What Is It? and other questions

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This weekend is Crispin Hellion Glover weekend here in Frisco. Not only is the multifaceted artist bringing to the Castro Theatre three evening presentations of his controversial, finally-complete experimental film What Is It?, accompanied by his slide show presentation and a question-and-answer session with the audience, but there will also be an eight-film retrospective of his acting work matinees and midnights. From his Reagan-era roles in River's Edge and the jaw-dropping the Orkly Kid to more recent starring roles in the Herman Melville update Bartleby and the Willard remake, Glover's career highlights will finally be shown together on the largest screen possible. And if you can't bear a Crispin Glover weekend without seeing David Lynch's Wild At Heart, it will be playing at the Clay Theatre midnights Friday and Saturday (unfortunately, unless you can enlist the aid of Doc Brown and his Delorean, you'll have to give up one of the Castro midnight screenings to see it.)

I was invited to interview Glover about What Is It? on the Castro Theatre balcony a couple weeks ago. What follows is the first-ever Hell On Frisco Bay artist interview. I've edited out my star-struck stammering but have tried my best to leave the conversation very close to the way it actually happened:

Hell on Frisco Bay: You've been working for years on this film.

Crispin Glover: Yes.

HoFB: Did it evolve in shape and scope, or is it how you envisioned it from the get-go?

CG: Both, because originally it was going to be a short film to promote the concept of working with a cast the majority of whom would be actors with Down's syndrome. I was interested in selling a certain script to a corporation to another film I was going to direct, and they were concerned about the concept, so I wrote a short movie to promote this idea. The initial structure of a simple hero's journey story structure: somebody in their normal world being disturbed, having to go out of that world into a special world, find allies and enemies, and in the end learn a lesson...all of that sits within this film. What the character was going through changed vastly as it turned into a feature film, and then again when I put myself in, and the Steven Stewart character who is the fellow with cerebral palsy that chokes me to death. He's the main character and author of the second film [It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!], which I'm very close to finishing.

HoFB: So after What Is It? we can look forward to that.

CG: I'm hoping. I never really like to say specifically because things can take longer than you think, but I'm hoping it will be relatively soon.

HoFB: It sounds like What Is It? started with an almost ideological desire to make a film with a particular kind of cast. It's certainly a rare thing to see characters with Down's syndrome played by actors with Down's syndrome in a feature film.

CG: Well, that's something I differentiate specifically though. When I was casting, I made it very clear to the people that I was working with that the film isn't about Down's syndrome and they're not playing characters that have Down's syndrome. It isn't about Down's syndrome. I was questioned about it a lot because the screenplay always had a lot of violence in it, and a lot of the guardians were concerned about the inaccurate portrayal of people with Down's syndrome as violent and the truth of it is that they're generally very genteel people and very nice people to work with. So I always make it exceedingly clear.

The fact of it is that really, the film is about my psychological reaction to certain restraints that are going on in corporate-financed film and the lack of taboo that I think is an extremely important barometer of what the culture is generally thinking about. It's being averted by corporate entities concerned that they're going to make audiences uncomfortable and lose money in the long run, and it ends up stupefying the culture. It's not a good thing. What's unusual is to see people with Down's syndrome making up the majority of the cast of a film and playing the lead roles. When I look into the face of somebody that has Down's syndrome I see, automatically, the history of someone who has lived really outside of the culture, and you can feel something from that when almost the whole film is made up of actors who have that quality.

HoFB: It seems like the film is an opposite of what we normally see in American films. Aesthetically, thematically, structurally, it's the complete opposite.

CG: A lot of people have said that. I agree, because there is the taboo element; it is what is not allowed and it genuinely does feel quite different because it is ubiquitous; you cannot at this point in time get funding from corporations if a film has any of those qualities at all. If you have one element they will not, even just one. This film has way more than one, so that makes it feel very different.

HoFB: Do you feel you're part of a tradition of oppositional cinema?

CG: Yes, absolutely. I don't feel like I'm breaking ground at all. I feel like I am reacting to this culture specifically. It is not something that has necessarily happened so much. I know there are people that want to react, and it's very difficult in this culture because it's expensive, and then you have to have distribution. I'm in a unique position from having worked in corporately-funded media so it does make it easier for me to contact media. If I didn't have that history and I made this very same film there's no way I would be able to get the kind of attention from media that I'm able to get. It's unfortunate because I'd still stand by the film if I was not. But there is definitely an integral part that I'm reacting to, and I've been part of that. It's been a part of my life so there's a genuine truth to it and genuine frustration that I've dealt with first-hand so it doesn't feel fake.

HoFB: It seems like a big part of the genesis of the themes and structure of the film is your place in the world, which is of course marked by your life in Hollywood as an actor.

CG: That's right. There is definitely an autobiographical element to the film, and there should be. People should make movies about what their experiences are. Often actors will write books or they'll make movies and it generally isn't about what their genuine experience is, and this one is really about that. Of course, it's poetically done so it's not like me walking into a casting office or a business meeting and having a particular discussion but I think the concepts -- ultimately it depends on the person, it seems like you're particularly sensitive to it, and some people just can't make any sense out of it all. It's rarer; most people do make some kind of sense of it, but it sounds like you're picking up on very specific things.

HoFB: I think it's definitely helped for me to have heard and read and talked about the film beforehand, and then I was able to view the film through that lens.

CG: That's one of the reasons that I go and talk about it. On some level, it's cheating because really a film should stand on its own one hundred per cent. It's one of the reasons why Rainer Werner Fassbinder's sensibilities are interesting to me. I discovered his filmmaking while I was working on this. I hadn't locked the film, but I was late in the process. Among the many things I admire about his filmmaking are the socio-economic, political, psychological commentaries that exist within the structures of his films, how clearly he understood those structures and how well he was able to illustrate those psychologies, the political/monetary backgrounds, and what they meant. It's extremely intelligent, extremely perceptive. I haven't seen another filmmaker that's come anywhere near the dynamic realms that he's gone into. It's unusual how intelligent that filmmaking is.

HoFB: You're making me think of Fox and His Friends.

CG: Fox and His Friends has it, Berlin Alexanderplatz has it, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven has it. He has it all the time, and I felt an obligation to ask myself, "what is this meaning specifically within the culture?" I felt the obligation to clarify in my own mind what some of these poetic things mean, because often I'll view something with an emotional reaction. I ask myself, "why am I reacting to that?"

HoFB: Fassbinder is definitely a kind of oppositional filmmaker, but aesthetically he's a lot less radical than what you're doing.

CG: Maybe. Cinematically, Herzog, Kubrick and Buñuel, really those filmmakers are more cinematic filmmakers, particularly Kubrick and Herzog.

HoFB: Fassbinder is cinematic, he's just not as...

CG: Fantastical.

HoFB: Yeah, exactly.

CG: But you can see later on he started working with sets, in his last film, Querelle. It's not my favorite of his films. Also he didn't finish it. There's a narration in it. When he narrates his own films, like the narration he does in Berlin Alexanderplatz which I think is my favorite narration I've ever heard in film, it's just so psychologically integrated into the moments, and he's a great performer, and intelligent. It's just phenomenal. In Querelle they have like an American narrator voice narrating this stuff. You just know if he'd finished the film it would've been a very different thing. His last film I think he was alive to finish was Veronika Voss, which had a beautiful look to it. He was so young when he died. It's really a tragedy. The amount of work that he did in his life; he made more films than years he lived, and one of those films is Berlin Alexanderplatz, which is fifteen hours long. I feel that if he had remained alive the face of cinema at this point in time would be totally different because he would have reacted to these very things that I believe are going on right now. I really do admire him very much.

HoFB: Is there anyone you would point to in the tradition you're operating in psychologically?

CG: Buñuel. L'Age D'Or specifically. I have my analysis of that film, and I think he was very much reacting to a Catholic-based situation. I feel these reactions in the film. It's maybe overlooked now, because these reactions are not necessary at this point in time. At that time when he was in Europe, Catholicism was pretty overwhelming. He grew up in Spain, so he definitely had that reaction his whole life, and it was a valuable thing for him to do, and it made sense for him. I don't live in a Catholic culture. It wouldn't make sense for me to be reacting to that. I live in a very different, maybe a little bit more difficult to define, or maybe certain things shouldn't be defined because if you define them you can get in real trouble, but there are different things that I'm reacting to, different control elements other than Catholicism.

HoFB: It's interesting how Buñuel did it in different ways at different points in his career. At first he was doing it very aesthetically radically with Dali, but later in films like Viridiana it's a more a narrative approach.

CG: And they're fantastic. I hesitate to call things narrative or non-narrative. All of Buñuel's films are narrative. What is It? was at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest experimental film festival in the US, and it won Best Narrative Film. This is a narrative film, but it is in the tradition of the vocabulary that Buñuel was working with in his early career. I see clearly those poetic realms, but you have to work in those poetic realms if you really feel that you could be offending people sometimes. Buñuel had to work poetically because if he just made a film that specifically attacked Catholicism he would have been in even much greater peril. There was some genuine peril. People got mad! They didn't just think this was a nice little fun film. He produced the film in Spain and then he had to leave Spain because of Franco. That's why he went to Mexico and that's when he started directing films again. And it is great to see how he changed. And it's something that I've thought about a lot. Certainly, all of the films that I'm interested in making are not in this exact same kind of vocabulary.

HoFB: It seems like even your acting work in the past has sometimes dealt with the audience's stance in regard to celebrity, like in The Orkly Kid, or Nurse Betty, or even that line in Rubin & Ed where Rubin talks about "famous frauds". It seems that, especially in The Orkly Kid, you haven't been afraid of looking at ways the general public relates to celebrity.

CG: Yeah, and What Is It? definitely has something about celebrity. It's a funny thing, because I've known people that are, you know, very well-known, and there is a business to celebrity-dom. It's peculiar to me if somebody doesn't realize that. Celebrity does change one's reality; even I see that there's kind of a warped sensibility of things. Everybody to a certain extent is warped by whatever their own reality is, if you want to call it "warped". It's a pejorative but it doesn't need to be. There is something that can be played with. I think Andy Kaufman played with celebrity in ultimately a very intelligent fashion, but if one plays with it people can become very confused.

I feel like the persona that is put forth by some of the most well-known celebrities, who are very much in control of that persona, is often quite the opposite of what their real self is, and probably their own mind's eye of themselves, and that one of the reasons that they want to put this other persona so far forward is because they really don't feel like that about themselves. I feel that often, though not always, people that constantly play a heroic type of persona are actually cowardly, whereas I feel like it's a very brave person who plays the cowardly person, or the person that is not viewed as the best person or the good person or the person that one wants to be. Of course it isn't one hundred percent true. There are great performers who have played heroic people, but I think that often times it isn't that way.

HoFB: I think that everyone, celebrity or not, does it to some degree. Takes on a persona.

CG: Sure, sure. And there are positive things to it too. You want to be the best person you can be, hopefully. Or you want to be the worst person, if that's your persona.

HoFB: It seems you tend to play characters that are not always the "best person". They're often very subversive.

CG: Yeah, I find those characters really interesting to play. Sometimes when I play the characters that are a little less eccentric or something, I wonder, is that as interesting to me personally? I mean, I should do those. Sometimes it's good for me. I mean, like the Nurse Betty character I played was definitely an example, but I enjoyed very much working with Neil LaBute. He was really a great director and I'm really glad I did that film, but I remember thinking, "this good guy I'm playing isn't that...odd."

HoFB: Do you feel closer to the eccentrics?

CG: It depends. On some levels I don't feel eccentric at all. I dress fairly conservatively. I actually I have a good standard of living, my property in the Czech Republic, my house. I have some nice antique cars. I've acquired a certain amount of things, but really most of my monies are going toward making my films now. But, I try to go to nice restaurants if I'm going to go out, or cook food for myself that's healthy. You know, those kinds of things that are normal.

HoFB: You've got a niche in American acting, where you draw people who wouldn't normally be drawn to Hollywood films like Charlie's Angels.

CG: That I consider a positive, definitely. That is a good thing and it's something that I count on for this film, for touring around. I know there are people that have become interested in seeing me, and I'm very grateful for that. Now I'm touring around with the film and I really am cutting out the middleman. I'm working directly with the audience that is coming in and paying the money to the box office. Ultimately those people are paying me back directly for the investment I've made in this film. I don't have a corporate, intervening middleman that comes between me and the audience. So I am extremely understanding that each one of those people that comes in is helping me out, and it's a very direct relationship. When I'm doing the book signings and I'm personally talking to each person, I'm quite grateful to that person. It's a very direct working relationship with -- I don't even like the word "fan base", but whatever you want to call it. People that are interested in your work.

HoFB: One last question: It seems that, increasingly, the way that economic transactions take place in the film world is through the sale of DVDs. I understand you're not going to be making a DVD of What Is It? available.

CG: It's hard to know what will happen, but right now I have zero plans for it. I want to continue touring around with it for years to come, and I have a concept of growing a library that I can keep touring around with, because I know everybody that wants to won't be able to see it on those three days in San Francisco that I'm here. If I come back next year or later with another film and I have this film with it, some other people can come that didn't get to see What Is It? before. Or, if somebody's interested in seeing it again. Because I know I like looking at a certain kind of film over and over again, and I want to make films to see over and over again, that you want to see projected in a theatre like the Castro.

End of interview.

What Is It? screens at the Castro Theatre with Crispin Glover appearing in person at 7:30 PM on October 20, 21 and 22. The Crispin Glover Film Festival will be held at the same theatre on those dates.

Robert Aldrich Blog-A-Thon: Apache

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I apologize for the long silence on this blog; I can't believe it's already been more than three weeks since my last post. Some of that time has been spent watching movies but it still feels like I've missed an awful lot. For example I unfortunately ended up seeing only a single solitary film from the Mill Valley Film Festival lineup, the one I was able to catch at an advance screening here in Frisco: The Queen. This shiny new Oscar hopeful ought to satisfy just about anyone looking for an intelligent film, but will probably disappoint anyone looking for a brilliant one. Of course, intelligent films are rare enough that I expect this one to do very well against its as-yet unseen competition.

Arranging trips to Mill Valley or San Rafael is difficult enough but the past few weeks I've been stretched particularly thin. I hope I can figure a way to make it to the latter venue for an October 26 screening of the Magnificent Ambersons and at least one or two of the Otto Preminger films playing the first weekend of December. I'm disappointed I missed films argued for so beautifully in places like here and here, but I didn't want to pass up an opportunity to go on a road trip to the Lone Pine Film Festival with my dad and then report on it for Greencine Daily. One real highlight of attending the festival was getting a chance to meet and talk movies with one of the best filmbloggers on my sidebar, Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Dennis is hosting a Robert Aldrich Blog-A-Thon today, but since I've already got several unfinished pieces I want to finish up and publish here this week, I'd all but given up on the idea of contributing, especially since I'd only seen the director's two most widely-esteemed films, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Kiss Me Deadly. But then I read about the difficulties preventing fellow blogger Girish Shambu from contributing a post to today's event, and I realized that I had no good excuse not to come up with something, however lame. I popped in a previously unwatched videocassette of Aldrich's 1954 Apache to see what I thought of it on a first viewing. What I've come up with is far less a contribution to the blogosphere's Aldrich-knowledge than an apology explaining why I emerged from a viewing of a Robert Aldrich film without having much of anything to say about Robert Aldrich.

Though my decision to pick Apache from among all Aldrich films to watch and write about is essentially due to happenstance (it was the one title of his I had conveniently lying around the house), I also thought it might be fortuitous to look at a film in the genre (the Western) that was also the focus of the film festival I'd just attended and written about. My fascinations with film genres in which a talented auteur director might be easily able to slip in touches more interesting and unexpected than in a Hollywood "prestige" picture have led me to become particularly interested in Westerns, but not to the point of becoming any kind of an authority on them as my exposure is still too narrow. Focusing a large portion of my film-watching efforts on the offerings available on Frisco cinema screens has helped to ensure that; Westerns simply don't get screened in this town very often. Even those of the spaghetti variety, like the Leone films playing the Castro next Tuesday and Wednesday, aren't seen terribly often here. So after a weekend at Lone Pine I've definitely been spending more time than usual considering Westerns, and particularly the way they portray American Indian tribes.

But nothing could really have prepared me for the utter preposterousness of seeing Apache's stars Burt Lancaster and Jean Peters in Technicolor "redface" makeup for ninety minutes. (Angelina Jolie might do well to look at this movie right about now.) Well, perhaps I could have eventually gotten used to it if the dialogue and acting weren't so stiff and humorless (Lancaster's Massai makes a single joke toward the end of the film when he places a tiny cornstalk up to his ear, but even that feels like far too weighty a moment), or if the history lessons weren't so bizarre in their inaccuracy. The film's premise rests on an understanding that Geronimo's Apaches (and, as the film implies, all other tribes as well) had no knowledge of farming until they were introduced to it by whites. The screamingly ludicrous symbol of this is a sack of seed corn (corn!!!) given to Massai by an Oklahoma Cherokee with the intention of helping him mimic white culture.

The gaping erroneousness throws the entire film off-balance, to the point where it's difficult to unpack just what messages are being sent, other than misinformation. There are attempts to bring up issues like assimilation and cultural relativity, but they can't really go anywhere. Still, it's worth watching the engine of Hollywood narrative techniques for once applied to get us rooting for a character who in most Westerns would be an unqualified villain. Massai's freedom fighting often resembles terrorism but the deck is stacked to have the audience feel the maximum amount of pity for his tragic character. By the end of the film he turns himself in and lives happily ever after, which I understand departs from the actual, more tragic fate of the historical inspiration for the character. It made me think of the requirements of the Hollywood Production Code. It seems unlikely that a film with the stance of Apache could have been made much earlier than 1954, by which point the code was starting to become a little less tight of a straightjacket in its requirements for the depiction of protagonists. But at the same time there's no way filmmakers working under the code could ever consider showing the truth of the worst atrocities committed against Indians, as it would mean terrible crimes would have to go unpunished. One Code-friendly option could have been to show the crimes and then punish them, but that would go against the sweep of a history in which perpetrators of such crimes have long gotten away with their misdeeds.

There is my reaction to a single viewing of Apache. It would take a far greater investment of study of the film and of other Aldrich films for me to be able to look past the biggest stumbling blocks I found in this film, primarily the 1954 convention of casting white actors in non-white roles, the stereotyped dialogue, and Hollywood-style rewriting of history. I hope to inch my way closer to a better understanding of Aldrich and what exactly he brought to the table through the other entries in today's Blog-A-Thon, but to be honest I'm not too eager to revisit Apache anytime soon. In fact, I feel more like running in exactly the other direction from Hollywood depictions of American Indians right about now. Which means the 31st Annual American Indian Film Festival coming to the Lumiere and the Palace of Fine Arts Nov 3-11, including a screening of the Journals of Knud Rasmussen Nov. 9, can't arrive soon enough!

Frank Borzage and the "Classical Hollywood Style"

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The "Classical Hollywood Style" of the 1930s and 40s is often referred to as if it were a monolith. The achievements of Hollywood auteurs from the era, whether Chaplin or Welles, Hawks or Hitchcock, are usually illustrated in terms of their divergence from this so-called "invisible style". Less often discussed are the contributions individual directors (outside of D.W. Griffith) may have made to constructing the style.

The legacy of Frank Borzage, whose films have recently been on view in New York, Berkeley, California and elsewhere this summer, is perhaps an ideal battleground for some of these issues to be wrangled out. Borzage was certainly no "maverick" director like Chaplin or Welles; he earned the first and the fifth Academy Awards for Direction for his Seventh Heaven and Bad Girl, respectively. Rather, he was a crucial developer of the ways that talking picture melodramas might resemble and distiguish themselves from their silent film predecessors. He was one of the first successful importers of European movements like expressionism and the Kammerspiel into his films (surely it was no coincidence that for a brief while he shared a studio, Fox, and a leading lady, Janet Gaynor, with F.W. Murnau). A silent-era Borzage film, especially a collaboration with cinematographer Ernest Palmer and art director Harry Oliver, contains a far more sophisticated interplay between shadow and light than most other Hollywood releases of the era. The result: these films look years ahead of their time.

But it's also interesting to take a look at Borzage flourishes that did not become assimilated into the "Classical Hollywood Style." Take Man's Castle, a beautiful film in spite of an apparant technical crudity even for a film made at the low-budget Columbia of 1933. I say "in spite of", but is it in part because of certain now-crude-seeming characteristics that the film is such a masterpiece? Frederick Lamster, in his 1981 auteurist survey Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity points out that after an early scene in which Spencer Tracy's Bill has just dramatically revealed his shared bond of poverty with the homeless Trina (Loretta Young, who developed a real-life romance with Tracy during filming), the couple are visually separated from the street crowd by a scale-distorting back-projection. The technical effect would be unacceptable by the standards of realism demanded for Hollywood product only a few years later, but the emotional effect of showing the pair all the more isolated from the world around them adds resonance to the film's romatic themes. I also noticed numerous instances in the film of what could be eyeline mismatch, but which also lent a dreamlike outlook to Borzage's starry-eyed characters.

Films like 1937's History is Made at Night and 1940's the Mortal Storm might be examples of the "Classical Hollywood Style" at its pre-war epitome, but the films Borzage made after the war have been characterized as increasingly out-of-step. His 1948 Moonrise, which led to a ten-year absence from feature filmmaking, has been categorized with the films noirs of the time, but it doesn't deal with the hardened criminals and cold-blooded schemers they do, nor does it utilize much of the gritty realism associated with the genre. Instead the film looks like a set-constructed exterior manifestation of the Dane Clark protagonist's increasingly tortured mental state, the bucolic decaying into full-fledged paranoia exhibited through the use of entrapping camera angles and POV-shots. The result seems more at home compared to Night of the Hunter or certain RKO Val Lewton films of the mid-1940s, than lumped in with Hollywood's increasingly "real" noir films of the time.

A wealth of recent web-based writing on Borzage has recently arisen along with the touring retrospective; Reverse Shot and Slant are two of the best places to find it. If you have your own thoughts on this underdiscussed filmmaker, the "Classical Hollywood Style", or the relationship between the two, please add a comment below!

Friz Freleng For All

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Welcome to the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon, in celebration of the late animation master's 100th (or is it 101st, or 102nd?) birthday. The picture to the right is a caricature of Friz from the 1952 Chuck Jones cartoon the Hasty Hare. Links to other sites participating in the occasion will be listed at the bottom of my long-winded post. Thanks to everyone for participating! I think it's wonderful to have such a collection of writings on Freleng in one place on the anniversary of his birth!

I'm not an animator or an animation scholar, but I love to watch classic cartoons, and sometimes try my hand writing about them. Knowing that writers far more practiced than I can sometimes get their extremities caught in painful, embarrassing traps when trying to reach for analysis of cinematic topics outside their realm of expertise (Mick LaSalle being a recent example) might make me hesitant to write on the form. But, though I'm still in the beginning steps of understanding the animator's craft (a term I use because it parallels the commonly-used "actor's craft", not to imply that animating or acting are unartistic endeavors), I hope I have something to contribute to a discussion of cartoons, if only an expression of my passionate belief that the best are as essential as the acknowledged great works of the cinema.

One of the film critics I most admire, Manny Farber, was among the first non-specialists to treat the Warner Studios' cartoons as an important topic of discussion, with a piece published September 20, 1943 in The New Republic called "Short and Happy." It's a brief, six paragraph article, but it does a good job describing the amoral appeal of the Warner house style in the early 1940s when compared to the growing tendency of Disney (the only cartoon studio to have received widespread critical attention at that time) toward virtuous uplift. In 1941 Preston Sturges had made a similar, if perhaps unintended, critique of Disney's transformation by using scenes of pure slapstick from 1934's Playful Pluto in his Sullivan's Travels as the catalyst for the film director's conversion from would-be educator to entertainer, reversing Disney's path during the period. Farber praised Merrie Melodies for being "out to make you laugh, bluntly, and as it turns out, cold-bloodedly." The problem with his praise in the original article, however, is that it now seems rather misdirected. Repeatedly Farber gives the credit for the cartoons to the producer Leon Schlesinger and not any of the directors to whom we now know he gave relatively free creative reign. This is probably why, by the time "Short and Happy" was placed in the 1971 Farber collection Negative Space, it had been edited to attribute the cartoons' singular qualities to Freleng, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Robert McKimson. But the re-edit causes more problems than it solves, as by bringing McKimson into the equation Farber awkwardly conflates two eras of Merrie Melodie-making: 1940-42, when Jones, Freleng and Avery were directing but McKimson was still an animator, and the period that stretched from 1950 until the early 1960s, when nearly all the studio's cartoons were directed by Jones, Freleng or McKimson. An added paragraph constrasting the directors' styles feels like it belongs in a different piece; it was that paragraph's reference to the 1958 cartoon Robin Hood Daffy that made me feel the need to look up old issues of The New Republic on microfilm.

Sad to say, Freleng probably emerges from Farber's 1971 (or earlier?) re-edit worse off than if he, like Robert Clampett or Frank Tashlin, hadn't been mentioned at all. In the new paragraph, Freleng is simply described as "the least contorting" while Avery gets to be called "a visual surrealist" and McKimson "a show-biz satirist", with Jones receiving several sentences of praise all to himself. At least Freleng cartoons like the Fighting 69 1/2 and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt get singled out for praise, but the latter is misidentified as a McKimson product in the re-edit. Perhaps the most enduring line Farber uses to describe the cartoons is: "The surprising facts about them are that the good ones are masterpieces and the bad ones aren't a total loss." In the original article three examples of "good ones" are identified as The Case of the Missing Hare, Inki and the Lion (both Jones) and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt. But the lone counter-example is the "poor" Wabbit Who Came to Supper which is saved by a single gag (where Bugs tricks Elmer into celebrating New Year's Eve in July) from implied "total loss"-hood. I disagree; that's one excellent 'toon!

But here I am, already on the fifth paragraph of this post, and I still haven't gotten around to saying what it is about Freleng that made me want to initiate this Blog-a-Thon in the first place. The above stuff is important, I think, because Farber is a deservedly influential critic, and his damningly faint praise of Freleng's talents in the revised "Short and Happy" has probably held some sway over the many, many readers of Negative Space in the years since its publication. It, or other conventional wisdom like it, certainly held some sway over my own opinions of Warner cartoons when revisiting them as an auteurist-minded adult. I took the genius of Avery and Jones almost for granted, and it was Bob Clampett's extraordinarily distinctive (almost always MOST contorting) style that first caught my attention as something of a "new discovery" for me. But gradually I began to appreciate Freleng more as well, and now I think he among all the Termite Terrace directors most exemplified this original Farber quote, contrasting the studio's artistic method against "insipid realism":

It is a much simpler style of cartoon drawing, the animation is less profuse, the details fewer, and it allows for reaching the joke and accenting it much more quickly and directly: it also gets the form out of the impossible dilemma between realism and wacky humor.

Increased realism has been a constantly recurring ambition of animated and live-action filmmakers alike. The Warner cartoonists were not immune; most notably, Jones started his directing career attempting to draw simulations of the natural world in films like Joe Glow the Firefly. Avery would often take a scene to the technological limit of cartoon realism, then demolish that limit with a gag drawing attention to the cinema-unreality of any filmed image (the hair-in-projector gag in Aviation Vacation being a quintessential example.) Clampett, on the other hand, fought against tendencies toward cartoon realism, and usually ended up with an anything-goes cartoon universe of wackiness. What Freleng would do in his most effective cartoons was something else: he'd create a gag that, if not realistic, would at least be performed by his characters as it would be if they were vaudeville actors. Then he would repeat the gag to the point of ridiculousness, altering time and/or space to increase the impact of the humor, and creating a sense of inevitability that is funny in a completely different manner than the unpredictable hilarity of a Clampett cartoon. The Wabbit Who Came To Supper follows this pattern, as do many of the Sylvester-Tweety cartoons, but the most perfect distillation of the principle is probably the 1949 Yosemite Sam/Bugs Bunny face-off High Diving Hare.

As Greg Ford notes in his commentary on the Looney Tunes: Golden Collection disc on which this short appears, High Diving Hare has a long set-up. It's true that there is often some gag-light "dead space" in a Freleng cartoon, but at least in the case of this one, the set-up is necessary to build the gag premise that will so pay off in the second half of the cartoon. The premise, for those of you who may not have seen the film before but want to see me overexplain it (I really don't recommend that; please watch it right now or skip to the end of this post where the links to other bloggers are) is that Bugs is presenting a variety show at an Old West Opry House. Yosemite Sam's favorite daredevil Fearless Freep is on the bill, inspiring the diminutive gunslinger to lay down a pile of cash and plop down right in front of the stage. Carl Stalling's musical contribution increases the tension as the camera makes a vertical pan (Paul Julian's background using a perspective effect to simulate a live-action tilt) up the impossibly high ladder to the platform Freep is going to dive off of. But if Sam isn't impatient enough already, he really loses his temper when Bugs interrupts a lengthy introduction to accept a telegram from the weather-delayed diver. Of course, all this set-up isn't to make Sam's anger more believable; with Yosemite you believe his anger from the first cel. It's to create a situation in which Sam doesn't want to just kill Bugs in his usual way, but to motivate him to force Bugs up the ladder to the platform so he'll dive in Freep's place. Freleng and his crew don't have a pair of six-shooters that can make Yosemite climb that ladder himself; they have to construct and draw everything.

The first dive takes over a minute to unfold, but each second is perfectly used. First there's the climb, backed by Stalling's chromatically-rising violins, then acrophobic (or so he says) Bugs inching to the edge of the diving board, then clinging to Sam and to the board to avoid the fall. When Sam aims his guns and orders, "now, ya varmint! dive!" it seems like the moment of no return. But of course it's really the perfect moment for a Bugs switcharoo. He convinces Sam to turn around and close his eyes while he puts on his bathing suit (an absolutely absurd modesty since Bugs is naked to begin with!) With his adversary not looking, he's able to rotate the board around an imaginary center, then use sound effects he must have learned from Treg Brown to bamboozle Sam into thinking he'd actually jumped into the bucket of water at the bottom of the ladder, when he's actually just landed on the platform, only a few feet lower than where he started. What happens next is absolutely priceless: Sam expresses genuine respect for the "critter", and in his state of shocked admiration he steps off the board into a stagebound freefall.

I'm not going to detail each of the subsequent 8 times Yosemite tries to force Bugs off the diving board and ends up the fall guy himself, but in each iteration of the gag the climb-trick-fall cycle gets briefer than the previous, except for the third, and the ninth and last fall. Sam's third ascent takes a few seconds longer because it's the film's first real break with the rules previously established in the cartoon's exaggerated but thus far logical universe. When he steps out on the board, unable to figure out where Bugs went, the audience is privy to the knowledge that he's standing upside-down on the underside of the board. Or so we think; as soon as Bugs informs Sam that he's the one upside-down, he falls, illustrating the principle that Looney Tunes characters can do anything until they realize they've done something they can't. By falls number seven and eight Freleng leaves the camera trained on the middle of the ladder so that we see a sopping wet Sam climbing up, and soon enough falling down and making a splash, but we aren't shown what Bugs is doing up there to keep Sam's water wheel of torment turning. The moment when we expect to see him fall again, but instead the silence is broken by the sound of sawing, is a hilarious friction between anticipation and surprise. The resolution is perfect because it's simply too easy. When Michael Barrier in Hollywood Cartoons claims that "gags in Freleng's cartoons tend to be of equal weight, so that a cartoon simply stops when its time is up" he either isn't considering High Diving Hare or else he's thinking specifically of big, complicated, finishes like the ones Jones supplies in most of his Road Runner or Sam Sheepdog cartoons. High Diving Hare's "biggest" gag is the first dive, and the others are like ripples on the surface, keeping the laughter generated from the initial splash going and going.

This is all just how I see it. Please feel free to disagree with any or all of my train of thought by leaving a comment below!

Freleng appreciators in the Frisco Bay area will want to know that the Balboa Theatre will be holding a tribute to the director sometime this Fall, including a screening of Ford's 1994 documentary Freleng Frame-By-Frame. (I'll post the precise date when I learn it through the theatre's informative weekly newsletter, available on the theatre website and through e-mail.) In the meantime they're screening a (non-Freleng) cartoon before each showing of Little Miss Sunshine.

Once again, thanks to all the participants in this Blog-A-Thon! If you've written something you'd like me to link, please e-mail me or leave a comment. Here are the links I've collected so far; they'll be updated several times throughout the day:

Adam Koford at Ape Lad.
Akylea at Robots cry too (en Español / in Spanish).
alie at blogalie (en Español / in Spanish).
ASIFA-Hollywood.
Brad Luen at East Bay View.
Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan.
Craig Phillips at Notes From Underdog.
Dave Mackey.
David Germain at david germain's blog.
Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
Dennis Hyer at Atlantic County Cartoons.
Gir at Gir's room with a moose.
girish.
Harry McCracken at Harry-Go-Round.
J.E. Daniels at the Adventures of J.E. Daniels.
Joe Campana.
Josh at jazz::animated.
Kurtis Findlay Burnaby at animated toast!
Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.
Mondoxíbaro (en galego / in Galician).
Peter Nellhaus at coffee, coffee, and more coffee.
Richard Hildreth at Supernatural, Perhaps -- Baloney, Perhaps Not.
Sean Gaffney.
Stephen Rowley at Rumours and Ruminations.
Steven at The Horror Blog.
Ted at Love and Hate Cartoons.
Thad Komorowski at Animation ID.
Thom at Film of the Year.
Tom Sito at Tom's Blog.
Xocolot (en Español / in Spanish).

UPDATE 8/22/06: Just wanted to point out that Wade Sampson published a MousePlanet piece on Freleng last week in honor of the centennial as well.

Also, thanks to Cartoon Brew, Greencine Daily, La Vanguardia and other sites that spread the word about the Blog-a-Thon. With more than two dozen officially participating sites, I'd call the day an unqualified success!

Bruce Conner's Permian Strata

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I thought that these two posts would make up my entire reportage from last month's Silent Film Festival. I was wrong. As the preamble to my entry in Girish Shambu's Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon I want to revisit my too-brief mention of G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, a film I'd never seen before, saving it for just such an occasion as a new print at the Castro Theatre. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it: a carnival of unending depravity both gaudier and gloomier than I had expected, this atmosphere driven on by Clark Wilson's superb Wurlitzer score. Making Louise Brooks the face of the festival, her image appearing on posters, T-Shirts and the festival program cover, surely helped make the screening the biggest audience must-see of the weekend. I only hope the folks who were turned away from the sold-out show can take some solace in the fact that, according to the Louise Brooks Society, the Balboa and the Rafael will be screening Louise Brooks films on the weekend before her centennial birthday November 14.

The screening was introduced by several people, but most notably Bruce Conner, filmmaker, artist, and on-off Frisco inhabitant since 1957. But like Louise Brooks, Conner was born in Kansas, and he related what it was like growing up in the same town as a retired Hollywood star, where he almost took dance classes at her studio, and almost got up the nerve to ring her doorbell once. You can see the beginning of Conner's intro at filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's blog. Zahedi mentions Conner's evidently declined health, something I too wondered about, as he seemed quite a bit less lively and comfortable speaking than he did even nine months ago at an SFMOMA appearance. I imagine that it might be easier to relax and naturally let a mischievous energy flow while speaking about one's own films in front of a few hundred people who have come because of their interest in your work, as opposed to speaking in front of 1400 silent film and Louise Brooks fans, some of whom might not even know who you are. But then Conner doesn't seem like the sort to be fazed by stage fright; he got 5,500 Frisco voters to mark his name in a 1967 Board of Supervisors campaign (perhaps won over by his campaign speech: a list of sweets). According to this interview he was diagnosed with a fatal illness twenty years ago. Perhaps it's simply a matter of having good days and bad days. At any rate it's great to see him still involved in Frisco's film and cultural scene.

But what I really want to talk about is not Conner's health, but his filmmaking. In particular, a film he made in 1969 that rarely gets discussed, and is only barely mentioned even in the monograph 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. This excellent tome contains close analysis by Bruce Jenkins of film-school staples like A Movie and Looking For Mushrooms as well as of later works like Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland. The 1969 film is called Permian Strata, a title which works in conjunction with the images and the song that makes up the film's soundtrack to form a colossal pun. So often experimental film gets pigeonholed as overly serious, boring, stuffy, or requiring an expertise in filmmaking processes to fully appreciate. But a big part of my attraction to these films is that so many of them exhibit an accessible sense of humor more genuine than some so-called comedies stuffed with lines written by "professional" joke writers do. Few films have the belly laugh potential of Permian Strata. I'll try my best to talk about the film without giving away the all the humor for those who haven't seen it yet, and I won't reveal the song on the soundtrack by name (I won't be able to avoid leaving clues, though, so if you're really concerned about having the surprise spoiled read no further).

The humorous nature of Permian Strata may be why it hasn't been discussed much. Conner has called it a "bad joke movie", which sounds like a dismissal of a slight film. But is it? Conner has never avoided using humor as a part of his films, his sculptures, or his other art pieces. His first film, the 1958 A Movie, derived as inspiration for its clown-car-of-recycled-footage collage aesthetic the scene in Duck Soup where Rufus T. Firefly calls for forces to come to the aid of Fredonia, which is probably why it too feels like a comedy. Dada was another early influence on Conner, and somehow it seems natural to connect Permian Strata with a piece of "anti-art" like Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. Like Duchamp, Conner appropriates pre-existing artworks and alters them to create a new work satirizing the relationship we have to art and history.

One crucial difference between Permian Strata and the Duchamp parody is that (understatement alert!) Conner's film is appropriating far less well-known specific images than the Mona Lisa. It took me a fair bit of research into the fascinating history of Christian films for me to determine Conner's source: a 1949 Cathedral Films release the Life of Paul: On the Road to Damascus. Having not seen this 13-minute film parable yet, I don't know whether it is the origin for every image in Permian Strata (I'm not sure how the opening shot of a robed figure flicking powder into a cauldron would fit into the story of St. Paul, for example) but according to Conner lore it's one of his few collage films (along with Marilyn Times Five) in which all the images come from a single source. Judd Chesler has been quoted on this:

The style of Strata marks a departure from Conner's earlier collage forms. Conner chooses the significant footage from the found film and simply sets it off against the music. There's no cutting between the scenes.

This last sentence suggests that Conner simply took an intact excerpt from On The Road to Damascus and synched it against the chosen music track, but that surely isn't true. In fact Conner has carefully re-edited the shots so that the visual content lines up with certain lyrics in the song. Thus the narrative of Acts 9:1-18 is subverted by the "sound effects by Robert Zimmerman". For example, while we hear the words "walking on the street" we see the actor who plays Ananias doing precisely that. It gets a laugh every time I've seen it, whether at a public screening with strangers or when watching the now out-of-print Facets videocassette at home with friends. We may be responding to a "bad joke" or taking gleeful pleasure at the secular trumping the sacred. But I think there's something else going on. Though On the Road to Damascus has been all but forgotten, it unmistakably bears the symbols of something quite familiar: the historical/Biblical film. The appropriated images stand in for an entire genre, and one surely doesn't have to be a non-Christian to recognize the absurdity of the artifice of a low-budget period piece. In the context of the original film, this absurdity might well be overcome by strong narrative and/or direction, but when recontextualized (redirected) by Conner every gesture feels like a peek behind the puppeteer's curtain.

The moment when Ananias lays his hands on the unidentified blind Paul (it occurs at the end of On the Road to Damascus and the middle of Permian Strata) is particularly hilarious in light of the double-entendre of the song, which you may have guessed by now. Cinematic depictions of the blind being "healed" are invariably ludicrous (at least, I can't think of any that aren't, can you? Don't say At First Sight or I'll assume you're a Coca-Cola operative), but due to the temporal re-editing in Conner's film the viewer doesn't even know exactly what the actor playing Paul is trying to portray. He arches his shoulders, sucks in his chest, flutters his eye lashes, and suddenly his eyes pop wide open like he's just gone under the influence of a strange drug.

Permian Strata's final shots, in which Paul is struck blind, seem particularly significant in light of Conner's life and career. Conner had utilized themes of blindness before, most notable in a pair of pieces relating to Ray Charles he made in 1961: the sculpture Ray Charles/Snakeskin and the film Cosmic Ray. Regarding the latter, according to a quote Jenkins highlights from the transcript of the 1968 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Conner "felt that I was, in a way, presenting the eyes for Ray Charles, who is a blind musician." Furthermore, Joan Rothfuss in her biographical section of 2000 BC quotes Conner relating an experience he had at age eleven that he'd unlocked from his unconscious upon first trying peyote in 1958:

I was home in the late afternoon with the sunlight coming through the window in my room. I was lying on the rug working on my homework. I decided to rest and I laid my head on the floor. The light started to change and became very bright....Shapes and sizes were changing. It seemed like they weren't inanimate. They were living things. I was part of them, and I was moving into them. I moved into a space that was incomprehensible to me....I went through things, and places, and spaces, and creatures. I became them, and I came back to myself....I went through all these changes until I was so old. I was so wrinkly. My bones were creaking and likely to break....Then I began to realize that I was on the floor, I was back....I became myself again, after eons of time....It was the same room. Only fifteen minutes had passed

I'm not sure what to make of this mystical experience, except to think such a memory surely is something Conner has carried with him through his artistic life, and to note certain parallels to the transformation the Paul character undergoes in the final minute of Permian Strata. At the moment he becomes blinded by a "very bright" light (in On the Road to Damascus it's Heavenly light accompanied by the voice of Jesus Christ), the soundtrack provides a couplet: "it's the end" rhymed with "come back again". I could be reading way too much into what was intended as nothing more than another synchronization joke like the one made at the line "walking on the street". But if Conner in 1969 remembered coming back again from exposure to a beam of light, it could be one reason why he responded to this particular 16mm footage strongly enough to make a film out of it.

Though Conner apparently believes that "Avant-Garde is a historical term. It doesn't exist anymore", here are some other pages to consult in today's Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon:

Acquarello at Strictly Film School.

Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura.

Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan.

Chris Cagle at Category D.

Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity.

Matthew Clayfield at Esoteric Rabbit.

Culture Snob.

Filmbrain at Like Anna Karina's Sweater.

Jim Flannery at A Placid Island of Ignorance.

Flickhead.

Richard Gibson.

girish.

Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.

Tom Hall at The Back Row Manifesto.

Ian W. Hill at Collisionwork.

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages!

David Hudson at Greencine Daily.

Darren Hughes at Long Pauses.

Jennifer Macmillan at Invisible Cinema.

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee.

David Pratt-Robson at Videoarcadia.

Seadot at An Astronomer in Hollywood.

Michael Sicinski at The Academic Hack.

Michael S. Smith at Culturespace.

Squish at The Film Vituperatum.

Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.

That Little Round-Headed Boy.

Thom at Film Of The Year.

Chuck Tryon at The Chutry Experiment.

Harry Tuttle at Screenville.

Walter at Quiet Bubble.