Vision Thing

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Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the release of Showgirls in director Paul Verhoeven's Mother Holland, and it didn't take much prodding for me to be convinced to join the appreciation party happening right now in the blogosphere. Yes, I actually like this perhaps inherently misogynistic film that rates a measly 3.8/10 from imdb voters and a 16/100 score on Metacritic. I count myself among the growing number of cinephiles whose views at the very least fit under the umbrella statement, "It doesn't suck."

I first saw Showgirls in the summer of 2001 when I scored free passes to Peaches Christ's summer series of witching hour cult movies called Midnight Mass. Showgirls was the second film in the series, and unquestionably the most raucous evening of those I attended (I skipped 9 To 5). The audience was packed with drunks, butch dykes, drag queens, and a few of us token "normals" who maybe didn't feel quite so normal anymore. I had the distinct impression that my friend and I were the only ones who'd never seen the film before, especially when most of the audience seemed to be yelling half the lines of dialogue at the screen. It was clear that at least we'd stumbled into a true cult phenomenon, and indeed Peaches has screened the film to sellout crowds at least once every summer since 1998. Well, how can you not enjoy a film on a certain level when surrounded by enthusiasm like that? I even got into the spirit of the evening and at one point around the midway mark yelled out (something I never do in a movie theatre) in my most nasal geek voice, "Excuse me, I'm trying to watch the movie!" It got a laugh, but there was some truth in my mock complaint. It was fun but difficult to untangle my reaction to the film from my response to the audience's shouts and cheers. I remember thinking that the film had utterly failed at being sexy if that was the intention, but I had the impression that the sterile plasticity of the sex and nudity just might have been part of a grander scheme to satirize the American Dream. Though I hadn't yet read Charles Taylor's review of the film, I agreed with his premise that Showgirls is intentional camp. I had been exposed to the idea of Verhoeven as satirist (through Zach Campbell for one) before seeing the film, and I found myself agreeing.

Here come spoilers in case you're still a Showgirls virgin...



I was totally caught off guard by Molly's rape scene, though. It's a truly disgusting and shocking scene, and sharply contrasts the good-natured humiliation, back stabbing, lying, pimping and whoring that make up the bulk of the film. Perhaps I was reacting less to the film than to the way the Midnight Masses became so much more subdued for this scene and its aftermath, but it felt like a real miscalculation to suddenly change the film's tone so radically. It took exposure to insightful analysis by the likes of Eric Henderson for me to start to understand the function of that scene in the film, and to finally see Verhoeven's creation as something more than a fun but flawed film.

So when the call went out for participation in a Showgirls-a-thon, I was ripe to revisit the film on DVD, which I finally did last night. What follows are a few thoughts and questions, not coherently gelled into any kind of argument whatsoever.

1. I own the soundtrack on audiocassette (it features excellent tracks from likes of Killing Joke, David Bowie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees) but I'd forgotten that in her initial hitch-hiking scene, Nomi changes the music from Dwight Yoakam (who she mislabels as Garth Brooks) to a song not found on my tape for whatever reason. "Vision Thing," by one of my favorite bands of the late eighties and early nineties, the Sisters of Mercy, is a song about America's cocaine-fueled aggression and imperialism. Though we don't hear the beginning of the song (which starts off with the sound of a coke sniff) I'm sure that whoever selected it knew what Verhoeven was up to; it's no coincidence that the Bowie song that plays in the dance club is "I'm Afraid of Americans". Oh, and guess where the Sisters are launching their 2006 American tour on March 22? Sin City itself, where the streets are lined with the tossed-away hamburger wrappers left by Nomis of the world over.

2. Having recently seen Footlight Parade for the first time and being struck by the incredible speed of the first half of that film, propelled of course by the actor who personifies "rapid-fire", James Cagney, I have to say Verhoeven doesn't quite capture that feeling of intense organizational energy though he comes close a couple of times. I'm not saying he's even trying to. The 1933 Lloyd Bacon/Busby Berkeley film Showgirls usually gets compared to is of course 42nd Street which is less fresh in my mind. But I definitely feel that Footlight Parade is worth a comparative look too, if only because the milieu seems somewhat more similar; aren't the depression-era girlie shows Cagney is trying to put together in that film some of the more apt equivalents to big Vegas shows like "Goddess"? And wasn't a big part of the appeal of Busby Berkeley's most lavish production numbers (like the ones in Footlight Parade) the feminine flesh on display, even if they never provided audiences the full frontal nudity required to bat eyebrows in 1995?

3. What kind of fantasyland is this where not only does someone suggest that Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul might star in "Goddess", but that the president of the hotel actually repeats the dismissed suggestion to the media? Or am I remembering 1995 inaccurately, with my post-Super Bowl, post-American Idol perspective clouding my sense of history?

4. What's with Cristal's underdeveloped Elvis fixation? Is there some character backstory or a key line that got trimmed out somehow?

5. Least-sexy sex scene in the film: Elizabeth Berkley flopping like a fish in the pool with her groin attached to Kyle MacLachlan's abdomen.

6. Spoilers again. That means you, mom; I know you haven't seen the film. Here's a wacky and/or trite interpretation of Nomi and Molly's relationship for everyone to point and laugh at. Let me know if this has already been proven or disproven somewhere I haven't seen (like in that Film Quarterly roundtable on the film that I still haven't read). Molly, who reiterates that she hasn't had sex in many a moon at the point Nomi comes into her life, represents Nomi's virginity (or born-again virginity if you will, since we later learn Nomi's a reformed Oaktown crack-whore). Though surrounded by wanton Vegas sexuality, Nomi's roommate remains chaste, ensuring that no matter what our natural-blonde heroine goes through in her escapades at the Cheetah club or with aspiring gynecologists by which I mean choreographers, her hymen remains intact. But when Andrew Carver and his gang force their camels through the eye of the seamstress's needle (sorry about that turn of phrase but I couldn't resist) it's as if Nomi has herself been raped. And though she gets revenge on the rapist, she also feels the blame and shame rape victims (I'm told) often do. Looked at this way, it seems that perhaps her departure on the road to Los Angeles is not so much a return to blind ambition but an escape from a community where she no longer can live in her own skin. Or is that what ambition always is anyway, an escape from our selves?

Bruce Conner and Crossroads (1976)

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Last week San Francisco was treated to a nearly-complete retrospective of one of its hometown heroes of experimental film, Bruce Conner. Conner is perhaps best known for his first film, to quote the Cinema 16 program announcement for its screening in early 1961, "a pessimistic comedy of executions, catastrophes and sex" called a Movie. Later films like Cosmic Ray, Permian Strata and Mongoloid (with songs by Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Devo, respectively, as soundtracks) would inspire both the rapid-cutting and archive-excavating techniques now thought of as clichés in the music video form.

His films were split into two programs of shorts (most films run for 5-10 minutes or so) each broken up by an intermission q-and-a session with Conner, who is at 72 years of age very sprightly and just the slightest bit obstreperous when he doesn't like an interviewer's question. I attended the program focusing on the more rarely-screened films and versions of films; it was quite instructive to see two alternate versions of Report screened on a single program, and I was delighted to see material like 1981's not-in-the-imdb Mea Culpa (music by Brian Eno & David Byrne) and a new "remix" of Cosmic Ray using a digital split screen technique. It's exciting to see new material from this great filmmaker, even if it (like last year's Luke) is rooted in projects started decades ago. In the q-and-a Conner intimated that he doesn't need to continue making the fast-paced films he's famous for when so many others are doing it for him.

The highlight of the evening for me was finally seeing Conner's longest (at 37 minutes) and most leisurely paced film, Crossroads. Constructed out of footage taken from 27 different cameras watching the nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll in July 1946, Conner's film forced me to contend with the beauty of its iconic mushroom cloud imagery and the concept of cinema as a record of destruction and decay. The division of the film into two halves, marked by the change of composer (Patrick Gleeson to Terry Riley) lends a taste of narrative structure that most of us expect from documentaries.

This year I was first exposed to the term "structuralist film" and the recent work of James Benning (13 Lakes and Ten Skies, each of which are composed of ten-minute-long static shots). Though I feel like I'm struggling to catch up to an understanding of this kind of filmmaking, I wonder why Crossroads, though made in a completely different manner, shouldn't be considered a sibling of this movement. It shares certain (at least surface) qualities, and I found myself contemplating the relationship between nature and the camera much as I did while watching a Benning film. At the same time, Riley's minimalist soundtrack accompanying images of destruction created a link in my mind to Godfrey Reggio's Philip Glass-infused Koyaanisqatsi and its decidedly non-structuralist progeny. I can't help but feel certain that Reggio was familiar with Bruce Conner's film. And I wonder if perhaps Conner hasn't made another like Crossroads because, again, others have been doing it for him.

DeMille and de Mille

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No, this is not another blog post about Anthony Hopkins. Last week I saw a pair of films directed by the DeMille brothers. One apiece, not working as a pair like the Coens or the Pangs or the Farrellys (Just who started this brother-directing-team trend anyway? I'm having trouble thinking of anyone earlier than the Brothers Quay). Cecil B. DeMille everyone knows for having directed the Ten Commandments (which I haven't seen) and the Greatest Show on Earth (which is inaptly named as it's probably the worst Best Picture Oscar winner ever) but he made some very watchable smaller-scale films earlier in his career, particularly in the silent era. I highly recommend Male and Female for some good, class-conscious comedy from 1919. Cecil's older brother William C. de Mille (they each spelled their last name differently for some reason) directed a long list of silents too but quit Hollywood after completing only a few talkies. The final film he directed on his own was the 1932 drama Two Kinds of Women, starring Miriam Hopkins as Emma Krull, the daughter of a "hick Senator" (Irving Pichel) from South Dakota who falls in love with a New York playboy (Phillips Holmes).

Two Kinds of Women for the most part plays like a typical romantic melodrama of the time. In part because the Holmes character is underdeveloped, Emma seems very naive (to her disapproving father and to the audience) to put faith in her new beau's renuciations of his former lifestyle. We're set up to see the usual conflict between "jazz age" values and traditional ones, but Emma sees no such conflict, moving into the world of speakeasies and police raids without abandoning her wholesome, Midwestern outlook. Though the script feels like nothing special, there are a couple of shocking directorial choices, especially in the context of a studio-themed series in which a certain house style is maintained. Besides the famed "Paramount Glow" there was also, for example, an avoidance of any camera movement drawing attention to itself. De Mille shatters this convention several times, most startlingly with a hand-held shot taken from the point of view of a drunken gold digger. There were audible gasps in the audience; one might even have been mine.

The accompanying co-feature was Cecil B. DeMille's This Day and Age. Absent any real lasting stars in the cast, it has become one of DeMille's most obscure and rarely-seen films. The most famous face belongs to Charles Bickford (also found in another Balboa series film, the outrageous White Woman), who plays a racketeer with ironclad connections in all the centers of power throughout the city except for the student body council at the local high school. When he murders Herman, an independently-minded tailor popular with a group of students, they determine to bring him to justice even if the community of adults is paralyzed by his power.

When a Cecil B. DeMille film is working, it unrelentingly sweeps me into the passions and thrills of the story, like a speech by a gifted demagogue. Thus did This Day and Age, milking the maximum narrative mileage out of each on-screen injustice against the youth and society, helped along by a healthy dose of salacious appeal in the form of a subplot in which a schoolgirl (Judith Allen) is used as sexual bait to distract the racketeer's bodyguard. It's only once DeMille spends several minutes more than absolutely necessary on elaborate, extra-packed shots of a victory parade from the scene of Bickford's inquisition (over a pit of rats!) and forced confession, to the courthouse where a previously unsentimental judge proclaims the mob of junior vigilantes "heroes", that I really had time to pause and reflect on what I'd been seeing. I remembered DeMille's conservative political bent, and suddenly noticed how the film acted as a mirror of fascist youth movements in Europe in the early 1930s in its expression of a desire for a new generation to assume the mantle of leadership from adults immobilized in the face of corruption.

I wouldn't necessarily go as far as some have in calling the film a fascist one, in part because it's missing a crucial implication we expect from the word today, that of racial purity. The extremely sympathetic character Herman is a Jewish immigrant who prepares ethnic food for the students, knowing that "the stomach is the last place to get patriotic." Robert Birchard, in his data-laden but context-light book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, points to this and to the existence of a "well-dressed and well-spoken black classmate" whose role in the plot against the racketeer requires him

to masquerade as a stereotypical shoeshine boy. This acknowledgement of black role-playing as a mode of social survival within the predominant white society is virtually unique in pre-1960s American film. (page 262)

Birchard is correct in pointing this out, but his attempt to completely exonerate the film from fascist implications doesn't quite convince. In the prior paragraph, he calls the film an "allegory (represented by youth versus adults) about the necessity for society to renew and maintain the will to defend itself against totalitarian forces (the gangsters)." But if the gangsters are the totalitarian force in the film, what do we call the vigilante methods of intimidation, interrogation and torture so admired by the judge at the end of the film? Clearly the film, like so many Hollywood products, leaves enough room to be read both ways. The fact that the youths use gangster-like tactics on the gangster makes it very similar to a film released by Warner only two months earlier, The Mayor of Hell. Except in that film the youth rebellion is led by James Cagney's gangster character, while This Day and Age cloaks the rebellion's gangster tendencies by casting his mob exclusively with youthfully innocent actors and extras.

Tonight I'm going back to the Balboa to see two more Cecil B. DeMille films, both the type of period epics he is most remembered for: the Sign of the Cross and Cleopatra. I've never seen either before, and I'm very excited to see how they play with such a fascinating (if somewhat repellent) film as This Day and Age fresh in my mind. Will I be swept up by the narrative again, only to find myself cheering for a questionable cause?

Saturday Nitrates

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The other day a fellow cinephile asked me if I'd seen Good Night, and Good Luck or Capote yet. My answer was no, that these days I'm generally not drawn to seeing films that seem to me (perhaps I'm being short-sighted) to be made for DVD or cable TV as much as they're made for theatrical release, no matter how good they're reported to be. I'm much more likely to put a priority on seeing something purely cinematic like The Weeping Meadow, especially since I've never seen a Theo Angelopoulos film in a cinema before. His previous film, the Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Eternity and a Day was theatrically released while I was living abroad in a city where prints of his films probably have never played, and Ulysses' Gaze before my cinematic interests included 3-hour art films by Greek auteurs. I won't pretend that I understood the significance of everything I saw in The Weeping Meadow, but I can assure you that my eyes popped over and over. This epic, which Angelopoulos intends to follow with two sequels, is undeniably composed for large screen theatrical viewing, not for even the most audacious of home systems. His long shots need to overpower the viewer with their complexity and their size. His long takes cannot be interrupted by the distractions of the home environment. A pause button would kill this film, and its incredible debut performance by Alexandra Aidini. Perhaps that makes it somehow too fragile to be of much use in the current aesthetic climate, but as long as there's a place like the Balboa taking the risk of showing such a film (if only for four days; The Weeping Meadow ends this Monday Oct. 31!) I'm going to be there.

The same reasoning draws me to as many revived classic films as I can fit into my viewing schedule. Films made in the era before anyone thought seriously of reducing and broadcasting them to mass audiences can feel like revelations when returned to their natural setting. Such was the case of Singin' in the Rain, which I saw at Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre last weekend. I'd only ever seen it on a television set before, and though I liked it, to be honest I'd never quite grasped why it could be so highly esteemed as to earn a place on so many notable top 10 lists; why it had become perhaps the quintessential Hollywood musical. No wonder; in a way I'd never really seen it! It wasn't just that the vastness of the screen helped me to see details like the broken hairs on Donald O'Connor's bow by the end of "Fit as a Fiddle", or the wrinkle in Cyd Charisse's panty hose when she appears in the "Broadway Melody" sequence. It was that the deep blacks, bright whites and vivid candy store colors emphasized the story's fantastic elements and made me more easily forgive the anti-historical, pro-talkie mythologizing. I was able to dream along with the film.

I don't think I'd ever seen any Technicolor print so rich in color and clarity. So when I noticed that the Stanford's printed calendar boasted that every Saturday would feature a screening of "a beautiful original print (usually nitrate from the UCLA film archive)" I had to wonder if I had just seen a nitrate print! I was familiar with Paolo Cherchi Usai's term "epiphany of nitrate", meaning the moment a cinephile may have when viewing cellulose nitrate (the Stanford being one of the few places in the world insured to run the obsolete material through its projectors for the general public) when the palpable difference between it and safety stock is understood, and all but assumed that my experience with this Singin' in the Rain print must have been mine!

But subsequent research showed me to be wrong. I found sources saying that the original nitrate print of Singin' in the Rain had been lost forever, and others implying that Singin' in the Rain was not quite old enough to have been distributed on nitrate prints, the format having been retired in 1951. In any case, a call to the Stanford Theatre's box office confirmed that the Saturday nitrate screenings will always be for the films being shown at 7:30 PM. I had seen nitrate after all; the other half of the double bill. It was a nicely-colored, but horribly scratched (the worst I've seen at the Stanford) and badly spliced print of the airheaded Don Ameche/Betty Grable musical Moon Over Miami. Nothing jawdropping. No epiphany, nitrate or not.

But I'm going back. According to the person I spoke to on the box office phone number, they'll be showing at least six more nitrate prints over the next few months, including Seven Days to Noon (tonight), Stormy Weather (Nov. 5), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (Nov. 12, and specifically promised to be "gorgeous" in the program guide), Down Argentine Way (Dec. 3), Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (Dec. 10) and Cover Girl (Dec. 17). I know you can't expect to force an epiphany, but I'm going to see if I can't try anyway. And who knows, maybe there will be some incredible safety stock restorations as second features?

Boom Crash Opera

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Nobody would mistake me for a regular operagoer. In 1990 I went on a high school field trip to see a matinee of Die Fledermaus at the SF Opera. On a 1996 trip to New York I caught a performance of the Philip Glass opera the Voyage at the Met. And the other night I saw my third-ever "legitimate" opera performance, Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer and the Trinity test. I was impressed. The John Adams score was great (admittedly I'm a partisan; I think Harmonium just might be the greatest piece of music composed in my lifetime.) The starkly radioactive design of the sets, lights and costumes created an otherworldly space on the War Memorial Opera House stage. The placement of the actors' bodies on the stage reinforced the sense that humanity was at this moment perhaps more clearly than at any other, dealing with something it was simply unable to truly comprehend. The final moments of the opera were particularly breathtaking and intense.

Yet something felt missing from the experience. I'm inclined to agree with the various reviews I've found that place the blame on the libretto, which was built out of a wildly diverse selection of texts of completely different registers, including favorite poems of Oppenheimer's and declassified government documents. Such blending is not a bad concept and in fact fits with Adams's record as a "populist" composer. Except that it didn't really feel as if there was any blending, sonnets difficult to absorb on a single listen unceremoniously dumped next to transcripts of a lot of talk about the weather. As a result, the opera felt entirely too episodic, without enough consistency of threads of theme or character running through it to sustain a sense of drama. Project setbacks would be introduced and seemingly solved before the next aria. Though the music conveyed an urgency that would make me susceptible to being grabbed by the throat and pulled headfirst into the monumental ethical dilemmas inherent in this moment in history, only in a few scenes did "Doctor Atomic" approach that feeling.

Perhaps I was supposed to be already quite familiar with the poems and/or the other documents used as text, and if I had been I would have been able to comprehend how they actually subtly fit together to form a narrative line. Or perhaps narrative line was intentionally out the window, or simply boiled down to a three-hour anticipation of the inevitable detonation. But somehow I don't think an effect that deliberate was really the basis of this pastiche libretto. More likely it was a compromised consequence of Alice Goodman's sudden withdrawal as librettist shortly before its due date. Goodman's recent explanation for bowing out doesn't seem borne out by the finished product. Whether this is because her concerns about anti-Semitism in the opera's structure were overblown all along, were remedied without her participation, or were valid but undetectable to an inexperienced audience member like myself, it's a fascinating subplot, and one that I somehow doubt will come to light until a day when the various parties' own documents become declassified.

A reason why Doctor Atomic's backstage drama is so fascinating connects to the reason why I felt compelled to see the opera in the first place: the Death of Klinghoffer. It's some kind of irony (which kind probably largely depends on your political persuasions) that Goodman reused the same "anti-Semitism" label that had been applied to her last collaboration with Adams and Sellars. I only became familiar with this opera about the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists through the Penny Woolcock film, which I first saw with a rather small Castro Theatre crowd at the 2003 SFIFF. I was incredibly moved, most-especially during the scenes where the panicked hijackers begin terrorizing the infinitely-more-frightened passengers and crew in the ship's dining room. Somehow, in the tragedy of the abrupt violence, singing feels like not only an operatic convention but a hyper-realistic effect even more appropriate than crying or shouting to convey the anguish of the situation. Woolcock's decision to shoot in a very immediate documentary style paradoxically minimized distraction from the music and text at the same time that it fleshed out details of character and setting.

This was my first time seeing an opera on film (opera really has been a big blind spot for me!) and I was as impressed by the BBC production's ambitiousness and daring as I was emotionally drained by the experience. I was disheartened to see how neglected the film was by critics, audiences, and theatre bookers that year. I can only assume that people are either scared off by the "opera" tag or the "anti-Semitic" one that has followed the Death of Klinghoffer since before its premiere nearly 15 years ago. Perhaps the opera and/or the film are indeed anti-Semitic; it's not obvious to me. I've encountered compelling arguments why it isn't, made by Adams and Woolcock on the DVD commentary track and by this guy here. I haven't yet heard a compelling case that it is though.

I've since taken a few stabs at trying to see how other opera films look next to Woolcock's. Bergman's the Magic Flute is a light confection in comparison. I didn't have the patience to watch more than the first 20 minutes of Losey's Don Giovanni on DVD. Maybe it was just my occasional Mozart allergies acting up again. Aria was an interestingly weird experiment but in an entirely different vein. Three Tales was even more interesting, weird, and different (and, like Doctor Atomic, strangely unsatisfying as a whole). I'm excited to try out the Tales of Hoffman when Criterion releases it next month, but I'm not expecting similarities between it and the Death of Klinghoffer. I'm perhaps most intrigued by Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, directed by its composer. (Should I say composed by its director?)

Anyway, what I'm trying to get around to saying is that I highly recommend cinephiles take a look at the the Death of Klinghoffer DVD, even if you've had bad experiences with opera in the past. Let me know what you think of it, if you think it's anti-Semitic or not, if there are other opera films you've seen that share its aesthetic philosophies, or if I need to wipe off my Harmonium afterglow before you'll trust a John Adams recommendation from me again.

Oh, and check out the final final few Doctor Atomic Goes Nuclear programs at the PFA. I've been remiss.