When at age thirteen or thereabouts I started getting excited about the wide world of motion pictures I also of course grew resourceful when it came to seeing art movies, world cinema, and off-the-beaten-track fare; seeing stuff and finding out bits and pieces about what had been going on since the late 19th century, movies and fucked-up movie people, from Helsinki to Rotterdam, a lot of it sounding like a whole hell of a lot of fun had indeed gone on...scandals that would cause the jaws of entrenched royal dynasties to fall to the floors and clank. Dignified achievements also. The fist international art cinema titans who grabbed me and got me steaming with excitement hot off the bat were Federico Fellini, especially 8½ (1963) and Roma (1972), and Ingmar Bergman, especially Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Persona (1966). When it came to significant American directors whose films I could rent, watch on TV, or see in a cinema, my predilection was for directors or films who/which demonstrated a distinctive visual approach moment-to-moment that could not be mistaken and that clearly artistically insisted upon itself.
Living Austro-Hungarian cartoon turtle Billy Wilder spoke to me precisely because I believe the critics are right when they claim that his work is cruel, predatory, and controlled. Peter Bogdanovich can barely handle to hear Billy Wilder’s name. Precisely what I ordered, then, doc—lights, camera, medicine cabinets. As a teen I most liked Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), surely their being the two most darkly lit in all the filmography.
Not yet aware of who his super famous dad was or what all that entailed, and many years short of reading Picture, Lillian Ross’s book about that film’s incomprehensibly absurd production, ritual studio butchering, and disownment by near all associated, I remember being deeply touched by the meditative monumentalism and mindful pathfinding in John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951) when I watched it on TV, an unusual blip in the programming. Because I’d just seen it on video, I could not help but place Huston’s approach in counterpoint with what I’d seen in and absorbed from Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 war tribunal flick Paths of Glory.
I was fascinated and more than a bit jazzed also by John Frankenheimer because in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seconds (1966) he shoots closeups and people in group formations in a way that is instantly recognizable and totally unlike anybody else’s shit. His use of lenses can have a wonderful power to disturb and his mode is one of persistent disequilibrium, which his very specific style brings over as an ongoing flow of purely cinematic affections. Of the immediately subsequent generation of big deal American directors, it is probably Brian De Palma who most distinctly retains the encoded and encrypted Frankenheimer legacy cipher subdural implant.
While certain filmmakers and films presented me with stuff that fertilized within me fast or hit me very hard—the experience of first seeing Jean-Luc Godard by way of Prénom Carmen (1983) and being mystified by the fact that for long stretches the soundtrack is intentionally asynchronous with the images surely deserves special evocation—the one time for absolute certain I remember being still very young and having that almost cliché reaction where the tape you are watching ends and the experience has been so powerful for you that you just sit for a considerable period silent and all but motionless....to risk sounding like I’m poor Pauline Kael losing it at the movies all over again...for me it was Robert Altman’s epic 1975 Bicentennial head-fuck Nashville. It is my strong suspicion—and there is a long, juicy history of commentary—that quite a lot of viewers react very strongly to the assassination and eerie denuded stasis that close that very-unpopular-in-Nashville true blue masterpiece of World Cinema Confederated and Entire. In terms of how my literary mind has always worked, Nashville is obviously going to appeal to me because it is a systems or network narrative plotted out over an expansive urban topography with a whole lot of characters intersecting with myriad social institutions and sowing just the right amount of that sweet straight-from-the-gourd discord wherever they may sashay. In Nashville a traffic pile-up on the freeway is a complexitive event closer to what it would be for emergency responders than to some traditional story about a person stalled in traffic and unable to meet their fiancé on time, or what have you. The essentially random shooting of Ronee Blakley’s mentally ill country singer Barbara Jean is both random and impossible to fathom from the perspective of the ground, of the earth. But it is singular and ineffaceable for anybody who has seen the film and who basically trusts their eyes and ears. In the network or systems narrative the random event loses its randomness and is placed back on the surface of the earth in highly intelligent grids and virtual blocks. For me the properly moral implications of Altman’s film and its fatalist ending are that we are each on some level culpable for the nasty little tragedies it takes all of us somehow to produce. Surely, ol’ Hitchcock would give the admiring, throat-clearing salute. Deep down, for Hitch, benevolent sadist uncle and understated humorist, personal but nonetheless too-public culpability was the One Big Game in Town.
