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November DVD Roundup:
Hamlet, The Interview, They All Laughed + Reds
The Stop Smiling DVD Roundup
Friday, November 10, 2006
They All Laughed (1980)Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
(HBO Home Video)
Hamlet (1964)
Directed by Grigory Kozintsev
(Facets)
The Interview (1996)
Indoctrination (1987)
Directed by Harun Farocki
(Facets)
Reds (1981)
Directed by Warren Beatty
(Paramount)
Reviewed by Lawrence Levi, Jared Rapfogel, Travis Miles and James Crawford
*****
They All Laughed (1980)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
(HBO Home Video)
Reviewed by Lawrence Levi
The Manhattan of Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed is a swinger's paradise, an island-wide pickup free-for-all, and it's heavenly. It's 1980, a seemingly ancient era of checker cabs and roller discos. A pillow-lipped cabbie (Patti Hansen, soon to be Mrs. Keith Richards) gives a lift to a suave older man (Ben Gazzara) at a morning heliport rendezvous. By the time she drops him off in the East Village, they've agreed to a date. In Times Square, a gawky guy (John Ritter) and his incognito accomplice (Blaine Novak) trail an ethereal blonde (Dorothy Stratten) to the Algonquin. While keeping tabs on her at the bar, the accomplice flirts with a brunette, and that night they all wind up on roller skates. A married European (Audrey Hepburn) in town for a few days submits to the allure of a stranger while her school-kid son (Glenn Scarpelli, the smart aleck from One Day at a Time) flirts with the stranger's daughters (Alexandra and Antonia Bogdanovich, the director's own kids). And a fast-talking country singer (Colleen Camp) sweeps through three men in as many days.
Bogdanovich, who was already several flops past his early Seventies career peak, keeps the mood light and the characters in almost constant motion. His screenplay (Novak's improvised lines earned him a co-credit) is filled with pickup lines delivered so sweetly as to make everyone a romantic. Nothing's sleazy in this freewheeling town, and sharing a joint on the sidewalk is as innocent as a nighttime stroll. Novak's Lothario moves and Brooklyn accent are a great comedic counterpoint to Ritter's prissy slapstick. Camp's rat-a-tat delivery, straight out of His Girl Friday, is mannered, but it's funny. Hansen is relaxed and saucy, and Hepburn, in her last starring role, is as graceful as ever. Gazzara has an easy charm — even his character's kids know him as someone with "a lot of girlfriends" — but there's a sadness in his eyes that's all too real. (Supposedly he and Hepburn broke off an affair before shooting began.)
Only Stratten, downplaying her Playmate looks, is a cipher. She was murdered right after the film wrapped, so studios wouldn't touch it, and Bogdanovich had to release it himself. Which is too bad, because They All Laughed is buoyant and beguiling. In an interview with Wes Anderson on the DVD, Bogdanovich says it's his favorite of all the films he's directed, and you can see why: It's a movie made with love.
*****
Hamlet (1964)
Directed by Grigory Kozintsev
(Facets)
Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel
Easily the most cinematic of the countless screen versions of Hamlet, Grigory Kozintsev's 1964 adaptation takes a great deal of license with the text, but its visual inventiveness in expressing the psychological and emotional substance of the play more than justifies its liberties. Despite running two hours and twenty minutes long, Kozintsev's Hamlet hardly touches on several aspects of the full play, taking advantage of its epic length not to cram in as much of the text as possible (it would take far more than two and a half hours for that) but to focus on conjuring a particular mood — an atmosphere of dread, foreboding, and uncanniness. Working with a (free) translation by the great Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, and a score by Dmitri Shostakovich, Kozintsev often seems less interested in the text itself than in embedding that text in a cinematic edifice with its own grandeur and expressive power.
The opening minutes are a case in point: Kozintsev replaces the play's first scene — the guards' encounter with King Hamlet's ghost — with a beautiful but wordless sequence which functions almost as an overture, as the camera glides around the majestic but claustrophobic castle of Elsinore. Though Kozintsev succeeds beautifully in opening out the play, staging much of it in the courtyards or on the ramparts of a castle (with a particularly memorable and evocative use of the roiling sea as a visual accompaniment to the "To be or not to be" speech), his film is nevertheless patently expressionistic, at times extravagantly so: the passage featuring King Hamlet's ghost seems to have sprung from (a Slavic) Orson Welles' wildest dreams.
Measured against the play itself, the film sacrifices a great deal. The most egregious (and strangest) alteration is Hamlet's absence during Claudius' confession; in the original play, Hamlet chooses not to exact his revenge then and there for fear that killing Claudius while in prayer will send him to heaven. Also missing is Hamlet's crucial "From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth" speech. But nitpicking aside, the cuts take a toll simply in terms of pacing and dramatic effectiveness: this Hamlet often seems rushed, merely touching upon many scenes without really putting them across. But Kozintsev recognizes that the play is so widely known and so often adapted that blind fidelity is unnecessary and even redundant. His movie is not Hamlet filmed, but rather a cinematic and (thanks to Shostakovich) almost symphonic meditation on Hamlet.
*****
The Interview (1996)
Indoctrination (1987)
Directed by Harun Farocki
(Facets)
Reviewed by Travis Miles
Harun Farocki, once called "the best-known unknown" German filmmaker by the historian Thomas Elsaesser, has long been championed by leftist and guerilla media acolytes as one of the most gifted visual essayists to emerge since 1968. A prolific and exploratory artist, Farocki employs film as both a political critique of visual culture and as an incisive tool to delineate the ways in which humans create meaning through the entire range of image construction. Facets Multimedia have single-handedly increased the potential for Farocki's potent work to garner the recognition it deserves in English-speaking countries by releasing four of his films in short order, with hopefully more to come.
Modest, deceptively slight examinations of the reification of human behavior in capitalist society, Farocki's documentaries Interview and Indoctrination obey the precept that showing is better than telling. On the surface, the films share the institutional focus of the work of documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, America's greatest chronicler of social space. Like Wiseman, Farocki refrains from adorning his material with interpretation or commentary, instead choosing his moments wisely and letting his subjects speak for themselves, trusting that they will expose the fissures latent in any interaction. Both Interview and Indoctrination were made for television broadcast, and while each under an hour, manage to provide a dense portrait of didactic social practices.
Interview, the slightly more "artfully" structured of the two films, is composed of a wide variety of role-playing and de-briefing situations from public and private training courses instructing individuals how to perform well in job interviews. A woman is dressed down for acting too glibly confident in a mock interview; a shy man is encouraged to make eye contact; an ambitious woman is rebuked for changing her mind about her salary requirements. Farocki punctuates these vignettes with slow-motion repetitions of key movements and interactions, scored to the arguably unsuitable strains of Neil Young in full-blown experimental solo guitar mode. What is cumulatively revealed in these superficially mundane sequences is the complicated social code underpinning the interview process. The interviewee must not only be prepared to present herself adequately in appearance, carriage, and clarity of speech, she must also be able to negotiate the complex psychological gambit of protecting her interests while attempting to secure the position. Without any commentary, Farocki slowly presents the evidence that the process not only objectifies human behavior into standards of propriety and "sell-ability," it also handily forces the interviewee into a position of disadvantage, so that the possibility of equal dialogue is never afforded.
Indoctrination is a focused and linear condensation of a five-day executive seminar on personal presentation that both extends and resituates the themes of Interview. Rather than potential employees, the subjects here are executives, and their task is to learn how to consolidate and project the power they have already attained. Gestures, postures, and modes of speech are decoded by a seminar leader to reveal the ways in which they convey or undermine the traits that the executives are being encouraged to embody: confidence, control, positivity, personability. Tapping a foot implies instability; "uhs" and "ahs" are Neanderthal noises; driving the wrong car to work can undermine employee confidence in the executive. The vaguely fascistic element of class conformism behind these diagnoses is unveiled at key moments, such as when a list is given of statements that can be positively or negatively distorted, with the only constant being the supposed verity that "all blacks go around barefooted."
The seminar leader himself proves the most fascinating figure of the film. Hot-tempered and mercurial, he responds to any criticism with an immediate refraction of the issue back onto the critic, in a manner that gives the lie to the professional veneer he is attempting to teach. Adept at holding court over men ostensibly more powerful than he is, he uses his connoisseurship of propriety to manipulate his students into complacence and conscription to "the method." With Indoctrination, Farocki takes material that could be incredibly stultifying and presents it simply and powerfully as a mesmerizing case study of compliance.
*****
Reds (1981)
Directed by Warren Beatty
(Paramount)
Reviewed by James Crawford
As a baby of the Eighties, I find it extraordinarily difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that Reds was made at all. According to the New Hollywood mythology of the maverick filmmaker, I imagined Warren Beatty muscling the film to completion despite intransigent Paramount producers toeing to uber-conservative Gulf + Western company line; frigid public reception in an era dogged by the cold war when liberal was fast becoming a four-letter word; and financial disaster because who would shell out to see a paean to the leftist intelligentsia committed to the screen? The truth, however, is far less spectacular than the gossip: brief (according to Beatty) negotiations with the studio, enthusiastic box-office and critical reception, and a fistful of statues come Oscar time. All of which owe to the fact that Reds, though promising to be as polemical and revolutionary as its subject matter, is rather mundane in the way it hews to classical narrative traditions.
As director, producer, and co-writer, Beatty's animus is all over Reds, but nowhere is that influence more evident than in his decision to cast himself as John Reed, the Oregon-born journalist and ardent socialist who is the only American to be buried inside the Kremlin. Reed and his cadre of left-wing dissidents — among them Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, and loosely, the playwright Eugene O'Neill — were among America's pioneer socialists, pro-labor, pro-union, and anti-Woodrow Wilson and his isolationist-interventionist reversal on World War I. But despite this wealth of meaty material, which Beatty used as a calling card to indirectly announce the depth of his liberal leanings, his approach is decidedly harmless. He trots out the old canard of classical Epic Romances (Dr. Zhivago and For Whom the Bell Tolls come to mind), harmlessly subordinating the weft and weave of history — which in this era meant epoch-shaking conflicts of nation-states and ideologies — to the formation of the couple.
Reed and his paramour/fellow-writer Louise Bryant (real-life lover Diane Keaton) are the human avatars at the crux of communism, playing out their own troubles — his obstinacy and bravado against her furiously defended insecurities — while tripping along the bleeding edge of the subversive community. In what can only be described as sellout filmmaking, artillery fire thundering across the French countryside is presented as mere annoyance that interrupts the rhythms of a particularly heated exchange between Reed and Bryant rather than as synecdoche of the war to end all wars. The feverish crowd inspired by Reed's speech on the eve of the Revolution — an event that Reed chronicled in his seminal first-hand account, Ten Days that Shook the World — and the grotty assembly hall they inhabit are merely props and decor across which Beatty and Keaton throw each other smouldering glances. Looking back on the 25th anniversary of the film, it's hard to divine what all the furor was about.
That said, Reds is not all epic disaster. The film remains relevant because it takes great pains to establish that dissent is indeed patriotic, and had value in its initial theatrical run by humanizing and essaying to understand an oft-vilified swath of the political spectrum. Beatty is well aware of the film's indeterminate status as truth, and so bolsters his exploration of the zeitgeist by intercutting the action with talking-head interviews about the era with aging non-actors from across the political spectrum. (The best of these is Henry Miller, ragged and profane in his final days, who sagely theorizes that there "was just as much fucking going on then as now.") But these interviews, originally designed to get around the knotty needs of dramatic exposition, do not lend the film a modicum of documentary truth; rather, they are just one of the film's proudly worn badges of contradiction. Shot against a background of velvety, fathomless black, these ethereal heads frequently contradict one another on even the most basic points, highlighting the vagaries of memory, especially as a way of understanding the past. In this way, the dramatic action, shot mutedly and murkily by Vittorio Storaro as though through the mist of history, emerges as just as viable an interpretation of Reed and his place in history as those reminiscences.