I’ve now seen Grizzly Man more times than Timothy Treadwell got a semi over bear poop, and every time it’s struck me as a thoroughly, exquisitely, wrong-hearted movie. So much so that it’s quite hard to know where to begin in describing its wrong-heartedness.
Indulge a reminiscence, then. It’s 2005, or thereabouts. Tavs and I are sitting in my university room, all studenty and impressionable. We’ve had a few smokes, and now we’re watching Grizzly Man for the first time. We’ve been watching it for, say, 30 minutes, and I think it’s fake. Well, maybe not fake – I don’t doubt its existence, I don’t doubt this is a Werner Herzog film (really, you couldn’t) – but I do think it’s false, faux, a made-up documentary, a fictive non-fiction. Now the film’s ended and I still think it’s a clever little unreal. I’m damn impressed, and, as one does, I head straight to IMDB. Bam! Boosh! Boom! It’s real. The whole thing’s real. It’s really real. I think I’m stoned Tavs. That was really… Read more »
Jonny reviewed The Kreutzer Sonata down the Well a while ago, but even if his, er, controlled praise encouraged you to see it, the film’s limited theatrical release would have severely reduced your chances. The film may have reached further than Motherhood, but only a little.
I’ve now got hold of the DVD, so it’s my turn to take a look at the film, although you should read Jonny’s review first because I’m going to skip describing the plot. The film improved with my second look, perhaps because the genre – out-and-out melodrama, or oaoma! – didn’t come as so much of a surprise. The last scene certainly takes a hairpin turn into human extremities that have little to do with realism on film – which is to say that horror/action movies have a monopoly on bloody violence, posing a problem to directors like Bernard Rose who want to do something different while still bulk-buying sacks of fake blood. But knowing what’s coming in The Kreutzer Sonata helps you appreciate the careful, playful way Rose rigs the tragedy of it from the beginning. The second time around, you pay more attention to the style, which can, I think, be named. It’s impressionism.
Like Bob Dylan, once reviled for his born-again Christian albums of the early 80s but now thought of as a congenial old coot, Eastwood somehow managed to bury the rightwing Dirty Harry stigma that followed him around in the 70s. (At a time when a lot of people in Hollywood were genuinely concerned that their country might be turning into a police state – during Richard Nixon’s administration – Eastwood was making movies lionizing a rogue cop. Talk about politically incorrect.) But Eastwood himself mellowed and grew as an artist with the passage of time: High Plains Drifter (1973) starts with three murders and a rape; The Bridges of Madison County (1995) doesn’t.
In Eastwood’s defence, the Dirty Harry movies that some found so objectionable were little more than Hang ‘Em High transferred to modern times. Extremely unpleasant men are making life miserable for ordinary citizens. The police are unable to control them. Into the mix comes a mysterious sociopath who is nonetheless fighting on the side of the angels. Nobody minded when Eastwood did this sort of thing in A Fistful of Dollars, High Plains Drifter, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Hang ‘Em High, just as nobody minded when he returned to this theme in Pale Rider and Unforgiven. It is only when the avenging angel appears in an urban setting that civil libertarians get riled up. Westerns are set in an era with which Americans feel comfortable, with everyone having a gun and gunslingers taking the law into their own hands. Rogue cop movies aren’t. If somebody takes the law into his own hands in the late 1800s, he’s a hero. If he does it in the late 20th century, he’s a fascist.
Those civil libertarians! There’s nothing they like less than a maverick avenger running around, ministering justice with a Smith & Wesson. Conversely, there’s nothing police states like more than rogue cops.
To be fair, mix-ups like this do bring a bit of colour to an article that is in most respects composed of unrelenting bathos:
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, True Crimes and Bloodwork appeared in rapid succession. They were all duds. Then came Mystic River and Million-Dollar Baby, which were not.
I stayed clear of the protracted Avatar debate because my main response was, “Why is this 3-D technology being wasted on CGI?” Not, I think, a POV many wanted to hear.
Well, bully for me, look: It’s only Werner Herzog, filmed at a school’s parent teacher evening (or something) holding court on latest project, a 3-D documentary on the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc and its famous caveman paintings.
He continues here, where he eventually suggests watching 3D films that aren’t action-packed blockbuster might be a bit tiring on the brain.
Is he talking about his own film? Well, who cares: What could be more tiring than Avatar, anyway?
Don’t Labour have better things to do than make Doctor Who fan fiction? Watch this.
That’s David Tennant doing the voiceover at the end. Technically, he isSean Pertwee’s father, regenerated. There’s no way this wasn’t contrived by a Who fan. In fact, it could easily be inserted into the last act of ‘The End of Time Part Two’ – the New Year’s Day episode – when Tennant makes his farewells. A last piece of advice for his Labour-supporting son.
Either someone in the government is gambling on the entire country joining the dots and appreciating this abnormal spiritual intervention, or there’s a spotty herbert in the ad department who’s hoping no one will notice. It’s a misuse of resources I can easily forgive, anyway.
And as electioneering goes, there’s been much worse than this, of course. It’s lovely, sylvan. I’d live in it.
Doctor Who 31.2 aside, I’ll mostly be watching Bollywood films over the weekend, for reasons that could well become clear later in the year (as ever, watch this space). I’ll keep you apprised of how I get on. I started today with Guru Dutt’s seminal Pyaasa (1957), which has a lot more in common with the non-musical productions of the same era (most obviously Ray’s Apu trilogy) than today’s Bombay bombastics do with, say, 21st Century Bengali drama. Or so I’m assuming – my terms of reference are compromised by an unimpressive lack of exposure to Indian cinema, and I ended up thinking, unhelpfully, about Dutt’s film as if it was a strange relative of It’s A Wonderful Life and Carnival of Souls. Although the supernatural is only suggestive in Pyaasa, its hero suffers a similar kind of metaphysical isolation, and the physical world that surrounds him seems to perform in chilling, animist ways.
Although the film arrives at a speculative happy ending for Vijay (Dutt), the impoverished poet who is only published and lauded – hysterically so – after his ‘death’, the film see-saws between socioeconomic despair and aesthetic rapture. His woes are expressly to do with his anonymity as an artist and his losing a sweetheart earlier in life, but this is intimately connected to a fundamental lack of funds, thanks to a society that fails to reward his artistic endeavour. When Vijay performs his rhapsodies – poems as songs – they are self-pitying, self-loathing. The poet would not exist without his suffering. He seems, through the lyrics, to demand a more caring cosmos, but if that was so, what would he do in it?
I like especially the way he is hemmed into his position by both sides – the uncaring city, full of venal publishers and obnoxious kin (where he is a good man in a bad world), and the glorious/sickly realm of nature (where he is meaningless). One is not the antidote to the other. Both destroy him. And yet he escapes – but where? What’s left? Dutt insists on a happy ending, even though this makes no sense, he has already covered the options and can offer no more. Vijay has to, I suppose, escape himself (with gold-hearted prostitute in tow). Which is to say Pyaasa has Frank Capra instincts, but can only go the way of Carnival of Souls.
Ronald Bergan has another of those pieces about the death (and possible afterlife) of serious film criticism at today’s Guardian blogsite, which led me to this older piece. I quote a whole chunk of it:
I believe that every film critic should know, say, the difference between a pan and a dolly shot, a fill and key light, direct and reflected sound, the signified and the signifier, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and how both a tracking shot and depth of field can be ideological.
They should have read Sergei Eisenstein’s The Film Sense and Film Form and the writings of Bela Balasz, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Serge Daney.
They should have seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire du Cinema, and every film by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman, as well as those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and at least one by Germaine Dulac, Marcel L’Herbier, Mrinal Sen, Marguerite Duras, Mikio Naruse, Jean Eustache and Stan Brakhage. They should be well versed in Russian constructivism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, Cinema Novo, La Nouvelle Vague and the Dziga Vertov group.
That’s not a punch in the gut, that’s a hail of gunfire. Step up!
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