HopkinsCinemAddicts

Airing Some Grievances

    Martin Scorsese does not know how to end a movie. This has been my belief for quite a while now, and I'm usually very careful about whom I say it to.  But it's time I explained.

    There is an expectation of finality when the end of a movie approaches--not a specific type of finality, but certainly a sense that the movie has indeed come to an end.  When the audience's hopes are dashed by an artlessly ambiguous final scene that is suddenly cut off by a black screen and the end credits, one may hear a theater-wide sigh of disappointment like the one I heard (and contributed to) after Martha Marcy May Marlene.  When the screen suddenly goes black after an artfully ambiguous final scene like that of the series finale of The Sopranos, audiences at home may hope their TVs have all broken at once.  But one is never completely unsure of whether a movie has ended--never, that is, unless you're watching a Martin Scorsese original.

    His early hit Taxi Driver in 1976 features a shattering let-down of a final scene after a most dramatic climax and successful denouement: Cybill Shepherd, playing Travis Bickle's (Robert DeNiro) former obsession Betsy, exits the backseat of his cab where she just spent an entire ride looking blank but pretty in the rear view mirror as both of them contributed sparsely to a conversation that went nowhere.  After a close-up of his very suddenly very intense right eye, Travis drives away, ignoring her attempt to pay him; she disappears into a town house as he drives clear down the street. Then, without cause or warning, the film enters a brief fast-motion period where Travis readjusts and stares intently into his rear view mirror--at what we're not sure, for neither Betsy nor the town house can be visible by then.  The credits begin to roll over tracking shots from the cab of New York City streets at night. So... what happened?

    Even Robbie Robertson's amazing face can't save The Last Waltz, Scorsese's 1978 concert-based documentary about The Band, from an unsatisfying ending during which they play the only weird, circus-y song in their repertoire as the camera zooms farther and farther away from them.  This final shot makes the musicians we have gotten to see at their absolute best, the guys we have gotten to know so well throughout the course of the film seem distant and unremarkable, for they appear confined and insignificant playing an aimless song on a dimly lit stage in the middle of an empty hall. The rest of the movie shows amazing live concert footage from the packed theater alongside close-ups of each Band member recounting absurd stories from the road, and we get a powerful sense of each musician's character, his feelings about his band mates, even the way he holds himself depending on the tone of the song he's playing.  But the ending nearly ruins all the film's hard work (I say "nearly" because nothing could hope to ruin their live performance of "Don't Do It").

    Goodfellas (1990): great movie, great performances, great monologues all around.  Excise the misplaced series of photos of Ray Liotta's gangster Henry Hill looking awkward outside his Witness Protection-provided house at the very end and we're in business.

    In his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Scorsese repeats his early mistake of placing the burden of complex communication on close-ups of eyes: we still don't know what these eyes are trying to say, we only know that this time they belong to Juliette Lewis rather than Robert DeNiro.  

    In 2006, Scorsese reinvented his style of endings with The Departed--and perhaps he shouldn't have.  Instead of seeing a few confusing seconds right at the end of the film, we must instead watch a clunky anvil of finality crash through the otherwise perfect final scene. Jack Nicholson's scene-chewing performance sets the bar for subtlety extremely low in this movie, but Scorsese's ending manages to drop it even further.  A shot of the just-murdered "rat" Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) lying dead on his living room floor pans up to show his expensive apartment's view of the golden dome of a nearby government building, a constant reminder and symbol of the political ladder he so desperately aspired to climb.  And on the railing of his balcony, crawling conspicuously across the shot of the gleaming dome, is... an actual rat.  Yikes.

    To be fair, I haven't yet seen his latest, Hugo, so I can't say whether Scorsese has learned anything in the last few years.  To its credit, Hugo did not win the award for best picture at the Oscars; that award is tainted for me, as no amount of elbow grease could ever polish away all that self-righteous Crash residue.

Buster Keaton’s Southern Idealism Rewriting a Lost Childhood

 

Buster Keaton is in no sense of Southern gentleman.  He spent most of his early life between the Midwest and the East Coast on Vaudeville tours and later settled in New York, and finally in Los Angeles (1). However, in his two of his most famous films The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. Buster not only treats southern culture with reverence, but also paints his heroic protagonist as Southern gentlemen. In The General, Buster goes to great lengths to stay extremely accurate to costuming, sets, and historical facts surrounding one victorious feat for a Southern train operator during the Civil War. Steamboat Bill Jr. has a northern protagonist returning to his southern roots as to pilot a steamboat in order to impress his father. In both cases, a misfit engineer in the Deep South has to complete a seemingly impossible task in order to impress a father figure and win the girl in the end.

Perhaps Buster was motivated by the demand for southern romances or was paying his respects to a pioneer of American film with an appreciation for southern landscapes and one of his personal heroes D.W. Griffith. Although one could tie Buster’s infatuation with the South to less of an aesthetic and more of a reflection of his deep seeded issues with his father.  As violent as Buster’s father was on the stage where he used Buster as a prop, he was much more of a destructive force at home with his crippling alcoholism. Buster could never live up to his father’s standards, even after he became wildly successful in film and continued to support both parents. Buster’s father would trivialize the film industry despite his son’s talent and popularity, as well as the revenue that allowed him to retire early (1). One would think that Buster would idealize the north and technological improvements, like the movie camera that rescued him from the vaudeville stage and brought him to his stable adult life. Instead, Buster is preoccupied with the Deep South, and a pattern of reliving and rewriting his past through characters in his films.  Perhaps with his herculean feats and having the losing force triumph bring him satisfaction his real life cannot provide. 

In The General, Buster plays a train engineer named Johnnie Gray in a small southern town during the Civil War. In order to impress his sweetheart and win the approval of her father, Johnnie decides he will enlist in the military along side her brother. Even though Johnnie fights his way to be first in line, he is deemed ineligible because as a train engineer he is more valuable to the South. However, Johnnie is not told why he is rejected so he begins to compare himself to the other men in line. He sees tall, short (none shorter then him however), old and young men all receive their draft cards. This scene is one of many self-deprecating ones that draw attention to his inadequacies in height and anxiety towards his own masculinity. After trying to fool the man behind the counter with everything from pulling his hat down over his eyes, pretending to be someone else, and by attempting to steal someone else’s card, he is quite literally kicked out of the office. Deemed a coward by his girlfriend and her father, he returns to his engine in shame. Later on, northern spies hijack his train and kidnap his girlfriend who has been somehow left in the train boxcar that they are hijacking.  At first he chases them on foot and on bike.  The handcar scene is the most revealing of the emphasis of his puny size. His small stature will not allow him to move the handcar by strength alone until he propels his body in the air to use all his weight to bring down one side of the pump.  And to add insult to injury once he gets the car moving it goes backwards.  When Johnnie finally gets to another train he can use in the chase, the engine disconnects from the cars carrying the reinforcements to help rescue his girl. He is now alone and against the entire Southern army.  After finding cannon along the way, he finally catches up with the captors. He loads the cannon attached to the back of the engine and fires it at the hijackers in the train in front of him; only to see the cannon ball fly a few feet in the air and land on the floor of his engine. Despite the failure (and not so subtle jab at his masculinity) he loads the cannon again with more gunpowder but accidentally aims it at himself. Realizing his mistake and in complete and utter terror, Johnnie disconnects the cannon, tosses a plank of wood at it. He turns and runs to hide on the front of the train. While rounding a corner, the cannon fires and miraculously hits just behind the enemy train.

After crossing northern lines, he escapes detection and ends up under the table where the entire was strategy is laid out. He rescues his girl. Somehow he manages to steal another engine after purposely disconnecting the car carrying the enemy soldiers.  Similar difficulties that faced him in his pursuit reappear to create another comedic chase. Johnnie rushes back and successfully warns the confederates of the attack. He ends up caught in the battle. He accidentally fires the shot that sends the northern troops into a retreat. He is promoted to lieutenant for winning the battle and causing a captured northern general to surrender. He discovers that the man he knocked out initially stealing the train is a general who he then escorts to surrender. In the end, he gets the girl, wins his soon to be father-in-law’s respect, and more importantly demonstrates his value to the cause despite his statue.

 Steamboat Bill Jr. places more weight on the father’s perspective and his negative characteristics rather than emphasizing Buster’s shortcomings. Steamboat Bill Jr. depicts Keaton as a similar character as his character in The General.  Willie Canfield (Buster) is an outcast in his southern hometown who tries to please his father, a steamboat pilot. His father is a strong, violent brute with a temper. The film begins with Bill learning of Willie’s return. Bill pictures his son as this bigger, stronger, picture of himself. Willie is below average height and weight. Although Buster introduces this film with a critic of his physical flaws, his focus is to highlight the father’s character flaws. At the train station, Bill mistakes a few tall, strong, men for his son. Conversely, Willie mistakes sophisticated intellectual types to be his father which may be a jab at his own father. When Bill learns that Willie is his son, he is repulsed and deeply disappointed. At this poignant moment, the camera pans to Willie jumping around with his ukulele trying to calm a crying baby. This whimsical display distracts the viewer from the tragic parallels between the father’s perception of son and his Buster’s relationship with his father. When Steamboat Bill tries to take Willie back to the boat, Willie tries to go back to Boston on a bus. Bill pushes the bus driver who tries to help Willie. He drags him to his car. In the car, Bill socks Willie most likely for trying to leave. Bill is rough with Willie throughout the rest of the film, sadly similar to Buster’s experience own father who tended to knock him around both on the stage and off (1). Bill also criticizes Willie’s style, forcing him to shave off his mustache and update his dress. In the gags, the barber shaves him in an instant without harm, but scares Willie in the process. At the clothing shop, Willie tries a variety of ill-fitting hats from Chaplin’s bowler to Buster’s signature porkpie hat, each time ending with his father tearing them off and throwing them in a fit of rage until they settle on a non-descript brimmed hat (which is swept away immediately after they leave the store). Again, Buster uses a silly gag to mask the much deeper issues between him and his father.  Buster’s father does not approve of his decision to go into film just as Bill chastises Willie’s choices. Bill continues to physically abuse Willie, as well as verbally berate him for being unable to pilot the steamboat well. In the end and after a freak storm floods the town, Willie single handedly saves his father, his girlfriend, and others using the steamboat. He finally wins his fathers approval.

Although Buster Keaton has been quoted saying he made movies just to make others laugh (2), it seems they serve a much more personal purpose. Although Buster’s story was one of a success, it was in no way a fairy tale. As depicted in his films, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr., Buster was only able to achieve a sense of approval from a father figure on the silver screen. It makes one wonder if Buster’s emotive yet seemingly stoical expressions would be as profound if he were not such a troubled man. 

 

 

Bibliography:

1. Keaton, Buster, and Charles Samuels. "Ch. 1." My Wonderful World of Slapstick. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1982. Print.
2. Kline, Jim. "Funny Sublime: The Uncanny Genius of Buster Keaton:." The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 16.2 (1997): 45-57. Print.
3. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons: United Artists Screen Shot

On the Doorstep of a Hidden World: Masks and Sacraments in Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT

A mask affords its wearer a rare privilege: he can ingest images from the outside world without projecting any back. He can nourish his imaginative life without letting anyone else register his thoughts, his reactions, or even his identity. He can become a different person with the mask on, then return to his same old self when he takes it off. In such a way, a mask acts as a sort of liminal device -- a portal that allows the Self to travel unscathed into secret worlds by concealing the face that would otherwise link that Self to its usual obligations, relations and consequences. But a mask is not innocent -- its privileges can tempt and corrupt, and its very presence often signals that a line has been crossed, that something has been done or seen that could not have been done or seen by an unmasked agent.

The Venetian mask that rests, cold and silent, on the pillow in this still from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut has its eyes wide open but sees nothing because it lacks a wearer -- it is an object welcoming to secret images but incapable of imagination. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's character sleeps with eyes shut, swaddled in bland blankets, dressed in a conjugal nightie, ring-hand facing out. She is vulnerable and incapable of travelling into the outside world, but her mind is active, and the film dwells on the erotic dreams that occupy her sleep. Her epistemological quest is inward-driven; she investigates her inner desires. But the mask, which her husband picked up on a secret foray into New York's sexual underworld, speaks to a knowledge-seeking journey of an entirely different sort: a hunt for a secret world outside that bed, a world accessible only through the secrecy and deception of the mask's wearer. This still, with all its implied dichotomies between presence and absence, blindness and sight, warmth and coldness, sleep and wakefulness, passivity and activity, encapsulates both the thematic richness and the viewing experience of Kubrick's film. Everything is there if you just look for it, but you won't necessarily see more by staring straight ahead with eyes wide open. Commit to closing your eyes and wandering through Kubrick's dream-world and you will see plenty.

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999 and based upon Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, is of course Kubrick’s final work,¹ released just months after his death. Grossly mismarketed as an "erotic thriller" ², enveloped in the real-life gossip-storm of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s (rumored) carnal dysfunction, weighted with the ambiguous expectations we reserve for the posthumous work of geniuses, and generally just derided for trying to confront sexuality in earnest, the film suffered, even and especially before its release, from unfortunate extratextual baggage. Thankfully though, all that baggage falls by the wayside once you actually watch the film. All that remains is cinema itself — the traces in time and space of a mind's probing, of its seductions, its frustrations, its dead-ending paths and unexpected acts of generosity. Whose probing, though? And whose mind? Do the film's obscure investigations belong to Kubrick, or to his characters, or to us, the viewers? The answer is both simple and complex: as in all detective stories -- and this is, despite the lack of guns/badges/detectives, a detective story -- the engines of narrative fuse our curiosity with that of the artist and with that of his creations. Eyes Wide Shut is a dream-universe that we are all citizens of; and all of us alike -- director, viewer, protagonist -- fast become consumed with finding the secret world that lies hidden within that world...

The film — which traces the nocturnal travails of the sexually malnourished and existentially unmoored Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise, in an elusive performance) — is 'problematic' in the best sense of the word. It refuses to be easily read — not in a wan Bartleby-esque fashion, but rather in a vaguely Borgesian way³, a way that multiplies symmetries and symbols and patterns, suggesting that meaning (whatever that means) is both ever-receding and ever-present, glimpsable but not inhabitable. As Bill begins to wander -- emotionally and geographically -- away from his wife Alice (played by Kidman as a woman with a rich erotic imagination and a barely-tapped reservoir of marital resentment), the film vacillates in tone between upper-class picaresque (Bill's wanderings as satirical voyage peppered with insinuating piano players, lascivious widows, gentle whores, and sleazy shopkeeps) and philosophical allegory (Bill's wanderings as subjective investigation into the darkest depths of desire, power and knowledge.) What the film is most emphatically not, though, is a sexy, straightforward jaunt through the sexual underworld of New York City. (Indeed, the city seen on screen is quite obviously not Manhattan; whether you want to call it "a dream-vision of the Upper East side" or just "London posing as such" is up to you.) And there is little in the way of linear story; instead, we follow in Bill's shadow as he circles -- like a blind but hungry falcon -- closer and closer to a hidden world of sex and death.

Gradually, the comedy-of-manners falls away, and we, like Bill, are drawn in, wide-eyed, by the pull of the sacred unknown, by the promise of a sexual unleashing accessible deep within the core of civilization. And so we arrive at the film's Gnostic centerpiece: the infamous orgy sequence, a mesmerizing scene where faces are hidden and skin is uncovered, where blue-bloods, capitalists and prostitutes don Venetian masks for oblique sacraments of sex and power. Sumptuous tracking shots follow Bill through a vast mansion as naked bodies thrust and writhe all around him in devotional silence; the soundtrack features an Orthodox liturgy played backwards to surreal effect; a high priest waves a censer; the blind and hungry falcon stops circling and alights at the center of his path and opens his eyes to see and eat. The formal virtuosity of the scene -- not to mention the heady brew of sex, power, wealth, revelation and mystery -- is enough to suck the air out of any room, enough to send cold tendrils of awe into any cinephile's brain, just as much as the similarly ornate final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in 2001, there is a pervasive mystical ambiance, a sense of historical objects repurposed for timelessness, but -- and I really never though I would say this -- the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut is perhaps even more ambiguous than the Louis XVI sequence of 2001. Are we witnessing a ritual of Dionysian wildness or rather an Apollonian intervention, the imposition of social and religious protocol onto the pre-social gestures of sex? What should we make of the utter lack of pleasure or emotion in the sex? Like Bill, we are left wondering what we have learned; reaching the secret world only leaves us with more questions: who is behind the masks? Is there another deeper secret world that orchestrated this one?

Eyes Wide Shut does not answer these questions, but neither does its narrative end with that morbid central sequence. The blind and hungry falcon -- having ever-so-briefly seen and tasted -- is cast back out into the world and finds himself circling outwards again, in concentric loops that return him, not without some melancholy, to the frustrations of the everyday. Bill re-acquaints himself with his professional and married lives but has to live with the corrupting and dangerous knowledge of what he has seen. And so the final third or so of the film traces the aftermath, the return to equilibrium, the frayed edges of Bill's consciousness stitching themselves back to reason, the compromises he must make to survive his brush with the sexual ineffable. Narrative circumstances force him to step away from the seductions of the secret world embedded in networks of power and wealth, and instead to focus on the secret world of married domesticity -- a different but no less mysterious type of sexual covenant. The return to this covenant will require a new set of maskings, unmaskings, sacramental rituals, and threshold-crossings, but perhaps I should save that for another post...!

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[1] His script contributions to A.I. Artificial Intelligence don't count; that film has Steven Spielberg’s grubby, sentimental fingerprints all over it — although it is occasionally possible to catch a glimpse of Kubrickian visual wit within the self-indulgent morass.

[2] A disreputable, not to mention inaccurate, genre christening that calls to mind Skinemax-y assignations much more than existential dream-longings.

[3] I am not referencing Jorge Luis Borges just for the fun of it. Aside from similarities in structure (an episodic, circling way of building narrative without ever quite building plot) and form (decadent, florid imagery dead-ending in banal obviousness, while the ineffable instead jumps out, in blunt and concise language, from the interstices of the everyday), there is also rich thematic overlap -- dare I say a shared metaphysics? -- between Borges's short stories and the world of Eyes Wide Shut. Both Kubrick and Borges fixate -- with trepidation and awe -- on the emergence of a raw, erotically-tinged secret world within the consensus reality of daily social functioning, a secret world that protagonists are pulled towards at great personal risk but can never quite understand. Both artists traffic in implication, in temptation, in that one glimpse of the infinite that barely lasts a second but that will perhaps haunt you forever. Consider, by way of an example, Borges's story "The Sect of the Phoenix," which describes a global mystery cult whose ominous secret, transmitted through the ages but never spoken aloud (nor even spelled-out in the pages of the story), is thought by many readers to be none other than the 'secret' of sexual intercourse. Here, as in Eyes Wide Shut, we see sex recast as a sub-world within the world, a secret society both obvious and unfathomable.

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Photo found on btsergio's Flickr account, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Theater and Film: The Work of Ingmar Bergman

     If photography was the mother of cinema, then theater was the midwife.  The first motion pictures, pioneered by Thomas Edison in the U.S. and the Lumière brothers in France, were largely devoted to life and its unadulterated slices.  Both the kinetograph and the cinematograph were pressed into service of the real.  Their task, to reveal life at its most unrehearsed moments: workers leaving a factory, kids leaping off a dock into the water, a boxer flexing.  Early cinema had much in common with the flâneur of Impressionism: life's idle, unbiased spectator.  Movement was enough to fill the theaters.  Eventually however, audiences required more than just pictures in motion.  Cinema had breathed new life into the photograph, had given its mother wings.  But it was the theater that finally nudged film on to flight.  On December 1, 1903, The Great Train Robbery (Edison Manufacturing Company), adapted from Scott Marble's eponymous stage melodrama, soared onto the screen as cinema's very first narrative film.  From that momentous day forward, theater has served as film's primary template for storytelling in the flesh.
    Literature too has shaped the development of film narration, but more on gestational terms.  Literature has served as film's narrative blueprint, theater, its narrative prototype.  In the art of storytelling, theater has always been film's closest comrade.  Theater is the midwife of cinema.  It was the theater that, to modulate a Socratic metaphor, drew out a second life from photography's first.  Theater helped release the strange and wonderful thing residing patiently inside the Niépcean womb.  With The Great Train Robbery, theater helped unleash the story in motion-pictures, perhaps film's greatest commodity.  All the story in cinema betrays something of the theatrical impulse.  Thus, theater and film are fundamentally related media that have shared a long osmotic history.
    Many of the first narrative films were essentially filmed plays, proscenium view pieces shot at a distance in long takes.  Early film acting was a product of earlier theater work, placing the highest emphasis on gesture.  Many films first appeared within a theatrical framework, weaved into stage productions by the likes of Marinetti and Meyerhold.  Max Reinhardt's theatrical lighting would set the tone for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920), and the look of German Expressionism in general.  The term mise-en-scène, which originally referred to scenic design, would later be adopted to describe the shot.  So many plays have been adapted into films and so many films have been staged.  Thus, the conversation between theater and film has been long and fruitful.  Orson Welles, David Mamet, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz all got their start in theater, not to mention a hoard of Hollywood's greatest Method icons.  So many have taken part in the theater-film discourse, and bettered themselves for the experience.  None however, have worked as extensively in both media as Ingmar Bergman, legendary filmmaker, revered dramaturge.  Bergman began in theater in 1938 and ended there in 2002.  In between, he made over sixty films, securing his place among the greatest auteurs of all time.  Bergman's films were all tempered by his love for, and experience with, the theater.  They were his greatest act in a three act epic.
    Thus, Bergman's approach to cinema was decidedly theatrical.  He had a singular feel for dramatic rhythm, a way of waiting for tension, pausing for resonance.  He flourished with continuity editing, the long take, the meticulous composition and the slow pan.  His techniques hovered over the poetry of the moment, the edge of dramatic tension.  And of course, Bergman had a wondrous way with thespians; eliciting the tenderest, most intricate performances from actors that came off as well onstage as they did onscreen.  Bergman's most famous film, The Seventh Seal (Svensk Filmindustri, 1957), was actually based on Wood Painting, a play he wrote as an exercise for one of his acting classes.  In the same vein, After the Rehearsal (Cinematograph AB, 1984) is about the staging of Strindberg's A Dream Play, a production Bergman had put on four times in the past.  Thus, Bergman's forays into both theater and film proved essential to the success and character of his oeuvre.  In Bergman's words, “My films are only a distillation of what I do in the theater.  Theater work is sixty percent."
    Of all the trends Bergman carried over from theater to film, August Strindberg's chamber play may have been the most prominent.  In his Letter to the Members of the Intimate Theater, Strindberg protests the tired conventions of classical dramaturgy and delineates a new kind of drama to help beat back the dust slowly gathering about the curtains.  Conventional wisdom demanded plays in five acts, each with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end.  The end of each act indicated a space for applause.  If the play was written in blank verse the last two lines had to rhyme.  Climactic monologues were a must, not to mention tirades.  Roles were specially crafted for stars, even if they conflicted with the general thrust of the narrative.  Strindberg hated how contrived and suffocating the classical formula had become, how a fast set of rules had begun to dictate the kind of play one could produce.  He hated the way playwrights were now slaves to stories they could no longer control, how the dramatic arc dictated the thematic flow of the narrative.  There was no room for the leitmotif, no space for thematic reverberation.  On the heels of Miss Julie, a ferocious one-act success, Strindberg began to see a way out of the traditional rut.  Thus, he tossed all these structural conventions aside, formulating a faster, more intense drama which would meet the demands of an impatient public and open up the way for thematic ascendancy.  This new kind of play revolved around “the concept of chamber music transferred to drama.  The intimate action the highly significant motif, the sophisticated treatment.”  Chamber music, with its structural latitude and emotional intimacy, was to be the model.  Designed for four instruments, this genre of music was meant for the coziness of a palace chamber and, as Goethe so famously described it, resembles "four rational people conversing."  It is useful to think of chamber music as conversation, as an intimate engagement amongst a small group of people who, though they might at times seem to wander off topic, always come round in the end.  Thus, chamber music, above all else, describes a sense of emotional immediacy punctuated by thematic reverberation.
    Strindberg drew the chamber play along these lines, organizing the drama into three acts, with a small cast, modest set design and intimate venue.  The play would subject all the structural conventions of realistic playwriting to the thematic and tonal concerns of the drama.  As Strindberg explains, "we seek the strong, highly significant motif, but with limitations.  We try to avoid in the treatment all frivolity all calculated effects....No predetermined form is to limit the author because the motif determines the form.  Consequently: freedom in treatment, which is limited only by the unity of the concept and the feeling for style.”  Bergman went on to stage a number of Strindberg's chamber plays at various points throughout his career, most notably Strindberg's oft misunderstood masterpiece The Ghost Sonata.
    The Ghost Sonata, modeled after Beethoven's "Geistertrio," is deeply indebted to the structure and rhythm of the chamber form.  Organized around three acts, five characters and a unity of both space and time, the action takes on a force that could only be achieved through the smallness of the chamber paradigm.  Coupled with this overriding intensity, is the leitmotif, the returning thematic phrase that punctuates each succeeding act.  One of The Ghost Sonata's most pronounced motifs deals with generosity and its inevitable adulteration.  At the beginning of the first act, the Student Arkeholz asks the Milkmaid to wash out his infected eyes.  After some initial hesitations, the Milkmaid obliges, dabbing at the Student with her handkerchief.  Only the night before a house collapsed, leaving a mess of dead and dying in its wake.  Thus, the Student cannot use his own hands, for they have been contaminated by the wounded.  This image, the gift of sweet water beside a poisoned world, designates magnanimity as the antidote to life's daily oppressions.  Only through kindness can we wipe away the memory of our most recent nightmare.
    Moments later however, the Student is confronted by the Old Man, Director Hummel, who observes the encounter from his wheelchair.  Hummel informs the Student that his father never repaid a debt accrued to him in days of foolhardy speculation, that though he saved Arkenholz's father from misery he was repaid only with "the terrible hatred of those who owe a debt of thanks."  Thus, Hummel asks for the Student's help, so that he may make good on his father's obligation.  The Student complies, spurring Hummel to make Arkeholz's fortune as a way of repaying his general debt to society.  As he accepts this new mission, Hummel takes the Student's hand in his own.  Arkenholz recoils at once, crying out against Hummel's freezing hand and draining touch.  The image has changed.  Director Hummel is moved by a chain of obligation, not by a  bending of the soul.  Hummel's generosity is contingent upon recompense.  For Hummel, the world and its hardships are mitigated more through negotiation than through kindness.  We are only as moral as we are dependent.  Thus, Hummel can't see the cruelty in raising old accounts with a stranger returned from the graveyard.  For him, life has been nothing but an iron contract, "no sooner do you escape one trap than you find yourself in the middle of another."  Hummel's relation to mankind is essentially vampiric.  His every kindness represents a draining of the blood, his every investment, a costly return.  Thus, each give becomes a take, each charity a sort of trap.  This killing kindness is echoed throughout The Ghost Sonata, evolving with each recurrence.
    The Cook and Maid of the Colonel's household don't even bother to disguise their traps as Director Hummel does; their courtesy is nothing but bald-faced malice.  As the Colonel's daughter complains, the cook "boils out the meet, gives us the threads and water while she drinks up the bullion.  And when we have steak she cooks the flavor out of it first, eats the sauce drinks the broth...it's as if she could suck with her eyes."  The Maid marches to a similar tune, forcing the Daughter to redo her every chore.  The Daughter herself is placed in ambiguous relation to charity.  As the Student explains in his last climactic monologue, the Daughter has given him nothing but false hope, a withering glimpse of paradise.  Her handsome house proved sick and sordid to the core, her shy affections, the gateway to venereal disease.  She offered the Student Maya's exquisite veil only to tear it from before his eyes.  The daughter is a kind of Indian giver, someone who offers only what they will later take away.
    The Ghost Sonata itself participates in this twisted sort of charity.  The play takes as quickly as it gives, practicing a vampirism not unlike Hummel's or the servants'.  It gives us the gentle Buddha "with a bulb on its knees, out of which the stalk of a shallot has shot up, which bears a spherical constellation of white star-flowers!"  As the Student explains it, "The bulb is the earth...the stalk shoots straight up, like the axis of the spheres...its upper end the...star flower...a reflection of the cosmos....Buddha is sitting with the bulb of the earth...so that he will see it grow out and upwards transforming itself into heaven.  This poor earth shall become heaven!"  The play seems to hold out some great hope for the dawning of utopia.  But this hope is soon retracted in the succeeding section, where Arkenholz excoriates the daughter for her general stagnation, for her failure to work toward the Buddha's promise of paradise.  Devastated, the Daughter dies instantly.  Here, the gift actually kills its recipient.  Sight kills the seer.  The coldness of reality eliminates the daughter and her shimmering veil.  The give and take motif comes to warn us about the play's own two gifts: candor and hope.  With complete candor we will die of despair, with complete hope we will grow sick with complacency.  Thus, the play strikes out for the golden mean.  Christianity is the gift of candor, the recognition of a sinful world rife with inevitable suffering.  Buddhism is the gift of hope, the belief in a way out, a heaven on earth that can be achieved through human decency.  The play shows us the ugly world beyond the veil even as it points toward the heavens.  Thus, it offers us the white flower without falling in for the white lie.
    But as we turn our attention to the close of the drama we are reminded once again of Hummel and his charitable traps.  As the Daughter lies dying, Arkenholz eulogizes over her fading form, appealing to the heavens, "And you sleep...sleep without dreaming, and when you awake again...may you be greeted by a sun which doesn't burn, in a home without dust, by friends who have nothing to hide, by a love without flaws.  You wise and gentle Buddha, who sits here waiting for a heaven to grow forth form this earth, grant us patience in our trials, and the strength of will so that your hopes will not be disappointed."  After all that talk of heaven on earth, the play goes in for the easy lie, the opiate of the masses, pie in the empty sky.  The Student's vision of the afterlife is nothing but mental masturbation, a remote, unrealizable fantasy.  How can this world ever house "a sun which doesn't burn" or a "home without dust"?  It can't.  There can never be a heaven here on earth.  It is the fantastic in the Student's monologue which makes his appeal for patience so pathetic.  Who will have the patience to wait for "a love without flaws?"  Our last hope is relegated to that faraway light at the end of a long dark tunnel.  Buddha and his heaven on earth have been replaced by Jesus and his posthumous salvation.  Thus, the play snatches away our last hope for respite, as Hummel drains away the remaining strength from Arkenholz's hand.
    Apart for providing audiences with tremendous insight into the intent of the narrative, the giving-motif also helps unravel the mechanics of both Strindbergian drama and the chamber mode.  Because Strindberg's chamber plays do not follow along the peaks of Freytag's mountain, because they are not structured through narrative intrigue, rhythm becomes the most crucial element of organization.  It is the flow from scene to scene, image to image, that guides the audience.  The inexorable chain of cause and effect is subjected to the resounding motif.  Like the theme in a musical composition, the motif returns again and again, sometimes when one least expects it, and often in variation.  Without the motif to annotate the action, The Ghost Sonata would be a vacuous play indeed.  It is the current of give and take, the Milkmaid's giving of water, Hummel's taking of hand, the vampirism from servant to servant, and then, the final exchange between Student and Daughter, that gives The Ghost Sonata its spiraling, breathless tempo.  That is what truly weaves the drama together, what makes the play a sort of conversation between characters who, though they might appear to veer off topic, always come round in the end.
    Autumn Sonata (Filmédis, 1978) too is cast in the chamber mold, bearing a resemblance to Strindberg's Ghost Sonata which runs deeper than the play's title.  The film also revolves around a small group of characters, in this case four, to reflect the chamber quartet.  The productions share a unity in time and place, the former occurring primarily in Viktor and Eva's vicarage over a twenty-four hour period.  Thus, the action takes on an intensity that comes with the chamber play and its signature sense of insulation.  The narrative itself progresses in a manner similar to the sonata form with  an exposition-reveal-return structure to guide the action.  At the beginning of Autumn Sonata we are given a sense of the major characters and the film's focus, the seemingly amiable, albeit enigmatic, relationship between Eva and Charlotte.  Thus, the film's opening delineates the lines along which the bulk of the drama is to unfold.  We then pierce through the Charlotte-Eva facade, exposing the ugliness of their antagonism in a reveal.  Here The Ghost Sonata again comes to mind, with all the muckraking of its second act, to wit, the Colonel's sordid, decadent household.  Then, as Bergman's film flutters to a finish, we return to the Sonata's original movement: a mother and daughter, pleasant, but from a distance.
    Like Strindberg's plays, Autumn Sonata also pivots around the "highly significant motif."  Theme, above all else, guides the pacing and progression of the narrative.  Of all the film's currents then, language, may be one of its strongest.  Language is something used and abused by all of Sonata's characters.  It is the mirror of the film, something that can reveal or distort reality at will.  Viktor opens the film with a soliloquy recounting his engagement to Eva and the quiet life they have led together ever since.  But Viktor's words often take liberties with the truth and this idyllic image is no exception.  Viktor and Eva have never been completely at peace with one another, or at least never in the way Viktor's words seem to suggest.  The couple has not always lived a "quiet happy life at the parsonage."  When discussing his wife with Charlotte, Viktor confesses that Eva never loved him, that she admitted to being incapable of truly loving anyone.  Throughout the picture Eva and Viktor act more like old friends than old lovers.  There is a hesitance in their interactions, a sense of mutual discomfort that refutes Viktor's allusions to domestic bliss.  Viktor moves on in his opening remarks to read an excerpt from one of the published works in Eva's forgotten literary past.  The passage hopes for a love that will one day give Eva the courage for true introspection.  Viktor then declares, "I’d like to tell her just once that she is loved wholeheartedly, but I can’t say it in such a way that she’d believe me.  I can’t find the right words."  Here once again, words are more a barrier than a bridge, especially as they are directed at the audience rather than the person who needs to hear them most.  But when Viktor finally does direct them to Eva herself he is dismissed.  Eva tells him his own words "have no real sense" that, as a minister, he must be suffering "from a kind of occupational disease."  At the end of the film, Viktor again reiterates his linguistic ambivalence lamenting, "If only I could talk to her, but it’s just a lot of dusty words and empty phrases."  Ambivalence might be the best word to describe Viktor, a man who spends the majority of the film tiptoeing around both his wife and her mother.  He is a man of dusty words, not a man of action.  Viktor rarely says or does anything; he is unable to influence the crumbling world around him, largely because his gap between emotion and expression is so yawning.
    Charlotte and Eva too are plagued by the inadequacies and abuses of language.  Charlotte may be the film's worst culprit, using words to conceal her shortcomings from others.  In her confrontation with Helena, Charlotte caresses her neglected, ailing child with all the sweetest of intonations, crooning, "I’ve thought of you so often, every day."  In this way, Charlotte disguises her hatred of both daughters and the mess she has made of motherhood.  As Eva explains, "I was brought up with beautiful words," but beautiful words alone.  The only way Charlotte ever expresses any true emotion is through music.   As she reveals while defending herself to Paul, "The critics always say that I'm a generous musician.  No one plays Schumann's concertos with a warmer tone nor the big Brahms sonata.  I am not stingy with myself."  Into music Charlotte throws all the finer feelings of her being, all the feelings one generally reserves for life.  Thus, her career in music literally and figuratively replaces her life as a mother.  Music replaces language; art replaces life.
    Eva too has a cunning way with words.  Her invitation to her mother skirts sweetly around the shadow of their past and the distance of their present.  In fact, like her mother before her, Eva is magnetized to the piano, leaving her career in literature by the wayside.  Thus, she too finds a woodenness in words, giving them up for the clear fire of music.  The exchange that best encapsulates language and its relation to both characters comes during the Chopin recital when Eva asks for Charlotte's opinion of her performance prodding, “I want to know what I did wrong.”  To which Charlotte responds, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”  Then, during Eva's late-night airing of grievances, Charlotte asks, "What did I do wrong?"  To which Eva replies, "You did nothing wrong."  The bookend here speaks volumes about the struggle between mother and daughter to elude, both one another, and the possibility for progress.  In the words of Strother Martin, "what we've got here is failure to communicate."
    Like Ghost Sonata, Autumn Sonata too is governed more by tempo than by a tightly structured narrative.  It slides and swells with the ebb and flow of conversation.  As Viktor talks to the audience, as Eva and Charlotte blather to each other, as Helena cries into the silent night, words are what pull the film from start to finish.  Language is the motif and "motif determines the form."  Thus, theater and film: the Strindbergian drama and the Bergman picture.  The chamber film was the concept of the chamber play transferred to celluloid.

 

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    In her seminal essay "Film and Theater," Susan Sontag concludes a long, laborious comparison of both media with the following:

    For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated.  Like the idea that everything is what it is, and not another thing.  A painting is a painting.  Sculpture is sculpture.  A poem is a poem, not prose.  Etcetera.  And the complementary idea: a painting can be "literary" or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical.  We need a new idea.  It will probably be a very simple one.  will we be able to recognize it?

    In many ways, as I conclude this long, laborious essay on the gesamtkunstwerk, a term I remain unable to spell, I feel much like Ms. Sontag: wry, irreverent and a little weary of the intermedia phenomenon in general.  I embarked on this project for many reasons, but diffidence may have been one of my most basic inspirations.  My overt intention was to give readers a new appreciation for the cinema as something protean, a product of aesthetic collaboration.  My covert intention was far more simpleminded.  I strove to validate film through the veneration of other media.  With Dali, Faulkner and Bergman I felt I could place film where it belonged: on the shoulders of giants.  The paragone that erupted during the Italian Renaissance still rages.  Which art is best?  Can we include photography in this most hallowed pantheon?  Can we include film?  I am very tired of questions like these, of unending attacks on the avant-garde.  I am sick of defending film against the skeptical student of art history or the petty English major.  One thing this project has taught me: that I needn't bother.  Film has been, is, and always will be, as profound and sophisticated as all the other arts to which we pay the most careful deference.   But again, I am sick of such comparisons, of the hierarchy, of a world measured in arching eyebrows.  Forget the staking out of artistic territory, forget the painterly, the literary and the theatrical, or at least, forget them as lines along which to do battle.  Art is an egalitarian realm.  One art can only aid another, if used in proper faith.  That is our new idea.

Bibliography

Conway, Stephen. "Rhythm and Blues: Strindberg’s Chamber Plays." Sub Verbis: Stephen Conway. 1993.         <http://subverbis.com>.

Knopf, Robert. Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Strindberg, August, Walter Gilbert Johnson, and  10 Stockholm .Intima teatern.  Open Letters to the Intimate Theater.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.

Strindberg, August, and Joe Martin. Strindberg-Other Sides: Seven Plays. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. "Film and Theater." The Tulane Drama Review Vol. 11 (1966): 24-37.

Törnqvist, Egil. Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University         Pre

Painting & Film: The Work of Salvador Dali

    Painting and film have always been intimately intertwined.  Many painters, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci and Jan Vermeer, were acquainted with the camera obscura, a sort of proto-camera used by many artists for meticulous image analysis.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of Impressionism’s founding fathers, also begot Jean Renoir, the towering auteur behind films like The Grand Illusion (RAC, 1937) and The Rules of the Game (Nouvelle edition française, 1939), both of which have been counted among the greatest films ever made.  Andy Warhol, one of modern art’s most iconic figures, dabbled in cinema for a significant portion of his career, adding over sixty films to his name.  But beyond these somewhat gimmicky parallels, painting and film are fundamentally united as visual media.  They are different dialects of a shared aesthetic language.  Painting has informed nearly every film with which I’m familiar, or at least every film with a sophisticated cinematographic approach.  It is a fundamental, and what’s more, inextricable part of all visual culture.  There is Rembrandt van Rijn in The Godfather (Paramount Pictures, 1972) and its chiaroscuro lighting, there is Andrew Wyeth in Days of Heaven (Paramount Pictures, 1978) and its pastoral vistas, there is Edward Hopper in Dark City (New Line Cinema, 1998) and it’s urban nightmares; there is paint behind every frame of celluloid. (Plow, Spring 2008)
    This past summer, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the synergy between painting and film with an exhibition devoted to the cinematic endeavors of Salvador Dali.  Dali dabbled in film for over thirty years, writing and directing with a flare found only in art’s most outrageous practitioners.  In 1929, together with Luis Buñuel, Dali set out to make Un Chien Andalou (Billancourt studios), a film now considered to be the touchstone of surrealist cinema.  At the time, Dali, and many surrealists like him, had become disillusioned by art and all it had come to represent.  Dali was disgusted with conventional conceptions of beauty, with anything that smacked of aestheticism.  Art had fixated on that which was pleasing to the eye, failing to do what it did best: reveal in stunning fashion the truth and beauty of experience.  So Dali fell on film as a weapon in the war against art.  Film, because of its uniquely revelatory properties, was to be Dali’s “anti-art,” Dali’s medium for change, his Barack Obama, if you will.  Thus, Un Chien Andalou was a film on a mission.  The mission: to shatter art at its core, to shake the very foundations of beauty.  But Dali was a shrewd warrior, an artist unwilling to fight such a momentous battle from a single front.  Dali’s offensive can be seen in all his paintings from this period.  These paintings hover over all of Un Chien Andalou just as Un Chien hovers over all of them in turn.  The two share a sort of whispered dialogue, a dialogue that exemplifies the give and take painting and film have enjoyed since the latter’s inception.
    Un Chien Andalou’s most famous sequence, its opening sequence, is perhaps the closest the film comes to metaphor, or allegorizing of any kind.  In this scene, Simone Mareuil’s eye is seemingly sliced in two by a sharp, shiny razor.  This shocking, brutal image serves as our induction into Dali’s world.  For Dali, the eye represented everything he was trying to debunk: the mind’s constant, tedious effort to make sense of the sensual world and the eye’s constant and equally tedious thirst for visual pleasure.  Dali would not subject himself to the eye of the viewer.  He would not make things make sense, nor would he make things look pretty.  Dali chose to shock and challenge his audience rather than cater to their expectations.  In fact, the cutting of the eye, alludes to a particular mode of Dalinian agitation: the body as object.  Throughout Un Chien Andalou and many of Dali’s contemporary paintings, the human body is degraded and defiled to the point of total objectification.
    At one point in the film, Pierre Batcheff gazes thoughtfully at his hand as a swarm of ants scurry forth from a hole at the center of his palm.  This sort of ant-orifice image was something that haunted and inspired Dali for most of his life, and, like melting clocks, became an essential part of his artistic signature.  It is a symbol that appears in Dali’s First Days of Spring (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg) and his Accommodations of Desire (Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/ARS, New York), both of which were painted around the time of the film’s debut.  Dali harnessed the body for its ability to astonish.  That jolt of revulsion, that was the lightning Dali used to rouse his viewers from their aesthetic slumber.  It was a jolt that went especially well with the cinema, with the meticulous, visceral eye of the camera.  Film rendered the human form in a way no other medium could.  Film had a kind of ocular exactitude that made any assault on the body all the more horrifying.
    Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (Musée du Louvre, Paris) was a painting that fascinated Dali for its focus on objects.  Dali believed that even the most mundane objects should be recognized for their transcendent poetry.  He loved Vermeer for the quiet way he would weave magic into a pillow or whispers into a book.  Dali nods to Vermeer and his emphasis on the overlooked in Un Chien Andalou.  When Simone Mareuil throws down her copy of the The Lacemaker, Dali signifies his commitment to the task of object elevation.  Simone herself seems bent on bringing objects to life.  In one scene, she lays out Batcheff’s eccentric outfit as if to call him forth from his clothing.  His tie, shirt and petticoat are all arranged in the form his body would take should he be somehow conjured into his clothing.  It’s as if objects have a soul that can be summoned under the right conditions.  Sure enough, in the next shot of the bed, Batcheff lies there fully clothed.  His position seems to suggest that he has indeed materialized to fill the sartorial outline.  Thus, for Dali, objects boasted a sort of anthropomorphic poetry.
    “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  The surrealist slogan hails from Le Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), a poetic novel lauded by surrealists as one of the signal precursors to the movement.  The phrase encapsulates much of the punch behind surrealist imagery: the discordant, arbitrary juxtaposition of objects.  One can see this sort of emphasis on objects and their “chance encounter” in Dali’s Study for Honey is Sweeter Than Blood (Private Collection).  The putrefying donkey, the dismembered body, the needle-like figures in the background, all are arranged as anecdotes amid a severely disjointed composition.  Dali lets each object tell its own story.  The donkey, the body, the needles, each image has its own sense of visual autonomy.  But it is their arrangement that gives the painting its energy.  It is the way these objects have been thrown together, the way they have been given a sort of miscellaneous unity.  It is their chance encounter on a canvas that is so compelling.
    Dali made use of this chance encounter in Un Chien Andalou.  In one stunning sequence, Batcheff advances upon Mareuil.  Straining against the weight of two grand pianos, Batcheff dutifully drags them both across the room to reach her.  Donkeys lie rotting atop each piano’s lid while two clerics (one of them Dali himself) slide along their backs underneath.  Again, the image resonates with Lautréamont and his sewing machine.  The pianos, the donkeys, the clerics, simply stringing the words together evokes something of what Dali was trying to accomplish
    The paranoid-critical method was perhaps Dali’s most important contribution to Surrealism.  The method was an artistic technique built around man’s paranoid tendency to detect causal relationships between unrelated stimuli. Dali went about provoking these sorts of delusions by embedding double-images into many of his works.  Offering up two images, Dali left the viewer locked in a maze of interpretive contradictions. Dali’s Invisible Man (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) exemplifies the paranoid-critical method in its depiction of a figure embedded into, and comprised of, his surroundings.  The viewer perceives the invisible man and yet cannot shake off the feeling that he might merely be the figment of an addled imagination.  The composition is so fluid that one can’t really tell where one figure ends and the other begins.  All the images seem to bleed into one another, creating a morass of overlapping ambiguities.
    Dali found an even greater fluidity in film and its ability to literally lay one image upon another.  In Un Chien Andalou’s most famous dissolve we are taken from Pierre Batcheff’s ant-ridden hand, to his spindly armpit hair, to a spiky sea urchin, and finally, to a severed hand rolling about in the street.  This procession of discordant images perfectly expresses the paranoid-critical aesthetic and its ability to encourage hallucinatory associations.  Batcheff’s hair and the spiny sea urchin are in no way connected to one another.  They are not linked by any sort of narrative cause and effect, nor do they share any inherent or symbolic properties.  They merely suggest one another; they have strong visual associations without sharing any sort of causal connection.  This may be the paranoid-critical aesthetic in a nutshell.  Thus, again we can see strong stylistic parallels between Un Chien Andalou and the paintings Dali did during the same period.
    Painting and film have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.  The two are simply different windows into the same sort of mimesis.  Salvador Dali exemplifies this brotherhood as a surrealist who straddled the line between both media, dipping into one or the other at will.  Dali was a great painter and a great filmmaker.  But above all, he was a great artist, and that is what matters most.

Bibliography

Gale, Matthew, ed. Dali & Film. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. 06-238.

Plow, Brian. Lectures on lighting and cinematography. 061.348, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Spring 2008

Street Symphonies (and Period Piece Cacophonies): Keitel and DiCaprio as Scorsese's Leading Men

Regardless of the few projects he probably should have left alone, Scorsese has made a lasting impression in the gangster genre with two films made over thirty years apart. After I finished The Departed (2006) and watched Mean Streets (1973) for the third time, I resolved that Scorsese’s gangster films were gospel to my eyes. Both films are marked by impressive casts, which are led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Harvey Keitel, respectively, as well as the reverence Scorsese shows to his early film influences. Scorsese’s first feature length film, Who’s That Knocking At My Door (1968), also stars Harvey Keitel and it screams inspiration from French cinema; however, there are definitely the starting patterns of Scorsese’s interest in religion as a thematic concern and the infamous use of his personal record collection. The movie is about a young man in New York City, J.R. (played by Harvey Keitel), and his relationship to a girl with no name (played by Zina Bethune). Their relationship is innocent enough until she confides in him that she was raped before they started dating. For the rest of the film we see J.R. stumble through this conflict between his love for the Girl and his resentment toward her, which produces few memorable moments other than the eyebrow raising final scene. For me, the best scene in the film is after she tells him what happened to her; this particular scene brings out a lot of genuine hurt in Harvey Keitel that you wouldn’t expect from such a young actor. Considering he had to play against a pretty stale Zina Bethune, I have to applaud Keitel for being able to work with anything. In acting classes, I’ve learned that if you listen to the other person in a scene, your dialogue will be golden; you can see Keitel hearing what she’s said and then taking it in, slow to understand at first and then faster, his confused fury gaining momentum. In the end, this screenplay doesn’t give him much; I think Mean Streets is infinitely better.

 Mean Streets starts with a black frame and a voice (Martin Scorsese’s) saying: “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Charlie (Keitel) then wakes up in a sweat, as if he just suffered a bad dream; but we’ve seen only darkness, and we only hear the words that pull Charlie out of this darkness and guide his actions for the rest of the film. Charlie wants to do his own penance as opposed to saying the ‘Hail Marys’ and ‘Our Fathers’ that the priests give to sinners looking for guidance. He tries to look out for his loud-mouthed, juvenile friend Johnny Boy (played by Robert DeNiro) and maintain a secret relationship with Johnny’s cousin, Teresa, all while trying to pull off some upward mobility by collecting owed money for his uncle. Harvey Keitel does a lot as Charlie that is worth watching again and again; in fact, the entire cast works ridiculously well together, which makes it an instant classic. Scorsese is speaking more in this film than in Who’s That Knocking At My Door, as we see him playing with his notorious tracking shot, red lighting and his affection for New York City in so many shots.

Thirty-three years later, The Departed boasts an almost entirely male cast list that still blows my mind and Scorsese makes a move up north to Boston as his featured locale. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s Scorsese’s most recent gangster film and it is downright wonderful. Before I watched it, I had some qualms about Leonardo DiCaprio playing a lead role and that’s because Leo in Scorsese’s hands equals me falling asleep. I may be the only person in the world that thought Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004) were kind of on the mundane side (again the Academy Awards and I totally disagree), but I don’t think Scorsese was being reasonable when he invested in the belief that DiCaprio could help well-rounded actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Cate Blanchett carry a film. A young Harvey Keitel probably would have knocked DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes out of the park, but the world will never know. Suffice it to say, I think Scorsese finally cast DiCaprio appropriately as Billy Costigan in The Departed, which got Scorsese the long awaited Best Director Academy Award.

Then, just as I was patting Scorsese on the back for a job well done, he went and made a choice I may never forgive him for: he cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Theodore Roosevelt in an upcoming biopic. I nodded off just thinking about it! Leo, Marty and period films do not mix; I’m especially concerned with period films about mortal legends like Teddy. Coincidentally, I learned a good deal about Theodore Roosevelt this summer from a good friend; I learned that Teddy Roosevelt was probably the most awe-inspiring president to exist…ever. I won’t go into details here, but he truly led a remarkable life and I’m not sure if DiCaprio can handle it. In order for Leonardo to earn this role, in my eyes, he would have to take a crash course in Teddy-ism. He needs to create and join a cavalry regiment to the same extent as the Rough Riders, as well as wrestle a bear. If Leo can survive, then he may have what it takes to tell the tale of a truly remarkable man. In other words, Harvey Keitel is probably up for playing the part.