The Sounds of Revolution: Godard’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘British Sounds’

 

“Sometimes the class struggle is also the struggle of one image against another image, of one sound against another sound. In a film, this struggle is against images and sounds.”

 - British Sounds

There was something in the air when Jean-Luc Godard took up the political banner of the late 1960s and shifted his filmmaking focus in terms of storytelling style and stories told, and in a general sense of formal reevaluation and reinvention. Always considered something of the enfant terrible of the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard was keen from the start to experiment with the conventional norms of cinematic aesthetics, from the jarring jump cuts of Breathless (1960), to the self-conscious playfulness of A Woman is a Woman (1961), to the genre deviations of Band of Outsiders (1964) and Made in USA (1966). But Godard was still, at a most basic level, operating along a fairly conventional plane of fictional cinema, one with relatively typical characters and generally progressive narratives of beginnings, middles, and ends (“but not necessarily in that order,” as he would clarify).

But then something happened. Not so much eschewing narrative, rather reformatting it, Godard’s work began to change, to more blatantly challenge and provoke; challenging and provoking those looking at his films as films, but also those looking at his films as declarative cultural statements. With this shift in his work, signaled by sociopolitical features like Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966) and confirmed by Weekend (1967), which put the nail in the coffin of this first phase in his filmmaking career, Godard’s output grew ever more experimental and deliberately provocative and esoteric, alienating certai+n factions of his previous audience along the way.



So be it. As Godard stated, to make political films, one must make films politically, and with that, bridges would be burnt and expectations would be thwarted. But this was Godard the activist and provocateur as well as the filmmaker. There was a sweeping sense of revolution all over the world, and Godard was in it, of it, manipulating it, and filming it.

If one takes a general survey of Godard’s most memorable filmic moments from 1958 to 1967, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of those moments would be visually based. In other words, it is in many cases the images, or Godard’s treatment of the images, that stand out: those jump cuts; his use of color in Pierrot le fou (1965); the stark, wintery black and white photography of My Life to Live (1962); Anna Karina’s tearstained face as she watches Maria Falconetti act in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); and our band of outsiders doing an impromptu Charleston. Of course, sound (or the lack thereof) is every bit as vital in these films (even in these sequences) but by and large, the auditory usually played second fiddle to Godard’s camera placement, movement, editing, cinematography, etc. This too would change in post-’68 Godard. Now, if not of a possibly greater importance, sound was on an even-keel with his sights.

With these elements in mind—the forging of new politically motivated paths, the continual exploration of bold formal approaches, and a filmic discourse that relied heavily on sound over, or at least in equal accompaniment to, the images—Godard was making revolutionary films in a revolutionary way.

First stop: England. Though initially considering The Beatles (the project fell through after several meetings and besides, according to Colin MacCabe, John Lennon was suspicious of Godard), The Rolling Stones entered the picture. Godard had early on expressed an appreciative interest in the group, particularly their 1967 psychedelic album “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” Cut to a year later and the Stones are working on “Beggar’s Banquet,” which, aside from containing songs of the moment like “Street Fighting Man” and “Salt of the Earth,” starts with the controversial and brilliantly written antagonistic anthem “Sympathy for the Devil.”



One Plus One, as Sympathy for the Devil was originally titled, is often now subtitled, and is still considered by Godard purists, captures the gradual orchestration of this opening track, shot over the course of three days, beginning with rough strains of improvisatory inspiration as they meld into a more fully formed creation. As Godard’s camera dollies, pans, and tilts its way through the recording studio, we see the entire Stones crew at work: Mick Jagger, clearly in charge; Keith Richards, too cool for school and erroneously billed as “Keith Richard”; Bill Wyman, hovering around the margins; Charlie Watts, who never looks entirely thrilled to be there; and Brian Jones, who at just 27 would be dead within eight months of the album’s release.

The sequences of Sympathy for the Devil that focus on the Stones, roughly about half the film, which are intercut with those sequences that will soon be discussed, contain the false starts, slip ups, frustrations, struggles, and achievements that inevitably go into most artistic endeavors. Aside from sound being obviously key in the development of a rock song, Godard incorporates an audio editorializing by having the sound randomly focus on specific elements of the song: Keith’s guitar, Mick’s vocals, Charlie’s drums, etc. There isn’t necessarily a rhyme or reason to what gets the attention when, nor is there always a correlation between who happens to be on camera and what sound in heard. This is Godard manipulating the sounds of the Stones as he had with other sounds before and continues to do today, amplifying certain fragments then and others now, often with little to no obvious justification.



The other half of Sympathy or the Devil is the more explicitly political and formally demanding portion and was shot a few weeks after these studio sequences. This assortment of segments features an eclectic and uneven mix of episodic vignettes. Anne Wiazemsky sprays discordant graffiti on city surfaces and turns up in the woods as Eve Democracy, the film’s producer, Iain Quarrier, whom Godard would later punch in the face following disputes about the film’s title and its conclusion, is a “fascist porno book seller,” and Black Power militant Frankie Dymon, as himself, is joined in a junk yard by likeminded comrades in arms. Over some of this, or dropped in as the scenes transition, we hear Sean Lynch providing commentary by way of a text that includes political, sexual, and violent references to Richard Nixon, Che Guevara, Ben Barka, Trotskyites, Lolita, Francisco Franco, General Walt Disney, and others.

The audio/visual assemblage of these sequences is fascinating if not always coherent or interesting. The first primary chapter features Dymon and other heavily armed black revolutionaries as they roam amongst, on, and even in the broken down shells of dilapidated vehicles behind a garage. In this junk yard, a Godardian set piece if ever there was one, several of the men recite from texts by Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, and Stokely Carmichael, either simply aloud or repeated into a tape recorder, preaching and preserving the respective sentiments. This includes passages proclaiming a need to “concentrate on the main enemy” to others touting the smooth skin and softness of white women.

Alongside these extracts, Godard’s additional audio or visual accompaniment is often ironic or upsetting to the perceived verbal focus. As we hear the call to militant arms, the men’s voices are frequently drowned out by the real world sounds of nearby car horns, passing ships, or planes flying overhead; there are additionally times when Lynch’s voiceover also interrupts the recitations. As these slogans of revolution are proclaimed or usurped, we are urged to assume one of two things: first, when a passage is clearly audible, by that fact we should presume its importance (why else would Godard make it so comparatively comprehensible?); and second, when the sounds of the everyday world going about its business come in over the readings, we then question the text’s significance (it must not have been too important to hear). Taken together, Godard seems to be providing a contradictory commentary about the meaning and potency of these black power passages as they are highlighted and confronted.



No less aurally distinctive is the sequence with Wiazemsky as Eve Democracy. This segment follows a film crew as they ask Eve an assortment of questions about culture, drug use, sexuality, and politics. To each question, Eve answers only “yes” or “no,” a simplistic response to these dense and complex questions, again an ironic verbal contrast on Godard’s part: “A man of culture is as far from an artist as a historian is from a man of action.” “Yes.” “There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary and that is to give up being an intellectual.” “Yes.” (Richard Brody points out that Wiazemsky spoke no English, so Godard just cued her “yes” or “no.”) And like in the junk yard scene, amongst the beautiful green foliage of the forest even these sounds of social proclamation are occasionally compromised by the aurally overpowering natural songs of birds chirping.

The third key non-Rolling Stones sequence takes place in a bookstore with an amusingly diverse inventory that includes everything from “Playboy” and “Penthouse” to “Justice League America” comic books, “Wrestling Illustrated,” “Motorcycle Mechanic,” “Complete Man,” and assorted sexually suggestive novels. Amidst magazine covers touting bawdy tales and crime stories, Quarrier reads from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” As the black power readings earlier leave one less than convinced of their polemic power due to Godard’s constant aural interruptions, the sections from “Mein Kampf” are similarly diminished in their influence by, on the one hand, Quarrier’s rambling presentation, and, on the other, the more dominant visual incorporation of tantalizing, comical, and tawdry magazines, which Godard’s camera continually hovers over.

The final segment of the film brings us back amongst the broken down cars as two African American women are interviewing the ostensible leaders of this revolutionary group. Spoken topics covered span the link between communism and Black Power, the oppression of the black populace in urban ghettos, and how Black Power will lead to political and economic gains. Most prescient in terms of this analysis is the stated hindrance of the communication barrier between classes and races: “Although we speak the same words, we are speaking completely different languages.” This then is something of a rarely overt proclamation of Godard’s own verbal preoccupations, especially as this film is concerned.

Through all of this, Lynch’s text and the Rolling Stones’ music come in and out of the soundtrack. But by the film’s end, “Sympathy for the Devil” as an organized song begins to take shape. When we return to the Stones during the final stages of the song’s completion, there is an evident cohesion of the tune’s disparate elements. Contrast this with the incongruous juxtaposition of political verbiage and ambiguous imagery in the film’s political segments. A little more than an hour into the picture, some of the political narration comes in over the Stones, but it seems to have trouble competing with the band as they hit their groove. Also as the song nears completion, we hear the isolation of vocals, drums, etc., all prior to the final mix. Here the similarity to the political vignettes is also obvious, as through the incorporation and dissemination of disparate sounds, Godard makes clear that context is everything, that any sound out of its unifying whole is perceived to be odd or incomplete, just as the reoccurring spoken texts are more or less vital given their surrounding accompaniments.

Though we do hear the completed version of “Sympathy for the Devil” at the end of the movie, this was not by Godard’s design and was done very much against his will. To Godard, the completed song signified a conclusion to the film’s political commentary as well, something he insisted was still a work in progress. “Sympathy for the Devil” should remain unfinished, just as the plight of the socially and economically repressed remains unresolved. Still, during this concluding scene, which has a general disarray of action, the multiple tracks of sound seem appropriate given the rest of the film’s complex nature. And as Richard Roud summarizes, “One knew how important the soundtrack was to Godard’s films, but One Plus One proves it is primordial.”





Two years after Sympathy for the Devil, Godard, now fully ensconced in the political climate of the era, returned to England to make an even more revolutionary and formally audacious film. Shot on 16mm at the behest of London Weekend Television (which turned down and later disowned the film) British Sounds, or See You at Mao (1970), is also divided into distinct segments, beginning with a tracking shot that spans a considerable length of a MG assembly line at the British Motor Car Factory in Oxford. In shooting this, Godard retains the realistic surrounding sounds of the industrial force. Aurally alongside the grinding, grating, pounding machinery is a voice reciting passages from “The Communist Manifesto.” The inclusion of the ear-splitting factory sounds was done, according to Godard, to stress his point that while audiences decry the harsh noise for its 10 minutes of screen time, the workers who toil away in such a factory are exposed to the unremitting cacophony for eight hours a day. Point well taken. The inclusion of the Marx/Engels text, which preaches against economic disparities, suggests the working class is slave to machines and overseers, and warns against the exploitation of wage labor, is clearly the more obvious auditory message. Taken together, these two sounds work in an odd unison where we actually see a type of labor discussed in the “Manifesto” put into practice as a sort of illustrated thesis. During this opening portion, we are also introduced to another audio theme that will last through the entire film. An older man (later a woman) reads a history of authoritarian abuse and worker difficulties to a young girl, who then repeats the text.

The second part of British Sounds takes leave from a broad appeal for working class rights and hones in on the concerns of women. A feminist text by Sheila Rowbotham rails against the exploitation of women, who when also workers are amongst the “exploited of the exploited,” while we see a totally nude young lady walk up and down stairs and enter in and out of two rooms. Here is a most perplexing form of audio/visual contrast or conflict on Godard’s part. While the text condemns blanket stereotypes and the objectification of women, we see the nonchalant objectification of women, the camera even at one point lingering on her pubic region (“Conceal your sex!” sounds out a male voice). Of course, every serious Godard scholar is quick to point out the non-titillating fashion with which the nudity is shown, but it’s still a curious decision. And when we see the woman on the phone, echoing the voiceover narration, the impression is that she is merely parroting the lines, repeating what she is told, not necessarily thinking for herself, which seems to go against the point of the segment.

Godard next includes black and white footage of a man spouting out statements in sharp contrast to the sentiments of the film so far. As an obvious counterpoint to the leftist proclamations in the first two sections, this astonishingly crass individual spews his extreme points of view regarding youth needing to “play their part in industry,” criticisms of students and worker ideology, and grumbling about “communist rabble” and Vietnam detractors. Most shocking are statements like, “Sometimes it’s necessary to burn women and children” and “We don’t like colored people, and I’ll tell you why.” Such profoundly offensive declarations are visually paired with either the man himself or insertions of printed text, everyday workers, or families.

The constrictive fourth segment of the film has a group of men sitting in close proximity around a table discussing business strategy and effective modes of production, while also recognizing the physical and mental toil that factory labor has on the workers. Though these men speak like management, they also note the need for a “political party committed to Marxism and capitalism” and they are quick to profess the need of both millionaires and those in poverty in order for capitalism to exist. This least interesting (visually) of the chapters appears to try to have it both ways (aurally), with little success in either case.



Following a poster with the words “students sound,” the next part of British Sounds has a group of university students listening to, and then revolutionarily rewriting, songs by The Beatles: “Hello, Goodbye” (“You say US, I say Mao”), “Revolution” (is rewriting really necessary?) and “Honey Pie” (“Money Pie”). These members of the Peoples Poster Brigade, as one poster indicates they are, are the youthful alarm of the coming revolution. Though their use of pop music to make their case is another ironic audio choice, they seem earnest in their attempts to take a commodity of popular entertainment and turn it into something politically active. In other words, to quote two of the printed texts that appear in this film, this is the amalgamation of “capital sounds” and “militant sounds.”

British Sounds concludes with two short scenes. The first features a bloodied arm making its way through the snow-covered ground toward a red flag, the second a barrage of voices and songs played over a montage of fists bursting through the Union Jack with appeals for solidarity. Throughout the film, the overlap of words makes for some challenging listening, with, like in Sympathy for the Devil, the assumption is that what is heard most audibly must by that fact carry some weight. To this effect, we get calls for the “abolition of the wage system” and statements that tie in nicely to this analysis, like “speech is the expression of power.” “It was the sound,” argues Richard Brody, “not the image, that mattered, because the sound carried the lecture, the doctrine, or rather, the indoctrination.”



In their conglomeration of multiple voices sounding off on everything from communism to orgasm, from Kennedy to Vietnam, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, or One Plus One, and British Sounds, or See You at Mao, are prime examples of the filmmaker’s ever expanding use of sound in film, as an artistic tool and as a propagandist instrument. According to Penelope Gilliatt, Godard wanted to “pound people with language.” “Even these raw first works of a new stage that is now tough going seem likely in the end to reach the ears of people out of sympathy with [Godard's] radical politics,” she writes, “not because of the yelling powers of polemics but because of the carrying powers of a poet’s voice.”

That poet’s voice continues to be heard, and over the course of the 40-plus years since these two films, it has been heard in ever-varying modes of expression. It is little wonder that when Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville started a video production and distribution company in 1972 they dubbed the enterprise “Sonimage,” and it’s no surprise that some of his more recent films of astonishing visual flourish bare the aurally evocative titles For Ever Mozart (1996), Our Music (2004), and Farewell to Language (2014). Godard remains as adamant as ever to explore the integration and juxtaposition of the visual and the aural, getting down to the most fundamental features of motion picture art, commerce, entertainment, and politics.


ARTICLE  from SOUND ON SIGHT

Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’ – What Might Have Been

    “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.” – Stanley Kubrick, Oct. 20, 1971.

There are few unrealized projects in the history of cinema more tantalizingly fascinating than Stanley Kubrick’s planned feature about Napoleon. Even in 1967, at the time of its initial pre-production (the first time around), it seemed like a potentially great idea. But now, looking back with Kubrick’s entire body of work as a reference point, it truly does stand as a project this legendary filmmaker should have been destined to make. Thanks to a mammoth and comprehensive collection of materials fashioned into Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, edited by Alison Castle and published by Taschen, we can for the first time see how Kubrick prepared for the film and what he had in mind for its ultimate big-screen presentation. Stylistic and thematic features now synonymous with Kubrick are evident, as are particular characterizations, set pieces, action sequences, and recurring visual motifs. 

Kubrick first began discussing the project around the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey; a notebook on the proposed film dates back to as early as July 1, 1967. He was never satisfied with previous depictions of the life of the great leader, even going so far as to criticize Abel Gance’s masterful Napoleon, from 1927. “I found it really terrible,” he said. It was “technically ahead of his time and [Gance] introduced inventive new film techniques … but as far as story and performance goes it’s a very crude picture.” Sergey Bondarchuk’s 1966 War and Peace was “a cut above the others, and did have some very good scenes,” but, he added, he wasn’t overly impressed. With Paths of Glory and Spartacus under his belt, a large-scale epic would have been reasonable for the then-39-year-old filmmaker; with Lolita and Dr. Strangelove most recently completed, he also had a degree of influence and had made a name for himself as a gifted, if provocative, director. Though 2001 had not yet been released when Kubrick first started contemplating the Napoleon project, it too would have further indicated his visual prowess and technical proficiency.



Kubrick expected to keep costs down on Napoleon by utilizing the same sort of front projection technique he had for 2001. Super-fast lenses and specially engineered film stock would enable him to shoot in real interiors with relatively little light (by just candlelight he suggested at one point, as he would eventually do with Barry Lyndon). Camera tests were also done using a “new kind of tear-resistant paper which could be printed to look like an actual military uniform from a certain distance.” Always with the bottom line under consideration, Kubrick, as indicated in the documentation included in the Taschen set, was meticulous about the financial aspects of this large-scale production. He knew that keeping under budget, as he regularly did, helped to ensure his creative freedom and limit studio interference. 

Kubrick estimated that the film would run about 180 minutes. Shooting would be done largely in France, Italy, and Sweden, and Romania and Yugoslavia had agreed to supply up to 30,000 troops as extras. According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto, “Production for the exterior location work was planned for the winter of 1969. Kubrick estimated he would complete the location filming in two to three months and another three to four months for the studio work.” 

Despite a pre-production memo that at one time stated “no stars” — presumably to keep costs down — to play the emperor, Kubrick had considered David Hemmings, fresh off his success in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, as well as Oskar Werner, Al Pacino, and, briefly, Ian Holm. Jack Nicholson was also a strong candidate, indeed the primary candidate into the 1970s; Kubrick was immensely impressed with the young co-star of the recently released Easy Rider. Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, and Jean-Paul Belmondo were also rumored to star in unspecified roles. As for leading ladies, Kubrick had noted Julie Andrews and Vanessa Redgrave as possibilities. Audrey Hepburn was Kubrick’s top choice for Josephine, but apparently, the sexual nature of the planned film, certainly daring for its time, steered her away and she declined outright. (On the sexual nature of the film’s subject, Kubrick contended that Napoleon had a “sex life worthy of Arthur Schnitzler,” author of, among other things, the novella Traumnovelle,” on which Eyes Wide Shut was based.)

Through the years that followed, the film hopped from studio to studio. Financing would seem secure and then suddenly dissipate. The proposed cast would change, possible locations would change, the storyline would change, and so on and so on. Alas, no film was to be made. The disastrous failure of other large-scale epics, particularly a similarly Napoleonic film like Waterloo in 1970, seemed to sideline the film for good. (“Waterloo was such a silly film,” wrote Kubrick not long after it came out. “It will not make things any easier but in the end I am sure we will get it done.”)

Yet even after A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Kubrick told an interviewer, “I plan to do ‘Napoleon’ next,” and in 1972, “A Clockwork Orange” author Anthony Burgess told the Village Voice that he was working on a novel about the life of Napoleon: “I’m writing it in the shape of a Beethoven symphony. Kubrick is going to make it into a movie.” And during the making of Barry Lyndon in 1975, rumor had it that Kubrick was simultaneously shooting battle scenes for “Napoleon.” By the next decade, though, the project had more or less vanished from his radar. In 1980, he gave the following response regarding the film: “I haven’t seriously though about [the] Napoleon film for years … [I]nflation would put the film in the neighborhood of $50 to $60 million, and I’m not sure that it can be done in under three hours’ playing time.” The idea of a Napoleon film was not totally dead for Jack Nicholson, though. As late as 1986, he was still talking abut the possibility of a Napoleon movie; in 1983, when asked who he would like to direct him in such a film, he responded, “Stanley Kubrick — I feel obligated to give it to him first. After all, he got me ‘Napoleonized’ in the first place.”

The frequent half-starts on the film through the years are perhaps largely due to how Kubrick viewed Napoleon’s life and times, insofar as they could be representative of any current period. The occurrences and the basic ideas that would manifest themselves in Kubrick’s Napoleon would have relevance no matter when the film would ultimately be made. Kubrick said, “I find that all the issues with which [Napoleon, the potential film] concerns itself are oddly contemporary — the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relationship of the individual to the state, war, militarism, etc.” (Shades of Strangelove and Paths of Glory, to be sure.)



Included in the Taschen collection are a book of images taken by location scouts, photographs of costume tests, samples of note cards detailing what was happening every day of Napoleon’s life, and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery. Aside from representing a fascinating collection for the Kubrick admirer, this assortment further stresses the meticulousness and drive toward total control that Kubrick brought to most of his productions. An extended conversation with professor and adviser Felix Markham gives remarkable insight into Kubrick’s queries regarding Napoleon’s life; alas, we can only speculate about their possible uses. Napoleon is also an exemplary case study of Kubrick’s attention to detail and obsession with collecting all of the facts, knowing all that there is to know about his given subject, and thus having the utmost control over his production. He was a filmmaker, as this collection can attest to, who wanted to see it all, understand it all, and know, better than anyone else, how to most successfully and authentically bring said details to filmic life. According to Eva-Maria Magel, “The material left behind by Kubrick is possibly the largest of all private archives on Napoleon … [comprising] a range of material, including his subject’s political testament, the memoirs of associates and opponents, academic studies, and popular histories. Numbering at one point at about 500 volumes …”



Also part of the set is a 1969 screenplay draft. From this alone, one is able to glean a decent idea of what Kubrick had in mind for the film. Of course, Kubrick’s cinematic eye was a singular one, and it would be egregious to presuppose what he would ultimately do. It is, nevertheless, not hard to imagine a reasonably accurate picture of the scenes described in the script, had they been shot, especially given the period in which the screenplay was written and at times considered for production, and taking into account the relative proximity of time periods covered in this story and Barry Lyndon. The imagery would have most likely taken on roughly the same detailed and carefully composed shape as the 1975 picture. As noted by Magel, “Barry Lyndon benefited enormously from the research, the pre-filming work and the technical insights of ‘Napoleon.’” Unquestionably, more than any other Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon can function as a sort of visual gauge with which to envision what is only described in the screenplay.

In a graphic pattern common to most of Kubrick’s work featuring wartime sequences, the script calls for scenes and shots depicting orderly assemblies of men on the battlefield; the mise-en-scene strongly indicates an illustration emphasizing symmetry and regimented formation, particularly as they are relevant to, and illustrative of, violent and militaristic exchanges. He wanted to stage the battles in “a vast tableau where the formations moved in an almost choreographic fashion.” And indeed, the screenplay descriptions do indicate what could have been immense panoramas of methodically orchestrated and executed carnage.

Throughout the screenplay, these sweeping vistas are juxtaposed with scenes of more constricted interiors, notably the scenes of strategic and bureaucratic conferencing and the scenes of sexual intimacy. In the case of the latter, if the violence proposed for “Napoleon” resembles Barry Lyndon and to a certain extent Paths of Glory, the sexuality is akin to Eyes Wide Shut. “Maxima erotica” is simply how Kubrick describes one scene, and Napoleon’s first encounter with Josephine is at a sexual performance of sorts, not unlike the haunting orgy in Kubrick’s final masterpiece. 

Relying on a good deal of commentary, the screenplay gives a voiceover to an unseen narrator as well as Napoleon himself, and at times Josephine and Tsar Alexander also chime in with their thoughts and observations. The voiceover belonging to the all-seeing narrator is similar to not only Barry Lyndon but also The Killing, in which the audience is afforded knowledge not necessarily granted to the characters involved. In Napoleon, it also gives considerable historical context, certainly helpful for a film so densely packed with names, years, military campaigns, countries, and so forth.

The structure of Napoleon similarly resembles Barry Lyndon in its rise-and-fall projection. With Napoleon, though, even more biographical area is covered. Kubrick manages to include a vast array of pertinent moments from the emperor’s life, starting as far back as his childhood, where we see that his military career essentially started at age 9. To maintain so much exposition and chronological information, Kubrick’s screenplay is remarkably swift. In fact, one wonders how, if filmed, Kubrick would have managed the pace. Starting with Napoleon as a small child, he is 20 years old by page 9, and from there on, it’s one scene after another highlighting crucial personal and professional events, all the way up to his death, and all in a 186-page script.

It’s clear that Kubrick cared a great deal about Napoleon. “I don’t claim he is the best and most honorable man in history – only the most interesting,” he said. And much of what is striking about Napoleon’s characterization in the screenplay is the larger-than-life persona he embodies. While this may indeed be historically accurate, one can’t help but also draw comparisons with the fictional Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Napoleon exhibits this same sort of independence, self-absorption, and social gall. “I am not a man like any other,” he declares at one point. By the end of the script, even if one knew nothing about the real figure, it would be hard to disagree with such a statement.



Also like Alex, Napoleon in Kubrick’s screenplay has a distinct love for authority, that is, his own. One of the most notable themes in all of Kubrick’s work is a depiction and analysis of organization, control, order, and authority, and this is unquestionably one of the primarily elements that continually arise in Napoleon. Though Kubrick’s project was never brought to eventual fruition, the materials that do exist on the film express perhaps better than any other Kubrick film notions of control and authority, in war sequences (pre-, during, and post-) in particular, but also in realms beyond. It’s little wonder that the topic so fascinated the filmmaker. As Geoffrey Ellis notes in “A Historian’s Critique of the Screenplay,” “I can understand why Kubrick’s fascination in Napoleon’s career lay chiefly in the nature of power itself: how it was gained, how it was ultimately lost.” And as LoBrutto rightly acknowledges, “Napoleon was an ideal subject for Kubrick: it embraced the director’s passion for control, power, obsession, strategy and the military.” A passage underlined by Kubrick in J. Christopher Herold’s “The Mind of Napoleon” clearly indicates how the filmmaker and his subject could be considered kindred spirits: “My power is dependent on my glory, and my glory on my victories. My power would fail if I did not base it on still more glory and still more victories.” Next to this, Kubrick wrote, “A task without an end.”

There are numerous scenes outlined in the script that illustrate these ideas. For example, Scene 21 reads: “ANIMATED MAP: Napoleon’s plan for the capture of Toulon. Explaining with narration how, rather than trying to capture the town by storm, it is, instead, only necessary to capture Fort Eguillette, a promontory of land from which French batteries would command the inner and outer harbours of the port, making them untenable to the English fleet, and quickly leading to the fall of the city.” Here, as seen in Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket, is a familiar image of one in control (or, at least, one trying to be in control), consulting a map as it stands as a tangible object conveying order and understanding. Along those lines, Scene 31 details: “INT- NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ – DAY: Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.” Still with the actual and symbolic significations of maps, this sequence epitomizes a man obsessed with control, with securing the details of his endeavors. Could there be a more telling image in a Kubrick film than this when it comes to showing one’s pursuit and craving for absolute control? This picture of the great general (with ranking an indication of authority) crawling around on all fours going over, no doubt to the last detail, his next move?

Also like in much of Kubrick’s work, there are sprinklings of humor in “Napoleon.” Kubrick often infuses some comedy, however dark, into a majority of his movies, and in Napoleon, there are moments of obvious comedic banter done simply to amuse, but there are also sequences of subtle, emotionally affecting comedy that has more resounding resonance. In the first case, one scene has Napoleon discussing the cold with Tsar Alexander. Napoleon inquires about whether or not the Tsar wears long-sleeved and long-legged underwear. “You can never conjure up brilliances with a cold bottom,” says the emperor, causing both men to laugh, concluding the scene. In the other case, however, the scene of the divorce proceedings for Napoleon and Josephine is tragically amusing in its superficial unspoken falseness; she agrees to the separation because she has been unable to bear him a child, not, of course, because neither one has ever been faithful.

Stanley Kubrick’s uncompleted Napoleon project is an engrossing entry in the great filmmaker’s career, and any admirer of his is certainly grateful for the breadth of material he left behind. Few of film history’s nonexistent potential classics have this much to work with and to explore. We’ll obviously never be able to know exactly what Kubrick intended to create. (This will remain true even if Steven Spielberg’s attempt to adapt Kubrick’s outline to a TV miniseries comes to fruition.) However, we should consider ourselves fortunate that he was so distinctive in his formal tendencies and narrative concerns; with these consistencies, combined with what is available, at least we can partially analyze Napoleon, or at least what might have been.
ESSAY  from SOUND ON SIGHT

Altman’s Unsung ’70s

Director Robert Altman had his fair share of ups and downs. The oscillation between works widely lauded and those typically forgotten is prevalent throughout his exceptionally diverse career. This was — and still is — certainly the case with his 1970s output. This decade of remarkable work saw the release of now established classics like M*A*S*H, Nashville, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as well as a picture like 3 Women, which would gradually gain a cult following of sorts and subsequently be regarded as a quality movie despite its initial dismissal. But couched between and around these features are more electric and generally more unorthodox films. There are multiple titles from this, arguably Altman’s most creative of decades, that remain generally unheralded to all but his most ardent of admirers.



For Altman, the 1970s began with this disparity. The first year of the decade saw the release of M*A*S*H, one of his most instantly provocative and popular films, and one of his most enduring. Later that same year though, there was Brewster McCloud, easily one of his most eccentric. The titular main character, played by the quirky, owl-eyed Bud Cort, resides in the Houston Astrodome and pines to one day fly, which he ultimately does by means of a mechanical wing device he has constructed. (Sounds reasonable enough so far.) Along the way, the film, supposedly Altman’s favorite of his own movies, brings in the following: the opening credits, shown twice; bumbling cops trying to solve mysterious murders; multiple references to The Wizard of Oz (the film even features Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West); an assortment of peculiar characters (for example, Altman regular Shelley Duvall in her first film role, and Sally Kellerman as a guardian angel of sorts who wears only a trench coat); some of Altman’s most random dialogue (Suzanne: “Have you ever had diarrhea from eating Mexican food before?” Brewster: “I like your car.”); and, well, a lot of bird excrement. After the timely and trendy M*A*S*H, a film like Brewster McCloud as a follow-up was certainly a change of pace, one that baffled audiences, most critics, and studio bosses. Now though, it feels charmingly unconventional. “It was my boldest work,” said Altman a few years later, “by far my most ambitious.”



While 1971′s McCabe & Mrs. Miller has rightfully been read as a key revisionist Western, where notions of generic heroism, setting, and imagery were subverted, Altman similarly deconstructed the Western film’s superficial ideas pertaining to mythic heroism with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson in 1976. In this case though, the results are more combative, not necessarily just toward the characters (McCabe is definitely not presented as a “hero” either), but chiefly in its general approach to the genre’s penchant for distorted and exaggerated historical reconstruction; there’s a reason “history lesson” is part of the film’s subtitle. This Buffalo Bill is not the uncontested legend of the west; this Buffalo Bill is a questionable legend of his own making, a scheming, egotistic, shameless self-promoter. As played by Paul Newman (and like with Warren Beatty in McCabe), there’s an obvious thesis regarding the nature of celebrity in the casting here, commenting on image-centric star constructions. The film is very much about show business, according to Altman. “Buffalo Bill Cody was the first movie star, in one sense, the first totally manufactured American hero,” he noted in 1976. “That’s why we needed a movie star … to play the role.” Beyond that, the film’s larger concerns are those of the Western’s very essence: myth vs. reality, truth vs. fiction, and heroes vs. villains. Black and white distinctions are fine for John Ford; Altman works in shades of grey.



Between McCabe & Mrs. Miller and what is perhaps his best film, Nashville, Altman continued to broach new and ever varied filmic territory, with Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, and California Split. While each have their qualities, the former two stand out for this uniqueness. Images (1972), one of Altman’s most enigmatic features (along with 3 Women five years later), is also his lone venture into horror filmmaking. The results, predictably when Altman goes genre, are fascinating. Susannah York gives a stunning performance as a women plagued by continuous and increasingly disturbing visions (she would win best actress at Cannes). Her paranoia and schizophrenia seep into the film itself — in its cryptic narrative exposition and its equally ambiguous visuals — and we are never quite sure of what is real and what isn’t. We’re left to wonder, with York, what is developing, why, and if it even really is. The film makes excellent use of contrasts. There’s the idyllic rural Irish setting, but played against its serenity is John Williams’ unnerving, Oscar-nominated score, his most exciting, if not most memorable, movie music. There’s also the relatively stable and secure life of the film’s main characters. The husband and wife have money, mobility, and a weekend cottage, but beneath this veneer of comfort, the mysteries and doubts lurk. Images, then, is a perfect title for this ominous film that questions the illusory surface of people and places.



Though not a genre in itself, no fewer than ten films have featured hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe as he adroitly solved crimes and treaded through the criminal underworld. Altman’s inclusion in this, The Long Goodbye (1973), is something a little different. Never having finished the source (“It’s almost impossible to comprehend”), Altman took considerable liberties with this 1953 Raymond Chandler novel. (Credit should also be given to screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who additionally penned the classic Howard Hawks Marlowe picture The Big Sleep, in 1946.) While still on the trail of a murderer, this Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, is a chain-smoking, cynical, lackadaisical, too-cool-for-school smartass. As such, while there’s detective work to be done, in Altman’s hands there’s also more than a little fun to be had. That fun is as much a part of the performances — Gould especially has considerable time for amusing asides, ticks, and character-building habits (the bits with his cat, for instance) — as it is with the Marlowe mystique. Those expecting a Bogart-esque slickness and tough-guy persona were sorely thwarted by this jaded incarnation. Altman the audio-innovator also takes the idea of a musical theme to another level, bringing in the title song in a variety of styles, popping up throughout the picture, even as grocery store music. A minor touch perhaps, but one that only adds to The Long Goodbye’s singularity.



Speaking of Altman’s aural techniques, much has been made of his innovative use of multi-track sound recording, and the full impact of this fascinating system is usually most appreciated in his films compiling a large number of speaking roles. In most cases, Nashvilleis seen as the crème de la crème of this method; its characters constantly talking over each other leaving audiences to — quite realistically — pick up the pieces of audible dialogue. But it was with A Wedding in 1978 that Altman arguably outdid himself with this audio construction. The interiors were far more constricted than in Nashville(there’s essentially only one location), making for more people in less space in any given scene, thus more talk to sift through. Not only that, Altman upped the ante by including no less than 48 featured characters in this film. Apparently, Altman jokingly told a reporter that after 3 Women he was planning to film a wedding — what a demotion for such a filmmaker! However, upon reflection, Altman realized the drama that was inherent in weddings and his next film, his next real film, was set. Certainly, other movies have centered on weddings and the catastrophes that abound, but none come close to equaling the hectic yet perfectly plausible mingling of people and their individual tragedies and comedies as A Wedding.



Altman’s next foray into genre territory was the 1979 science fiction film Quintet, again with Paul Newman. This movie isn’t quite like any other in the Altman cannon or in the wider category of sci-fi/fantasy. “It’s set probably in the future, or else in the present in a parallel world,” stated Altman, and this type of obscure description perfectly suits the film’s unconventional visuals and narrative. The titular ‘Quintet’ is the name of a game played amongst the inhabitants of an inhospitable arctic wasteland; some play with a dire and deadly seriousness, thus forming the crux of the film’s suspenseful and mysterious plot. The setting is a city dying out, the result of an impending ice age set to eradicate human existence. This idea of a frozen reality dooming humanity is more than an additional narrative catalyst though, it’s a stylistic device. Aided by a genuinely frigid location (at one point, the temperature reached 60 below), the film looks and feels cold. The icy conditions are palpably present in every stark, grey, dismal scene. It gives the performances and the story credibility, and it all forms the despairingly bleak visual palette of the picture. In some ways, it similarly reflects the glacial pace of the film, certainly one of Altman’s most trying in terms of typically swift story progression. And if the locale looks barren yet somehow futuristic, it’s most likely because the film was shot on the dilapidated site of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montréal, which perfectly matched the desired sense of prior vibrancy now in decline. Lastly with Quintet is one of Altman’s most curious stylistic choices. For some reason (and the reasons are quite debatable), the edges of the frame are obscured with a Vaseline-like substance, essentially creating a blurred border around the central image not unlike masking effects from the silent era. A further part of the film’s overall visual appearance? (Something to do with the cold maybe… or symbolic of surroundings closing in?) Or simply an empty and ineffectual gimmick? This is but one point of discussion raised by this truly distinct Altman movie.

Altman would begin the next decade with what may be his most underrated movie. Popeye was widely panned upon its opening and is still seen by many as one of the great filmmaker’s lesser works, one that, just in general, seems rather odd (at best) or simply bad (at worst). But Altman’s Popeye is actually one of the director’s most purely enjoyable pictures and, as some more recent Internet comments point out, the film is newly gaining much deserved popular appeal. When released, Popeye was not the kind of movie audiences were expecting from this rebel director (ironically, it appears Popeye was seen as too unusual and too unclassifiable, even by those who appreciated Altman for being just these things). In any event, with a mumbling one-eye-closed Robin Williams in the title role and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl (the part she was born to play; indeed it’s her best performance), the plot is as delightfully unassuming as one of its source comics. It’s directed and acted like a live-action cartoon, with sequences obviously exaggerated and preposterous, the characters similarly erratic and unorthodox in the extreme, and some moments at times simply bizarre. It’s over-the-top and amusingly absurd, but it’s extremely likable and fascinating, and Williams’ nearly inaudible one-liners are frequently hilarious.



Nevertheless, Popeye’s poor reception would signal the beginning of further tumultuous, though nonetheless productive, times for Robert Altman. After more than a decade of lower-key film and television work, work that is still noteworthy, Altman would burst back onto the Hollywood scene with a film that, oddly enough, sharply jabbed the ridiculous mechanics of Hollywood itself: The Player in 1992. As opposed to his work in the 1970s, from this point on even his lesser features were paid some attention, based solely on his previous record of accomplishment if nothing else. Then into the new millennium, Altman was generally heralded as one of America’s great filmmakers, an iconoclast who was still doing things his own way. An honorary Oscar in 2006 sealed the deal.

From his first feature (Countdown, 1967) to his last (A Prairie Home Companion, 2006), it is surely indicative of Altman’s talent and place in cinema history that so many of his films are worth a second look and critical reevaluation; not only worth it, but benefiting from it, their merits justly revealed. In so doing, as hindsight remains 20/20, no doubt more unsung Altman films originally dismissed will be newly minted as classics.


This piece is part of the Robert Altman Spotlight at Sound on Sight

World War II Through a Comedic Lens

When Lina Wertmüller, with Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), and Roberto Benigni, with La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), chose to look back at the era of World War II, its beginnings, its horrors, and its aftermath, they would do so, daringly, in comedic fashion. Through the lens of the comedy, these two filmmakers broached a topic almost sacred in its sobriety, and presented issues relating to the holocaust, primarily, and did so in a tone hitherto only just hinted at. Wertmüller’s was a dark comedy of savage humor and vulgarity, Benigni’s was one of light, heartfelt emotion; both would result in films that were not just good, but ones that more than succeeded at what they were respectively setting out to do. Though with a similar time period and occurrence serving as a backdrop, the films Seven Beauties and Life is Beautiful deal quite differently, in terms of narration, thematics, and aesthetics, with the issues at hand.

From the outset, the picture beginning with images of violent intensity, juxtaposed audibly with Enzo Jannacci’s bizarre, humorous, and strangely surreal “Quelli che” (“Oh yeah”), it becomes clear that Seven Beauties is not going to be a typical film about the events of World War II. The fighting as such will be of little concern for Wertmüller. She, instead, would look at the absurdities of the happenings and the inner, more subtextural, conflicts during the period. This is highlighted in this opening sequence alone, where images of Hitler, soldiers, warfare and more are repeated, cut rhythmically to the music, and comically jumbled, making them all appear at the most funny, at the least peculiar. Wertmüller here takes such iconic images of the war and, in placing them out of their initial contexts, creates an abstract poem of allegory and allusion, of ridiculousness coupled with violence and humor. Yes, from this opening, we know this is not going to be just a “war movie,” nor will it be a typical, certainly not a neorealist, approach to the time, place, and the event of World War II. This montage goes on for more than three minutes before we find ourselves in the story proper, not quite sure at this point if what we just saw and heard had anything to do with the diagetic world of the film, or it was some sort of Brechtian technique to take us out of the story before we ever get in it. What we do know, however, is that Wertmüller is going to take us on one hell of a ride.

The song continues, but Wertmüller then changes film stock to color and we follow a single individual. This is signaling that we are now in the plot of the film and that this person is a character, not just stock footage. This main personality, we learn, is Pasqualino “Seven Beauties” Frafuso (Giancarlo Giannini), and he will be, for better or worse, our “hero.” And his introductory heroic deed to open the film? We find out that he is a deserter who stole bandages from a dead man and used them to fake an injury so as to more easily escape. The heroics of Don Pietro Pellegrini are long gone in a film like this. It’s now every man for himself, with disregard to political or national commitments or convictions. These, Wertmüller establishes right way, are to be the unpleasant truths of war, the part you don’t see in Hollywood films to be sure. The images are dark, dank, and unpleasant. As they walk through a downpour, the two characters, Pasqualino and his fellow deserter, discuss how much they hate Germany, why they don’t want to kill anyone, and then they ultimately arrive at a hillside where they see a group of men and women disrobed and shot down by the Germans. This, it would now seem, is to be a somber and serious look at war—but what a sudden shift in tone! As quick as she sets us straight, however, Wertmüller gives us dialogue in which the friend notes that they may as well be accomplices to the Germans for not stepping out and spitting in their faces, instead they run away. But, Pasqualino contests, “They’d have come after us and we’d be shot. Useless suicide.” Less than heroic, to be sure, brutally honest, cowardly, self-serving: the character development in this film will be as complex and distinctive as the story and the film itself. This is further brought to our attention by a break in the continuity narrative with a flashback, the first shots of which being that of a scantily clad, and rather obese, woman performing a song and dance routine. Brilliantly, this has all been in the first 10 minutes.

Conversely, look at how Benigni begins his tale. This film will be, so we are told via voice-over, “a simple tale, but not an easy one to tell … like a fable.” Intentions here are clear, as clear as they are at the start of Seven Beauties, and like through the abrasiveness of Wertmüller’s opening, Benigni’s more romanticist notions also make its tone known from the off. Two Italians, one of whom is Guido Orefice, played by Benigni, are cruising down the open road, through brightly-lit scenic beauty. The style is simple, with no cinematic flourishes or exaggerations. When drama unfolds (their car looses its breaks) it’s almost incidental, even as they barrel down a steep embankment, crashing through the forest and a crowd of people. Benigni’s tonal establishment makes it obvious that a lightness and good humor will prevail here (in the beginning anyway). While the car is getting fixed, Guido as a character develops, and he turns out to be, as portrayed so marvelously by the director of the film, the total antithesis of Pasqualino. Guido is funny, charming, happy, and pleasant. As much as we may not be sure about Wertmüller’s initial characterizations—what kind of people are these deserters, what are they up to, where do they stand—with Guido we have utmost liking and acceptance immediately. He, and the start of Life if Beautiful, are as clear to read and understand as the azure skies above its opening locations; Pasqualino, and Wertmüller’s creation, are as multifarious and shady as the first environments of that particular picture. But, and this is key, they are both right away funny, though unquestionably in dissimilar ways.

As Wertmüller’s film progresses, continuing to utilize the flashback unfolding, itself a self-conscious stylistic and narrative device that more sharply associates and contrasts one scene from the one that precedes or follows it, we see how Pasqualino arrived at his current state. And at the same time, we follow him as he heads into his future, a future that will find he, and Wertmüller’s critical discourse, developing and intensifying. Benigni’s tale, on the other hand, though with one significant and story-quickening temporal ellipsis, moves forward at a steady, logical and continuous pace, clearly placing it more in the tradition of classic Hollywood storytelling. While Wertmüller’s storytelling devices are fashioned in such a way as to have the spectator question and become cognizant of the methods of narration, Benigni’s is one that seeks, and accomplishes, an emersion of emotional involvement.

The general shape of the narratives in these two films not only stresses the differences in filmmakers but in the stories they are telling. Benigni’s is a life-affirming tale of a father’s sacrifice, and defiance against the most dire of circumstances. Wertmüller’s, on the other hand, is an almost allegorical tale (a scathingly black one) that gains most of its impact in the more metaphoric and abstract analogies and statements, all through images, characters, and lives that are perhaps less than appealing. Other than with slight hints of the tenuous times to come (a horse painted with anti-Semitic remarks, comments on race inequality), Life is Beautiful takes nearly a full hour of screen time before it begins to truly delve into aspects of a darker side of life, the holocaust specifically, or World War II in general. Instead, we see the bumbling, romantic, and charismatic Guido finding himself a job as a waiter, surrounded by high class, and trying to woo the object of his affection, schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). Through a series of comical, and by no means serious, misadventures, he succeeds in finding his way into Dora’s, and the audiences’, heart. They have a child, they goof around, and all is, for the time being, good.

Now, in contrast, look at the initial moments of narrative establishment in Seven Beauties. Reading chronologically, that is, what leads up to Pasqualino’s life in the concentration camp, not the actual order in which scene are presented in the film, while they too may not focus explicitly in the events preceding up to the horrors of World War II, they nevertheless encompass an atmosphere of seamy sex and carnal violence. We see Pasqualino to be a chauvinistic man, a dirty man, an obscene man deep within the more dubious aspects of human life. He’s vain and domineering and oversees a family of equally questionable, and unattractive, sisters. He loves the ladies (to his mind he is a Casanova-esque womanizer), but there is no sense of Guido’s type of charm here, on the part of the characters, nor on the part of the audience. By the first hour or so of this picture, we see that Pasqualino loses one of his sisters to prostitution (he can’t abide, apparently having some sense of familiar pride), and he vows to, and succeeds in, killing her pimp/fiancé, and, after taking the body, chopping it to pieces, and stuffing it in suitcases for disposal, he gets arrested. This is not the fluffiness and magnetism as seen in Life is Beautiful, but they are all elements that play a crucial role in the lager, grand scheme of Wertmüller’s picture. It’s only in a non-flashback sequence about midway through the first hour that we see what sort of shape the film is ultimately going to take. Inside the camp, without any gloss over its depravity and danger, the at-this-point apolitical Pasqualino is forced to confront the threat he now faces. “How did the world ever get like this?” he asks.

How the two characters in the two films face the adversity and trials of the camps is where we get an interesting divergence, each with their equal amount of poignancy, interest, and, if one can use the word, amusement. Guido, notably in the camp with his son and his wife (who is with the other women separated from the men), is forced for his child’s sake to approach the dread in a, to say the least, unique fashion. So as not to scare the boy more than he already is, Guido creates an elaborate and hilarious in its manifestation story of the camp being essentially one big game, with everyone vying for points in order to be the winner. Brilliantly, and purposefully, misinterpreting the words of a German guard, Guido announces the “rules” of this game and his plan of making, to the best of his ability, the whole experience possible for him, but mostly his son, to endure. Never taking off his comedic mask, Guido, despite the hardships, the terror, and the anxiety, keeps things as fun and as entertaining as possible for his boy. As Peter Bondanella notes, “[H]e turns the often dirty and shameful events in the camps where people did anything possible to survive into a fabulous world play, inhabited by at least one benign clown.” (449) Even before the finale of the picture, these moments of playfulness and deception for the benefit of his son pull at the heartstrings to an exceptional degree.

On the other hand, when Pasqualino finds himself thrust into these most unpleasant of circumstances, he chooses not the high road, but sinks lower and lower into an emotion and dignity abyss, wallowing in self-pity. In other words, he “…touches rock bottom in his obsession with survival, and he is forced to earn his survival with a feat of sexual prowess, the seduction of the commandant…” and “Since our hero has been reduced by life in the camp to a physical wreck, the [commandant] first makes Pasqualino eat a bowl of food, then forces him to quiver at her feet.” (Bondanella, 363) This is in sharp contrast to the way in which Guido keeps with remarkable consistency his personality of humor and love. Believing that his place in the camp was a matter of bad luck, Pasqualino’s declaration to escape is proceeded by his decision (derived by another flashback in which his mother once assured him that in every woman, even an evil one, some decency exists) that his best method for flight, especially given his, he believes, exceptional ability to woo the opposite sex, is to appeal romantically to the large and in charge commandant, played by Shirley Stoler. No matter the death and degradation that surrounds, Pasqualino is now intent on finding his way out through his appealing, romantically, to this authoritarian woman, a daring, bizarre, funny, and disturbing premise. All of this would lead to, in Roger Ebert’s words, “easily the least erotic sex scene ever filmed.”

Despite their extremely different methods of perseverance and coping, the two films do share an interesting similarity in terms of what is actually being said about the conditions of a concentration camp, and to a larger extent the ideas of racial cleansing and mass executions. There can be little doubt that, through Guido’s humor and Pasqualino’s attempt at seduction, both regardless of their situation, Benigni and Wertmüller are commenting on the absurdity of the aforementioned dubious features of World War II. They are notions so dreadful and unimaginable in their horror that both filmmakers approach them so as to place their absurdity in a way that is heightened by the preposterousness of how the two protagonists handle them. This notion is especially alluded to in Seven Beauties when one looks at the parallels between the mental institution and the camp: the rows of “inmates,” the anonymity, the uniforms, the tortures, the despair, the appalling conditions, the women in charge, and the levels of deprivation committed by Pasqualino (the rape in the asylum and the murder in the camp). In the face of such absurdity, one must be absurd. Which location, in this film, is the craziest after all?

There is the sense that neither picture is, of course, meant to be taken literally. No doubt Guido would never have lasted as long as he does in a real concentration camp, and everything about Pasqualino’s actions seems exceedingly exaggerated and ridiculous. But realism in treatment does not appear to be of primary concern for either filmmaker, much to the chagrin of their respective detractors. Both approaches to storytelling here are distinct from a chronicle of sorts on the holocaust. Believable or not, these two films are more about telling engaging and fascinating stories than with detailing how the abhorrence of the historical happenings actually went down.

While sex may be at the fore in the latter part of Seven Beauties, it is basically nonexistent in Life is Beautiful. And other than in sections near the end, or by allusion and dialogue, the same could almost be said about violence. Neither is heavily featured in Benigni’s picture; again, this is not only aside from the primary purpose and tone of the film, but the director also takes the stance that it is generally accepted through popular understanding and knowledge that most know what went on in camps such as these. The hint and undercurrent of potential and existing violence will suffice, until, that is, it becomes essential to the concluding of the plot.

With Seven Beauties, however, violence, and the concept of violence, gets a far more contemplative treatment. Out in the populace, Pasqualino’s killing of the pimp is viewed by some as heroic, and he himself revels in the idea of being “The Monster of Naples.” There is a respect, a lightness, and some bizarre level of admiration attributed to his murderous behavior. His “honor-killing” of sorts has a degree of acceptability. Violence, in this fashion, can be with its reasons. But, when one looks at the violence inflicted by the Germans at the camp (and elsewhere) one is instantly appalled, as are we when Pasqualino must ultimately murder a fellow captive. All instances are murder(s), but in their contexts Wertmüller calls attention to their complexities. Does a “legitimate” reason justify the deed? Why do the characters, and we as spectators, react and interpret so differently the two actions? Citing Jerzy Kosinski, Millicent Marcus notes that, “Wertmüller wins our sympathies for a despicable protagonist by making him a cartoon character, and since we have laughed at Pasqualino all along, this tempers our reaction to the monstrosity of his final deeds.” (Marcus, Italian Film, 316)

It’s not an explicit treatise on the nature of violence, but certainly in comparison to Life is Beautiful Seven Beauties does approach these issues in a more dialectical manner, and it is in the balance between comic and tragic moods and this “only apparent levity” that “offended some critics, who believed it implied Wertmüller’s equation of petty crime and mass murder.” (Bondanella, 363) The killing of a man, even a pimp, is no petty crime, and this, in my view, is the only act of comparison, not, by any means, an equal one. But, it does try, as R.T. Witcombe writes, to “link the Fascism of the streets of pre-war Italy with the atrocities committed in a Nazi camp...” (250) Marcus also calls attention to the structure of Wertmüller’s film insofar as the way it lends itself to such drawn comparisons. It “plays on the violent contrast between the prewar life of the protagonist and his current plight in the camp, constantly [shifting] from present to past as a way of foregrounding the ironic relationship between … Pasqualino’s two conditions.” (Marcus, After Fellini, 283)

Aesthetically, Benigni and Wertmüller also present the two films in two immensely differing approaches. Matching its general tone and ideal, Life is Beautiful is composed (and this is in no way a fault) in a straightforward visual style. Framings are clear, open, and balanced. Benigni emphasizes only what need be, only when necessary. He utilizes a consistently smooth and inconspicuous maneuver of the camera, and close-ups are used at their most effective when they are purely for the purposes of emotional manipulation. Lighting is bright (even the camp bunkers are lit extensively) and most of the scenery, definitely at the beginning but even near the end, is clean and accessible. Like the way in which much of the violence is left to the mind's eye of the audience, the locales, interiors and exteriors, often leave no real trace of unpleasantness. Despite some allusions to Italian films of the neorealist period (can anyone ever steal a bike in an Italian picture and not recall De Sica?), Life is Beautiful yields no similar treatment of the environment or the mood of those war years.

Conversely, with Seven Beauties, only adding to the ugliness and unseemliness of the actions and characters in the film, Wertmüller presents the film in such a manner as to accentuate the grime, the dirt, the claustrophobia, and the pervading unpleasantness. A hand-held camera adds to the sense of uncontrollability, of being at the mercy of the situation with no restraint. Her lighting choices leave many scenes, before (the murky wilderness) and during the time at the camp, situated in, if not always darkness, at least an almost repellent overuse of artificial and distorted illumination (the green during the infamous lovemaking scene is a good example). The living conditions, again before and at the camp, are also unkempt; they are dirty, crowded and seem to ooze sweat, tears, blood and a palpable feeling of discomfort. Close-ups in Seven Beauties are not just for emotional purposes (though they do work psychologically); instead they serve to emphasize frequently the unpleasantries of the picture: scared faces, ugly faces, angry faces, evil faces, and the final close-up of Pasqualino’s “haggard face” which “convincingly suggests that some values are more vital to human existence than survival.” (Bondanella, 365) As unassuming as Benigni’s direction is, Wertmüller, reserving her right for experimentation in the “art film,” directs with several instances of self-consciousness, calling clear attention (as in the credit sequence) to the more provoking discourses the film presents.

Brilliant, involving, and quite satisfying in their own ways, Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful present the modern world’s most infamous tragedy in unique lights, in unique examinations, through the unique generic fashion of the comedy. The characters and stories are markedly different, but they are both engaging and generate strong reactions. That neither can easily, nor immediately, be dismissed is a testament to their individual power, and at the heart of both pictures is, and this is certainly rare in a holocaust film (which neither movie really is), humor. Savage or touching, the wit in both pictures reveals the potential for further exploration into this most terrible of historical atrocities, and it also points towards an aspect of the cinema that allows for such unthinkable approaches to, indeed, become not only thinkable, but filmable.

Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. Seven Beauties. Original review, April 16, 1976.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19760416/REVIEWS/ 604160301/1023
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Continuum: New York, 2004.
Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2002.
Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1986.
Witcombe, R.T. The New Italian Cinema. Oxford University Press: New York, 1982.

Weimar sensibility in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s mise-en-scene

In the period of Germany’s Weimar Republic, a unique and volatile pre- and post-war era within a window of less than 20 years, the German people were experiencing a torrent of new ideological, social, and political views. What was once normal was giving away to the new and unusual; what was typically viewed as quintessentially German was now being inundated by outside influences, by strange and foreign people and their imported cultural baggage. Whether or not these elements were as directly and obviously portrayed in the cinema as some like Siegfreid Kracauer would argue, there can be little doubt that film, this most popular, class-spanning and innovative of the arts, was indisputably influenced to one degree or another by this state of the German populous. The times were surely changing, and in no film like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari 1920) do we get a sense of what this meant for the cinema, let alone the German films of the period.

Like other historical filmic movements (Italian Neo-Realism, Soviet montage cinema, and the French Nouvelle Vague, as just some famous examples), German Expressionist films take their cue from what was happening in that respective country, in that particular time. The familiar and the strange were at odds in the real world, and they were the same in the cinematic.

One only has to look at the still frames in any cinema history book to see where this strangeness was most frequently represented in many Weimar-era German films; the set, the mise-en-scene, is the most commonly discussed and easily recognized feature of these expressionist films, Caligari being a prime example. The pervading sense of uneasiness, anxiousness, and, as Sigmund Freud calls it in his essay “The Uncanny,” the unheimlich, is taken from the minds of the German population and given an outlet in the locales of Caligari. There was something shocking by having this style represented in the cinema, in its visuals and its narratives. There, on the big screen, exported across the world, these films had a technique never before seen in the movies.

The set design of Caligari was a blending of real locations, that is, places that do and can exist (offices, the home, a fair), with a pattern and look that is anything but normal. This contrast between the standard and the surreal is where much of the film gets its power and where we see the German feelings express themselves. Places that the German people we accustomed to were exaggerated and skewed in such a way that an unnerving sense of horror and torment were brought to the forefront. The labyrinthine townscape in Caligari, the incessant and repetitive rotation of scenic elements (causing, according to Freud, “a feeling … that recalls the helplessness we experience in certain dream-states”) and the irregular and warped images of domestication created a mood on screen that matched that of the audience.

A dizzying array of pointed lines and sharp light/dark contrasts made parts of Caligari seem as though we were in the mind of a distraught individual (which, perhaps, we are). While the characters in the film, most specifically Dr. Caligari and Cesare, can be deemed “strange,” in their behavior, their look, and the danger they bring to the Holstenwall town, certain parts of the film show that the setting is warped in ways that do not only relate to them – for example, the city clerk’s office and the embellished chairs.

While the German inhabitants were physically and mentally in a condition of unrest, so too is the film. Locations and most characters are in a constant state of abnormal movement. Sidewalks lead to places they shouldn’t, people (most memorably Cesare) move in jarring strides, and even the structure of the film, beginning and ending with a framing story that encompasses a possibly false primary story, causes the entire film to twist and turn and topple upon itself. The set develops a life of its own, giving the sense of mobility. We see this in Freud’s essay when he cites E. Jentsch, making a note of “‘doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate.’”

It is also worth noting the increased modernity that was overtaking Germany at the time, especially in terms of urbanization and artificiality. This is shown to great effect in Caligari, chiefly in its lighting style (painted shafts, for instance) and in the fact that the whole film, indeed most all German films of this expressionist movement, was shot indoors on a stage. This is a further distancing of the real.

It is remarkable that during this period of turmoil and strife these great filmic artists were able to tap into the popular zeitgeist and create works of such telling beauty – “The uncanny that we find in fiction … actually deserves to be considered separately. It is above all much richer than what we know from experience; it embraces the whole of this and something else besides, something that is wanting in real life,” says Freud. Their far-reaching influence spanned the globe, most prominently in the approach to light- and shadow-play seen later in the American films noir. All the same, even if the German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had not had such a meaningful and lasting cinematic power, what stands alone as simply the films of this Weimar epoch are extremely valuable as art and as statements of a culture. To varying degrees, the films of this time are a revealing window into the Germans’ minds, souls, fears, and anxieties.

Work Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” trans. David McLintock.
London: Penguin, 2003: 123-162.

Being a “good fella” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas

Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film Goodfellas is perhaps the greatest gangster picture ever made. It is nearly unrivaled in its texture, its details, and its expansiveness. And, given that it so thoroughly encapsulates its gangster life-style and so methodically relates the lives of its gangster characters, it comes as no surprise then that, as part of such a system, it also covers territory always present (explicitly or implicitly) in the gangster crime film: masculinity. These gangsters are, first and foremost, men, and as such they have quite distinct ideas of proper masculine behavior, attitudes, and inclinations. There is a mob-based code of conduct that could just as easily be seen as representative of a more broad set of male-based codes. Men are at the crux of the gangster film, and they are (as the title of the film suggests) of major prominence and importance in Goodfellas.

Honor, honesty, resilience, and assertiveness are crucial aspects of this male-dominated gangster society and this film. Amongst these men, the notion of masculinity takes shape in the ways in which the main characters watch out for each other and cover for one another. It’s telling that after Henry gets busted for selling cigarettes, the crowd of waiting men call out that he has “broke his cherry.” Here his entering into manhood is a result not of some first sexual escapade, but of getting arrested and keeping his mouth shut, telling the authorities nothing, and not ratting on his friends. Within this male-ruled world, such issues hold sway over the more commonly held others. “Jail [or, at least the threat of it in this case] becomes a ritual of manhood,” notes Fred Gardaphe.” (107)

To the gangsters in Goodfellas, part of their masculinity also manifests itself in the form of their possessions and their appearance—“If the clothes make the man,” writes Gardaphe, “than Scorsese realizes gangster manhood through the costuming of his characters.” (106). The most respectable of the men in the film are those with money, who own the finer things in life, and who can afford to get away with their criminal lifestyle by paying off whoever needs it. As much as the men in this film hold their status by such material items as rings and shoes, part of their sense of masculine ownership also extends to the power (thus ownership) they have over individuals. Be it the way Jimmy (notably nicknamed “the gent”) keeps police and others at bay by slipping cash here and there, or the way he bullies and roughs up/persuades Morrie, the men here declare their dominance through convincing, though certainly cruel, ways, and this is a major part of their masculine set of mind, this view of “men using violence to assert their authority.” (Gardaphe, 106).

The family too takes a considerable role in the life of these gangster men. After brutally beating (presumably, they think, killing), and prior to burying Billy Batts, the group of Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy are nonetheless respectful, gracious, and humorous with Tommy’s (Scorsese’s) mother. The wedding between Henry and Karen is also a highlight of familiar relations (blood-relatives or otherwise) and a telling moment of the film; and later Paul and Jimmy go to great pains to make sure that, even despite Henry’s infidelities, their marriage remains intact. Maintaining a family, even with a girlfriend on the side and with the occasional domestic violence, is still a key ingredient of the male gangster proper. This quite unique form of marriage counseling on behalf of Paul is representative of a common element of Goodfellas, which Gardape point to as scenes where an “older man shows a younger man what men are expected to do.” (108) But, it’s all about maintaining this front of decency, of male roles in the family structure; once that is compromised, so it seems, then so too is the said male’s role in the gangster family.

Along these lines, we get the notion in Goodfellas of desperate father-figure searches, most obviously and prominently between Henry and Paul and Jimmy. Scorsese has said that “[the real] Jimmy was a professore type, in charge of the young kids,” (Thompson, 158) and [the real] “Henry Hill’s kids looked on Jimmy [Burke] as an uncle,” (Kelly, 275). This concept is what leads Gardaphe to cite critic Pellegrino D’Acierno in sayings that Scorsese’s films “comprise ‘a cinema of the sons.’” (101) The younger characters in Goodfellas are as much trying to preserve (for the most part) proper relations with their male superiors as they are trying to make something of themselves independently. This father/son dynamic is why the dishonesty Henry expresses towards Paul is so devastating. It is perhaps telling that, seeping across the real/fictional film line that Scorsese’s own father plays a pivotal figure in the film and Joe Pesci has acknowledged some real-life inspiration in his embodiment of the explosive Tommy: “I can draw on my temper because it’s terrible. My father had a terrible one.” (Kelly, 270)

Additionally, the respect garnered by these gangster characters, simply by others knowing who and what they are, also goes towards Goodfella’s general take on masculinity. One could look perhaps at the film’s most famous sequence (my favorite) where Henry takes Karen to, or more precisely though, the Copacabana nightclub. By his connections, by his abilities to maneuver the corridors of the night club, bypassing the lines and the “regular people,” Henry does a good deal to appeal to Karen. He is, to her, quite a guy. This is what a man should do. It’s amusing then, after the two have seated, that Henry tells Karen he is “in construction,” a stereotypically manly profession, one that does not, however, usually account for such rights and influence as Henry clearly has.

By being able to take what they want, when they want, how they want, the men in Goodfellas through their criminal acts, present themselves as outlaw heroes where such outlaw behavior is a prerequisite for the life they choose to lead. If not through violent means, how else are they to attain this sort of independence and influence? “Violence is a form of expression,” says Scorsese, “it’s how people live.” (Brunette, 140) The fact that they lead a life of crime is also a crucial element in their masculine framework insofar as it is emblematic of their nonconformity, to rules, to boundaries, and to acceptable modes of behavioral protocol. This is representative of the “‘tough guy’ masculinities” Gardaphe looks at in his section on “Rough Boys: The Gangsters of Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino.” Like Scorsese earlier Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) and Mean Streets (1973) some of the “rough boys” in Goodfellas have not yet become, as Gardaphe calls then, “wise men.” (101) They are younger hoods struggling to find their footing in this surprisingly complicated world of codes and conduct, with overtly masculine sensibilities.

Of course, given that many of these characters, most frighteningly Tommy, go to extensive lengths to declare their masculine superiority, “to challenge each other’s masculinity,” and make widely known their notably male supremacy, its little wonder that anxiety and violence pervades many scenes of the film. (Gardaphe, 107) The characters, again especially Tommy, are also out to prove something. This is part of Scorsese’s penchant a “culture of masculinity as a struggle to negotiate one’s place in a society that expects its men to be strong and tough enough to handle life on the streets.” (Gardaphe, 104). Violent and aggressive behaviors are synonymous with the views of these hoods with respect to being a man, and what that entails.

Scorsese certainly doesn’t endorse such concepts of manhood, yet in many ways he doesn’t look too expressively critical either, but given his affinity for such characters and his real life associations with such individuals, there can be little doubt that he is at least commenting on their behavior, on this way of life. Keeping more or less objective, Scorsese argues by the characters’ own destruction that this is not an ideal way to live. The glamour and power that go along with such masculine notions and views, and the subsequent violent and criminal actions that frequently follow, do not last. Not necessarily criticizing their deeds, Scorsese does present occurrences where the film makes it quite clear that this hedonistic, macho lifestyle is dangerous. It could be in the form of the always-insecure Tommy, desperate to continually reassert his strength and power (his masculinity), resulting in considerable bloodshed and even a breach of the masculine code laid out early on in the film; or, this over-the-top excessiveness of ownership and control resulting in materialism taking precedent over masculinity.

Martin Scorsese is arguably the greatest filmmaker working today. His films, illustrating a variety of themes, featuring an array of characters, are open to multiple readings. But amongst most of his work, certainly those pictures most well-known, ideas of masculinity and its relationship with crime and violence figure prominently. Known for his realism in portraying these issues, Scorsese from his first foray into the gangster and aggressively assertive male world, with the 1964 short It's Not Just You, Murray!, up through his latest offering on such subjects, The Departed (2006), has delved almost effortlessly into the often complex psyche of male thought and action. The frequent gangster milieu for Scorsese serves as an ultimate mythological, psychological, and sociological arena for the playing out of masculine dilemmas, often with violent and/or criminal elements. Just as filmmakers like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah have primarily set their male-centered filmic studies within the genre walls of the western, so too has Scorsese successfully found the surroundings of the gangster film to be his stage for masculine action, drama, and thought.



Works Cited
Brunette, Peter. Ed. Martin Scorsese: Interviews. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Gardaphe, Fred. From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Reprinted in and cited from “Crime and Violence in American Film.” Baker, Aaron. Ed. Arizona State University Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996.
Thompson, David. Ed. Scorsese on Scorsese. London: Faber and Faber, 199