|
AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE
|
THE
BRITISH ARE COMING MONTY PYTHON – AND
YES, SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT by Harlan
Kennedy One of the most vexatious activities in the world is to stand on the
cold and windy beach of British cinema waiting for a New Wave to break. The
movie-goer takes up position, in inverse mimicry of King Canute, and waits with vain hope to get his feet
wet while apostrophizing the ever-inert sea. The drain on his stamina and
optimism is cruel. Suddenly, however, British cinema is actually on the move. The shock
of sea-water has hit the ankles and there are real signs that the tide is at
last coming in. From Monty Python's Life of Brian to Ken Loach's
Black Jack, from
Alien to Fame, from
the gay-Eighties gallimaufry of Derek Jarman's The Tempest to the
clean lines and quick cynicism of Quadrophenia, the new films from
British directors have been twinning two qualities seldom ever united before
in the same movie in Britain: exuberance and a subversive intelligence. At the start of the Eighties it looks as if the Absurdist
tradition in British art –
fathered by Laurence Sterne and descending
through such varied scions as Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce to today's Monty
Python – has got into the bloodstream of British cinema: not to effect
any absolute comic nihilism, but as the long-needed medication to rejuvenate
a sluggish metabolism. In the hunt for inspiration, the new British movies have been fanning
out over a huge area of social and cultural terrain – from the New Testament
to terror-in-space, from Shakespearean fantasy to Sixties gang warfare. Yet
all alike have been motivated as if by a common ideal: that of de-structuring
tradition, of shredding stereotypes, of bringing the flip-book wit and
rapidity of movie expression to subjects prone by age and overuse to
ossification. In Loach's Black Jack, the pinpricks of Absurdism deflate the Masterpiece Theatre stateliness
of filmed costume drama. In Ridley Scott's Alien, Absurdism's
dream-logic allows a science-fiction fantasy to power full-steam-ahead with a hitherto unthinkable minimum
of "scientific" exposition. In Jarman's The Tempest, the world of the Absurd
transforms Shakespeare's moralistic fantasia into a contemporary punk
parable. ● Of the two prime ingredients of this shot-in-the-arm Absurdism, one is a new freedom with Surrealist
elements – juxtaposing the incongruous and using anachronism, for instance,
as a tool to unstiffen stereotypes – and the other
is a transfiguring touch of satire. The new films take old cultural models
and rejuvenate them by stretching their limbs into a loose but logical
burlesque extremism. If Sterne is the antique
forefather of the new Absurdism, the modern training-ground is surely TV commercials. British
commercials have an obliquity, a choppy wit, and an improvisational flair
that make them seem almost a different genre from the brute-force promotionalism of their American cousins. As much as in
selling products, British commercials seem interested in selling stylistic
ingenuity and the crazy compactness of the "thirty-second movie." The quirky fragmentation, the near-subliminal idea-association, the
living-dangerously between trigger-response logic and total non-sequitur –
the thirty-second commercial can make an Absurdist virtue from time-costs-money necessity. In
Britain commercials have also been surprisingly bold in predicating their
impact on a degree of cine-literate sophistication in their audiences.
Parodies of old films or old film styles – from Stagecoach to Casablanca
– flicker across the screen
in mercurial paeans to this or that detergent, perfume, or chocolate bar. Critical untouchability has been a huge
advantage to filmmakers like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, and Nicolas Roeg – all of whom came up through the commercials school. They have had the
freedom of total anonymity and total critical neglect. If they had flexed
their eccentricities in a signed and personal feature film, or even a signed
and personal short, they would have had to run the gauntlet of British
critical conservatism and public incomprehension. (What the public can take
in a product-marketing context is surprisingly more adventurous than what it
can take in an "artistic" or "realistic" context.) Certainly Britain is a country which has long had a tendency to use the
"too little" of documentary realism as a schoolmaster's cane to
beat the "too much" of fantasy and the surreal. The career of
Michael Powell, Britain's resident movie genius in the Forties and Fifties,
was virtually a one-man paradigm of that warring dualism, gravitating now
toward monochrome austerity, now toward bumpy and delirious flights of fancy.
It's probable that only Powell, with his head for heady contrasts, could
have survived and thrived as he did. It's notable, too, that the last time any kind of unity vaporously
encircled British cinema was back in the Swinging Sixties, when regional realism
spawned a series of hairshirt-and-homespun-philosophy
adaptations of novels about the working class. Room At The Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
This Sporting Life, et al. burned dolefully on the screen,
hymning the squalorous romance of abortion,
football, and sausages-and-mash. It was less an example of triumphant
artistic unity than a beleaguered, bandwagon homogeneity – a
retreat-to-the-provinces rejection of slick commercialism, which, though it
left Belgravla for Birmingham,
did nothing to cure the British cinema's besetting diseases of literary
dependence and literalistic realism. It's no coincidence that the movement
happened when TV commercials were still a babe-in-arms, and the infinite
possibilities they taught us for speed, compression, and visual literacy were
still unexplored. Now the picture is changing, the extremes are synthesizing, and though
there are still dizzying contrasts in style – between Jarman's rococo The
Tempest and Bí11 Forsyth's scat and idling That Sinking Feeling – there's a common balm of
film-sense, and a belated but transforming realization that the movie image
and the movie inspiration are more important than the source material.
Reverent or "respectful" adaptations of non-filmic originals are
justly discredited; and visually the British cinema is at last starting to
slip gear, vary speeds, and change lanes and levels with ease. ● The new spirit abroad in Britain is a kind of yea-saying iconoclasm.
And the two recent films involving The Who are typical of this simultaneous
putting-down and vamping-up of tradition. The Kids Are Alright is a docu-biography of the London group which hurls outrages-to-the-media at us
at a lightning rate. It's a self-destruct, self-renewing documentary which
burns the cliché skin off the genre and clothes it anew in insult, slapstick,
and fertile comedy. Franc Roddam's Quadrophenia
(with music by The Who, who were also executive producers) performs the
same service for the British youth-in-revolt movie. A genre that gave us
films like The System and The Leather Boys is scarcely recognizable in this
elegy to Sixties gang warfare. Dour monochrome thuggery
is replaced by a picture – of gang
culture that is spiky, funny, and fast-driving – and that cuts narrative
corners more successfully, en route to a visionary ending, than any
British "commercial" film in recent memory. While these two films cheerfully duff up modern subjects, Monty
Python's Life of Brian and Ken Loach's Black
Jack roll up their sleeves to deal with History. Loach's
film is perhaps the more startling revelation, coming as it does from the
director who, a decade ago, brought you such stripped-down docu-dramas as Kes and
Family Life. The albatross that hung around Loach's
neck in the Sixties was an excessive, TV-schooled trust in cinéma vérité techniques. Because the locations were
real, or the actors were improvising their own words, we were asked to
believe that the story and theme had a greater Inner Truth. In Black Jack, with
its eighteenth-century tale of children, giants, and madhouses, Loach uses
the same technique but has found a way to transform it virtually by
satirizing it. He sets informality in a formal context, making his period
characters extemporize and colloquialize and speak
off the tops of their heads just like you and me. It's like watching a
Sheridan play performed by players who have forgotten their lines and have to
new-mint them as they go along. We aren't belabored with any assertion that
this is a Holy Writ version of history; rather, it's a fresh, funny,
spring-heeled, anachronous vision of the eighteenth century that delivers a
powerful body-blow to the starched formulae of costume cinema. Monty Python's Life of Brian does much the same with its portion of the British
heritage-though broader is its way and more crooked its gait. What Black
Jack does for stereotyped views of the Augustan Age, Life of Brian does
for piously trusting schoolroom attitudes to the New Testament. It is the
first Bible "epic" to make the simple point that, since the world
has never been short of fools, charlatans, and bullies, nor of illogical and
inconsequential events, why ever should it have been so during the first
years of the Anno Domini era? Monty Python's influences on British culture seems to me far more
radical and momentous than anyone has yet reckoned. Its brand of British
nonsense – sprung from the lineage of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll – has been brought to bruise on just about every sacred institution
known to Western homo sapiens in the twentieth century. In the process of debunking traditions, the
form of Python humor has mimicked the content. Out from their films and TV
programs have gone the shibboleths of order, continuity, and narrative
logic, and with them any pretense at the suspension of disbelief. Python
have arrived – improbably, and by a logic of the heart not the head – at an
authentic version of that à la mode ideal,
Brechtun
distanciation. Once again, TV commercials have almost certainly been a formative
influence. Their disjointed thirty-second bursts of imagination offered a
blueprint for Python's success in switching TV comedy style from legato to
staccato: from the smooth naturalistic runs of Situation Comedy to the
anarchically stop-go notation of Python's
And-Now-For-Something-Completely-Different. ● Python have popularized in TV and cinema a (self-) consciousness about
aesthetic form that structuralist critics, slaving
over hot typewriters, and structuralist filmmakers,
slaving over ice-cold moviolas, have been crusading
for for years. But you can seldom do it with the
head; it has to come from the heart. And it's no surprise that when one views
the latest British structuralist film exercises,
they are often dry, effortful movies, wheezing fitfully in the wake of Monty
Python's bolder, more reckless essays in de-structuring. Phil Mulloy's In The Forest, for example, which has
been the most lauded British feature-length movie in the structurally
self-conscious vein in the last two years, is a pedagogic pageant of English
social history – from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution – whose
chunky, tableau vivant style is a putative assault on all ideas of
narrative streamlining. But far from dismantling cliché attitudes as it
dismantles cliché forms, the film merely clears the ground for the erection
of new doctrinaire stereotypes. Here march the Archetypal Peasant, the
Archetypal Landowner, the Archetypal Priest, in a dire procession of
Marxist's-Eye-View Every-men – units in an argument rather than living human
beings. Artistic "de-structuring" is clearly a bifurcal
process. It can move towards a new-dogmas-for-old evangelism in which one set
of stereotypes, formal or thematic, is shuffled out of the way to be
substituted by another. Or it can move in the direction of a free-ranging
iconoclasm, which makes no attempt to replace the discredited formulae with
new-coined ones of its own. Monty Python waves a flag for the second and freer tendency. Structuralist filmmaking in Britain, with shining exceptions
like the ingeniously comic short-filmmaker Peter Greenaway, partakes of the
first. Greenaway's surrealist impromptus have done for the
British short film what Monty Python has done for the feature: warping
formulae with their non-sequiturs and disarming expectation with their heady
collision between incongruous elements. In A Walk Through H, Greenaway's masterpiece, it's as if a TV art documentary had been involved in a
smash-up with a Borgesian quest-thriller. Over
weird abstract paintings that we are assured are maps a plummy
voice narrates the last journey of a (now-dead) ornithologist. As with other
products of the current renaissance, humor goes hand in hand with formal
subversion, and de-structuring is given the kiss of comic and emotional
life. ● So too with Derek Jarman. Jarman broke into British consciousness as a
director five years ago with Sebastian, an all-male, Latin-speaking account of the last days
of the arrow-fated Roman saint. It was lush, bizarre, and resonantly inconsequential:
not so much a deep-delving study in martyrdom as a giddily belated tribute
to the homosexual tradition of dying-saint iconography. Nude centurions and
skimpily-clad soldiers lay about in the Mediterranean sun, and Sebastian died
in the gracefully voluptuous swoon of a Quattrocento model. Jubilee followed, a
determinedly (too determinedly) riotous piece of Warhol-Morrissey pastiche
transposing Elizabeth I to Punk London. Then came his masterpiece to date, The
Tempest. Jarman's Shakespeare movie is the apotheosis of Camp. Camp is Absurdist
de-structuring with its hair
let down, its shoes kicked off, and a general air of undoctrinal
revelry. The machinery of dramatic illusion is exposed, the fictions freely
confessed; but the purpose is not to hector us about the manipulative subterfuges
of Art but to draw us joyfully into the creative process itself. The Tempest begins
by flouting credulity – why are Prospero and Miranda, supposedly marooned on a desert island, inhabiting a genteely decaying stately home? – and ends by virtually
creating its own cosmogony to house Shakespeare's re-envisioned play. With Jarman's earlier fantasias (notably Jubilee), one sometimes felt the
truth of the adage: When Everything Is Possible, Nothing Is Interesting. But
there are no diminishing returns in The Tempest's miracle-working,
because the thing-being-transformed is familiar, intricate, and fascinating
– Shakespeare's play – and the things-it-is-being-transformed-into have, for
the first time in Jarman's work, a sort of poetic-demented harmony. Situated somewhere between Punk and Python, and mixing destructive glee
with ornate inconsequence, Jarman's films are the most fascinating and probably
most central work of the New British Cinema. In style and attitudes the new
British films are a complete about-face from the dogged, claustrophobic
realism of the Sixties working-class movies. Where the latter reached back to
recent cultural history, taking their social conscience and photographic
austerity from the British documentary tradition, the new British cinema
reaches back through the centuries into pre-cinematic culture. ● Black Jack and Life
of Brian and The Tempest are twentieth century offshoots of a
surreal British tradition that began with Laurence Sterne's Tristram
Shandy and wound down through the ages with
Carroll, Lear, Woolf, and Joyce. Sterne broke up the monolithic masonry of the
English novel into a crazy paving of idea-association and pregnant inconsequence.
By indirection he found a new direction for story-telling, in which the
cause-and-effect logic of external events was refracted into broken,
glittering, disordered shapes by the processes of individual mental response. At one point as it descended through British cultural history, Sterne's heritage divided into two separate paths. One
became the stream-of-consciousness fragmentation of Woolf and Joyce, evangelizing the darker
possibilities of narrative disruption. (Their modern cinematic descendant
is Nicolas Roeg.) The other
became the "nonsense" tradition of Lear, Carroll and (via TV commercials?) Monty
Python, delighting in the free and spontaneous vandalism to which they could
subject notions of logic and artistic structure. The Sterne tradition is
really the art of filleting form. You take away the backbone of
chronological narrative and watch what patterns the body collapses into. As
with dreams, the de-structuring reduction to essentials often produces
apparently nonsensical results. But the logic has been rearranged, not destroyed,
and the new patterns have both a meaning and a beauty of their own. Two shining recent examples of what happens when a British mind,
exposed to and influenced by these chop-structure traditions, is applied to
non-British material are Ridley Scott's Alien and Alan Parker's Fame.
Scott's direction of Dan O'Bannon's screenplay produced what is probably
the most vividly corner-cutting Sci-Fi shocker ever. A prodigious minimum of
exposition and explanation and a prodigious maximum of swift action and
abrupt, idiomatic character responses make Alien look like a
comic-strip of the Subconscious. Parker's handling of the musical and narrative elements in Fame shows
a similar if more erratic flair for cutting through exposition and going for
the essential. At its best (chiefly in the opening audition sequences), the
movie springs from peak to peak of impromptu energy, leaving the plateaus to
be sketched in and lightly traversed by the filmgoer's own imagination. It's
like A Chorus Line re-shaped for the movies and for the audio-visually
fleet of foot. It's no surprise that Scott and Parker were both schooled in the
time-squeezing discipline of TV commercials, and that both saw that form as
a dry run for feature movies. Scott even calls commercials
"thirty-second feature films." As a cinematic training-ground for
taking short-cuts to the quintessential, commercials are without rival: and
their influence has rubbed off not just on the men who made them but on all
who have "grown up" with them. Neither Peter Greenaway nor the
Monty Python team served an apprenticeship in commercials, but like the rest
of us they have lived with and learned from these time-bombs of Instant Drama
that explode across our screens each night in a dream-like staccato. ● Clearly not every new British film – not even every one mentioned here
– is a fully-fledged specimen of this oneiric
corner-cutting. But each is tinged with the New Illogic. And any suspicion
that it's merely a flash in the processing lab, or a chimera in the mind of
an over-excited critic, is confounded by the continuity and depth-in-numbers
of the new trend. Last year's Edinburgh Film Festival, for example, unveiled the first Scottish
contribution to the trend. Bí11 Forsyth's That Sinking Feeling has
exactly the invertebrate comic grace, the profusion of missing narrative
links, that Black Jack or Life of Brian boasts. A vestigial
plot about a gang of jobless Glasgow teenagers planning and executing a
heist (their target: sixty stainless-steel sinks from a warehouse) is there
mainly to be picked up and put down at will – to provide a few action
hiccoughs in the film's rivetingly funny sostenuto of anything-can-happen idleness. Forsyth's film is Inconsequence raised to the level of high art. It moves
from one surreal, laid-back cameo to another, flicking an impudent glove
each time across the face of commercial cinema's narrative determinism. For
all those who have been sitting on the beach so long waiting for the New British
Wave to come in, Forsyth's movie – along with its English fellows – gives one
the best possible kind of sinking feeling. The sea is coming in, the
deck-chairs are getting wet, and it's time to retreat to higher ground and
wonder panoramically from afar. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE MAY-JUNE 1980 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
|
