Category: Video

THREE REASONS FOR CRITERION CONSIDERATION: Shuji Terayama’s PASTORAL, TO DIE FOR THE COUNTRY (1974)

THREE REASONS FOR CRITERION CONSIDERATION: Shuji Terayama’s PASTORAL, TO DIE FOR THE COUNTRY (1974)

null

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play's Robert Nishimura spotlights the provocative career of the late Japanese avant-garde director Shuji Terayama. He has created this essay with the accompanying trailer for Pastoral, To Die In The Country in an effort to convince Criterion to restore and release this important work as part of its collection.]

Every great filmmaker reaches a point in their career when they need to reflect upon their life and childhood, tracing the path that lead them to where they are today. Most often these nostalgic quandaries find their way into new fictionalized scenarios, drawing on personal experience to entertain themselves as well as audiences. Sometimes a director takes a more direct approach, probing their past in the form of autobiographical diaries. Our experiences as children inevitably make us who we are today, and tapping into those memories can provide some tasty material for any filmmaker who questions why they make the kind of films they make. (Look to Federico Fellini’s entire career for further evidence of that point.) Not all memories are immediately accessible to recall, especially those associated with extreme emotional connections.

Those particular memories are stored in the deep recesses of our subconscious and often emerge in our dreams; even then, they're not exactly clearly defined. So, then, what happens when a director decides to make a film about their childhood, but also must confront issues of psychological trauma that have been buried within their subconscious? The result is Shûji Terayama's Pastoral, To Die in the Country, a film so unique and spellbinding that it transcends all classification.
null
Shûji Terayama is probably the most radically subversive yet well-respected director in Japanese film history. He was the filmmaker's filmmaker, a media darling and a true Renaissance man. For many directors from the 1970s onward, Terayama was pure inspiration. In my previous Three Reasons installment for The Noisy Requiem, Matsui Yoshihiko told me that seeing Pastoral was an eye-opening experience, one that immediately inspired him to become a filmmaker himself. In Japan, Terayama was a well-known poet, artist, writer, street performer and leading figure in Japan's growing avant-garde theater movement in Tokyo. He had a profound effect on the art community in Tokyo, but remained elusive to mainstream attention outside of Japan. One of his first films, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a wildly experimental short in which children overthrow the adult world, shocked critics upon its release and managed to get banned outright in several countries. Despite being completely avant-garde and metaphoric, what offended the censors were the film's scenes of simulated sex involving children. By today's standards, these same scenes would hardly lift an eyebrow. Even a casual Freudian reading of the film reveals what would be his strongest contextual trademark: serious mommy issues.

For anyone who would like to know more about Terayama's life, Pastoral is as good a place as any to start. For the most part it is an autobiographical film, teaching us all about Terayama's upbringing in a small countryside village in Aomori Prefecture. After losing his father during WWII, Shûji was raised by his very domineering mother as well as the determinedly traditional and superstitious townspeople. We see Shûji compete with these traditional values, struggling to find stimuli and sexual satisfaction in a small town that is very much stuck in time. All Shûji wants to do is break away from his mother and the other backward hillbillies, get laid by the milf next door and catch the first train out of town. Such a synopsis might very well have been from the movie you watched last night at the multiplex (like Judd Apatow's Midnight Train to Bonerland, coming to a cinema near you…probably), but Pastoral is in no way a traditional narrative. Just as our own memory becomes fragmented and nonlinear, Terayama utilizes the same disjointed dream logic that corrupts all our memories. Characters float in and out inexplicably, settings change without warning, the cinematography and editing are highly expressionistic, and just when you start getting comfortable with this style of storytelling the film abruptly stops. Halfway through Pastoral, we learn that not only are we watching a film, but that Terayama hasn't finished making it yet. The director (played by Kantarô Suga) isn't satisfied with how things are going and must go back in time, enter his own film and change the outcome.
null
The film begins (as does the Three Reasons video) with his earliest childhood memory: playing kakurenbo (the Japanese equivalent to hide and seek) in a cemetery. As little Shûji lifts his head to find his playmates, all the people associated with his youth come creeping into view from behind the tombstones. At this point we see that all the characters in the film are wearing whiteface, a characteristic usually reserved for ghosts. But these are not ghosts come to haunt him, they are the specters of his past that have become faded over time, himself included. These characters are stuck in time as well as place. Terayama uses images of clocks throughout the film to exemplify this point, especially in his own childhood home, where his mother's refusal to fix their broken clock indicates her unwillingness to change, forcing young Shûji to be stuck along with her. The film maintains dull monochromatic tones whenever Terayama is at home or in the village. The villagers are represented by a coven of black-hooded, eyepatch-wearing old women who keep the town in a stranglehold of superstition. Just outside the town is a traveling circus troupe, constantly preparing for a show that never occurs. Whenever we visit this particular location, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of color fills the screen and covers the circus characters. For Terayama, these characters represent modernity with their wild sexual escapades and complete freedom from time and tradition. Once Shûji is exposed to these people his desire to run away is firmly cemented. The only thing holding him back is his mother.

Terayama once wrote that life was like an enormous outgoing book. So if we needed to change something about ourselves, we need only go back and rewrite what happened. Pastoral represents his desire to do just that. This is why the Terayama character must go back and confront his younger self. In order to complete his film Terayama must convince his younger self of what needs to be done: kill their mother. In scenes where Terayama is in contact with the younger Shûji, his subconscious is allowed to run wild. Free associations and dream-derived figures parade past the two Terayamas in one particularly beautiful sequence. Fans of Luis Buñuel's surrealistic films or Guy Maddin's recent introspective films will find a kindred spirit in Terayama. But in many ways Terayama is Maddin's stylistic opposite, and Buñuel couldn't hold a two-sided candle to the effortless phantasmagorical freedom of Pastoral.
null
Albeit titled "For Criterion Consideration," I largely use that phrase as a euphemism. This film needs to be seen; I just point to Criterion because they are respected for bringing important films to a wider audience (in the best editions, etc., etc.). Needless to say, Pastoral, To Die in the Country is an important film by an important filmmaker. The unfortunate fact that none of Terayama's films are distributed anywhere outside of Japan forces determined cinephiles to use questionably legal means to find them. Japan's FilmForum does have the English-friendly four volume compilation of Terayama's short films, which includes the oh-my-god-think-of-the-children Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Die-hard fans of Japanese cinema or the avant-garde will know Terayama, but it is time that the West pay their proper respects to a great filmmaker by allowing his films to be widely seen. I cannot think of a better salute to Shûji Terayama than a Criterion release in the U.S. or a Masters of Cinema release in the U.K.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. Born and raised in Panamá, he then moved to the US, working at the University of Pittsburgh and co-directing Life During Wartime, a short-lived video collective for local television. After fleeing to Japan, he co-founded the Capi Gallery in Western Honshu before becoming a permanent resident.

VIDEO ESSAY: Searching for the Muppets

VIDEO ESSAY: Searching for the Muppets

null

[iw-legacyvideo id=”6e400350-1317-11e1-8472-123138165f92″ url480p=” http://v.indiewire.com/iw_flash/PressPlayNew/PressPlay_Muppets_Part2.mp4″ url720p=”null” url1080p=”null” stillimage=”http://indiewire.s3.amazonaws.com/6e/4162e0131711e18472123138165f92/file/animal_muppet_13.jpg”%5D

EDITOR'S NOTE: The release of Jason Segel's The Muppets has re-ignited world-wide interest in revisiting the legacy of Jim Henson. To mark the occasion, Press Play contributor Jason Bellamy has created Searching for the Muppets, parts 1 & 2. Together, these video essays explain the enduring popularity of these beloved characters as well as evaluate their cultural impact since the death of their creator. The embeddable version of Muppets, part 1 is here. The embeddable version of Muppets, Part 2 is here.

When Jim Henson died in 1990, at the age of 53, there was reason to fear that the Muppets wouldn’t live on without him.

They did. Since Henson’s death, Muppets have appeared in three major movies, a short-lived TV series, a few TV specials and several direct-to-YouTube videos. They’ve inspired toys, calendars and postage stamps. And now they’re poised to hit the big screen yet again, in a movie written by and starring Jason Segel.

Indeed, the Muppets brand, which has roots to the 1950s, has persisted in Henson’s absence. But the Muppets’ true spirit? That’s been hard to find.

The word “muppet,” a combination of “marionette” and “puppet,” accurately describes the majority of Henson’s foam-and-fur characters wherever they may roam, from Sesame Street to Saturday Night Live. But when we talk about “The Muppets,” we’re referring to a very specific, if sprawling, cast of characters who gained their fame with The Muppet Show.

Starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Rowlf, the Swedish Chef, Statler and Waldorf and so many more, The Muppet Show played for five seasons. It inspired three Jim Henson movies and a cartoon spinoff, not to mention Fraggle Rock, while creating a brand as distinct as the one over at Sesame Street.

nullWhere Sesame Street is designed to educate, The Muppet Show is designed to entertain. Full of frenetic song-and-dance routines, intentionally bad jokes and chest-heaving off-stage drama, The Muppet Show is a loud, loony, heartfelt variety act that’s transparently disguised as a loud, loony, heartfelt variety act.

To find the essence of the Muppets, the search has to begin here, because The Muppet Show was Henson’s magic factory. It was a place where a frog tap-danced, crocodiles rocked and pigs flew … in space. Working closely with head writer Jerry Juhl and longtime collaborator Frank Oz, who literally was Bert to Henson’s Ernie, Henson created a world of whimsical absurdity that seemed limitless, and in fact often delighted at pointing to the presumptive line just before leaping over it.

Like the puppets themselves, the show was a marriage of tangible authenticity and cartoonish fantasy, brought to life by incredible unseen artists who were so skillful in their illusions that the predominantly waist-up action never seemed less than fully formed.

Thirty-five years after its inception, the genius of The Muppet Show remains its cross-demographic appeal. Kids are helplessly drawn to the characters’ colorful and cuddly exteriors, and all the high-energy skits that needn’t be fully comprehended to be wildly entertaining. Adults, meanwhile, find kinship in the characters’ black and blue interiors — all those maladjusted and overwhelmed but unfailingly optimistic souls.
null
It’s easy to forget, in light of the Muppets’ well-known capacity for sweetness, that irritability and lack of sympathy extended far beyond the old cranks lobbing insults from the theater balcony. Indeed, as often as The Muppet Show is tender, it’s a symposium of bickering, putdowns, sarcasm and exasperation. Henson’s Muppets possess the boundless optimism of a child, but their personality flaws, ranging from anger to arrogance to ignorance, are distinctively adult.

From afar, The Muppet Show fulfills Henson’s dream, articulated by Kermit in The Muppet Movie. It’s a place for singing and dancing and making people happy. More than that, though, The Muppet Show – like the three Henson-powered movies that followed it – is a tribute to perseverance, an ode to those who soldier on with indomitable hope in the face of mediocre or even disastrous results.

The cast of The Muppet Show is a band of misfits, oddballs and failures. The Swedish Chef’s cooking abilities are as questionable as his dialect. Bunsen Honeydew’s inventions only succeed in traumatizing his put upon assistant Beaker. Fozzie is a comedian forever in search of his first laugh. Gonzo is a desperate performance artist in search of his audience – a weirdo before there was a Jackass. Miss Piggy is a diva without talent and a seductress without an enthusiastic admirer. And Kermit? He’s a dreamer stuck in a nightmare, a well-meaning leader and loyal friend who wants to do the right thing, and usually does, but sometimes can’t quite manage to bite his fly-catching tongue.
null
Kermit’s importance to the Muppets’ signature spirit and brand identity can’t be minimized. Clever and self-aware, Kermit is the audience surrogate, our guide through the chaos, an island of sanity amidst an ocean of zany foolishness. After Henson’s death, when Kermit’s presence was significantly reduced in deference to the man who gave the banjo-playing frog his soul, it created a void that has never been adequately filled.

To some degree it never can be. But the Muppets phenomenon is bigger than Kermit and even Henson. The post-Henson Muppet projects haven’t missed the character of Kermit so much as the quality of Kermit’s character. Kermit isn’t just the most identifiable Muppet, he’s the most relatable one, too. In Kermit’s determination, we see who we want to be, and through his occasional inability to maintain his composure, we see who we are. Kermit grounds the Muppets. Without him, or another Muppet in that role, the balance is thrown off and the inmates take over the asylum.

That Kermit and the gang have seemed less like themselves since Henson’s death has less to do with the puppeteers performing them – Steve Whitmire, in Kermit’s case – than with the roles the Muppets themselves have been performing. In two of the three big-screen movies released in the post-Henson era, the Muppets have vacated their own characters to step into others. These projects are not without their charms, but it’s hardly an accident that the most consistently entertaining character in the post-Henson years is the one who has been allowed to remain mostly himself: Gonzo.

Alas, the other characters often appear to be in a daze. Fozzie has no clue whatsoever that he’s Fozziewig in A Christmas Carol, and to watch Kermit as Captain Smollett in Treasure Island is to be condemned to the tragedy foretold in Henson’s final Muppet movie, 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan, in which Kermit is struck by a cab and gets amnesia. Kermit looks like Kermit, and he roughly sounds like Kermit, but he just isn’t Kermit. Not exactly. Which only makes us long for the real thing.
null
Sure enough, the post-Henson projects have held true to the mission statement of singing, dancing and making people happy, but while doing so the Muppets have disappeared inside their characters all too well, and the wonderful exceptions only prove the rule.

These post-Jim Henson Muppet adaptations stand in stark contrast to the one near the end of The Muppet Show’s third season, when the Muppets perform Robin Hood. Here, as in A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island, the Muppets step into other roles, but the crucial difference is that they never lose their own identities. Kermit, as Robin Hood, is still more of a backstage ringleader than a hero. Gonzo plays the Sheriff of Nottingham, but he only does damage only to himself. And Miss Piggy, who refuses to accept her role as Sister Tuck, proves more conniving than the Sheriff of Nottingham in an effort to get top billing, whatever it takes.

Time and again, The Muppet Show shows us that the Muppets can’t escape who they are. They’re too odd, too mediocre, too, well, human for that. And we love them for it.

And that brings us back to the Muppets’ unforgettable sweetness.

If in memory, the cuteness and tenderness of the Muppets overshadows the bickering and putdowns, there’s a reason. Many episodes of The Muppet Show end with the cast rallying around the guest star and joining in song, effectively erasing all the preceding friction and failure with one dose of literal harmony.

What made the Muppets’ sweetness so affecting is that, just like the exasperation and suffering, it’s entirely honest. With imperfect voices and awkward figures, the Muppets sing from the heart. And by ending almost every episode of The Muppet Show in song, Henson suggests that underneath the cynicism and the sarcasm, and the woe and the wounds, love and hopefulness are our default settings.

Beyond the singing and the dancing, the arguing and the teasing, the gags and the stunts, the core value of The Muppet Show is sincerity. When you find earnestness, you find the spirit of the Muppets. 


Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. Follow him on Twitter.

24: Kiefer Sutherland’s ticking clock classic turns 10

24: Kiefer Sutherland’s ticking clock classic turns 10

nullEDITOR'S NOTE: Kiefer Sutherland's ticking clock classic debuted 10 years ago this week. To mark this milestone, Press Play is re-publishing the video essay series "5 on 24" which was created by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas for the Museum of Moving Image in 2010. According to their introduction, "5 on 24" examines various aspects of the show, including its real-time structure, its depiction of torture, and the psychology of its hero, counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer. The show tapped into the ticking-clock on-the-go mentality of post-millennial society. And its machine-gun pacing, real time structure, and long-form plotting took aesthetic risks that no other action show had dared.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=110/872 http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=112/873 http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=111/867 http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=113/874 http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=114/875

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television. Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play.

DEEP FOCUS: Michael Tolkin’s THE RAPTURE (1991)

DEEP FOCUS: Michael Tolkin’s THE RAPTURE (1991)

[Editor's note: This video essay explores the themes of The Rapture in detail, and requires knowledge of its plot points from beginning to end. Both the video and the following transcript of its narration contain spoilers. To read Matt Zoller Seitz' 1991 Dallas Observer review of The Rapture, click here.]

We each have our own image of God, whether it was formed from reading the Bible or just having the notion that he is a nonexistent, mythical figure. Michael Tolkin's 1991 film The Rapture challenges all those perceptions and forces us to consider who God really is. It's the story of a truly spiritual — and, more importantly, intellectual — awakening.

Sharon, played by Mimi Rogers, is someone whose life is adrift. She lives an existence numb to human emotions, trying to get whatever cheap thrills she can find. Only when Sharon begins to notice how others are at peace with themselves does she begin to find her purpose. Sharon completely embraces the beliefs of Christianity, finding a way out of her past life.

Now, The Rapture does not let her off the hook. It questions Sharon's steps towards God. It articulates the responses you would expect from an atheist. It suggests that she is being brainwashed, or perhaps replacing one addiction with another. Rogers' powerful performance makes it difficult to tell whether Sharon is incapable of thinking for herself, or if she really believes deeply in every platitude she offers.

Sharon marries and has a daughter with one of her early sex partners (David Duchovny), saving him from his own aimless existence. This is where the film starts to challenge the beliefs of Christians and non-Christians alike. After Sharon loses her husband in a mass shooting, both she and her daughter are not deterred. They are both fully convinced that the rapture is soon approaching. Sharon believes she receives a message from God to take her daughter to a remote park until the rapture happens.

At this point, some of us skeptics may question whether Sharon shaping the child's religious beliefs constitutes some form of child abuse. This begins a lengthy section of the film where they both hold steadfast to their beliefs that the rapture will eventually come. In fact, a police officer (Will Patton), a non-believer at that, shows more concern for their well-being than they do. And yet the film does not even make it that easy for the non-believers. Running out of food and options — and, in Sharon's case, her faith — she decides to do the unspeakable to her daughter to end her suffering, as well as demonstrate her devotion to God even more. God becomes less a mythical figure and more of a human one. Sharon slowly comes to the realization she may have wasted her life appeasing someone who is only toying with her feelings. This would be easier to dismiss if we discovered that God did not exist. But this is where Tolkin's film becomes braver, and challenges us with the notion that God is indeed real.

The thesis of The Rapture is that God is a narcissist, giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives. The film posits the theory that God is undeserving of our love even if he does exist, that he is in no way any less fallible to pettiness and power trips than the human beings he created. Like many humans, God lives by a set of rules and laws that he applies arbitrarily at his own moral convenience. Tolkin illustrates this by showing the non-believing cop immediately being accepted into heaven by declaring his love for God in a last ditch effort to be saved. He's merely saying what God wants to hear to save his own skin.

Sharon, on the other hand, I consider to be one of the bravest characters in film. Even when confronted with the truth of God's existence, Sharon's resistance shows her to be more spiritually and intellectually awakened than she has ever been in her entire life. And it's that resistance — not only to a belief system, but to an all-powerful being — that makes me consider The Rapture a truly inspiring film.

Steven Santos is a freelance TV editor/filmmaker based in New York. His work can be found at StevenEdits.com. He writes about films at his blog The Fine Cut. You can also follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: ON THE GO, PART 1: BULLITT, THE FRENCH CONNECTION AND THE SEVEN-UPS

VIDEO ESSAY: ON THE GO, PART 1: BULLITT, THE FRENCH CONNECTION AND THE SEVEN-UPS

The subtitle of Aaron Aradillas and Richard Seitz's series "On the Go" says it all: "The Golden Age of the Car Chase, 1968-1985." Films that played in American theaters and on TV during those years were likely to contain at least one car chase. Some pictures from this period were built around a series of car chases. A few were essentially feature-length chases in which most of the action and dialogue took place while the characters were zipping down city streets or interstate highways.

The chase has always been with us, of course; it's as old as movies, and chases have hardly become scarce today. But there was something overwhelming about chases during what Aaron and Rich call the Golden Age. The combination of more sophisticated filmmaking technology, innovative camerawork and editing, bigger and louder cars and (by the mid-'70s) drastically escalating budgets meant that the chases were more viscerally effective than any before or since. I think the absence of digital effects — which started to appear in the late 1980s, and were used to wreak virtual destruction, add nonexistent pedestrians to crosswalks, and even digitally move vehicles closer together — might explain why these post-Bullitt chases, even the lighthearted ones, feel so intense, even oppressive. On some level, moviegoers knew that the overwhelming vehicular mayhem projected on big screens in the analog era was real — that those were flesh-and-blood drivers risking actual death and inflicting actual property damage, and that certain effects could not be cheated.

By the late '70s and early '80s — which showcased the "Smokey and the Bandit" films and "The Blues Brothers," which between them wrecked hundreds of cars — some critics saw the willful extravagance of chase films as evidence that both directors and audiences were morally and intellectually bankrupt, and that Western cinema had lost whatever shreds of perspective and taste it once had. Box-office receipts eclipsed such objections, though — and in hindsight these movies have a childlike innocence, or maybe an adolescent naivete. This was an era that produced a hit show called "C.H.I.Ps", large portions of which consisted of endless scenes of the heroes, a couple of swingin' single highway patrolmen, riding motorcycles around Southern California's then-pristine interstates, grinning at sexy babes from behind their mirrored sunglasses. Despite the gas crisis of the early '70s, most people weren't losing sleep over oil scarcity, climate change, or minimizing the size of their global footprints. They didn't want to save the planet; they wanted to hop in a Highland Green 1968 Mustang GT 390 Fastback like Steve McQueen in Bullitt and go tear-assing around San Francisco.


That's where this Press Play series opens — with McQueen in Bullitt (1968), the film that kicked off the car chase era. As Aaron points out in his script, this film's big chase feels tonally disconnected from the rest of the movie, a hardboiled crime thriller with a whiff of existential malaise; but it was the hell-on-wheels setpiece that made the film a hit and inspired countless attempts to best it. Director Peter Yates and his key stunt drivers, Carey Loftin, Bud Elkins and Bill Hickman, make hash of both San Francisco geography and auto mechanics; by some counts, Frank Bullitt's car loses five wheel covers during the sequence, and the chasing cars pass the same green Volkswagen Beetle over and over. But it was exhilarating, and when people left the film, it was all they could talk about. The movie's producer, Phll D'Antoni, looked at the box office take, rightly credited it to the brilliant chase, and told William Friedkin, the director of his next major action picture, 1971's The French Connection, that he expected him to top it.


And he did. A particular line from Aaron's script jumps out at me: "…a car chase that was indicative of the sense of lawlessness running rampant in big-city America." That's what raised the French Connection chase beyond Bullitt, and that set the stage for subsequent 70s and 80s chases; in contrast to the Bullitt chase, with its hilly, wide and curiously depopulated San Francisco streets, Friedkin's car-vs.-elevated train sequence was the densest, wildest, most intensely urban car chase yet filmed. It's agonizingly claustrophobic, with cars and people constantly getting in the way of mad dog cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman, playing a character based on real life New York police detective Eddie Egan). The whole film is set in a paranoid, savage early '70s Manhattan that's like a film noir city with all the poetry boiled out of it; it's a place devoid of love or even decency, a hellhole in which laws are merely suggestions. Every scene seems perched on the edge of chaos. The chase pushes it over the brink. It's crazy.


It seems no surprise that when D'Antoni stepped into the director's chair for the first time, it was in service of what Aaron calls "a kind of spiritual sequel to The French Connection": The Seven-Ups (1973), starring Roy Scheider as Buddy Manucci, a character loosely based on Popeye's Connection partner Buddy "Cloudy" Russo. (Both characters were based on Sonny Grosso, a technical adviser on Connection and the real life partner of Eddie Egan.) The peak of D'Antoni's film — and the only part that really stuck with audiences — was the car chase, a setpiece that's so transparently trying to top the French Connection chase that it can't help but pale in comparison. It's still pretty astounding, though — loud, fast and brutal, and infused with that distinctly '70s sense of physical and emotional decay. The Seven Ups, like The French Connection, used many of the same drivers and stuntpeople as Bullitt, including Bill Hickman, who choreographed the chase. This sequence might have been as influential in its own way as the other two, because it was so immense and impressive yet obligatory. Any subsequent film that staged a stunningly intricate chase because it thought the audience expected it should send D'Antoni royalties. — Matt Zoller Seitz

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television. Video editor Richard Seitz has worked for 20 years as a sound designer, audio engineer, composer, and dialogue editor for video games, television, short films and theatrical trailers. Game titles include The Hulk 2, Battlestar Galactica, Van Helsing, The Hobbit, Predator and Diablo 2. Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking

VIDEO ESSAY: CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking


Part 1


Part 2


EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play is proud to premiere a new video essay by Los Angeles scholar and filmmaker Matthias Stork. His video essay, Chaos Cinema, should be a welcome sight to anyone who’s ever turned away from a movie because of a director’s shaky camera.

PART 1

During the first decade of the 21st century, film style changed profoundly. Throughout the initial century of moviemaking, the default style of commercial cinema was classical; it was meticulous and patient. At least in theory, every composition and camera move had a meaning, a purpose. Movies did not cut without good reason, as it was considered sloppy, even amateurish. Mainstream films once prided themselves on keeping you the viewer well-oriented because they wanted to make sure you always knew where you were and what was happening.

Action was always intelligible, no matter how frenetic the scenario. A prime example: John Woo’s classic Hong Kong action film Hard Boiled. Its action is wild and extravagant, but it is nevertheless coherent and comprehensible at all times. Viewers feel and experience the exaggerated shootout fantasy without ever losing their bearings. In terms of camerawork, editing and staging, precision is key. Woo’s film is in fact strongly influenced by the work of American directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese. A similarly great American action film is John McTiernan’s Die Hard. Notice the economy of cuts and camera moves in the scene where hero John McClane fights the bad guy’s chief henchman, Karl. The fight itself is frantic yet clearly understandable, both riveting and stabilizing — the M.O. of classical cinema.

But in the past decade, that bit of received wisdom went right out the window. Commercial films became faster. Overstuffed. Hyperactive.

Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking. Film scholar David Bordwell gave this type of filmmaking a name: intensified continuity. But Bordwell’s phrase may not go far enough. In many post-millennial releases, we’re not just seeing an intensification of classical technique, but a perversion. Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.

Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

Even attentive spectators may have trouble finding their bearings in a film like this. Trying to orient yourself in the work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollock painting, except the only art here is the art of confusion.

Consider Michael Bay’s Bad Boys 2, an explosive mixture of out-of-control editing, intrusive snatch-and-grab shots and a hyperactive camera. Bay’s cacophony stifles the viewer’s ability to really process the film’s CGI-assisted skirmishes. The action is cool to look at, but it’s hard to discern in detail, and there’s no elegance to it. The shots are often wobbly. Sometimes this is due to the use of deliberately shaky handheld cameras. Other times, the filmmakers have made relatively stable shots seem much wilder and blurrier in post-production through the use of AfterEffects software. (This is not film grammar, it is film dyslexia.)

Considering all the deliberate insanity occurring onscreen, these movies should be totally unintelligible. Yet we still have a faint sense of what’s going on.

Why?

Because of the soundtrack.

Chaos films may not offer concrete visual information, but they insist that we hear what is happening onscreen. Ironically, as the visuals in action films have become sloppier, shallower and blurrier, the sound design has become more creative, dense and exact. This is what happens when you lose your eyesight: your other senses try to compensate. Consider how relentless machine-gun fire, roaring engines and bursting metal dominate the opening of Marc Forster’s James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace. The scene’s dense sound effects track fills in the gaps left by its vague and hyperactive visuals.

But the image-sound relationship is still off-kilter. What we hear is definitely a car chase — period.

But what we see is a “car chase.”

French auteur Robert Bresson rightfully stressed the importance of sound in the formation of atmospheric depth in movies. He even argued for its primacy, saying that in some ways sound might be even more important than picture. But in lavishly funded action films that wish to create an immersive experience, sound and image should be complementary, and they should be communicative. In Quantum of Solace and in other works of chaos cinema – image and sound ultimately do not enter into a dialogue, they just try to out-shout each other.

In contrast to Bay’s and Forster’s haphazard execution of action, consider the meticulously staged and photographed car chase in Ronin. In contemporary action cinema, such a sequence is, unfortunately, hard to find.

PART 2

Chaos cinema technique is not limited to action sequences. We see it used in dialogue sequences as well. We hear important plot information being communicated, but the camerawork and cutting deny us other pleasures, such as seeing a subtle change in facial expression or a revealing bit of body language.

This deficiency is especially discernible in the musical film, a genre that ordinarily relies heavily on clear-cut choreography and expressive gestures. But the woozy camera and A.D.D. editing pattern of contemporary releases clearly destroy any sense of spatial integrity. No matter how closely we look, the onscreen space remains a chaotic mess. For comparison, consider a scene from the classic Singin’ in the Rain. Long, uninterrupted takes allow us to see the extraordinary performances of the actors. No false manipulation necessary.

To be fair, the techniques of chaos cinema can be used intelligently and with a sense of purpose. Case in point: Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. The film uses chaotic style pointedly and sparingly, to suggest the hyper-intensity of the characters’ combat experience and the professional warrior’s live-wire awareness of the lethal world that surrounds him. Bigelow immerses viewers in the protagonists’ perspectives, yet equally grants them a detached point of view. The film achieves a perfect harmony of story, action and viewer involvement.

But such exceptions do not disprove the rule. Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It’s an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state. The film does not seduce you into suspending disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.

Some film buffs have already grown tired of chaos cinema – especially the so-called “shaky cam,” which has been ridiculed even by South Park. Despite stirrings of viewer discontent, however, chaos is still the default filmmaking mode for certain kinds of entertainment, and it’s an easy way for Hollywood movies to denote hysteria, panic and disorder.

Chaos cinema seems to mark a return to the medium’s primitive origins, highlighting film’s potential for novelty and sheer spectacle – the allure of such formative early works as The Great Train Robbery. You can trace the roots of chaos cinema to several possible factors: the influence of music video aesthetics, the commercial success of TV, increasingly short viewer attention spans, the limitless possibilities of CGI, and a growing belief in more rather than less. Those who look closer, though, may wonder when cinema will recapture the early visceral appeal of the train pulling into the station at La Ciotat — truly a symbolic relic, powerful in its simplicity. Chaos cinema hijacks the Lumière brothers‘ iconic train, fills it with dynamite, sets the entire vehicle on fire and blows it up while crashing it through the screen and into the rumbling movie theater – then replays it over and over. And audiences are front and center, nailed to their seats, sensing the action but not truly experiencing it. All is chaos.

Matthias Stork is a film scholar and filmmaker from Germany who is studying film and television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education with an emphasis on American and French literature and film from Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has attended the Cannes film festival twice (2010/2011) as a representative of Goethe University’s film school. You can read his blog here.

DEEP FOCUS: Sidney Lumet’s PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981)

DEEP FOCUS: Sidney Lumet’s PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play is proud to premiere this video essay by New York based critic-filmmaker Steven Santos. His piece on Prince of the City is split into two parts and can be viewed above. It is a visual analysis of Sidney Lumet’s so-called “NYPD films”: Prince of the City, Serpico, Q & A and Night Falls on Manhattan.

by Steven Santos
Press Play Contributor

THE STORY

Prince of the City was released on August 19, 1981. Like so many of Sidney Lumet‘s movies, this one lives and breathes New York City, showing us everything from tenements to court rooms and everyone from drug addicts to district attorneys. The film has well over a hundred speaking roles and what I would consider one of the best casting of authentic New Yorkers in film, mixing professional and non-professional actors throughout. The look and feel of the movie would influence many films and television shows in subsequent decades, ones that strove for realism and a more procedural approach to the cop genre. One of those shows, Law & Order, even used one of the film’s most prominent cast members, Jerry Orbach.

Prince is a complex tale of police corruption in the 1970’s adapted from the book by Robert Daley and based on the life of narcotics detective Robert Leuci. Danny Ciello, played in a towering performance by Treat Williams, is an over-confident narcotics detective has skimmed money from criminals for years without it weighing on his conscience. The film’s title refers to his ability to make cases while working mostly unsupervised.

But from the opening scene, you begin to see the cracks in this prince’s facade. An argument with his drug addicted brother shows that there is someone unwilling to continue the charade that Ciello and his partners are somehow upstanding officers of the law. In a key scene, Ciello is forced to rob a drug addict to supply heroin to his informant. He begins to take pity on him, perhaps recognizing his own addicted brother. More importantly, he begins to witness firsthand the consequences his illegal acts as a cop have on others.Ciello remembers why he wanted to become a detective, and makes an effort to change because he can no longer see much of a difference between the cops and the criminals no matter how much he tries to justify his actions by blaming the way the criminal justice system works. Perhaps you would think that this film will be a simple tale of redemption, where a man acknowledges his wrongdoings and then helps to put the remorseless criminals behind bars.

But as we all know, but rarely care to admit, doing the right thing is quite a messy process. While Prince of the City may be a sprawling epic about how deep corruption runs in the New York City police department, it is as much about how we never can quite wash the slate clean of our own past corruptions, big or small.

SERPICO/CIELLO

Prince was not the first or last time that Sidney Lumet examined this subject. 1973’s “Serpico”, based on the real-life detective Frank Serpico, is the only one of his films about police corruption in New York City that he did not write or co-write. In real life, Robert Leuci was an acquaintance of Frank Serpico. Serpico begins with its main character graduating from the police academy and follows him from precinct to precinct, as he seems to run into a citywide problem of outwardly corrupt police officers. In interviews, Lumet has said that he made Prince because he was not satisfied with the way he portrayed cops in his earlier film. Watching Serpico today, one would be hard-pressed to disagree with him. While it features a terrific performance by Al Pacino, the film refuses to examine this real-life figure beyond making him a martyr. It’s not about a man struggling with doing the right thing, it’s about a man resented by the world for being a tortured saint. While both Serpico’s and Leuci’s stories occurred during the same time frame, the films about them seem to take place in different worlds.

The key difference between Serpico and Ciello is that Ciello does not necessarily stop lying when he decides to come clean, for fear of incriminating himself or ratting out his partners. Lumet’s Serpico does not necessarily challenge its main character’s righteousness, nor does it bring many shades of gray to its exploration of why the rest of the police department seems completely corrupt. Prince raises questions about morality and loyalty; unlike Serpico, it doesn’t make it easy for us to decide who the bad people are. Police corruption was the subject matter that Lumet kept revisiting and exploring, perhaps to find new shades that could not be contained in just one film.

LUMET’S NYPD

In addition to Serpico and Prince of the City, Lumet returned to the theme of police corruption twice more in the 1990’s with Q & A (1990) and Night Falls on Manhattan (1997). Of the four films, Q & A is the one that plays most like a crime thriller, as we watch a fairly degenerate cop (Nick Nolte) target drug dealers who had ripped him off at the same time that he’s is being investigated by an assistant district attorney (Timothy Hutton). Without a doubt, you can call Nolte’s character the villain of the film. But even so, Lumet allows this corrupt cop to explain his logic, almost daring you to empathize with someone who you know from the very first scene has committed the murder he is being investigated for.

In 1997’s Night Falls on Manhattan, also based on a book by Robert Daley, corruption extends to family members. The film centers on an assistant district attorney (Andy Garcia) whose rise in that office coincides with an investigation into police corruption that may involve his own father (Ian Holm). While the father’s partner (James Gandolfini) is clearly on the take, his own corruption involves fudging an arrest warrant to put away a drug dealer that he had been targeting for a long time.

Lumet is fascinated by the logic behind corruption. What is the thought process that causes people to lose their way? The key to Lumet’s success in exploring this theme is the degree to which he does not pass black and white judgment on his characters. The more we see ourselves reflected in people who justify their amoral actions, the more Lumet has made these people human. While Q & A and Night Falls on Manhattan admirably try to explore the gray zone of morality and corruption, it is Prince of the City that is Sidney Lumet’s masterwork on that theme.

ARE YOU THE DETECTIVE CIELLO?

While we may understand what drives Danny Ciello to help the special attorney task force make cases against corrupt cops, we are less sure how we feel about him. Much of what drives this man is his loyalty to his partners. As he puts it, “The first thing a cop learns is that he can’t trust anybody but his partners. I’ll tell you something right now. I sleep with my wife, but I live with my partners.”

Prince of the City takes the time to show us why that is. Even when Ciello finally admits to his partners that he is working to take down corrupt cops, they gather to not necessarily support him, but show concern for his well being. There is a loyalty among these detectives that Ciello will never have with all the attorneys he works for. The film further blurs the line between moral and amoral by showing Ciello’s mob-connected cousin as someone more reliable than the often ambitious attorneys. In one scene where a crooked cop and bondsman threaten to kill Ciello, it’s his cousin who vouches for him, saving his life.

Prince of the City is the Lumet film that truly makes you understand corruption by showing us this expansive group of people and the degrees they are willing to live with their consciences. Ciello’s final confessions lead to the destruction of people he considered family, people who loved him in a way that he will probably never experience again in his life. That is why you can see and understand the regret in his face when his partners eventually shun him. Doing the right thing is quite a messy process.

While Prince of the City has many admirers, the film has not gotten its due for its influence on the genre or the complexity with which it presents its subject matter. I consider it to be the Sidney Lumet film to watch to fully understand who he is as a director, a summation of all his work. With its large cast, the film creates a detailed world with communities of lawyers, gangsters, drug addicts and cops. At the center of it all is a performance by Treat Williams that ranks among the best, comparable to the greatest work of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, actors originally considered for the role.

What makes “Prince” essential is its universal and complicated take on how each of us cope with the moral choices we make. If we try to understand who Detective Ciello and how we feel about him, we begin to understand ourselves.

ADDENDUM:

This video essay has been in the works for a while. By coincidence, while I was editing it near the end of July, Prince of the City was given a rare screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center with both Treat Williams and Robert Leuci in attendance. It was shown as part of the Film Society’s tribute to Sidney Lumet.

Williams and Leuci had a fascinating Q & A after the film in which they mostly talked about working with Lumet. Williams in particular showed pride in this film. It is clearly the highlight of his career. But it was odd to see the man the film was based on talk about it in the flesh, considering that film does not portray him heroically. Leuci had not even seen the film from beginning to end until that night, probably because reliving that experience could not have been easy. While he admits the film takes some dramatic license, Leuci lauded how Lumet had stayed true to his story.

As this was a tribute to Lumet, Williams and Leuci told stories about the making of Prince, talking about the long audition process Williams went through and how Lumet did not want Leuci around set due to the not-very-happy experience of having Frank Serpico on set all the time during the production of Serpico. Although Lumet is not acknowledged as a significant auteur by cinephiles because his almost invisible direction served the story rather than himself, the Williams/Leuci Q & A re-asserted that Lumet was a filmmaker with a true vision, and highlighted the choices he made that enabled Prince to be so effective.

According to Scott Foundas, who introduced the screening, Prince of the City was the hardest film of the tribute to locate a 35mm print for. Apparently, this print was borrowed from the Harvard Archives. In essence, on its 30th anniversary, Prince almost feels like a lost film. It wasn’t even released on DVD until about four years ago. I hope this video essay will shine a light on Prince of the City as well as Lumet, acknowledge its masterful filmmaking and storytelling, and perhaps help prevent the film from being lost in the coming years.

Steven Santos is a freelance television editor/filmmaker based in New York. He has cut docu-series for MTV, The Travel Channel, The Biography Channel, The Science Channel and Animal Planet. His work can be found at http://www.stevenedits.com. He writes about films at his blog The Fine Cut). You can also follow him on Twitter.

DEEP FOCUS: War Against the Machines: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

DEEP FOCUS: War Against the Machines: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened on July 3, 1991. It was a sequel to his surprise hit The Terminator, which was released 7 years earlier; in the original, Cameron was clearly working with a limited budget, but "Terminator 2" was designed to be more ambitious, as he had made both Aliens and the personal but financially unsuccessful The Abyss in between. Perhaps in response to that failure, Cameron fully subscribed to the "Bigger is Better" school of filmmaking to guarantee audiences would not reject his future work. He decided to revisit his earlier hit to not only expand on that story, but to realize a vision that was limited years before by both technology and budget. Cameron was given a then-astronomical budget of $102 million. What did that money buy, you may ask? A turning point in photorealistic, computer-generated images — or what we call today, in the post-Terminator land of films, "CGI".

The Terminator films operate on the same premise. In Cameron's future, the world has been taken over by an artificially intelligent computer system called Skynet that has revolted against its human creators, the defense firm Cyberdyne Systems. In Terminator 2, the assassin sent back in time to kill future human resistance leader John Connor is the constantly morphing T-1000. Or perhaps we should refer to it as James Cameron's machine creation.

The shapeshifting T-1000 is a more effective killing machine than the original T-800 model played by Schwarzenegger in both films, but humanity ultimately wins out when the older Terminator model outsmarts him. With both the cyborg assassin and Cyberdyne Systems' technological research destroyed, the sequel presents a definitive ending. The victorious T-800 lowers himself into burning liquid metal, ensuring the world will not be destroyed and humanity will triumph. James Cameron leaves us with amessage of hope. At least, that is what we thought when we watched the film end back in 1991. Unfortunately, the story did not end there. Not unlike Cyberdyne, Cameron had let his creation turn against him. It is easy to point out both the unnecessary sequels and television show which undid the ending to Terminator 2 to shamelessly cash in on the premise again and again. But those were not necessarily Cameron's doing. They may instead be long-term effects of building movies out of CGI blocks. This is the film's true legacy, and Cameron himself — the director of such CGI-laden films as True Lies, Titanic and Avatar — is not only a practitioner of this type of filmmaking, but a vocal advocate as well. We must ask: Is James Cameron Cyberdyne, building the technology that will be used against humanity?

In the 20 years since Terminator 2, our movie theaters have become inundated with one soulless CGI spectacle after one another. Filmmakers have looked to what was groundbreaking in Cameron's 1991 film and responded with a weightless cinema in which larger percentages of any shot are given over to computers and, ultimately, lack dramatic consequence; it becomes more difficult to believe in something once you realize it was created by hardware and software.

When we look more closely at Terminator 2, one can see the seeds of this planted in the contradictory ways it presents its ideas. Surprisingly, the CGI in Cameron's Terminator sequel is restrained in its use, especially compared to what subsequent movies, including Cameron's, have done since. At the time, Cameron was still using practical in-camera effects, a product of his earlier work in low-budget filmmaking. His 1980s movies often employed models, miniatures and puppets, even as he eventually moved towards digital effects in 1989's The Abyss. Cameron's vision at the time was not as disconnected from the human experience as it is now. We could differentiate between the machines and true flesh and blood. This is why Terminator 2 cannot be dismissed so easily. Yes, Cameron is playing with a bigger toy box, but he does not do so at the expense of his ideas or the genuine affection he has for his characters. The movie never forgets that it is about a mother-son relationship, though one that has the future of the world at stake. As with many Cameron films, there is a great deal of skepticism about how we employ technology in the modern age, particularly when it leads to some sort of blowback. The villains in the Terminator movies are not only the machines, but those who created them — namely the researchers at Cyberdyne Systems, the fictional corporation in T2 that allowed the machines the opportunity to wipe out humanity. The film preaches a message that machines are not to be trusted.

But it does so by relying heavily on computer technology. And at one point, the film's heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) too easily accepts the possibility that the T-800 sent to protect her son John (Edward Furlong) would be his best possible father figure. It often feels as if Cameron wants us to love the machine, especially when it has him spouting catchphrases ("Hasta la vista, baby") to make metal and steel more cuddly.

While we can all acknowledge that we have seen CGI employed to realize some filmmakers' artistic visions, those films have been rare amid the visual noise that we have had to endure. Cameron himself has not been immune to film's greatest indulgence of the last two decades; his movies have become more bloated, not merely in budget, but in spectacle. The runaway box office successes of both Titanic and Avatar may suggest that his finger is on the pulse of America, but it is also representative of the collective short-sightedness of both the filmmaker and his audience. The fighting cyborgs of Cameron's Terminator films have evolved — or more appropriately, devolved — into the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robot creations that today's filmmakers insist we love. While we cannot quite blame Cameron for the lesser filmmakers who imitate his films poorly, we can certainly point an accusing finger in his direction for the current 3D trend, which Cameron has repeatedly declared the future of cinema.

So now, it is a battle between the resistance and the machines, not unlike the future world presented in Terminator 2: Judgment Day — a world in whiich 3D has been given a purpose, thanks mainly to CGI-reliant movies. The questions to ask are: Did James Cameron and his audience forget the message of Terminator 2? While we remember T2 as an effective science fiction action film that had some heart, do we also remember how Cyberdyne did its research with the best of intentions, not realizing what its creations would one day become? This is not to advocate sending a Terminator to deal with the James Cameron of 1991, but to wonder if the director would have done things differently if he could have known where his innovations would lead — or if his message to those in the resistance who seek more of a human touch in films was always: "Hasta la vista, baby."

Steven Santos is a freelance TV editor/filmmaker based in New York. His work can be found at StevenEdits.com. He writes about films at his blog The Fine Cut. You can also follow him on Twitter.