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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
2011
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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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