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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT
ARCHIVE |
VENICE – 2011 TEXTUAL
PASSIONS, SOURCEY CINEMA AND BASING INSTINCTS by
Harlan Kennedy Who
said it first at the 2011 Venice Film Festival? I think we all did: “Gosh,
there are a lot of films based on plays and books.” From WUTHERING HEIGHTS to
CARNAGE to the Golden Lion-winning FAUST; from THE IDES OF MARCH to ALMAYER’S
FOLLY to TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY. Scanning the Mostra
movie lineup our shout was instant, simultaneous, unanimous. “Gosh, there are a lot of films based on plays
and books.” Literary
pedigree is a la mode again in moviedom. Libraries
are clearly being ransacked on an Alexandrian scale. You
have to go back to studio mogul Irving Thalberg and
the between-wars MGM he managed with LB Mayer to remember so many novels and
plays clattering into screen incarnation. Back then it was culturally kosher.
Every classic by every genius, whether Will Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Jane
Austen or Uncle Tom Hardy, was grist to the film mill. Great novelists were
themselves hauled into Hollywood to push the grinding wheel (like slaves in
SAMSON AND DELILAH). One such novelist, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, resented it so little – this co-opting and
indenturing of literature and its craftsfolk – that
he turned Thalberg into his own fictive hero in his
last novel, the titular Hollywood titan of THE LAST TYCOON. Ensuing
decades, however, have largely said “No.”
The Italian neo-realists said “Basta!” to
literature-sourced cinema. The French New Wave said “Jamais
notre chemin. Saisez une vie.” (“No way. Get
a life”). To the umbilical dependency on mother-texts the answering rule and
motto, in mid-century filmmaking, was: “Go into the street, young man/woman.
Find your scenario there.” The word “world”, after all, contains the word
“word.” Therefore all that matters is contained in life itself. Then
came postmodernism, a nostalgia-powered movement. Now comes post-postmodernism,
in which we not only reflect on our common cultural heritage, we reflect on
reflecting on it. We look at literature again, through a glass darkly, even through two glasses. (Make mine a double). We look at it
as something that has been sequestered too much and something now endangered,
several times over, by the era of vanishing bookshops, cyber-age illiteracy
and the extinction of spelling and grammar in a blaze of tweets and textings. Today Shakespeare, essaying HAMLET, would have
to write “2B or not 2B that is the q” – then decide whether ‘twas nobler to
click “Send” or try to condense the thing even more. One
of the few practises holding out against the death of written or recited
language has been rap. Rap – hate or love it – adores words. You cannot help
thinking of rap’s manic logophilia while watching
Polanski’s stage-sourced CARNAGE, acted in English (Yasmina
Reza’s original play was French) by a dazzling cast. The tale of two
quarrelling couples, gifted with the gab, is witty, precipitate and mordantly
garrulous; it went down a treat in Venice. Ten or twenty years ago, even with
a cast this good (Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C Reilly),
it would have been denounced as filmed theatre. No
one stops talking in Aleksandr Sokurov’s
FAUST either. At Venice some critics, whom it would be inimical to name
(Justin Chang of the Hollywood Reporter and Roderick Conway Morris of the
Herald Tribune), tangled themselves in knots arguing that this
Russian-directed, German-speaking wonderwork was not ‘pure cinema.’ Because
pure cinema, they contended, is all images and this film is all words. Piffle. Words
don’t damage or destroy images. We’ve had the talkies for 80 years. We have
known a dozen outstanding directors – Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Alfred
Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Robert Altman (the other six
available on request) – who were hardly word-shy. We have established that a
good filmmaker can handle both sound and vision,
language and picture. I
couldn’t help thinking of rap, to return to that, as I watched and listened
to FAUST. The dialogue, characteristically of filmmaker Sokurov,
goes in one ear, out the other and seldom stops doing either. It is a rapt,
scat, poetic, pauselesss burbling. One can fully
attend or not, as one chooses. (Same for the weirdly recessed and
subterranean music). The images in the film are dominant; the images are
stunning. But at the same time, since humans can multi-task, to goggle with
the eyes at a German Romantic forest landscape or to swoon at the
pearly-skinned beauty of Isolda Dykstraum’s
Margarete – whose face would surely enrapture
Goethe himself (“Oy vey,
is that Ewigweibliche!”) – does not preclude
heeding, in the very same moments, the movie’s auditory riches. The
‘rap’ – alternative meaning – on George Clooney’s THE IDES OF MARCH was that
it was another filmed play. But this too rejoices in a kind of rap. You wind
up an actor like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Paul Giamatti
and set him going. A good speech, skilfully delivered, is a thing of wonder,
full of zingy music, siren rhythms and hiphop
counterpoint. Additional boon: the moving camera turns such a speech into an
artefact different from that on the stage. As in CARNAGE, so in THE IDES OF
MARCH. We’re no longer theatregoers watching the distant thunder of
thespians. We’re neighbours and intimates pressing up against their faces.
The blink of an eye, the twitch of a cheek, the hint of a blush or a sudden
blanching. And we can also watch, with the same point-blank intentness, the mute
telltale responses of the onscreen listener. So
where does ‘pure cinema’ begin and where does it end? It can coexist with
words; it can also exist where words have been, by a director’s choice, winnowed
out. WUTHERING HEIGHTS, based on the well-known book by E. Bronte, is a
‘literary’ project for which British cameraman Robbie Ryan won the Venice
Film Festival’s Best Cinematographer prize. Why did he win? Because this
WUTHERING HEIGHTS isn’t ‘literary’ any more. It’s a painting gone kinetic.
Bronte’s words (leaving a few for narrative guidance) are churned into an
elemental visual gouache – rain, wind, mud, moors, storm, lightning, more
mud, more moors – which in turn expresses all or most of the themes, emotions
and character crises in the novelist’s story. Cinema
has moved on from the time, its heyday the 1970s, when a “radical” filmic
response to a literary text was a pedagogic face-off between director and
author. A tableaux vivant style was often used so that the nearly static
object – the book or play – could be assaulted, like a coconut shy, by the
filmmaker’s Brechtian or leftian
apercus. You know the kind of thing. Jean-Marie Straub doing Corneille.
Fassbinder doing EFFI BRIEST. This year at Venice, Chantal Akerman’s LA FOLIE ALMAYER, a tropistic
hangover, did the same. Her film is a sort of professorial lecture on Conrad,
arid, etiolated, precious, devaluing the very jungle images to the status of
lantern slides. There
are other directors who don’t get the message; who think a few tweaks of once
modernist text-interrogation are the way to go or who, worse, like David Cronenberg in A
DANGEROUS METHOD, adapting Christopher Hampton’s Jung/Freud play THE TALKING
CURE, believe shallow fidelity can be defeated by the even shallower option
of “opening out.” Better (these directors think) to have a man deliver a
speech while walking to a carriage, climbing a hill, getting in a boat,
chasing a bus or falling down a cliff, than to have him deliver it sitting on
a chair or at a desk, as he would on stage and almost certainly in life. Opening
out? Schmopening out. Adapting a book or play for
the cinema is – let’s say it loudly – about opening it in. Don’t tell your film to push the play
around the local park. Don’t tell your film to pelt the play with (your)
purist-revisionist perceptions. If you admire the play enough to film it, let
its spirit push you around. In the same way that a good actor has the
controlling intelligence not to exercise absolute control, but lets his
dialogue inhabit and shape him (so that at the point of performance we’re not
aware of “delivery” or “technique”), a good director adapting a literary text
succumbs to its magic and lets it work him. That’s
why CARNAGE and THE IDES OF MARCH are such cracking films. That’s why
WUTHERING HEIGHTS is an honourably passionate homage to Emily Bronte. And
that’s why Sokurov’s FAUST, in which a Russian
director allows himself to be Mephistopheleanly
possessed and plurally piloted by the protean
spirit of a German verse play, won the Golden Lion at the 68th Venice Film
Festival. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM
INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
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