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Weekend Horrorthon! – The horrors of the built environment edition

by rick
written by rick

For tonight’s matinee, we showcase three films exploiting what might be called Architectural Horror, which is a term I just made up right now and immediately decided to copyright so please don’t use it or I will have to talk to the lawyers. There’s an inherent link between the built environment of a film’s depiction and its mood, narrative, and meanings, but sometimes the associations are inextricable.

On the one hand, you have The Shining; on the other, The Happening, in which a case could be made that the entirety of its inexplicable running time is constructed out of visits to different buildings and houses, all fraught resonances that M. Night Shymalan apparently found very important.

It’s less a trope than a basic fact, from Expressionism on: the literal architecture of the film impacts, and occasionally embodies, the architecture of the mind it aims to evoke, successfully or not. Here are three successes, separated by decades but linked by a particular fixation on the built environment and its horrific consequences.

1) The Fall of the House of Usher – Jean Epstein (1928)

Poe’s classic bit of Gothic Horror isn’t necessarily terrifying; more filed under, “Steeped in Dread.” In Epstein’s hands, it became on opportunity to deploy every in-camera trick he could conceive, and immersing it all in an appropriately ethereal built environment: a haunted house, a living grave, an unreliable narrator, the tension between what is seen and what is felt, rampant doublings of character, and more.

Somewhere between Impressionism and Surrealism — Usher was the first film screened at the Cinémathèque Française founded by Langlois and Georges Franju, and was championed by Buñuel, who would later dismiss it and Epstein himself as hopelessly bourgeouis — it’s a marvel to look at. Visions of masculine control and post-Freudian hijinks animate it (there’s more than a whiff of Possession, and even a rocking chair scene), but it’s the aesthetics that linger, and send people looking for a non-dopey way of saying “Lynchian”. It’s a hell of a movie.

2) Night of the Living Dead – George Romero (1968)

Like everyone else, I wrote an obituary/MASH note about Uncle George this week. My admiration for his first and (come at me) greatest film is a matter of public record.

One aspect that is less frequently discussed — amid reflections on low-budget filmmaking and race, class and gender in the explosive context 1968 — is the centrality of the film’s lived environment.

The abandoned house in which our protagonists find themselves plays such a dominant, if limiting, role that it almost seems silly to mention it. It’s that key to the mise-en-scene. The acts of boarding up, and unboarding, are primary narrative devices; so’s the barred basement door, the sheets, the kerosene that provides for molotov cocktails, the gas tank in the yard. Romero mines these family-home signifiers for all kinds of associations and reversals, as our makeshift family-under-siege assumes the exact places and positions of those who’ve already been chased away or consumed.

I could go on about this all day, but I won’t. Let’s all just watch Night of the Living Dead again for the 1000th time.

3) Shivers – David Cronenberg (1975)

Within a decade from the Pittsburgh debut of Romero’s first masterpiece, it had already been subsumed, zombie-like, into the culture. From the perspective of Architectural Horror (seriously, don’t steal this, I am so broke), Cronenberg’s ode to its implications traded the small confines of the bourgeois single-family-home for a Ballardian high-rise, a technocapitalist monument to the well-scrubbed future.

And then released the psychopharmocological sex zombies.

Shivers is not a great-looking film, certainly a world away from the gloss and sheen of later Cronenbergian deep-dives into mind-fuckery, leg-wound-fuckery, and just plain fucking. But that’s half the charm. Nascent ideas about technology, desire, and power infect the whole thing, taking the zombie trope of infection and turning it literally venereal.

Also, to its great credit, Shivers simply makes good on the promise of its creeping dread, that unsettled sense only lo-fi cheapies seem to deliver. Like Usher and Night of the Living Dead, its world is delimited, claustrophobic. But just like the earlier two, it turns out those structural horrors find counterparts in the people around us.

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CommentaryGreat Movie Project

Epstein’s Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher

by rick
written by rick

Though not the first of his stories to appear on film, The Fall of the House of Usher is perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known Gothic tale, and arguably the best suited for cinema. Its central themes — the embodiment of individual interiority in physical architecture, the more or less haunted house, the living grave, the unreliable narrator, the tension between what is seen and what is felt, the rampant doublings of character — all seem appropriate to an imagistic treatment.

In 1928, French director Jean Epstein (and co-writer Luis Buñuel) explored all this and more, delivering a haunting, occasionally ridiculous post-Freudian shadow-show. As a fixture of an advancing avant-garde that preferred Surrealism over Impressionism, Buñuel would go on to dismiss Usher and Epstein more generally, but the film was widely celebrated in cinephile circles on release, with Henri Langlois deeming it “not only the ultimate expression of ten years of experimentation but their justification.”

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The story is famous but bears repeating, if only to showcase the liberties taken and interpolations enacted by Epstein and Buñuel.

In Poe’s telling, our narrator, a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, is summoned to his estate. Usher complains of illness, both his own and that of his sister Madeline. The house, he maintains, is alive and sentient. His friend attempts to distract him with painting and art, but the pervasive sense of madness holds sway. Madeline dies, or so we are told, and is interred in the family tomb, though our narrator can’t help but observe her lifelike aspect even in death. Features of the house begin to take on characteristics of Roderick’s paintings, and weird noises occupy them both. Eventually, Madeline herself returns from the grave during a storm, to the friend’s shock but seemingly not to Roderick’s. The siblings die together as the narrator flees, watching in horror as the house itself is cleaved in two.

The film retains much of this, at least in broad strokes. But there are significant differences.

Here, Roderick (Jean Debucourt) and Madeline (Marguerite Gance, wife of fellow director Abel Gance, who Epstein admired) are married, a change in the narrative that could either signal Epstein’s more conventional Romanticism or a literalization of Poe’s barely-subtextual incest theme. Madeline also plays a much more central role in film than story, in which she barely appears in the flesh. Instead of a basement tomb, Roderick Usher, his friend, and a valet convey her out to the country for burial. Poe’s house-bound claustrophobia is somewhat mitigated by such excursions.

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The most crucial distinction, however, is the role of painting, which occupies something like a reverse-Dorian Gray role in the film. As Darragh O’Donoghue notes:

The most obvious break is in the interpolation within Usher of motifs and narrative events from other Poe stories, most obviously the story-within-the-story of “The Oval Portrait” (1845), in which an artist’s painting of his wife becomes increasingly life-like in proportion to her wasting away and eventually dying.

Epstein films the early sequences of Roderick’s portraiture of his wife as a kind of artistic mania; indeed, Usher repeatedly assures anyone who will listen that “Here, here is where she lives!” Debucourt is filmed as though possessed by the beauty, not of his wife, but of his image of her — he aggressively dabs at his palette, single-mindedly securing her in “the frame” as the real Madeline fades, until eventually relegated to a murky, living grave outside.

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Throughout the film, Epstein contrasts Roderick Usher with every other character through technically distancing sleights of hand. Certain scenes find only him in slow-motion while reverse-shots move at a normal speed; other sequences form montages of individual images (his hands, a billowing curtain, a grandfather clock that never seems able to strike midnight, a broken guitar string, a fast tracking shot down a hallway) that seem to indicate he either controls the house with his mind, or the house controls him.

It can be enormously unsettling. O’Donoghue finds that the contrasts can make The Fall of the House of Usher “a chore to sit through,” but I had the opposite reaction. There’s something gripping and uncanny about the whole enterprise. It’s a cliche to refer to silent films as, in and of themselves, “oneiric” and dreamlike solely on account of their flickering uncanniness, but Epstein emphasizes this to such a degree that it can’t be ignored.

His Usher is a collection of interrelated visions caught between worlds, and — with Debucourt frantically rocking back and forth in his chair as the world collapses — its vision of attempts at masculine control is startling. (Did Andrzej Żuławski have Usher in mind 53 years later, when he set Sam Neill in his lunatic rocking chair in Possession, another film about shadowy doubles and the vagaries of control? A question for another day.)

The Fall of the House of Usher, the first film screened at the Cinémathèque Française founded by Langlois and Georges Franju, would mark one of Epstein’s final flirtations with this variety of the early avant-garde, and France’s:

[T]he period of avant-garde experimentation in France was about to end, marked by the release of Buñuel’s Surrealist L’Âge d’or in 1930. Sound equipment was too expensive for these independent artists and American-style story films became the accepted standard for producers and audiences alike (…) Epstein had already begun to explore new territory, calling the craft of acting primarily “a school for lies” and advocating for realism in films.

Buñuel and Salvador Dali would release Un Chien Andalou the following year, and Surrealism would eclipse the Impressionist impulses pioneers like Epstein were already abandoning. Years of war would then change everything again (the Jewish socialist Epstein himself was imprisoned by the Gestapo and would only make a few more films after 1944).

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But The Fall of the House of Usher remains a landmark, as haunting and personal an adaptation as you could want, a synthesis of influence and innovation. If its High Art aspirations look quaint and overly Romantic now, there’s no escaping its weird power.

Favorite Ebert passage:

There are times when I think that of all the genres, the horror film most misses silence. The Western benefited from dialogue, and musicals and film noir are unthinkable without words. But in a classic horror film, almost anything you can say will be superfluous or ridiculous. Notice how carefully the Draculas of talkies have to choose their words to avoid bad laughs. The perfect horror situation is such that there is nothing you can say about it. What words are necessary in “The Pit and the Pendulum”? “The Fall of the House of Usher” resides within its sealed world, as if–yes, as if buried alive.

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FilmGreat Movie Project

Flesh, Spirit and Faces in The Passion of Joan of Arc

by rick
written by rick

It is an article of faith among your more generous cinephiles that you should never be embarrassed by the classics you haven’t yet seen. Everyone has blind spots, no one has time to see everything, and a gap in your viewing only indicates how much you have to look forward to! Fair enough. Yet, as a silent film enthusiast, I remain mortified that it took me this long to watch Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in full. It’s as close to a perfect film as I can imagine.

Why did it take so long? For one thing, Dreyer’s masterpiece is so enshrined in cinematic lore and the collective experience of the image that it can almost feel as though you’ve seen it already. (Speaking for myself, the film’s famous interpolation into Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie may have added to this sense, but more on that later.)

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As Joan, shot by Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Maté almost invariably in tortured close-up, Maria Falconetti appeared on the screen here in 1928 and promptly vanished, leaving iconic expressions of grace, suffering, and devout fervor for the ages.

Like a handful of images from the Silent Era — Harold Lloyd on the side of the department store building, Keaton miraculously unharmed by the falling house, Chaplin frantically grappling with the mechanical wheel, the Husband and Wife of Sunrise lost in their shared reverie in the middle of a busy street, the mechanical birth of Metropolis‘ Evil Maria … you choose — Falconetti’s face, fearful or defiant or gripped by heavenly longing, lingers in the imagination. Even the imaginations of those, like myself, who arrived to its contemplation late.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is completely disinterested in Joan’s military exploits during the Hundred Years’ War. Instead, Dreyer focuses on her trial for heresy. In real life, her interrogation alone went on for more than a month; in a bold act of compression, Dreyer portrays the events as transpiring over the course of a single day, the better to emphasize the unrelenting cruelty of her inquisitors and her suffering at their hands.

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Dreyer’s film is justly famous for the ubiquity of close-ups, but this general fame obscures just how radical The Passion of Joan of Arc is for viewers. David Bordwell, a critic whose formalist analysis can often miss the forest for the trees, is actually essential here. Bordwell notes that “Of the film’s over 1,500 cuts, fewer than 30 carry a figure or object over from one shot to another; and fewer than 15 constitute genuine matches on action.”

The effect is dislocating and jarring, willfully violating the 180 degree rule and leaving the sense of disembodied, slightly off-centered faces suspended in spaces made symbolic by their simplicity and emptiness. We never know quite where we are, or how to look.

The camera pans, generally, from left to right across faces (an incredible scene seems to depict a game of telephone, as inquisitors pass along a question to trap their victim), before cutting abruptly to Joan. Holes were dug in the ground for cameras to emphasize distance and stature; she appears small, her interrogators outsized, enormous, monstrous figures of fear and admiration. (For a more in-depth discussion of these issues, see Matthew Dessem’s profoundly insightful analysis.)

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There are few breaks in the action as the film relentlessly hammers home the masculinist power of the state and church brought to bear on a single woman convinced of her visions. Dreyer forbid the use of any makeup, so facial blemishes are emphasized, individual pores highlighted.

The Passion of Joan of Arc can, at times, take on the urgency of a documentary made in the 15th century. (Cocteau: Dreyer’s film is “like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn’t exist.”)

And throughout it all, there is Falconetti, embodying one of the purest presences in cinema history. Given the tepid response to now-iconic films like Metropolis or others in this series, it’s noteworthy that this was recognized at once by contemporary critics. In The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall praised her performance in 1929 as one “that rises above everything in this artistic achievement,” continuing, in words still difficult to argue with 87 years later:

The scenes where Jeanne is finally led to the stake in the Place du Vicux Marché, Rouen, are agonizing in their remarkable realism, and this is, of course, one of the reasons that Britain has banned “The Passion of Jeane d’Arc.” America benefits where Britain loses, for as a film work of art this takes precedence over anything that has so far been produced. It makes worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams. It fills one with such intense admiration that other pictures appear but trivial in comparison.

The story behind The Passion of Joan of Arc is nearly as famous as the film itself. Dreyer had decided to make a film about a French woman; the Maid of Orleans was reputedly chosen by drawing straws. He spent a year or more in research on the topic, deciding eventually to ignore her military exploits and focus entirely on her trial at the hands of the disbelieving male prelates and to base the film almost entirely on the newly-famous transcripts of her trial.

Dissatisfied with his casting options (Lillian Gish was briefly considered, further angering the French clerics who already felt the agnostic Danish director had no business making this film), Dreyer discovered Falconetti in a comic stage performance and decided he had found his Jeanne.

The film was shot chronologically, a highly unusual approach — indeed, Falconetti had hoped this would buy her time to talk Dreyer out of having her cut her hair at the film’s end. No such luck.

Enormous amounts of studio money were used to build a replica Medieval village which Dreyer barely shows on screen, to the chagrin of his financiers. The intention, apparently, was to force the cast to feel they were of the moment with the subject at hand, that they were in fact living centuries prior. By all accounts, it worked, leading to a kind of ecstatic mania among the performers.

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Dreyer was notoriously ruthless and intent on realism, in ways that would never be allowed today (nor should they) — encouraging real tears, having Falconetti kneel for hours on stone, the deployment of actual fire, and so forth.

And for all this trouble? The Passion of Joan of Arc was heavily censored, rejected by the Church, banned in England, and eventually destroyed. Dreyer painstakingly recreated the film from outtakes and the remaining footage. This version, too, was destroyed.

Bastardized copies, disavowed by the director and panned by critics as unrepresentative of the original intent, circulated for years. Then, in 1981, a miracle occurred: a nearly pristine original was discovered … in the closet of a mental hospital in Oslo! How it got there remains a mystery. The strange overlap of thematic treatments of visions and possible madness in the film with the location of its discovery is both entirely appropriate and entirely bizarre.

It seems almost too perfect, but then so does The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is uncompromising filmmaking, a perfect combination of subject, performance, and auteurist approach. (How auteurist? Dreyer remarked, “Allowing others to prepare a scenario for a director is like giving a finished drawing to a painter and asking him to put in colors.”).

The sets by Jean Hugo and Hermann Warm, who previously handled this role for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, are striking in their austerity. The effortlessness of the camera’s movement indicates an entire crew committed to a singular vision.

In the end, that vision is, more than anything else, the human face. When Godard’s Nana retreats to the cinema in Vivre Sa Vie, it is of course The Passion of Joan of Arc that she attends, her tears in the audience mirroring the close-ups on screen. Ebert quickly explained that this is because both are “about a woman judged by men.” Perhaps. Others have found more formal (and more convincing) explanations. The lingering impression in both cases, on the most basic level, is the fascination with those flickers of life, light, and sorrow that the face reveals in darkness, the ways we connect to and find ourselves in the images before us.

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For Dreyer, this was the foundation of the cinema. More than narrative, more than Epstein’s photogénie or the later Cahiers emphasis on mise-en-scène. For Dreyer, “Nothing in the world … can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

The Passion of Joan of Arc begins with a text, focuses on an interrogation, passes through torture at the hands of a threatened leadership, and ends with a death in flames, as birds, symbols of grace and transcendence, blend into clouds.

But it’s Falconetti and Dreyer’s great triumph that the cumulative impact of their film is resolved into a single human face containing multitudes, alone in the frame but imbued with the inexpressible wonder of life as it is lived, as it is represented, and as it might be. All arguments flitter away like those same birds. There are only faces, and then there is sky.

Favorite Ebert quote:

To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is an unsettling experience–so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire. Our sympathy is engaged so powerfully with Joan that Dreyer’s visual methods–his angles, his cutting, his closeups–don’t play like stylistic choices, but like the fragments of Joan’s experience. Exhausted, starving, cold, in constant fear, only 19 when she died, she lives in a nightmare where the faces of her tormentors rise up like spectral demons.

 

Perhaps the secret of Dreyer’s success is that he asked himself, “What is this story really about?” And after he answered that question he made a movie about absolutely nothing else.

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FilmReviews

Ménilmontant, Kirsanoff, & the avant-garde

by rick
written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147039/” name=”Ménilmontant” description=”A couple is brutally murdered in the working-class district of Paris. Later on, the narrative follows the lives of their two daughters, both in love with a Parisian thug and leading them to separate ways.” director=”Dimitri Kirsanoff” producer=”Dimitri Kirsanoff” actor_1=”Nadia Sibirskaïa” ]Here’s what transpires in the astonishing first 56 seconds of Ménilmontant, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 avant-garde masterpiece.

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Delicate curtains flutter inside a home’s open window. Suddenly, a woman’s frightened face appears behind them, an assailant trailing. The doorknob turns frantically. The door finally opens and the woman emerges. The scene repeats and a similarly terrified man emerges. We cut to the crazed face of the man chasing them both. The man and woman are thrashed in turn, continuity falling by the wayside. An ominous axe leans against the house. Quick cuts to: the woman’s bloodied face; the man, head tilted back in open-mouthed horror; the axe raised aloft. Relatively longer shots: barren trees in the distance, the axe thrown into a puddle of mud and rainwater; the open door to the house and the mess left behind; a fire still burning in the hearth. Finally, a haunting cut to two young girls playing happily in the woods with a kitten.

It’s a remarkably violent, explosive, and highly stylized opening sequence, through which the Soviet-French director Kirsanoff conveys a surprising amount of information in less than a minute. Typical of his style, however, and characteristic of the rest of the film, it’s very much up to the audience to determine how these pieces of information fit in Ménilmontant.

An odd, elliptical, elegiac film – a classic melodrama starring Kirsanoff’s wife and muse Nadia Sibirskaia, bookended by acts of shocking violence – Ménilmontant remains largely overlooked (despite its apparent status as Pauline Kael’s favorite movie). A closer look reveals its status not just as a work of art, but as a fascinating window into conflicting and evolving elements of the period’s cinematic avant-garde.

Of course, “avant-garde” is a notoriously nebulous term. In this context, it joins together Kirsanoff, generally associated with French Impressionism, with artists as diverse as Man Ray, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Jean Epstein (all of whom, among others, are included on Kino’s “Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s”). This is counter-intuitive: Kirsanoff’s focus on narrative, however oblique, is worlds apart from Dadaist pure cinema, the Surrealists’ scorn for anything resembling the “bourgeois trappings” of story and character, or the Futurists’ single-minded fascination with technology and movement for its own sake. Poet Robert Desnos claimed the unifying strands were “[A]n exaggerated respect for Art, a mysticism of expression … standing out because of its production’s speed, its absence of any human emotion and the danger it represents to all the rest of the movie industry.” But only the first three qualifiers really characterize Ménilmontant.

Kirsanoff’s avant-garde bonafides mostly arise from general association and from operating outside of the governing systems, self-funding projects that allowed for freer experimentation. Ménilmontant draws liberally from multiple new sources – especially wedding Eisenstein’s Soviet theories of the montage and “conflict” to aspects of the French auteurs’ focus on subjective experience – but also reaches back to much older, standard melodrama.

After Ménilmontant’s brazen opening, we enter into a narrative recognizable to anyone familiar with Pabst or von Sternberg. Without a single title card – and there are, impressively, none to be found at all throughout Ménilmontant, all information conveyed either through image or carefully incorporated words in the mise-en-scene, like “To My Father” and “To My Mother” on a tombstone – we gather that the murdered adults were parents to the two young girls. The crime itself is never explained, leaving a sense of unease that haunts the film, and is only resolved in its conclusion by a parallel, and similarly ambiguous, act of violence. The children are glimpsed walking down an empty, tree-lined street in a series of elegant dissolves, and an overgrown graveyard marks the passage of time.

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We next catch up with them in the working-class neighborhood of Paris that gives the film its title. Perhaps a decade has passed, and the two eke out a living making artificial flowers while sharing an apartment. As in most melodrama, a man comes between them: in this case, a womanizer who seduces Sibirskaia, the younger of the two. A sexually frank sequence finds her in his apartment, where the two flirt and touch fleetingly, before an Eisensteinian montage of cityscapes and traffic stand in for their actual sex. (Even such Futurist touches are deployed by Kirsanoff in the service of narrative.) Some critics have implied that Sibirskaia’s character is raped instead, but there’s little reason to think so from the text, despite that being a frequent enough trope: in fact, Kirsanoff’s camera adores her face and movements, all of which imply innocence and coyness (fidgeting with her leg, turning her back, stealing a quick kiss with a smile). The clanging montage might indicate an innocence lost, the country girl now fully citified, but there’s not much to suggest an attack on her lover’s part.

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In any case, she finds herself eventually abandoned and, to make matters worse, observes her ex-lover seducing her own sister, who we have previously glimpsed waiting in vain for her return. To make worse matters even more dire, we cut to Sibirskaia entering a maternity ward. We are now firmly in the realm of conventional melodrama, informed by Kirsanoff’s array of in-camera tricks, quick editing, and poetic eye.

The realist narrative – the seduced and abandoned single mother fending for herself in the ambivalent city – continues to butt up against Kirsanoff’s impressionist sensibilities. A long sequence cuts between Sibirskaia cradling her baby, her face full of despair, and the waters of the Seine. (Kirsanoff adores water: in one of several startling superimpositions, her face and the Seine share the same space on film, implying her thoughts of an uncanny merger between the two.) Is she contemplating suicide? Child-murder? Both? The subjective emphasis is clear, even if the exact details aren’t, and for an agonizing minute – and eternity by the standards of Ménilmontant – we hold our breath.

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She decides against it (whatever “it” was, precisely), and we find her on a public park bench. In a deeply humanist scene that Chaplin must’ve admired – and that Pauline Kael surely did, too – an old man quietly and without eye contact shares a piece of bread and salami with her. The simple act of kindness brings her to silent tears.

Ménilmontant closes with a reunion of the two estranged sisters, the older of whom now appears to work as a prostitute outside of a seedy motel. Glimpsing her nephew for the first time, the elder embraces the younger, suggesting that the bonds of sisterhood are stronger than the nefarious and patriarchal forces of the modern city. In case there’s any lingering doubt, the film’s final moments showcase another brutal sequence, as the young man is bludgeoned and beaten by two previously unseen attackers (a woman and a man, in an inversion of the film’s opening). As viewers, we could surmise that he is a pimp or a crook, in context, but the narrative is open-ended. Perhaps this is an attack as random as the parents’ murder, or perhaps he simply has callously used one too many women in Ménilmontant.

What’s most interesting, though, is the existence of a narrative at all. While Kirsanoff’s film shares much with the art films being made at the same time, and draws heavily on the dynamism of his homeland’s montage technique, Ménilmontant grounds the experimentation in something approaching melodramatic realism, at least by avant-garde standards. The film should be better known, if for no other reason than the contributions Kirsanoff makes to bridging the gap between early and later experiments in form.

As for Kael’s admiration, it’s not hard to imagine why. When she wrote, in “Trash, Art and the Movies”, that “for the greatest movie artists … there is a unity of technique and subject,” she may very well have had Ménilmontant in mind.

Of course, in the same essay, Kael wrote:

Simply to be enjoyable, movies don’t need a very high level of craftsmanship: wit, imagination, fresh subject matter, skillful performers, a good idea – either alone or in any combination – can more than compensate for lack of technical knowledge or a big budget.

Despite Kirsanoff’s own protestations (“knowing nothing” about film technique), the low-budget Ménilmontant is clearly not lacking in craftsmanship. But it’s in the areas of imagination, skill, performance, and the newness of its narrative and aesthetic configurations that it most stands out.

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CommentaryFilmInterview

“I Love Seeing Film Projected.” A Conversation with Susan Oxtoby

by rick
written by rick

In Part 2 of our discussion with Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, we talk a bit about film preservation and restoration, about archives and collective memory, and the future of film in the digital age.

susan oxtobyOxtoby also went out of her way to encourage folks to come out to the Nuri Bilge Ceylan series, emphasizing “his use of the natural landscape in Turkey combined with his aesthetic,” and Bam/PFA’s three-day event with Charles Ferguson. I will be following this advice and hope to see you there.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Part 1 is here.)
______

Rick Kelley: Can we talk about preservation for a second? What are the general difficulties and concerns today to preserving film and film ephemera?

Susan Oxtoby: The challenges are always time, money, and changing formats. The good news is that a lot of very important work is already being cared for by the world’s film archives. It’s so exciting to be in the digital era, because a lot can be done using digital techniques to help restore aspects of film. There are all the ethics around that, as well …

RK: Yeah, I got some questions about that, too. [laughter]

SO: Yeah. I’m not going to be able to go too deep on this one, but one of the challenges of just the overhead and management of digital archives or having … I mean, you’re always trying to protect the original format. So if that’s celluloid, it’s important to have it stored under proper conditions and well cared for, but then a digital interface can [be useful] in restoration. But the costs associated with the digital technology is more expensive than working in photochemical restoration.

I think, though, when you look at what’s been happening internationally, it’s really exciting, all that’s being done. [And] here in the U.S., from the film studios and the nonprofit archives to the universities to the schools that are teaching the next generation of archivists. There’s a lot that’s happening very well. And a lot of material is getting saved. If you just look over the last 15 years, even the thought that this term “orphan films” exists … there’s a sense that we need to have our collective memory preserved by archives, even when it comes to the tradition of home movies or video. This is all very exciting. We learn so much about ourselves from what’s been recorded on film.

RK: Is that how you would define archives, as a repository of collective memory?

SO: Sure, that would be a good definition. [Pause] Yes. [laughter]

Unfortunately, archivists have to be so selective in terms of what they can give the full treatment of preservation to. In the sense that, often, you need to protect the things that are the most highly threatened – if it’s nitrate composition breakdown or it’s color fading or material that’s affected by vinegar syndrome. So in some ways you both have to save the things that are unique and maybe most greatly threatened. And then there are the aesthetic choices that one makes, protecting the legacy of important film directors or artists working in film.

Part of that is public awareness. You know, from country to country, there are different ways that funding archives works. The tradition in Europe may [include] more financial support for culture, the overhead of what it takes to do archiving. There’s some countries in the first world that are lagging behind in this area.

RK: You also hear horror stories of vast swaths of collections just being lost, just being gone.

SO: And that could be because of war, bombing, and things that get lost for that reason. Or it could be climate conditions, maybe in Southeast Asia and collections that are in parts of the world affected by humidity and heat and rapidly changing temperatures really affecting how things are stored. And it’s not cheap to run an archive. I mean, the energy bills are quite extreme. So it’s a lot altogether.

The good news is that there are a lot of international partnerships and there’s been, even when it comes to filling in holes in the history of American film production, there are things that have been found in different parts of the world.

metropolisRK: Do you have a favorite discovery along those lines? Like, [lost reels of] Metropolis famously turned up years ago.

SO: I don’t know if I can name one right here and now, but it is amazing just how it’s a constantly evolving history. Things keep being found and keep being added to what we’ve already preserved.

The long and short of it is, it’s always a work in progress. You always protect your originals, because you know at some point there may be a better technology developed to help us with restoring works, or there could be new material found.

RK: Your comment earlier about the use of digital to help with restoration seems to imply that you’re not … you know, there’s the whole “film vs. digital” divide that happens and these sort of debates that go on. It seems like you have a more nuanced view of that.

SO: I love seeing film projected. So of course, if we can show a film, we will. And we go to great lengths and expense to import prints to include them in our public program.

Increasingly, I see digital restorations that I’m okay with, but I will still often be looking at digital restorations and saying, “Aw, this is paling from my sense of how this film should look on the screen.” There are good combinations of archivists working with particular lab technicians who are getting it right, and [who are] very, very concerned about how you can replicate a work in digital format that’s a really good rendering of its original film format. So I’m not opposed to it at all. But I certainly love the fact that our theater is set up and still the majority of what we show on screen is film, celluloid.

RK: Absolutely. [But] it seems like everyday there’s a new doomsday scenario about how theatrical exhibition is just going to go away. Just last week, Sean Parker’s Screening Room idea, which you might’ve heard about …

SO: I have not.

RK: Ok, so the idea is users pay, you know, $50 to get a special box and you can put on your own cinema at your house …

SO: I guess that sounds great, in the sense that people can learn issues about curation. [laughter] And how to DJ your own film program. Why not?

I’m just not opposed to digital. I mean, when I was in university, they were kind of between the 16 mm reduction print and early VHS. That’s when I was studying films and had to write papers. But then, when DVD came along as a way to preview at home or be able to go back and study something closely and see how a film is actually put together? I’m all for that. I think it’s very important to be able to have access to a work. It’s important to see it projected well in a theater and to have the cinema experience with other people in the audience, and hopefully it’s a very well presented experience of the film. But to be able to go back and study it? I think that’s very important personally to have access to digital copies. I would think that film criticism is better off when we have greater access to work in digital copies.

Of course, I’m not troubled over film attendance patterns, but then I’m also not actually programming in a commercial theater! I’m working in a very specialized context, so …

RK: How do you see the PFA’s role in that?

SO: It’s very important to have all options catering to the next generation of cinephiles, and to be offering general filmgoers a chance to understand what makes film an art form, to interact with filmmakers. I really feel like young … I’m sorry, “cinephiles” is a little precious. But I think it’s certainly important for, say, junior high students to be introduced to interesting cinema, well-programmed films, well-made films, and the sense of watching a film with an audience in a nice cinema. You don’t want to wait until university for that to happen, you know? These are art-going patterns that you want to instill at a young age, and you want people to get excited about the world of culture younger.

So yeah – I think it’s really important. It would be nice if people could often see films in a theatrical context, but that’s not always the case. But … I think we do well in that role and that we offer a really nice venue in the new theater.

my winnipegRK: Speaking of the new theater, when I saw Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg here last month – a really hilarious, fascinating, striking movie visually – but also it sounded so good. How involved were staff with the specifications for the design of the theater itself?

SO: We had quite a bit of input. Part of that input was to create a theater that had a high enough ceiling that it recedes out of your consciousness, that you’re not conscious of a ceiling that’s closing down on the projected image. I wanted it to be high enough that it receded from your mind. And to have a well-masked image, a movable masking on the top and bottom and right and left. To have a theater where the rows have a slight curve – we have so many events where we have guests, and the fact that there’s a Q&A discussion and the audience can see the person who might be speaking at the end of the row. I think that curve was very important, and [it was] was something that we requested.

And we lucked out, because Meyer Sound very generously donated. They fed into the acoustical design of the room with the architects and AV consultants who were designing the room, but they also of course produced the speakers and worked very hard to make the acoustics in that space just ideal for cinema.

PFA theater

RK: It really shows.

SO: Yeah. So this is great: we can play the volume on these films at just the right level and you hear all the elements of the soundtrack.

I’m very happy with the sight-lines – we actually asked for a combination of a gentle rake down at the front of the theater and amphitheater towards the back. We had a theater in mind that we were modeling the rake after. So we fed into this quite a bit.

The darkness of the room is something we all were suggesting would be very important. [And] the stage – that was another request, that we have a short stage. I previously had worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario – the Cinemateque Ontario was based at the Art Gallery of Ontario when I was there. Some of the features of this room remind me very much of [that] theater. I do like the fact that the person at the podium is looking into the room almost at eye-level. That’s good. And I think the lighting in the theater is a big improvement for us, because we can do a lot with it, and at the same time, it’s so nice to have an inviting space for discussions.

RK: Yeah, again, Guy Maddin was my recent experience and it did feel really approachable. It didn’t feel like I was at a lecture so much as a communal screening.

SO: Good!

RK: So to wrap up, what in the rest of the season are you most excited about?

SO: All of them! All of them. [laughter] Oh, let’s see. I’m not going to dodge the question.

One of the things I do love is when you see a lot of programs, you see the throughlines between different series, the way that they work off each other. That’s one way it’s lovely. But I’ve really been enjoying the Jean Epstein series. The thing is, Epstein’s work, I’d only seen a few of these programs after all these years. Many of these works are recently restored, and [with] Epstein as a filmmaker and as someone who began in the silent era, the films are beautifully composed and the editing is very fluid, so it’s an eye-opener for me to get to know his body of work.

RK: So after all these programs and different locations, there are still things for you to encounter …

SO: Oh, absolutely. It’s always like that. And I’ll never even see all the films I’d love to see in my life.

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CommentaryFilmInterview

“There’s Just a Wealth of Filmmaking That Could Be Shown”: A Conversation with Susan Oxtoby

by rick
written by rick

Susan Oxtoby knows film.

Over the course of her career, the current Senior Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Bam/PFA) has programmed countless series and retrospectives, introducing audiences to under-seen, rarely-screened masterpieces from throughout the world and across cinema history.

A filmmaker in her own right (her late friend Stan Brakhage charmingly provides her film All Flsusan oxtobyesh Is Grass with the most Stan Brakhage-esque recommendation imaginable), Oxtoby’s passion for and commitment to cinema — its preservation and exhibition, its relevance to our lives and cultural memory — are evident.

Both were very much on display when she graciously agreed to sit down and chat about Bam/PFA’s first two months in its new location, what she’s most looking forward to this season, and what surprises future seasons might hold.

This is Part 1 of our interview: tune in tomorrow for a closer look at the challenges of film preservation, the role of archives in the modern world, and a curator’s thoughts on the “film vs. digital” debate.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.)
_______

Rick Kelley: So it seems to me you have the world’s coolest job. What led you to enter the world of film curation in the first place? What was your path like?

Susan Oxtoby: In terms of curating films, programming films, that really began in a student film society at the University of Toronto. It was called the Innis Film Society – Innis was one of the 8 colleges in the School of Arts and Sciences system at the University of Toronto, but it was also where cinema studies as a program and discipline was based. And so I had actually gone through that cinema studies program at the University of Toronto and was in another degree, studying film production, and I realized I should get involved with the student film society because they were showing such great work.

And so there was a period of about 7 years – this is the essay answer! – where I was completing my second degree but I was also back at the University of Toronto showing this very impressive year-round program of largely avant-garde film, or art films. It was a Thursday night program, so that was where I got a sense of how to construct programs. Every year, we brought in about 15 visiting filmmakers, Canadians and Americans, some international guests, but usually it was working in the area of avant-garde film.

tiff cinemateque

Then, my early jobs were actually in independent film distribution. In Toronto, there’s the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, which is much like Canyon Cinema, the same kind of philosophy. So I worked in distribution for about 3 years representing independent work in an artist-run center and was always meeting with visiting film curators from all over the world, and helping them interpret this large collection of some 3,000 films, largely Canadian but also international in character. A position opened up at the very young Cinemateque Ontario, which is now TIFF Cinemateque. So I kind of joined and became a young film programmer for my first professional position in curating back in 1993 and stayed with that institution for 12 years and became the Director of Programming.

That was an interesting period because that was a young institution – I’d say for its first 15 years it kind of went from 0 to 60 in terms of becoming very well-known for its programming. Of course, I was working with the wonderful James Quandt, who was the founding Director of Programming and is still there as the Senior Curator. So that was great. And we really built it up. You know, we were modeling ourselves largely after the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal and, frankly, the Pacific Film Archive.

old BAMPFA

RK: It all comes full circle!

SO: It comes full circle. And so we were in very close contact with this international network of film archives, and we partnered a lot with the curatorial staff here at the PFA.

RK: So it was sort of a natural transition when you came over here. You already had the groundwork laid in some ways.

SO: Yeah. But that was how I got into programming. And, you know, from my early teens, I really got interested in foreign films. My parents were cinephiles, so I saw a lot growing up. [They] were really into films, concerts, interesting international travel. And I was growing up as a child of the ’70s, let’s say, in my university days, and that was when a lot of places would have the latest Fassbinder film, the latest new, contemporary Italian film playing in art houses around Toronto. So I very quickly got into following that as a major.

RK: And you made a few films of your own, too. You’re a filmmaker in your own right.

SO: I definitely studied film production and I worked with independent filmmakers for a couple of years, filmmakers in Toronto, either avant-garde filmmakers or documentary or narrative filmmakers. And then I have two 16 mm films that are in distribution.

RK: So, for those of us (like myself) who don’t really know, what is a day in the life of a film curator like? What do you, you know, do?

SO: [laughs] I think a lot of people think, “Oh, you spend your whole day watching films!” Actually, this is not the case.

We spend our days in correspondence, and, of course, as the head of our department, I spend a lot of time in meetings. And then I’m fortunate to see most of our programs, so I spend my evenings at the theater. But it’s interesting. When you’re dealing with contacts all over the world, I start my day very early, corresponding with Europe, and then of course the East Coast, and whatever I can get done by the end of the day in Pacific Standard Time. And maybe by the end of the afternoon, we’re working with contacts in Asia, trying to get those emails off …

RK: It sounds exhausting, actually!

SO: [laughs] Yeah, but you know, you work against the world’s time zones. I mean, it’s extremely varied. I love the fact that we’re in this new location, Bam/PFA, and that we have so many visitors coming in, like this chance to chat with you today or to host [filmmakers]. There’s a visiting filmmaker yesterday, Wang Bing from mainland China, who’s here in the Bay Area for a few days, and he wanted to come over and meet with our staff. So that was exciting. We’re not even hosting his work right now, he just wanted to come see our institution. It was fun to show him around the galleries, the couple of theaters and the outdoor screen, and talk about what we might be able to do in the future.

bampfa

So that’s the thing. It’s been so exciting for us now to be in this new location meeting with so many visitors. It happens a lot, and in any given week we’ll have the guests that we’re bringing in for our programming but also meeting with the public.

I’m really delighted that in this spring semester, we’re offering some programs that are lecture screenings – the In Focus: The Role of Film Archives and this upcoming series of Japanese film classics – and that’s where I selected the programs we’re showing and invited guest speakers to come in and share their knowledge on specific film programs or topics. One of the things I think we do particularly well at Bam/PFA is the involvement of guests and specialists, from filmmakers to archivists to practitioners who might be editors or the wonderful academic talent here at UC Berkeley and beyond.

RK: How does the PFA build its collection? I know there were large donations back in the day, but how do things work now?

SO: Well, it’s very difficult for us to actually raise funds to go out and purchase prints. Some of our patrons are learning that it’s possible to make a gift that would go toward our film acquisition budget if it’s designated for that. But a lot of prints come in currently from film distributors who know they’re getting out of the business. [They] understand that we are an archive and that they can offer their prints to us and, if those prints are still in exhibition condition, we would take them in and be able to show them over time. So basically, donations from filmmakers and film distributors, acquiring films outright, [and] also working with other archives that might have recently worked on restoration … that’s the perfect time for us to acquire a new print.

We recently purchased a copy of The Seventh Seal from the Swedish Film Institute, and I’d love us to be doing as much of that as we can possibly manage, because it’s a great way to build the collection. We had some local donors who helped underwrite that, and it’s the perfect film for us to have in the collection. It will get screened a lot over the years. We had three very full programs [already].

RK: With the new location, did the move alter the programming, or change the audience, in any way?

SO: It has definitely changed the audience. Our numbers are really great. I think downtown Berkeley has … you know, I think there are more people going out for a bite and coming to the new Bam/PFA to see a film, look at the galleries. So it’s great. We’re now joining with all the other cultural venues based in the downtown core – the jazz festival or Berkeley Rep, Freight and Salvage or the new university theater …

RK: Sure. It’s very much in the community.

SO: It makes a big difference to be on the same block as BART. We’ve heard a lot from people who are just grateful we’re so much easier to get to. And then there are also all the restaurants, and just more night life at this end of the campus. So that really is great.

But I do think that just by launching this building, more people have found out about our programs and there’s been a great public response. The only thinone floor belowg that’s rocco and his brothersreally changed in our programming is that we’ve introduced some limited engagement films, so that’s a place where we might have three screenings of Rocco and His Brothers or, upcoming, we’re showing a contemporary Romanian film, One Floor Below. We’re showing that four times. The only other time that film has shown recently has been at Mill Valley. So it’s a chance to see a contemporary film from Romania, and there’s been a new wave of Romanian filmmaking that’s been highly recognized.

We really wanted our inaugural season to be reflective of all the great strengths that we are known for, in terms of showing beautiful silent films with musical accompaniment or avant-garde film programs, or the focus on documentary filmmaking as always in our spring season. Plus complete retrospectives like the Maurice Pialat or the Jean Epstein series that’s on the screen right now. Upcoming, we’ve got the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and that’s a rare chance to see his works to date in a complete retrospective. To my knowledge, the only venue in the U.S. that’s done a complete Ceylan series is MoMA in New York about a year and a half ago.

bampfa pialat bampfa ceylan bampfa epstein

So our hope is that we will be on a closer to year-round schedule on our five-day-a-week program when the museum is open, which means we’re going to be showing more films than we were at our old location. And by allowing some of those to be repeated, make it a little easier for the public to get more of those films in their schedules.

It’s hard when you only show something once. I mean, we do, and they do very well, but giving more chances, more opportunities to see particular programs will help us build our membership.

RK: One of the more notable projects in the old location that you were involved in was “Discovering Georgian Cinema”, and I was curious first of all how that came about, and what you think is vital about showing underseen or even never-seen films?

SO: “Discovering Georgian Cinema” was such a wonderful opportunity for me personally, because I had no background in Georgian film before I took on that project. But I think I did have the right kind of background to take on such a complex program because of my connections in the international archival community. So it was this wonderful opportunity and something I know I’ll be returning to, doing more with this area of cinema.

But it started from the point that Bam/PFA’s film collection has, in fact, the largest collection of Georgian films in North America, and I may be right in saying the third largest collection outside of Moscow.

RK: That’s amazing. And similarly true of Japanese films as well, right?

SO: Yes, that is true. Our Japanese collection is a very important study collection, and a portion of it would be of exhibition quality. But it’s definitely very important for researchers, especially researchers who might not have the Japanese language as a capability.

With the Georgian project, I received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to allow me to visit a number of archives and to visit Georgia and make connections with the local film community there. So I went to Tblisi, I went to Berlin where there’s a very large collection, and to Moscow, as well as archives in Europe like Amsterdam and Toulouse. And I was partnering on this project with the Museum of Modern Art. It was so important to be working with MoMA because that really increased the profile of our series. It was about 57 different programs here in Berkeley, which is bigger than anything we’ve done. And [it was] an opportunity to bring in filmmakers from Tblisi or from Europe, and experts on Georgian cinema. So it was a great learning experience

RK: Is that one of the key roles an institution like the PFA plays, to bring these kinds of things to new audiences?

SO: Absolutely. And we thought carefully about calling it “Discovering Georgian Cinema”, but I think it is absolutely the case that a lot of these films are completely unknown here in the U.S. If you actually went through to see how many of these films had never been shown by any institution in North America, there would be a good percentage of them represented in that category.

RK: I’m hard-pressed to name too many Georgian films.

SO: [laughing] Exactly. But it is a beautiful body of work. And of course in many different types of ways.

But we were able to do a lot of different things with that program. I think certainly to show enough work from the silent era. Soviet Georgian filmmakers really were doing very inspired silent films. And then there’s the period from about the mid-’50s through the ’80s, which is kind of a beautiful period of narrative cinema and development, in terms of Georgian filmmakers perhaps being critical of the Soviet regime and their relationship within the Soviet Union. But also always making works that were very much about the history of Georgia, the spirit of the Georgian people, the music and poetic and dance traditions.

I’m sure we’ll circle back and present more of these films another time round. You know, we could focus on particular directors or … I think contemporary Georgian film is really exciting right now. Things are coming together and there are a lot of really creative young filmmakers, so I think it’s an area of the world to watch.

RK: Earlier today, I was making a list of all the different filmmaker retrospectives you’ve been involved in over the course of your career, and I eventually just gave up, because there were too many. And I just wrote, “Pretty much everyone I’ve ever heard of.”

But are there series you remember particularly fondly? Perhaps in terms of exceeding your expectations for audience engagement or for really lively discussions?

SO: Many, many. That’s what keeps me going – the relationship between the guests we bring in and the audience response to their work. But I’m a real generalist. I mean, I do have specialties – avant-garde film and now Georgian cinema for sure are two of those. But I really do enjoy the fact I’ve usually been with institutions that show 400+ films a year, and so I’ve always been researching in an area that’s new to me. And I think you need to be a generalist in a lot of ways. I find that very exciting, and I’m constantly learning from the films I’m involved in selecting, but also from my colleagues.

One area I want to come back to – and I haven’t been doing this in the last decade that I’ve been in Berkeley – but I’m fascinated by abstract cinema. Which is squarely within the avant-garde tradition. But I did a series in Toronto called “Abstract Cinema: A Century of Light Play”, and it brought together French films from the 1920s, some German avant-garde film. It was a chance to bring in experimental filmmakers to present their work and show it. One area of cinema that I love, and I think it’s also related to my time going to music concerts, is just films that deal with rhythm and color in a very abstract way. And maybe it’s because I’m somewhat challenged when it comes to narrative cinema. [laughter] I might forget how a story ends, but I’ll remember the mood and atmosphere quite well.

So I would love to start introducing kind of an ongoing series that looks at abstract cinema. I think it’s perfect for us, because we’re also an art museum, and I think that there’s crossover … whether it’s music, poetry, or fine art, [audiences] can connect to that kind of cinema very well. There’s just a wealth of wonderful filmmaking that could be shown. That’s something I’d love to do.

 

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