Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (24) Interregnum: Director/Auteur/Autoren

Andrew Sarris

Debates about authorship in the cinema have occupied a central place in film studies since the late 1950s when Cahiers du Cinema proposed the politique des auteurs, basically a political strategy in the form of a polemic for a new cinema to replace what mainstream French cinema was seen by a new generation of critics to have become a moribund “tradition of quality” epitomised by stylistically formulaic versions of French literary classics dismissed as ‘bourgeois cinema for the bourgeoisie’.

Prior to this, traditional film criticism assumed the industrial nature of film production with its division of labour prevented a single authorial voice from being heard or seen in mainstream cinema. This led some critics to claim that cinema, except in exceptional circumstances, could not be regarded as an art, being commodified entertainment serving the ideology of the capitalist economy. The exceptions were films in which the director - a Renoir, Murnau or Dreyer - assumed the marked unifying presence of the author-artist.  As the organising force of a film or group of films so, as Bordwell has argued, the author becomes a kind of protagonist in the drama, a point of identification for the knowledgeable viewer. It is then possible to argue that traditional film criticism has responded to art cinema on its own terms by supporting a complicit relationship between artist-director and critic then forming a link with the receptive viewer. 

 

The long debated canon of classics formed the basis, as already noted, of an art cinema only critically defined as a mode of film practice in the late 70s. Ironically it was films of the French New Wave and the New German Cinema along with classics of Italian neorealism and Russian montage that led the way in this retrospective reformulation of cinema art and its attendant institutionalisation. Ironic because the debate around indigenous cinemas was primarily directed at how to counter American cinematic imperialism. It was the work of latterly recognised auteurs in the Hollywood studios, as much as those in European cinemas, that provided inspiration for the critics-filmmakers-to-be, writing in ‘Cahiers’ in the 50s.                                                          

 

I well remember, as a would-be cinephile in the throes of linking sub-titles with art, taking in Andrew Sarris’s yet to be tested polemical erudition inspired by ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ headed “American Directors,” 68 pages in the 28th (Spring 1963) issue, of Film Culture. 

 

Howard Hawks

My first concern was finding Howard Hawks listed in the “Pantheon” then recognising in the “Second Line” list of ten auteurs only the names of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Buster Keaton, and doing a mild double take on David Lean appearing with other “Fallen Idols” having recently seen Lawrence of Arabia, here being summarily deflated along with The Bridge on the River Kwai by Sarris as “hot air […] lacking a point of view.” Very soon to be discovered were the films of ‘unknown’ “Third Liners” like Sam Fuller  (Underworld USA)  and Nicholas Ray (Johnny Guitar), and in “Esoterica” Don Siegel (The Killers ). Further down the track to enlightenment, waiting for discovery was the “dark humour” in melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk  (not only in Magnificent Obsession and Written on the Wind but also it was suggested less persuasively, in the likes of All That Heaven Allows), and the “naive sophistication” in the comic creations of Jerry Lewis  (The Patsy, The Nutty Professor) and of his mentor Frank Tashlin (Artists and Models, The Disorderly Orderly)..

 

It should be noted that when auteurism first emerged in the 50s, directing was, as Sarris noted, almost exclusively a male domain, no more so than in Hollywood, a situation seemingly confirmed, by “that actress of actresses,” Lillian Gish who, after once directing a film in 1921, declared that directing was no job for a lady. Amidst Sarris’s select lists of hundreds of directors in the American cinema there was only one woman, Ida Lupino. He curiously chose to exclude the notable career of Dorothy Arzner as a director in Hollywood from the late 20s to the early 40s, leaving that task to his wife and fellow critic, Molly Haskell, then working towards her pathbreaking book ‘From Reverence to Rape’ subtitled ‘The Treatment of Women in the Movies’ (1973). Sarris commented that only two women - Leni Riefenstahl and Agnes Varda - had then risen above the “Oddities and One shot” classification accorded Lupino by him as an ‘oddity’ along with 14 male directors including ‘one shot’ directors Charles Laughton, Gene Kelly and John (The Alamo) Wayne.

Barry Humphries, Barry Crocker
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie 

 

The new waves in France and West Germany with their director- focussed auteurism and autorenkino - embryonic notions of ‘writing with the camera’ (mise en scene) - formed the basis of a new, more open, modern aesthetic.  This played little evident formative role in the initial audience acceptance of a home-grown genre, 1971-6, in Australia’s film revival (Stork, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Alvin Purple, Petersen and Don’s Party, et al). In 1979 when the subsequent Australian period genre was at a low ebb, film critic John Hinde dissented from the earlier chorus of disapproval of ocker comedy by the critics which likely came, he contended, symptomatically from “an ancient unconscious streak of wowserism embedded in the Australian psyche.”  Audience approval of ocker or sexploitation comedies was reflected in their box office performance indicating “that they were in touch with some half-conscious self-recognition wandering in the impoverished sexual limbo of our culture.” The films in question, Hinde suggested, “offered, in effect, crude sketchy maps which might have enabled later films to make more detailed exploration of this terrain,” in the then more relaxed censorship environment (Dermody & Jacka vol 2 p.79). In the path-breaking American-Australian coproduction, Wake in Fright (1971), repression had been given disturbing expression to “a horror at the heart of Australia that is about the conditions of sexuality, as Meaghan Morris [said], by being about repression, violence and male segregation” (ibid 81).   

 

The financial viability established by the box office success of Alvin Purple (1973), made on a very low budget, freed the Australian Film Development Corporation from the already politically uncomfortable position of continuing to fund ocker comedies. It is hardly surprising that the recently re-established funding body, the Australian Film Commission, followed through by seizing upon the local and international success of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The institutional agenda shifted to national image (re)building in accord with the varied critical and commercial successes of a relative flood of diverse period dramas in Picnic’s wake (‘the AFC genre’),  eg, Sunday Too Far Away, Caddie and The Getting of Wisdom  through to The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant, marking the second half, 1975-80, of the first decade of the Australian film revival which had also, arguably, been a decade late in arriving

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock

While both the Australian and New German cinemas shared the basic search for a new audience starting from point zero: in both cases what was actually showing on each nation’s screens was controlled by overseas based distribution and exhibition interests. The major difference was that in Germany the production of ‘denazified’ genre films for domestic consumption resumed after the war (although there was a strong continuity in Germany between popular 30s and post-war film genres) while in Australia there was, at this time, “a complete vacuum of feeling as to what might constitute an Australian feature film”  (D & J ibid). In contrast, political protest was given strong voice at Oberhausen and was strategically taken up politically by the group’s only effective spokesman and ideologue, Alexander Kluge. He had varying success in directly addressing the vacuum created by the absence, both domestically and internationally, of an ‘autorenkino’ (authors’ cinema). In Australia on the revival of production, other than the establishment of a loosely integrated national film and TV school and an experimental film fund, there was, at least initially, no culturally coherent direction spoken or taken. There was little recent knowledge or history of audience responses beyond the variable barometer of critical and box office success. This meant that when success came on all fronts with Picnic at Hanging Rock, it was acclaimed as a breakthrough that, by the end of the 70s, looked more like a lone intrusion of Europeanness into the Australian landscape.

 

                                                                           ****                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                              

The initial skirmishes following the arrival of auteurism, such as the one recounted below, were confined to what can best be described as the margins of a post-war emergent Oz film culture strengthened by the film revival. What was being sensed here was an encounter with a new way of understanding style as not just the hallmark of a small number of gifted director-auteurs working in special conditions of creative freedom.. 

 

Sarris made no secret of the fact that he was reshaping the Cahiers politique as an instrument for asserting the superiority of American cinema. Robert Stam, in his book Film Theory, acknowledges that Sarris’s work, “at its best,” deployed his broad knowledge of cinema “to convey the genuine achievement of Hollywood cinema.”   Stam further describes Auteurism as “less a theory than a methodological focus” that “clearly represented an improvement over antecedent critical methodologies,” in so doing performing “an invaluable rescue operation for neglected films and genres” while playing “a major role in the academic legitimation of cinema studies”  (89-92).

 

Robert Stam  “The Americanisation of the Auteur Theory in Film Theory An Introduction  2000, 

Albert Moran, Tom O’Regan eds. The Australian Screen,  essays by O’Regan  “The Ocker Film” and Graeme Turner “The Period Film” 1989

Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka  The Screening of Australia  vol 2  1986                                           

John Hinde  Other People’s Pictures  ABC  1981

Tom O’Regan  Australian National Cinema  1996

Barrett Hodsdon The Elusive Auteur  2017

 

 

Addendum:  ‘Word thuggery’ at SUFG

 

In 1966, with Andrew Sarris and 'Movie' fuelled auteurist fervour, Bruce and Barrett Hodsdon, both then having a sizeable hand in the shaping of Sydney University’s Film Group's term programs, usually in consultation with their then mentor, John Flaus, decided that the twice weekly screenings offered the opportunity to immure members in the work of a chosen auteur. This was seen as a way of both focusing upon and redefining in criticism the creative role of the director in the commercial film industry, Hollywood being the paradigm. In this case the clear choice seemed to them to be Nicholas Ray, both having recently caught up with Johnny Guitar at a suburban “ranch night”.

 

Satyajit Ray

With Flaus’s doubtful assent Bruce had programmed, a double bill of films by the two Rays (Satyajit and Nick) on a Monday night during third term 1965, in the Union Theatre, SUFG's main venue. The former had established himself (quite rightly) from his first film Pather Panchali, as something of a film society and art house icon.*

 

Screened in the first half, the only locally available copy of  Satyajit's Devi,  a 16mm print of a b&w film in standard ratio, thrown into relief , wall to wall, by the brash 35mm CinemaScope-Eastmancolor spectacle of  Nick's Party Girl with the accompanying “ Party Girl, Party Girl” theme song behind the credits. Acting as a prologue to the ensuing drama is the sexually choreographed gyrations of  Cyd Charisse which drew an audible reaction, in approval (or otherwise), especially from those sitting in the front section of the theatre where self acknowledged cinephiles tended to sit (and still do), seemingly affirming Mas Generis's much more recent claim in Screening the Past that cinephilia “is a condition of sexual attraction to movies”. 

 

Nicholas Ray

The Hodsdons then programmed four more of Nicholas Ray's features – Bitter Victory, Johnny Guitar, Wind Across the Everglades, and Rebel Without a Cause, to be screened in the course of seven weeks during first term, 1966. The then SUFG President, Brian Murphy, insisted they could only have the four Ray films if the series commenced with a 16mm screening of  Bitter Victory in a rent-free venue,  the large former kitchen of a decaying, soon to be demolished building, in the eyes of the philistines aptly called The Blind Institute. 

 

A surprisingly large number of members crossed City Road to the Institute on a Friday night in March, to view, in those austere surroundings, the lingering death by scorpion bite of a Ray anti-hero played by Richard Burton, the setting being the North African desert during WW11. The President had also resolved to establish a roneoed newsletter in which members could vent their displeasure, or otherwise, at this precocious intrusion on their rights. 

 

It took several weeks for the uniformly hostile response (to the films as much as to the theory) from a small number of motivated members to appear in print in the newsletter which ran six issues. In advocating gradualism in the face of what he saw as overcompensation by the so-called 'new guard', Flaus claimed that it was a violation of a member's right to expect the honouring of a cultural contract for diversity in programming choices when he/she took out a membership. Mike Thornhill responded to Bruce's defence of auteurism in the newsletter with a charge of  'word thuggery'. Both Flaus and Thornhill were concerned with the priority given to the auteurist notion of 'interior meaning' (the equivalent of an authorial sub-text linked in the work of a chosen director) which they felt all but ignored the key literary element ( the role of the screenwriter). John was adamant that 'the concern should be what the work is, not almost exclusively with the artist's (read director's) intentions'. Bruce rebutted that the new pre-eminence given to form (the French term mise-en-scène had not yet been absorbed into the English lexicon) was not to neglect content (what the film is about) but was central to it.  

 

John Flaus

So on it went, intensely but briefly with a certain rancour lingering. Thornhill, in a chapter on film culture for the book 'Entertainment Arts in Australia' (1968), quoted 'introspective Sydney film buff, John Flaus and fellow 'member' of the Sydney Push (there was no formal membership),  in his essay. John is quoted defining a film buff as 'a compulsive aesthete of the cinema (who is often a secret romantic) caught in one of the cultural traps' 

                 

His pale ideology ensures that his own life will be a conformist one, but his imagination seeks a symbolic revolt. The Auteur concept of the director makes an ideal sublimate. He is the lone, creative (self-enclosed?) talent striving to impose his vision upon an insensitive world, yet he is  also the masterful leader whose command is law (on the set) (8).

 

John does not now have a strong recollection of this controversy that surrounded the emergent politics of auteurism. He suspects that he was more the soft voice while fellow Push members Mike Thornhill and Ken Quinnell were 'the hard cops'. (Does John now see himself, in retrospect, as something of a local Bazin figure – a reference to the 'Cahiers' critic and father figure of the French New Wave?). A suggestion was made at an informal late night gathering after the screening of  Party Girl ('give the new guys a chance') by ex-MUFS provocateur and aspiring filmmaker Bert Deling (Dalmas, Pure Shit), who was then living and working in Sydney. John opened his response in the newsletter with “the new guard, given a go - albeit restricted - in the first term 1966 programme - have overreached themselves (sic)”. This overreach was the overweighting in film selection by what was being claimed to be the main game in film criticism: the overriding attribution of individual creativity to the authorship of a chosen director especially in the Hollywood studio system. John saw screening five Ray films with the primary purpose of promoting the claimed directorial talents of a director, at times in creative tension with the system, as promoting  'a new orthodoxy' drawing on Andrew Sarris and 'Movie' magazine in the UK “that promoted Hitchcock and Hawks as the great directors”. For 'the new guard' Sarris opened up a new, engaging way of looking at Hollywood films. 

 

Raoul Walsh

In the terrain of classical Hollywood's 'journeyman director' hierarchy Flaus did concede a more singularly discernible directorial personality, for example, in Raoul Walsh's work behind the camera, over that of say Henry Hathaway's. John, from his later vantage point as a working actor in films became an increasingly astute observer, in his criticism, drawing the distinction between the director as the “setter of the scene” (metteur-en-scène) who competently but anonymously directs pretty much according to the set rules and conventions, as in much tv drama, and the director as auteur. In 1992 John wrote that the latter “shapes meaning through mise-en-scène” the what and the how unified through visual style – “the orchestration of meaning through the actors and assignment of dramatic priorities to pictorial factors,” in other words,“ the movie director's province of creativity”.

 

John's lengthy 1992 essay, “Thanks for Your Heart Bart” (9) (now accessible online), goes a long way towards redressing the imbalance of those days of auteur theory-inspired angst, standing as an insightful primer not only for aspiring actors but also for cinephiles. The forthcoming book by Barrett Hodsdon, The Elusive Auteur (2017) has potential to be something close to definitive, if that is possible, in the final laying to rest of a controversy spanning back at least to 1966 and the shock of those five Nicholas Ray films in the SUFG program in six months.

                                                                                     

 The above essay was first published on “Film Alert 101’ in April 2016

* A better option for the double bill (if prints and then been available) would have been the first film of each director : ‘Pather Panchali’ and ‘They Live By Night’, or say ‘Charulata’ and ‘Johnny Guitar’.

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

 

Streaming on Netflix and on SBS on Demand - Two takes on Irish crime - BODKIN (Jez Scharf showrunner) and BLUE LIGHTS (Series 2 - Declan

It seems a bit like the Irish crime producers are doing to the Brits  what the New Zealanders do with us more generally...make better films I mean... So is the sample too small and the fact that there's been no new series of The Line of Duty for awhile tipped the balance towards Ireland as the primary place for "Brit" TV crime. Hard to know. There was Boat  and Wolf of course but still, small though the contribution may be when you look over the the total output of Brit TV crime in 2023  the Irish seem to have a knack for the stuff. It's probably all traced back to the DNA whereby in the sinews of real Irish crime was the activity of the IRA in robbing banks to finance itself.  Maybe it dealt in drugs too. Whatever, all over Ireland, if you believe Blue Lights and to a lesser extent Bodkin, crime is rampant. In fact the Belfast of Blue Lights  is a hot bed of Loyalist gangs nowadays more interested in fighting for control of the drug trade than defending the Crown.  

All this of course just follows on from the work of Peter McKenna (Not the VFL footballer but I wont go into that again) which I breathlessly admired a year or so back when I  wrote about his series Hidden Assets and Kin. The latter especially had a sense of Shakespearean downfall about its gang leaders and their trusted offspring, their lieutenants and the powerful women who pulled their strings. It also had two of the most ferocious villains you'll ever come across - the successive heads of the Kinsella gang played by Ciaran Hinds and Francis Magee.

Blue Lights  created by Declan Lawn, Adam Patterson and Louise Gallagher, is much more a descendant of  Z Cars and The Bill. Series one tossed us into a police  station where a handful of rookie cops, all with a backstory that had to be explained, start policing the mean streets of Belfast. The lines between the old cops and the young were clear. The old cops knew much, in one case too much, and the young cops knew bugger all. Of the four young cops in series one, one has dropped out and become a lawyer with a cause that has to be the most slow burning element of series two. 

By series two, now on SBS on Demand if you can stand the ads for Chemist Warehouse, or elsewhere if you look around, the back stories are given and a couple of new cops are introduced, both of them appearing to be dodgy in ways that only get explained later. The new cops are there because drug crime and drug dealing has got out of control and two Loyalist gangs are at war with each other. Into this steps an ex-military man whose sister runs a bar which pays protection money to one of the gangs. The  veteran, who saw and did terrible things in Afghanistan, isn't going to take it anymore. ..Enough said...

Will Forte, Siobhan Cullen, Robyn Cara, Bodkin

Bodkin, screening on Netflix is a much smarter bit of film-making, much less formulaic if you dont regard the crime,  the corrupt police, mysterious disappearances and cold case investigations as part of a formula I guess. A Guardian-type journalist is under the pump for a story she has written exposing crime in high places which has led to the death of her whistleblower. Her editor decides she needs to cool off so sends her back to her homeland Ireland to investigate a cold case involving mysterious disappearances. Somehow or other an American podcaster and his enthusiastic assistant  are also investigating the case and the contrast couldn't be clearer. 

The journo is abrupt, crash through or crash and the podcaster is full of handwringing political correctness about what he should and shouldn't be doing. It has a drollery to it that's irresistible. The credits may shock you. I know nothing about the writer/showrunner Jez Scharf but I have heard of two of the many Executive Producers, Barack and Michelle Obama and the director of the first two eps Nash Edgerton. How a boy from Sydney get picked up to direct two eps of an Irish TV series is a mystery but I guess that's how the worldwide network of agents and producers works these days. 

The Current Cinema - Janice Tong sends in a Filmic Postcard about EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2023)

Between the visible and the invisible: the enchantment of fate in Evil Does Not Exist

Hitoshi Omika as Takumi in his woodland shelter

 

It is possible that Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s cinematic world displaces the real, even though the story that unfolds is often filled with the everydayness of existence: human enterprise, the need for connection, sketches of nature, chance encounters; and all through modest but memorable performances and finely crafted dialogue. His latest, Evil Does Not Exist, isn’t so much an ecological fable, it has the whimsy of a fairy tale; or perhaps, better yet, the intrinsic philosophical traits of a thought experiment – one that invites both simple and complex answers; as well as conjuring up lines of thought within us that are difficult to define because they belong to the transcendental nature of things.

 

Let’s start with this well-worn premise: “If a tree falls in a forest, and there is no one to witness it, would it make a sound?” We immediately start to ponder on the tree’s existence beyond the mind, or our perception. Maybe you’re asking a question in return: “Why does it matter?” or answering the initial question with “Of course it does! We can’t possibly think something doesn’t exist just because we are not there to see it.” And others would say that “Sound is a mechanical wave that requires an ear or another sensory receptor to perceive it”. To respond in such a way is natural, and this is the same as when one attempts to grapple with the meaning of Hamaguchi’s title as statement: “evil does not exist” – where? Where does evil not exist in this world? Or perhaps you’ve drawn the conclusion that Mother Nature can do no evil as it does not know the difference? But does that supposition not situate the human (and with that human nature) outside of the world in which we live? If not, then the ‘evilness’ in human nature becomes, all too simply, a sociological construct. 

 

Lovely Hana in her many quiet moments

Eight year old Hana (Ryô Nishikawa), and her father, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) live in a small rural community of Mizubiki outside of Tokyo. Their shared world is often in companionable silence, or punctuated with practical knowledge passed down from father to daughter, like how to read animal tracks, or tree names and their identification characteristics. They are at ease with the land they live on; Hana often wanders the woodlands, its adjoining fields and watering hole on her own and without fear. The trepidation an audience feels is often associated with other filmic and traditional narratives involving lone girls wandering in isolated environments; her image conjures up that of Little Red Riding Hood and other less charming contemporary crime dramas. 

 

Cutting wood provides the metronomic heartbeat of the film

On the other hand, Takumi acts like a typical single father; the village ‘handyman’ – he is a skilled woodcutter and the rhythmic chopping of firewood in two long sequences show his strength and solitary nature. We are invited to share his world through the duration Hamaguchi prioritises in these scenes. Time spent observing Takumi chopping wood gives us a sense, (however fleeting a 5 minute scene actually is in someone’s life) of his existence – he is the heartbeat of the community and his woodcutting, with every stroke of his axe – just like his footsteps – creates the pulse of the film. Practical, self-sufficient, strong. Like Chantal Akerman’s long sequences, these scenes force the audience into a different mode of perceptive temporality, because as the scene unfolds it transforms our experience into a thoughtful, conscious lived time. Reminding us that Hamaguchi is no stranger to cinema in the long form; his film Happy Hour (2015) ran to 5 hours and 17 minutes. It is a treat, as Omika gives a stunning and natural performance; first-time actor, he was production manager to Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021).

 

The many faces of the natural world

Then, the film shifts gears with the introduction of outsiders. They have come to speak with the community about a ‘glamping’ site development in the reserve. Solemn but polite discussion and feedback take place in a town hall meeting with the tightly-knit community, including the chief of the town. Slowly, through their paced feedback; the inhabitants unmask the potential environmental disaster and impact if the site build were to continue as planned. Back in Tokyo, it is of course revealed that the glamping development is but a money-making scheme for the owners; developed in haste to take advantage of a government grant and the cost cutting would prove to be a disastrous proposition for the environment and livelihood of the residents. Even the two representatives present at the community meeting felt morally corrupt to move forward. This is an affecting narrative and is intended for our loyalties to sway from the residents of Mizubki to the two representatives from the agency who seem to suddenly reveal to us (and to themselves) their humanity; and also to the wildlife that inhabit the land. 

 

Is one for ‘progress’ or intrinsic change

Hamaguchi’s stylistic choices evoke a folklorish mystery to an array of displaced point of view shots, like when he mounted the camera on the back of Takumi’s truck in two similar sequences. The point of view captures Takumi’s departure from the school after he failed to remember to pick up daughter and is reminiscent of a scene fromAntonioni’s The Passenger (1975) when Maria Schneider’s character stands up in the and turns her back to the front seat; although in Hamaguchi’s film, nobody is running away from their past. Then in another scene, we see Takumi’s face in close-up before we learn, from the dialogue, that he is hovering over a wild wasabi plant. But whose point of view is this? The plant’s? A temporal point of view?

 

In many of Hamaguchi’s films; it is as though time in all its valencies already coexists in his filmic universe. His films are populated with echoes of images: like the doppelgängers of themselves, or actual doppelgängers like in Asako I & II (2018) or in one of the stories in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. So too, the eye of the camera misses nothing, especially the uncanny, (just like Takumi) – like the drop of blood caught in the thorn of the Siberian ginseng tree, or the gutshot deer in this mystical forest of frost fields and leaf litter. 

 

In a creative partnership: Eiko Ishibashi (L) and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (R)

The germination of this film actually started when composer Eiko Ishibashi asked Hamaguchi to produce a video for her live performance – Ishibashi first worked with Hamaguchi in Drive My Car (2021). In an interview, Hamaguchi said that he had to restructure the way he worked to do this. Rather than progressing the narrative through dialogue, he felt that the actors had to co-exist independently to her music so that when they finally combined, it would produce a most compelling synergy. The flipside companion piece, GIFT, was created; a 30 minute film without dialogue or diegetic sounds but paired with a live score by Eiko Ishibashi using footage from the feature film made an appearance at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival in February. More recently it was shown at the Walter Reade Theater in May, ahead of the NYFF61 special screening of Evil Does Not Exist. 

 

For me, Schumann’s Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) – played here by the one and only Maria João Pires – from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes) Op. 82 (1849) makes a perfect pairing for this film and echoes the kind of uncanny ambience woodlands evoke. I could hear this score in my mind’s eye when replaying a few of the forest sequences.

 

Whose POV?

In the feature film, Ishibashi’s score acts as a counterpoint to the tale.  In its opening travelling sequence, a point of view shot from the forest floor – we observe a pre-dawn or crepuscular sky with its tree crowns up above. Unmoored, this shot provides little sense of narrative connection, but accompanied by Ishibashi’s melancholic composition it becomes mournful and ominous. When the music comes abruptly to an end – the sound literally torn away from our ears without warning – one can’t help but feel a little bereft or even wounded by this (or rather, the lack of) soundscape. The image cuts to Hana’s sweet face observing a tree close up; and just as quickly, the ominous feeling is forgotten. 

 

And in another travelling sequence, this one of Takumi in the forest tracking his daughter whom he’s forgotten to pick up from school, we see him walk along a forest trail on his own, the camera progresses from left to right following his course. Our vision of him is gradually blocked by the cross section of landscape in front of us – the camera is on a lower plane than that of the trail – we see soil, snow, tree roots and its substratum as it continues to track along for a good 20 seconds or more. When we finally come to a clear view of the path again; we find Hana being piggybacked by her father and the two of them continue to move along the trail. No audible sounds were heard that indicated their union. We are left to imagine their meeting in our own minds only after the fact. 

 

^{Father and daughter reunited}

So too, the ending that has caused quite a stir amongst filmgoers, exists outside of our visual field. Asking what happened is like asking whether a thought experiment can draw a definitive answer. Just like when one asks whether a falling tree would make a sound if no one is there to perceive it…I suppose our only consolation is that we are mere humans; and it is in our nature to relate meaning with existence. 

 

 

As of May 2024, Evil Does Not Exist is currently showing at various cinemas. You can find Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s films Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car on Stan, AppleTV and Prime.

This piece was first published on Janice Tong's blog Night...thoughts on Cinema

 

 

 

 

 

 

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL - Barrie Pattison pays his once every 15 years visit to LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (Marcel Carne, France 1945)

Curiously, around WW2 classic cinema peaked simultaneously internationally, with a group of master crafted costume films which had a common aesthetic. Gone with the Wind in the U.S. achieved enduring fame. World events and the laziness of critics meant the German Romanze in Molle never attracted that kind of attention outside its home language territories but the French Les enfants du paradis was, in the years after its 1945 post-armistice release, touted as the greatest film of all time.

I’ve been re-visiting it at fifteen year intervals over my adult life. It’s disturbing to consider that my viewing at this year’s French Film Festival is likely to be my last. 

 

More than any other film I watch, it is different each time. I once saw the Paris Cinémathêque’s first run copy, struck when war time shortages meant that the laboratory chemicals needed to give it a full range of tones were not accessible. The copy was pin sharp but used only shades of gray. The new digital restoration has been darkened, presumably in an attempt to provide a supposed film noir look. Detail is lost. A lighting flash gives a glimpse of the original texture. Arletty here just seems odd, commenting that the Roger Hubert’s studio moonlight streaming through the Trauner decor’s window makes everything beautiful. 

 

However, it’s not just that the film physically changes but the audience response also shifts. Fifties commentators detected a grim war time defeatism. Now that no longer resonates when it comes out of a history most of its audience never lived through. The precision with which it is crafted was, and to an extent still is, the quality I admire in it, though watching the film now, I can see that contemporary Hollywood directors like Victor Fleming and Lewis Milestone exercised even surer control … and this left no room for spontaneity, triggering the freewheeling antagonism of France’s subsequent Nouvelle Vague film makers.

 

Le Boulevard du Crime

Nothing can destroy the imagery. The on-screen curtains open on an extraordinarily elaborate, vivid panorama which immediately amazes viewers who now know the war time shortages that dogged production – making it the most expensive French film them made. Costumed extras leave their already busy side street to join the thronging Boulevard du Crime, named after the lurid melodramas played in the row of theatres there, with performers front of house touting for passer by customers.

Straight into the establishing scenes - Arletty’s Garance, is the star tent show attraction, where punters pay to see her naked but find her decorously holding up a mirror in her barrel of shoulder deep water. She visits murderous dandy Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand, a celebrated classic stage actor who doubled as a1947 Fantomas) in the shop-front where he writes letters for his illiterate customers, one in progress for a begging wife beater. Arletty seeks out the place because (clue) it’s like Theater. 

 

Arletty as Garance

On the street, white face mime Baptiste Deburau  (Jean-Louis Barrault)  is the subject of abuse from his spruiker father Anselme (Étienne Decroux) and Lacenaire picks the watch pocket of fat, rich spectator (André Numès Fils), with a gendarme (Louis Florencie) all set to take Garance away for the crime, when (first and most frequently cited of the set pieces) Baptiste springs to life miming the actual theft to exonerate Garance. His brilliant performance and its context would be enough to make any film exceptional and we’ve just started.

 

Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste

The film moves from the street into the Théâtre des Funambules mime theatre, taking us further into director Marcel Carné’s world of romantic grotesques. A pair of bird head men, like the ones in author Jacques Prévert’s collages, mill about back stage where Albert Rémy’s stroppy  performer quits, abandoning his tacky lion skin outfit and creating an opportunity to enter the troop for Pierre Brasseur’s wannabe actor Frédérick Lemaître. We don’t see their performance.

Théâtre des Funambules

 

Meanwhile the film has other worlds on display – Jeanne Marken’s rooming house, where the proximity of Brasseur and Arletty means Barrault misses his chance with her and the night time streets, where he wanders encountering bogus blind beggar Gaston Modot. There’s also a fake blind man in Sacha Guitry’s 1939 Ils étaient neuf célibataires and Guitry himself starred in his own Deburau film in 1951. It’s disconcerting to find the famous actor there in a role that will always be associated with Barrault. Les enfants ...is probably consciously threaded through French movie culture. Francis Girod also put the original historical characters on screen in the 1990 Lacenaire.

 

Marcel Herrand as Pierre-François Lacenaire 

Here Modot, his sight miraculously recovered, leads Barrault back to the Red Breast Inn, a low dive named after the previous owner’s throat was cut. The actor confronts Herrand’s henchman Fabien Loris, who throws him through the window, with Barrault turning his head so we can see it’s him actually doing the stunt. Loris is surprised to see Jean Louis re-appear, dusting himself off, like Daniel Craig after the train wreck in Skyfall. Barrault drops the heavy with a sabat kick, from which he is unable to recover. Awed, Arletty now can’t get enough of the mime.

 

However, the action moves ahead, the company, now also comprising Brasseur and Arletty, have achieved prominence, though actor Brasseur chafes at being unable to speak. We see their newly celebrated performance - in stage decors created by celebrity French animator Paul Grimault, for whom Prévert scripted their great cartoon, Le petit soldat.

 

Maria Casares, Jean-Louis Barrault

Barrault marries proprietor Marcel Pérès’s daughter Maria Casarés who, while on stage, sees Barrault and Arletty together in the wings. She calls out, shocking the Children of the crowded Gods seating at hearing a performer’s voice. Casarés will shortly star in Cocteau’s Orphé. These two roles are so prominent that is comes as a surprise to find she made another thirty films. I want to see her TV lady Macbeth.

A further complication is introduced when lecherous nobleman Louis Salou declares his interest in Arletty with a grotesquely enormous floral basket. Meanwhile Herrand has his eye on a bank messenger’s pouch and uses Marken’s rooms to strike and she, jealous of the actress, fingers her as an accomplice. It’s time to ring down that animated curtain for the end of part one.

 

There’s another mime theatre performance but Brasseur, having lost Arletty has found the emotion to realise his dream role as Othello. “Jealousy belongs to all if a woman belongs to none.” Brasseur’s idea of Shakespeare actually seems kind of tame from the excerpt we see. Herrand, dagger concealed under his frock coat, plans on robbing the famous actor but is stunned to find him casual about splitting his recent lottery winnings. Brasseur’s high jinx with the authors of the proposed bandit Robert Macaire melodrama (Jean Angelo, Jean Marais and Robert Hirsch made Macaire films) gets him into a duel.

 

"...an elegant veiled woman..."

Meanwhile an elegant veiled woman takes a box each night to watch Baptiste perform. In relache, Lemaitre discovers it is Garance/Arletty, who has survived her association with Salou retaining her values where he expected to find her corrupted – “embetisée par l’argent.” In another lavish setting, the theatre metaphor is extended when, surounded by elegant socialite play goers goers, vengeful Herrand pulls back the balcony curtain to reveal Arletty and Barrault together, to the violent Salou, who made the mistake of dismissing the underwold character (“he does not duel”). Casarés sends their child, young Jean-Pierre Belmon, to Barrault, only to have the boy confront Arletty, as the intertwined plots converge.

 

The structure recalls Carné’s first major film, Drôle de drame, where another Barrault character makes his way among a gallery of grotesques. Again here the name stars – Marken, Modot and maybe Pierre Renoir get to register. The final scene is as imposing as the opening – giant set, mob of costumed extras showered with confetti while Kosma(?)’s score drives the action.

 

Is Les enfants du paradis still exceptional? Has it had an extraordinary impact on the perception of film? I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. The production’s ambition and craft skill are astounding, particularly in the context of the WW2 Occupation where the decorated studio floors had to be made of papier maché and replaced each time the heavy studio camera tracked over them. A tiled passage way is built for the single shot where Turkish Bath operator Habib Benglia leads Herrand and Loris.

 

Marcel Carné (top centre) on the set of Les Enfants du Paradis

Is it the greatest film of all time? I don’t think so. I don’t even feel it’s Marcel Carné’s best work. It is flawed by miscasting, where everyone seems to be the wrong age. Only the extraordinary Maria Casarés is able to convince us. Arletty had been a gifted comedienne. You don’t know French film if you haven’t seen her as a blonde but she was now just about rusted on to the Carné Productions after her roles in Hotel Du Nord, Le jour se leve and Les visitors du soir, where she already presents elements of the Garance character, which would become the most famous in French film. (when Langlois opened an auditorium in the Pompidou center he called it Salle Garance) However approaching fifty, it’s a big ask to believe the four key male characters are obsessively in love with her. But Garance is not just the actress’ physical presence. I could see Micheline Presle, then at her zenith, in the Mayo costumes and delivering Jacques Prévert’s dialogue under Carné’s direction but it was Arletty who became the face of foreign language film post WW2.

 

However, anyway you look at it Les enfants du paradis still deserves its landmark status. Knowledge of the cinema is incomplete without it. Not too many films you can say that about.