Gigantism

In 1978, I experienced my first foreign epic, Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novacento). A propagandistic saga about class and coming of age, at a shortened 4.25 hours it was still a luxurious, grand folly. De Niro and Depardieu as childhood friends then competitors; the gorgeous Dominique Sanda; Burt Lancaster as a family patriarch; Donald Sutherland playing a Fascist as “only a very dedicated liberal” could: “hyperbolic … grotesque … curling of lips, baring of jagged teeth, and flashing of demented eyes …”

Next day, I found a copy of the New Yorker at the local library with “Hail, Folly!”, a review that praised Bertolucci’s “crazed utopian romanticism” while still being appalled by his vision, its flaws and the occasional horrific scene (one featuring Sutherland and a cat, hence that line above). The review was equally epic, flamboyant and unforgettable. The final lines were: “… a grand visionary folly. Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”

The critic was Pauline Kael, the issue was 31 October 1977, but the review is collected in her 70s anthology When the Lights Go Down. A new Kael collection and the first biography are about to be published, and the New Yorker has marked the occasion with an essay by Nathan Heller. The magazine’s astute sub-editor of its film reviews Richard Brody also blogs about Kael’s foibles, includes links to other tributes, and directs the reader to her collection of capsule reviews 5001 Nights at the Movies for the nearest she ever got to declaring her canon. When Kael died 10 years ago, Brody provided links to other tributes, at Salon and The Cooler; on her 80th birthday in 1999 Salon published “A Gift for Effrontery”, a profile of Kael, and they have just published a slideshow of their selections of great film books.

Without visiting the library though, we can spend half an hour in the company of the woman herself:

A Less than Lovely War

Even in the playgrounds of Lower Hutt, Peter Watkins’s 1965 docudrama The War Game was discussed with alarm. And we had only heard the terrifying trailer. The film portrays Britain before, during and after a nuclear attack. Originally made by Watkins for BBC, the governors of the Beeb got the heebie-geebies. They said it was unsuitable for a mass audience and banned it from broadcast. After an outcry, it was released to cinemas.

Variety describes The War Game as “grim, gruesome, horrific and realistic … the most telling part is the aftermath of the bomb – the severely burned are killed off and their bodies burned, and looters face the firing squad.”

Even though there was no hope of seeing it mid-60s New Zealand, just knowing about it almost kept me awake. Now it can be viewed via the always-worthwhile site The Documentarian.

Look Who’s Talking

THE CONVERSATIONS: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury, 2002).

Film directors are like Napoleon, all-powerful and usually vertically challenged. “But even Napoleon needed his marshals,” says Michael Ondaatje in this book, a series of conversations with leading US film editor Walter Murch. Although just one of hundreds of names seen in the credits when the crowd is filing out of the cinema, the film editor is crucial to turning the director’s vision into a viewable reality. The film editor – and many of the greats have been women, like Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Sight) or Thelma Schoonmaker (longtime Scorsese editor) – is one of the unsung heroes of the form; they can shape the mood, create the pace, make the story work.

It was when Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient was being turned into a film that he befriended Murch, an intellectual as well as a craftsman. Murch’s talent helped Francis Ford Coppola shape some of the most important American movies of the 1970s: the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and 1974’s The Conversation.  The latter gives this book its title, and was recently restored. Its very subject matter concentrates the mind on the aural side of film-making; it’s about a sound engineer (Gene Hackman) and specialist in surveillance work who hears of a murder plot. Filmed on a low budget between the first two Godfathers, it encapsulates the issues Murch faces in his job. A simple matter like the clothing a character wears can make the editor’s job easy or impossible. If the costume department insists on strutting its stuff, dressing the lead in a variety of outfits, that limits what an editor can do if the story has to be reconstructed at the editing desk.

Murch came to editing after being a sound editor, and he expounds on the use of music and sound in movies. His work on American Graffiti revolutionised the use of pop in movies. Most films now have a relentless soundtrack, either telegraphing narrative punches, crassly manipulating the emotions, or inappropriately creating a merchandising tie-in. “Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids,” says Murch. “It gives you an edge, it gives you speed, but it’s unhealthy for the organism in the long run.”

There’s nothing subtle about mainstream movie making now, and The Conversations returns the audience to the basic craft, inviting them in so their experience is enhanced. It’s the best book about filmmaking since Francois Truffaut's similarly illuminating Hitchcock.

Aftermath

1. Just a kiss away 

I hadn't heard of Baird Bryant but he was responsible for one of the most gripping images in a documentary. There were 20 cameramen at Altamont, but he was the one who filmed Meredith Hunter being murdered by the Hell's Angels. Bryant's footage captured a moment that revealed Hunter was carrying a pistol. In a brilliant idea - which would give a PR agent conniptions now - the editor of Gimme Shelter Charlotte Zwerin suggested they show the clip to Mick Jagger, and film him while he watched it. When the violence broke out at Altamont, Jagger limply said to the crowd, "Who's fighting and what for?" The Angels, who looked like extras from Planet of the Apes on PCP, didn't take a damn bit of notice of the camp limey. Still one of the greatest music documentaries - it has a real, edgy narrative that builds to a climax, and terrific music - Gimme Shelter was the Maysles brothers' masterpiece, and not equalled until Dig. But Bryant, who died recently aged 81, did more than just hold a camera on that day: he shot the folk-rock doco Celebration at Big Sur and also the trippy New Orleans sequence in Easy Rider. In the 1950s he hung out with Ginsberg and Burroughs in Paris, drafted an early translation of The Story of O and wrote erotica. Celebration at Big Sur captures the sun setting on California hippies at a festival in 1969, with early footage of Joni Mitchell and CSNY, plus John Sebastian and Joan Baez; it's cut up into bite-sized portions on YouTube. But here is Bryant's most famous moment ...

2. Standing in the shadows

Elvis at a last supper with greaseball apostles, Little Richard as circus act, Jerry Lee Lewis in all manner of sleazy incarnations, the Beatles taking tea with the Queen ... these unforgettable images were by Guy Peellaert, the illustrator of the classic Rock Dreams, who died recently. His air-brushed, hallucinogenic portraits of the rock'n'roll pioneers said more than 1000 verbose rock critics. The captions were by the master of the one-liner, Nik Cohn, and as Paul Rambali said, they were "a reminder that brevity is the soul of pop." A sample: "Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke, shot dead in a motel, was black but dressed up white, sang Soul but wrote Teendreams, wagged his ass but gently, with a certain deference." Peellaert spent three years on the drawings, Cohn just a fortnight on the captions, and it sold a million copies. (What took Cohn so long? His timeless rock history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom only took six weeks.) Jagger hired Peellaert to paint the cover of It's Only Rock'n'Roll, Bowie for Diamond Dogs (the dog/man's testicles were later painted out), Scorsese for the poster of Taxi Driver, Wim Wenders for Paris, Texas. Michael Herr (Dispatches) wrote the foreward to a Rock Dreams reissue. For a salon of cynicism, Peellaert was court portraitist. All the images from Rock Dreams are on his website, along with his other books.

3. Woke up this morning

… and wondered who is killing the graphic artists of rock’n’roll? The third to go to the great inkwell in the sky is the NME cartoonist Ray Lowry. Over many years he took the michael out of solipsistic rock musicians and their fans, and thought up endless variations on the opening line of Robert Johnson’s ‘Walking Blues’. But his most famous piece of artwork is the cover of the Clash’s London Calling, for which he took a Pennie Smith photo of Paul Simonon smashing his guitar and turned it into an update of Elvis’s first album.

Five-ring circus

I could boycott the Olympics, but I don’t think the Chinese would notice. At least it is now safe to watch on New Zealand television again, with the Bowzer of the TVNZ sports department finally out of our living rooms.

The last Olympics I actually cared about were those in Munich in 1972, before I was old enough to realise that politics and sport are always intertwined, no matter what sports administrators claim. (Recent example: the IRB saying that New Zealand shouldn’t host the rugby world cup, as that will only be preaching to the converted rather than evangelising the cult to new territories.)

But the Black September terrorists changed that, and the compelling documentary One Day in September brilliantly shows how the world suddenly lost any vestiges of post-war naiveté. Then the tit-for-tat Olympic boycotts started, and the IOC greed became even more vulgar – which is saying something after the dictatorial dominance of IOC head Avery Brundage - and it all seemed like a giant propaganda exercise.

So I thought I’d do some homework, and watching the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl seemed a good place to start. Because one thing these Olympics will have in common with those in Berlin of 1936 is that they will be spectacularly visual. China is a nation whose art direction knows no bounds: even Cecil B DeMille wouldn’t have tried to alter the actual atmosphere to get a better shot. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles missed a grand opportunity, even with the sensibility of an actor in the White House; all I remember is Stevie Wonder at the nadir of his career, closing the show.

Riefenstahl was 91 when the documentary was made: feisty, defensive, and as unpleasant as a witch-like version of Winston Peters. She was still in denial about the political motives behind her film-making, claiming that she was just an artist, and besides, she believed in the rise of Hitler because he promised peace and security. But her film-making is still breathtaking, be it in the Tyrol mountains or her balletic, slow-mo shots of high-divers.

During this year’s Olympic torch relay fiasco, many people made the point that it was all a Nazi construct invented for the 1936 Olympics, rather than something that dated back to Greece. At that point no links had been made with Riefenstahl’s Olympia but I’m sure they’ll come thick and fast after a billion flags get waved in unison later this week. (Riefenstahl claimed that Hitler wasn’t behind her film, in fact he wasn’t even into the Olympics at all, as it meant that other nations would have to be portrayed as being occasionally victorious over the master race.)

Years ago Susan Sontag – writing of Riefenstahl’s “fascist aesthetics” – made a connection that rings true: how the German director’s work paralleled that of Busby Berkeley, working at the same time over in Hollywood on his mad, epic musicals. As Dave Kehr, reviewing Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – about the Nazis’ Nuremburg rallies – summarised,

Berkeley’s abstract musical numbers, with their own geometric patterns and tendency to absorb individuals into standardized, idealized groups, seem to apply the characteristics Sontag listed in her essay “Fascinating Fascism”: situations of control, submissive behaviour, endurance of pain, domination through pageantry, turning people into things, multiplications and “orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.” Rather than smartly tailored military uniforms, Berkeley placed his performers in scanty costumes that emphasized the symmetry of legs and bosoms; the uniform platinum wigs that many of his chorines wore invite comparison with the caps and helmets of Hitler’s massed forces at the Nuremberg rallies filmed by Riefenstahl in 1934 (filmed one year after Berkeley’s best film for Warner Brothers, Footlight Parade).

Yesterday in his New Yorker blog, George Packer made a different connection between Berlin and Beijing. He is currently reading Victor Klemperer’s I Shall Bear Witness, the diaries of a Jewish academic living in Dresden during the rise of the Nazis. The New Yorker excerpted these 10 years ago, in its 27 April 1998 issue, and it was deeply moving because of its very mundanity. Day by day, bit by bit, another element of human rights was withdrawn for Jews. For me, the most unforgettable image was the moment when Klemperer, elderly and starving, spotted a tiny piece of salami that had been left on a table. Just as he reached out to pick it up and eat it, a cat leapt up and got there first. (Later, the Nazis decreed that all pets belonging to Jews had to be put down: not given away, put down.)

Here is Klemperer writing in his diary on August 13, 1936:

I find the Olympics so odious because they are not about sport—in this country, I mean—but are an entirely political enterprise. “German renaissance through Hitler,” I read recently. It’s constantly being drummed into the country and into foreigners that here one is witnessing the revival, the flowering, the new spirit, the unity, steadfastness, and magnificence, pacific too, of course, spirit of the Third Reich, which lovingly embraces the whole world. The chanted slogans on the streets have been banned (for the duration of the Olympics), Jew-baiting, bellicose sentiments, everything offensive has disappeared from the papers until August 16, and the swastika flags are hanging everywhere day and night until then too.

Packer emphasises that he’s not equating the Chinese with the Nazis, he is making the point that the IOC’s decision to award them the Olympics is a reminder that it’s all politics, and that the Chinese leadership want it both ways: quick to criticise others for commenting on their sovereign affairs, while “eager to cash in on all the geo-political benefits that the Olympics will bring. China didn’t even bother to abstain last month but instead vetoed sanctions against Robert Mugabe at the U.N. Unlike Germany in 1936, China is prettifying its streets without pretending to prettify its foreign policy.”

If you can’t stomach The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl there are plenty of excerpts of her work on YouTube, or this insightful obit from the New York Times. At 180 minutes, Horrible Life includes a lot of Aryan posturing and self-denial, but it’s still well short of the 220 minutes of the original Olympia. And probably the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.