IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY: The Philosophy of Bill

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Don Hertzfeldt's feature-length animation It’s Such A Beautiful Day were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Don Hertzfeldt's latest work, ME, will have its first Madison-area screening at the Cinematheque on Thursday, September 5 at 7 p.m., followed by the full-length version of It's Such a Beautiful Day. The screening, part of our Thursday night Premieres series, takes place at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Garrett Strpko

Those unfamiliar with the work of Don Hertzfeldt will likely be surprised just how far his seminal film, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, pushes the thematic and aesthetic limits of animation as a medium. Originally released over the course of five years as a series of short films, garnering numerous accolades and much critical acclaim along the way, the short feature follows Bill, an average, rather lonely character who learns he is suffering from some unspecified illness of the mind. As Bill’s condition worsens, it leads to embarrassing misadventures, horrifying hallucinations, and moving philosophical reflections, all depicted through Hertzfeldt’s trademark sardonic and subjective style.

Most audiences tend to associate the medium of animation with the simple themes and the creative, eye-popping design of children’s media. While Hertzfeldt’s approach is certainly no less imaginative than the likes of Disney, it embodies a simple yet often ingenious sensibility which in a certain way takes animation back to its roots: pen, paper, and camera. Traditional animation generally proceeds by photographing or digitally imposing moving figures over a static, pre-drawn background. By contrast, It’s Such a Beautiful Day was painstakingly hand-drawn on copy paper. First among the many distinctive features viewers will probably notice is the modest design of the characters and environments. Bill and his counterparts are stick figure-like. His exploits are often depicted against the pure white background, imbuing the film with a character of a doodle, like a flipbook one might have drawn on pad of sticky notes.

Hertzfeldt mixes this relatively simple design with avant-garde optical effects afforded by the 35mm rostrum animation stand on which the film was captured. The animation stand, built in the 1940s and, according to the film’s description on Vimeo, “one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in the world,” allows one to not only capture images frame-by-frame against a flat surface, but also to move the camera in a variety of ways. This gave Hertzfeldt the opportunity to mix his animation with changes in camera movement, focus effects, and other unorthodox techniques. For instance, many of the film’s sequences are depicted through a peculiar ‘split-screen’ effect, in which action occurs simultaneously or sequentially in different ‘bubbles’ distributed across the frame. To achieve this, Hertzfeldt poked holes in a piece of paper, attached it directly to the lens, and lined up his drawings so that they would be framed within those holes. All these techniques combine to create an aesthetic where the materiality of animation—the crumpling of paper, the stroke of a pen, the physicality of a camera—is brought to the forefront and made a spectacle in and of itself.

Also among the film’s distinctive features is the omnipresent, omniscient third-person narration provided by none other than Hertzfeldt himself. Giving us a window into Bill’s hopes, fears, dreams, and memories, Hertzfeldt’s plain, matter-of-fact delivery is the source of much of the film’s humor and broader irony. One cannot help but laugh out of absurdity as he explains in a cool and practical tone the bizarre deaths and ailments in Bill’s family history. Despite the narration’s omniscience, it remains highly subjective; we are kept in Bill’s mind, and things are explained to us from his point of view, which, because of his illness, occasionally defies what we as the audience know to be true.

In addition to being the source of the film’s humor, the narration is also the source of its philosophical concerns. Much of the narration focuses on Bill’s inner life. Besides being surreal, his journey is also existential. His diagnosis (forever kept vague to us, and, we must assume, also to Bill) leads him to mentally explore his sense of identity. One might consider the film a sort of journey of self-discovery—or, even, self-creation. We understand from the get-go, through his unassuming, generic demeanor and appearance, that Bill is a bit of an everyman. But what makes him him? Is it his family, the people and circumstances that led to his birth? Or is it his life choices, the decisions or lack thereof that defined him and his environment? And what if his knowledge and memories of these things are not as certain as he believes? What is he or the world to make of his apparently impending death? Through a careful balance of wit, creativity, and earnestness, Hertzfeldt pushes the boundaries of what we might be used to in the medium to explore these questions with tact and humor.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL: The Marvelous M. Gustave

Friday, August 23rd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Grand Budapest Hotel will screen in the second part of our Thank You, David Bordwell series on Friday, August 30 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by David Bordwell's video essay discussing Wes Anderson's visual style.

By Josh Martin

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” muses lobby boy-turned-reclusive hotel proprietor Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) in the final moments of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Spoken with the “imperceptible air of sadness” that the film’s novelist narrator identifies early in the picture, Zero offers one final remark: “He was one of them.” That faint glimmer in question is Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the meticulously mannered, quick-witted, and often hysterically profane concierge of the film’s titular establishment. Gustave is many things – a poet, a philanderer, a precise and dutiful manager – but above all, he is a man of decency and honor. At this stage of the film, Zero’s tribute to his friend and mentor is also a lament, a mourning of the loss of a man whose principles and dignity, much like the “enchanted old ruin” he managed, left him at odds with an increasingly violent and desolate age. “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” Zero opines, “but he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” Imbued with that indefatigable grace by Fiennes, Gustave H. is the melancholy center of gravity in Anderson’s crown jewel, a film that remains an indelible creation.

Like many of Anderson’s recent works, which experiment with storytelling structures such as the stage-play-within-a-fictional-TV-show-within-a-film of last year’s Asteroid City, or the anthology of newspaper articles recalled by their scribes in 2021’s The French Dispatch, The Grand Budapest Hotel employs a complicated narrative approach matched by its play with aspect ratios, colors, and other elements of form. The film opens with a young girl visiting a memorial site for an author (Tom Wilkinson), whom we are told is one of the literary gems of the fictional European land of Zubrowka. The girl is carrying a copy of one of the author’s best-known works: The Grand Budapest Hotel. Here, Anderson cuts to the author of the novel in question, who remembers his time in the 1960s as a young man (now played by Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest. It was during this stay that he learned the tale of Mr. Moustafa, who regaled him with the loopy account of how he acquired this property in the 1930s – the story that eventually became the author’s novel. Anderson presents these layers of storytelling and artifice with an impressive clarity throughout, with the metafictional structure unfolding smoothly for the viewer.

The plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel itself is zippy, matched by the rhythmic, playful tempo of Alexandre Desplat’s Oscar-winning score. Anderson revels in his tale’s twists and extreme convolutions – knotty phrases such as “the second copy of the second will” come to make perfect sense in a world divorced from any kind of realism. This sense of play extends to the film’s engagement with various genres, defying a simple classification in favor of a knowing smorgasbord of popular forms. The bildungsroman, the murder mystery, the war film, prison break pictures, even a set piece that echoes slasher movies – all are present in Anderson’s metamorphic work. Yet even as it evolves and shifts beneath the viewer’s feet, the film orbits around Fiennes, whose first collaboration with Anderson (he would later reteam to play a panoply of roles in the director’s 2023 Roald Dahl shorts) brings the scrupulous clerk to life with specificity and vividness. The British thespian demonstrates an instinctual feel for the director’s rat-a-tat dialogue, exemplifying Gustave’s prim-and-proper formality and his deliciously combative sense of superiority (“You wouldn’t know chiaroscuro from chicken giblets”).

Yet in an interview with The Daily Beast, Fiennes describes Gustave as “quite alone,” with his cheeky performance of dutiful service acting as a “persona” to veil his more turbulent emotions. More than just a superlative comic turn, Fiennes imbues in Gustave a tenuous balance between the humorous and the melancholic – a balance that is essential to an understanding of the film’s broader milieu. Despite its tinkering with genre and heightened environments, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film principally concerned with the looming clouds of war – with the violence and prejudice that emerged at the twilight of one age and the dawn of another, pointedly addressing Zero’s status as an immigrant and the xenophobic sentiments that arose around this fictionalized portrait of World War II.

Such tonal clashes and thematic concerns can be traced back to the source material. In the closing credits, Anderson acknowledges the inspiration of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author of novels such as Letter from an Unknown Woman who left Europe in the 1930s amid rising antisemitism and fascism. During an interview with Anderson, Zweig biographer George Prochnik describes the film’s “fairy tale dimension” signified by the blend of a “confectionary” style and “black” humor as matching the tenor of Zweig’s own writings. Indeed, The Grand Budapest Hotel is such a feast of candy-colored pastel palettes that one is almost startled by the slow incursion of depravity into its narrative. Hints of unexpected discordance are visible early – Anderson loves sudden non sequiturs and digressions – but as the film progresses, the onslaught of decapitations, dead cats, and severed fingers further disturb the frothy mood.

Anderson is a filmmaker often reduced to a set of recognizable aesthetic idiosyncrasies: symmetrical frames employing what David Bordwell describes as “planimetric style,” visual incongruity, mannered dialogue. As such, the director is often accused of being emotionally distant and socio-politically opaque, a formalist hamstrung by that dastardly label of “style over substance.” Though this contention deserves further scrutiny, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a particularly strong refutation, with Anderson’s style and his themes operating harmoniously in tandem. The affectations and lovingly controlled frames – arranged with as much rigor and purpose as Monsieur Gustave’s hotel – serve as counterpoints to Grand Budapest’s more morose sensibilities, with characters whose stylized mannerisms fail to fully obscure lives marred by tragedy.

An emphasis on Grand Budapest’s solemnity and sociopolitical reflections could, perhaps, dampen an audience’s interest, lest they be subjected to a moody and downbeat experience. However, the pleasures of the film’s form and narrative are so immediate and immense – so evidently delectable for the spectator – that those depths of theme and feeling slowly creep up as the film continues, growing in profundity and capaciousness with each return to Anderson’s world. A decade after its initial critical and financial success, The Grand Budapest Hotel remains beloved in part because it is something of a magic trick, fusing its competing tones, genres, and emotional registers with, to return to Zero’s words, the kind of “marvelous grace” that even Monsieur Gustave would envy.

RACE WITH THE DEVIL on 70 Movies

Tuesday, July 16th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

Listen below to an episode of 70 Movies We Saw in the 70s, featuring co-hosts Ben Reiser (of UW Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival) and Scott Lucas (renowned musician and member of Local H) discuss the marvelous hillbilly horror Race with the Devil. Then see the movie in a new 4K DCP on Friday, July 19, 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Free admission!

RACE WITH THE DEVIL: A Trip Gone Bad

Monday, July 15th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Race with the Devil were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Race with the Devil will screen in our "Action Vehicles" series on Friday, July 19 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. 

By Josh Martin

In Susan A. Compo’s biography of Warren Oates, the iconic star of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), she recalls a bizarre story from the production of Race with the Devil, Jack Starrett’s 1975 genre-bender. With Oates and co-star Peter Fonda eager to appear in “a sure-fire moneymaker,” the former agreed to lead the project — tacking on the additional request of having producers furnish him a new RV. Preparing to shoot the film in the Texas winter, Oates loaded up the vehicle with friends, including pal Harry Dean Stanton, for a series of drives through the southwestern United States. During these drives, Oates and his companions took heavy doses of psychedelic drugs. Soon, they reported experiencing close encounters with extraterrestrial life — encounters witnessed only by those under the influence. In Compo’s account, Oates associate Dean Jones recalls that “they all saw a UFO'' on the drive to San Antonio, though Bob Watkins, another friend, acknowledged that they “were hallucinating to some extent.” This countercultural debauchery may seem irrelevant to the eventual production of a major motion picture, but it is in these conditions — an anxious, drug-addled state, blending genuine fear of the unknown and jovial absurdity — that the equally paranoid and unusual Race with the Devil came to exist.

Starrett’s film features an elevator pitch that practically jumps off the page. Four years after Fonda and Oates first appeared together in The Hired Hand (1971), the former’s directorial debut, the duo reunited for a road movie-turned-horror picture about two motorcyclists who stumble upon Satanic rituals deep in the heart of Texas. If this concept seems ripe for campy thrills and witchy kitsch, the tone that the filmmakers strive for proves more sinister, a mood that is immediately evident from the opening credits. As the camera tilts up on the dividing lane of a dark, empty highway, storm clouds gather ahead, clustered around a lone tree as discordant music sets the atmosphere of unease. The clouds change in color to a bright, blood red, with the space eventually abstracted, enveloping the spectator in this frightening universe.

Despite the early preview of a menacing mood, Race with the Devil more accurately simulates the steady deterioration of a bad trip. Fonda and Oates star as Roger and Frank, respectively, two friends and speed enthusiasts who are taking their first much-needed vacation in a long time: a January jaunt to Aspen for some winter skiing. Roger and Frank are joined by their wives, Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker), as they pack into Roger’s brand spanking-new $36,000 motorhome, equipped with all manner of bells and whistles. The RV enables the kind of independence and solitude that the men are looking for, with Roger exclaiming, “We don’t need anything from anybody! We are self-contained, babe.” But more crucially, the road trip gives Roger and Frank an opportunity to relax, to bond with one another, sharing sentimental remarks over drinks and racing their bikes in the Texas desert. Seemingly in an attempt to push the opening credits sequence out of our minds, the film plays up the tranquility of this escape – the sense of calm that washes over our lead characters.

Stopped for the night in an empty valley, Roger and Frank’s boozy soiree is rudely interrupted when a tree is lit on fire several hundred feet from them. Their interest piqued, the buddies look through a pair of binoculars to see a strange ritual, featuring men chanting and wearing bizarre robes. The tone of the film does not immediately shift, with Starrett teasing the potential for comedic hijinks in this peculiar discovery. Yet as the ritual continues, the film initiates an accelerated editing rhythm, with the montage becoming more pronounced in tandem with the demonic chanting. But this is no hallucination: the frenzied cutting culminates in the sacrificial murder of a young woman, an act of violence that sends Roger and Frank into a full-blown freakout. Spotted by the cult, they find themselves on the run, the good vibes of their vacation thwarted.

Race with the Devil plays on the fears of the post-countercultural moment, on a diffuse sense of paranoia directed at the dark side of peace, drugs, and free love. The sheriff, when informed of the ritual murder, grumbles that a “bunch of hippies moved into the area… stuffed garbage up their nose and into their arm,” thus making the town an uglier place. Though Fonda’s Frank is skeptical that the murder is “hippie”-related, the film draws on this constellation of interrelated cultural pressure points, engulfing post-Manson mania, ritual violence, and Satanic panic.

Equally essential to this concoction of mid-1970s anxiety is a fear of rurality, of what horrors may lurk deep within the forgotten, neglected corners of America’s vast landscape. Race with the Devil concocts a disturbing ambience around the denizens of these small Texas towns, transmitting the unshakable feeling that everyone is in on the plot, out to punish the city folks for their invasion on this territory. Compo notes that the screenplay, written by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop, was “inspired” by John Boorman’s 1971 classic Deliverance, another tale of friends who get a little more than they bargained for with some nefarious locals on their vacation. And while the slasher is not a sub-genre in play here, Race similarly recalls Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), particularly in the dusty spaces and open Texas fields where our horror takes place.

Amid this swirl of influences and cultural concerns, the film had a somewhat tumultuous production, which Compo’s book carefully recounts. Co-screenwriter Frost was the original director, but 20th Century Fox became weary of the unpredictable Oates, Fonda, and Bishop’s frequent changes to the dialogue, eventually placing Starrett in the director’s chair as a steadying force. After this change, production settled into a groove, resulting in a profitable endeavor. In one famed anecdote, producer Paul Maslansky solicited the work of “Satanists and black magic experts” as extras, providing a purported verisimilitude to the far-fetched picture. 

While writing on Race with the Devil often draws comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), the particularities of the cult’s Satanic plot here are functionally irrelevant. What Starrett’s film instead offers is a feeling of suspicion — an uncertainty that builds to a surreal sense of entrapment and terror. In this manner, one feels a stronger kinship between Race with the Devil and the uneasy vibes of films like The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1974) or Messiah of Evil (Huyck and Katz, 1973), especially as Starrett’s picture reaches its climax. Though Maslansky believed that the ending “sucked” and co-star Lara Parker lamented its “meanness,” the unsparing, slow-motion conclusion is the perfect validation of the film’s paranoid logic, with all the distressing incidents and unresolved threads coalescing into a nightmarish series of images. Race with the Devil may have its fun — in its intense chase sequences and its buddy film rhythms — but a feeling of inescapable doom lingers once the credits roll.

Cinematalk Podcast: VAGABOND, with Kelley Conway

Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

Winner of the top prize at the 1985 Venice Film Festival, Agnès Varda's Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) begins with the discovery of the lifeless, frozen body of the young hitch-hiker Mona (Bonnaire). Through flashbacks recounted by individuals who crossed paths with her (portrayed predominantly by amateur actors), Varda constructs a fragmented depiction of this mysterious woman, crafting a mosaic-like portrayal that the director playfully referred to as “Rashomona.” Bonnaire’s multi-faceted turn won her several awards, including France’s Cesar, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prize for Best Actress. Vagabond screens on 35mm film as part of our series tribute to David Bordwell at the Cinematheque on Wednesday, July 10. On this episode of Cinematalk, Ben Reiser sits down with Professor Kelley Conway, a noted Varda scholar, to discuss the making-of and legacy of Vagabond.

VANISHING POINT: The Last American Hero

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

This essay on Vanishing Point is by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Vanishing Point will be screened on Friday, July 12 in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free. Copies of Vanishing Point Forever by Robert M. Rubin will be on sale before and after the screening. To learn more about the book and the movie, listen to a new episode of our Cinematalk Podcast featuring special guest Robert M. Rubin!

By Josh Martin

Kowalski (Barry Newman), the enigmatic protagonist of Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), is a man of few words. He is stoic and direct, always acting on impulse and instinct. This ethos of simplicity is even reflected in his mononymous title: in a deleted scene with a hitchhiker played by European film star Charlotte Rampling, Kowalski insists that this moniker is his “first, last, and only” name. Suffice to say that Kowalski, who finds himself in an interstate chase with highway patrol officers as he drives from Colorado to California, spends little time explaining the psychological motivations of his actions. Instead, he leaves the mythologizing to Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind disc jockey whose program becomes a sort of Greek chorus for the film, narrating Kowalski’s travels by following a police scanner. Through his radio show, the garrulous Super Soul molds the impenetrable Kowalski into a folk legend, a stand-in for the mood of America. Super Soul becomes the voice of Vanishing Point, anointing Kowalski as “the last American hero, to whom speed means freedom of the soul.” “The question is not when he’s gonna stop,” Super Soul wonders aloud, but “who is gonna stop him?”

If this seems rather philosophical for a car chase movie, it all functions harmoniously within Vanishing Point, which is described by cultural critic John Beck “as the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider.” Sarafian, who rose in the ranks from industrial films to Hollywood alongside maverick director Robert Altman, indulges in the experimental spirit of the times. Inflected by Michelangelo Antonoini and other European arthouse masters, the film tinkers with temporality, narrative, and ambitious feats of montage, complicating its own straight-forward conceit. With a script written by Cuban novelist Guillermo Infante Cabrera (under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain), the film strives to probe the notion of the American spirit – to shape a portrait of the independent outsider whose resistance to conformity makes him a national icon and source of identification.

Yet far from a singularly intellectual exercise, Vanishing Point uses its sense of formal play to up the ante on its muscular thrills, balancing its competing aims as a State of the Union address and a super-sized stunt showcase. It is this tension – between the melancholic and the thrilling, the thoughtful mood and the high-octane jolts of action – that makes Vanishing Point so distinct. The plot, of course, is simple: late on a Friday night, Kowalski is assigned to deliver a Dodge Challenger to San Francisco. An amphetamine user and a compulsive risk-taker, Kowalski meets his drug dealer prior to the drive and makes a bet that he can complete the drive by 3 PM on Saturday. Such a feat, of course, would require Kowalski to drive extraordinarily fast.

And drive fast he does. In a quote from an interview with Turner Classic Movies that circulated widely upon Sarafian’s passing in 2013, the late director emphasizes his aim to “physicalize speed,” to make this experience palpable for the spectator throughout Vanishing Point. In the film’s initial chase sequence – which commences when Kowalski is spotted speeding by patrol officers – Sarafian initiates a bombardment of aggressive formal techniques. As Kowalski zips through this windy terrain, the camera presents hazy close-ups of the Challenger that soon shift out of focus, drifting into a blur of indistinguishable movement. The scene proceeds almost as a premonition of the style that would later develop in music videos, with electrifying editing rhythms and an underlying soundtrack of sonically aggressive rock music. If “[physicalizing] speed” was the principal goal, this exhilarating exercise is a testament to a job well done.

In the passages between these sensorial vehicular thrills, Vanishing Point emerges as a character study – of a character who refuses to be studied. Despite Kowalski’s reticence to speak and the overall narrative minimalism, the film continually discloses brief glimpses of exposition through elliptical editing, interrupting the flow of action to chronicle his life’s story. Throughout these fragments, the viewer sees the defining moments of Kowalski’s life: a near-fatal crash during a stock car race, his intervention as a cop during the sexual assault of a young woman by a fellow officer, and the death of his lover in a surfing accident. Later, the cops will discover Kowalski’s war history, adding another traumatic experience onto his growing record. With a life immersed in tragedy, Kowalski takes shape as a man more at home weaving through the verdant green trees and dusty desert landscapes of western America than continuing onward in traditional society. Though the film will pivot to a more literal death drive as its speedy journey progresses, Vanishing Point’s signature images of this outsider indulge in stunning natural scenery, prioritizing extreme long shots of Kowalski’s Challenger as a dot on the horizon, a blip on the expansive landscape around him.

In a rite of passage for every future cult classic, initial reviews in the mainstream press were far from kind. The New York Times’ Roger Greenspun derisively framed it as a film that asks the question, “why not make a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase?” Yet half a century later, Vanishing Point remains a cultural touchstone – and an object of great interest to film directors and historians. Recently, Robert M. Rubin published Vanishing Point Forever (FilmDesk Books, 2024), a mammoth, 500-page volume that assembles production documents, marketing materials, and essays from critics such as J. Hoberman, all serving as proof of the idiosyncratic film’s enduring popularity.

The legacy of Vanishing Point extends to a widely discussed association with the work of Quentin Tarantino, who references the film in his 2007 exploitation homage Death Proof. As Tarantino’s quintessentially loquacious characters chat at a Tennessee diner, New Zealand daredevil and stuntwoman Zoe (Zoe Bell) professes her desire to drive a 1970 white Dodge Challenger, with her friend instantly exclaiming “Kowalski!” in return. When another character expresses their unfamiliarity with Vanishing Point, Zoe responds incredulously: “It’s just one of the best American movies ever made!” If it’s not one of the best American movies ever made, it certainly is one of the most American, channeling the spirit of the era and the sublime pleasure of its scenery to craft a portrait of the last American hero, “that last beautiful free soul on the planet.”

Cinematalk Podcast: VANISHING POINT With Robert M. Rubin

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

On a new episode of the official UW Cinematheque podcast, Director of Programming Jim Healy talks with Robert M. Rubin, author of Vanishing Point Forever, a gorgeous new volume from Film Desk Books. Rubin discusses the enduring legacy of Vanishing Point (1971), director Richard Sarafian’s existential car chase classic. Rubin also talks about the essential contributions of author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who was credited with Vanishing Point’s screenplay using the pseudonym Guillermo Cain, and the star qualities of the Dodge Challenger R/T! Vanishing Point screens for free in a new 4K DCP on Friday, July 12 and copies of Vanishing Point Forever will be available for sale before and after the screening!

 

New Cinematalk Episode!

Wednesday, June 19th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

On an all-new episode of our Cinematalk podcast, Cinematheque programmers Jim Healy & Ben Reiser discuss the free screenings on offer during June and July!

THE SMALL BACK ROOM: Life During Wartime

Friday, June 14th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on The Small Back Room were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A newly restored 4K DCP of The Small Back Room will screen on Friday, July 5, 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is Free.

By Josh Martin

In the London war offices depicted in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Black Room (1949), an assortment of background signs provide a grim insistence on nightly wartime rules: “Don’t forget the blackout!” Set in 1943 at the height of the Second World War, the anxious, gloomy atmosphere engendered by the mandated preventative blackout enhances the viewer’s experience of this cinematic nocturne. As the preeminent mid-century British filmmakers, Powell and Pressburger (known collectively as The Archers) are still best known today for their elaborate use of Technicolor. Whether in service of the lavish, fantastical ballet of The Red Shoes (1948), the feverish desires of Black Narcissus (1947), or even the floral gardens of A Matter of Life and Death (1944), the legacy of the Archers is inseparable from their probing of cinematic color’s emotional and affective possibilities. However, the Archers were no strangers to the affordances of black-and-white, demonstrated by collaborations such as I Know Where I’m Going (1945) and The Small Back Room, a film that draws on moody shadows and expressionistic style to craft a tale of British despondence, resilience, and redemption.

Based on a 1943 novel by Nigel Balchin, Powell and Pressburger’s film introduces viewers to a cramped, chaotic space in the London offices of the British army, where a compendium of misfit scientists experiment with the latest in weapons technology to serve in the fight against the Germans. Operating like a disorganized, miniature Los Alamos, the “back room boys” attempt to marry their knowledge of statistics with the “feel” of weaponry as experienced by the everyday soldiers. Sammy Rice (played by David Farrar, a favorite of the Archers) is a specialist in munitions and bombs working out of this back room, but he is struggling with a disability: the loss of his foot in action. Left in endless, excruciating pain, Sammy alternates between popping pills and failing to stay away from any whiskey he can get his hands on, doing whatever it takes to mitigate the misery of his prosthetic foot. Despite the support of his love interest, war office assistant Susan (Kathleen Byron, another member of the Archers’ stock company), Sammy spends most of his time stuck in a cycle of discontent and snarky self-loathing, cynically lamenting his lot. However, Sammy finds a chance at a purpose when approached by Captain Dick Stuart (Michael Gough), who informs him of the existence of a dangerous new German bomb that the military has thus far struggled to successfully disable.

The Small Back Room arrived at a transition point in the career of the Archers. As described by Powell in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, a rift had formed between the filmmakers and J. Arthur Rank. The superproducer, who shepherded many of the Archers’ most notable triumphs of the 1940s, was profoundly unhappy with the prospects of The Red Shoes. As the Archers grew more frustrated with Rank and his lack of confidence, the independent filmmakers were also being wooed by Alexander Korda, the head of British Lion Productions. Powell approached Korda with the idea of adapting The Small Back Room, which, from his vantage point, “had a great suspense sequence” at its climax and an “ideal” role for Black Narcissus star Farrar. Korda, unfamiliar with the book, agreed to buy the rights if Powell and Pressburger were interested in adapting it for the screen. Rank ultimately decided, along with his associate John Davis, to dump The Red Shoes into theaters with little fanfare and no premiere. This decision sparked, in Powell’s words, the conclusion of “one of the greatest partnerships in the history of British films.” The Archers agreed to a five picture deal with Korda, the first of which would be The Small Back Room.

Powell and Pressburger were familiar with dramatizing British perspectives on World War II. The catastrophic conflict – and the decades leading up to it, as presented in 1943’s epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – had been a central subject for the directors throughout the 1940s. Far from a retread, The Small Back Room offers a distinct approach that expands on the Archers’ previous explorations of World War II-era Britain, placing an emphasis on the London home front – on the bureaucratic politics and behind-the-scenes machinations that shaped the war effort. This national portrait works in careful conjunction with the film’s more penetrating character study of Sammy Rice, whose endurance and recovery from his shattering, alcoholic despair mirrors Britain’s own comeback and ultimate victory in the war.

Though triumph is on the horizon by the film’s end, our subject matter is stark – and starkly reflected by the non-naturalistic shadows and sinister ambience of the film’s black-and-white world. Powell admitted to incorporating his love of the great German expressionist films into The Small Back Room, and we see the fruits of this influence in the surfeit of canted angles, in the cavernous, twisted spaces inside the war office – all united by the low visibility and limited illumination provided by cinematographer Chris Challis’ black-and-white compositions. Most prominently, such influence is visible in the noteworthy sequence criticized upon release by Britain’s Monthly Film Bulletin as a “lapse… into surrealistic camerawork.” One must forgive the Bulletin for its own “lapse” of judgment, as the scene in question is one of the most astonishing in the Archers’ filmography.

Resembling the Salvador Dalí-designed interlude in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) or, perhaps more aptly, the drunken dreams of grandeur by Emil Jannings’ lowly porter in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), Powell and Pressburger present an assortment of nightmarish sounds and images that represent the inner turmoil of Sammy, now at his lowest point in the film. As a clock ticks loudly in the soundscape, the camera lingers on Sammy’s gaze, fixated on a whiskey bottle. The clock grows louder, with the film alternating between images of the clock’s inner workings and striking close-ups of a pained look on Sammy’s face. Eventually, the scene itself morphs into an abstract and distorted space, inundating Sammy and the spectator with strange visual reminders of his addictions, failings, and overwhelming fears. The whiskey bottle grows larger, the alarm clock becomes louder, and our tortured protagonist finds himself one step closer to his breaking point.

This commitment to formal innovation is evident throughout The Small Back Room, from the exchange of intimate close-ups on Farrar and Byron’s expressive faces to the meticulous tension of the climactic bomb disposal, a quiet exercise in stillness and unease. Down on his luck and in dire pain, facing a high likelihood of death, Sammy still approaches the bomb hoping for some insight that could help beat the Germans. “Are you sure you can manage?” the captain asks. With a typically British stiff upper lip, Sammy can only chuckle and smile, responding: “Suppose I’ll have to.” In a resurgent moment for the Archers in contemporary film culture, highlighted by the North American tour of the British Film Institute’s “Cinema Unbound” retrospective and the forthcoming release of the Martin Scorsese-produced Powell/Pressburger documentary Made in England, The Small Back Room is a prime candidate for rediscovery and further appreciation. Among their many canonized classics, the film remains a key chapter in their oeuvre, a visually accomplished character study that doubles as an essential work of postwar British self-mythologizing.

The Clockwork Precision of SPEED, 30 Years Later

Friday, June 14th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Speed were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Speed from the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research will be screened on Wednesday, July 3, at 7 p.m., in our series tribute to the late David Bordwell. Admission is free

By Josh Martin

Speed (1994) exemplifies the fairly well-crafted action picture. You can say it has three acts (bomb on elevator/on bus/on subway train), or Thompson’s four parts (with a midpoint stakes raiser, the death of an innocent bus passenger, proving that the bomber is willing to kill everyone). The running motifs do causal work. The bomber is watching a televised football game featuring the Arizona Wildcats, and in phone conversation with Jack, the cop on the lethal bus, he refers to Annie, the woman driving, as a ‘wildcat.’ Only later will Jack realize that the bomber can see Annie’s Arizona sweater, so there must be a video camera aboard. The ‘pop quiz’ line answered by Jack’s flippant ‘Shoot the hostage’ at the film’s start recurs at the end, but now Annie is the hostage, and Jack cannot follow his own maxim. Both motifs tie into a broader arc of Jack’s character. At the beginning he’s valiant but impetuous, and his mentor, Harry, warns him that he’s going to have to learn to think if he’s to survive. The bomber mocks Jack for the same reason: ‘Do not attempt to grow a brain.’ But when Jack concludes that the bomber is monitoring the bus, he devises a way to send looped video footage to the bomber while the passengers escape. At the Climax, Jack can use his recklessness strategically: with the subway train hurtling out of control, he realizes that he must accelerate. In the course of his adventure, Jack’s boldness gets tempered by wiliness and prudence. This is not a moral education worthy of Henry James, but it’s enough to bind the suspense and stunts into a reasonably well-contoured whole” (David Bordwell).

Bordwell’s analysis of Jan de Bont’s action classic Speed (1994) emerges in the context of a broader look at modern action cinema in his 2006 book, The Way Hollywood Tells It. Rejecting a cynical reading of action films in which “spectacle overrides narrative,” Bordwell instead sketches a vision of the genre contingent on “all the standard equipment of goals, conflicts, foreshadowing, restricted omniscience, motifs, rising action, and closure.” “Far from being a noisy free-for-all,” Bordwell writes, “the industry’s ideal action movie is as formally strict as a minuet.” De Bont’s film thus serves as an exemplar of how such “equipment” works in the modern action genre, producing a form that blends extravagant thrills with key narrational work.

What strikes the viewer about Speed, both from Bordwell’s assessment and one’s own engagement with the picture, is its impressive economy in fulfilling these classical norms. Here we have a film that rarely slows down, instead providing character depth and narrative information through action, often by employing clear and cogent cinematic grammar. The rather simple scenario is nonetheless handled with skill, intricacy, and precision, operating in tandem with a rapid pace and sense of energetic urgency. The film follows Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves, in prime form), a hotshot LAPD bomb squad member who recently succeeded in thwarting an elevator bombing by an aggrieved terrorist (an amped-up Dennis Hopper). As an act of revenge, Hopper’s bomber rigs a Santa Monica city bus to explode if his monetary demands are not met. If the bus accelerates over 50 miles per hour, the bomb will be activated. If the bus subsequently slows below this 50 mph threshold, it will explode. If the LAPD tries to remove the passengers from the bus, it will explode. These are the conditions in which Jack must save the lives of the ordinary Angelenos who happen to board this doomed vehicle.

One of Speed’s many strengths is its casual evocation of the day-to-day lives of the bus riders, succinctly crafting dynamic characters who exemplify the diversity of the city in microcosm. The nervous Helen (Beth Grant), who will later panic in the face of this dangerous endeavor, mentions that she started riding the bus due to stress: “I just couldn’t handle the freeways anymore. I got so tense.” Self-proclaimed “yokel” Stephens (Alan Ruck) is the quintessential LA tourist, confused by the airport and the city’s insufficient networks of transportation. Annie, played by Sandra Bullock in her breakout role, receives an especially snappy characterization. Aside from some small essential details – her revoked license, and her attendance at the University of Arizona – the film is ultimately uninterested in an elaborate backstory that would bog down the pace. The viewer meets her in a moment of high stress: chasing down the city bus, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. From the smirking reaction of bus driver Sam (Hawthorne James), this is part of Annie’s everyday routine – it’s just another day on the LA bus lines.

Of course, such expertly staged metropolitan mundanity only carries any weight in contrast to the intensity of Speed, a picture that deliberately heightens its pace – and its performances – to match the playfully choreographed chaos. Dennis Hopper, eight years after David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), brings a similar villainous ferocity to his role as the bomber, whose boisterous bellowing and unpredictable fury provide a sublime foil to the stoic Jack Traven. Reeves, ice cold off his widely criticized performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1993), is a natural fit as the sharp, cool-as-a-cucumber Traven, further honing the action star persona he began crafting as early as Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991). Paired with the nascent everywoman charisma of Bullock, our three leads make for a formidable trio, helping to smoothly execute the narrative norms and beats that Bordwell emphasizes.

Far from just a showcase for its stars’ well-honed personalities, Speed is also one of the definitive Los Angeles movies, a city symphony that presents obstacles and details only possible in the smog-covered city of Angels. “LA is one large place,” Stephens quips at one point, and the film eagerly makes use of this sprawling landscape. Los Angeles is built upon a complex network of freeways, a web that enables high-speed pursuits and the omnipresent threat of stultifying traffic jams. De Bont, who served as the cinematographer for fellow LA actioner Die Hard (1988) before making his directorial debut here, uses the idiosyncrasies of the city to the fullest, exploiting the narrative challenges presented by construction hazards, the inescapable visibility of hovering local news cameras, and the threat of ravenous reporters. By the time Jack and Annie send a subway car crashing onto Hollywood Boulevard, landing in front of delighted tourists at the Chinese Theatre, the film’s portrait of everyday LA slyly gives way to an ending only possible in the movies. Hooray for Hollywood, indeed.

In a decade that produced a surplus of high-octane action filmmaking – from the continued reign of Die Hard’s John McTiernan to the emergence of Michael Bay’s signature mayhem – Speed remains a high point of the era. In the introduction to The Way Hollywood Tells It, Bordwell offers a defense of his study of classical norms, conventions, and “ordinary” films, writing that the interrogation of these norms allows us to “better appreciate skill, daring, and emotional power on those rare occasions when we meet them.” On its thirtieth anniversary, de Bont’s picture remains one such occasion: a beacon of classical Hollywood craftsmanship and its enduring ability to thrill the spectator.

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