NEW YORK’s press knows without a doubt how movie elements should behave, and it excoriates those films which dare to rearrange formal conventions. It tells us (1) music should never be an aggressive, dominant element (as it is in Moses and Aaron); (2) voices over the film should explain and correspond with visual material and never create a contradiction to the image (India Song blasts this law); (3) an image should hold the screen no longer than it takes a quick New Yorker to digest the point (Kaspar Hauser has its own passionately held notion of pace and its purpose); (4) an image should never be blocky, sculptural, and anti-flow (Moses and Aaron promulgates these Cézanne-esque qualities) or airlessly compacted, flattened into close frontality (the homosexuals in Fist-Right of Freedom are often profiled toward each other, close to the camera, filling most of the frame). Above all, a movie should progress fluidly in a rhythm and length that are comfortable and familiar to audiences (which applies to none of the above films, our favorites at this year’s New York Film Festival).
Yvonne Rainer, a Manhattan dancer and filmmaker, describes one of her dances with an iconoclastic humor unknown to the righteous, reproving New York movie critic, who not only knows every point at which an artist goes right or wrong, but knows it conclusively within twenty-four hours. Ms. Rainer talking about Parts of Some Sextets: “Its repetition of actions, its length, its relentless recitation, its inconsequential ebb and flow all combined to produce an effect of nothing happening. The dance went nowhere, did not develop, progressed as though on a treadmill or like a ten-ton truck stuck on a hill: it shifts gears, groans, sweats, farts, but doesn’t move an inch. Perhaps next time my truck will make some headway; perhaps it will inch forward—imperceptible—or fall backward—headlong.”
Ms. Rainer is a saturnine independent who makes jokey, unkempt, opinionated films (“Well, you know, Shirley, I’ve always been a pushover for sweeping statements about society by deep thinkers”). None of her films are shown in this year’s turn of Roud’s Roulette Wheel at Lincoln Center.
“Is it Ms. Duras’s intention to bore the audience, and, if so, does she feel she has succeeded?” This question, which is asked Duras every time she brings the festival another of her talented cryptic movies of beautiful people trapped in rituals, is typical of New York’s daily-weekly press, treating anything other than illustrative storytelling as the act of a witch. This brings up some subdued, plotty filmmaking: The Wonderful Crook, a Swiss world in which all emphasis is on tidy landscape, décor, and props. The movie stays far away from its subjects, lingering on small people, shopkeepers and workers, in pleasant outdoors décor that contradicts the reality of their trade; the few closeups remain decorative and reveal little in a soft, all-the-way Thirties storytelling that made many critics anything from comfortably happy to ecstatic.
With its gentle, fresh landscapes and towns, laundered to pristine perfection, and a tout va bien attitude that expresses itself in the diluted, rhythmic pace, the movie’s design involves keeping the figures small inside the landscapes and being tidy and/or whimsical with each event that might otherwise become sordid. The hero’s first robbery, to pay the wages of the carpenters in his failing furniture factory, ends quickly with his shooting a vase of wildflowers. An ugly fight is made piquant by the Robin Hood hero throwing a portly businessman’s spectacles into a sprawling oak tree. You barely see the factory or the all-important handmade furniture which furnishes the motive for the entire plot. Everything is muted and decorous: a half-nude cutie pie (Marléne Jobert) in a half-lit room, in a pose-y private moment; she runs the bath, pensively waits in bed for the bath to fill, her feet on the wall. It’s terribly photogenic for a supposed private moment, but, in its stiff juicelessness, it’s like everything else in the film: tepid and decorous.
In the modern Swiss films, a good character actor has to be repressed, filled with propriety, in no-energy scenes that don’t develop and hardly expose the actor beyond a decorative prettiness. A small patrol of talent has been obscured here: Labourier, a firecracker with a solid Thirties toughness in Rivette’s cute gripper; Léotard, a swiftly efficient villain, now you see him, now you don’t, in French Connection II; Depardieu, whose washing-machine salesman in Nathalie Granger was a memorable vaudeville turn. These second knives are dropped into this film’s fastidious landscapes with an eyedropper. Heaven forbid there should be some excess—acting, dialogue, anything.
The rage against radicalism went on in the press and perhaps exhibited itself behind the scenes in the selection of short films which, with the exception of Straub’s Introduction to Schönberg’s Accompanying Music for a Film Scene, were, across the board, mediocre, philistine. Is it possible that Ernie Gehr hasn’t made a brilliantly lit, ghost-image short good enough for this festival?
While some critics talk about the wit and movie legerdemain in F for Fake, a tour de force on the pomposity of art dealers, this cleverly edited, fast-cut movie is a crude attack on what is obtainable in painting and how it is read. At the base is François Reichenbach’s dismal footage about the art master faker Elmyr de Hory: repeated shots of de Hory, wooden palette perched on his left thumb, squashing his brush into the paint, mixing the color without ever looking at the palette, and then smashing it onto the canvas in an unintentional parody of the inspired artist at work. This image of the modern artist is as misleading silly as the kid in Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer brushing three strokes before walking back to his tape recorder.
Reichenbach’s chit-chat footage has been smartly re-edited by Orson Welles, the main gag being a staccato three- or four-shot interview which ends in a stop frame of the gleeful con artist with a fake conviction and enthusiasm on his face. A typical laugh is gained from Clifford Irving’s story that de Hory painted two Modiglianis and one Matisse before lunch and sold all three. De Hory, a natty and rather petite man who wears ascots and wide belts in jet-set bohemian fashion, runs about Ibiza like the island’s official host, kibitzing with anybody he meets in outdoor cafés, inviting them to his next party: “Don’t forget now, I’ll be looking for you.” He presides over forced jolly dinners in restaurants, with a glib, stage-center garrulity, as he tells his guests of his most outrageous coups against those fools, the art experts, and brags that every major museum in the world has a de Hory hanging in it.
Throughout, the artist is presented as one who puts something over on others, and the communicated material of painting is only the various insignia that superficially denote a Matisse or van Dongen (de Hory’s not bad at a Matisse conté crayon drawing, but he paints a lousy van Dongen oil). It is not the joyful effervescent experience indicated by Welles’s narration and the chief actors: de Hory, Irving, and the mad zoomer, Reichenbach. Along with its vulgar idea—the concept of art as a conspiracy of greedy, pompous people in collusion to create an image that will make them look like big shots—the actors seem to be pushing the most tiresome hedonism; and beneath some razzle-dazzle editing and insert shots of an editor’s paraphernalia, there is Reichenbach’s society-reporter’s sensibility: celebrities bragging through some flimsy anecdote, walking toward and away from the tipsy, hand-held camera.
Along with the above film, there were two other self-indulgent hand-held camera ramblings. In Grey Gardens, a smug crew, liberal and complacent as to its motives, swims toward and around two compulsive, painfully poignant performers, a pair of recluses trying to play up to and not let down this movie crew which is putting them in the spotlight. The camera in Milestones is even more A-B-C desultory, jiggling around, tagging after the actors, not very interesting people babbling their lives away. An interesting idea—the student radicals of the Sixties, five years later—weighed down by tons of desultory encounter therapy talk.
Derivative, taking from everywhere, Black Moon opens quite wonderfully: damp and romantic early morning light, the image is of a badger sniffing around on the highway. It’s in lush countryside, not quite light yet; tension builds as a car is heard approaching. It becomes clear that the badger will be killed, and, after this happens, a slender adolescent in a Tyrolean hat steps out of the small car, traumatized but expressionless, staring back to where the badger lies crushed. From that point, the porcelain-faced English beauty, revealed to be a young girl, is relentlessly tormented and undergoes one unimaginable reversal after another.
After some exquisitely engineered tracking shots which follow the adolescent’s orange Honda rippling through woods, across fields, the girl ends up in a Lewis Carroll country house inhabited by kinkiness and multiples. First, she’s immersed with Thérèse Giehse, an old lady (not unlike the complainer in Grey Gardens) propped in a vast bed littered with food, newspapers, animals. She converses in jabberwocky with her grumpy bosom-buddy rat, checks up on the surrounding male-female war via a large short-wave radio, and eats by suckling her daughter’s breast. Lily, the young girl-woman, is then terrorized by a brother and sister who look alike and will tolerate her presence, but won’t speak to her. Instead they run their hands slowly over her face and make little pressure with the tips of their fingers on her shoulder. “Oh, your name is Lily,” says Cathryn Harrison to Joe Dallesandro; “so is mine.” The handsome, muscular Joe, wearing a white ruffled shirt and a golden necklace of two wings around his neck, symbolizes the movie’s sensation of being encrusted in rich appurtenances.
Black Moon is prodigiously inventive but in a way that is a rather heartless pastiche of films made with passion and vehemence. The hand-touch communication (bed-ridden Thérèse Giehse running her hands over the contours of Harrison’s delicate adolescent face) is a shocking echo of Fini Straubinger’s efforts to communicate with other deaf mutes in Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness. A snake crawls over the virginal sleeping teenager in Walkabout; another smaller snake crawls up the skirt of the virginal sleeping Lily. In Herzog’s Signs of Life, the movie comes to a halt, observing some quiet animal behavior, a school of fish causing a paper to twirl in the water; Black Moon similarly stops and becomes silent, watching an animal . . . The animals in this movie are fancifully good actors: the wonderfully dumpy unicorn whose slangy talk is mostly comprised of bitchy advice-giving, and a terrifically independent rat who talks like a querulous Moog synthesizer.
We didn’t see everything, but it was no surprise that the Munichers (including the Straubs, who have been in Rome five years) provided the intensity and uplift, the sense of crackle, anticipation, that sets their films apart from a work like Conversation Piece, a cavernous space inhabited by one interest: Helmut Berger’s sinuous, outrageous freeloader. Fist-Right of Freedom is less about various types and classes in a dated image of the gay world than it is about the passing snits that lead to petty cruelty, every moment against the nearest person. What seems like a Joan Crawford melodrama (a gentle, unprepossessing guy who has a side-show act—“Fox, The Talking Head”—Fox makes a bundle on the lottery and is slowly fleeced of it by a foppish lover) is really a gutty, pessimistic indictment of the constant treacheries between the closest lovers, friends, and family members that arise out of the minutest provocations.
The Festival’s most deceptive movie is loaded with standard clichés (the suave predatory aristocrat in the ascot; Fassbinder, himself, in a cunningly pliant portrait of the rough-trade hustler); the acting is theatrical to lugubrious; the framing is all tight space, little distance between front and back, the people uncomfortably within a tiny box composition (suggesting the claustrophobia of being pinned, forever, with a certain class). The sense of the plot is of a five-line news shocker from the back page built into theater with the focus and framing kept lowercase.
The final scene—Fox lying dead in a garishly lit subway, his pockets being rifled by a pair of twelve-year-olds—is appallingly unremarked. Two of his ex-lovers passing by trying not to notice, the cobalt-blue tiled station, combine to stamp Fox’s unimportance. Ironically, the scene is the first since the opening in which the ill-equipped, emotionally vulnerable Fox has been allowed enough room in the frame to feel a bit free and comfortable.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All—the awkward framing, unpredictable camera positions, the flow of light that meanders in and out of the frame—is the droll, zestful, looming work of a filmmaker still on the prowl, making an exploratory work each time out. The work of a self-propelled artist who’ll never give up, the movie uses the Kaspar Hauser mystery, “the sole known case in human history in which a man was born as an adult,” to take you into an anti-rational as well as irrational movie area previously inhabited by Buñuel, Franju, and Browning. It gains this lovingly crafted anarchism through (1) the intense estrangement of the lead actor, Bruno S.; (2) joining odd-angled inventions and disparate actions choreographed within the same scene; and, especially, (3) giving the sense that the filmmaker has ferreted out (Bruno S. and the prosperous peasant town of Dinkelsbühl, which has tremendous charm in its colored shapes) or made all the elements which appear in the movie. With its unpredictable joins, off-kilter shots, it’s a lyrical affirmation that resonates one main idea in the mind: the beauty and loss involved in adjusting to society.
While Kaspar is involved with ideas of Access to and Deprivation from expression and communication, Moses and Aaron addresses itself to the problem of the space between idea and image in the most materialist of films. “I want the actors to sing as they act, to sing in the desert; in other words to do the Schönberg opera in the most materialist way possible.” The movie is exalted, rough-hewn, multifaceted. The Moses style (bare décors, minimal camera, actors as passive vessels doing an exact singing of the abrasive and seductive music) is conveyed through an uncompromising concern for Thingness over illustration. This is a theater costume, this is wool . . . Ultimately there is only examination of cracked walls, parched ground, wool, paralleling the same intense physicality of the musical sounds. In the past, its forbiddingly austere filmmakers—who have found a way in films to illustrate the conflict between the necessity to understand one’s own time in social and economic terms, and the infinity of silence toward which great art tends—have made the sound track the major element in their films. The delicious and joyful Moses and Aaron, however, is a very sensual experience, from its voluptuous 360-degree pan around the oval-shaped Roman arena in the Abruzzi mountains to the Cézanne-like sculptural insistences which make every crack in the arena’s walls seem extraordinary, a physical reality that reverberates in the mind.
Both Moses and Aaron and the Kaspar Hauser film are apart from the other Festival films, given the ecstatic intensity of their weather. In the exact reading of Schönberg’s opera, the mise-en-scène has a dry, parched air and a light that produces the sensation of a new sculptural world. The sense of air resounding with music is not only a rare movie experience; this is one of the few times when weather, sound, and physical setting have been united with such tactile objectivity. The movie’s anti-flow nature, the scrupulous insistence that each element be accountable for itself, leads to a weird sensation: every item is a concrete phenomenon that has to be read for the first time.
The movie about Kaspar—a grunting, lumplike figure raised in a dungeonlike cellar from infancy—has the sense of fragrance, plus the very delicate motion of rustling, the small effect of flapping bird wings. Whether two sodden, aging creatures are seen in a pauper’s prison watching Kaspar’s first introduction to words and anatomy (“Kaspar, das ist die hand . . . das ist der arm”), and grousing about it (“What kind of a place is this, anyway?”), or the movie is outdoors on a misty hilltop, Kaspar being back-packed into civilization on the shoulders of his black-caped jailer, the film in terms of light has an awakening, ethereal effect. Like its strange foundling who is a just-born grown man, the movie seems introduced to the world for the first time.
Granted that it looks homemade (one of its wonderful essential qualities), the great quality of the Kaspar movie is its entry into the poetry of the unadjusted and unaligned. Kaspar’s appearance in 1828 in the Nuremberg streets has been examined from every possible literary direction; this totally passionate job of direction, an attempt to penetrate details of what Kaspar’s reactions might have been, brings together an actor’s (Bruno S.) own real-life estrangement and a director’s career-long obsession with the awkward and unacclimated, those who are not harmoniously part of society’s mainstream, and a sense of pace and composition that is unusual in its music-poetry orientation. The first scene—Bruno S. chained to his cell floor, rapidly shuttling a toy horse on wheels back and forth, abruptly mouthing the word “horse” in rhythm with each movement—symbolizes every other scene in this Rousseau-like mystical experience. The figure of Bruno S. has the clarity and stark innocence of a Rousseau portrait, and each part of his world (Mr. Daumer’s living room, his garden) has the same earnestly portrayed presence.
Kaspar’s progress from cell to autobiographer is peculiarly paced: it doesn’t move by cinematic flow or any approximation of normal movie progress. Each scene is not only involved in itself, but the actor’s trance-like stare, sucking an egg in a queer shed scene, finds its own space in a musical development. One of the key qualities in this stubborn film is its off-balance list (a list: an inclination to one side, as of a ship; a tilt) through time, a lyricism that won’t be hurried for box-office or plot convenience.
Where Fassbinder works with close two-shots and the effect of two people butting against one another, Herzog’s favorite images not only involve Separation but the effect of two stubborn people, kids or adults, involved in different realities. A young girl tries to teach a complex nursery rhyme to Kaspar, who’s lunking along in his own rhythm, completely unable to accommodate her speed. While the schoolmarm-ish, insistent girl rattles off her rhyme about a little white cat, Kaspar can best achieve single hard-won words. The very physical feeling of Herzog’s films derives partly from double action scenes: an ingratiating kid with a memorable trilling voice teaching the rigid Kaspar anatomy while some squashed prisoners grumble nearby; a lieutenant reading Kaspar’s letter while a flea-like town scribe is recording the document, making the officer stop over every word, setting up a rhythmic mismatch of sounds that has the enthusiastic humor of a Preston Sturges scene.
Herzog gives the sense of a director without ambivalence, fantastically concentrated on building his movie by piece. There are qualities in the above scenes—the world is full of marvels, it’s stupid not to know there are venal capitalizers and those with pure vision, the A-B-C enactment of education: how do we learn to talk, the difference between deprivation and accomplishment—of a very joyful, uplifting, erratic movie that gives the sense of not being preplanned.
A bit like Moses and Aaron, the foundling’s education starts and stops, progressing fitfully through blocky, self-enclosed units. The film will stop to observe phenomena: a quiet peasant couple in a second-story window watching Kaspar, standing transfixed with a letter of introduction in his hand. A close shot: Kaspar’s name written in cress and flowing script in Mr. Daumer’s garden. It was planted by Kaspar and then negligently trampled by some visitor to the garden. This surprising interstice—nothing leads into or away from this garden scene—suddenly lifts into a focus on a nearby stork, just that movement having caught a frog, and tossing it around before swallowing it. Whereupon the camera returns to Kaspar’s name in cress. The movie, which gives the sensation of being handmade, filled with its own constructs, always seems charged with enthusiasm: unenclosed, fluid, spacious.
The one film that approached the German films in dedication, the feeling of artists trying things, is the mysterious India Song, a leftwing work fascinated with rituals. Using actors who have a nightmarish sensuosity, choreographing near stasis theatrically and with a heavy Freudian quality, lingering like Bertolucci on the Past, beautiful people dancing in a beautiful setting, India Song is very polite, intellectual, and smells of polished leather, fine tobacco, and spices. Its great attraction: a sound track that works off Godard’s layering voices, overcrowding the language, creating a film that acquires much of its excitement in the mixing room. While the iced, frozen visual film suggests a barely mobilized Dewar’s liquor ad, another movie parallels the visuals, permeated with every sound from unearthly whisper to a chattering Laotian beggar woman and man’s shriek that is like a culture’s death pangs.
While the sinuous, off-screen movie ravishes itself with talk, about the forbidding heat, great love affairs, the defeat of Leftist Movements in the Thirties, the visual side of India Song is a slow ballroom dance with Delphine Seyrig in hypnotic movement with one of five male dancers. Some of its stylistic moves:
(1) Movements that barely crack the surface;
(2) A hermetically still, glazed scene: no bit players, few props;
(3) The camera behaves like one of the detached languid characters;
(4) Creation of stasis and order. Waiting;
(5) Constant doubling: in casting; staging the work against a giant mirror; having the look-alike actors in operations that hug the border of the screen; everyone but the beggar woman talks in aesthetic monotone.
Most of the formal qualities in India Song seem motivated by the filmmaker’s language, her talent for cryptic writing: the elegance, ironic humor, women’s-magazine sentimentality, the excessive control. The whole affair trembles between the fiction in third-rate women’s writing—“what bliss, what heat” (and what perfect spun-silk trousers)—and a slow-moving horizontal structure in which tempo, silence, pause, repetition, modulation are stressed. A sort of fine-laced acerbity and irony cut through the Gatsby-like acting and scene. The film has mysterious ponderousness, and one wonders about the importance of elegantly held cigarettes, a Venetian-red gown which is possibly held in place by adhesive tape, and the over-dosage of a Thirties fox-trot, “Blue Skies,” re-phrased and played 300 choruses.
One thing about the Festival: it didn’t overturn, or even begin to contest a five-year-long fascination with the films of Herzog, Straub, Fassbinder, and Duras. The Kaspar film perhaps overruns into its ironic autopsy with doctors poking Kaspar’s brain, the camera holding on the limping clerk’s fadeaway exit. There are scenes in Moses where the documentary approach, the severe clarity, approaches illustration more than in History Lessons, the Straubs’ meditation on didacticism or political discourse. Shots of the golden calf, a bad dance, the erotic moments, are closer to De Mille and Rossellini’s late history films than to Schönberg’s mind and music. Still, to sum up, there were no films that even touched the fervent, uncompromising starkness of the Moses, the snarling energy and frankness of Fist. You would have to be blind not to realize the responsibility for movies as a medium, the energy, and ideas, in any of the above films.
with Patricia Patterson; November–December 1975