Quickies, Vol. XXVI

The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948) – This was awhile ago, but it begs mentioning. A beautiful, nearly sublime film that only early Technicolor could produce. Films about art that still maintain a concern for the inner political machinations and ramifications of art demand attention. They don’t pretend to transcend, and in so doing they wind up utterly transcendent. The portrayal of theater nearly suggests that theater existed for centuries – millennia – simply to preface what it would look like cinematically. Put them both together and they give birth to something that neither on its own could approach.

Breathless (dir. Jim McBride, 1983) – Although it’s been just long enough to warrant a revisit to Godard’s “original” (something about calling Godard “original” is always slightly ironic), took in the American remake instead. Expectations were low, so when this one offered some really remarkable bits, pieces, and overall product, apologies were in order. This belongs with the “best” of the L.A. films. Los Angeles dominates everything about it and is used adeptly as a catalyst that drives the narrative. Also, cinema. They make love behind the giant screen, with Gun Crazy‘s own love scene in the background. They aren’t cinephiles, exactly, but this is meta. At one point she stands identified with a contemporary Venus de Milo mural. It, like the film, is a scribbling over something classic and established. This is permissible, since that’s all Godard was doing in the first place. The films plays with the gaze, attempting to offer a more balanced take on the typical assumed male spectator. Richard Gere is objectified sexually, although so is Valerie Kaprisky. Still, shots of her are complex, offering subjective access rather than just candy for the male viewer’s enjoyment.

Blow Out (dir. Brian DePalma, 1981) – Like the above Breathless, here’s another free-standing gem that rips heavily but shamelessly off European art house cinema from the sixties. Blow-Up was Antonioni’s look at surveillance and all its implications regarding reality, or the lack thereof. DePalma’s version works off of Antonioni’s, along with Coppola’s The Conversation, but with a more realist narrative conclusion. It may not be feel-good, but it’s geared more toward audience expectations and pleasure. That’s to say, Travolta doesn’t disappear on a green in the last shot as Hemmings does in Blow-Up, and he doesn’t return to a primal, womb-like stage like Hackman does in the last shot of The Conversation.

Revolver (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2005) – This was marketed as Ritchie’s return to form, following his dabbling in the remake business and featuring his wife Madonna as the main star (Swept Away). In Revolver, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. Going for maximum entertainment value, the film also wallows in its refusal to give any clear-cut answers. Reminds one of the description of Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development: “She gets off on being withholding.” Once the film wraps up, Ritchie enlists various psychologists and university profs to explain the mental phenomenon underlying the film’s narrative uncertainty during the closing credits. Whatever. Using this sort of thing as an instrument to a greater end is one thing, but it comes off as highly pretentious. Hitchcock had a way of giving the audience enough to work with while maintaining suspense, but films like Revolver put off the distinct vibe of being better than their audience. Ritchie confirms this in an interview, acknowledging that they cut out a lot of material that would have shed more light on the nature of the plot.

The Great Dictator (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1940) – Embarrassed not to have seen it earlier, but at least it’s now happened. Quite a fascinating Prince and the Pauper story set in WWII, mostly because of Chaplin’s suggestion of Hitler’s humanity. Of course, he later said he wouldn’t have made the film if he’d known about the nature of the Holocaust. The most interesting scene has to be when Hinkel plays with the balloon-globe privately in his nest of an office. There’s something wickedly beautiful, almost transcendent, about the image. Chaplin is a self-described fool, so when he portrays a Hitler-esque dictator, he comes across as a naughty child who is so self-obsessed (as children tend to be) as not to consider the realities going on based on his ruthless orders.

Morning Glory (dir. Roger Michell, 2010) – Wow, just awful. This one sticks to the formula like it’s got nothing else to offer, which it doesn’t. Harrison Ford seems just as scotch-drunk here as he did on Conan a couple weeks ago. Rachel McAdams’ character, to which the viewer is sutured, is a workaholic whose outlook on life is completely superficial, and that is applauded at least or assumed normal at best. The obligatory unemployed montage is an insensitive insertion in an era of massive unemployment. It’s another movie that tells us: you can be the very best, if you only work hard enough, and once you get to the top, you realize how only then can you take a breather and enjoy life a little.

The Kid: It’s Good

Further proof that Chaplin had a gift that has evaded most of modern cinema. How can a film 50 minutes long be so, simply, “good.” This is “good” in the moral, Dostoyevskian sense. That being the case, it’s no surprise at all that The Kid was Kurosawa’s favorite Chaplin film. Look to Kurosawa’s ideal film, in some sense (in terms of his own ideals), Red Beard, and you essentially see The Kid worked out by repetition in three different acts. The caretaker, the father figure, or as Keiko McDonald has it in her helpful essay, “Images of Son and Superhero.” Chaplin in The Kid reached for a moral goodness not unlike that in City Lights that transcends melodrama while coming up shy of transcendence itself. Part of the genius of Chaplin, of course, was that he only reached for what he could grasp firmly, but he had a remarkable reach.

The Kid is sort of the archetype of so many film dramas that followed, many of them atrocious. Think of I Am Sam, a similar story that descends ever quickly into the judicial and political realm (as things tend to do when Sean Penn is involved), to say nothing of its shameless appeal to the irrational in all of us. The Kid is simple and beautiful and it simply works, without trying to expand its feasibility beyond the cinematic screen. It holds powerful ramifications beyond the theater, to be sure, as all good cinema does. Chaplin withheld the boundary-blurring until The Great Dictator in 1940, at a time when so much was at stake that Chaplin had to speak up (literally, for a change). Of course in that film, Chaplin appeals to the rational and the human rather than to the merely emotional and sentimental like I Am Sam.

But enough of that film. It’s hard to discuss The Kid on account of its simplicity and perfection. It’s not so much “formulaic” as it is the formula itself. The multi-balance of humor, narrative, drama, realism, and fantasy make it just right. Speaking of fantasy, the dream sequence in this film must have inspired Fellini. And little gags like the following do more than simply trigger laughter. The rather morbid humor it expresses is countered in the film’s second half with its powerful counterpart, the sort of thing that’s at least ineffable if not also sublime.

City Lights

Is there a more wonderful irony in all of cinema than that of Charlie Chaplin making a silent film about a blind woman? It can be no accident that this was Chaplin’s last silent film, and that he, as the greatest silent film star, must have been particularly conscious of that group of people who were unable to enjoy his work. Even aside from the woman’s blindness, this film would be a success simply by virtue of its lack of sentimentality and comedic perfection. But that ingredient and Chaplin’s handling of it makes this his greatest film. Earlier entries have described Kurosawa’s work as exeplifying everything that cinema should be about. Nowadays, to show something beautiful, you are supposed to show raging ugliness beside it. Typically, the effect is to highlight the ugliness and make beauty the footnote. But this gets to a bigger problem not only in cinema today but in everything today. People do not know beauty. Think of the much overhyped and extremely pretentious film American Beauty. Supposedly a film about that subject, the boy who professes a deep, almost suicidal, obsession with beauty rather misses the point as to what is beautiful. He films a piece of wadded up paper flying around in the wind and says that sometimes things like this are so beautiful that he almost can’t take it. The intensity of his expression, melodrama of his words, and tears reflecting (or perhaps refracting) his filmed image overpower the fact that he’s watching a some trash blowing against a concrete wall. When everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful. When the most beautiful things are the most accidental things, we have done a great disservice to ourselves and the idea of beauty. What is the substance of that paper flying around? What does it say, imply, or at least reflect? The point is not that there is no beauty in these things, but that there are other, much better things that are much more beautiful. If an object contains beauty, it is not very beautiful, because the nature of beauty is that it cannot be contained. Real beauty bursts forth and can’t be missed. It ages like wine and familiarity with it breeds greater wonder.

That being said, City Lights is a beautiful film. Whereas much of Chaplin’s work is beloved because of its humor and the Tramp’s loveableness, City Lights‘ comedy serves its story. Charlie’s compassion for the street woman is evident immediately. At first taken aback that a women (even a street woman) would acknowledge his existence, the moment Charlie sees that she cannot see fills him with the best kind of pity for her. The term “compassion” is here used in its full meaning, for Charlie is more driven to work than ever, and cannot bring himself to keep even the smallest percentage of his money for himself, despite the fact that she would never know if he did. On the contrary, his wish that she believe him to be a wealthy man is not so much a fantasy-fulfillment for him as a reason for her to accept his gifts. He constantly tips his hat to her, though she cannot appreciate the gesture. At the same time, he kisses her hand at their every meeting, translating his respect to the sense of touch.

André Bazin, in his chapter on Charlie in What is Cinema?, notes that Charlie’s comedic timing is flawless. He gives the viewer enough time to appreciate the joke and laugh at it, while not drawing it out for too long. Just as one thinks he has gotten the joke, Charlie spins it to make it much funnier. While boxing in order to obtain rent money for the woman, Charlie runs, jumps, and charges his opponent head first to get him down. (It doesn’t work.) The move is so unexpected that Charlie does it again for us. This time, we expect it and are able to laugh. At this point, most comic actors would repeat the same thing to a dulling effect. On Charlie’s third attempt, however, he mistakes the referee for his opponent and flattens the ref. The humor is thus heightened over what we already found to be hilarious. The film is full of little scenes like this that are choreographed to humorous perfection.

The ending of City Lights is often said to be one of the great endings in cinema history. When one knows this going into the film, the conclusion is actually quite shocking. Ending a story about a tramp and a poor blind woman, Charlie could easily have sunk into a sappiness. On the contrary, the challenge in a film like this is to avoid such an ending and keep it understated. (On another aside, when most films understate a potentially sentimental ending, they draw so much attention to the understatement that the effect backfires. For some reason I have an image of someone trying so hard to jump over a stream that he fails to see the cliff near the stream, and jumps over it, too.) City Lights fades out at the exact moment when one wonders how Chaplin will avoid that sort of ending. It is a perfect ending precisely because it does not want to be perfect. Chaplin’s remarks later that he wasn’t actually “acting” in that scene are thus completely believable, because his expression is too fitting to be contrived. Just as Charlie’s Tramp has no alterior motives in the story – he only wants to express his love for the woman – Charlie the filmmaker submitted every other motive for the film to his intent to create something truly lovely and powerful. In a word, this is a film about goodness.

The Gold Rush / Modern Times

So it’s totally backwards to watch Charlie Chaplin after you’ve seen the hundreds of stars who emulate his every move. Thankfully, I remember as a kid watching The Gold Rush before I saw Grandpa Simpson wooing his retirement-home beloved with puppeteered food and dinner utensils. Still, that was a long time ago, and it warranted another viewing (at least). The Gold Rush, along with Modern Times, is a very funny movie. Watching the guy who in many ways invented the slapstick comedy (and did so intelligently) was one of the more refreshing movie exercises in which I have engaged.

The genius began with the howling wind blowing the door open and preventing Chaplin’s ejection from the blizzard-shrouded cabin. The scene was milked for all that it was worth, and then it ended as if it had never happened. That is to say, it was still hilarious at the end, and Chaplin moved right along without looking back. The speed of the rolling film along with Chaplin’s movements made even the bear scene effective. Other sight gags such as twirling shoelaces on a fork like spaghetti, Chaplin’s morph into a chicken, and of course the famous teetering house were creative and impressive. Instead of trying to fool the audience through special effects, Chaplin embraced the primitive sets and props as a means of greater comedy.

Notes: Shot of house slightly tilted from interior prior to first exterior shot. Symmetry before/during house teetering. Perspective of other: CC becomes chicken, confession, CC hides knife. Everything but physicality and music says drama rather than comedy. CC nearly always facing camera. Innocence, optimism. Modern Times: Use of sound. Commentary on capitalism. Identification.