Bernardo Villela is like a mallrat except at the movies. He is a writer, director, editor and film enthusiast who seeks to continue to explore and learn about cinema, chronicle the journey and share his findings.
Writers: Steve Langford, Debra Blanchard, Tom Ruegger, Paul Dini
Tiny Toons was the first of a wave of Warner Brothers Animation shows produced by Steven Spielberg. Each episode began with an opening title sequence complete with theme song.
It’s no small feat to create a next generation of characters to interact with, and follow in the footsteps of, the Looney Tunes. Perhaps what made this show successful was that it incorporated the notion that these characters were learning and being taught the ins and outs of being toons by the old guard who act as teachers and mentors at Acme Looniversity. So they play a supporting role for those who don’t want to see only all new characters. Another function this show served was a continuation of the Warner Brothers canon following the death of Mel Blanc.
The episode opens with a Wacko World of Sports newsreel, which is a reference to an eponymous episode earlier in Season One, which itself was a riff on ABC’s longtime series ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
The segment sets up the rivalry between the Acme Looniversity Toonsters and Perfecto Prep. The term rivalry is used loosely here because Acme is winless on the season (a montage shows their loss to the University of Woodpeckers, Santa Ana Barbarians, and the Metropolis Marvels.
Elmyra plays nurse to the team, her character originated on this show before joining both Animaniacs and being teamed up with Pinky & the Brain. Little Sneezer is established as the team’s super-fan and his involvement is pivotal later in the episode. Babs, Fifi, and Shirley the Loon are the cheerleaders and Buster has just been named the new quarterback of the team.
Then there’s an ominous introduction to Perfecto, the antagonists. Even the building looks foreboding. It’s also the first part of the episode that requires a little suspension of disbelief as they are cited as being undefeated in their 200 year history. A would-be record in actual college football and if the implication they’ve played that long—well, college football only turned 150 in 2019. However, that information, the whole opening captured my imagination as a child and serves as a great lead-in to the story.
Next, we go into a pep rally where Bugs, the team’s coach, introduces Buster to the student body. The cheers from the cheerleaders are the comedic highlight here and they’re jokes I relate to better as an older sports fan.
“ARE WE GONNA WIN?”
“NO!”
“ARE WE GONNA LOSE?”
“YEAH!”
“ARE WE GONNA LOSE BIG?”
“YEAH!”
“HOW BIG?”
“WE’RE GONNA GET ANNIHILATED!”
We move to Perfecto who sing their fight song in this scene and it includes the lyric “because, you see, we always cheat,” this is both fitting for sports at the moment and the honesty is refreshing.
Aside from the new QB Acme is also unveiling a new playbook for the big game.
The playbook, “filled with razzle-dazzle,” is coveted by Perfecto. When they Acme players go their separate ways we see that Plucky is not headed toward his house but is covertly meeting with Perfecto. In an Eight Men Out kind of twist, Plucky has with him the playbook they so desire. He enters a limo, hands over the book, and visits campus. In exchange for relinquishing it and throwing the game he’s being promised the ability to transfer there.
Plucky’s courtship includes video games and a seductress by the name of Margo Mallard who induces a rather Daffy-like reaction from Plucky; the first of many successful sight gags in the episode. The combination of classic bits with modern motifs was one of the things that drew me to this show aside from old favorites still being there.
One of the best running gags of this episode is Perfecto’s cheerleaders being disaffected Valley Girls (“Perfecto…rah”). When Plucky first signals Perfecto a play during the game he says “Am I a louse or what?”, which is a very Looney Tunes kind of aside. Later, there’s an anthropomorphic football gag that despite nearly being mandatory is well done.
Football fans will appreciate some of the trick plays Acme tries to run like the Statue of Liberty play. The most famous example of it can be seen below.
Recently, I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit with my son, and during the opening animated sequence, he asked something to the extent of “Why are there so many windows in that kitchen?” What he was commenting on was the subtle gag at play in that scene that it took me many views to pick up on—animated shorts played with space to conserve how many backgrounds they needed to create in the cell animation days and Who Framed Roger Rabbit exaggerated that.
There’s an instance of that technique which may not have been intentional in this episode. After a kick Acme is pinned at the one-inch line (A good call by Sylvester doing play-by-play in the booth; his flooding the booth with spit and Porky trying to avoid it is another great running gag in this episode. On the next play after that kick, Buster drops back to pass about twenty yards and doesn’t even enter his own end zone much less run out the back of it like he should have.
The only other football-related SNAFU is that no extra points being kicked were shown, one was arbitrarily awarded to generate the closest possible result.
Because Perfecto is signaled by Plucky about the plays they are able to force two strip-fumbles that are returned for touchdowns.
Near the end of the first half Buster brings in the secret weapon he told no one about: Diz; Diz being the young counterpart to the Tasmanian Devil. Diz is told to go long. He does. Buster puts some mustard on his throw, cue sight gag. Diz catches it, by swallowing the ball, for a touchdown.
On Perfecto’s next series Diz creates some havoc on the defensive side and would have come down with an interceptions if Perfecto hadn’t put a literal rocket on the ball that carried him out of the stadium, the where we don’t know.
It’s 18-7 at the half (see, Perfecto missed their extra-points, Acme didn’t and we saw none of them).
The halftime show is the Wackyland Rubber Band a great homage to Porky in Wackyland.
During halftime, Ronny, Perfecto’s alpha, accosts Plucky in the restroom. He’s angry about the touchdown, having expected a shutout, and is adamant that Perfecto better win.
Sneezer was in a stall overhearing this and it prompts him to say “Say it ain’t so, Plucky,” in another Eight Men Out moment.
Coming back from the second commercial break, or fade to black on streaming (Hulu has it in the US), we’re thrown back into the action with another tried and true gag: the use of stock footage. Many more of these techniques can be used in a single narrative when aiming for 22-23 minute episodes than a 6-8 minute theatrical short.
Sneezer’s refrain of “Say it ain’t so” continues to assail Plucky. Buster is sacked and as other players fall to injury Buster accepts the cheerleader’s offer to suit up. His only protestation being “Oh, brother.” For 1990 that’s progressive indeed.
As one might expect the girls don’t just help the boys avoid forfeiture. About to get tackle Babs screams that she lost her contact lens—insert gag about her having brown eyes—she finds it first and runs for touchdown. Acme now trails 18-13, another extra point missed unseen.
Fifi, the new generation’s answer to Pepe, forces a fumble and recovers for Acme with 0:06 left in the game. Buster is drawing up a play for Shirley the Loon and Babs catches Plucky signaling Perfecto. Perfecto thinks they have the game won regardless. Plucky is sent to the bench.
For the fourth time Sneezer implores “Please, Plucky, say it ain’t so.”
After the snap Plucky steps back onto the field just inside the boundary at the line of scrimmage. Buster gets him the ball immediately. In football terms, excluding the trick element aside, this play became popular much later. It’s a smoke-screen—a quick, short throw to a wideout that relies on yards-after-catch. Because Perfecto believed Plucky out and not replaced they didn’t cover that area and couldn’t catch up to him. Plucky scores as the gun sounds, no extra-point needed, Acme wins 19-18.
Ronny complains: “That wasn’t in the playbook!”
“Sure it was,” is the response. “Check the last page.”
It reads: You’ve been had. Signed, Buster Bunny.
Aside from the only-as-cartoony-as-it-needs-to-be football action, the drama of the game on display in this episode captured my imagination when I first had it and has kept it since; more on that in a bit, but first the denouement.
Sneezer approaches Plucky in the tunnel. He is proud and never doubted the team. Sneezer offers him a drink, Plucky gives him his jersey in an homage to the Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial.
Perfecto laments their fate as Diz returns on the rocket-ball, from Hawaii it seems, and crash lands on them in a final bit of poetic justice.
A few times in my early teen years and twenties I tried to deny the sports-loving part of me thinking it interfered with my creative side. What I later discovered was I needed to find balance. Since I’ve gotten better and better at doing.
The notion of Tiny Toons not only learning their craft in school but being student-athletes captivated me. I drew my favorite characters—Warner, Disney, or otherwise—in Acme uniforms and based on when they debuted in theatrical shorts I plotted when their school days would have been. I’ve thought about it with modern characters also.
In that endeavor I also imagined what positions certain characters might play. I sated my sports interest, my creative impulse, and I also learned a little bit of film history. Little did I know at the time this was an activity all about balance.
For artists in any discipline you never know what kind of impact your work will have. I’m sure those involved in “Acme Bowl” didn’t know that I—and other kids like me—would still know the score of that game thirty years later, still have drawings they made inspired by it or the diary entry I wrote recapping the episode when I had just seen it.
One of the reasons I love this blogathon so is that to discuss a series or season in totality can be tiresome. However, some individual installments can stand the test of time even better than the show as a whole. It was a pleasure discussing this one.
NOTES:1. This film can be streamed on Hallmark Movies Now, which is available for a free seen-day trial 2. There were few photos of this film I was able to find online, none featured Claire Trevor unfortunately.
Breaking Homes Waves aired on ABC on November 27th, 1987 and is based on a Norman Rockwell painting by the same name, the film is written and directed by John Wilder. It stars Jason Robards as Lloyd, Eva Marie Saint as Emma, Doug McKeon (best known for On Golden Pond) as Lonnie; and, of course, Claire Trevor as Grace Porter was given the TV honorarium of “Special Guest Star.”
Despite being based on a work by the epitome of Americana, this film does go beneath the wholesome veneer to find the drama. It centers of Lonnie who is leaving home for the first time to attend college. While he’s adjusting academically and socially. At home, his mother, Emma, learns she has leukemia and decides not to tell her husband, Lloyd, or her son.
Claire Trevor comes in as Grace, a high school teacher, Lonnie being a former student of hers, and she is also a friend of the family. Her scenes in this film are few but significant.
In her introductory scene she arrives at our protagonist’s home driving herself. Her first shot is a male gaze shot (While male gaze was an old-hat cinematic motif by the late-‘80s what makes this instance a little different is that both characters involved are senior citizens) that starts at her foot exiting the vehicle and pans up. This establishes the mutual attraction between Grace and Lloyd. That scene is the setup and we immediately sense the screen presence that earned her the special guest star credit, even if we were previously unfamiliar with her. During this very same year she also appeared on an episode of Murder She Wrote.
When Grace speaks to Emma she asks how she’s doing especially considering Lonnie has just left for college. The bond Grace shares with Lonnie is revealed when she mentions that she never had kids but if she did he’d have been like Lonnie. Direction-wise this scene is a little off because the subtext that Grace carries a torch for Lloyd is clear but there’s never a reaction shot for Emma, so whether or not she’s any the wiser is unknown. We’re led to believe she’s not.
Regardless of that Trevor carries much of the screen-time in this scene and emotes subtext through the surface of banal dialogue, which is a testament to her abilities.
Claire next appears when Lonnie comes home from school over Thanksgiving. This visit is at the beckoning of her mother because he and his success at college mean a lot to her. This is the part in the film where Trevor has her first significant involvement and is one of two storytelling scenes she has. Here she relates how this was her hometown and that she met a man, fell in love, and then traveled the road. What surprises Lonnie as a young man who has left the nest for the first time is that Grace’s returning home and teaching generations what she learned in the great big world gave her a renewed sense of purpose after losing her husband and brings her more joy than globetrotting did. Trevor in this scene effortlessly captures the energy of a sage who tells the tale quite naturally evidencing the progression of her acting style to a more modern sensibility, demonstrating that at this age she still had the chops.
The next scene Claire Trevor has is her penultimate of the film, and finds Grace running into Lloyd in town near the pharmacist’s. At this point in the film the ailment that Emma has been hiding from her family is highly suspected by her husband. This adds a layer to the tension, this is on top of the sexual tension, as there is confirmation in this scene that there was a romantic past between the two. The restraint of emotion with clear communication between the scene partners here is most excellent.
Spoiler Alert
Claire Trevor’s final scene in this film is one where Lonnie visits her at school after the death of his mother. This is another storytelling scene where she relates to Lonnie that she and Lloyd had a relationship after he was a student of hers. Due to this fact they broke it off in order to spare her reputation. She then met her eventual husband and Lloyd met Emma. This sequence consists of longer takes and Clair Trevor and Doug McKeon play off each other well. Moreover, the naturalistic style of delivery is still present. This scene paves the way for Lonnie to talk to Lloyd get his side of the story and bury the hatchet with him as he had been angry with his father when he didn’t understand his actions and now needed to vent and to understand his mother’s decision.
Claire Trevor plays a small but significant role in this film. There are times when the “special guest star” connotation is given due to an actor’s reputation and is not merited by the role and/or the material. Here it is deserved and Trevor shows to those who may not have known why her reputation preceded her into this film.
When I saw the Out to Sea Blogathon the first thing that came to mind was Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. The reason for this is that when dealing with seafaring narratives you are normally are left with few options of how to approach it in terms of the kind of story being told.
As per usual Hitchcock worked from a concept first conceived in prose. In this case a story by John Steinbeck. Shaping into cinematic story proved a daunting task in the scripting stage, as Hitch told Truffaut in their now-legendary interview series:
I had assigned John Steinbeck to the screenplay, but his screenplay was incomplete and so I brought in MacKinlay Kantor who worked on it for two weeks. I didn’t care for what he had written at all. He said ‘Well, that’s the best I can do.’ I thanked him for his efforts and hired another writer, Jo Swerling, who had worked on several films for Frank Capra. When the screenplay was complete and was ready to shoot, I discovered the narrative was rather shapeless. So I went over it again, trying to give dramatic form to each of the sequences.
This kind of revolving door of writers was not unusual then, nor is it unusual now; nor is a director’s pass of the script. This kind of revisionary writing is what many directors do in lieu of writing their own scripts start-to-finish—Spielberg would be a modern day example. Much of Hitchcock’s contribution can be seen in Constance Porter’s (Tallulah Bankhead) arc. However, there are other touches that make this work special, one of under-appreciated works.
In the shipwrecked variant of the seafaring tale (this film deftly incorporates elements of that, war film, and chamber drama) there can be visual monotony to the goings on. What Hitchcock does to break this up is balancing the claustrophobic (being on a small lifeboat with a group of survivors) to agoraphobic (the oceanic nothingness that surrounds them). Another visual component that gives this film some vibrancy is that Hitchcock uses close-ups sparingly. Instead he frames many three-quarter, two-, three-shots, and larger group shots.
While, like Rope, this is a unity of space tale (but not time) yet there are cinematic moments, cuts, and mise-en-scène. So while the actors often share the frame listening and reacting to each other in the same take this film never feels theatrical.
As the title indicates the primary motivation for all the characters is survival. It instantly jumps into the action barely showing the sinking of the passenger ship by a U-Boat and getting right into the lifeboat.
The sea and their vessel is the ideal setting for this clash of characters who are a microcosm of World War II’s combatants. The focus remains myopically on the characters only focusing on the seafaring aspect as much as necessary and as a function of these characters.
As Hitchcock did later on The Birds, there is no musical score in this film. It’s another decision that focuses the audience’s attention on the characters as it searches for more verisimilitude and less spectacle.
As each passenger climbs out of the wreckage and onto the boat, there is tension and conflict as those already on the boat discover who the newcomer is and more about them. This is mostly subsumed and not bombastic. Most of the overt conflict surrounds the character of Willi (Walter Slezak), the German who comes aboard.
There are deceptions along the way but the character of Willi is most definitely an intriguing one. Hitchcock mentioned to Truffaut that some criticism from the press about the film was about the Nazi being too skilled, in short that they wanted the movie to be more propagandistic as it was released in 1944. However, the fact that he was the most qualified to captain the lifeboat doesn’t changed the fact that he lied about his rank on the U-boat and what supplies he kept on his person amongst other things. Plus, he goes to great lengths to earn their trust in order that his deception(s) can go undetected.
Had the film been more starkly black and white in its characterization, as some critics wanted it to be (judging a film by what you want it to be, and not what it is, is a cardinal sin of criticism), I don’t think the film would have had the afterlife its enjoyed despite its disappearing from cinemas with little fanfare upon its initial release. Save for a rather lengthy run in New York.
With any film the audience, both critics and the general public, are the final arbiter of meaning and impact–or at least have the final say whether “correct” or not. My perspective ends up being somewhere between Truffaut who said:
At one time I was under the impression that Lifeboat intended to show that everyone is guilty, each of us has something to be ashamed of, and that no one man is qualified to pass judgment others.
And Hitchcock who said:
Here was a statement telling democracies to put aside their differences temporarily and to gather forces and concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was derived from a spirit of unity and determination.
In drawing the characters out, in giving them all dimension, you will naturally see flaws and positives in all these people. Having no character be a paragon of virtue is what makes this film art and not the propaganda some desired.
Yet Hitch’s message is also there, especially at the very end after the second shipwrecked Nazi is dealt with, the line is clearly delivering the moral he wants, but can be variously interpreted such that it doesn’t become a preachy statement–a trap many films of the era fell into. It could taken as a modern spin on the expression “Kill them all, let God sort them out.” The preceding events showed that when these people allowed their better natures to prevail and followed the Golden Rule they were taken advantage of. They were shown over and over again they could not deal with the Nazis humanely.
With Lifeboat Hitchcock puts on a morality play at sea with representative figures which are archetypal, yet layered; well-rounded and not stereotypical and it is perhaps that it did not connect as well 76 years ago as it might now.
Hearing that the O Canada Blogathon was back I was wanted to join up. What I needed was a subject. To find one I sifted through my mounds of unwatched Blu-rays and DVDs (some blind buys; some not). Upon doing that I knew the film I’d write about would be Dawson City: Frozen Time.
When I was young I would often study maps and the Yukon was one of the areas that fascinated me. The attraction had to do with its name, its remoteness, it nearness to the Arctic Circle, and also (probably on a subconscious level) that Dawson City was denoted on the map in what I could only assume was a sparsely populated area and it was not the territorial capital.
The reason for Dawson City still being on a world map in the mid-to-late ‘80s, when I was young boy, looking them was that it was epicenter of the final great gold rush in world history.
The town was built so prospectors had somewhere to live, the local Hän tribe displaced. That was one of many things I learned in watching this documentary.
But its selection is about more than just facts gleaned, which were many.
The film opens interviewing the couple who made a discovery of the movie reels while excavating for new construction project in 1978. However, this is but a framing mechanism and what comes between these bookends and predominates the film is a mix of stills, archival footage, and Dawson City film finds, both newsreels and features, that tell the story of the town’s history either with events that locals witnessed via movie houses or reenacted through narrative features that were set in Dawson City.
The impetus for the narrative crisscross is that in discussing the town you have to establish the find, the foundation of the city, the year-by-year stampede of prospectors north, followed by the dwindling population later.
Dawson City’s apex population of 30,000 in 1898 and the fact that people from all walks of life came there in search of fortune made it such that it was a crossroads. The people who came through as the town boomed and what became of them after their time there also play a part in the story.
To the nascent film industry Dawson City was a new market, so films came as people needed entertainment in all forms. However, Dawson was the end-of-the-line and films were slow to come there. Studios did not want the costs of shipping the film canisters back from the Yukon to California, so when local theaters were done with them the studios ordered the prints destroyed.
The formerly flammable nature of film stock plays a part in some of Dawson City’s early tragic moments and gives this film its tagline: Film was born of an explosive.
The tragedy for film everywhere—one of the omnipresent in its early history—was shortsightedness. Many films were purposely destroyed, involuntarily burned, or merely decayed over time erasing much of the silent era’s output. A form of safety film was first developed in 1910 but not adopted until the early ’50s due to prohibitive costs—more shortsightedness. All this talk of film burning had me thinking of Cinema Paradiso when Alfredo, already blinded in a film fire, is introduced to safety film by Toto he laments that progress always comes too late.
In the end the decision in Dawson City to not burn all the film and how it was finally stored helped preserve much of it paving the way for one of the most monumental film finds in motion picture history. More specifics than that are spare to preserve some other surprises, for the film which contains plenty (not that one could adequately describe the magic of this particular film in mere words, but my meager attempt is forthcoming).
This film separates itself in its aesthetic approach to its subject matter. Other films have used feature film footage as a stand-in for archival footage or dramatization; the essays in the booklet included with the Blu-ray by Lawrence Weschler, Vanity Fair, and Alberto Zambenedetti highlight Los Angeles Plays Itself as a prime example. However, it is the other techniques that combine with this that make this film a unique and masterful work.
For long stretches of its running time Dawson City: Frozen Time functions as a silent film. The titles cards disseminate needed information about the images we are shown, without voice over. We go through the rise and fall of Dawson City as a hub of civilization.
Director Bill Morrison was one of the first people to view much of the recovered footage, and so, over the years developed an intimate relationship with it that allowed him to exploit it as well as he does here.
The rapturous symphonic score by composer/multi-instrumentalist Alex Somers increases the immersive nature of the film.
A general interest audience will be captivated alone by how disparate folks like Fred Trump, grandfather of Donald, had his first financial success there; Tex Rickard, founder of the New York Rangers, passed through; Robert Service, poet and Jack London, novelist, found inspiration there; Calamity Jane, made a splash; Klondike Kate, of course, got her name there and there’s a pub not too far from me bearing her name a mere 3,917 miles away; the Carnegies, Guggenheims, and more all crossed paths at the top of the world.
The connections to the film industry and its history don’t stop with a couple thousand rediscovered film reels: Alexander Pantages and Sid Grauman both had their humble starts in Dawson City. Perhaps, most amazing to me was the reference to the 1957 Academy Award winning documentary short City of Gold, which tells the tale of Dawson City’s gold rush, but more influentially pioneered the pan and zoom techniques on still photos that Ken Burns would later make famous and make a staple of documentary filmmaking.
A few years ago when cutting a documentary for my local church I learned that Final Cut Pro now has a function called Ken Burns that facilitates usage of the aforementioned technique. So if you’ve used that software recently you’ve felt the influence of Dawson City, too, albeit in a very indirect way.
Toward its conclusion the film becomes transcendent upon entering a montage of Dawson City film finds that are in various stages of water damage and other forms of decay. The imperfections of the film, scratched, nebulous, nearly abstracted images dance to the crescendo in the score. Being able to see part of an image that was previously lost is better than nothing. The visual image in a motion picture can be—and often is—beautiful even when imperfect. Hairs not removed from the gate live forever in the recorded image. Some older films will always have Nelson Spots or cigarette burns on them. Pristine images are ideal, but there is a majesty, power, and poetry to decayed film that still survives through the ages, preserving a moment in time.
It is the fact that this film can tell the story of the Gold Rush; how it created Dawson City; who came and left and how those people experienced the world; how the film was found and also celebrate celluloid itself that makes this work so special.
Decasia (2002)
The essays included with the Blu-ray also made me aware of a film I had not heard of by Morrison called Decasia. Decasia is a portmanteau of “decay” and “fantasy” and it plays with the idea of this kind of montage for a feature. The fact that Morrison made a whole film in this motif and blends a similar sequence seamlessly into a film that already tackles so much is remarkable.
Morrison’s Decasia was the first film released in the 21st Century to be added to the National Film Registry. It would not surprise me if this film ends up there someday also. It’s a story about a small town in the Yukon, but also all of Canada, all of America, and all of cinema. So much stemming out of such a small town is a miraculous thing, as is the discovery of the film, as is Dawson City: Frozen Time.
When I watched the documentary Reel Injun – which is a fascinating attempt at an all-inclusive retrospective of the history of Native American characters and narratives on North American, mainly Hollywood, screens – I was somewhat surprised to see the inclusion of Atarnarjuat: The Fast Runner in it. However, it made sense for two reasons: it’s a tale of the First Nations (Canadian vernacular for indigenous tribes) and because of its universal appeal. This appeal is perhaps most brilliantly demonstrated by the reactions of Native Americans to this film. It was a consensus: the movie is something special and “an inside job.” This term is left vague but you can tell what it means it’s a story born in a tribe, that’s lived with it, and now found a home on film shaped my Inuit filmmakers. However, this thought echoed through my mind even more when I thought to write about Atanarjuat. I had seen it the third film a loose trilogy (The Fast Runner Trilogy concluding in Before Tomorrow) and knew it was a thematic rather than chronological, but when I discovered there was an illustrated screenplay and started reading it, and its additional materials, I knew that the term “inside job” was not only fitting (which I assumed), not only a great compliment (which I knew), but also a testament to the level of work taken on by all involved, in this film and in Isuma Productions’ ongoing mission.
The Wonders the Pages Contain
On the equivalent of a blurb page the significance of the Atanarjuat in film history is made apparent: “the first film written, directed, and acted by Inuit in the ancient oral language of Inukitut…” then the accolades like the Camera d’Or at Cannes, Genie Awards and the like. But the review by A.O. Scott really gets you going if you don’t know what you’re in for:
“The Fast Runner is not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece. It is, by any standard, an extraordinary film a work of narrative sweep and visual beauty that honors the history of the art form even as it extends its perspective.”
Then came the first awe-inspiring, chill-inducing moment that came only in this book, which is a timeline of the Igloolik area, where the story is set and shot, starting at 7,500 years ago with the emergence of the island to the period between 1995 to 2002 when writing the film began and after the festival runs and worldwide release.
With education being one of Isuma’s goals aside from preserving oral traditions (Isuma is the Inuit word for ‘to think’), there are quite a few enthnographic supplements to the screenplay the first being a letter from Claude Lévi-Strauss of the Académie Française to Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, professor at Laval University and Head of the Institute for Traditional Inuit Life, reacting to the film but also hoping for added information, and intimating that a deep link between the cinematic construct and cultural traditions, which do seem to permeate the film.
Yet this is only dipping your toes in the water. Then you get Zacharias Kunuk, one of the writers and director of the film, telling the story of how he first heard the legend of Atanarjuat as a child. And reading that brief missive just made me appreciate the weight not just of the story decisions he had to make within the given narrative but also the project selection. This was to be the first project of its kind and this was the story and he was the one not only trying to keep this legend alive for future generations but also dealing with modern filmmaking headaches like raising capital.
This hurdle, and the added difficulties of it are underscored in the interview with Paul Apak Angilirq, a co-screenwriter, not only did they confer with a group of elders on behavioral differences, and cultural differences in pre-colonial times, and the old oral version of Inukitut, and pick between the minor variations that exist in any legend passed down by oral tradition, but also they had to translate the script into English as it was being written in hopes to try to secure grants and other funding.
These two versions of the script are put to full use in the illustrated screenplay, aside from behind the scenes photos, production stills, inset boxes with more pertinent cultural information as appropriate; and most notably and poetically parallel text syllabic Old Inukitut on the left, English on the right.
Since two screenplays are crammed in the pages the spacing is condensed to accommodate the photos. Despite this the movement of the story is evident, and even some details in the script that aren’t strictly speaking visual details, are conveyed in the film.
After the screenplay there is an extended ethnographic commentary from the aforementioned Bernard Saladin d’Anglure that covers the Legend of Atanarjuat, the Inuit people in general, and shamanism. In discussing the Inuit he goes from pre-colonial times, and mentions Knud Rasmussen whose Thule expeditions and journals form the basis of the hard-to-find second film in the series up to and including the end of the last holdouts against radio, television, and formalized permanent settlements, creation of the syllabic alphabet and contextualization of the formation of Nunavut. It’s a testament to the non-fiction writing and insights offered that I gladly read the front and back matter without much hesitation.
This was not the first book indigenous legends with parallel text I read but it much more readable in part because while the goals are similar (imparting knowledge and preserving traditions) the audience for all parts of this book is fairly wide, and there isn’t a section that reads like it’s mostly for specialists (e.g. linguists or anthropologists).
Even if you never heard of the term ethnography before, if you know and like the film I’d recommend you seek out the illustrated screenplay. If you want to look this screenplay up, I’d say find the film first and all of the book will have that much more impact on you.
Directed by Chuck Jones this Looney Tunes short is another that takes place on the Warner Brothers backlot. Daffy has a meeting in faceless studio head J.L.’s office (clearly modeled after Jack L. Warner). Part of Daffy’s desire in this outlandish pitch is to break out of what he sees as typecasting and play the role of a swashbuckling hero.
Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this short is how it deals with the concept of casting. In the framing mechanism Daffy is pitching a film to break out of the type-cast mold he feels he’s stuck in. Within the pitched story the Warner crew cast from their stable of stars to create a swashbuckling, animated version of The Scarlet Pimpernel called The Scarlet Pumpernickel.
Daffy plays Daffy Dumas Duck, Porky Pig plays Lord High Chamberlain, Mama Bear plays a handmaiden, Henery Hawk plays a pageboy, Sylvester plays a Lord and groom-to-be, Elmer Fudd plays an innkeeper; and an obese horse not unlike the one in What’s Opera, Doc? also makes an appearance.
This short is also a showcase for the music of Michael Maltese who is frequently the unsung hero behind the scenes of the Looney Tunes shorts.
Aside from some visual flair like hanging off the underside of a cliff, a flood, the Pumpernickel using a parachute; it’s an absurd plot only animation could really pull off in such a short amount of time. As the commentary track on the DVD observes it packs in all the conventions of a swashbuckler with comedic effect, complete with jokes about Errol Flynn. Also, on the Golden Collection’s commentary track I learned that this was more of a showcase for Mel Blanc than usual as he voiced Elmer Fudd in this short as well though he usually didn’t.
This is also one of the Looney Tunes shorts which has been the target of retroactive censorship and re-edits on TV. The short ends with Daffy putting a gun to his head, as his story ends with the Scarlet Pumpernickel killing himself. Daffy shoots, falls to the ground, then looks up (the bullet went through his beret) and says “It’s getting so you have to kill yourself to sell a story around here.” Edits dropped frames where the gun fired and cut straight to him on the ground. In my estimation it’s a useless edit as the implication is still there. Yes, the reality of suicide is more present in today’s world. However, the fact remains that art of the past cannot and should not be constantly altered to fit ever-changing mores and realities. They are what they are and are reflective of a time. It’s up to each successive generation to know better as the collective consciousness grows.
As such, there’s not a moral to be learned from this short, it’s funny with jokes for audiences young and old, for people who just like animation or old Hollywood; but it’s not a morality play and an excellent quick parody of a genre.
Even when you’re as legendary and accomplished an actor as Christopher Plummer is there are certain themes you may be loath to revisit if it mirrors a bit too closely to one of your more famous roles. In Remember Christopher Plummer plays Zev Guttman, a Holocaust survivor living in a nursing home whom has just lost his wife and is dealing with dementia. Now entering a new stage of his life he can embark on his mission to avenge the death of his family at Auschwitz.
When the material is good enough and you feel it has something to say, the director you’ll be working with is acclaimed (as Atom Egoyan is), you will gladly participate in a film that may appear to share superficial themes (Nazism and World War II) to a film in your past you can’t seem to outrun (The Sound of Music). Furthermore, when you have over 200 credits to your name, and are in your late eighties (an age bracket that may as well not exist as a consideration in mainstream films) you may not be too picky. However, as some of Plummer’s more recent films like Beginners show he’s not just agreeing to a project because he read a script as some actors over a certain age may appear to.
What is the most notable in this film is that Plummer is not merely the elder statesman in an otherwise youthful cast. Quite on the contrary Remember features impressive performances from fellow octogenarian Martin Landau and septuagenarian Bruno Ganz, and features but a brief supporting turn by the prodigious and prolific young actor Peter Dacunha. Not only are the older actors great but they feature prominently in the film. However, the film as opposed to the pre-packaged film for the older set it is one about characters and plot considerations that are specific, and can communicate to audiences of all ages due to the use of expertly employed suspenseful set pieces.
While much of film acting is the ability to recreate emotional notes many times over owing to the need to shoot coverage, much of a film like Remember wherein a character must reabsorb givens as if it is entirely new information asks much more from an actor, director, and editor than a conventionally constructed film. In this film Plummer has to not only emote to have us engage in the repeated loss of his wife but also on more than one occasion have us fear that his only purpose left — as he sees it — will fail because he has either forgotten about the letter that now defines his reality or because in his travels it has become illegible.
While a protagonist going brazenly into random encounters with other men of a certain age and asking them they are German, were at Auschwitz, and a blockführer does allow for a quiet thrum of tension throughout; there are moments of unexpected pathos. Zev has but a name (Rudy Kurlander) and a location to find each of the man who could be responsible for killing his family. One of the men has a number tattooed on his arm, which catches Zev by surprise.
“You’re Jewish?”
“Homosexual.”
At that moment Zev breaks down in tears, feeling remorse and offering his condolence. It’s a wonderful moment of empathy that is but an example of how this is a more layered emotional experience than one might expect going into it.
There is a huge revelation that I will not spoil but it is the commitment to a performance that allows it to work. When the film is over and consider things in hindsight you will note the clues were there all along, but you didn’t even realize you should have been looking for them.
This film was distributed by A24 who is a company willing to go outside the norms and push the envelope even where we weren’t aware it should be pushed even lightly. It is available to stream for Amazon Prime subscribers and is worth checking out.
Whenever I’ve been offered the opportunity to write about Laurel and Hardy, I’ve jumped at it. This is not just because they were a staple of my childhood as I mentioned here:
I love Laurel and Hardy. I’m not sure how many of their features I’ve seen. I do fondly recall watching their shorts on weekends growing up.
However, that and the fact that The Music Box became a sort of white whale for me for years does factor in. The fact that Laurel and Hardy was just something I found on TV, usually thanks to TCM, lead to me seeing many of their shorts without knowing their names. The internet, my studying films, and revisiting some had men eventually find The Music Box by title.
In my youth I knew them as O Gordo e o Magro first, the Portuguese name for the pair which translates to The Fat Man and The Thin Man. I learned their names in English, and watched them here, I even recall coming across plastic toys of them in Brazil.
That dyed-in-the-wool fandom has me wandering back to them on occasion as my gyre of movie-watching wends its way through history, be it their silent, more often their short talkies or their features I come back to this duo often.
Sometimes this is by design and others it is by chance. When writing on the topic of non-competitive Oscars I ran into Stan Laurel, whom was awarded one (Oliver Hardy was not) for:
his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy. Stan Laurel was not present at the awards ceremony. Presenter Danny Kaye accepted the award on his behalf.
When trying to select a way for me to discuss the War to End All Wars on Film Laurel and Hardy were the only way I could find to get myself a comfortable toehold.
A silent, solo turn by Ollie in The Show, and their film Brats was one of my favorite discoveries of 2012, were two other times they came up just on my blog. So, you can clearly see an omnipresence there in my life and times.
However, the most persistent memory of them of all so far as I’m concerned is The Music Box. It’s one I may have lost track of for a time because I think of it the way Friends names episodes “The One with the Piano Movers.” This is likely their most iconic bit. It’s not a wonder the synopsis cites Sisyphus because the task at hand is just as hopeless and fraught with peril but far funnier with these two involved.
Humor is subjective, but since I saw it this has been one of the handful of funniest things I’ve ever seen. Enjoy!
When deciding what to write about for the Great Villain BlogathonFrailtyjumped out immediately. The reason for this is not that there’s nothing necessarily unique about the antagonist(s) within the narrative, nor in the fact that there is some role reversal, but rather in how that comes about and the approaches to it.
That is what makes Frailty such an interesting film to examine in this topic. The mandatory SPOILER ALERT applies that if you have not seen this film you should cease reading now as the film will be discussed in depth.
Frailty
For a horror film to thrive its villain(s) need to be effective, for the villains to be effective they need to have a potentially horrific foundation upon which to work. This is a film that offers quite a bit of solid ground to tread upon for not only does the paradigm of the narrative shift fairly often, but in terms of its crafting there are fascinating things to consider. Frailty, for as vague as it may sound, is exactly the title this film needs for whether it’s the frailty of life, the human spirit, religious belief, sanity, and even reality; any weakness, any fissure, any breaks can have dire consequences. Frailty examines such consequences.
This is one of the more frequently overlooked turns by a director/lead actor (Bill Paxton), a fact underscored by his untimely death earlier this year. When you include the fact that it was a first feature film credit for both he and screenwriter Brent Hanley, then the unlikeliness of the creation of what Roger Ebert rated a four-star film is multiplied.
Another thing that jumped out at me was that this is not unlike a story I would’ve written in my late teens or early twenties, thematically speaking. However, if one takes a look at an early draft one can see a majority of an excellent script in tact that was improved to increase surprise and pay-off, and build mystery.
The film gives the sense of Biblical verses clashing without getting into pulpit-pounding, even with all the talk of God, angels, and demons it remains character driven. In true-to-theology fashion fear and disbelief the two most common reactions these characters have to Biblical figures hearing messages from angels. The talk of “are we destroying demons or killing people” in family may get over but the director’s voice could come through in a less obvious in a clip fro the show Davey and Goliath where the discuss the notion of God making people do things or something happen in a very thoughtful way. The allusion to the story of Abraham and Isaac is very properly included and underscores the Old Testament sensibility of the film.
There is built on a bed of lies a dramatic shell game of names, and antagonists. Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) comes into the FBI building wanting to see Agent Doyle (Powers Booth) who is in charge of the God’s Hand case, a rash of serial killings linked by notes claiming that “God’s hand was at work.” When Fenton finally gets to see Doyle he starts weaving his tale of how his brother Adam is the God’s Hand killer, and has recently committed suicide. Doyle is doubtful, which sets up the necessary and well-handled element of doubt in this story, but agrees to listen for a time. This disbelief is reflected in the flashback with Fenton as faith and disbelief go hand in hand. He flashes back to when he (Matt O’Leary) and Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) were kids and how the story of the case really started with their father (Bill Paxton). As wild as the story is, at critical junctures gets satisfactory corroborations from others, such that Doyle keeps listening.
In this frame you have the introduction of an unreliable narrator, which a classic literary and cinematic device, but that’s not the only trick in store just perhaps the most surprising one of all. The biggest twist of the proceedings is that the man who presents himself as Fenton is actually Adam all along.
Crafting a Villains and Shifting Them
In this film, as you may be able to tell above, plot and character are very closely intertwined such that the changes in the story invariably alter how the audience may react to characters. The film in its flashback gives you what you think is a protagonist you can root for, one whose fighting the good fight. Well, you do have him in Young Fenton. He doesn’t believe the story his father is trying to sell him and who his younger brother seems far too eager to believe. But this tale is tragic in a sense. Young Fenton will not save the day, he will survive his childhood (barely) but he will be dead within minutes of the film having started.
In a world where you’re unsure if anyone is honest is where the line between villain and anti-hero is a little blurred, where demons may or may not exist; there is an additional onus on the casting not only for the adult versions of the characters but who plays their younger versions. Three out of the four are of vital importance and cast with the utmost precision.
The hard to properly attribute truism that every villain is the hero of their own story is very applicable to this film. For this film to communicate effectively with its audience all the actors had to connect with their characters and understand the world from their character’s truth. It is only in this way they can hope to be dimensional human beings, rise above caricatures, and have a far more primal, deeper impact on its audience. Having a talented actor such as Bill Paxton directing the film certainly helped the cast and allowed them to expand the potential of their roles: it brought Matthew McConaughey his best performance prior to his McConaissance; a deft turn from Powers Booth; a well-earned ‘Introducing’ credit for Matt O’Leary who is spellbinding; a deceptively good pre-Peter Pan turn from Jeremy Sumpter; and a chillingly effective, and convincingly convicted self-directed role for Paxton.
Yet, to minimize Paxton’s directorial effect to just performance would be wrong. A grasp of narrative and material is needed to successfully shift the audience’s view of a character, or at the very least to successfully pull of a story twist. Furthermore, there are plenty of great visuals that drive home whether its Young Fenton fearfully stepping back into the dark, Young Fenton standing between Dad and the ax, Young Fenton seeking light and water through the knothole, the odes to Hitchcock — Young Fenton’s dismembered head against negative fill, and the dolly back-zoom in at the end — and graceful dissolves that may have impressed Truffaut.
Also, for the perception of the characters to change frequently the circumstances of the story have to change, which means that the story cannot hinge on just one big twist but have quite a few; and this one does: Fenton kills dad not the demon he’s meant to, which the audience both doesn’t necessarily expect and is glad for, making him momentarily heroic. Adam finishes the kill that dad can’t complete, sending not just a momentary jolt through the audience but breaking the relief that may have come over the audience. We know things are not yet resolved or over just because dad is gone. The twists come until the very end when we learn that Adam is the Sheriff in Meat, Texas.
In this film you go from identifying Fenton to watching his downfall, the zealous end of a patriarch’s life, and the transformation of Adam from complete innocent into acolyte. His typically quiet observance of events as a child make him a hard one to read and that foreshadows his ability to tell the story from another perspective so convincingly. Not that it’s entirely unforeseen either after Young Fenton has killed dad the frequently mentioned promise to buried in the Rose Garden is made. Young Adam’s angry assertion that “I promise to God I’ll bury you here,” show’s the switch flipped in him perhaps more so than when he followed through on dad’s destruction of a demon.
Another brilliant touch in Frailty is that as you follow Adam’s tale (whom we believe to be Fenton), an twists unravel, you realize you’re witness to his methodology. Every demon on his list presents a new challenge. FBI Agent Doyle presents quite a few. However, with Fenton being the demon prior it got the ball rolling and allowed him to concoct his tale, and Adam figures out a way to change the names in the story of his life well enough such that he can lay the appropriate traps to get Doyle’s attention, tell his story with just the right breaks such that he could lead the Agent to his future burial place.
What’s perhaps most impressive in Frailty is that it manages to be deft in a film that deals with a zealotry — or a metaphysical plot depending on your viewpoint. Fenton’s transition from suspected-demon to full-blown serial killer is mostly offscreen. We are witness to only the inception but not the road traveled thereafter. What we may interpret merely as Adam being an obedient, agreeable child is confirmed to be his truth as he saw (or believed he saw) the same things his father saw.
In the end it is Dad Meiks who spends the longest run inhabiting the role of the antagonist in the film. He may have a soft spot for Fenton inasmuch as he does not destroy him after he claims an angel told him he’s a demon, but he still dehumanizes him by locking him in the newly built cellar, starving him in the dark, and only gives him water through a knothole. With him occupying that position and Fenton being his victim its clear where we’ll identify for a majority of the tale. When all is said and done it would have come as no surprise if Fenton had killed himself. However, that was to be another twist, another lie Adam told. He did destroy Fenton and made it seem as if it was he who killed Agent Doyle, hence the ruse of the name when asking to see him.
Conclusion
If Frailty was but a spectacle of twists and upended expectations it would not have the staying power it has had since its release in 2002. Clever writing also can only do so much. It is the sensitive, humanizing, layered portrayals these characters are given by their actors that makes them relatable and identifiable. The performances ultimately makes it possible for the characters to occupy disparate roles throughout, and engender pity if not sympathy. For a villain is ever more effective when you can see where they’re coming from and understand the world from their vantage point, and Frailty makes it such that that happens. You will likely not agree with them, but you will understand them, and that makes the visceral reaction far more palpable.
When embarking on blogathon I tend to opt between either of two extremes: either I pick a subject I know innately, preferably looking at it from a vantage point I’ve note yet attempted; or conversely picking a subject which to become more enlightened about, in short, seeking a moment of auto-didacticism. It was with the former intent I embarked to write an introductory sort of overview to the works of Germaine Dulac.
The collegiate experience doesn’t permanently affix one’s critical or aesthetic modality of choice but it does greatly influence it. As such, my reflex knowing that I was covering a writer/director was to take an auterist approach seeing how one of her films was already being covered in-depth.
As it so happens this decision, based on the facts of her life and career, was of providence more than of my own making. I discovered that not only did Germaine Dulac write, direct and shoot films but she was also one of the earliest pioneers of film criticism. One of my longstanding complaints: the French pioneers of film theory such as René Tabard or Henri Langlois are hard to find in print and translated to English are hard to find.
Aside from her inclusion in the forthcoming Early Women Filmmakers box set from Flicker Alley in May, Tami Williams, PhD, is preparing Pure Cinema: Selected Writings of Germaine Dulac, for publication through the University of Wisconsin Press.
So more in-depth knowledge of her life and works are on the way, allow me a brief introduction that I hope will inspire you to look further into her fascinating life and work.
I. SEARCHING FOR PATHWAYS FROM UNIQUENESS TO UBIQUITY
Typically when women are breaking into male-dominated fields their inclusion and acceptance seems to be almost self-congratulatory on the part of the gatekeepers of the boys’ club (“See we let the girl in, aren’t we great? ‘Men’ on three!”). Take for example this article pictured below which that starts with the phrase “Germaine Dulac is the only female director in France at the moment.”
The particular nomenclature had her bristling against it, whenever and wherever she could Metteur being a phrase borrowed from the theatre, it bears noting that the standard credit for film directors in France is now mise en scène.
In response to a journalist who only cited the novelist of the source material as the ‘author’ of The Seashell and the Clergyman (Le coquille et le clergyman). She said:
“les intellectuels et le cinéastes se rapproches, or, ce sont des nuances de mots qui les séparent irrémédiablement”
the intellectuals and the filmmakers should develop a closer kinship to one another, for it is only nuances between words that irremediably keep them apart.
However, her push against the status quo wasn’t just against the parameters and influences on film, but also one that was very sociopolitical in nature. Aside from her activism in socialist causes, the onset of the Great War had her urging women to make their presence felt and a difference. While World War II was seen as a sociological flashpoint in the United States where the war effort suspended typical notions about the sexes and work, Dulac sounded the rallying cry in the War to End All Wars as it was on France’s doorstep:
“international task of French Women.” She urged her audience to “create things anew and according to your own spirit”
Yet while being quite involved in activism this did not slow down her varied productions during this time:
From 1916-1918, Dulac produced and directed six feature-length films, a six-episode serial film, a ballet-pantomime set at a cross-dressing masked ball, and a series of journalistic shorts, all of which are lost, though Williams thoroughly describes and analyzes the existing related documentation. After the war, though continuing to produce films on her own, Dulac mostly worked with independent producers, including Ciné-Studios, Film d’Art, Société des Cinéromans, and Delac, Vandal et Cie.
II. VANGUARDIAN
One of the traps when discussing a female pioneer in a field is discussing the precedent she set, or the way in which she was an antecedent of those in said field in her gender. Make no mistake, there were many instances wherein Germaine Dulac was out in front of all filmmakers in many ways.
Not only was she on the vanguard of thought, but there was little to no precedent for it. In a wonderful piece on Senses of Cinema (see it for a more in-depth reading of her career and works) that Dulac was indeed ahead of her time in championed the notion of auteurism that Truffaut, Goddard, Varda and others would rally around and propel in France in the ‘50s and ‘60s onward.
“This letter addresses a concept—authorship—that was not prominent in French film discourse at the time.”
-Rosanna Maule
If one were to look at her filmography, be it what is still extant or it in toto, one will find that despite its at time varied stylings it her works are typically distinctively hers. Much as the scattershot styles and genres the great Michael Curtiz directed in part as a result of the Studio system, Dulac’s varied output was dictated in part by the marketplace in which she worked.
Since the end of World War I, French cinema was hindered by an economic and institutional crisis, struggling to counteract Hollywood’s emergence onto the international film scene. The fragmentation of France’s film industry into various film companies, many of them small and independent, and the crisis of the national system of film distribution and exhibition coincided with the expansion of alternative circuits of film production and distribution by avant-garde filmmakers.
She was a woman definitely marked by her era and some of her quotes underscore the very issues that arise when engaging in feminist film theory as Patrice Petro astutely observes:
As the history of feminist film theory so clearly demonstrates, the very attempt to ‘find’ a female subject has led to a paralyzing situation in some feminist film histories, which tend either to affirm a socially constructed feminine identity or to reject any attempt at self-naming at all.
Yet one must not fall too deeply into the trap of examining films that at this point in time are around ninety years of age by current social mores. Be it in telling a tale of a wife distressed by her relationship with her oafish husband with a different kind of tragic capper (The Smiling Madame Beudet), A farcical look at a cruise romance (Invitation to the Voyage), or the impossible conflict of clerical celibacy as seen through the eyes of a woman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), her vantage point on these dramas was unique in and of her perspective alone even if she did not have different aesthetic aims than many, but that she had too.
“It is unacceptable that half of humanity continues to be written off.” Despite her exemplary career, during which she was compared to such cinema luminaries and innovators as Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir, Dulac experienced erasure both during her life and after her death. Over a century later, women directors are still grossly underrepresented in the film industry, women’s stories dismissed as unbankable by producers, and it is still unacceptable.
Flitterman-Lewis expanded upon that notion by saying The Seashell and the Clergyman was “a more intriguing field of inquiry, for it thematizes woman as a force of desire within the production of the filmic writing itself”.
If you get too bogged down in labeling you could be missing the textual intrigue in examination of the technical. If you want to label her as a surrealist impressionist, you can What ratio she filmed these stylings in, and whether this film fully fits the surrealist mode, and if in The Seashell and the Clergyman she gets to shout “FIRST!” rather than Un chien andalou, is not as important as having created the work itself and how she advanced the aesthetics of visual of storytelling, and engaged in an active dialogue both in her work, in her writing on film, which establish an exchange between high and popular culture, art and commerce.
“The avant-garde and commercial cinema, or the art and industry of film, form an inseparable whole.”
In this balancing act, Dulac found the equilibrium for other forms of exploration that paved the way for her presaging other cinematic developments.
Her filmic approach to sport in her documentary of the Tour de France anticipated Leni Riefenstahl. In 1919, Dulac set up her own distribution office in New York, becoming one of the first foreign filmmakers to do so. She also distributed several of her films through London studios.
Her dialogue between art and criticism and commerce and art she would foreshadow things not just like the The New Wave, where a group of young French critics viewed and studied film voraciously with the intent to study the landscape, but in embracing the avant-garde and popular cinema she anticipated not just one of the New Wave idols, Hitchcock, but in professing the auteurist belief can be found in more broadly accessible film types she anticipated the likes Spielberg.
III. QUESTING FOR DIALOGUE
Her insistence on creating and persisting upon a dialogue about the nature of film, challenging preconceived notions while the art was still in its youth, cannot be underestimated in its importance in affecting the form’s aesthetic development.
When the cinema was a purely visual art form there was truly more a case to be made against intersectionalism. With the advent of sound, cinema became the crossroads of all artforms, the cinema and its forerunners became much closer. However, seeking ones own voice, ones own means of creation, and standards of narrative and technique was a necessity. The only way to adequately establish such beliefs were to experiment and to share your thoughts with colleagues. This exchange of different ideas, especially when one has a unique view of cinema is a necessity:
I actually had the desire to become a dramatist, but when some pecuniary circumstances obliged me to abandon this first path to chose that, at the time more lucrative, of the cinema, I had no regrets. However, in the beginning I did not understand the importance of the cinematographic expression in its entirety. Only by using ideas, lights, and the camera was I able, by the time I made my first film, to understand what cinema was, art of interior life and of sensation, new expression given to our thought … an art non-tributary to the other arts, an original art with its own meaning, an art that makes reality, evades from it while incorporating it: the cinema spirit of beings and things!
And Dulac was certainly not one to run from nuance and say things that very nearly contradicted each other (but not quite), as this quote from the same interview proves:
I believe that cinematographic work must come out of a shock of sensibility, of a vision of one being who can only express himself in the cinema. The director must be a screenwriter or the screenwriter a director. Like all other arts, cinema comes from a sensible emotion … To be worth something and “bring” something, this emotion must come from one source only. The screenwriter that “feels” his idea must be able to stage it. From this, the technique follows.
Not only would this philosophy be embraced by the New Wave but further down the line would appeal to many modern day actors.
IV. NOUVELLES VOGUES
The French word vogue is now so synonymous with fashion that it’s full embraced in the English lexicon, the name of a magazine, and a hit song by Madonna all bear its name. However, it is one thing to introduce things as the latest trends, but it’s quite another to explore new notions so throughly that they tend to permanently affect an aesthetic landscape, which is what it seemed Dulac did.
She maintained an ongoing dialogue between different models of cinemas that the auteur and the European art cinema would later crystallize into oppositional clusters, despite their interrelations in the film industry and in the production and distribution policies of European governments. She established a more consistent correspondence between film theory and practice, personal view and formal expression, aesthetic and technical considerations. Although her filmmaking career ended relatively early and she subsequently pursued a more administrative role at Gaumont, she continued to write and lecture on film, maintaining her intellectual and aesthetic commitment to cinema until her death.
Dulac avoided the contradictory intentions of auteur critics and filmmakers by keeping the contradictions in check through a dialectical position in her filmic and theoretical practices. From this perspective, her auteurism also invites one to reconsider the conceptualization of the auteur in different historical and critical frameworks.
If one were to take too cursory a glance at the career trajectory of Germaine Dulac one might be too quick to dismiss it, as one where she transitioned from more literary-based traditional films to impressionist and surrealist works to newsreels. However, the back and forth of these works is more involved than that, and her interests even more varied than that as she also wrote plays that were performed and engaged in theatrical criticism.
One need look no further than her Wikipedia entry to see disinformation spread with a generic, unsupported claim that “Her career as filmmaker suffered after the introduction of sound film and she spent the last decade of her life working on newsreels for Pathé and Gaumont.”
As if this was some sort of failure on her part, running the nonfiction film department of France’s oldest film distributor and writing presciently about the importance the newsreel could hold. Poor thing. It made me nearly want to create a Wikipedia account just to flag that nonsense.
The title of this piece has been purposely been selected for its trace of irony. For Dulac was not seeking the next trend like a bandwagon to jump on but instead was seeking to introduce new concepts and change the paradigm wherever and whenever she could. First, let us look at that aforementioned, and scoffed at by some Wikipedians, newsreel work:
La Mort du Soleil (The Death of the Sun)
The team she headed at France-Actualités made and sold to distributors, including its patron Gaumont, a weekly compilation of about twenty minutes made up of short news items. In the 1930s, cinema programmes usually consisted of a short film, and a newsreel, before the “big film”. News theatres offering non-stop newsreels and cartoons were just opening. About five companies, including Pathé, Eclair etc., competed for contracts. A typical newsreel programme from the archives of France-Actualités, for 2 March 1934, ran for 20-30 minutes as follows :
Belgium: accession of King Leopold
Lake Placid bobsleigh competition
‘Paris-humour’: a taxi-driver’s strike, using a puppet
Maiden voyage of the Normandie
The mysterious death of local councillor in Dijon*
General review of the army garrison in Algiers
Children’s string band in Montmartre
Police work: how laboratories help trace criminals
Film awards at Harry’s Bar, Venice
Two air force planes collide in mid-air
Funeral of victims after a street riot
Saint-Malo fisherman’s religious procession
When one characterizes working on newsreels as a career that is “suffering” the inference is that nonfiction films are less than, that person has without careful examination answered the question why film even needs to exist. Germaine Dulac examined that question, and make no mistake based on what little I read, and knowing there’s more to come, she never overlooked the basic question, which I’ve seen too few tackle:
When the cinema was first discovered and given mechanical and technical form by the Lumière brothers, it took by surprise a world by no means ready for it.
If we compare cinema with the invention of printing, that too had brought upheaval, by finding a completely new means of spreading the written word, but it did not create any new form of expression: on the contrary, it appeared in response to a need. […] Commercial entrepreneurs had created a “need” for cinema among popular audiences before artists had had a chance to reflect on its possibilities.
In fact many of Dulac’s crusades were not shortsighted in their aims but seeking to create a cinematic framework and reexamine definitions that were, in her estimation, too quickly set in place in the art’s infancy.
Her wish to unify creative responsibilities in the figure of the filmmaker insists upon the need to break away from the literary and theatrical notion of authorship in French culture. For Dulac, abolishing the expression metteur en scène (which she considered reductive because indebted to its theatrical origins) would have meant dispensing with a concept that at the time was, even more so than in literature, almost exclusively identified with male authorship.
The foreword-looking nature of her film thought was especially prescient when it came to the newsreel:
The public has learnt to notice any changes in their attitude, their appearance or their gestures. Familiarity starts to breed sympathy and perhaps understanding of ideas. Greater familiarity leads to more informed judgment. Walls come down. The vagueness of speeches can be harmful. The precision of the camera brings the clarity of truth.
Thanks to newsreels, we can enter into diplomatic discussions, into quarrels or alliances between peoples, and we can learn about their society.
The dialogue she was interested in was just not in traversing the divide of criticism and creation, but also in meandering from one style of filmmaking to another.
In remaining working on newsreels Dulac kept some of her focus always on what many (mostly men) thought the original function of the motion picture was going to be: the recording of real life events rather than staged, scripted dramas or comedies.
In her avant-garde work she focused on another major tenet of the cinema the juxtapostional relationship of images through editing technique, the quasi-musical rhythm it by itself could create, and the mimetic ability to reflect the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind, as well as the alchemical tricks that could be achieved by techniques in post production such as super-impositions split-screens and the like.
The Dancer’s Prism
While traveling back and forth between the artifice and veracity of film she was able to underscore the impartiality necessary to accurately convey current events and what cinematic techniques could be manipulated to mold interpretation. In short, she put out a primer on how to interpret the influence of propaganda on newsreels and films.
The cinema, with its whirlwind of moving images, delivers what we all dream about, all the things that escape conscious thought.
What lessons could have been learnt if the cinema had been invented a hundred years earlier, if it could have captured the ancien régime and then the events and people of the French Revolution!
In future years, historians will unquestionably go to this source rather than to written documents, because thanks to film, they will be able to reconstitute an event not merely in the imagination, but with an exact visual image.
The result of this little survey was as follows: the items I had selected from the weekly programmes were actually dependent on each other: one thing had led to another. When stripped of irrelevancies, their graph told an inexorable tale. The cinema was truly in the service of history.
This is another example in which the cinema binds together the scattered forces of humanity and coordinates them into a single current which thereby gives them wider distribution.
If that isn’t enough to convince you that her aims were for the future and the overall betterment of the artform, perhaps nothing else could convince you, but in fact there is more.
From 1930-1935, Dulac was the artistic director and nonfiction filmmaker at Gaumont, one of France’s largest and oldest production houses. She also assisted Louis Lumière in creating France’s first major film school, L’École Louis Lumière, where she taught until her death in 1942. Dulac was fundamental to the 1935 nationalization of the French film industry and in 1936 helped establish the Cinémathèque française.
If you reached this point and are itching to see some of her work, my mission has been accomplished. Below is what was readily available online. Enjoy!
V. PURE FILM: Or, Don’t Take My Word for It Just Watch
“Throughout the picture,” writes critic Nathan Southern, “Dulac uses such devices as slow motion, distortions, and superimposed images to paint Beudet’s various emotional states onscreen,” an intersection of form and substance that resulted in a picture that “instantly established Dulac as a force in world cinema.”
The Smiling Madame Beudet (La Souriante Madame Beudet) (1923)
Invitation to the Voyage (L’invitation au voyage)(1927)
The following quote perhaps describes this film best, for even through its experimentations in repetition, in shot length, even without the framework of the source material, and the tongue-in-cheek commentary keeping this quote in mind one will see it embodied on celluloid.
A film’s characters are not the only important things; the length of the images, their contrast and harmony, play a primary role alongside them. A new drama made up of movement, finally understood rationally, asserts its rights, magnificently leading us towards the symphonic image poem, towards the visual symphony beyond familiar formulas where, like music, emotions burst, not into deeds or actions, but into sensations.
Below you will find links to both a monochromatic and a sepia-toned version of the film. The monochromatic one features a more logical scoring option in my estimation inasmuch as I find jazz to rarely be fitting accompaniment to silent cinema, and is frequently anachronistic.
Monochromatic
Tinted
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Le coquille et le clergyman) (1928)
After more than seventy years, Germaine Dulac’s film The Seashell and the Clergyman surely merits that we take another look, as we reclaim Dulac’s rightful place among pioneering filmmakers of the early avant-garde. – Maryann De Julio
Spanish Dances (Danses Espagnoles) (1928)
Some of the earliest works of the silent cinema were merely cinematic records of particular dance styles or routines. In excess of two decades later, Dulac here pushes that idea forward with the technology available to her.
Celles qui s’en font (1928)
The music video was hotly debated innovation in the music industry in the 1980s. Today, it is such an afterthought it’s rarely discussed at all. More than a half-century before that Germaine Dulac already experimented with the form.
Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque (1929)
This was the first of Dulac’s shorts I watched. Borrowing nomenclature from ballet and combining it with her shock of images she creates a study in motion created by both her mise en scène and editorial choices. It is a symphony of movement.
Retour à la vie (1936)
I could not find a subtitled version of this film unfortunately. Some of the drama is readily apparent and visual. It’s only the detail that is lost in this talkie. However, it is another example of Dulac’s preoccupation with the juxtaposition of city life in Paris versus the very different provincial existence in the rural areas of France.
Coda
Beauty and the Beast (2017, Disney)
This Paris-province conflict is still a reality of modern-day France, and the examination that Dulac was so fond of sees itself exemplified this very year as Disney in expanding the story of Beauty and the Beast for the live action version had Belle, Maurice, and her late mother as Parisians until she was taken by the Black Death.
The Movie Rat 