Spike Lee in London

BFI Southbank has a current season of films which places Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in context. Lee has come over to speak during the season and he popped up in the crowd at Arsenal’s home game against Wigan on Saturday. I know he is a big sports fan. He’s been to Arsenal before and I’m sure he enjoyed the game.

We’ve also had interviews in the Independent and on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in which he was interviewed by the urbane, liberal and generally calm and organised Mark Lawson. But Spike lived up to his billing and Lawson seemed quite nervous. It was a joy to hear someone who wasn’t interested in giving us platitudes and just spoke his mind and laughed a lot. I enjoyed the interview but was very disappointed by one of his comments. Asked about the films that were being shown alongside Do The Right Thing, Lee told us quite clearly that he hadn’t chosen the films – and he didn’t agree with showing all of them. Lawson suggested that the Paul Haggis film Crash might have been influenced by DTRT. Lee said that he didn’t want to be associated with Crash. I can understand that but I confess that I was dismayed when Lee came out with a tirade against Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine. Kassovitz should have acknowledged  his debt to DTRT he said. And then it transpired that Lee hadn’t seen the film. His friends had told him all about it and so he didn’t want to see it.

I guess this is vintage Spike Lee and we have to take the rough with the smooth. You should watch the film, Spike. It’s one of the best films of the 1990s and Kassovitz has spoken about his influences, including your own role model and fellow NYU graduate Jim Jarmusch as well as Martin Scorsese. He has spoken about the independent US features, including the ‘hood’ films that he admired – I think that Juice is perhaps closest to La haine. In many ways the young Kassovitz worked in similar ways to the young Spike Lee and although his subsequent career has been a disappointment, I think La haine still stands up. So, go on Spike, give it a go.

Those Spike Lee Joints

The home of 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Photo © Sparkdance as shown on Flickr

It’s twenty years since the release of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (it feels a lot longer, not sure why). The BFI is celebrating the occasion with a season on the Southbank in London and we are also going to get some screenings up here in Bradford. I’m also planning a course, so it seems a good idea to revisit the work of Spike Lee, one of the most controversial directors working today. I’ve seen most, but not all, of Lee’s features so I’ve got some catching up to do and some re-viewings. I’m not qualified to judge how well he represents African-American culture, though I feel like I’ve learned a lot from his films. Although race is a major topic for him, his films are also about gender, social class, the family and a host of other issues. Most of all though he is a stylist and I think that his films are distinctive because of their visual qualities, the use of music and great casting. Lee is a genuine auteur. There are few filmmakers whose work is instantly  recognisable from their company’s name. But when you see the announcement that a film is from ‘40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks‘, you know that it is a Spike Lee Joint, sho’ nuff.

I’d have to say that I haven’t yet seen a bad Spike Lee film or perhaps more accurately, I haven’t yet seen a Spike Lee film that wasn’t interesting in terms of style, content and commitment. I know that there are commentators that I respect, such as Armond White, who are very down on Spike and accuse him of blocking out other more worthwhile filmmakers because of his vigorous self-promotion and propensity to ’say it like it is’ as loudly as possible – but even when I don’t necessarily agree with him, I think it is better that he is out there saying things than keeping schtumm.

Spike Lee was born in 1957 in Atlanta but grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. He went back to college in Atlanta at the famous Black school, Morehouse, before developing his filmmaking skills back in New York at the Tisch School a couple of years behind Jim Jarmusch. Lee’s father is a noted jazz musician and composer and his mother was a teacher. His father has worked on the music for several of Lee’s films and his family life has clearly influenced his filmmaking.

In 1986, Lee’s first ‘commercial’ feature She’s Gotta Have It, a low budget independent film, was one of the earliest successes of what became known as American Independent Cinema. Since then, Lee has been continuously working on fiction features, documentaries, TV dramas, music videos and commercials, all produced by his own company. As of August 2009, Lee had released 20 features (fiction and documentary) and another 20 TV/video/commercials etc. This is a staggering achievement given the conservative nature of the mainstream American film business and the forthright arguments put forward by producer/writer/director/actor Spike Lee. This hasn’t prevented major features like the last Spike Lee Joint, the Miracle at Santa Anna (2008) from failing to get a proper release outside North America. Personally, I find it difficult to imagine what the winning documentaries must have been like that prevented Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997) and When the Levées Broke (2006) from claiming Oscar success. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised given the commercial failure of Bamboozled (2000), the biting satire on the racism in American television. In the same year, Lee had a big commercial success with a documentary/concert film featuring four African-American comedians, The Original Kings of Comedy. Lee is tough and sharp when it comes to surviving in the American film industry. It would be good to discuss what we think his films have contributed to global film culture over twenty years and more.

I would put Spike Lee into my Top 10 American filmmakers of the last twenty years without hesitation.

Danny Boyle – life after Slumdog

Screen International this week reported that Danny Boyle has signed a three year deal with Fox Searchlight and Pathé, the two companies behind the successful distribution of Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog is still making money around the world with theatrical currently showing $358 million and DVD already at $30 million in the US.

Boyle is said to be keen to link up with Indian filmmakers Shekhar Kapur and Anurag Kashyap and has acquired the rights to the book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, a collection of essays about the city by a returning former resident. Shekhar Kapur is best known for Elizabeth in the UK, but more importantly he made Bandit Queen (India/UK 1994) with part-funding by Channel 4. This was one of the first films to attempt to marry aspects of British and Indian popular cinema. Anurag Kashyap is a younger (37) filmmaker with wide experience as an actor, writer and director. He has worked with Mani Ratnam and with Deepa Mehta, but it was his own film, Black Friday (India 2004), about the 1993 Mumbai bombings, that Boyle watched in his preparation for Slumdog.

The success of Slumdog means that Danny Boyle will have great freedom to choose his next projects. But it doesn’t mean that he has become a critical success. Anyone who wants to gauge the challenge that Slumdog’s success has presented to the critical community should look at the last two issues of Cineaste magazine. Robert Koehler wrote one of the silliest reviews of Slumdog I have seen and what was worse he wrote about the film claiming deep knowledge of India and Indian Cinema. Taken to task in the latest issue by Rahul Hamid, Koehler then compounds his folly. I don’t want to rehash all the debates again, but Koehler seems unable to accept that Slumdog is an Indian story about aspects of contemporary globalised Indian life adapted and mounted by Brits and Indians working together and drawing on recent Indian film styles.

Nouvelle Vague Directors: Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy and Jeanne Moreau on location on the Riviera for Baie des anges © Raymond CAUCHETIER / 1993 CINE TAMARIS

Jacques Demy (1931-1990) is the New Wave director who, like Louis Malle, is difficult to categorise. Some link him to the ‘Left Bank Group’, but this is primarily because he married Agnès Varda in 1962. Otherwise he had little in common with the politics of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker. In some ways he was closer to Truffaut and he certainly knew all the Cahiers gang, presumably via Varda or from his film school contacts. There were several distinctive aspects of Demy’s cinema which made it ‘personal’ and ‘different’.

Demy was fascinated by American Cinema – but by musicals rather than B films noirs. Nearly all of his films present a romance drawing in some way on the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a fan of various aspects of classical French Cinema and French popular music culture. Demy was a native of the West Coast of France in the region around Nantes and this coastline provided the backdrop for his best known films, Lola (1961), Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les demoiselles de Rochefort in 1967. These films draw on various Hollywood sources – On the Town (1949), the Stanley Donen film about sailors on leave in New York is an obvious influence on Lola. The stars of Demy’s New Wave films are the women (and the music of Michel Legrand). In his first four films these are Anouk Aimée, Jean Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Deneuve again with her sister Françoise Dorléac. By 1967 he had a full star cast – Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, George Chakiris and Gene Kelly. Demy moved to the US to make Model Shop in 1969 and after this his career foundered. The early quartet of films have survived however and are well worth watching, both for their own specific qualities and because they represent a different side to the New Wave.

Demy’s second film was La baie des anges (Bay of Angels 1963). Jeanne Moreau as a platinum blonde is a bourgeois wife with a gambling habit. The film starts with a typical New Wave tracking shot by Jean Rabier (who had been an assistant to Henri Decaë on Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’énchafaud (1958) before shooting several films for Chabrol and then for Varda and Demy). The camera appears to be mounted on a car or truck which is driven at speed along the deserted promenades of the Riviera. It reminded me of Jean Vigo’s ‘city symphony’ film A propos de Nice (1929) photographed by Boris Kaufman. The action then switches to Paris where a young man in a boring accountancy job is persuaded to visit a casino by a colleague. When he wins a considerable amount on the roulette table, Jean (Claude Mann) decides to change his holiday plans and instead of visiting relatives in the country he finds a hotel in Cannes and starts to visit the casino. Here he meets Jackie (Moreau) who he had briefly seen earlier being thrown out of a Parisian casino.

The main part of the film is a melodrama about sex and money. Jean and Jeanne have a tempestuous and whirlwind affair driven by the thrill of gambling with its intense highs and lows and moments of exhilaration and despair. There is passion and indeed violence in the relationship and the narrative has an ‘open’ ending that is quite abrupt. What this points to is the curious mixture of ‘fantasy romance’ and cold realism that seems to infuse the films I’ve watched.

I enjoyed Baie des anges. At times I thought to myself, “there isn’t much plot”, but at the same time I realised that I was engrossed by the rich texture of the images and the way in which the narrative unfolded. Moreau is a star actor, but I wasn’t completely convinced by Claude Mann. Sometimes he appeared perfect for the role and sometimes out of his depth. Jeanne Moreau’s hair was my main concern. I presume that it was meant to signify ‘artifice’/'brittleness’. I certainly didn’t like it, but it worked in the sense that it somehow enhanced Moreau’s extraordinary ability to look soft and alluring one moment and hard and frankly terrifying at others.

I’m hoping to watch more from Demy soon. In the meantime, there is a clip from Baie des Anges on an earlier posting here. 

Senses of Cinema article and links.

Genova (UK 2008)

Will Holland as the older daughter, Kelly, in Genova

Having thought that I’d missed Genova, I managed to catch it in France where it is titled Un été Italian. I seem to have spent a long time extolling the virtues of Michael Winterbottom and defending him in the face of indifference or hostility. As a result, I was a little worried about seeing this feature which has hung around since last Summer before getting a release. It hasn’t helped that the only Winterbottom films that have been deemed commercially successful tend to be those that for me are his least interesting, such as A Cock and Bull Story (UK 2005). It’s a relief then that Genova is a big return to form for Winterbottom fans – and of course another commercial disaster.

For most reviewers, Winterbottom’s main distinguishing feature as a director is that he constantly moves from one genre to another and can’t be pinned down. The implication is that this is a problem, rather than an indication that Winterbottom is an auteur filmmaker who makes films for his own reasons. If he does draw on genre repertoires, it isn’t usually in order to frame a story in genre terms. For mainstream audiences this presents a real problem in that the films do not offer conventional structures – or rather they do not fulfil the expectations that generic story structures set up. This is certainly true of Genova, which perhaps has less ‘plot’ than any other Winterbottom film and instead offers the most intense and emotional representation of a brief period in the lives of the central characters. 

If Genova draws on any generic repertoire, it is the current cycle of psychological horror/ghost stories, but its clearest referent is not a modern Japanese or Spanish film but Nic Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now (UK 1973). In that classic film Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are a couple who are deeply in love, but grief-stricken over the death of one of their children. When they visit Venice they are disturbed by a sense of foreboding in fleeting sightings of a mysterious figure. In Genova, a university lecturer (Colin Firth) loses his wife in a car crash which his two daughters survive. He decides to take the girls to the Northern Italian city of Genoa for the Summer to help with the grieving process. The comparison between the two films is valid but not helpful towards an understanding of what Genova is actually about. Don’t Look Now is a genuine melodrama/thriller with conscious attempts to draw in an audience through the strength of the bond between the parents and the sheer terror that threatens them in the potentially supernatural mise en scène of the dark canals. Genova is much more circumspect about what constitutes a ‘ghost’ and is in many ways a supremely realist film. In fact, it made me think about another film concerning grief on a trip through Italy – Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Italy 1953).

I’ve called Winterbottom an auteur, but I’m sure he would also credit the authorial contributions of his collaborators. The other ways to approach Genova are via its writer Laurence Coriat and its familiar crew members, especially Marcel Zyskind as cinematographer. Laurence Coriat wrote my favourite Michael Winterbottom film, Wonderland (UK 1999). She is also working with Winterbottom on a long-term project featuring Wonderland’s John Simm and Shirley Henderson and on a film with Marc Evans, a long-time friend of Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton and the Revolution Films set-up. Coriat is almost an ‘in-house’ writer and with the usual suspects on set, it would seem that Genova must have had a sense of coherence as a project. Having said that, Winterbottom’s shooting strategy and Eaton’s approach to squeezing evey drop out of the tightest of budgets must always make shooting a film like this extremely demanding.

The production set-up recalls Code 46 (2003) which also featured a North American star (Tim Robbins) plunged into the world of low-budget ‘guerilla filmmaking’ on the streets of Shanghai. Robbins was not too impressed by the rigours of the shooting method but Catherine Keener in Genova seems more receptive in interviews. Code 46 is a lot more plot driven, but both films tend to have narrative ‘gaps’ that audiences are expected to fill and endings which are very open. I like this and it doesn’t cause me problems.

Colin Firth now lives in Italy so presumably he found himself on solid ground. Catherine Keener plays a friend, an old classmate from Harvard, who works in Genoa. She helps widower Joe and his two girls travel to the city and arranges a temporary post for him at the university. Keener is a well-known in American Independent Cinema. The two girls are played by Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine (who I later discovered I’d seen in the US remake of Dark Water). I that Firth is meant to be a Brit, though I didn’t really think about this as globe-trotting academics are pretty common these days. The low budget production includes a winter driving scene in Sweden and some UK work as well as a Chicago street scene and the main shoot in Italy. The only production issues for me were the casting of Kerry Shale (nice man, but aren’t there any other American actors in the UK – his presence makes me think of plays on Radio 4) and the use of Ryanair as the airline flying into Genoa (from the US?). The real benefit of course is the freedom to shoot in the Zyskind style.

What this means in terms of the emotional feel of the film is the disorientation brought on by hand-held ‘Scope camerawork with sometimes jarring cutting. Everything is filmed in available light, so we linger in darkened rooms or move between dark and light with all the problems of re-adjusting. This makes the film quite uncomfortable to watch, but matches the numbness and lack of focus felt by the characters. The architecture of Genoa also plays a part as characters (i.e. the girls) have to follow a route through narrow alleyways. Zyskind tilts the camera up to show us the bright sky struggling to reach down into the narrow alleys as the girls wonder where they are. This effect matches that of Christie in Sutherland in the similarly dark alleys and canals of Venice. The efect also carries over into a sequence in the woods close to the beach where another search takes place.

In a sense, Genova is an ‘anti-melodrama’. The characters get angry, but mostly their emotions are pushed down. So much in fact that I’ve seen complaints that the Firth character is a ‘bad father’ who seems indifferent to his wife’s death and unconcerned about what is happening to his children. I think he’s shown as behaving in the way many English men would. He suppresses emotion. In a melodrama, this would then ‘return’ to be expressed as an emotional release in some way, but here Winterbottom constructs a narrative with cold realism and the result for me was devastating. I’ve never really rated Firth before (I’m afraid I’ve generally ignored him) but here I thought he was excellent. Two crucial scenes with Catherine Keener struck me as the most psychologically ‘real’ I’ve seen for a long time. Here’s a movie I’d recommend to anyone prepared to question their own emotional responses to film narratives.

Nouvelle vague Stars 5: Stéphane Audran

Stéphane Audran and Bernadette Lafont in Les bonnes femmes

There was a period in the early 1970s when I was so struck by Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher (1970) that I sought out all his other films. I’m sure, however, that a major part of my intense interest in these films was simply in watching Stéphane Audran on the big screen. In those days, repertory cinema in London made it possible to catch up with art films from the 1960s so there was often a Chabrol film, with his then wife Audran, showing somewhere.

I’m not sure if a career mainly working for one director qualifies Stephane Audran as a ’star’ of la nouvelle vague, but she was certainly the star of Chabrol’s films. Her career began with small roles in two mainstream features in 1957/8 when she was in her mid twenties. This was followed by a small role in Eric Rohmer’s first feature before her first (small) role for Chabrol in Les cousins in 1958. In 1960 she is one of the four shopgirls in Les bonnes femmes, but for the next few Chabrol films she has only minor roles with the exception of the little seen L’oeil du malin (1962) in which she is one of the three leads. Her rise to stardom comes with Les biches (The does) in 1968 – in which she plays one of a pair of bisexual women who become involved with Jean-Louis Trintignant. She had married Chabrol in 1964 and for the next few years, the couple had a golden period producing well-received bourgeois crime thriller/melodramas.

Claude Chabrol was easily the most prolific director of his generation. Between 1958 and 1970 he made 22 films (4 of which were ’segments’ in portmanteau films). It’s hardly surprising that Audran didn’t have too much time for work with other directors. Chabrol also tended to make the same kinds of films – mostly related to his great interest in Hitchcock’s work. Stéphane Audran became his ‘cool blonde’. I need to go back and watch some of the classic films from the late 1960s and early 70s again, but my memory is that Stéphane Audran could manage to create a tension between an elegant and aloof cool sophistication and hints of vulnerability. I did watch Le boucher again a few years ago and it stood up very well. (In the book on Chabrol by Robin Wood and Michael Walker, Walker points out that where most mainstream critics praised the film highly, Cahiers du cinéma turned against Chabrol for the first time.)

Here is the trailer for the elusive L’oeil du malin – could a UK or US distributor find this and put it out on DVD please?

. . . and as Ginette in Les bonnes femmes.

Nouvelle vague Stars 4: Bernadette Lafont

Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont in Les Mistons

I thought I’d cast around for a more unusual choice and I remembered Bernadette Lafont (b. 1938) who could claim to be the first star of La nouvelle vague as the young woman whose dancer’s legs flashing beneath her billowing skirts as she cycles by fascinate the young boys in Truffaut’s short, Les Mistons (1957). The film was set in her home town of Nimes and her co-star was Gérard Blain, who also went on to star in films by Chabrol and Godard.

In 1958 she appeared with Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy in Chabrol’s Le beau serge in 1958 and then again in a smaller role alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo in A double tour  for Chabrol in 1959.

The Chabrol film that I remember and which is one of my favourite nouvelle vague films, is Les bonnes femmes (1960) in which she is one of the shopgirls referred to in the title. Le godelureaux (1961) is a rare Chabrol in which she starred opposite Jean-Claud Brialy. After this she seems to have had many smaller roles in a range of films including titles directed by Louis Malle and Jacques Rivette. Later lead roles came in Nelly Kaplan’s feminist comedy,La fiancée du pirate (1969) and Truffaut’s Une belle femme comme moi (1972) and then the lead opposite Jean-Pierre Léaud in Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (1974).

Bernadette Lafont with Jean-Claude Brialy

Bernadette Lafont is still working and I realise that I saw her only a few years ago in the romantic comedy I Do (Prête-moi ta main, 2006). She has nearly 170 credits on IMDB. Not conventionally beautiful, but very definitely physically attractive, Bernadette Lafont has clearly been well suited to comedy and this has perhaps been her greatest strength. As the list of credits above suggests, she worked with many New Wave directors and starred with the leading men of the movement. She seems to me very ‘French’ (and no, I don’t really know what that means, it’s just an instinctive feeling!). This YouTube clip shows her being interviewed for a promo on Les Bonnes Femmes.

Here’s the trailer for the very wonderful La fiancée du pirate:

Nouvelle vague Stars 3: Jeanne Moreau

Jean-Claude Brialy and Jeanne Moreau in The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928) is slightly more problematic to categorise as a star of la nouvelle vague. She was, and still is, a major international star, who began in films nearly a decade before the New Wave was established. She also had an important stage career in the 1950s. She was also 30 by the time she appeared in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold, 1958), the Louis Malle film often argued to herald the New Wave to come. Nothing wrong with being 30, of course, but she wasn’t the ‘young star’ of the later films.

If we do want to include Jeanne Moreau in this collection, I would argue for three factors. First would be her work with Louis Malle, with Les amants (1959) and Viva Maria (1965) plus a smaller part in Le feu follet (1963). (She also had (very) brief cameos in other New Wave films.)

As Catherine in Jules et Jim (1961), Jeanne Moreau became one of the iconic figures of the classic period of the French New Wave, although since this was a period film she was separated from Belmondo, Brialy and Léaud as ‘young French characters in contemporary Paris’. She would appear later as ‘the bride who wore black’ in Truffaut’s film of that name in 1968.

Her third claim to New Wave status is the extraordinary range of films that she made in the 1960s, both for French directors on the outer wings of the movement (e.g. Jacques Demy, for whom she starred in La baie des anges (1965)) and directors abroad influenced by the New Wave or already established as auteurs:  La Notte (1961) for Antonioni, Eve (1962) for Jo Losey, Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) for Bunuel and the two films for Tony Richardson (a Truffaut disciple?) in Mademoiselle (1966) and The Sailor From Gibraltar (1967).

Moreau was a different kind of star. I never thought of her as youthful or vivacious like Anna Karina, but she was very sexy in a more cerebral way and had great depth as an actor. This clip from  Ascenseur pour l’échafaud shows her image off to perfection. That’s Miles Davis on the soundtrack and the kind of nighttime location shooting in Paris that New Wave directors prized. Moreau could be in an American film noir, but she seems a much more complex character – older, wiser, more fragile and yet more dangerous – than any American femme fatale.

Here is a tribute montage of stills, several from films mentioned in our nouvelle vague pages. Enjoy!

And finally, Jeanne Moreau as a platinum blonde in La baie des anges – I’ve not watched this through as it’s the end of the movie, which I hope one day to find.