Early Days at the Movies
Fanzine
Real Women in
the Movies
Just Kidding
The Seventh Art's Seventh Heaven
So What Happened
Next?
POETRY AND PROSE
Aperçus
Répérés
Choses Vues
Zastrugis
THE
SEVENTH ART’S SEVENTH
HEAVEN
Bright
boys like Gus Van Sant subvert the trend. His frame-by-frame mock-up of
Hitchcock’s Psycho (2001) is an expensive
reproduction, the
cinematographic equivalent of today’s Elvis look-alikes.
Cosmetics now are too
sophisticated to catch the shade in the light. The imitation Elvis is
gloss,
the real one matted. Current film technology is too shocking in itself
to pack
Hitchcock’s. And, no matter how actors mimic one another,
their natural vanity
can’t fail to remind you they are doing just that.
It’s a laudable trait which
French film noir and Brecht’s plays
exploited. But it’s a dying art as
actors trying to be natural become boringly literal.
Hitchcock’s
Catholicism expressed itself in moral games with his captive actors and
audience. He made them feel guilty for being voyeurs at the sacrifice
(his
films were Black Masses). You can’t commit sins in a dream or
at a movie, and
actors were not ultimately responsible, being his playthings. So he
forgave
everybody when the film was released, and the lights went up.
‘I only know what
the soul of the well-meaning fellow is like, and it makes me
shudder’, says
Camus.
The
new new wave of hyper-film-literates from George Lucas to Van Sant make
themselves voyeurs of a more relaxed movie culture. So many pictures
were made
in the nineteen thirties and forties that mistakes were permitted. You
could
take a chance or three. A week’s showing recouped the cost,
reissues in
fleapits made the profit. The current crop of filmmakers are like
scientists
who are only allowed by their discipline to work within the confines of
what is
called the literature, that is, the accumulation of received wisdom in
a
self-enclosed field. Creative works are put on the back burner while
careers
flourish. Their haunting of cinema history is self-serving rather than
creative
and the Seventh Art remains in a money-spinning rut.
Actors
too no longer derive their performances from psychological or life
based
sources. They draw from predecessors, who have been successful, in
artistic as
well as box-office terms. The two go together with film actors, at
least in the
long run. Cult movies become ‘Classics’ through
their stars more than anything
else. Learning from masters makes good sense if you are willing to defy
them
when the camera is yours. But modern actors are mastered by their role
models,
a pragmatic subservience - television has to be shot quickly and you
wouldn’t
want to surprise the director. Most parts are stock and conforming to
them is
easy. Prostrate yourself before the altar everybody prays at, and avoid
risks.
Be the protagonist of less rather than more. Make yourself tout
petit
and lose yourself in bigger and louder screens. Become dots in the
desert,
disappearing into the mirage. The only aspect of performance that
hasn’t got
smaller is physique (Tom Cruise is a giant compared to Audie Murphy or
Alan
Ladd).
Forty
years ago, my father used to say the actors of today aren’t
what they were. His
were the barn-stormers like Edmund Keane and Henry Irving who were
larger-than-life and the plays they made their own, cut down versions
of
Shakespeare, became the vehicles of their excessive presence. They
brought down
the house. The sky was theirs. In my childhood the last great actor
managers,
Donald Wolfit and Anew MacMaster (I wouldn’t dare put them in
parentheses)
preferred to tour stage plays in picture palaces after the last showing
rather
than be contained by a screen. Eisenstein might have done justice to
their
outsized presence. An arm raised, a disdainful lash caught in the eye
of a
storm. Still.
Performances
borrowed from well-known movies provide ready-made emotions for the
audience to
share. But repeated exposure attenuates them. Every time the screen is
flooded
by a weepy moment from, say, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in Penny
Serenade
(1941), the handkerchief harvests less tears. There is less and less of
‘the
child who was like no other’ to go round. Increasingly I am
at one remove. All
the better to appreciate George Stevens’ ruthless direction
of the ultimate
tearjerker. The tunes that evoke the staged memories that keep the
action going
are unmemorable ones, and Cary Grant’s charm has been reduced
to that of Archie
Leach, the blue collar worker he might have become if he had stayed in
I
can’t say that last time seen it brought on tears enough to
need a hanky. Still
we cry all the time, subliminally, low-grade weeping keeps the retina
healthy
(less styes or motes in the eye can only be a good thing). Contemporary
movies
only make me feel hungry for the popcorn of my youth. They ringard
a
bell that’s gone digital, and so can no longer be heard. The
saturation of
films with quotations from the past (the over-educated directors must
amuse
themselves) renders them meaningless. Their context is outside the
picture -
crosswords rather than jigsaw puzzles. I have lost my taste for
recognising
them. It’s like seeing a bagwoman wearing your
mother’s clothes. Big new movies
overwhelm me with supersonic sound, supernatural colour and technical
tricks.
King Kong-sized rubber monsters with shrieks where the heart should
beat. Human
presence and feeling is absent. The one remove that allowed you to
enjoy by
secondary intention, genre films has eradicated. Sheer sensation has
taken over
and headache is the dominant effect. Product placement offers its
anodynes
while the new taboos bawdlerise the human realities (when did smoking
in
mainstream
What’s
on the screen is reflective and rarely of the self. This is, as
Kierkegaard
prophesised, a reflective age. The last time a contemporary film closed
the
distance between the screen and me was Les Triplettes de
Belleville (2004)
by Sylvain Chomet, possibly the last of the handmade cartoons (computer
imaging
is more economic). The doleful eyes of the orphan, Champion, who became
a
lonely cyclist, meet those of his endlessly resourceful grandmother,
Madame
Souza, while Bruno, their obese dog, yaps at passing trains out the
window in
whatever urban wilderness they find themselves. I know they will make
do
despite.
Les
Triplettes’s
making is not some modish return to primitive narrative (as in, say,
Chaplin).
It’s full of quotations. The doleful eye is pure Keaton,
hardly a naïve. Buster
was the brash, noisy and impulsive Joseph Francis when directing,
dangerously
close to high art in his holistic mise en scène
where clapboard towns in
hurricanes become the extension of the settlers’ world
disintegrating into
capitalist chaos. The great German Expressionist FW Murnau (Faust,
1927)
could not do it better. Joseph Francis was just the real-life brother
of Betty
Davis’s Paris-dreaming girl in The Petrified Forest
(1936), a self-made
aesthete in a desert outback, doomed to disappointment and decline by
drink.
Whereas Buster the actor was the saint of silent movie slapstick. But
the two
Keatons - Buster and Joseph Francis - overlap in his facial (and
physical)
expression of headstrong poetry. He is not just an acrobat of brilliant
gags. A
pity Beckett’s Film (1966) came so late
in his career. Unlike Billie
Holiday, he had no Teddy Wilson to prop him up. I identify with him too
(not so
ridiculous. I am no stranger to pretentious pratfalls). Actors as their
real
selves despite, writers who can’t help themselves have
something in common.
‘Nature breaks through the cat’s eyes’ in
adversity. The Irish proverb is not
gratuitous. Keaton’s Irish origins show through his films. A
tramp who was once
a hedgeschool master. No wonder Beckett paid attention.
Animations
like Les Triplettes offer the future something more
grown up than the
normal run. There is more in the film than meets the eye. The only
weakness is
the sound of actors’ voices, but dialogue is so rare you
hardly notice (what a
pleasure being spared looking at them?). Its success everywhere
surprised
Van
Sant allowed himself one single significant difference from the
original Psycho.
The idea that there is a murderous mother’s boy in us all.
Hitchcock would have
liked it (make them feel guilty). The actor who played Norman Bates was
in no
way like Anthony Perkins. I think he studied for the part by watching East
of Eden. He sees himself as James Dean, a chunky youth crying
for his
mother. But since Brett Ellis has patented him in his self-obsessed
novels as
the standard
I
think it was Van Sant’s way of killing off Hitchcock
(something his actors
wouldn’t have minded. He treated them badly). But being like
anybody is so near
to being nobody that the whole enterprise dies in the water. Just like
Janet
Leigh, though the shock is more delayed. The new Norman Bates is a
sniveling
self-indulgent boy from a dysfunctional family. In other words, Frank
Paul is playing
himself playing Brett Ellis playing James Dean. It’s all too
knowing and
world-weary. Actors are surely meant to act someone we don’t
know. And films
are the gauze that sees through the stranger to us, the audience, who
entertain
him for an hour our two before we go home and get on with our dreams. I
have a
backlog of such encounters and the dreams to sustain them. I don’t think
there will be many more new
ones for me. But who knows?
Serendipity,
which is always right, often contradicts common sense. I
wasn’t looking to
discover that
By
accident, I saw the beginning again in Le Café. Guy was
otherwise engaged and
Eric the clochard got his hands on the télécommande.
And there it was,
But
there was no port footage at all on the European side of the
It
bothers me more that Bras might have been left on the cutting floor,
and
