the films
themselves. The films often cite (or even recite) any number of literary, theoretical and
philosophical texts. Yet this practice of citation, appropriation and allusion, of folding
language into, or asking it to hover above, the image is predicated on an understanding of
the shortcomings of language itself. For Ahwesh's work proceeds first from the act of
seeing, or more accurately, looking – at the world and the bodies that inhabit it.

Ahwesh was reared in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, in her own words, “one of those sad
industrial towns” (1) near Pittsburgh. She went to school at Antioch College in the 1970s
where she studied with Tony Conrad (“a father figure”) (2) and was introduced to radical
artists and filmmakers like Paul Sharits, Carolee Schneeman and Joyce Wieland. She
returned to Pittsburgh after school, threw herself into its burgeoning punk scene and
started shooting Super-8 films that documented, quite idiosyncratically, the things, people
and places around her. In organising a film series at an art space called The Mattress
Factory, Ahwesh decided to invite as her first guest George Romero, a Pittsburgh
filmmaker himself, whose native city had paid him little notice before Ahwesh's
invitation. Their meeting led to Ahwesh's working as a production assistant on Romero's
Creepshow (1982) (3). The immersion in Romero's phantasmagoria seems so uncannily
fitting, given the trajectory of Ahwesh's career, as to be nearly over-determined, yet, as
anecdote (Ahwesh recalls that she was “assigned to entertain Stephen King's son and
played 'Dungeons and Dragons' with him”) (4) it manifests the unstudied and nerdy cool
of Ahwesh's films themselves.

After the Romero stint Ahwesh moved to New York and continued making films and
doing tech work at The Kitchen, one of the nerve centres of New York's experimental
performance scene. As her notoriety has increased over the past two decades she has been
the subject of major museum retrospectives and the recipient of some of the most
prestigious awards given to practising creative artists. At present she teaches at Bard
College and continues to live in New York City.

Despite the Romero episode, biography does not go far in illuminating Ahwesh's films,
despite how much we actually sense her physical presence in many of the films
themselves – behind the camera, on the soundtrack, etc. In fact, it is this palpable present-
ness in her work that almost obviates the biographical crutch. For in looking at her work
we feel summoned to participate in an epistemological experiment that is the very
substance of the films themselves.

This is heady language – we might even think inappropriate – for discussing a body of
artistic work in which memorable moments include a fake plastic hand playing a harp, a
grown woman threatening to use a microphone as a dildo or Ahwesh herself playing the
computer game Tomb Raider. Ahwesh's is messy work – gloriously messy – and is
deeply invested in the luxurious plenitude of the visual field. The films look great and yet
are never merely pretty; they frustrate aestheticising, formalist tastes. Likewise, although
the films often cite theoretical texts, they are never merely theoretical. They inhabit a
strange stretch of territory in the world of experimental film and video, never exhibiting
the formal shape of, say, a Hollis Frampton or the precise political clarity of a Su
Friedrich. Ahwesh's practice is a porous one, grounded on a radical technique of pastiche
and aimed at unsettling categories and hierarchies.

As is always the case, it is better to attend to the films themselves than to belabour the
qualities they share generally. I will start with The Deadman, a film Ahwesh made with
her collaborator Keith Sanborn in 1990. It is one of her best-known films and one that
immerses us straightaway into many of her preoccupations and methods.

The film grew out of Ahwesh and Sanborn's interest in the work of Georges Bataille and
in particular Bataille's text Le Mort which Sanborn translated and on which the film is
loosely based. Bataille's investigations of the morbid and the transgressive found
sympathy with Ahwesh's Romero-inflected interest in the horror film. Shot in black and
white 16 mm, The Deadman actually begins as a sort of horror film: its opening images
are of a white frame house, shot from below, the time either dusk or dawn. On the
soundtrack someone gasps in (what sounds like) agony. Next we hear the sound of
breaking glass and the beating of bird wings, as the image cuts, first to a close up of
chandelier, creaking as it sways from the ceiling, next to a shot of a man lying naked on
rumpled bed sheets, his penis flaccid in the cradle of his thighs. Scoring the last image is
the sound of a buzzing fly – a metonymic soundtrack of death and decay. The next shot is
from the outside of the house again, as a woman, naked but for a thin plastic raincoat,
leaves the house running. The naked man is the film's ”Dead Man”, the woman, Marie.
Ahwesh's camera then follows her as she fucks, pisses, shits and vomits her way through
the rest of the film.

 
The Deadman - drawing
The film's events more or less follow those of the story. Ahwesh has said that she was
drawn to adapt the text because she liked “how Bataille does not explain the emotions of
the characters” (5). The camera actually seems to savour its exteriority to the events of
the profilmic. The use of silent film intertitles, all actual lines culled from the original
Bataille story, reinforces the exteriority of the film's narration. For instance, as Marie
flees the house of the Dead Man (who is named Edward, we learn) and runs into the
woods, an intertitle in inserted which reads “When Edward fell back Marie felt a void
open.” Then, just after this, a flat female voiceover intones “The time had come to deny
the laws to which fear subjects us.” When Marie arrives, some seconds later, (having
stopped to piss along the way) in darkness at the doorway of a bar, rain falling and the
sound of rain falling, she waits more than two minutes to enter. The camera records this
waiting in its entirety in one very long take. The image is poorly lit – so dark we can
barely make Marie out only when she moves falteringly into a small sash of light on
screen right. In the middle of this long take an intertitle appears which reads “Marie
despaired but played with her despair.”

All of these pronouncements gesture towards human, psychological interiority, and yet
the film gives us no entry whatsoever into the mental life of this character. The intertitles,
in their archly archaic obsolescence, suggest the insuperable gap between word and
image, between the signifying system of language and the phenomenological process of
looking at something (a dead man, a woman, a film). In fact, the snippets of Bataille's
actual (though translated) language that the voiceover and intertitles give us clearly
declare the film's independence from its source.

The film might be misunderstood to have undertaken the uncomfortable burden of

translating the “transgressive” acts described in Bataille's text to the screen, as if to do so
would itself constitute an act of transgression. Such a project would have been silly;
Ahwesh and Sanborn's concerns are elsewhere. Ahwesh has said herself, “I think of The
Deadman as one long female jouissance, not a transgression at all” (6). Marie, the main
character (played with fantastic abandon by the filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery) derives
her jouissance from letting the patrons of the seedy bar pleasure and penetrate her body.
The film itself, though, is grooving on its own jouissance – playfully pitting intertitle
against image, the documentation of what looks to be very real sex among very drunk
people with the make-believe phoniness of the set. (The actors are dressed like kids who
have raided a thrift store, and empty beer cans posing as full give themselves away with
the hollow sound they make when placed on the table.) As Marie rolls around the floor of
the bar with Pierrot, one of the bar's patrons, the camera records the whole of the sloppy
encounter, again in what might be called an uncomfortably long long take. We think of
Pasolini here, of Jack Smith, of Warhol.

While the rough, embodied (because hand-held), often over- or under-lit cinematography
creates a squalid visual glamour and thus claims our attention, part of our interest is
nonetheless in the mere – or very – fact of watching this amorphous “scene” unfold.
When will it end? How much more will we see? What allows me to see this? Scott
MacDonald, in his interview with Ahwesh, confessed to her his failure to appreciate The
Deadman, saying “it felt like a student film” (7). But it is exactly the film's deceptive
slackness that constitutes its philosophical and even political rigour: only through its
superficially amateurish (often hilarious) elisions and dilations, its mordant tautologies
(8) and wilful omissions, its hokey dialogue and its raw display of female sexuality can
the film succeed in forcing the kinds of questions it does from its viewers.

The mise-en-scène is less overtly dark in Martina's Playhouse (1989), but the film has as
unsettling an effect on its audience as The Deadman. The film switches back and forth
between two Super 8 sound home movies: one of the young Martina (Martina Torr) and
her mother (the performance artist Diane Torr) in their cramped New York apartment; the
other of Jennifer Montgomery (Marie from The Deadman) clowning around in Ahwesh's
own apartment. In both cases Ahwesh is behind the camera. These two home movies are
punctuated by beautifully fragile, seemingly decayed and scratched close-up footage of
flowers and flashes of leader. Over this footage we hear recited texts from Bataille on the
sexual meaning of flowers and Lacan on the constitution of desire in the field of the
Other.

 
 Martina's Playhouse
The editing back and forth between the child
Martina and the adult Jennifer is fascinating.
Both are incredible performers, fully aware of
the way that Ahwesh's camera interpellates
them as such. Martina, preparing to go “on”
whilst putting a dress on her plush toy frog,
screams over and over, “I'm not ready!” as
Ahwesh continues to film. Jennifer, on the other
hand, reminds Ahwesh that she wouldn't be
there were it not for the camera. These slight
gestures of resistance from her subjects (9),
however, are displaced by the pleasure they
obviously take in exhibiting themselves for the
camera.

The scenes with Martina are the centre of the film. In them Martina narrates her
interpretations of images torn from magazines and interacts with her mother and Ahwesh,
who stays behind the camera but whom we occasionally hear. The scenes of playacting
between mother and child are the most challenging. At one point Martina's mother
pretends to be a baby and nurse from Martina's breast. The scene is a powerful document
of the creativity and freedom that can be explored in the context of parent-child
relationships. At the same time, because of the repressive nature of our own culture in
regards to the subject of childhood sexuality, the footage makes its viewers somewhat
nervous. Although it is not even remotely pornographic, the intimacy of the footage and
its long, unstructured nature provoke us into thought. Why, when there is nothing
perverse about the footage, does it make us uncomfortable? As well, there is a
strangeness that results from the implicit acknowledgement that, although this is
incredibly privileged footage in terms of its immediacy, the footage is also highly
mediated – as much a performance as Martina's narrating the meanings of the magazine
pictures or as, at another point in the film, Jennifer's threatening to use Ahwesh's
microphone as a dildo.

The flower footage is the neat, nearly formalist, counterpart to these scenes. Early on we
hear a voice reading Bataille's theory of the sexuality of flowers over the image. This text
explains that the giving of flowers as a sign of love enacts the displacement at the very
heart of sexual desire. Later we hear, again over similar flower footage, Ahwesh coaching
Martina through reading aloud Lacan's “The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis.” Martina
reads hesitantly but with a persistent cadence. She mistakenly reads “point of lack” as
“part of luck”; Ahwesh corrects her. Later, again over similar footage, Ahwesh reads the
excerpt again, imitating Martina's metronomic rhythm. While the appropriation and
insertion (uncredited) of these bits of theory set up a broad field of resonance with the
footage of Martina and Jennifer, there is clearly, as in The Deadman, meant to be no one-
to-one correspondence between the texts and the film. Martina's “misreading” clearly
undermines whatever authority we might have granted to these texts (especially the
Lacan, since that is the text whose reading is both enforced and bungled). Ahwesh's
enforcing Martina to rehearse the Lacan also seems to signal the filmmaker's own
acknowledgement of the burden she forces her footage to bear, both in its own terms and
vis-à-vis Lacanian theory. As well, even our own desire to over-read the film in terms of
its quotation of Lacan seems to be made suspect by the film's own deceptive
nonchalance. For a film seemingly rather lacking in rigorous form, Martina's Playhouse
actually sets up an electrifying network of correspondences.

The film of Ahwesh's that most determinedly takes on the subjects of sexuality and vision
is undoubtedly The Color of Love (1994). Essentially it is a found footage film.
According to Ahwesh, a friend dropped off a load of old film canisters that had been left
outside, prey to the elements. Inside one canister Ahwesh discovered a Super-8mm
pornographic film of two women making love to each other and to a man who appears to
be dead or unconscious. The film had become degraded and decayed which gave it an
amazing richness of color and texture. Ahwesh “did an improv on the optical printer”,
“slowing some sections down and speeding others up a bit, repeating some things, and
elongating the cunt shots” (10). Then she added a score of tango music. What resulted is
one of the most beautiful and provocative artefacts in film history. The use of the tango
music seems a clear nod in the direction of Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928). Like
its surrealist predecessor, The Color of Love is an assault on the norms of vision. It is
explicit; it shows too much. The seductive surface of the film (if ever there were a case
for haptic cinema or embodied vision, this is it) draws us into a pas de deux of attraction
and repulsion.

 
The Scary Movie
The Scary Movie (1993) is another collaboration with Martina Torr, who by the time the
film was shot, was some years older than she was in Martina's Playhouse. Shot in
wonderfully high contrast black and white with very low key lighting, the film is one of
Ahwesh's most beautiful and most light-hearted; it is also the most reflexive of her many
nods towards the horror genre. The film features Martina and co-star/playmate Sonja
Mereu. While Martina is costumed in cheap girls' dress up clothes, Sonja has a fake
moustache, black gloves and prosthetic monster fingers. The first shot is a repetitive and
jerky hand-held pan of a hand drawn music score while the sounds of Psycho-like violins
play on the soundtrack. So begins what might be called an anatomising re-reading of the
horror genre. The entire soundtrack is a pastiche of music and sounds native to the horror
film – screams, strings, squeaking doors, footsteps, etc – although with a few corny
phrases and sound effects that sound as though they've been lifted from a Warner
Brothers cartoon. At various points a prosthetic rubber hand (obviously manipulated by a
human extending from offscreen space) reaches mock-eerily to caress Martina who
pretends to be asleep. Sonja probes/assaults Martina with kitchen tongs and later stabs her
repeatedly with a tin-foil knife, and in turn is stabbed by the rubber hand wielding a
similar weapon. In the middle of the film's duration, Sonja holds up a poster announcing
the credits (she is credited as the “Doctor/Killer”, Martina as the “Patient/Hand Lover”).
Then we see the girls screaming, then dancing. They seem to have escaped their outing
into the horror genre. The film ends.

The Scary Movie toys with the creaky machinery of horror while simultaneously
articulating an understanding of childhood as a joyously ludic domain, one part Romantic
innocence, one part grand guignol. As well, it reveals the violence of the genre – violence
usually directed against women – to be a play of silly and thoroughly controvertible
conventions. While Ahwesh clearly enjoys indulging in the tropes of the horror film, she
also is distant enough from it to end her film with her heroines fully alive and unscarred.

The horror film haunts Ahwesh's work as a generic possibility (there are elements of it,
for instance, in the found film source for The Color of Love), but Ahwesh treats it most
elaborately in Nocturne (1998). Ahwesh based her script on a review she read online of a
Mario Bava film The Whip and the Net (1963). Nocturne is loosely about a woman whose
lover is dead but whose ghost continues to visit her. The plot is a pretext for Ahwesh to
explore familiar thematic material (the irreducible excesses of life, death and sex) while
giving free reign to her visual imagination. Nocturne is perhaps Ahwesh's most
unembarrassedly beautiful work. The film shifts back and forth between black and white
film and pixelvision. The camera luxuriates in the play of light and shadow, landscape,
the patterns of wallpaper, the sharp and forbidding beauty of the face of its main
character (played by Anne Kugler). While ostensibly a ghost story, the film seems to
want to lose itself in the phenomenal rather than the noumenal. Ahwesh's pixelvision
cinematography stages a kind of intimacy of infinite regress. The digital graininess of
pixelvision makes it seem that the closer the camera draws to its object, the further the
object moves away, or breaks into millions of tiny constituent parts, disappearing into
what Lyotard has called the “unpresentable”. Here Ahwesh's cinema opens out onto the
sublime, which is itself an ecstatic, even religious, experience, one arrived at through the
brooding swarm of the material.
 

 
Strange Weather
Nocturne shares its pixelvision
cinematography with Strange Weather
(1993), a fake documentary about crack
addicts that Ahwesh made with Margie
Strosser, a fellow traveller of her Pittsburgh
Super 8 days. Set and shot in Florida,
Strange Weather's camera observes its
pseudo-subjects from an almost unbearably
close physical range as they arrange scores
on the phone, freak out about being caught
by the police and kill time telling stories while waiting for a hurricane to roll into town.
The film's feeling of hypnotic tedium and its milieu of grimy, nervous languor are
achieved through its extreme close up cinematography and its near Warholian interest in
duration. By threatening to swallow up its overdetermined “subject” (drug addiction), the
film's outlandish form (which is almost a kind of formlessness) produces a space for
ethical reflection on this same subject that could not be accessed through the usual, tired
discourses on drug use.

In recent work Ahwesh has continued to force serious philosophical questions from
unlikely material. The footage that constitutes She Puppet (2001) was recorded directly
from Ahwesh's computer as she played the video game Tomb Raider, famous for its
robotically voluptuous animated protagonist Lara Croft. As she seems to push the
character to the outer edges of the Tomb Raider world, different female voiceovers read
from the work of Sun Ra, Joanna Russ and Fernando Pessoa. As we watch Lara Croft
fend off attacking huskies and machine gun wielding commandos, dying again and again,
we catch ourselves attributing the content of the voiceover texts to Lara's subjectivity.
She Puppet therefore cunningly demonstrates the improbable persistence of the processes
of spectator identification. But more importantly, the film performs this work in the
context of posing larger questions about the incredibly abstract, but at the same time all
too real and particular, nature of the category of the female in our cultural imaginary.
There is nothing real or realistic about the animated image of Lara Croft, and yet, through
the repetitive acts of violence and self-destruction, she becomes real and we find
ourselves believing in her on the very basis of her being obsessively violated. In many
ways She Puppet is the most succinct and powerful essay on the position of women in the
field of cinematic vision since Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.

The contours of Ahwesh's work expand far beyond the few examples I have discussed
here (11). What holds the body of her work together is its global resistance to the notion
of being held together, to boundaries, to resolution. Ahwesh's explanation of her
resistance to narrative might serve as a sort of ars poetica:
The reason I've never liked narrative is because traditionally narrative film has to
have resolution. By the end, you're supposed to be able to figure out why things
happened the way they did. And I've always been more into presenting a problem
 and getting you into an emotional place where you understand the calamity or joy
or desire within a person's life. It's like a texture, or a mood, a moment – not this
is the story and this is how it turns out. (12)
This attitude has generated a labile openness and indeterminacy in Ahwesh's work that
has proved richly rewarding. While her films consistently engage and challenge us in
their experiments with form, they do not present us with a closed textual or authorial
system. They have, rather, the courage to act centrifugally – to fling us away from
themselves and back into the world from which they come, of which they are a part and
which they have enriched.

© John David Rhodes, November 2003

Filmography*
Pittsburgh Trilogy (1983) 50 mins, film

Ode to the New Pre-History (1984–1987) 25 mins, film

From Romance to Ritual (1985) 10 mins, film

The Fragments Project (1985–1995) 50 mins, film

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1987) 10 mins, film

I Ride a Pony Named Flame (1988) 5 mins, video

Martina's Playhouse (1989) 20 mins, film

The Deadman (with Keith Sanborn, 1990) 40 mins, film

Strange Weather (with Margie Strosser) (1993) 50 mins, video

The Scary Movie (1993) 7 mins, film

The Color of Love (1994) 10 mins, film

the vision machine (1997) 20 mins, film

Nocturne (1998) 30 mins, film

73 Suspect Words and Heaven's Gate (1999–2000) 8 mins, video

She Puppet (2001) 15 mins, video

The Star Eaters (2003) 24 mins, video

Certain Women co-directed with Bobby Abate (2004) 72 mins, video

*Much of Ahwesh's early work on Super 8 is uncatalogued

  

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Robert Aldrich
b. August 9, 1918, Cranston, Rhode Island
d. December 5, 1983, Los Angeles, California

by Alain Silver
 

Alain Silver is a Los Angeles-based writer/producer

of independent feature films, whose books include
several surveys of film noir and director studies of
Aldrich, David Lean and Roger Corman.

filmography       bibliography       articles in Senses       web resources

The struggle for self-determination, the struggle for what a character

wants his life to be...I look for characters who feel strongly enough about
something not to be concerned with the prevailing odds, but to struggle
against those odds. (1)

The critical reputation of Robert Aldrich, scion of the Eastern

establishment and graduate of the best finishing schools in Hollywood,
burst out of Europe with la politique des auteurs. As early as 1957, Aldrich
became No. 7 of the "Les Grands Créateurs du Cinéma" series of director
monographs published by the Belgian Club du Livre du Cinéma, which
followed studies of Robert Bresson, John Huston, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De
Sica, Luis Buñuel, and Marcel Carné. This was certainly heady company
for a new American director, not yet forty years old. Aldrich's relatives
included politicians and bankers - the Rockefellers were both - but the first
and last favor he asked from any of them was when an uncle at Chase Bank
helped him get his first job as a production clerk at RKO.  From there he
progressed through the ranks of assistant directors and graduated to
directing television in the early 1950s. Although a lifelong liberal and the
co-worker of many blacklistees, Aldrich's only brief period as persona non
grata in Hollywood was because of a disagreement with Harry Cohn on the
Columbia project The Garment Jungle (1957). Aldrich was active in the
Directors Guild of America throughout his career and ultimately served as
its president, overseeing the negotiation of a break-through contract in
terms of creative rights in 1978. Ironically for a director seldom regarded
as an artist by American critics, Aldrich's union activism on behalf of
directors' prerogatives alienated studio heads and cost him work at the end
of his career.

If there is a core to Aldrich's worldview as expressed over the course of

thirty feature films, it would simply be the oft-confessed proclivity for
"turning things upside down." Aldrich conforms to the traditional narrative
requirements of heroes and villains, but within that he often skirts the issue
of good and evil in favor of personal codes and moralities. "He didn't
divide the world up into good and evil," Abraham Polonsky said of
Aldrich, "he didn't see it that simply. He found himself as someone who
knew that his idea of himself was why he existed; and that his self-esteem
and respect for himself could never be jeopardized by any compromise that
involved that deep portion of himself." (2)

Perhaps the best example of this process is Aldrich's adaptation of Kiss Me

Deadly (1955). A quest for the Grail, in the sense that social historian Mike
Davis describes as "that great anti-myth usually known as noir," (3) Kiss
Me Deadly is equally what Borde and Chaumeton call a "dark and
fascinating close" (4) to the noir era, whose main character is an "anti-
Galahad" in search of his "great whatsit." This tension between myth and
anti-myth, between hero
and anti-hero, is the key
to Aldrich's work.
Hammer is a radically
different character than
many who preceded and  
followed him in
Aldrich's work, equally
unlike the defiant
warrior Massai in
Apache (1954) and the
tormented Charlie Castle Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and Christina
in The Big Knife (1955).   (Cloris Leachman) in his "pretty little car" in Kiss
But all these characters Me Deadly
inhabit the same cinematic milieu, a world where men's greed for land,
money and power challenge the individual to survive. "I guess you have a
weakness for a certain kind of character," Aldrich readily admitted; "It's
the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing,
characters that are bigger than life, that find their own integrity in doing
what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths." (5)
Although they are culturally quite different, both Massai and Charlie Castle
appealed to Aldrich because of their idealistic struggle. As supporting
characters remark, Massai cannot give up his fight and Charlie cannot
sustain his; both are fatally imperiled by "doing what they do the way they
do it." From Aldrich's earliest work, cynicism and idealism combined to
create violent, angst-ridden outbursts of existential despair. Little wonder
that such a thematic outlook should give Aldrich a cutting edge status with
European observers. As a filmmaker, Aldrich always came straight on,
usually with more visual style than Ray, more raw energy than Fuller, and
more social consciousness than Losey.

Aldrich's films concentrate on the most basic situation: man attempting to

survive in a hostile universe. Like most filmmakers, Aldrich uses and
reuses such general devices as narrative tension between subjective and
objective viewpoints and the frustration or fulfillment of the audience's
genre expectations. In order to survive, certain Aldrich heroes can be more
consistently vicious, self-centered and cynical than any villain. Christina's
assessment of Hammer - "You're the kind of person that has only one true
love: you" - in Kiss Me Deadly is echoed in the admission by Zarkan in
The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968): "I'm not sick, I'm in love...with me."
Others like Massai in Apache, Joe Costa in Attack! (1956), and Phil Gaines
in Hustle (1975) are driven by an irreducible and essentially idealistic
personal code. In following it, their behavior becomes even more extreme
than either Hammer's or Zarkan's. Characters who are in narrative terms
antagonists, like Joe Erin in Vera Cruz (1954) and Karl Wirtz in Ten
Seconds to Hell (1959), reflect on and try to explain their compulsive
destructiveness by telling essentially the same story: learning from and
eventually murdering a father figure who had taught them to look out for
number one.

In films such as these,

the presence of a ruthless
pragmatism in one of the
two principals would
normally promise a clear-
cut alignment into hero
and villain, into Erin
versus Ben Trane, Wirtz
versus Eric Koertner,
black versus white. The
actual result is
The doomed bomb squad of German veterans in
Ten Seconds to Hell (from left to right): Eric ambiguous. Each film is
Koertner (Jack Palance), Wirtz (Jeff Chandler), less than absolute in its
Sulke (Wesley Addy), Tillig (David Willock), Loeffler definition of a moral man
(Robert Cornthwaite), and Globke (Jimmy yet is absolute in its
Goodwin). definition of morality. In
Vera Cruz and Ten Seconds to Hell, the protagonist does finally defeat the
antagonist; but the triumph is more societal than personal. In The Flight of
the Phoenix (1966) and Too Late the Hero (1970), the moral distinctions
among the members of a group are so finely drawn that the chance or
haphazard manner deciding which of them live and which die constitutes
the pervasive irony of the films. As Major Reisman counsels the prisoner
Wladislaw early in The Dirty Dozen (1967), innocence or guilt, reward or
condemnation, are purely matters of circumstance. "You only made one
mistake," he says, pausing by the cell door and grinning back at the man
sentenced to death, "you let somebody see you do it."

In this sense, Aldrich is a rigorous determinist. His fables about bands of

outsiders remain remarkably consistent across generic lines. Attack!, Ten
Seconds to Hell, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, Too Late the
Hero, Ulzana's Raid (1972), The Longest Yard (1974), and Twilight's Last
Gleaming (1977), adventure films, war films, and Westerns - all isolate a
group of men in a specific, self-contained and threatening universe. The
core plots are diverse: soldiers behind enemy lines; a bomb disposal unit in
post-World War II Berlin; passengers on a plane down in the Sahara;
inmates of a prison; ex-convicts in a missile silo. Yet in each situation, the
characters undergo the same, inexorable moral reduction. And often both
the idealists and the cynics - the social extremists - perish.

Usually, these conflicts are between men and nature and between men and
other men. All three war films as well as The Flight of the Phoenix and
Ulzana's Raid have effectively no women characters at all. In The Longest
Yard and The Choirboys (1977), the restricted perspective of convicts and
cops respectively reduces women to objects, and unattractive ones at that.
In the few films that do focus entirely on them, The Killing of Sister
George (1968), What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) or
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(1964), many of the women
are deviate or psychotic.
Notably, Baby Jane and Sister
George are performers,  
personas behind which some
women retreat in a male-
dominated society. Even more
notably, Frennessey in World June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) without her
for Ransom (1954) and the   "Sister George" costume in The Killing of
title character in The Legend Sister George
of Lylah Clare are also performers and bisexuals. For both, Lesbianism is
an alternative to the men who love them obsessively and want desperately
to control their behavior. The societal assumptions which make
relationships between men and women so difficult are most clearly
addressed - and left unresolved - in Hustle. The man is too alienated to
make a commitment; the woman is forced to separate sex from love by
working as a prostitute. For Aldrich, the gender of his protagonists was less
important than their struggle: a film is only "'masculine' in the sense that it
was done by a majority of masculine players. In theory, it was supposed to
be metaphorical. In practice, it wasn't that important." (6) Beyond
Westerns and war films, Aldrich's films have a generic breadth matched by
few other filmmakers. Aldrich's work ranges widely from the self-
described "classy soap opera" Autumn Leaves (1956) to the "sex and sand
epic" Sodom and Gomorrah (1963) to the "desperately important" political
thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming. In between, there are a few comedies and
several noir films, as well as the occasional psychological melodrama and
the neo-Gothic. There are prison pictures, cop pictures, sports pictures, and
pictures about people who make pictures. The interior consistency of
theme and style in Aldrich's films resists classification according to genre.
Erin and Wirtz recount their twisted, nearly identical histories in the
context of an adventure Western and a return-from-the-war melodrama
respectively. Zarkan is a retired film director, Hammer is a private
detective: yet their self-love, their egocentric disdain for the lives and
feelings of others, and their inability to rectify this attitude even when
presented with second chances are traits which mark them as sibling
personalities from radically different genre backgrounds.

Aldrich's visualization
also transcends the
conventions of genre.
Strong side lighting, the
camera placed in an
  unusually high or low
position, foreground
clutter, and staging in
depth appear as
frequently in his
Westerns, war pictures,
Velda (Maxine Cooper) helps the wounded neo-Gothic thrillers, even
Hammer (Ralph Meeker) escape the beach house in his television work,
in the explosive ending of Kiss Me Deadly (one of
the scenes missing from most copies of the film
  not just where they might
until the 1997 restoration--see Web Resources
be expected in a '50s film
below for more on this) noir like Kiss Me Deadly
or the richly colored
frames of a Hollywood melodrama like The Legend of Lylah Clare.
Transmuting and expressing in sensory terms the physical and emotional
make-up of the situation, of the characters caught in these frames, remains
the basic dynamic of an Aldrich picture regardless of genre. Aldrich's
camera may capture a figure crouching behind a lamp, like Charlie Castle
in The Big Knife, or lurking at the edge of a pool of light, like Lily Carver
in Kiss Me Deadly. Grimacing faces or dark objects will suddenly intrude
into the foreground of medium long shots, disturbing previously flaccid
compositions, possibly in anticipation of a violent turn in plot events.
Recurring high angle medium shots peer down from behind ceiling
ventilators in every type of film, World for Ransom, The Angry Hills
(1959), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Too Late The Hero, so that the
dark blades slowly rotating above the characters' heads become an ominous
shorthand for the tension whirring incessantly inside them. Conversely, the
hissing sound of man's life leaking out in Kiss Me Deadly or a postmortem
burst of gunfire in Attack! become objective correlatives to the dissipation
of the audience's tension. In a subjective manner, the characters sometimes
"choose" to situate themselves within the frame. For the guilt-ridden
Charles Castle, the lamps about the room have a symbolic value which
unconsciously draw him back to them again and again. Or characters may
be placed objectively: Lily Carver at the edge of the light in Kiss Me
Deadly is simultaneously in a figurative darkness appropriate to her mental
state.

Even an off-beat, particular icon, such as a ceiling fan, can become a

variable metaphor. In World for Ransom the slowly turning overhead
blades in the room where Mike Callahan is interrogated by an underworld
figure are not only a
distracting influence at
the frame's center but
cast multiple shadows on
the surrounding walls.
This de-focuses the
reading of the shot away  
from the human figures
to create a visual
confusion equivalent to
Callahan's mixed
emotions. In The Angry
Hills, a crane down to
eye level from an Frennessey (Marian Carr) and her obsessed lover
  Mike Callahan (Dan Duryea) in World for Ransom.
opening position behind a
similar fan diminishes the object's importance as a distraction and suggests
an unwinding, an impending détente rather than a knotting up of plot
events. In both these pictures, Aldrich adapts the photographic styles of
film noir to make specific visual statements about characters and events. In
Callahan's initial movements through the somber streets, alleys, and
stairwells of Singapore, angle and editing shift the wedges of light and the
dim boundaries of narrow passageways as if he were traveling through a
dark maze, anticipating for the audience the uncertainty of his actual,
emotional condition. From early films as narratively diverse as Attack!,
Autumn Leaves and The Angry Hills, Aldrich's characteristic low light and
side light cast long shadows on interior walls and floors and form
rectangular blocks to give the frame a severe, constricting geometry which
can symbolise the director's moral determinism.

While Aldrich's definition of milieu may be superficially realist - must be

so, in fact, as the overall context of the films themselves is superficially
realist - selection of detail is the most readily applicable method by which
figurative meaning may be injected. In The Legend of Lylah Clare, the
contrast between Barney Sheean's office and Lewis Zarkan's home,
between autographed black and white photos of various stars on the walls
and lustrous oil paintings of Lylah, between evenly distributed fluorescent
light on flat white surfaces and candelabras glistening off the broken
texture of wood paneling - all this is not merely a contrast of setting, but of
sensibility as well. Both are established within a stylised conception of
"producer's office" and "director's home" that is ambivalent, being both
serious and satirical, descriptive and analytical. Subject/object split when
viewing reality, genre preconceptions, and sensory input are all in play.
Decor and camera angle inform character, character affects angle and
decor; and the recognition of type reconciles or estranges the audience to
the aptness or inaptness of these interactions.

If there is an indisputable cynicism in Aldrich's presentation of figures like

Zarkan and Sheean, it is bifocal, acting as both authorial opinion and
authorial conjecture of what the world's opinion of such men might be. If
there is any vulgarity in the way they are presented, it is less a formal
deficiency than an appropriate reflection of the lifestyle in which they are
trapped. Ultimately, characterization and caricature, like all of Aldrich's
thematic and stylistic components, refocus on the basic question: survival.

In Hustle, Lt. Phil Gaines' partner

remarks as the two watch
pornographic home movies
featuring a suicide victim that her
action was rash because "her
 
survival wasn't threatened."
Gaines's reply is: "It depends on
how you define survival."
Reflecting this personal belief,
Aldrich's judgment of Ben Trane
Lt. Costa (Jack Palance), Sgt. Tolliver or Eric Koertner, of Zarkan or
(Buddy Ebsen) and Pfc. Bernstein (Robert Joe Costa is more severe than the
Strauss) observe a possible enemy
 
position in Attack!
judgment he passes on characters
less idealistic or with less sense
of honor. The former are foolish enough to place their faith in societal
institutions, which collapse around them or betray them. They repress
personal values for the vaguely postulated good of society at large; their
disillusionment and sometimes fatal alienation is the price that must be
paid. Not that the "mealy-mouthed" compromisers from the self-
immolating Charlie Castle to the craven Captain Cooney in Attack! fare
any better. Aldrich and most of his heroes are caught in a dichotomy
between natural and artificial, between chaotic and ordered, between
instinctual and institutionalised conduct that impels the unaware or
unprepared into indecision and that can short-circuit a saving or creative
act into an impotent or deadly one. The ending of Ten Seconds to Hell is a
montage of the introductory close-ups of the men of the unit intercut with
shots of the rebuilt city. A quick reading might be that those who died did
so meaningfully, for a reconstructive purpose. The conclusion of Ten
Seconds to Hell is echoed in The Dirty Dozen which uses similar shots of
the commando unit at the dinner celebration before the mission that will
kill most of them. The same reiteration of the "male unit" takes place in the
end credits of The Choirboys.

"What really gets you is the idea that maybe you're wrong" is the
accusation aimed at Frank Towns in The Flight of the Phoenix. It could be
hurled at many other Aldrich heroes as well. Trane and Koertner, Towns
and Lt. DeBuin in Ulzana's Raid survive their mistakes and misjudgments.
For others, the rectification of error comes too late. For none is it easily
accomplished. Being wrong is not a moral deficiency in Aldrich's work. It
neither mitigates nor insures salvation. What it does is make the
"offenders" into outsiders, because, as Reisman tells Wladislaw, it is
getting caught, not being wrong, that creates the violation of acceptable
social conduct. When circumstances put the protagonist in an untenable
situation, any solution is permitted. What separates the amoral Hammer
from the self-righteous Costa are not just personal codes of conduct. Each
protagonist also has an experiential notion of how society will react to his
behavior, whether it will validate or condemn it. That is what separates
Reisman from Wladislaw.

"Pilot error" is what Frank Towns ultimately enters into his log as the
cause of the crash in Flight of the Phoenix. Most of Aldrich's films, in their
own genre contexts and particular plots, are explorations of the
infrastructure of error. What each makes progressively clearer is the
conditional limitations of attributing blame. A frustrated Towns takes
solace in his bitter and defensive accusations of Moran: "If you hadn't
made a career of being a drunk, if you hadn't stayed in your bunk to have
that last bottle, you might have checked that engineer's report and we
might not be here." Blaming another gives way gradually to the resignation
of Fenner in The Grissom Gang (1971), McIntosh in Ulzana's Raid, or
Crewe in The Longest Yard. Some early characters like Koertner anticipate
the grim assessment of McIntosh in Ulzana's Raid: "Ain't no sense hating
the Apaches for killing, Lieutenant. That'd be like hating the desert 'cause
there ain't no water on it." This is a conscious expression of the capricious
causality at work in Aldrich's pictures. For the reasons for the crash in the
Sahara in The Flight of the Phoenix are as arbitrary, as free of pure
causality, as the military assignments in Too Late the Hero or Ulzana's
Raid.

From Mike Callahan's

rejection by the perverse
and aptly named
Frennessey in World for
Ransom through the
fatalistic freeze-frames at  
the end of The Legend of
Lylah Clare and The
Grissom Gang to
Gaines's offhanded death
in Hustle, the one
constant in Aldrich's
work is that ultimately no   Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is Kiss Me Deadly's
quester with no qualms about violence.
one is untouched by the
savagery of the surrounding world. For those who expose the more visceral
layers of their psyche to it, the risk is intensified. It is not merely
annihilation but also, what may be worse, a descent into an unfulfilled,
insensate existence. If, in the final analysis, Aldrich's sympathy resides
most with individuals who are anti-authoritarian, with anti-heroes like
Reisman in The Dirty Dozen or Crewe in The Longest Yard, it resides there
because these are persons who survive. They survive by resolving all the
conflicting impulses of nature and society, of real and ideal, of right and
wrong, in and through action.

© Alain Silver, April 2002

  

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Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

b. December 11, 1928, Havana, Cuba
d. April 16, 1996, Havana, Cuba

by Julia Levin  

Julia Levin is a freelance writer on film. She came to the

United States from Baltic States, Latvia, at the age of 22
and studied Film Studies at University of California at
Santa Barbara. She now lives in New York City.

filmography       bibliography       articles in Senses       web resources

The films of Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea give insight into how the Cuban
revolution that had inspired so many people all over the world had come to a crisis. His
films always defined the limits of expression in revolutionary Cuba (1). Unlike any other
Cuban filmmaker, Alea was able to retain a sophisticated balance between his dedication
to the revolution and his critical judgement of it when its ideals had been betrayed.

Throughout his career, Alea constantly upheld his personal vision and never put his
critical eyes to rest. “To view and study Alea's films is to see revolutionary Cuba through
the eyes of the island nation's most important and consistently critical filmmaker,” says
Paul Schroeder. (2) What's more, the lively and complex ways Alea's films depict life in
revolutionary Cuba defeat the stereotype of communist art as dull propaganda. In films
such as Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and
Guantanamera (1994), Alea describes life in Cuba in subtle, often comic ways.
Artistically and intellectually, the trajectory of Cuban cinema – from cinéma vérité to
experimentalism, and from neorealist drama to social comedy – has paralleled the
trajectory of Alea's directorial career. Similarly, Alea's films are a primary source of
cultural politics in revolutionary Cuba, a fact that allows one to study his films directly
against the political climate in which he lived and worked. Through his films, Alea
focused on speaking frankly about the course of Cuban revolution and its effect on the
future of Cuba. From his first feature film, Stories of the Revolution (1960), to his last,
Guantanamera (1994), Alea was able to explore his own complicated relationship with
Cuban revolution: while working within the system, he always criticised its
shortcomings, insisting on public discourse.
The most famous Cuban director (and certainly the most beloved by his fellow
countrypeople) Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (known to his close friends and colleagues as
Titón) was born on December 11, 1928 to a bourgeois, politically progressive family.
Persuaded by his father, he went to study law, although his personal interests gravitated
toward cultural and political issues. Upon graduating with a law degree from University
of Havana, he studied film at the Centro Sperimentale della Cinematographia in Rome
(which had spawned, amongst others, Michelangelo Antonioni), where he fell in love
with cinema and where he directed his first neorealist film, El Mégano (1954), (3) with
Julio Garcia Espinosa, another filmmaker he met at Centro Sperimentale. It has been
noted that this film marked the very beginning of the New Latin American Cinema, the
'new wave' in cinema that grew out of the desire by many Latin American filmmakers to
unveil the conflicting realities of their own countries and to do this by exploring the
political potential of the filmic medium (4). Alea was one of the founders of the Instituto
Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), which was created in 1959 in
order to vigorously produce and promote cinema as the most progressive vehicle for
communicating the ideas of the revolutionary through, for the most part, documentaries,
although some fiction films were made there
as well. The ICAIC recognised film as the
most powerful and important art form in
modern life, a voice of the state, and,
unquestionably, the most accessible form of
distributing revolutionary ideas to the masses.
In its first 24 years, ICAIC produced nearly  
900 documentaries and over 112 feature
films.

In his early filmmaking days, having a

distinctive personal voice, being an auteur in
the European sense of the word, meant a lot   Death of a Bureaucrat
less to Alea than belonging to this
conceptually new and collectively important film project with national weight and
significance. Over the years, he has evinced a fondness for both historical and
contemporary stories, always marked by politically pointed commentary and a satirical
twist that many critics noted as influenced by the films of Luis Buñuel. An ardent
supporter of the revolution that dispatched the despotic Batista and brought Castro to
power, Alea nevertheless had an uneasy relationship with the political regime of the
revolutionary Cuba under Castro. Repeatedly in his work, the director painted a more
complex portrait of Cubans than the rest of the world was able to imagine. He made some
gutsy critiques of the socioeconomic and political realities of his land, as he pondered the
persistence of a petty-bourgeois mentality in a society supposedly dedicated to the plight
of the working poor.

From the beginning Alea was committed to using film as an instrument of social
awareness, and Neorealism, with its desire to expose the true face of the working poor,
was a perfect stylistic vehicle for such exploration. His first feature work, Stories of the
Revolution, was not necessary a successful one but rather a telling tale about the
traumatising and inequitable effect revolution had on society. The film depicted the
official history of the revolution and, following the traditions of Neorealism, used non-
professional actors and was shot on actual locations to bring about the prosaic realities of
every day life. The weakness of Stories, however, is that its narrative structure was rather
diluted, and the overall tone of the film, oscillating between epic and drama without
being either, didn't amount to the film's success.

After producing a series of shorts while working for a Mexican-owned film production
company, Alea decided to take a break from making documentaries to dedicate himself to
an entirely new genre – comedy – as it gave him a chance to experiment with narrative
and comic technique. His next film, Twelve Chairs (1962), was based on a satirical novel
of the same name by two Soviet writers, Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov (5). The zest of the
story comes from its ridiculing of the challenges of a new, socialist order: when a wealthy
woman resists the thought of giving her possessions to the collective, she hides her
treasures in twelve chairs of a dining set. Her nephew finds out about it after her death,
when everything has become nationalised, and starts chasing the chairs all over the
country. Alea, combining new comic and narrative tropes, decided to alter the original
story and had the protagonist embrace a new, socialist reality at the end of his tumultuous
search, thus demonstrating Alea's own belief in revolutionary ideas. Despite the criticism
it received at the time (Alea was criticised for having created his characters too
schematic), the film is significant as “an example of socialist realism because it presents
in a very direct way a critical moment for our society, a moment of transition when one
can observe very clearly the fight between the old and the new” (6).

In his next film Death of a Bureaucrat, Alea continued experimenting with the comic
genre. This black comedy criticises, at an early point in the Castro regime, the
administrative muddle of the political system. The main protagonist's uncle dies and asks
to be buried with his identification card. However, the uncle's wife must present the card
in order to receive her husband's pension. What follows is a series of darkly comic
adventures that nearly drive the nephew mad, and
culminate in a hilarious scene in which the desperate
nephew, in one of his futile attempts to secure the
pension, strangles the main bureaucrat at the cemetery.
The film's stylistic exuberance pays tribute to a variety
of cinematic styles and quotes from the masterpieces
of cinema. Paul Schroeder notes that “in the film, there
are direct visual quotes of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last
  in the clock sequence, of Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars
in the final sequence, of Buñuel's Un Chien andalou
and Bergman's Wild Strawberries in two different
flash dreams, and of Chaplin's Modern Times in the
opening sequence” (7).

Alea's next film was to join these masterpieces of the

world cinema itself.
  Memories of Underdevelopment Memories of Underdevelopment is based on Edmundo
Desnoe's novel Inconsolable Memories. The story takes place during a transitory period
in Cuba, between the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,
events to which the film makes direct reference by using fragments of newsreels,
recording of speeches, filming with hidden camera (8). Alea made full use of the
handheld camera technique in addition to voiceover, which, despite the protagonist's
moral ambiguity, give the film a remarkable level of unity and completeness.

Without any particular political affiliations of his own, Sergio, a well-off intellectual,
becomes increasingly self-absorbed and alienated from the world around him when, at
the onset of the revolution, his wife and friends leave Havana. Meandering the streets of
the city at this “time of departure”, Sergio, while considering his countrymen
“underdeveloped” in order to satisfy his intellectual quest to become a writer, is
confronted with his own inability in self-realisation. Aesthetically, Memories resembles
the early-'60s work of Antonioni. Its mood, conveying the characters' labyrinth of moral
ambiguity and detachment and the use of long, isolating camera takes gazing at deserted
streets and characters' faces, are all key elements of the Italian director's oeuvre.

Although Alea had touched upon many aspects of Cuban society – the dual nature of its
political regime, the identification of the individual, collective consciousness (“Cubans
need someone to think for them,” says Sergio), and the battle of the sexes, a theme he
will later discuss in his two other landmark films, Up to a Certain Point (1984) and
Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) – audiences were disturbed by the portrayal of a
noncommittal individual who was only concerned with himself, his thoughts and the
search for sexual gratification. Perhaps they were not prepared for a film of such calibre?
The sophistication, the mood and the inner voice of the film (Sergio's thoughts and
experiences as he is confronted by the new reality) are surprisingly European. Sergio is
portrayed fundamentally as an alienated outsider – an approach that allows Alea to make
an almost sceptical statement about the individual's place in the march of history. The
film would not have been as effective had Alea not constructed it as richly as he did – by
using documentary and semi-documentary footage to show the reality around Sergio as
he witnesses it. This renders the film very personal, and is employed as a backdrop to the
political reality in Havana, giving the film its philosophical, ruminative touch.

The level of narrative and stylistic sophistication Alea achieved with Memories of
Underdevelopment ensured many contradictory readings of the film. One critic read it as
“a demystification of bourgeois individualism particularly effective in the film because of
the dramatic social cataclysm that frame the narrative and ultimately render Sergio's
individualism obsolete” (9). Other critics, however, read the film as a critique of the
revolution and, overall, the most inappropriate subject matter for the progressive Cuban
cinema. To this Alea responded that the film was not only aiming to depict Sergio and his
like as endangered species. It also addressed those obstetricians of culture who:
…have believe themselves to be the sole depository of the revolutionary legacy;
those who know what the socialist morality is and who have institutionalized
mediocrity and provincialism… They are those who tell us that people are not
mature enough to know the truth…This film is also directed to them, and is also
intended, among other things, to annoy them, to provoke them, to irritate them
 (10).
I think the term “underdevelopment” refers not only to the struggling Cuban economy at
that time or its period of transition as much as it shows Sergio's inability to connect to
people and things, to make the connection between himself and society.

The next chapter in Alea's career opened up for him a new area of exploration: the
historical film. The reason many Cuban filmmakers turned to historical dramas instead of
making films dedicated to contemporary events is that the ICAIC switched the focus to
historical films when the political atmosphere acquired distinctive oppressive undertones
(Cuba supported Czechoslovakia's invasion by the Soviet Union and the closure of the
University of Havana's Department of Philosophy). The period that followed the vibrant
1960s has become known as the ”grey” years during which Cuban art lost its vitality (11).
For this reason, Alea turned to mapping out Cuban history and made A Cuban Fight
Against Demons (1972), a film in which he traced the precursor of the Cuban Revolution
when, in 1672, Cuba fought against Spanish control. In The Last Supper (1976), Alea
also portrayed Cuba's ambivalent attitude toward slavery.

Once Memories of Underdevelopment was completed, Alea envisioned making a film

about an individual committed to the revolution, instead of a brooding, self-absorbed one.
He eventually turned the lens onto himself and made Up to a Certain Point (1984), a film
that is fundamentally a love story between a
middle-age documentary filmmaker and a young
single mother working in the docks of Havana.
The film effectively examines the psychological
split between the dynamic ideas of revolution and
the reality of social order. The production was  
preceded by the publication of Alea's critical
study, Dialectica del espectado , in which he
outlined how the ICAIC should have responded to
the changing demands of the revolutionary
societal process.   Last Supper

Up to a Certain Point follows a group of documentary filmmakers who are shooting a

film about Cuban machismo in the docks of Havana. While researching this project,
Oscar, a married, middle-aged screenwriter, meets Lina, an independent young
dockworker. Their ensuing romance and its subsequent finale are reminiscent of that in
Memories of Underdevelopment, further dissecting the questions of liberation and
bourgeois intellectualism. Without realising it, Oscar is the same man himself as the
dockworkers he is portraying in his film. It is probable that Oscar represents Alea – just
as Sergio could very easily stand in for the director. By turning himself in for such
examination, Alea not only possibly admits to being as sexist as the men he depicts in his
documentary, but, more importantly, is not afraid to make a statement about the
pretensions and contradictions of Cuban society. Stylistically, the film is engaged in
portraying clearly defined boundaries between social classes – through the use of music,
language, and gesture. There is also a second subtext in the film, akin to an almost
Godardian parallel between life and work, and the societal co-dependency between
people's personal and private lives.
The representation of several character types is very important to the film. Arturo, the
director whom Oscar consults and the one who represents a self-righteous stereotype of a
bureaucrat is depicted as yet another “macho”. It is perhaps people like Arturo that Alea
provoked in Memories of Underdevelopment. The female character Lina is developed a
lot more carefully and thoroughly than Elena, with whom Sergio was having a fling in
Memories. Lina is the embodiment of revolutionary consciousness (she actively
participates in workers' meetings), and she rebukes the persistent machismo of Cuban
men: she choose to divorce her husband and decided to remain independent when
realizing that Oscar is not the man for her.

In 1994, Strawberry and Chocolate

became the first Cuban film to receive
an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign
Film. This is not the first film to
examine the often-contradictory
concepts of art and propaganda, but the
  balanced perspective presented here
instils the issue with freshness. In my
opinion, this film is perhaps the best
example of Alea's mature style,
precisely because it exemplifies the
director's approach to creating a film as
  Strawberry and Chocolate a process in which the relationship
between director and the actors amounts
to the film's success.

The story, set in 1979, concerns the relationship that gradually develops between the
flamboyantly gay Diego and a very young, politically committed university student,
David. David feels threatened by Diego's openly frank homosexuality as much as he is
threatened by what he senses could be Diego's rejection of revolutionary ideas. The
official ideology in Cuba in the 1970s focused on the importance of ideological unity
amongst Cuban people, which ruled out any precedent of “false intellectuals” who
promote snobbism, extravagance, homosexuality or any other form of social aberration
(12). At first, Diego is an example of such aberration for David, but gradually, the naive
and uncompromising student learns that Diego is not a “false intellectual” but an
authentic, thinking, well-educated artist. Even though in the course of the film it is David
who undergoes a major emotional transformation, Diego is the main focus and
protagonist of the film. He is complex and charismatic, religious (he admits to believing
in Jesus) but committed to the ideas of the revolution in his own personal ways.

The union between Diego and David reveals, in many instances, Alea's attitude toward
Marxism-Leninism as an official Castro ideology at that time. With his liberal, eccentric,
tolerant and cosmopolitan views, Diego is a lot more attractive than naive David, whose
head is filled with rigid socialist ideology. Even the contrast between the cramped,
stifling dormitory room David shares with another ardent student and Diego's spacious,
bohemian, and book- and record-filled flat challenges the appeal of Marxist-Leninist
ideals.

The acting style and character development is essential in Alea's work, and this fact
becomes increasingly evident in the director's late films. Although Alea always used
carefully prepared scripts, improvisation during shooting was encouraged. The filmmaker
had developed a group of staple actors who had come to realise his fondness for Cubans,
their country, their travails, sadness, and joy. Among those, Alea's wife Mirta Ibarra, and
Jorge Perugorria deserve special mention. Perugorria's portrayal of Diego in Strawberry
and Chocolate is almost hypnotising – so believably responsive, vulnerable, and sensual
it is. Ibarra is an actress of luminous, smiling, feminine talent, as is evident in her
portrayal of Lina in Up to a Certain Point, Georgina, the long-suffering wife of a local
bureaucrat named Adolfo in Guantanamera, and the sometimes suicidal, sometimes
comically religious and sometimes irresistibly naive former prostitute, put out of work by
the revolution, in Strawberry and Chocolate.

The most recurring theme in Alea's films has been the intellectual defining his place in
the revolutionary society: Memories of Underdevelopment, Up to a Certain Point, and
Strawberry and Chocolate are all united by this idea. Alea's films are complex and open
to interpretation. His critiques drew on satire and irony, and they succeeded because of
his profound understanding of human nature, its strengths and frailties. Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea brought an unprecedented vitality and exuberance to Cuban cinema, rich with ideas
and interpretations, to create an often contradictory, complex connective tissue of life in
Cuba. Portraying everyday life and ordinary people, he was able to endow them with all
the eccentricities of the world, yet they never appear cheesy or cliché. Alea's films
provide curious insights into conformity and freedom, maturity and stagnancy, the
political and personal, and sanity and drama as inextricable components of a thick and
vivifying whole, that being life.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

© Julia Levin, May 2003

Filmography
El faquir (1947)

La caperucita roja (1947)

Una confusión cotidiana (1950)

Il sogno de Giovanni Bassain (1953)

El mégano (1955)

Esta tierra nuestra (1959)

Stories of the Revolution (Historias de la revolución) (1960)

General Assembly (Asamblea general) (1960)

Death to the Invader (Muerte al invasor) (1961)

Twelve Chairs (Las doce sillas) (1962)

Cumbite (1964)

Death of a Bureaucrat (Muerte de un burócrata) (1966)

Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) (1968)

Cuban Fight Against Demons (Una pelea cubana contra los demonios) (1972)

El arte del tabaco (1974)

El camino de la mirra y el incienso (1975)

Last Supper (La última cena) (1976)

La sexta parte del mundo (1977)

One Way or Another (De cierta manera)

(1977)

The Survivors (Los sobrevivientes)

(1979)
 
Up to a Certain Point (Hasta cierto
punto) (1984)

Letters from the Park (Cartas del

parque) (1988)

Far Apart (Contigo en la distancia)

(1991)   Guantanamera

Strawberry and Chocolate (Fresa y chocolate) (1993)

Guantanamera (1994)

Bibliography
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Dialectica del espectador (The Viewer's Dialectic), La Habana, José Martí
Publishing House, 1982, reprinted 1988.

Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, Conversations with Filmmakers,
University of Texas Press, November 1993.

Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 1985.

Michael Chanan, Thomas Gutiérrez Alea: Memories of Underdevelopment and Inconsolable

Memories, Rutgers Films in Print, New Jersey, 1990.

Zuzana M. Pick & Thomas G. Schatz, The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project,
Texas Film Studies Series, University of Texas Press, 1993.

Paul A. Schroeder, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: The Dialectics of a Filmmaker, Routledge University
Press, 2002.

Click here to search for Tomás Gutiérrez Alea DVDs, videos and books at

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 Woody Allen
b. Allen Stewart Konigsberg
b. December 1, 1935, Brooklyn, New York, USA

by Victoria Loy  

Victoria Loy wrote about Dogme95 and surrealism for

her MA dissertation at Sydney University. She is
interested in emerging paradigms in film criticism.

filmography       bibliography      articles in Senses       web resources

Is Woody Allen a misanthrope?

[The universe is] haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent

–September (1986)

In 2002 Woody Allen received the prestigious Palme des Palmes, the Cannes
Film Festival's lifetime achievement award. His career spans five decades and
has earned him fourteen Academy Award nominations and three Oscars
personally; his cast and crew have won six Academy Awards. Allen has won
eight BAFTA (British Academy of Film) awards and his films have
consistently won prizes and acclaim from the New York and Chicago Film
Critics Circles, the Writers Guild of America, the Cesar Awards in France and
the Bodils in Denmark. His films are taught in the departments of philosophy
as well as film in universities in Europe and North America (1). Apart from the
substantial body of feature film work (over thirty films with director and/or
screenplay credits) Allen has written numerous plays and short stories. In 2002
Time film critic Richard Schickel produced Woody Allen: A Life in Film for
the 'Turner Classic Movies' station on cable television.

He has continually downplayed the notion of congruity between himself and

his filmic persona but Allen is definitely an auteur, serving as director,
screenwriter and star of most of his films. He regularly employs the same key
crew – cinematographers Sven Nyquist, Gordon Willis and Carlo DiPalma;
producer Jean Doumanian, and of course his actors, among them Mia Farrow,
Diane Keaton, Dianne Weist, Judy Davis and Alan Alda. In a circumstance
unusual for Hollywood cinema, Allen wields a notoriously tight control over
all aspects of his work – casting, writing, shooting and editing – and, beyond
this, is so exalted that he is not required to submit a script for studio approval.
After a disastrous experience on 1965's What's New, Pussycat? (which he
wrote but felt he lost control of during shooting) Allen has demanded and
received virtual autonomy (2).
In her review of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) the late film critic Pauline
Kael suggests that the reason New York critics love Woody Allen is that
“they're applauding their fantasy of themselves” (3). In some of his films,
including Stardust Memories (1980) and Deconstructing Harry (1997) Allen
has explored being a prisoner of his own persona (whilst denying the likeness).
Although the persona secured Allen a loyal audience, he has fallen in and out
of favour with the film community partly, as Kael suggests, because of his
appeal to the urbane quasi-intellectuals who critique cinema; a familiarity that
has over time moved from intimate to contemptuous. Too often in recent years
'criticism' of Woody Allen's films has virtually forsaken content wherever it
does not fit into a discussion of what seems to have become more important:
his scandalous personal life (4).

With his strong background in writing, Allen's films, particularly the broadly
comic ones, are dialogue-
heavy (which Allen feels is
more challenging than a
film without dialogue). He
works frequently with
master shots and actor
choreography, a technique  
more successfully realised
in say Husbands and Wives
(1992) than in Mighty
Aphrodite (1996). Despite a
widely perceived decline in
the ambition and   Mighty Aphrodite
accomplishment of his films
in the last decade he remains a key figure in the American film landscape.
Both academic and popular film criticism on Allen most often employs
psychoanalytic theory, as his subject matter corresponds easily to the Freudian
concepts of desire, repression, and anxiety and sexuality. The thesis of The
Denial of Death (a psychoanalytic text which Alvy buys Annie and reflects on
after they separate in Annie Hall) cites as two strategies of evading mortality –
sexuality, which Allen has embraced wholeheartedly in both his work and life,
and the belief in and service to God, which he has not. Other critics have noted
the parallels with philosophers such as Socrates and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter
with regard to the impossibility of authentic romantic commitment.

***
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I
definitely overpaid for my carpet.
– Selections from the Allen Notebooks'

– You have no values. Your whole life, it's nihilism, it's cynicism, it's
sarcasm, and orgasm.
– Y'know, in France I could run on that slogan and win.
 – Deconstructing Harry

Natasha, to love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But,
then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to
love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be
happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to
be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much
happiness, I hope you're getting this down.
– Love and Death

These quotes encapsulate Allen's philosophy – he undercuts his own existential

angst with absurd humour that provides distraction or comic relief and is in its
own way an answer to these unanswerable questions. It is almost as if he is
sending up the more austere philosophers who formulated these enquiries. His
films are largely comedies – but, as one of his characters maintains, what is
comedy but tragedy, plus time? (5) The spectre of death haunts many of
Allen's films, as thanatos, the essential flipside to the forces of life and love
that are irresistible.
Doc: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Mother: Tell doctor [?] It's something he read.
Doc: Something you read, heh?
Alvy: The universe is expanding.
Doc: The universe is expanding?
Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it
will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Mother(shouting): What is that your business? (to doctor) He stopped
doing his homework.
Alvy: What's the point?
Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in
Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
– Annie Hall

Allen appears fascinated by

the fact that whether or not
we choose to acknowledge it,
death's constant presence is
manifested in the idea of God
  and the possibility of moral
order in the universe, the
afterlife, fate. Throughout his
career he has invested a
scholar's commitment to the
predicament of man in a
doomed universe. For Allen
  Annie Hall these are all inescapable
aspects of humanity and it is
thus our lot to struggle with the paradoxes of desire and morality, freedom and
faith, consummation and reflection. His films explore the perhaps pointless
struggle to achieve resolution. Sometimes it appears, as in Annie Hall (1977),
as the ironic dissatisfaction that comes when a much-yearned for ideal is
attained and the reality is (necessarily) lacking. Play It Again, Sam (Herbert
Ross, 1972) Annie Hall and Manhattan (1979) celebrate, nostalgically, the end
of love. As a psychoanalytic notion nostalgia is a painful return, an uncanny
pathology. In other films like Interiors (1978) Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) death is more patent – a mother
commits suicide, a mistress is murdered in cold blood. The fatal aspect of
romance for Allen is foregrounded. In Love and Death (1975), an earnest but
comic take on the themes of sex, death and the possibility of an afterlife (set
against a nineteenth century Russian literary landscape), Allen's character
Boris cavorts through the woods with the Grim Reaper, both recalling and
parodying the Death figure of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).

Irony and fate, two other aspects of our existential predicament, are recurring
Allen themes. In Bullets Over Broadway (1995), the cultivated protagonist
David Shayne must watch in despair as Cheech, a brusque bodyguard with an
innate feel for dramatic dialogue, improves and champions his play. (Like
Mozart's wretched colleague Salieri in the play/film Amadeus, who interprets
as mockery the irony of God bestowing the gift of genius on one so
'unworthy'.) Mighty Aphrodite (1996) exhibits the theme of fate overtly with an
actual Greek chorus on hand to provide commentary and warn on the danger of
interfering with destiny.

***

As the early films of a comedy writer, Take the Money and Run (1969),
Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973) were largely platforms for slapstick and
the development of signature dialogue,
as well as the evolution of the schlemiel,
a Yiddish comic figure characterised by
timidity, failure and perseverance. Annie
Hall and Manhattan were bittersweet
comical films about the loss of love and
the perversity of pursuing an idea(l) of
 
romantic happiness. The Purple Rose of
Cairo (1985) and Radio Days (1987)
were nostalgic fantasies in which Allen
revelled in period costumes, scenery and
sentiment (6).

Stardust Memories again evoked the   Stallone and Allen in Bananas

nostalgia of old romances, but was also a
more serious commentary on filmmaking. As Annie Hall could be analogous
to Sartre, Stardust Memories is a fantasy, a recognition of mortality in line
with the philosophy of Heidegger. Film director Sandy Bates (played by Allen)
contends with the hostility of critics who feel betrayed by his shift from
comedy to drama. Coming shortly after Interiors, Allen's first overtly dramatic
film, the parallels were evident. The film drew more accusations of narcissism
and self-indulgence, as would Deconstructing Harry (which also centers on an
artist at a still point in his career) but Stardust Memories is lighter and
ultimately more positive (7).

While the films sometimes catalogue the despair of the romantic protagonist
they are, comparatively at least, hopeful. (The exception here is Interiors,
which with its grey seaside location, claustrophobic indoor setting and suicide
was indeed bleak and derided as an overly ponderous Bergman rip-off.)

The schlemiel is a hapless figure and Allen has always been self-deprecatory –
“It figures you've got to hate yourself if you've got any integrity at all” (8) –
but the dissatisfaction seemed more like an aspect of the persona than the
personality. Allen's films in the '90s however have shown the development of a
darker streak, a bitterness without the sweet. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman
perceives this tendency in his review of 1998's Celebrity:
[O]ne would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the
National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.
Whether or not the filmmaker regards the condition of celebrity as a
curse, his meditation on the subject is extraordinarily punishing.
Celebrity is as nasty as Mighty Aphrodite or Deconstructing Harry,
and without the jokes (9).
The film comments upon the essentially empty nature of fame or celebrity. It
portrays those upon whom society has deemed worthy of celebration as stupid,
vain, occasionally violent and basically irrelevant. The film is lacklustre,
betraying the apathy shared by the characters and the filmmaker. It is as if
Allen's lifelong investigation has led to a grim conclusion – man is not worth
bothering about because he is a slave to his own desires who chooses to remain
in the dark; who is if not quite content to flounder in the mire, then too listless
to change.

Crimes and Misdemeanors poses the

 
  Crimes and Misdemeanors
questions: could you get away with
murder? Not just logistically but
privately, in your own conscience?
If you do commit murder and then
prosper, where is God? Although it
contains his usual blend of comedy
and seriousness, Crimes is a darker
Woody Allen film than its
predecessors. It is played mostly as
dramatic realism, shot through
murky shadows by Bergman
cinematographer Sven Nyquist.
Judah (Martin Landau) is a married, wealthy doctor who organises the murder
of his mistress (Anjelica Huston) when she threatens to disrupt his life. At first
he is haunted by guilt but finds that in time he forgets, is able to live normally
again, unburdened by the memory of his horrific crime. Perhaps to emphasise
the senselessness of this situation Allen pairs this story with a subplot
involving a romantic triangle where ultimately, the character who prospers is
the one who seems the least worthy, the one we have been invited to mock and
disdain.

The death of the character Louis Levy in the film is suggestive of Allen's move
towards the philosophical stance of misanthropy. Levy, a professor of
philosophy, is the subject of a documentary that Cliff (played by Allen) is
making. Scenes of his addresses to Cliff's camera present some of the moral
issues the film proffers, for example:
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral
choices. Some are on a grand scale; most of our choices are on lesser
points, but we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are,
in fact, the sum total of our choices.
Levy (and, if we regard him as an auteur, Allen) seems to come to some
resolution:
It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the
indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the
ability to keep trying, and even to find joy, from simple things like the
family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might
understand more.
However Allen's decision to have this particular character commit suicide
perhaps indicates that he (Allen) no longer has faith in reason; that, as another
character in the film comments, systems of belief are futile in the face of lived
experience. Elsewhere Allen has perversely admired reason as a useful
mechanism of denial (10).

Husbands and Wives (1992)

offers further indications of
Allen's disenchantment with
humanity. At the time of the
film's release much was
  made of the close parallels
between the narrative, which
concerns in part an older
man's infatuation with his
young student, and Allen's
personal life, which had
  Husbands and Wives been upset by the revelation
of his affair with his partner
Mia Farrow's adopted daughter. The situation was vindication for those critics
who had long argued that Allen's films were self-indulgent representations of
his own life.

What is remarkable about the film is how joyless it generally is, how
negatively events and people are portrayed. There is a paucity of Allen's
customary comic relief, however rueful, to lighten the tone and instead the
characters seem futile and hopeless. Allen and Farrow play Gabe and Judy
Roth, a Manhattan couple who find their own marriage in crisis when their
friends Jack and Sally (Sidney Pollack and Judy Davis) announce their
separation. Farrow and Allen act and look joyless, weary and old. Farrow's
Judy is angry, fretful and frustrated with her husband – “I don't know why you
ask for my opinion, you don't care about it.” Gabe looks equally care-worn,
and it is not surprising when the bleak-faced couple fret and bicker so much
before sex that they decide to call it off. In this film, unlike earlier films (such
as Play It Again, Sam) nostalgia can't revive romance. Gabe recalls to Judy a
sentimental ride through Central Park in a carriage, in the rain. For him this
symbol of past romance is strong enough to sustain the present but Judy
refuses, saying that memories are not enough.

Apart from a feeling of hopelessness many of the characters have a nasty, cruel
spirit. The narcissistic Sally has no problem, when leaving new lover Michael
to return to Jack, in getting Judy to do the dirty work. Jack, once his self-
delusion about his new partner Sam ends, treats her obnoxiously. His attitude
has always been that she is intellectually inferior but one night, embarrassed by
her earnest defense of astrology at a party, he tells her to shut up and tries to
drag her into the car, then leaves her there while he invades Sally's house and
begs her to take him back. Whilst still married, Jack had been enthusiastically
sleeping with prostitutes and encouraging Gabe to do the same, suggesting that
one girl in particular had “a mouth like velvet”.

Gabe's relationship with the younger Rain (Juliette Lewis) has none of the
innocence of Ike and Tracy's in Manhattan. In that film Allen's Ike saw
himself as the teacher (as did Alvy in Annie Hall); in Husbands and Wives,
although he is her university professor, he cannot assume the role of mentor
privately because she exhibits too much self-awareness. When Rain critiques
his work as being “so retrograde, so shallow” and admonishes him for
idealising a past flame as “powerfully sexual, when in fact she's pitifully sick”,
Gabe turns on her nastily, calling her “a twenty year-old twit”. Their intimacy
doesn't progress past a kiss, as Gabe can't summon up the desire or energy to
justify anything further, or even fool himself into thinking there is any point.
He tells Rain that because it would end badly they should forget it. The
situation is a wearier recapitulation of the Sartrean view of the impossibility of
romantic relationships.
In Deconstructing Harry Allen's perverse pleasure in interrogating the
boundaries of his filmic persona again brought critical focus on the parallels
between Allen and his protagonist Harry Block, a writer who must endure the
wrath of family and friends when he exposes them in his crudely coded
autobiographical stories. For those who subscribe to the idea that Allen's films
are canvases for his own anxieties the film is masochistic flagellation as Harry
is made aware of the intense pain, anger and shame he has brought upon the
people in his life. The wretched unhappiness of the characters is striking, even
when it is represented with twisted humour. Harry explains his situation to a
prostitute – “I'm spiritually bankrupt. I'm empty, I'm frightened…I got no
soul.”

The sexual sensibility in Deconstructing Harry is crass and vulgar; a marked

shift from Allen's usual artlessly bawdy attitude. In one of Block's stories, a
couple who are cheating with each other at a family barbecue are attempting
some kind of intimacy. The woman murmurs wistfully about having the
freedom to be together, and
the man replies "Mmm,
sounds great. Now open
wide”. Allen uses the taboo
term 'cunt' twice in the film,
both times when Harry is  
referring to a woman in his
life. The infrequency with
which the word is deployed
in the mainstream cinema
makes its connotations of
anger and venom more   Deconstructing Harry
distinct.

Allen's doleful Block has dismissed religion as a faction of exclusive clubs that
“tell you who to hate”. He comes to the conclusion that “the truth about our
lives consists of how we choose to distort it”. This position of relativism, of
recognition of the plurality of meaning renders the formulation of an ethical
stance futile (11). If we can continue to read the films as those of an auteur it
seems as if Woody Allen's earlier 'romantic-philosophic' nature has developed
into cynicism, if not misanthropy. Perhaps things that were sublimated at a
safe distance in his art, such as profligate desire (“The best thing is twelve-year
old blond girls, two of them whenever possible”) and how to abide by it (“The
artist creates his own moral universe” (12)) have perforated screen into life.
Instead of seeking change his characters are content to stay put or cannot see
far enough to effect the right sort of changes. His characters no longer find
redeeming pleasure in the small details of life, such as the Sunday breeze and
Dorrie's face in Stardust Memories, or the films of Ingmar Bergman and the
face of Tracy in Manhattan. The fact that we continue to make the same
mistakes and fail to learn has ceased to be so harmlessly amusing to Allen.
In Schickel's documentary, Allen repeatedly and in a rather surreal fashion
utterly rejects the idea that his satires have a target and his persona a referent.
In his film work as well he seems to have backed away from serious inquiry
into human nature and is content to take (still comical) potshots at our foibles –
the nouveau-riche (Small Time Crooks, 2000), the film industry (Hollywood
Ending, 2002) and of course, the inevitable doom of romantic love.

Woody on location

© Victoria Loy, June 2003

Filmography
As director:
What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

Take the Money and Run (1969)

Bananas (1971)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
(1972)

Sleeper (1973)

Love and Death (1975)

Annie Hall (1977)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980)

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Radio Days (1987)

September (1987)

Another Woman (1988)

Oedipus Wrecks (1989) part of New York Stories

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Alice (1990)

Shadows and Fog (1992)

Husbands and Wives (1992)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Bullets Over Broadway (1995)

Mighty Aphrodite (1996)

Everyone Says I Love You (1997)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Celebrity (1998)

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Small Time Crooks (2000)

The Curse of The Jade Scorpion (2001)

Hollywood Ending (2002)

Anything Else (2003)

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Match Point (2005)

Other credits:
What's New, Pussycat? (Clive Donner, 1965) writer and actor

Casino Royale (Val Guest et al, 1967) actor

Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross, 1972) screenplay and actor

King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987) actor

Scenes From a Mall (Paul Mazursky, 1991) actor

Antz (Eric Darnell & Tim Johnson, 1998) voice

Films about Woody Allen:

Wild Man Blues (Barbara Kopple, 1997)

Woody Allen: A Life in Film (Richard Schickle, 2002) made for television

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Michael Almereyda
b. 1960, Overland Park, Kansas, USA

by Jeremiah Kipp  

Jeremiah Kipp has written for Filmmaker Magazine,

Fangoria, MovieMaker Magazine, Shock Cinema and
other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
filmography       bibliography       web resources

What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in

faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like
an angel. In apprehension, how like a God. The beauty of the world. The
paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

So says young prince Hamlet. I like to imagine William Shakespeare's

iconic figure saying these words with a wry smile, approaching the world
and all its people, places, and things within it with a sense of humor.
Certainly, Michael Almereyda did in his screen adaptation of Hamlet
(2000). His handling of the material ebbs and flows with Hamlet's
contradictions, and also becomes representative of this director's
idiosyncratic body of work. Almereyda's films are in a constant state of
zigzag between the intellectual and the emotional, the swift and the
lethargic, the epic and the everyday, the ironic and the sincere. What do
you expect from a guy who went to Harvard, one of the most prestigious
schools in the United States, only to drop out and pursue a career making
motion pictures? Talk about combining the highbrow and the lowbrow.

Almereyda moved to New York, working on a screenplay about the

inventor of modern electricity, Nikola Tesla. That unproduced script
secured him a literary agent and Almereyda went off to Hollywood,
becoming a script doctor for hire. Some of his dialogue remains in Total
Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990), perhaps more so than in his credited work
on a botched sci-fi comedy called Cherry 2000 (Steve De Jarnatt, 1987).
He penned the first draft of Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders,
1991) and scripts for renowned filmmakers Tim Burton and David Lynch.
While this allowed Almereyda the opportunity to meet some of his
contemporaries, he found the screenwriter's trade disenfranchising. The
Lynch and Burton films were never made.

His first attempt at directing was a 35mm short called A Hero in Our Time
(1985), based on the story by Mikhail Lermontov. What resulted was a Los
Angeles film noir starring Dennis Hopper, but one that Almereyda didn't
have the resources to properly finish. He went from that to his wildly
uneven first feature, Twister (1990), a project plagued with difficulties.
This portrait of a dysfunctional family in the Midwest featured an excellent
cast of character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover, Suzy Amis,
Tim Robbins, even a cameo by William S. Burroughs. But it never finds its
visual or metaphorical footing, cursed by an inappropriate soundtrack and
too-quirky characters that rarely feel grounded in emotional reality. It's
more interesting as an entry point for Almereyda, his initial dealings with
the comedy of miscommunication and tragedy of familial struggle that runs
throughout his work.

Unable to raise money for other projects after the Twister debacle,
Almereyda was faced with the reality of scaling back if he wanted to
continue making films. With no budget, no producers, and complete
creative freedom, he drew inspiration from the black-and-white video
diaries of experimental filmmaker Sadie Benning. These lyrical, often
autobiographical short subjects were made for virtually nothing with the
PXL-2000—a $45 Fisher-Price camera intended as a kid's toy, now
discontinued. This portable camera has an incredibly limited depth of field,
the image breaking down into abstractions. But it's also quite flat and
painterly, somehow ideal for dreamy shots of faces and objects that drift in
and out of sharpness.

Almereyda's first hour-long featurette to utilize Pixelvision, Another Girl,

Another Planet (1992), delights in close-ups of blurred activity. The
downtown characters constantly light fresh cigarettes, their matches
causing bright onscreen blurs. Almereyda impishly follows the minutiae of
late night interactions: the fast, hurtling motion of a pinball game, and the
slow momentousness of a young man pushing an ashtray over to a new
girlfriend. Speed and slowness go side by side, or as the title character in
his follow-up film Nadja (1994) says, “Here you feel so many things
rushing together. It all comes alive after midnight.”

As Another Girl, Another Planet's hapless protagonist Bill (Barry

Sherman) thinks back on
relationships with
girlfriends past, the
Pixelvision might be
read as the haziness of
his memory drifting
away from romantic  
love. As the characters
break out into poetic
litanies about pain and
desire (“I wasn't used to
being happy. It was
somehow exhausting,”)
music becomes the tool   Another Girl, Another Planet
to express their feelings. As one relationship crumbles apart, Nick Cave
and the Bad Seed's ferocious “The Mercy Seat” drives hard through the
scene as Bill fiddles with lit matches. During a tender kiss between boy
and girl, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” opines in the background.

The music feels like found art, but lest we get too esoteric Almereyda
undercuts these philosophical monologues and idyllic Pixel-portraits with
wry humor. As the oblivious lovers kiss, their pal (Nic Ratner) sits on the
other end of the same couch. It's that familiar party moment: bored,
smoking, waiting for your friends to finish their smooch so you can talk to
them again. Nothing deflates false sentiment faster than a well-timed gag.
There are more nightlights, cityscapes, party folk, and clever gags in
Nadja, Almereyda's contemporary New York remake of Dracula's
Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936). The count's poor little rich girl
offspring (Elina Lowensohn), drifts through the movie brooding yet
vivacious. Her witty dialogue makes playful use of romantic suffering,
pining away lines like, “I need to simplify my life.” As she drifts through
the somnambulant world of Almereyda, wrapped in a hooded cloak like
one of the Bronte sisters, she's more petulant club kid than bloodsucking
fiend.

Nadja is a vampire film like Jean-Luc

Godard's Alphaville (1965) is science
fiction. Though it embraces genre
  conventions through Gothic imagery,
iridescent black-and-white
photography, fight and flight
  Nadja sequences through the shadowed
streets, and a climactic pursuit to a
Transylvanian castle, Nadja is intended as a comedy. The characters all
seem to be moving at different speeds: Peter Fonda's aging rock star
variation on Van Helsing seems to be wrapped up in his own problems,
babbling about vampire lore and spouting postmodern non-sequitors (“He
was like Elvis in the end,” he mutters, recalling his final battle with a
world-wearied Dracula). Trying to get away from it all are the well
intentioned, struggling lovers Jim and Lucy (Martin Donovan and Galaxy
Craze), who spend most of the movie trapped in a slapstick brain fog from
psychic trauma. Nadja's brother (Jared Harris) spends half the movie in a
near-comatose state while her slave Renfield (Kurt Geary) moves faster
than the camera can keep up with. As the tagline for the movie goes, the
dead travel fast.

The signature shot of Nadja is of Almereyda's party girl vampire gliding

along in the foreground through a long alleyway, while in the background
—running at top speed but hindered by slow motion—are her pursuers.
Almereyda said of this image, “In some ways it encapsulates the feelings
that are at the core of the film, not being able to catch up with the thing
you're pursuing. The faster you run, the farther away it gets.” (1) The
breaking of cinematic time carries through the fight scenes, where
Almereyda seems so bored by the conventions of action films he cuts out
all the fighting. Characters often black out along with the movie, skipping
the violence only to wake up afterwards in unlikely places, like Van
Helsing awakening under the lid of a piano. His befuddled look seems to
say, “How did this happen? Ah, well.”

There's also the incorporation of Pixelvision as a “vampire's eye view”,

taking us out of traditional film stock into a more surreal, otherworldly
way of seeing. Cutting back and forth, often within the same scene,
becomes jarring and keeps the viewer slightly disoriented. It's fitting style
for the supernatural film—and also for the self-imposed dreaminess of
falling in love, or even the giddy confusion of excessive drinking. It's the
language of dreams, or daydreams, or maybe madness. (As if to tip his hat
to his executive producer and fellow dream weaver, Almereyda gives
David Lynch a cameo as a morgue security guard.)

While Nadja played at the Sundance Film Festival, Almereyda

preoccupied himself with making a short documentary called At Sundance
(1995) as a means of survival. With media hype and business transactions
happening all around him, perhaps he found it comforting to individually
meet a group of filmmakers including Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes,
Richard Linklater, and Matthew Harrison. Almereyda put his camera on
them, and they spoke about the movie business. Most of the interviewees
are chatty and effusive, speaking as artists struggling to maintain their
individual voice within a popular medium.

In 1997, between larger projects, Almereyda made a short, no-budget Pixel

adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's short story The Rocking Horse Winner.
Relocating the story from a British estate to the sunny poolsides of
bourgeois California, playtime is never far removed from a child's fantasies
and a wealthy family's boredom. A clairvoyant boy is able to predict the
results of horse races, and his trace-like state is augmented by the
flickering use of Pixelvision.

Eric Stoltz gives a priceless, carefree performance as the kid's

unscrupulous uncle, whose obsessive mixing of cocktails is in counterpoint
to shaking the Magic Eightball for answers to the unknown (shake it up
and it says, “Yes, definitely,” or “Try Again” or “Remains Unclear.”) The
occult aspects of the story never stray too far from the everyday objects at
our fingertips, which lends the movie its touch of bittersweet humor.
Almereyda often uses magic tricks in his films: Hamlet makes a chess
piece disappear on-camera; a character in Happy Here and Now (2002)
pulls a bunny from an empty box.

Almereyda's Rocking Horse likewise sprung from chance while he was

house sitting in Los Angeles, yet again frustrated in his efforts to make a
full feature. He found the Lawrence story in an anthology, and considered
the story not only magical but also deeply personal. He explained:

[It] seemed to be about the differences between privilege and luck. Here I
was…staying in houses with maids, gardens, and pools, but I felt deeply
unlucky, unable to make a movie. I recognized myself in the story, and saw
how I could throw a short film together while waiting for bigger things.
Instead of waiting for bigger things. (2)

The struggles of the independent filmmaker are typified in Almereyda's

second attempt at riffing on monster movies: The Eternal (1998, also
known as Trance.) Making a deal with Trimark to craft a mummy movie
on his own terms, Almereyda quickly discovered that he and the studio
were working at cross-purposes. Without final cut and saddled with
compromises, Almereyda found The Eternal to be an underwhelming
experience. Much like the drunken characters wandering through the film's
haunted house, the movie falls off the tracks of coherence midway through.

Nevertheless, there is much in The Eternal to enjoy. Following a hard-

drinking couple called Jim and Nora (Jared Harris and Alison Elliott) on
their trip from modern New York to the old country of Ireland, the opening
third is wildly funny in the tradition of The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke,
1934). This gimlet eyed couple's endlessly quotable dialogue (“In much the
same way the spider is not an insect but an animal, Guinness is not strictly
speaking alcohol. It's food!”) and the inspired use of frequent Almereyda
collaborator Jim Denault's cinematography keep The Eternal on the fast
track.

The magnificent opening credits sequence, a slow motion close-up on Jim

and Nora on a roller coaster summons up the mood of a happy drunken
joyride even as Cat Power's ballad “Rocket” sets a haunting mood. Once
again, music becomes central to Almereyda's characters: Nora rediscovers
an old boyfriend while standing by the jukebox; Jim and Nora take a break
from the creepy house by putting on a Joe Dolan record and breaking out
into a spontaneous dance. As if on cue, that's when creepy uncle
Christopher Walken comes waltzing in saying, “I'm so happy!”

For a movie that's ultimately about a Druidic mummy causing havoc,

Almereyda's wild digressions (with characters he clearly has affection for)
keep The Eternal watchable even as it spirals out of control. Once men
with guns start breaking through the windows and elaborate booby traps
are being placed for the mummy, Almereyda has wandered into the
familiar genre movie territory he had previously subverted in Nadja.
Almereyda seems more comfortable with genre as a frame of reference to
be commented on; as he does in his modern day Hamlet by having the
Melancholy Dane deliver his “To be or not to be” monologue in the Action
aisle of Blockbuster Video.

This sets the stage (or screen, as it were) for a Hamlet for the information
age. From its opening scene of the young prince (Ethan Hawke) dabbling
in Sadie Benning-style Pixelvision diaries to a press conference held by
Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), CEO of the Denmark Corporation, video is
everywhere. Television screens and monitors, Times Square telescreens,
security cameras, found footage, and news programming all interweave
themselves into a movie that could have been called Hamlet 2000. Like
Godard, he fuses the ancient with the contemporary by unapologetically
setting his story in the present day. Almereyda confirms, “It's unmistakably
a Hamlet of its time which is already shifting into another time. I would
make a different Hamlet this year.” (3)

If Hamlet seems
more surefooted
than Almereyda's
other work, it could
  be because the story
of Hamlet is part of
our mass
consciousness. It
can be relocated to
any time or place
  Hamlet without hindering
its design, and in
fact can be used as a tool for Almereyda to express his own feelings about
where we are now. Ethan Hawke's slacker intellectual sifts through his
memories and recollections by capturing them on his Pixel camera. In this
way, he's the prototypical Almereyda protagonist.

Like the characters in Nadja and The Eternal, Hamlet is part of a

dysfunctional family with an archaic history. He's also a video artist,
responding to his role in history as surely as the journeymen in Alexander
Sokurov's (digital video) movie Russian Ark (2002). “It's not just the
history of art,” Almereyda said, referring to his Harvard experience as an
art history student. “It's history as it sweeps along, as artists react to
specific times and events. You start out looking at Impressionist paintings
and then discover there was something called the Franco-Prussian War. All
sorts of complications pile up.” (4) Perhaps there's something to be said
about responding to the past from the present; as video becomes the
predominant visual medium, it's a new format responding to the old.
Almereyda's Hamlet rests on that threshold, and on the dawn of a new
century.

So how does the future look from here? The optimistic title of Almereyda's
latest film is Happy Here and Now, a romantic jazz riff that again dabbles
in modern technology. This time, it is cyberspace. A young woman named
Amelia (Liane Balaban) goes to New Orleans in search of her missing
sister. She involves herself in a multimedia quest that has her plugging into
the computer, able to build a composite identity. The movie takes place in
some unspecified future, or maybe the present, where computer users are
able to use different faces and voices online using an audio-visual virtual
reality program.

As she interacts with an Internet ghost named Eddie Mars (Karl Geary, if
his character's face is to be trusted), she comes to realize the truth of that
Oscar Wilde quote: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth." Are the eyes to be trusted?
Happy leaves that question hanging in the air, as characters remind
themselves not to judge books by their covers. Characters seeming to be
one thing (a killer, a barfly, a Termite control employee) turn out to be
something entirely different (a rescuer, a club owner, and a musician, in
this case). An early clue to this mysterious travelogue: “You've heard of
the French Quarter?” asks Amelia's uncle Bill (Clarence Williams III),
driving her through an unfamiliar part of town. “Well, this ain't the French
Quarter.” Like finding out new things about new people, Almereyda
explores hidden parts of New Orleans that you wouldn't find on the
postcards.

Happy Here and Now, like all of Almereyda's film, has intellectual
trappings but is fundamentally an emotion picture. Moving away from the
cold metallic skyscrapers of Hamlet, Almereyda dives into the vivid colors
and homegrown music of New Orleans. Local musicians and personalities
play themselves, filling out the cast and allowing for some finger snappin'
musical numbers along the way. In a movie that explodes with ideas, it's
also about people somehow finding their ways together through the use of
technology. How strange that being alone at our computers might be the
thing that brings us all closer together, and how wonderful when those
people discover they aren't alone.

This indefatigable filmmaker continues onward, already in post-production

on a documentary about Sam Shepard and his recent play, The Late Henry
Moss. Though he's often self-deprecating in interviews, bemusedly saying
he's just getting started in his career and wishes he'd made twice as many
films by now, Almereyda's been surprisingly prolific in his time. The best
thing that can be said is that his work, while comparable in some ways to
Hal Hartley, David Lynch, and Jean Cocteau, remains distinctively his
own. Continually weaving the threads of romanticism, metaphoric time
travel, expressionistic audio-visual dreamscapes, and a passion for
alternative music into his movies-as-tapestries, one wonders how much
longer Almereyda's movies will slip in under the pop culture radar. As in
The Rocking Horse Winner, the future remains uncertain—but if
Almereyda shakes the Magic Eightball, let's hope the answer he comes up
with is, “Please try again.”

© Jeremiah Kipp, February 2003

Filmography
Films directed by
director:
 
A Hero of Our Time (1985)
also writer

Twister (1990) also writer

Another Girl, Another

Planet (1992) also producer,
writer
  Almereyda (right) on the set of Hamlet
Aliens (1993)

Nadja (1994) also writer

At Sundance (1995)

The Rocking Horse Winner (1997) also writer

The Eternal, a/k/a Trance (1998) also writer

Hamlet (2000) also screen adaptation

Happy Here and Now (2002) also writer

This So-Called Disaster (2003)

William Eggleston in the Real World (2005)

OTHER CREDITS

Cherry 2000 (Steve De Jarnatt, 1987) writer

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991) writer

Search and Destroy (David Salle, 1991) writer

Senses of Cinema

Pedro Almodóvar
by Steven Marsh

Steven Marsh is Assistant Professor of Spanish Cultural Studies at the University of

Illinois, Chicago. Previously, he lived in Madrid where he still spends much of the year.
He is the author of Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of
the State (Palgrave, 2005) and one of the writers of the forthcoming collaborative volume
Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: An Oral History of Cinema Going in 1940s
and 1950s Spain. He is co-editor of the anthology of essays entitled Gender and Spanish
Cinema (Berg, 2004).

b. September 25, 1949, Calzada de Calatrava, Spain

Filmography
Select Bibliography
Articles in Senses
Web Resources

Pedro Almodóvar is the cultural symbol par excellence of the restoration of democracy in
Spain after nearly 40 years of the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Since Almodóvar’s emergence as a transgressive underground cineaste in the late 1970s
and early 1980she has gone on to establish himself as the country’s most important
filmmaker and a major figure on the stage of world cinema.

However, it is Almodóvar’s ambivalent relationship with the country of his birth (and
where he has made all of his 16 feature films to date) that has proved symptomatic of the
complexities surrounding the filmmaker. While subversion of identity is the key subject
matter of his cinema, Almodóvar has consistently flirted with his own sense of “Spanish-
ness” (most frequently in his recourse to – and resignifying of – the symbolism of the
Catholic Church). This has led often to a mixed domestic reception, which takes the form
of unconditional acclaim by certain sections of the Spanish media but that has also seen
him vilified by conservative critics. Whatever reaction he provokes, there is little doubt
that Almodóvar rarely – if ever – inspires indifference.

Like Don Quixote before him, Almodóvar was born in the region of central-southern
Spain known as La Mancha. His humble origins, as a member of a large and
impoverished family of peasant stock, have left their indelible mark on his work. He
often cast his own mother (Francisca Caballero) – possessed of the archetypal wisdom of
peasant womanhood – in cameo roles in his movies prior to her death in 1999. Many of
his films see their urban-dwelling protagonists return to their ancestral family homes in
the country, variously, for refuge or redemption. The rural home town, while at the heart
of the Spanish national imaginary – this is a country in which most of the urban
population is only one generation away from the feudal pueblo – is an ambiguous
Arcadia. His most recent movie Volver (2006) deals directly with the ghosts of the
nation’s past in its portrayal of the typical Spanish village. Later, when Almodóvar was
eight years-old the family moved to Extremadura in the west of the country where he
would receive the brutish education at the hands of the Catholic Church that is reflected
in the richly baroque tale of priests and child abuse of La mala educación (2004).

At the end of the 1960s Almodóvar arrived in Madrid. After completing the compulsory
military service and spending periods as a hippy in Ibiza and London, he secured a day
job as a clerk for the national telephone company Telefónica. It was a position he would
maintain for more than a decade, with occasional unpaid leaves of absence to work on his
various projects. Indeed, in several of his films we see homages to this period of his life,
such as the Madrid skyline in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), marked
by the emblematic red light of the Telefónica clock tower and the pervasive, almost
obsessive presence of telephones in almost all his films of the 1980s. Almodóvar has
often spoken of how much he learned from listening to the women who surrounded him
in the office where he worked. For a filmmaker who had no formal training, he has drawn
on his experiences to develop what is almost universally acknowledged as one of his
greatest strengths: his ear for the sounds, the rhythms and the dialects of the street, and
thus his capacity to direct actors.
Meanwhile by night, and following the death of Franco in November 1975, Almodóvar
was steadily becoming the leading figure in Madrid’s flourishing alternative cultural
scene that would become known as La Movida. Commencing as a stage hand for the
theatre troupe, Los Goliardos – where he met Carmen Maura, the actress who would
become his leading lady for the first half of his filmic career – he also performed in a
punk rock group, wrote pornographic photo-novels and, significantly, purchased a super-
8 camera with which he shot a series of outlandish shorts which guaranteed his
burgeoning notoriety. Finally, in 1980 he shot his first feature Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras
chicas del montón,a bizarrely ribald chronicle of life on the wilder fringes of the Madrid
night-time experience. Pepi, Luci, Bom… wasa film, plagued by financial and technical
problems. It took 18 months to shoot and required its director to return to his post at the
telephone exchange before it was finally completed. In many ways, it was an
inauspicious commencement to Almodóvar’s professional career – the technical
limitations and blatant amateurism of the cinematography are evident for all to see – but
it also captured the spirit of the times – above all the sense of cultural and sexual freedom
– and established Almodóvar as a force with which to be reckoned.

Almodóvar’s career has been plagued by accusations of frivolity. His apparent lack of
political commitment contrasted with that of his contemporaries. The end of the
dictatorship opened up a dizzying array of political, social and cultural opportunities and
the possibility of substantive changes in society seemed real. Just across the border in
Portugal – a few hours drive from Madrid – the 1974 revolution had provided what for
some was an exemplary means of transforming society. By the same token, the dominant
oppositional school of Spanish filmmaking – drawn, with very few exceptions, from the
privileged elites – looked towards France and the auteurist tradition and which, in spite
of its claims to committed film often seemed devoted to the cinematic essay.
Almodóvar’s disavowal of this kind of solemnity would initiate a conflict with the
Spanish film establishment that endures to this day, in spite of his international
reputation.

Despite the hostility to which he has often been subject at home, Almodóvar has clearly
emerged from a particularly Spanish cultural tradition. Much of the criticism that has
been levelled at him stems from the alleged influence of Hollywood cinema on his films.
Such critics often adopt the discourse of progressive politics – the accusation against
Almodóvar is that he has capitulated to cultural imperialism – to defend what is
essentially a fairly tiresome and well-worn brand of Spanish nationalism. The reality is
that Almodóvar is indeed influenced by North American cinema (which international
filmmaker isn’t?) and particularly so in his early work. This influence, however, is
scarcely that of “dominant” Hollywood films but rather the underground, transgressive
cinema of the early John Waters and Andy Warhol. That said, his numerous stylistic
appropriations of Alfred Hitchcock (particularly in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de
nervios, but there are many more) and the influence of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas are
undeniable elements present in Almodóvar’s work, as he himself is keen to acknowledge.
Likewise, his use of music – and the scores to his films are remarkable in their own right
– suggests both a global sensibility and an ear for the newest trends close to home. From
the post-punk new wave of his early movies to the boleros, the bossa nova and the
flamenco of his melodramas and more mature work, Almodóvar’s cinema provides a
veritable feast of transnational eclecticism.

The fact remains, however, that the most significant (and yet largely unrecognised)
influence is that of the Spanish cinematic tradition that stretches back to the Second
Republic of the 1930s. Almodóvar is the direct filmic descendent of Edgar Neville –
Spain’s finest director of the 1940s – as well as the absurdist humour of dramaturgs and
screenwriters Miguel Mihura and Enrique Jardiel Poncela (all three of whom,
incidentally, learned their cinematic trade while working on Spanish-language versions of
Hollywood films in the Los Angeles studios of the late 1920s). Likewise, Almodóvar has
repeatedly drawn attention to the debt that he owes to Neville’s heir – and the closest
Spanish filmmaker to Federico Fellini – the great Luis García Berlanga as well as to the
director/actor Fernando Fernán Gómez (who appeared in Almodóvar’s Oscar-winning
1999 movie Todo sobre mi madre).

There is, moreover, another major – and often unremarked upon – cinematic influence on
Almodóvar. Luis Buñuel, who went into exile in Mexico in 1939 after Spain’s Civil War
is a constant referent for contemporary Spanish cinema. Buñuel, though, has long been
associated critically with precisely the elitist pantheon of filmmaking that Almodóvar has
rejected (or that has rejected him). Indeed, Buñuel is very often not even considered to be
a Spanish cineaste by foreign critics, owing to the fact that much of his best-known work
after 1939 was produced outside of the country, particularly in Mexico and France.
Nonetheless, there are a number of parallels between the two directors. Both inhabit an
ambivalent critical space that defies discursive categories of nominative definition, in
which adjectives such as “popular” or “arthouse” are employed to classify and codify
filmmaking. Although both directors are often referred to as auteurs, is a little-known
fact that Buñuel, whose international reputation comes principally from his surrealist
collaborations with Salvador Dalí, was a key figure in the promotion of popular
filmmaking during the Second Republic (1931–39). Likewise, Almodóvar – especially in
his early work – was the leading exponent of the kind of popular urban comedy very
much associated with Madrid in the 1980s. Almodóvar’s 1997 film Carne trémula –
interestingly a film that for the first time in his oeuvre had a plot marked by the passage
of historical time – quotes directly from Buñuel’s creepily comic 1955 tour de force,
Ensayo de un crimen.
The intense, difficult and invariably complex relationship with the country of his birth
provides us with the key to understanding the cinema of Almodóvar. The central issue in
his films, and it is one with which he engages in a myriad different ways, from his
earliest work to his most recent is the question of identity. This key feature of Almodóvar
is never more consistently depicted than through the motif of writing. Writing reality into
existence (and thereby changing it) through fiction is a means of interrogating all forms
of subjectivity and subject formation. One need only note the abundance of characters
who adopt multiple pseudonyms, the repeated images of typewriters, the information
transmitted through found notes, the eerie presence of ghostwriters.

This critique of the subject extends to all other forms of identity. His refusal to kowtow to
the academic exigencies of the Spanish establishment or to indulge in political posturing
through his cinema does not mean that Spain is not central to Almodóvar’s subject matter
nor that he is uninterested in politics. In much the same way – and in a country where
same-sex marriage is now legal – his obsessive concern with the fluidity of genders, the
interchangeability of sexual tastes and orientations, his constant interrogation of discrete
sexual identities has disappointed certain militant gay activists who, for political reasons,
evidently would prefer a clearer – and less ambiguous – definition of sexual identity (and
would also like to have seen Almodóvar take a stance in favour of gay rights). The point
is an important one, Almodóvar’s characters are never exclusively heterosexual or
homosexual, instead they perform their identities and thus are identifiable by what they
choose to be at any particular moment. The point is made tellingly in several of his films
but a clear example is in his 1986 La ley de deseo. In this film Almodóvar cast the well-
known post-operative transsexual (at least to a Spanish audience), Bibí Andersen, as the
mother of a child who – to all intents and purposes – has been adopted by an onscreen
transsexual played by Carmen Maura. Similarly, Almodóvar is responsible (in this film
and others such as the 1982 Laberinto de pasiones) not only for having launched Antonio
Banderas’ film career but also for having converted him into a gay icon. In this sense
Almodóvar has an affinity with the new queer cinema of the 1980s and 1990s and owes a
particular debt – again via Sirk – to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although Almodóvar has
gone out of his way to disavow the suggestion that he is a gay filmmaker (rather than a
filmmaker who just happens to be gay), the content of his films often subtly points up a
gay geneology. In Todo sobre mi madre – a film that is essentially a work of mourning of
a mother for her son and Almodóvar’s recent loss of his own mother – the intertexual
references abound to create a patchwork of literary antecedents that inflects and subverts
the forward march of teleological history of facts and figures. This is a text structured
around a set of other texts produced by globalised community of gay writers:Federico
García Lorca, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams.

Identity, though, is principally subverted in Almodóvar’s work through the human body.
In La flor de mi secreto (1994) and Todo sobre mi madre we see explicit references to the
donation and transplant of organs (and Spain is one of the world’s most generous nations
in this respect). The common idea that one’s “essence” is contained in the particularity of
a single organ (such as a heart) is upended by Almodóvar. Likewise, cloning (Laberinto
de pasiones), sex changes (La ley de deseo) and wholesale resuscitation (Hable con ella
[2002] – Almodóvar’s most metaphysical film) all make the body the agent of flexibility
and change. In Todo sobre mi madre, the transsexual character of Agrado (Antonia San
Juan) delivers an ostensibly comic speech concerning the surgical alterations performed
upon her own body, which she pointedly claims are what make her who she really is. The
discourse surrounding artifice and reality is, of course, at the heart of Miguel de
Cervantes Don Quixote, the key text in the Spanish literary canon. Almodóvar and
Cervantes not only undermine Christian notions of the body as an essential and inviolable
representation of being but they also subvert identity by proposing the body as a site of
imitation. One of the characters in Tacones lejanos (1991) is a magistrate whose
investigation leads him to impersonate (in drag) a fading 1960s cabaret star (played by
Marisa Paredes), while also assuming the identity of a drug dealer. The fact that the
character is played by one the most important figures of the Spanish pop scene, Miguel
Bosé (who, in the past, has modelled himself upon David Bowie) adds an additional star
quality to the dimensions of the character. In a melodrama clearly related to Sirk’s 1959
Imitation of Life, the film raises the possibilities of mimicry as more real than that which
it seeks to imitate.

It is perhaps because of this play on the boundaries of identity – or borderline ambiguities

– that Almodóvar delights in threshold locations. His use of airports especially Madrid’s
Barajas airport, which appears in many of his films, from his second to his most recent;
the dressing rooms of film studios, theatres, nightclubs, replete with mirrors that lend
themselves to particular filmic effects; cemeteries, in Madrid, Barcelona and (again) in
his latest film, Volver. These are points of transition but they are also locations of
transformation. This spatial aspect to Almodóvar is an important one. Urban space, the
precincts the city arenas that have marked recent Spanish history and crucially, the
element of freedom of movement are associated with questions of identity and with
bridging those features that seem most peculiar in this particular director’s work. Critics
have noted the importance of space in films such as the early ¿Qué he hecho yo para
merecer esto? (1984) or in Carne trémula but its implications have rarely been analysed.
The cultural intersections and the abundant hybrid forms produced of Spain’s uneven
development and the dramatic and rapid changes of recent decades have provided
Almodóvar with a rich mine of material. In both Mujeres al borde de un ataque de
nervios and Volver rural life is at the heart of urban culture and vice versa.

On March 11, 2004 a series of explosions ripped through three commuter trains as they
approached Madrid. 191 people were killed and thousands more were injured in Europe’s
worst ever terrorist attack. The bombings came three days before the Spanish general
elections and a week prior to the programmed release of Almodóvar’s 15th feature, La
mala educación. The right-wing ruling party in government at the time sought to
capitalise on the event by blaming it on the Basque separatist group ETA, while
simultaneously concealing information that indicated that an Islamic terrorist group was
responsible. Very quickly it became apparent that the government had lied and on March
14, in the face of all predictions to the contrary, the opposition Socialist Party won the
elections. Almodóvar applauded the result. Almost exactly a year previous to the
bombings Madrid had hosted one of the largest demonstrations ever held to protest
Spain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq. The three main speakers at the end of the
march were Pedro Almodóvar, his leading actress in Hable con ella, Leonor Watling, and
veteran director and actor Fernando Fernán Gómez. At the premiere of La mala
educación later in the month of March 2004, a right-wing mob outraged at Almodóvar’s
statements gathered to insult and hurl rotten vegetables at those entering to see the new
film. After winning two Oscars and numerous other awards both at home and abroad, it is
testimony to the enduring reputation for transgression that Almodóvar remains a
refreshing source of contention and controversy.
Filmography

Pepi, Luci, Bom y las otras chicas del montón (1980)

Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions) (1982)

Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) (1983)

¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) (1984)

Matador (1986)

La ley de deseo (The Law of Desire) (1987)

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women On the Verge of a Nervous

Breakdown) (1988)

¡Átame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) (1989)

Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (1991)

La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) (1994)

Kika (1996)

Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)

Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (1999)

Hable con ella (Talk To Her) (2002)

La mala educación (Bad Education) (2004)

Volver (Return) (2006)

Select Bibliography

Mark Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, IB Tauris,

London/New York, 2001.

Pedro Almodóvar, Patty Difusa y otros textos,

Marvin d’Lugo, Pedro Almodóvar, Contemporary Film Directors series, University of

Illinois, Chicago, 2006
Frederic Strauss (ed.), Almodóvar on Almodóvar, Faber and Faber, London/Boston,
c1996.

Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, Verso, New
York, 1994.

Kathleen Vernon and Barbara Morris (eds.), Post Franco Postmodern: The Films of
Pedro Almodóvar, Greenwood, Westport, 1995.

Articles in Senses of Cinema

The Flower of My Secret by Carla Marcantonio

  

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Robert Altman
b. Robert Bernard Altman

b. 20 February 1925, Kansas City, Missouri, USA

d. 20 November 2006, Los Angeles, California, USA

by Robert T. Self

Robert Self is professor of English at Northern Illinois University (DeKalb).

He has published articles in Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Literature/Film
Quarterly, Film Criticism, New England Quarterly and Journal of Film and
Video. He has recently published “Resisting Reality: Acting by Design in
Robert Altman's Nashville” in More Than a Method (Wayne State, 2004). He
is the author also of Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality, published by the
University of Minnesota Press in 2001.

Filmography      Select Bibliography      Articles in Senses      Web Resources

The Modernist Art Cinema of Robert Altman

Robert Altman is 80 years old in February 2005. He is the director of 33

feature films since his first major Hollywood film in 1967. He is a notorious
renegade from the standard operating procedures and finished products of the
motion picture industry, and he has been critically acclaimed as one of the most
pre-eminent directors in American cinema during the last quarter of the
twentieth century. His two most recent films reflect the independent director
continuing to make independent films: The Company (2003) is at once a
fictional meditation on ballet and a documentary on the work of the Joffrey
Ballet in Chicago. Tanner on Tanner (2004) reprises Tanner '88's (1988)
fictional cast, real presidential politics, and creative collaboration between
Altman and Doonesbury's Gerry Trudeau to cast a caustic and mockumentary
eye on the American presidential campaign of 2004. The unusual diversity of
his work, as well as its prestige, is represented by William Bolcom's opera
adaptation of A Wedding (1978), currently performing at the Chicago Lyric
Opera, under Altman's direction.

In 2001, at age 76, Altman mounted his most recent big scale movie
production. Gosford Park employs a huge cast, including practically the entire
first echelon of contemporary British actors; location shooting at an elegant old
English manor house; the lavish set designs and costumes of the heritage film;
and an intricately crafted (Academy Award winning) screenplay. Gosford Park
will stand as one of Altman's best films. Moreover, it simultaneously represents
the most salient features of his films and reasserts the parameters of the
American art cinema.

Gosford Park reconstructs classical narrative form in many ways: It ironically

interweaves numerous genres – the Agatha Christie murder mystery, the
upstairs/downstairs social drama, and the country house comedy of manners.
Forty-four speaking parts in the film provide glimpses into the tangled
implications of over 25 separate plots and constitute one of the largest cast of
characters of all his multifaceted narratives from MASH (1970) to Prêt-à-
Porter (1994). In Gosford Park logical causality disappears under the pressure
of traumatic engagements that are not only unspoken by the narrative but are
repressed by the characters themselves. The classically requisite discovery of
the culprit at the end is contravened by the geometric progression of alternative
clues and Altman's insistence that the murder is never resolved. The confusing
multiplication of plot lines and the hybrid mixing of murder, manners, maids,
and man servants critiques a singular and stereotypical view of crime, justice,
and social class by subverting the classic detective story. The film breaks the
ideological illusion of harmony between masters and servants valorised in
cultural representations like the 1970s British television series
Upstairs/Downstairs. It reveals hypocrisy and meanness in the class system
where social crimes and misdemeanors multiply and expand beyond the ability
or the interests of the mystery story to say ask “who dunnit?”.

Like other works of modernist discourse, the film also reflects upon itself as an
act of aesthetic production. In the midst of all its narrative indirection Altman
reflexively introduces two representatives of the entertainment industry. The
Hollywood movie executive is a producer of Charlie Chan films who is in
England to research a new movie, a murder mystery set in a country house full
of guests for the weekend, “not unlike this one.” The role of the producer both
critiques the pretentiousness of the English social order and represents the
vulgarity of American popular culture. His Jewish ethnicity and his bourgeois
American manners offend the other guests who assure him that he can tell them
the end of his planned film because as one says at dinner, “none of us will see
it!” The mutual interchangeability of the effete world of British high society
and mass culture entertainment is marked more specifically, however, by the
role of Ivor Novello. Novello in real life was a small time actor and a big time
success as a popular songwriter and matinee idol in 1930s England. The
performance of his sentimental and escapist songs about other worlds, other
times, and other loves motivate two dramatically different effects. His fellow
guests are mildly amused by this divertissement from the popular culture, but
the servants – who have been abuzz about the presence of this star since his
arrival – are entranced. At one point Altman's cameras catch the enthralled
servants behind doors, on the stairs, in the hallways in small groups
mesmerised by his singing. Aristocracy and popular entertainment alike create
worlds of magic and illusion and escape. Like its representation in Nashville
(1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), The Player (1992) and Prêt-à-
Porter, the world of entertainment is both treasured and condemned for its
fascinating and coercive images.

Gosford Park sums up the

characteristics of all the films
Altman has made since 1967
when he began to make movies
in Hollywood. Born in 1925 in
Kansas City, he spent the post-
war decades developing a
thorough competency in
cinematography by making
business and industrial films. In
Gosford Park the late 1950s and early 1960s he
became one of the most prolific television directors among a large group of
new directors that included Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah and
Sidney Pollack. He worked regularly as director for numerous series, including
most notably Bus Stop, The Millionaire, Whirlybirds, Combat, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, and Bonanza. He earned a reputation in those years as a
cantankerous and rebellious filmmaker who liked to shoot stories “sideways”.
One producer from the Kraft Suspense Theater in the early 1960s described
what Altman “hated most in television, and that is the very commercial, highly
plotted story, and he hated commercial storytelling with a vengeance.” (1) In
1967 he left television production for the feature-film world of Hollywood,
making Countdown (1968), a science fiction film in the classical style, and
That Cold Day in the Park (1969), a psychological thriller that first
demonstrates the art-cinema style that would become his signature. His third
film in 1970 was the highly acclaimed MASH, the most successful box-office
film of his career, and his first of the five films across the reach of his career to
earn Academy Award nominations for Best Director (along with Nashville,
The Player, Short Cuts [1993] and Gosford Park).

Over the last 36 years Altman's Hollywood career can be divided into three
phases. Between 1968 and 1975 he was part of the “Hollywood Renaissance of
directors like Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick,
Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola.” (2) MASH, Brewster McCloud
(1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), California
Split (1974) and especially Nashville were major contributions to the
reformulation of Hollywood formulas of story and style. By the end of the
1970s, however, with the successful advent of “post-classical” films like Jaws
(1975), Rocky (1976), Star Wars (1977), and Superman (1978) by young
directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the high concept blockbuster
film ended the days of experimental art-cinema films. After the box-office
failures of Quintet (1979), A Perfect Couple (1979), Health (1979) and Popeye
(1980), production money disappeared, and Altman could no longer sustain his
independent Lions Gate studio. For most of the 1980s, then, from Come Back
to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) to Vincent and Theo
(1990) he became an artist-in-exile, shooting films in 16 mm, working as an
artist in residence at the University of Michigan, making films for cable
television, living in Paris. In 1992 The Player enjoyed large popular and
critical success and was widely hailed as a comeback. Then, with Altman
himself in his 70s, the 1990s witnessed – in Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter,Kansas
City (1996), The Gingerbread Man (1998) and Cookie's Fortune (1999) – the
most sustained and aesthetically successful productivity of his career as an art-
cinema director. Gosford Park reveals the cinematic maestro in serene control
of his craft. It earned seven Academy nominations, including Best Director and
Best Picture and won the BAFTA award for best picture and the Golden Globe
award for best director. In his 79th year he made an independent art film about
ballet, directed a four-hour television satire for HBO of American presidential
politics; directed A Wedding at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and began working
on two new films. Since 1967, he has directed a cinematic recreation of 1930s
Kansas City jazz, an operetta in a compilation film, 33 movies, 10 major
television films – and built one of the most remarkable careers in the history of
Hollywood.

That career has consistently been marked by high critical acclaim and hostile
popular reception. His refusal to tell straightforward stories, his apparent
improvisation of script, his casting unusual actors and stars against type, his
restless and obliquely motivated zoom shots, his multiply layered soundtracks
– such qualities have regularly been seen as significant innovations in
Hollywood story and style or as quirky irritations. Reactions to Gosford Park
again are representative in their exuberant admiration and characteristic
antagonism. The hyperbolic superlatives of the national film critics reflect the
qualities of invention now generally ascribed to America's reigning auteur
director: the film is everywhere described as “remarkable”, “brilliant” and
“magisterial”. Like his other films which famously feature a large ensemble of
actors – MASH, Nashville, A Wedding, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The
Player, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City, Dr. T and the Women (2000) –
Gosford Park's numerous story lines are perceived as “engrossing”,
“entrancing” and “amazing”. The film reflects the director's “astounding ability
to orchestrate dozens of featured players into a coherent whole while allowing
each actor individual shining moments.” (3) Andrew Sarris praises Altman's
“patented polyphonic virtuosity” (4).The director who has routinely described
himself as a painter rather than a storyteller is compared to Rembrandt, the
“greatest flow master in movie history.” Roger Ebert writes: “Here he is like
Prospero, serenely the master of his art.” (5)

Yet even as they heap dramatic praise on Gosford Park, critical reviews, again
characteristic of popular and journalistic reaction to his work, also point to
ways the film disorients,
unsettles, and irritates. It
displays again the
characteristics of Altman's art
cinema that have so alienated
audiences for 36 years. Its
 
narrative style is chaotic and
ungoverned; its multiple plot
lines confusing and
disorienting; its attempts at
plot clarity intrusive, its
whodunit indifferent. The Gosford Park
film's ensemble cast is molded
together superficially only to puzzle. Altman's swirling array of characters, bits
of dialogue, social commentary, and moving cameras neither cohere nor
conclude. Like Mozart accused of composing music with too many notes,
Altman directs too many characters. The organisation of the film makes it clear
that Altman “became quite lost when trying to sort and order this batch of
footage. Gosford Park's structure is evasive, at best, and it is devoid of
rhythm.” (6) The schizophrenic gulf here is amazing and typical. Despite the
overwhelming acclaim for this and other films and their director, practically
every positive perception of Altman's craft throughout his career has been
countered elsewhere by a negative reaction.

These reviews summarise the 36 year critical reaction to Altman's

idiosyncratic, pessimistic, ironic, exuberant and experimental films.
Significantly shaping this reaction is the films' participation in the modernist
discourse of the international art cinema. They substitute structure for story and
form for representation; they depict debilitated individuals living in constrained
circumstances of powerlessness and subservience. They display a cynical view
of the commercially motivated idealism of contemporary culture. They
reflexively indict the entertainment industry as complicit in the malaise of
contemporary American culture. These patterns of discourse in Altman's films
have constantly offended the audience for post-classical Hollywood's high
concept form of entertainment. And they simultaneously define the emergent
form and style of the “Americanized art cinema” (7). Altman's art-cinema
narration systematically displays an open and poetic mode of storytelling; a
continuing perception of social identity as fragile, fractured, and fragmentary;
and a critical self-consciousness about the nature of narrative communication
itself.

Modernist Narration

Classical narrative cinema assumes the possibility of social discourse and

asserts a unified social identity grounded in the secular humanism that
optimistically posits “man” as the position of intelligibility, meaningful action,
and ethicality. Modernist cinema presupposes on the other hand the world as
splintered and centreless, meaning as imprecise and indeterminate, morality as
divisive and illusory. It asserts that the human being is neither an autonomous
individual nor a meaningful unity, but a process of divergent and contradictory
forces, both internal and external. It suspects the power of communication in
the face of human greed, alienation, estrangement, and self-destruction. Rather
than encouraging viewer identification with a coherent character psychology, it
delineates a variety of contradictory subject positions that critique privileged
intelligibility.

A central strategy of modernist cinema is its effort to represent a true rather

than an idealised reality. Its human figures are ordinary “people”, not literary
“characters.” The behaviour of these people frequently seems motivated by
unseen events and unknown causes and necessitates active audience
participation in the closing of narrative gaps for the construction of meaning.
Actions may prompt reactions but not in any logical or sequential way.
Narrative order disappears. Narrative lines multiply. People assume major roles
in some stories and minor in others.

Modernist narratives consequently develop fictions where story and plot time
are fractured, where story reflects on its telling, where cause and effect are
implicit, and where social identity is unstable and fragmented. At the same
time these narratives are motivated by a sense of order that appears not in the
causal logic of transparent beginnings, middles, and ends, but in poetic
metaphors, in symbolic registers, in formal designs. Its commitment is thus
both to a greater verisimilitude and to an expressive aesthetic that conceives the
work as, like W.B. Yeats, some “artifice of eternity” or like Wallace Stevens, a
“supreme fiction” that has within it an expressive truth about the human
condition. Thus modernist cinema urges a reading of character and identity,
action and plot both realistically and formally, as textual devices
communicating values implicit in the discourses and ideologies which intersect
to produce them.

Robert Altman calls the art cinema's blend of subjective and objective realism
“subliminal reality” (8). It recognises the unspoken and unspeakable
dimensions in human interactions. It employs lyrical and metaphoric style to
suggest connections in inexplicable human associations. It arises from anxiety
and doubt about ultimate meanings and value. It posits behaviour as a gamble
with random consequences and defines relationship in curious patterns of
repetition. It glimpses the efforts of marginal men and women caught in
irresistible systems that shape desire and action. It engages active audience
awareness as necessary and complicit in the construction of consequence. It
recognises the authority of craft, like T.S. Eliot's “objective correlative”,
indirectly to convey aesthetic insight, like Emily Dickinson's poetic dictum to
“Tell all the truth/ but tell it slant/the truth in circuit lies.” Subliminal reality
paints numerous, divergent surfaces of the human enterprise to suggest
subterranean roots of narrative potential.

The films of Robert Altman everywhere reflect these modernist qualities. Their
fractured and fragmentary narratives are not logically and causally inflected
conflicts and resolutions but formal, lyrical designs that conceive social
identity as multiple and unstable and frequently shaped by the debasement of
contemporary values in popular entertainment. Altman's films may be best
understood in terms of three particular aspects of art-cinema narration: its
interrogation of classical Hollywood storytelling and popular genres, its
representation of debilitated and ineffectual social individuality, and its
reflexive analysis of the entertainment industry as complicit in cultural
alienation.

Story and Discourse

One of the most salient

characteristics in Altman
films is the narrative with a
large cast of characters.
From MASH to Gosford
Park his films repeatedly  
set numerous stories in
motion – with so many
actors that it's hard to count
them: 40 in Nashville, 48
MASH
in A Wedding, another 40
in Short Cuts, over 60 in both Prêt-à-Porter and The Player, with many
“playing themselves”. In these films he paints large canvases with motion that
results more from the edited interconnections among scenes in different stories
than from the logic of any overall story development. Altman has consistently
expressed his hostility to narrative causality and closure, and his films
dramatically display an antipathy to straightforward, clearly delineated, and
causally logical narratives. An analysis, for instance, of the scenes cut from
Gosford Park reveals that shots and scenes potentially explaining character
behaviour and motive were systematically removed from the final cut of the
film. Throughout his career Altman has relegated motivation to the “subliminal
reality” of conflicting, indeterminate, vague, inexpressible characterological
desire. We look for explanation of human action, he says, “But there doesn't
have to be one” (9). These films ultimately asked to be read not as realistic
fictions but as expressive portraits and murals of modern life.

On one hand, these multiply plotted films become more like reality, where
lives intersect in random, chance and discontinuous ways without apparent
reasons. Narrative coherence gives way to fragmentary puzzles. On the other
hand, Altman has also regularly stated his craft to be that of a painter or a
musician. Individual characters, then, bits and pieces of action, interact within
the spaces and across the times of his films like tonal signatures or pigments of
paint. Character motive, personal relationships, causal behaviour become
ambiguous, diffuse, implicit.

A central characteristic of the art cinema is its liberation of the visual and
spatial systems of film from the logical system of narrative. Altman's large
casts and diffuse stories actively assist in this process where he says that story
itself asks to be read in 3 Women (1977) like a dream, in Kansas City like jazz,
in The Company like a pas de deux, in Gosford Park like a tapestry. The
editing rhythm of McCabe & Mrs. Miller follows from the musical rhythm of
the Leonard Cohen's music subsequently used on the sound track. Vincent and
Theo seems to be motivated by a desire to follow the trail of these two bothers
in order that the director can paint with his camera the same people and places
of Van Gogh's paintings. Consequently, part of the difficulty in following the
complex play of stories in Altman's films is their modernist presumption that
meaning emerges from the simultaneous perception of connections among
images and phrases in space that have no consecutive relationship to each other
in time. Each of the 24 roles in Nashville is a colour whose meaning resides in
its proximity to adjacent colours and its various intensities within the figure the
film makes. Similarly the multiple fragments in Short Cuts coalesce ultimately
not just as the threads of disrupted stories but as the musical accompaniment to
the classical, new age, and jazz compositions that shape the whole film.

Altman's films strikingly illustrate that the art cinema is a poetic as well as a
narrative art. The sombre palette of gold and green in Images (1972); the
restless, sensuous and ambiguous zoom and pan shots in Nashville and 3
Women; the pointillistic final sequence in the blizzard in McCabe and Mrs.
Miller; the exhilarating colour and music of fashion in Prêt-à-Porter, the
compulsive repetition of red and black throughout The Gingerbread Man), the
stunning contrast of primary colours during the ballet performances with the
honey-brown spaces of rehearsal and life in The Company – these qualities
reflect the eye of a painter. Altman has consistently asserted that the goal of his
films is an emotional rather than an intellectual effect:

I look at film as closer to a painting or a piece of music; it's an

impression…   an impression of character and total atmosphere… The attempt
is to enlist an audience emotionally, not intellectually (10).

Narrative hardly disappears in Altman's film, despite his self-description as a

painter. In another aspect of the art cinema, Altman's film aggressively
interrogate popular narrative genres, almost as though he has been involved in
a research and development project systematically to revise Hollywood's major
product lines. Images is a psychological thriller. MASH is a combat film. The
Long Goodbye is a hard-boiled detective film. Nashville is a musical. McCabe
& Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill are westerns. Quintet is science fiction. A
Perfect Couple and Popeye are musical comedy romances. The Gingerbread
Man is film noir. These well-known narrative forms provide the director
platforms from which to display other concerns about the nature of human
behaviour and its cinematic observation. Their stories seldom provide the
context for significant, heroic action; rather they reveal spaces that enclose and
forces that act upon a multiplicity of selves. Graphic and rhythmic dimensions
of editing and cinematography frequently come unstuck from generic logic.
Story moves psychologically from apparent external to obscure internal
motivation. Plot becomes a project open-ended, ironic and ambiguous.
Unfamiliar and unusual actors play against the star system, and stars play
against their box-office personas. The innovative expressivity of the auteur
director produces a metaphoric, often moody and contradictory, generally
oblique discourse rather than the effaced zero-degree of style in the classical
narrative cinema.

Social Subjects

The multiple strands and fragments of fiction in Altman's films generally

depict contradictory, powerless, isolated and fragmented identity. When they
construe social subjectivity as situated within a larger community – in MASH,
in Health, in Secret Honor (1984), in The Player – the individual appears as a
dependency of group need or is subsumed by the coercion of others. In
particular these representations of the self appear as functions of socially
constructed gender roles. Most of Altman's films challenge the dominance of
masculinity in American culture, whether in the unusual manipulation of iconic
star personas like Paul Newman, Warren Beatty or Richard Gere or in the
reconstruction of generic formulations to assert the inefficacy of male action.
Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) is mastered by elite treachery in Secret Honor. Jack
Lemmon lives as an emotional cripple because of his infidelity in Short Cuts.
Marcello Mastroianni sleeps in sexual impotence in Prêt-à-Porter. Johnny
(Dermot Mulroney) dies from racist incompetence in Kansas City. Griffin Mill
(Tim Robbins) rises to the top in Hollywood through murder and greed in The
Player. Sully Travis (Richard Gere) is sucked out of a successful gynecology
practice by a tornado and the whirlwind of deconstructing gender roles in Dr. T
and the Women. Films like Brewster McCloud, Come Back to the 5 and Dime,
Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Short Cuts display a pathological fear of
inadequacy in a society which is emasculating and where masculinity is
psychologically and socially dehumanising. In Secret Honor, the president of
the United States contemplates suicide in the face of self-perceived
powerlessness and humiliation. In The Gingerbread Man, the father is
simultaneously the figure of the law and the guilty figure of masculine threat
and ineffectuality. In Popeye, Olive Oyl's charges against Popeye's father echo
the arraignment of masculinity in these films: “He's a crook, a thief, a
kidnapper, and a bad father and more!” Altman's films depict a masculine
subjectivity of guilt, insecurity and defensiveness, in retreat from both the
authority and the stress of the phallocentric culture.

Conversely, his films about

women, which are the most
systematically ambiguous and
psychologically subjective of
Altman's films, represent
women as marginalised, co-
dependent and disabled by the
coercive power of patriarchal
3 Women influence. That Cold Day in
the Park, Images, 3 Women,
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Fool for Love
(1985), Kansas City, and Cookie's Fortune graphically convey crises in verbal,
sexual and economic production and exchange that constitute female identity in
all of Altman's films. In the diegetic world of Cookie's Fortune, for instance,
Camille (Glenn Close) desperately attempts to control appearance, decorum
and power in face of a community represented significantly as the local male
police force. The internal fantasy of her rewriting and production of Salomé as
an Easter pageant delineates the drive of Oscar Wilde's heroine to procure the
silence of male prophecy as the cost of the king's illicit desire. This fictional,
metaphorical and actual destruction of the male and the related construction of
divergent, pathological, interdependent femininity comes to its most forceful
expression in Jimmy Dean. Joe's (Mark Patton) male-renouncing castration
gives birth to his feminine identity, Joanne (Karen Black). When Mona (Sandy
Dennis) displaces his fatherhood of the bastard, mentally deficient son Jimmy
Dean onto an imaginary relationship with the movie star James Dean, Joe
renounces the power of fatherhood as well as male sexuality. Altman's films
about women in particular reveal the construction of the self as an action of
retreat from phallic authority.

These films present the fear, isolation, and anxieties of personality. They depict
contingent personal identity, troubled economic relationship and splintered
communication. They dramatise the powerlessness, the traumas, and the effects
of social alienation and class estrangement, and they critique the institutional
forces, including the cinema itself, which contribute to those traumas.

Systems of Entertainment

Rather than a self-consciousness that reflects the movieness of the film itself,
Altman's films have, since MASH, developed a reflexivity that critiques the
world of mass media and the effects of “the show business”. Nine Altman films
in particular take as their subject a reflexive stance toward the entertainment
business generally or the film industry in particular. It's the country music
system of need and debilitation in Nashville. It's racist nationalism in the wild
west show of Buffalo Bill and the Indians. It's the gendered and psychotic
addiction of fans in Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
Vincent and Theo chronicles the tensions among artistic integrity, financial
necessity, and public taste. Kansas City sets the power of black Kansas City
jazz against the white authority of 1930s machine politics. Cookie's Fortune
comically produces Salomé as the Easter pageant in a Mississippi Presbyterian
church. The Company contrasts behind-the-scene stress and the performance
glory of ballet.

Entertainment is the fashion industry in Prêt-à-Porter, which displays a

complex mix of glamour, seduction and politics and its influence on the social
nature of gender roles. The
film contrasts the
authoritative, free and
sexually confident female
body with a sociopolitical
 
body positioned by the web
of power relations that
dominate and objectify
women economically,
sexually and physically.
The Player is Altman's The Player - opening credits
most overt satire and cynical critique of the film business. The film not only
chronicles the greed of the entertainment industry; it more profoundly and self-
consciously locates the roots of classical Hollywood discourse in the anxiety of
a phallocentric culture which seeks solace and release in the objectification and
control of the desirable female. Its reflexive awareness of these issues reiterates
the representations of masculine insecurities, the depictions of feminine
dependency and insecurity, and the refusals of narrative authority that course
throughout Altman's films, that constitute the expressive ambiguities, that
motivate the unspoken realities, the faint clues and indirections of Altman's art
cinema.

Similar to the depiction of country music, the wild west show, and fashion in
Nashville, Buffalo Bill and Prêt-à-Porter, these films are big, high-energy
productions. With the exception of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, they contain
significant performance sequences. In these moments, they revel in the alluring
spectacle of the show business, even as they reflexively and obliquely construct
art-cinema narratives that examine the unspoken desires, anxieties, and
estrangements that motivate the values of the contemporary entertainment
world. But they also present self-conscious indictments against show business
as an accessory in the violence and alienation of modern life. Their fictions
comment on the entertainment-making business, the system of mass-media
storytelling, their constructions of reality, and the negative effects of those
constructions on social subjectivity.

Like most of Altman's other films, Gosford Park tells meandering and unclosed
stories; it depicts insecure and vulnerable social identity, and it critiques the
assured simplicities of the entertainment business that makes human need the
basis for commodities sold by stars, glamour and false illusions. Its success at
the box office, with the critics, and at the awards ceremonies was surprising. A
central problem in the popular appreciation of Altman's movies has been their
perceived bleakness of vision. They not only fail to close down the societal
eruptions of plot conflict or resolve the conflicts of personal abilities and
commitments; they also appear cynical and pessimistic about the values of
mass culture and its dominant forms of entertainment. These subversive
qualities have always impressed the critics more than audiences, but so many
moviegoers bought tickets to Gosford Park that it garnered the third best box
office of Altman's career. Perhaps here, as at the beginning of his Hollywood
career in MASH, Altman's iconoclastic vision and innovative storytelling struck
some sympathetic cord with his audience. Perhaps the world of the English
aristocracy is sufficiently distant and enchanting to matter; perhaps the lives of
the servant class are represented with a sufficiently gentle and caring manner to
be attractive. Whatever the reason, for a moment Altman's ensemble
appreciation for actors, his disdain for rationally linear narratives, his genre
revisionism, his lyrically moving camera, his oblique and obscure sound
recording became widely the ground for praise instead of criticism. For another
moment after 33 films in as many years, the man who makes gloves in an
industry that sells shoes, the maverick director is also the master.
© Robert T. Self, December 2004

If you would like to comment on this article, please send a letter to the editors.

1.

Filmography
Films
 
Countdown (1968)
That Cold Day in the Park
(1969)
MASH (1970)
Brewster McCloud (1970) Robert Altman
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Images (1972)
The Long Goodbye, The (1973)
Thieves Like Us (1974)
California Split (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976)
3 Women (1977)
A Wedding (1978)
Quintet (1979)
A Perfect Couple (1979)
Health (1979)
Popeye (1980)
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Streamers (1983)
Secret Honor (1984)
O.C. & Stiggs (1985)
Fool for Love (1985)
Aria (1987)
Beyond Therapy (1987)
Vincent and Theo (1990)
The Player (1992)
Short Cuts (1993)
Prêt-à-Porter (1994)
Kansas City (1996)
Robert Altman's Jazz '34: Remembrances of Kansas City Swing (1996)
The Gingerbread Man (1998)
Cookie's Fortune (1999)
 Dr. T and the Women (2000)
Gosford Park (2001)
The Company (2003)

Television Productions

Two by South (Rattlesnake in a Cooler/Precious Blood)(1982)

The Laundromat (1983)
The Dumb Waiter (1985)
The Room (1985)
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1988)
Tanner '88 (1988)
McTeague (1992)
Black and Blue (1993)
Gun (1997)
Tanner on Tanner (2004)

zzz
 

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Theodoros
Angelopoulos
b. April 27, 1935, Athens, Greece

by Acquarello

Acquarello is a NASA Design Engineer and author of

the Strictly Film School website.

filmography       bibliography       articles in Senses       web resources

In Theo Angelopoulos' haunting fable odyssey, Landscape in the Mist (1988), an adolescent girl
named Voula (Tania Palaiologou) begins to tell a bedtime story to her younger brother Alexander
(Michalis Zeke) before being interrupted by the sound of their mother's approaching footsteps.
Disappointed, Alexander impatiently complains, "This story will never get finished." It is an
innocent observation that appropriately characterizes Angelopoulos' epic and distinctive native
cinema as well. From the absence of the conventional word 'End' at the conclusion of his films to
his penchant for interweaving variations of episodes from his earlier films (which, in turn, are often
culled from personal experience) to create interconnected 'chapters' (1) of a continuous, unfinished
work, Angelopoulos' cinema is both intimately autobiographical and culturally allegorical and, like
the children of Landscape in the Mist, traverses a metaphysical plane where the real and the mythic
figuratively (and sublimely) intersect to map the organic and borderless landscape of the Greek
soul.

From an early age, Angelopoulos' artistic role as a figurative chronicler of the contemporary Greek
experience seemed fated. A self-described 'war child', (2) he was born during the dictatorship of
General Metaxas on April 27, 1935 to a middle class merchant family. His earliest childhood
memories innately reflected a broader national trauma—the sound of air raid sirens and the sight of
Germans entering Athens following the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940—an indelible image that
he later recreates from memory for the opening scene of Voyage to Cythera (1983). During the war
years, his father, an unassuming and diligent shopkeeper named Spyros, and his disciplinarian
mother, Katerina, struggled to provide for young Theo and his siblings Nikos, Haroula, and Voula,
but like all Greek families of the time, were profoundly marked by the experience of great
hardship, economic austerity, and hunger. The sensitive and thoughtful filmmaker would be further
affected by two traumatic events in his youth: the Christmastime arrest and disappearance of his
father during the period known as 'Red December' in 1944 after being informed on by a cousin for
not supporting the communist party at the outbreak of Civil War (an incident that is alluded to in
The Travelling Players [1975] and Ulysses' Gaze [1995]), and the death of his sister Voula from a
childhood illness at the age of 11.

After his father's arrest, Angelopoulos began

to write poetry—a creative medium that he
still considers to be the most important
artistic influence in his life—even as he
seemed destined to inherit his uncle's legal
  practice. Nevertheless, young Angelopoulos
proceeded to study law at the University of
Athens, but left shortly before graduation for
his compulsory military service and, upon
returning, decided instead to travel to Paris in
order to study literature, film, and
  Ulysses' Gaze anthropology at the Sorbonne under the
tutelage of Claude Lévi-Strauss (whose
theory on the universal, cross-cultural structure of myth undoubtedly influenced Angelopoulos'
mythically allusive approach to cinema). In 1962, he entered the prestigious French film academy,
IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) but was expelled from the program after
his first year, purportedly for arrogance and lack of discipline. (3) He then enrolled in a workshop
at the Musée de L'Homme where he studied the techniques of cinéma verité under famed
ethnographer and documentarian Jean Rouch. After completing the course, Angelopoulos was
inspired to create his first film and sought assistance from his former IDHEC colleagues to shoot a
16mm short film entitled Black and White, a paean to film noir about a man being mysteriously
pursued by unknown entities throughout Paris. Unfortunately, his limited budget was insufficient to
cover the cost of developing a working print and, consequently, was never able to reclaim his film.
The real-life episode would ironically parallel the introductory premise of Ulysses' Gaze as a
disenchanted Greek-American director, known only as A (Harvey Keitel), obsessively searches for
three lost, undeveloped reels by Balkan film pioneers, the Manakia brothers that represent the first
film from the region: the pure, cinematic 'first gaze' that he believes will restore his own corrupted
artistic vision.

While still assessing his prospects for a career in the French film industry, Angelopoulos returned
home to Athens and, on an impulse, accepted a position as a film critic for a left-wing newspaper
called Demokratiki Allaghi, a decision that he explains had resulted from the trauma of being
assaulted by the police during a pro-Papandreou student demonstration in 1964. He continued to
work for the periodical until its abolition in 1967 during a crackdown on radical opposition by the
military junta of Colonel Papadopoulos. It was during his tenure at Demokratiki Allaghi that he was
recruited for a promotional film project by Greek composer Vangelis for his musical group
Forminx for an upcoming American tour which, despite Angelopoulos' premature dismissal, proves
noteworthy in that it provided the young filmmaker with the funding that he needed to shoot his
first (released) short film: an experimental satire on finding (or more appropriately, creating) the
'ideal man' entitled Broadcast (1968) which was awarded the Critics' Prize at the Thessaloniki Film
Festival.

For his first feature film, Angelopoulos reveals the influence of his documentary training under
Jean Rouch, drawing inspiration from a real-life murder of a guest worker by his wife and her lover
after returning home from Germany. Creating an episodically non-sequential film-within-a-film
entitled Reconstruction (1970), the deeply conscientious filmmaker uses the potentially salacious
narrative material to present a broader social and anthropological commentary on the dying of the
Greek village—and consequently, the essence of the Greek soul—a cultural preoccupation that he
subsequently discusses in an interview with Andrew Horton in 1993:

The village is a complete world in miniature. The old Greek villages had a spirit, a life, full of work
and play and festivity. Of course, Greek villages began to depopulate by the turn of the century, but
it was really World War II and the subsequent Civil War in Greece that completely destroyed the
reality and concept of the Greek village. Our whole way of life was changed by these two
catastrophes.

…The changes [to the village-centered nation] would have been made in a much more gradual and
gentle way. You have to understand that part of the result of these wars was that in the 1950s over
500,000 village men went to Germany in particular, but also America and Australia, etc., to
become guest workers. That meant a big shift in village life. Suddenly the men were gone and the
women remained. With all these changes, the spirit of the villages began to die. (4)

Even with his earliest feature, Angelopoulos already provides a glimpse of his innately personal
cinema through the opening sequence of the husband Costas (Michalis Photopoulos) returning to
Epirus one day after an extended sojourn as an overseas guest worker—an autobiographical
incident drawn from the unexpected reappearance of Angelopoulos' own father after months of
uncertainty over his fate following his arrest (the family had already become resigned to the tragic
probability that he had been executed).

A Trilogy of History

Continuing in the vein of reflecting the dynamic cultural landscape of rural Greece through
episodes from contemporary history, Angelopoulos created Days of '36 (1972), the first film of
what would become his self-described trilogy of history that also includes The Travelling Players
and O Megalexandros (1980). (5) Ostensibly inspired by an actual prison hostage situation
involving a parliament official in 1936, the film is also a subversive indictment of the corruption
and incompetence of the then-ruling military junta (1967–1975) whose heavy-handed method of
governance and retention of power relied on violence, intimidation, and censorship of the
opposition.

While the events depicted in Days of '36 were

compressed over a relatively short period of
time, Angelopoulos' epic masterpiece, The
Travelling Players, is pivotally set in the years  
1939 through 1952 and provides an expansive
framework that spans the pro-monarchy Metaxas
dictatorship (1936–1941), the German
occupation of Athens (1941–1944) during World
War II, and the Greek Civil War (1944–1949).   The Travelling Players
Expounding on the themes of migration and
displacement explored in Reconstruction, the film follows a struggling itinerant acting troupe as
they repeatedly attempt to perform (but never seem to be able to finish) a pastoral play entitled
Golpho the Sheperdess throughout the turbulent unraveling of Greek history during the mid 20th
century.

It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos uses members of an otherwise anonymous cast of

marginalized traveling players as conveyers of contemporary Greek history through a series of
fourth wall monologues in the film: Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) traces his immigration from Asia
Minor to Greece (a reminder of the country's historically borderless, ethnically diverse population
that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire), Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) chronicles the start of
the Civil War after the defeat of the Germans in 1944, and Pylades (Kiriakos Katrivanos) provides
a personal account of the torture of political prisoners. In essence, by using the testament of people
who are literally transient and homeless (and without
identity), Angelopoulos creates a powerful analogy
for all Greek people as displaced exiles within their
own country.

The problematic pattern of foreign intervention in

 
Greek sovereignty that is depicted in The Travelling
Players is also visible in O Megalexandros, a
densely structured film that interweaves two of
Angelopoulos' predilections—history (the late 19th
century kidnapping of aristocratic British tourists by
Greek bandits in Marathon) and myth (the bandit   O Megalexandros
leader who believes that he is the reincarnation of Megalexandros (6))—into a provocative
examination on the destruction of myth, both as a heroic figure (Alexander the Great) and as an
ideology (utopia). Even at this early juncture, Angelopoulos' cinema had begun to reflect on the
failed idealism of his generation, a disillusionment that he would subsequently articulate through
the elegiac image of Lenin's dismantled statue aboard a drifting salvage barge in Ulysses' Gaze.

Angelopoulos' use of allusive, iconic representation in O Megalexandros is also evident in the

preceding film, The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a
group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a
partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and,
compelled to deliberate on its 'proper' disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting
their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation's
deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal
accountability.

A Trilogy of Silence

Having brought his provocative re-evaluation of 20th century Greek history to modern day Greece,
Angelopoulos then sought to capture the human toll of its tragic legacy. The result is a series of
haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness,
myth, and memory that the filmmaker describes as the trilogy of silence: the silence of history
(Voyage to Cythera), the silence of love (The Beekeeper [1986]), and the silence of God
(Landscape in the Mist). (7)

Voyage to Cythera follows the plight of a

returning political exile (Manos Katrakis) during
the general amnesty of the 1970s, a communist
and Civil War partisan fighter who, 32 years
earlier, had re-established a new life in Tashkent
  in the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.
Similar to Reconstruction, the film-within-a-film
narrative of Voyage to Cythera provides a
structural metaphor for a displaced father (who,
like Angelopoulos' long-absent father, is also
named Spyros) attempting to rebuild his former
life and reconnect with his family, only to find
  Voyage to Cythera
that in the wake of devastating wars, abandoned
villages, and commercial development, the idea of home has become a myth.

In contrast to the poignant, yet affirming and transcendent parting image of the cast-off and adrift,
but reunited aging lovers in Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper is a dark and somber portrait of
profound disconnection, loneliness, and obsolescence. The film chronicles the aimless life of a
middle-aged, recently separated schoolteacher named Spyros (Marcello Mastroianni) who,
dispirited by the loss of his beloved daughter through marriage, embarks on his family's traditional
vocation of apiculture and travels southward on an undefined, instinctual springtime migration.
Desperately attempting to connect with the realities of an unfamiliar modern world through a
promiscuous, rootless, Western pop culture-addicted young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who
seems oblivious of the past, Spyros represents the lost generation of Greeks who, like
Angelopoulos' father, have become irrelevant, anecdotal relics within their own country after
decades of divisive wars, economic turmoil, and unstable governments.

As Spyros searches for elemental connection by following in the path of his forefathers, so too is
Landscape in the Mist a journey towards a mythical origin as two siblings, Voula and Alexander,
attempt to find their unknown and essentially nonexistent biological father who, their mother
evasively (and conveniently) explains, lives in Germany. Guided by daydreamed, unanswered
missives to their eternally silent father, the children's odyssey is an existential quest for ancestral
identity and community. From this perspective, the reprised roles of the itinerant, traditional stage
actors from The Travelling Players in the film may be seen, not only as a self-referential farewell to
the trauma of mid 20th century Greek history, but also as a melancholic observation on the
nebulous direction and seemingly inevitable extinction of Greek cultural identity towards the end
of the 20th century: an uncertainty that is symbolically encapsulated by the children's surreal
observation of a large, spinning, disembodied stone hand with a missing index finger rising from
the sea.

A Trilogy of 'Borders' (8)

With the escalating ethnic turmoil in the Balkan region during the 1990s, Angelopoulos returned to
the theme of the nation's historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to
examine the artificially divisive nature of geographic borders. In The Suspended Step of the Stork
(1991), a reporter named Alexander (Gregory Carr), on assignment near the Greece–Turkey border,
encounters a refugee (Marcello Mastroianni) who bears a resemblance to a politician who, years
earlier, had abandoned his wife (Jeanne Moreau) and disappeared. Culminating in the memorable
wedding sequence of the refugee's daughter (Dora Chrysikou) marrying her childhood love from
the opposite side of the Evros River, Angelopoulos illustrates, not only the painful absurdity and
human consequence of arbitrary, man-made frontiers, but also humanity's innate capacity to
transcend these restrictive barriers: a theme that is illustrated in the parting shot of a line of yellow
jacketed (a familiar, idiosyncratic image in Angelopoulos' cinema) repair workers climbing
telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon.

The refugee's resigned sentiment, “We've crossed the border and we're still here. How many
borders must we cross to reach home?", carries through to the makeshift, outdoor cinema in
Angelopoulos' next film, Ulysses' Gaze, as A arrives for an unauthorized screening of his film. Like
the adrift Spyros in The Beekeeper, A's
devastating emotional odyssey through his
ancestral homeland is also a personal journey to
reconnect with his cultural past, striving to
recapture the purity of human vision that has
  been tainted by romantic loss, artistic
controversy, familial estrangement, ideological
disillusionment, and the ravages of war.

Following the epic scope of Ulysses' Gaze,

Angelopoulos then created what is perhaps his
  Eternity and a Day most intimate and introspective work to date,
Eternity and a Day (1998), the story of a terminally ill writer and poet named Alexander (Bruno
Ganz) who settles his personal affairs and bids farewell to family and friends, having decided to
admit himself into the hospital on the following day where he will spend his remaining days
awaiting death. Alternately struggling to reconcile with his emotional abandonment of his late wife
Anna (Isabelle Renauld) and aiding the plight of a young Albanian orphan (Achileas Skevis) living
on the streets, Alexander finds a greater, redemptive purpose through the literal exchange of words
—poetry and communication—and is able to transcend the corporeal bounds of his unfinished
existence.

The three evocative words received by Alexander from the Albanian boy during the course of their
journey capture the film's nostalgic and contemplative tone. The first is korfulamu, a delicate word
for the heart of a flower, a literal 'word of comfort' for his physical suffering. The second is xenitis,
the feeling of being a stranger everywhere that reflects his occupational distraction and
estrangement from his family. The third is argathini, meaning 'very late at night', a word akin to the
metaphoric 'twilight' of one's existence. Inevitably, the words express the poetic essence of
Angelopoulos' indelible cinema as well: the soul of the Greek village, the sentiment of perpetual
exile, and the dying of a culture.

At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, during which Angelopoulos received the coveted Palme d'Or for
Eternity and a Day, the filmmaker remarked, "I belong to a generation slowly coming to the end of
our careers". (9) Nevertheless, despite his seemingly resigned statement, he continues to work
diligently at his craft, having begun filming the first installment of an ambitious, large-scale
romantic trilogy on the star-crossed destiny of two people from Odessa during the early part of the
20th century. The century-spanning, international three-part epic—the latest chapter in
Angelopoulos' evolving, 'work in progress' oeuvre
—is scheduled for completion in 2004.

Theodoros Angelopoulos

© Acquarello, June 2003

Filmography
The Broadcast (E Ekpombei) (1968) short film
Reconstruction (Anaparastasis) (1970)

Days of '36 (Meres Tou '36) (1972)

The Travelling Players (O Thiasos) (1975)

The Hunters (E Kenege) (1977)

Alexander the Great (O Megalexandros) (1980)

One Village, One Villager (Chorio Ena, Katekos Enas…) (1981) television

Athens: Return to the Acropolis (Athena, Epistrophi Stin Akropoli) (1983) television

Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi Sta Kithira) (1983)

The Beekeeper (O Melissokosmos) (1986)

Landscape in the Mist (Topo Stin Omichli) (1988)

The Suspended Step of the Stork (To Meteoro Vima Tou Pelargou) (1991)

Ulysses' Gaze (To Vlemma Tou Odyssea) (1995)

Eternity and a Day (Mia Eoniotita Ke Mia Mera) (1998)

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia: To Livadi pou dakryzei) (2004)

Click here to search for Theodoros Angelopoulos DVDs, videos and books at

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search
Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer

b. February 3, 1927, Santa Monica, California

 
by Maximilian Le Cain

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinephile

living in Cork City, Ireland.

filmography       bibliography       articles in Senses       web resources

Offering a description of himself for the program of a 1966 screening,

Kenneth Anger stated his 'lifework' as being Magick and his 'magical
weapon' the cinematograph. A follower of Aleister Crowley's teachings,
Anger is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the
projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces.
Cinema, he claims, is an evil force. Its point is to exert control over people
and events and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention.

Whatever one's view of this belief may be, what is undeniable is that in
creating the nine films that he either managed to complete (Fireworks
[1947], Eaux d'artifice [1953], Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome [1954-
66], Scorpio Rising [1963], Invocation of My Demon Brother [1969],
Lucifer Rising [1970-81]) or else released as self contained fragments
(Puce Moment [1949], Rabbit's Moon [1950-79], Kustom Kar Kommandos
[1965]), Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique
visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these
wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely
cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing
of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony
Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of
filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical
writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories]
than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in
resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” (1)

Anger's films are cinematic manifestations of his occult practices. As such,

they are highly symbolical, either featuring characters directly portraying
gods, forces and demons (Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Lucifer
Rising) or else finding an appropriate embodiment for them in the
iconography of contemporary pop culture (Puce Moment, Scorpio Rising,
Kustom Kar Kommandos, also Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome). This
view of pop culture as vehicle for ancient archetypes is also the basis of
Hollywood Babylon, his famous book about the seedier aspects of
Hollywood history. In attempting to induce an altered state of
consciousness in his viewers, Anger dispenses with traditional narrative
devices, although his films definitely tell stories. Using powerful esoteric
images and, especially in his later works, extremely complex editing
strategies that frequently feature superimposition and the inclusion of
subliminal images running just a few frames, Anger bypasses our
rationality and appeals directly to our subconscious mind. The structure
common to his major works is that of a ritual invoking or evoking spiritual
forces, normally moving from a slow build up, resplendent with fetishistic
detail, to a frenzied finale with the forces called forth running wild.

The films directly pertinent to

this description that fully
develop it both within their own
contexts and in regard to each
  other are Inauguration of the
Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising,
Invocation of My Demon
Brother and Lucifer Rising. The
first of these details the shifts in
  Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome consciousness undergone by
guests at an occult Eucharist at
the house of Lord Shiva, the Magician. The first scenes detail his
preparations for the event. The decadent magnificence of the spectacle is
established in the opening image: a big close-up of a gold chain at the
centre of the frame that, snakelike, slithers away from the camera, out of
focus and ultimately upwards. The camera follows to reveal the hand of
Shiva, luxuriating in his bed, languidly observing the chain, dangling it
over his face. He then reaches out to his bedside table which is laden with
rings. His hands opulently bejewelled, he swallows the chain, the first
example of oral consumption, the means whereby each alteration of
consciousness will come about. Shiva proceeds to a small, completely red
room where he perceives a deity in the mirror, and then to the space where
the bulk of the action transpires, a completely dark area of indeterminate
dimensions. The guests begin to arrive, each dressed as a mythological
deity—Pan, Astarte, The Scarlet Woman, Isis, Lilith, Aphrodite, Hecate
and, prefiguring the pop-culture references of future works, Cesare the
Somnambulist from Wiene's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), each bearing
narcotic gifts.

This section of the film is constructed around Shiva greeting each guest,
often in a different form, and partaking of what they offer. The movement
of the film is essentially the passing of the gifts from one guest to another
as they advance into a state of transpersonal ecstasy. Anger's compositions
are highly formal and painterly, seducing the viewer with the spectacle of
the sumptuous costumes and adopting a colour palette of an aggressively
theatrical beauty, reminiscent of Powell's Tales of Hoffmann (1951). The
final part of the film is an orgiastic vision of the ritual's consummation,
with fast cutting, multiple superimpositions including images of magical
symbols and the presence of fire hinting at an apocalyptic destiny for those
involved. Even if Anger's films are mute, it would be inaccurate to think of
them as silent—his use of music is never less than vitally important and
frequently deeply impressive. In this case Janacek's Glagolitic Mass adds
to the rapturous imagistic grandeur of Anger's ritual.

Scorpio Rising is practically an amplified remake or, more precisely, a

translation of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. The implied destruction
that concluded the earlier film referred to Anger's recurring preoccupation
with the end of the Christian Age of Pisces, the violent death of which was
necessary to allow for the birth of the Age of Aquarius. The arcanely
theatrical, neo-decadent imagery and abstract space gives way to a realistic
milieu, that of a contemporary biker gang. The fetish objects are now the
paraphernalia of youth subculture and the violence more savage and overt.
But the patterns are the same—a loving preparation for the ritual, the build
up of energy at the ritual and finally the act of destruction. Anger has
simply taken his show to the street.

The preparations involve the bikers

fixing and polishing their motorbikes,
donning the 'ceremonial garb' of leather,  
bedecking themselves with rings and
chains like Shiva in Pleasure Dome—
the physical aspects of preparation.
Psychically, there is the reading of   Scorpio Rising
comic books, the adoration of James
Dean visible on posters in the protagonist's bedroom, the imitation of
Brando who appears on his television in Laslo Benedek's The Wild One
(1954) and the snorting of cocaine. The 'ritual' is a homoerotic Halloween
party, featuring fancy dress like the gathering in Pleasure Dome, where we
witness sodomy, fellatio and all manner of pranks. That this machine-
fixated biker gang is a death cult is made obvious by the omnipresence of
the skull and cross bones, the adoption of Nazi imagery and the noose that
hangs in the hero's bedroom. At the party, a man dances around with a
skull on a wand, touching people's heads with it in twisted benediction.
The film moves into its third stage when the hero leaves the party to
desecrate a church, smashing the altar, installing swastikas and skulls,
urinating into his helmet and casting a hex on a diurnal motorbike race that
results in an accident. That same night there is also another accident that
leaves one of the bikers, presumably the hero, dead.
 Scorpio Rising represents the
densest, most complex montage
of Anger's career. As previously
stated, the hero's 'preparation'
features images of Brando and
  comic books. This comparative
editing is developed in the
second part by the blasphemous,
contrasting incorporation of
images from the life of Jesus
appropriated from a Z-grade
  Scorpio Rising Sunday school movie, a copy of
which Anger is supposed to
have discovered left on his doorstep by accident while editing Scorpio
Rising. It is the perfect vehicle for conveying Anger's perception of an
effete Christianity perishing in the face of the new phallic virility that the
bikers embody. As the ranting biker casts his hex from the church, images
of Nazism and Hitler grow in frequency. Some shots are barely perceptible,
such as the few frames of an erect penis intercut with Jesus healing a blind
man. As the film progresses the intensity of the editing increases,
culminating in the death hex in which the spell seems to summon, by way
of editing, a seemingly unconnected race that ends in accident as the form
the malediction takes. These are only the major strands of this semiotic
layering; other images are also called in to comment on the action and its
meaning.

The use of music in Scorpio Rising is possibly the most influential aspect
of Anger's oeuvre. The soundtrack is comprised entirely of a series of pop
songs and a few sound effects. The songs not only add to the energy of the
visuals but their lyrics form an ironic commentary on them. This
prefigured such films as Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) and
American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) that paved the way for wide use of
'found' soundtracks.

If the 'translation' of the antique, closed universe of Pleasure Dome into the
real milieu of Scorpio Rising implied
that Anger believed Magick was active
in the modern world and by the early
'60s no longer needed an academically
mythological context to be made  
cinema, the berserk Invocation of My
Demon Brother shows it as immanent
by the end of that decade. Aptly
described by its director as “an attack on
the sensorium”, it is a disturbing   Invocation of My Demon Brother
montage of jarringly edited images and
symbols accompanied by a repetitive synthesised soundtrack by Mick
Jagger that sounds like a malfunctioning computer printer. An albino man
raises a wand; another man passes a knife across his chest; a cat is thrown
on a fire; people smoke from a skull shaped pipe; Anger performs fevered
rituals involving burning documents and swastikas; the Rolling Stones and
a group of Hell's Angels appear; a procession of musicians descends a
staircase followed by a fireball that stops at the bottom, resembling a burnt
corpse and holding a sign that reads: 'Zap—You're pregnant—That's
witchcraft'. For all its violence and ugly chaos, Scorpio Rising was careful
to gradually draw the audience in to its well-defined milieu through a build
up of details that in some ways parallels Scorsese and the Rossellini of La
Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966) and kept its drama safely confined
to this well defined space. Demon Brother, on the other hand, is terrifying
in its randomness and lack of a defined space. There is a brief build up at
the outset, with the wand and the knife, but soon the audience is
experiencing the full impact of Anger's fragmented nightmare. Symbols,
superimpositions and distorting lenses abound. If there is one dominant
recurring image, it is eyes in close up, fixed on the audience. A found
footage image of soldiers leaving a helicopter in Vietnam is fully visible
twice. However, it appears throughout the film on a C roll visible only with
infra-red glasses, subliminally adding to the sense of anxiety—one of the
most extreme examples of Anger attempting to bypass our rational minds.

His subsequent and latest film to date, Lucifer Rising is a departure from
his previous major works. If Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising and Demon
Brother remained fixated on death, Lucifer Rising is about rebirth, a
celebration of the power of nature and of the ancient gods. It is a film of
breathtaking beauty and power that supplants the closed worlds of
Pleasure Dome and Scorpio Rising as well as Demon Brother's zone of all-
pervading disorientation with an awesome sense of timelessness and spatial
immensity, engendered at least in part by having been shot at often sacred
sites all over the world. The 'ritual structure' of the previous films is
present, but opened up. It now operates on two levels, encompassing the
world of the gods as well as the efforts of the adept at summoning them.
Linking Egyptian mythology, embodied by Isis (Miriam Gibril) and Osiris
(Donald Cammell), with Crowleyan practices, it celebrates Lucifer not as
the devil but as lord of light. 'Lucifer' Anger observes 'is the patron saint of
the visual arts. Colour, form, all thee are the works of Lucifer.'

These 'ritual' structures are also present in some of the less developed
works in either a minor or abbreviated form. Puce Moment, a film linked to
Pleasure Dome in terms of its visual opulence (and, indeed, shots from it
are used in Pleasure Dome's superimpositions), shares the later film's
fetishistic act of preparation, in this case a movie star getting dressed to
walk her dogs and magically floating out of her house on her bed. Rabbit's
Moon retells the story of Harlequin and Pierrot, which fits into Anger's
common narrative pattern of a hero who summons up forces that finally
harm him. Likewise Eaux d'artifice's ending, in which the heroine seems to
turn into water in one of the numerous fountains among which she has
been walking, appears to suggest punishment for meddling with natural
powers. Kustom Kar Kommandos seems more like a camp send-up of the
machine fetish elements of Scorpio Rising than anything else, with a
muscular young man polishing a car with a fluffy duster against a pink
background in exaggeratedly eroticised compositions to the
accompaniment of the Parris Sisters' Dream Lover.

Anger began life in Hollywood and popular legend maintains that an

appearance as a child actor in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Max
Reinhardt/William Dieterle, 1935) revealed his vocation to him. As a boy
he claims to have made a series of unscreened and possibly lost films with
such titles as 'Who Has Been Rocking my Dreamboat' (1941), 'Prisoner of
Mars' (1942) and 'Drastic Demise' (1945). His first film in distribution is
Fireworks (1947) and it already marks him as a major talent. Essentially
the story of a dream, this sado-masochistic, homoerotic vision of a young
man who cannot sleep and goes in search of a light, only to be beaten and
torn open by a group of sailors already displays the influence of Crowley;
it is a veiled study of an initiate's symbolic death and rebirth. It also
displays the influence of Jean Cocteau who was so impressed by it that he
invited Anger to come to France. He spent much of the '50s there, involved
in many abortive projects. Indeed, Anger's career is littered with films
abandoned due to lack of funding or to
theft, fire or vandalism. Puce Moment is
all that was shot of a proposed feature,
'Puce Women', about fading Hollywood
stars in their decaying mansions. In  
1949 The Love that Whirls was
destroyed by Eastman-Kodak
developing laboratories who objected to
images of nudity. Adaptations of   Fireworks
Cocteau's La Jeune homme et la mort
and Isidore Ducasse's Les Chants de Maldoror in the early '50s got no
further than test shots. A documentary about Crowley's erotic frescoes at
Thelema Abbey was 'lost' by the magazine Picture Post which
commissioned it. Only 20 minutes of an adaptation of Pauline Reage's
L'histoire d'O were shot in 1960.

Anger returned to the United States in 1962. After the success of Scorpio
Rising he planned the ambitious Kustom Kar Kommandos, abandoned due
to lack of funds—the only scene shot comprises the film of that title that
we have today. The original and very different version of Lucifer Rising
was stolen in 1966, never to be recovered. In 1968 Anger went to London,
where he began an association with Mick Jagger. Demon Brother was
constructed from remaining footage from the first Lucifer Rising and
material shot in London.
Since Lucifer Rising, Anger has spent his time pruning, maintaining and
preserving his films, adding new soundtracks to several of them. He also
travels widely to attend screenings of his work. In rigorously pursuing a
vision of the cinema that is as original as it is personal, Anger not only
created one of the most consistently thrilling bodies of work in cinema but
in so doing highlighted the poverty of imagination that governs so much
'normal' filmmaking and the unconscionable limitations still placed on the
medium. Like other geniuses of the American Underground such as
Brakhage, Warhol and Markopoulos he has had a certain amount of
influence over succeeding generations of filmmakers. But, like them,
whatever he has taught others, he will always remain unique, one of the
few filmmakers whose work is capable of returning meaning to that much
overused word—'visionary'.

© Maximilian Le Cain, January 2003

Endnotes:

1. Tony Rayns, “A Kenneth Anger Kompendium”, Cinema, No. 4,

Oct. 1969

  Kenneth Anger

  

Filmography
Fireworks (1947)

Puce Moment (1949)

Rabbit's Moon (1950-79)

Eaux d'artifice (1953)

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66)

Scorpio Rising (1963)

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)

Lucifer Rising (1970-81)

  

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Michelangelo
Antonioni
b. September 29, 1912, Ferrara, Italy
d. July 30, 2007, Rome, Italy

by James Brown  

James Brown is completing an Honours degree

in film theory at Flinders University in South
Australia, where he also organises the Ellipsis
Film Society.

filmography       bibliography       articles in Senses       web resources

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex - critically

stimulating though elusive in meaning. They are ambiguous works that
pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative
causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction. Displaced
dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings,
moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the spectator is compelled to
respond imaginatively and independent of the film. The frustration of this
experience reflects that felt in the lives of Antonioni's characters: unable to
solve their own personal mysteries they often disappear, leave, submit or
die. The idea of abandonment is central to Antonioni's formal structuring
of people, objects, and ideas. He evades presences and emphasises related
absences. His films are as enigmatic as life: they show that the systematic
organisation of reality is a process of individual mediation disturbed by a
profound inability to act with certainty.

Antonioni was raised in a middle-class environment that he accepts has

influenced his creative perspective. His formative interests in art included
puppetry and painting. From 1931-1935, he studied at the University of
Bologna where he became involved in student theatre. After graduating in
economics, he took a job as a bank teller and contributed stories and film
criticism to the Ferrara newspaper Corriere Padano. Before he moved to
Rome (sometime around 1940), (1) Antonioni attempted to make a
documentary at a local insane asylum. When the set was lit, the patients
suddenly responded with convulsions and the film was aborted. (2) (This
experience prefigures the strong key lighting of Tentato suicidio [1953].)

In Rome he began writing for Cinema, a hotbed of political and social

criticism. Since the (neorealist) direction of the journal was contrary to
Antonioni's interests in alternative technical practices and filmmaking
styles he stopped contributing after only a few months. (3) He spent a
similar amount of time at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,
making one, now lost, short film. A stint helping write Un Pilota ritorna
(Roberto Rossellini, 1942) led to the signing of a contract with the
production company Scalera. While drafted into the army, Antonioni still
contrived to work under assignment on I Due Foscari (Enrico Fulchigoni,
1942) and Les Visiteurs du soir (Marcel Carné, 1942).

Antonioni's first documentary concerned the inhabitants of the Po valley

region near Ferrara. Shot in 1943, Gente del Po was not released until after
the war in 1947. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through
degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still, he
displayed an early resilience and determination to complete the film, a trait
that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future.

In the next few years, Antonioni continued to write criticism and

screenplays, translated French literature, and made several more
documentaries. N.U. - Nettezza urbana (1948) and L'Amorosa menzogna
(1949), in particular, were well received: both won awards from the Italian
Guild of Film Journalists and the latter competed at Cannes. On the
strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing from Vallani
Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan.

The narrational structure of a search with competing urges of desire and

death surfaces in Cronaca di un amore (1950). Antonioni will consistently
return to this structure in his later works.
The film's protagonists are doomed past
lovers who find their romance renewing
and repeating itself with the same tragic
ends. Their wish for the destruction of  
an intervening third-party twice comes
true but on each occasion something
unidentifiable is also lost between them.
All that remains is an individual,   Cronaca di un amore
separated existence. (An immediate,
violent, desire-quenching version of the wish-device occurs, imaginarily, at
the end of Zabriskie Point [1970].) Cronaca is suggestive of film noir, (4)
but Antonioni sidesteps traditional plot conventions to focus on the interior
feelings of the lovers. He utilises a mobile camera, composes roomy
frames, and follows the performers in deep-focus long takes. Key dialogue
is highlighted by centrality, symbolism, frontality, unexpected movement,
and cutting: a range of methods that define Antonioni's precise emphasis of
narrative by particulars of style. This approach occupies Antonioni's
formalism until more comprehensive analytical cutting techniques and less
character-dependent camera movements arise first in Le Amiche (1955) and
then more definitively in his first widescreen film, L'Avventura (1960).

Perhaps Antonioni's main concessions to the dominance of Italian

neorealism are his configurations of class. As in Cronaca, the relatively
poor female protagonist of La Signora senza camelie (1953) is thrust into a
wealthy environment. From shop assistant to star B-grade actress, she is
beset by the demands and advice of men. Her ultimate failure is an
inability to control her own life. Antonioni has said that he considered the
film to be a mistake because he concentrated on the 'wrong' character. (5)
Who the preferable character might have been remains a mystery. The
film's style is similar to Cronaca, with an odd, perhaps absurd, reflexive
effect: the melodramatic filmmakers within the story, similar to Antonioni,
seem to be utilising mobile camera, long take strategies!

I Vinti (1953), a trio of separate stories set in Paris, Rome, and London,
was shot before Camelie but released at least seven months later. (6)
Troubles that began in pre-production between Antonioni and the film's
producers presumably continued until the film's premiere. (7) Additionally,
the film was censored
abroad which may have led
to long delays. The reason
for all the fuss was
Antonioni's insistence on
portraying three murders
 
and investigations without
providing any moral, social
or other evidence to
identify the killers'
motivating reasons.
Reconstructing the space
  L'Eclisse
evacuated by motive,
Antonioni positions characters with respect to their environments,
foregrounds landscape and experiments with independent camera
movement. This destabilising of character and narrative by formal
abstraction continues to be emphasised as Antonioni's style develops. His
next work is a complex example. Tentato suicidio is staged amid artifice
but presents a range of stories about attempted suicide that purport to truth.
Cesare Zavattini, producer of L'Amore in città, intended its segments to
record the daily life of "ordinary" people. Antonioni takes Zavattini's
quotidian premise and, rather than concede to it, investigates its validity.
Four of the stories are reconstructed and their non-fictional guises come
under threat from the fictional probing of the cinematic stylistic system.
Even in the presence of non-actors who tell their own stories, Antonioni is
incredulous of a basic "real" dimension.

Another attempted suicide begins Le Amiche, linking two stories that are in
medias res. (8) Both concern the immediate traumas of two women: Clelia
(Eleanora Rossi Drago) is returning to a displaced past, while Rosetta
(Madeleine Fischer) is unable to foresee a romantically successful future.
Their lives are influenced - hindered more than assisted - by an ensemble
of social friends. The interaction between all players is handled at a
deliberate slow pace, with space carefully constructed to suggest what has
previously happened and to convey internal group dynamics. The second
story is perhaps the most interesting, unravelling in parts that effect change
on the first. Clelia's stable linear progression through the story is counter-
pointed by the emotional imbalance of Rosetta's highs and lows. How
Antonioni dramatises the differences in the two stories is largely reinforced
by a flux of inclusions and exclusions in his staging. The scene on the
beach is an often cited example. (9) Only Rosetta is isolated for the length
of a single shot. There are teasing set-ups which briefly single out someone
else, but a track or pan finds others. A single insert shot in the scene
depicts a drawing of Rosetta by Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), the object of
her affections. Clelia, on the other hand, is always framed side-by-side
with another. At the pivotal moment of the scene, a cut suddenly reveals
the two of them standing together. Antonioni's arrangement of his cast
functions to incorporate and separate ideas and conflicts as required at
specific moments. Close observation of placement in the mise en scène is
worthwhile because it helps explain the unknown properties of the story:
its past, how its characters think and feel, even speculation as to what
might happen next. (10)

The complexities of Antonioni's multi-actor staging style are not as

apparent in Il Grido (1957), a bleak portrayal of one factory worker's
journey away from home, through various liaisons, and back again. There
is a return to the use of a mobile camera paired with analytical cutting
(including some reverse shots) to serve the interests of dialogue. The
constant state of Aldo's (Steve Cochran) agitation is emphasised by this
more rapid technique of editing. Even the longer shots (at least three are
just over a minute long) concern arguments between Aldo and women.
What sets Il Grido apart from Antonioni's previous films is his stylistic
response to a different milieu. Dank, gaslit interiors are tight spaces forced
by the staging into a moderate depth. The result is an effect of oppression
from which Aldo always tries to escape. But when he surges outside, the
land is such a contrast that it too is threatening. Antonioni generally
maintains a high horizon line, emphasising the flatness and desolation of
the background. The high camera angle also accentuates the smallness of
Aldo's daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi), whom Aldo is unwilling, or
unable, to properly father. When he sends Rosina home on a bus, the
element of pathos generates a strange and rare Antonioni moment. It is an
interesting opposition to the awkward attention seeking of Valerio (Valerio
Bartoleschi) in Il Deserto rosso (1964).

Antonioni's next four films frame the period of his most intense and, it is
generally accepted, productive work. Some consider L'Avventura, La Notte
(1961), and L'Eclisse (1962) a
trilogy (or, with Il Deserto rosso, a
tetralogy) of sorts, largely because
of a consistency of style, social
setting, theme, plot and character
 
(especially the roles played by the
ubiquitous Monica Vitti). (11) The
usefulness of such a categorisation
is questionable. (12) However, at
least in the first three, Antonioni   L'Avventura
demonstrates a formal stability
between films that, considering his earlier fluctuations in method, is
surprising. Part of what makes L'Avventura so impressive is that Antonioni
developed a cohesion of narrative and stylistic devices that had only
haphazardly surfaced in his earlier films. It might not be too ridiculous to
suggest that analogous to some of his characters, Antonioni was searching
for something, a method of communication, which he finally "found" with
L'Avventura. That he wouldn't let go until he had explored the approach a
couple of films further, is retrospectively understandable.

It is with these films that Antonioni became a famous, critically esteemed,

and even popular filmmaker. Concurrent with a boom period in the Italian
industry and a re-vitalisation of European cinema in general, Antonioni
was suddenly reflective of a massive change in film culture that he had
really been progressing towards for the last decade.

The critical discussion of these films is so extensive that I will forego

summarising them here. But it is worth mentioning that a fundamental
element of "the trilogy" is Antonioni's increasing interest in the abstraction
of space: for instance, the shot of the church in the deserted village in
L'Avventura; the opening shot of La Notte that tracks down the Pirelli
building; and the final seven minute montage of L'Eclisse. These kinds of
independent, wandering, investigative techniques are dominant traits in Il
Deserto rosso, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point and The Passenger
(1975). However, there is expansive conjecture regarding their purposes
and effects.

For his first colour film, Il

Deserto rosso, Antonioni
further abstracted reality.
 
Effects trick the eye: the
flattening of space by
telephoto lenses; the strange
scale, placement, and colour of
objects; out of focus
foregrounds and backgrounds.   Il Deserto rosso
He implements a faster, sometimes disorienting, cutting style and
emphasises the aural qualities of industry. To use André Bazin's phrase
perversely, the dramatic evolution of Antonioni's revised style is a
dialectical step, but not in the direction of realism. (13)

Il Deserto rosso marked a turning point. Antonioni's shifting directions of

interest compelled him to explore international markets, include male
protagonists, and vigorously question the nature of photographic reality. In
this transitive period, he made another short film, Il Provino (1965), a
preface segment for Dino De Laurentiis' I Tre volti, starring Saroya, a past
queen of Iran.

No small account can possibly

sum up the ambiguous openness
evident in Antonioni's next film.
Aside from being his biggest
commercial success, Blow-Up is a
  highly valued critical commodity
that has drawn the interest of an
astounding range of
commentators. The reasons for
such a deluge are somewhat
Blow-Up   unclear. Other films are, for
instance, self-reflexive, conducive
to subject theories, or consciously explore how reality and meaning are
constructed. Nevertheless, Blow-Up continues to attract various emergent
criticism. Rather than add to such a mass of interpretation, and again for
reasons of space, I will instead vouch for the usefulness of Peter Brunette's
"post-structuralist," feminist account. (14)

Compared to the troubled Zabriskie Point, the story surrounding the risky
production and exhibition of Blow-Up is a relatively happy one. When
Antonioni went to make a film in America, he decided to make a film
about America. He said, "I see ten thousand people making love across the
desert." (15) And the problems began.

Quite unlike the complex ambiguity of Blow-Up, the story of Zabriskie

Point has a considerable vagueness located in its simplicity. It clearly
constructs a negative image of authority and materialism, but its converse
handling of revolutionary students is not especially exciting or engaging.
That leaves the most compelling centres of the film as its two fantasy
sequences. These in their most reduced forms amount to love (more
accurately, mass sex in the desert) and death (expressed via the violent
explosion of a houseful of commodities). (16) They're outright
hallucinatory spectacles, practically Hollywood marketing devices, which
makes the massive losses the film
took at the box office even
stranger. (17)
 
The Passenger is another open text,
full of self-reflexive concerns such
as perception, reality, identity and
truth. Past narrative techniques are
further explored: doubling,   The Passenger
journeying, constructing an unseen death. While Blow-Up investigates the
possible, but redundant, existence of an object, this is a search that turns
inward and ultimately finds nothing.

Antonioni's style in these three films is far removed from that of the '50s'
films. The earlier invocation of interior moods and feelings has been
discarded in favour of a construction of exterior things in their own various
contexts. His characters are now positioned as part of a complex network
of objects and inter-subjective relationships. The camera no longer
functions to serve the action; it becomes a tool for Antonioni to inscribe
meaning. He asks questions that are best resolved by stepping outside the
fiction and considering the film's structure of organisation and cognition.
By incorporating the film viewing experience into the story, his formal
choices are layered with a political subjectivity: he explains how ideology
is working within the film.

The height of such artistry explains the relative disappointment, to most, of

the rest of Antonioni's films. Il Mistero di Oberwald (1980) is an abrupt
swing away from epistemological preoccupation. Made on video for
television, it provided Antonioni relief from high budget production
burdens. Excited by the potential of new filmmaking technologies, he
experiments with post-production colour manipulation to produce unusual
effects. In other respects the film is less daring, perhaps a signal of
Antonioni's desire to move in a different direction but not quite knowing
where.

With Identificazione di una

donna (1982), he returns to older
concerns. A specific filmmaking
problem (the processing of
choices available to a director) is
merged with devices of
searching, uncertainty and
sudden abandonment. It is
tantalising to put Antonioni in
the shoes of the director in the
Al di là delle nuvole text, opening up a reading that
suggests a confusion about what
kinds of films he ought to make. But it seems just as sensible to consider
Identificazione as a re-focusing on the hesitant, anxious individual, now
framed by apparent self-reflexivity. Its formal system is a balance of
autonomy and traditional continuity: a complex arrangement, both
distancing and engaging. The problem may reside in the mix. At this late
stage in his career, Antonioni and the film's producers may have felt it
necessary to appeal to a large, international market. He expected to
continue making pictures, but the lack of success here probably assisted in
the halting of his progress. In the historical context of a worldwide
resurgence in mainstream cinema, the inability to construct a narrational or
stylistic pigeon-hole for Identificazione was troublesome.

Thirteen years later, after a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak,
Antonioni was able to make Al di là delle nuvole (1995), with Wim
Wenders providing insurance should the production come into difficulty.
For most critics, the return was welcomed even though few admired the
film. This time, it may be impossible to reject the alter-ego hypothesis: a
lot of the wandering Director's (John Malkovich) dialogue is culled from
Antonioni's interviews and writings. However, the Director's presence
within the film is largely observational. Even his affair, in the second of
four segments, occurs because of a voyeuristic curiosity. His presence
bares witness to a nexus of love stories, a collection of events he has been
told, or possibly invented. They are lost stories, in the sense of being
momentary, transitory, and disconnected in space and time. In an authorial
context they are stories Antonioni has told elsewhere, not directly on film.
They existed outside of cinema, beyond the clouds of the imaginary.
Without the benefit of the cinematic apparatus, without the human
capacity, continually stressed in the cinema of Antonioni, to observe and
perceive, most of us would never hear or read them.
No one would have seen them.

  Michelangelo Antonioni

© James Brown, May 2002

Filmography
Dramas directed by Antonioni:
Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) (1950)

La Signora senza camelie (The Lady

without Camelias) (1953)

I Vinti (The Vanquished) (1953)

Tentato suicidio (Suicide Attempt)

(1953);
episode of L'Amore in Città (Love in the
City)

Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) (1955)  

Il Grido (The Cry) (1957)

L'Avventura (The Adventure) (1960)

La Notte (The Night) (1961)

L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962)

Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert) (1964)   La Notte

Prefazione: Il Provino (Preface: The Screen Test) (1965);
episode of I Tre volti (The Three Faces)

Blow-Up (1966)

Zabriskie Point (1970)

The Passenger (Professione: Reporter) (1975)

Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery) (1980)

Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman) (1982)

Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds) (1995), Co-directed by Wim Wenders

segment in Eros omnibus film (2004)

   Documentaries directed by Antonioni:

Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley) (1947)

N.U. - Nettezza urbana (Sanitation Department) (1948)

Superstizione - Non ci credo! (Superstitions) (1948)

L'Amorosam menzogna (Lies of Love) (1949)

Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit) (1949)

La Villa dei mostri (The Villa of the Monsters) (1950)

La Funivia del Faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria) (1950)

Chung Kuo Cina (Chung Kuo China) (1972)

Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca) (1983); segment of Falsi

Ritorni (Fake Returns)

Kumbha Mela (1989)

Roma (1990); segment of 12 Autori per 12 Città (12 Authors for 12 Cities)

Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (1992)

I am unable to verify the productions of Roma - Montevideo, Oltre l'Oblio,

Bomarzo, and Ragazze in Bianco. Presumably short documentaries made
between 1948-1950, they are not listed in most filmographies.
OTHER CREDITS
Un Pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns) (1942) Dir: Roberto Rossellini (Co-
scriptwriter)

I Due Foscari (The Two Foscaris) (1942) Dir: Enrico Fulchigoni (Assistant
director and co-scriptwriter)

Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) Dir: Marcel Carné (Assistant director)

Caccia tragica (Tragic Pursuit) (1947) Dir: Giuseppe De Santis (Co-scriptwriter)

Le Sceicco bianco (The White Sheik) (1952) Dir: Federico Fellini (Co-
scriptwriter)

Uomini in più (1955) Short film directed by Nicolò Ferrari (Producer)

La Tempesta (1958) Dir: Alberto Lattuada (Second unit director)

Nel segno di Roma (1958) Dir: Guido Brignone (Director of reshoot)