From DB:

Whatever you think of his films, Steven Soderbergh keeps Hollywood lively. Anybody who can remake both Solaris and Ocean’s Eleven has to attract your attention. He’s created at least three films I admire: Out of Sight (brilliant effort at a novelistic structure onscreen); The Limey (but I wish it were longer); and The Underneath (underrated, especially by its director).

So when Brian Rose and Paul Ramaeker sent me “You Can Make ‘Em Like They Used to,” by the ever-reliable Dave Kehr, I had to offer my two cents. You may want to check it before it evaporates into the Times pay-for-access archive. In a nutshell, Soderbergh’s The Good German is the most thoroughgoing effort by an American director to reproduce the look and feel of a 1940s movie. For me, Dave’s piece raises a lot of intriguing questions about how accurately you can reproduce an earlier style today.

RetroClassicism

During the production Mr. Soderbergh was committed to remaining as true as possible to the technique of the era. By reproducing the conditions of an actual studio shoot from the late 1940s, he hoped to enter the mind of a filmmaker like Mr. [Michael] Curtiz, to explore the strengths and limitations of a classical style that has now largely been lost.

This project hooks up with some arguments I made in The Way Hollywood Tells It. For one thing, I suggested that the overall “classical” style of Hollywood, founded on a certain conception of cinematic storytelling that emerged around 1917, hasn’t been abandoned, even in the most craven items we find in our multiplexes. But of course more local changes in style, shifts in particular technical devices of camerawork or lighting or editing, have come and gone. Another book I worked on, with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, tries to trace some of the stylistic variations within the classical tradition. We covered topics like the development of deep-focus cinematography in the 1940s–just the sort of period-based technical choices that Soderbergh is trying to recapture.

Another theme of The Way is interestingly confirmed by Dave’s article. Some historians have argued that we’ve entered a “post-classical” era in which classical storytelling principles have been abandoned. I tried to show that in fact many of our filmmakers, like Cameron Crowe and Martin Scorsese, have the utmost admiration for the studio filmmaking tradition and define themselves as heirs and continuers of it. Spielberg said that he’d like to be the Victor Fleming of our era; now Soderbergh has a new model.

“I often think I would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz [on right],” Mr. Soderbergh said. Mr. Curtiz, the contract director, made more than 100 films for Warner Brothers, including Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy , between his arrival in Hollywood from Hungary in 1926 and his death in 1962. “That would have been right up my alley,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “making a couple of movies a year of all different kinds, working with the best technicians. I would have been in heaven, just going in to work every day.”

Today most directors carry forward the basic premises of the overall classical style quite spontaneously. A few do so in fuller awareness of that tradition, and several of those think about how they can enlarge, deepen, vary, or otherwise add to the heritage that they respect. Evidently The Good German is an example of this last tendency.

Through a Ground Glass Darkly

Take a deep breath. Some gearhead stuff coming. But interesting gearhead stuff.

“We set up our little guidelines,” [Soderbergh] said. For one, he banned the sophisticated zoom lenses that make life easier for today’s cinematographers, returning to the fixed focal-length lenses of the past. “I did some research and found some script continuities for a couple of Michael Curtiz films,” he recalled, referring to records of the lens and exposure used in every shot, in case retakes were necessary. “I found that he restricted himself to at most five lenses, usually three or four. I talked to Panavision, and they happened to have some older lenses that they’d made that didn’t have all the new coatings on them and also were a focal length that isn’t really used anymore. One of them was a 32 millimeter, a wide-angle lens that nobody uses anymore but was one that Curtiz used a lot.”

Wide-angle lenses have short focal lengths. As the name implies, they take in a wider field of view than lenses of longer focal lengths. They tend to distort vertical lines and make faces look puffy, so they weren’t recommended for medium-shots or close-ups. That was a task for lenses of “normal” lengths. It’s an interesting fact of film history, though, that over time the conception of a normal lens has changed.

In the silent era, the most commonly used lens seems to have been the 50mm, the classic “two-inch” lens. It was taken to be close to normal human vision. But by 1950, 35mm had become the default lens. Why? This wider-angle lens could be used easily on location and in the smaller sets mandated by wartime restrictions. Improvements in lighting, lens coatings, and film stock made the lens of short focal length more feasible. The Good German is set in the late 1940s, and Soderbergh has plugged into a general trend of filmmaking of that time

These lenses allowed directors to stage in greater depth, pushing foreground planes quite close to the camera and distant planes quite far back. And all the scene’s components could be in reasonable focus. After Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes, Ball of Fire, The Maltese Falcon, and How Green Was My Valley (all 1941) showcased a range of deep-focus possibilities, many cinematographers developed wide-angle styles.
They believed that the greater depth of field enhanced both realism and pictorial beauty.

Frank Planer: For Criss Cross (1949): “To give this picture added realism through photography, we filmed every scene with the 30mm lens to carry a wire-sharp depth of focus throughout the frame.” (Jack Taylor, “Dynamic Realism,” International Photographer 20, 9 (September 1948), 6.)

Russell Metty: Used 30mm lens at f/2.3 throughout Arch of Triumph (1948). (Herb A. Lightman, “‘Triumph’ in Low Key,” American Cinematographer 28, 5 (May 19447), 167.

Robert Surtees: For Act of Violence (1949), claimed to shoot all scenes with a 28mm lens “in order to carry focus and give more interesting compositions.” (Surtees, “The Story of Filming ‘Act of Violence,'” American Cinematographer 29, 9 (August 1948), 282.)

Ted McCord: For Johnny Belinda (1948), used 28mm lens almost entirely, even for medium-shots. (Herb A. Lightman, “‘Johnny Belinda,’ American Cinematographer 29, 10 (October 1948), 339.)

Many years later Stanley Cortez recalled that he had used a 30mm lens heavily for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). (American Film Institute Seminar no. 35 (Glen Rock, NJ: New York Times/ Microfilming Corp of America, 1977), 1242-1243.)

Here are some typical examples of late 1940s wide-angle shooting from The Little Foxes, 1941; Notorious, 1946; Caught, 1949, and T-Men , 1949.

So given Soderbergh’s use of wide-angle lenses, will he try to reproduce the deep-focus look of the 1940s?

Coda for Ultimate Gearheads: The 32mm lens to which Curtiz refers was presumably the Cooke Speed Panchro lens, since I can’t find any other 32mm lens available at the time. (See Jackson J. Rose, American Cinematographer Hand Book and Reference Guide, 4th ed., American Society of Cinematographers, 1942, pp. 44-45.) Most cinematographers used the wide-angle lenses available from other companies, which were typically in the 25mm, 30mm, and 35mm ranges. Cooke, Leitz, and other firms also offered a 28mm length and a few still wider ones (25mm, 24mm, down to the Goerz 15mm!).

Another coda: The wide-angle style persisted in black-and-white filming into the 1950s and through the 1960s. It was hard to adapt to color in the 1950s, especially in the anamorphic formats like CinemaScope, but the emergence of faster color stocks made it more feasible in the 1970s. (I was reminded of this when Turner Classic Movies recently ran The Outfit (1973), with lots of neat depth shots.) The wide-angle look is occasionally revived today, notably in neo-noir, as here in The Usual Suspects.

Light Waves and Sound Waves

To achieve effective depth of field, 1940s sets had to be lit at very high levels. This necessitated using the bright, hard illumination provided by arc lamps, as Gregg Toland did on Citizen Kane. Arcs, heavily used in the silent era, had been replaced by incandescent lamps in the late 1920s, because their hissing sound was picked up by microphones. “Inkies” were quieter. But once mikes became more selective, arcs were revived for Technicolor filming, and in the mid-1930s they were coming back into use for black-and-white shooting. Yet for The Good German…

They also used only incandescent lights, Mr. Soderbergh said.

Today’s actors aren’t accustomed to the blinding levels of set lighting of that period. So again, it’ll be very interesting to see if Soderberg’s inkies can provide enough depth of field to generate the flashy deep-focus of shots from the 1940s.

Wide-angle lenses also posed problems on the set. Since they took in a broader field, lighting equipment and other production gear had to be kept further back so it wouldn’t show in the frame. (Christopher Doyle told me that for the hyper-wide-angle shots of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, crew members had to stand well behind the camera because anyone standing alongside it could wind up in the shot! Doyle’s lenses for that shoot had a focal length equal to 6.5mm!)

Moreover, 1940s wide-angle close-ups and medium-shots brought the camera within range of the microphone and other equipment. (You can hear the arc lights humming in a 35mm print of Citizen Kane, and other soundtracks of the period occasionally pick up camera or dolly noise.) Soderbergh again:

Where many, if not most, filmmakers use “body mikes” to capture the intimate whispers of dialogue, Mr. Soderbergh recorded his sound the old-fashioned way, through a boom microphone held just over the actors’ heads by a technician standing out of camera range.

“The rule was, if you can’t do it with a boom mike, then you can’t do it,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “Which was helpful to me because, in talking to the actors about this very externalized performance mode I was going to ask them to assume, it helped to be able to say, ‘You have to talk louder, you have to project more, because I’m not getting a good enough track.’ ”

I like the prospect of this whole approach, but I suspect that if 1940s filmmakers could’ve used wireless body mikes to cut camera murmur, they would have. Maybe this is a case when anachronism is welcome?

A Final Note: Staging

Dave Kehr and I have long been arguing against current filmmakers’ reliance on static staging and frantic cutting among close-ups. (Some readers took me to the woodshed on my criticism of The Departed on these grounds.) Dave and I enjoy the synthetic style of the mature sound cinema: long-take handling of actors crossing the frame and readjusting themselves in an integral space, punctuated by pointed closer views and that underrated workhorse, the spacious two-shot.

So you can practically hear Dave’s applause in this summary passage on Soderbergh’s choice of wide-angle lenses:

For audiences the shorter lenses mean a wider field of vision, expanding the camera’s range beyond the tight close-ups and two-shots that define today’s television-influenced filmmaking. With the wider range, groups of three, four or more characters can appear together on screen, minimizing the need for cross-cutting, which creates a different kind of interaction among the actors and a more expressive sense of the fictional space they inhabit.

Actually, the long lens can also create the sort of dynamic among bodies in space that we appreciate. A telephoto framing can show the interaction of several characters too. (Granted, they’re behaving in a curiously cardboardy-looking space.) We get this interaction in Altman’s 1970s films, but my favorite exponent is Hou Hsiao-hsien, who blocks his action as subtly in the distant long-lens views as classic directors did using more normal lenses.

Movies seldom turn out looking the way that the makers promised beforehand. Even the 1940s classics I litanized above don’t completely fit the cinematographers’ descriptions. Judging by the trailer for The Good German, the steep low angles and over-the-shoulder framings echo The Third Man more than, say, Jacques Tourneur’s Berlin Express.

And put aside all the fancy aggression of deep-focus. The big question is: Will Soderbergh dare to be simple as well? One production still seems promising.

I hope that Soderbergh has recognized that his mentor provided plenty of full shots with room for performers to breathe and move around. Such shots were as common, and as typical, in the 1940s as the suffocating compositions of noir. Recall this fluent passage from Mr. Curtiz’s noirish Mildred Pierce, in which characters cross the frame, shifting the compositional balance as the camera discreetly moves backward, inward, and sideways. Mildred and her husband move unobtrusively forward as the dramatic pressure rises–before it’s cut off by a crucial phone call from offscreen.

This staging technique is as characteristic of 1940s cinema as…well, as it is of 1930s and 1950s cinema. Let’s hope that some of it finds its way into The Good German. Can he really make ’em like they used to?

I have more comments, especially on Soderbergh’s fascinating remarks on changes in editing, but those are more appropriate to my next installment.

Addendum, 25 January
Owing to a slow and barren rollout, The Good German arrived in Madison last week. I caught it yesterday, so I thought I’d add this postscript.
It’s hard to appreciate as a straight film, it’s so dense and tightly wrapped in an air of pastiche. For the first time in my life, I felt the way students starting to study film tell me they feel: Noticing technique takes away from following the story. I found it hard to engage with the unfolding action because there was always some archaic technique obtruding–a trembling back-projection, a soft-edged wipe, or noirish lighting. I think audience involvement is also hurt by schematic plotting, with the Clooney character getting pretty regularly clobbered by bad guys.
So what about it as a pastiche? I think it fails. It’s cut a bit fast for the period (I clock it averaging about seven seconds per shot), but that’s not the real problem. The photography is too high-contrast for a studio film of that period; on the print I saw, the blacks were fairly rich, but the whites were blasted out and the grays were mostly gone. The editing of the fights is very modern, short and sharp and at some moments almost unreadable. On the whole, shots are closer and compositions less compact than in the sort of 1940s film that Soderbergh seems to be mimicking. These factors are probably due to the fact that he had to shoot in 1.85 and couldn’t stick to the 1.33 proportions of the newsreel-montage credits.
In my blog, I’d hoped that Soderbergh would revive the fluid crosswise staging of the period, but no such luck. Stand-and-deliver rules, with the over-the-shoulder framings and big reaction shots as prominent as in any movie today. Soderbergh also succumbs to the modern habit of ending a scene on a long-shot, which most directors of the time wouldn’t favor.
As for the voice-over narration. Soderbergh knows that the forties saw a lot of experimentation with this technique. But I don’t recall that his variant–each of the three main characters gets a stretch of voice-over in the beginning, middle, and end–has an equivalent at the time. When a 1940s film draws on more than one character’s voice-over, we’re given an overarching narrating situation to frame each one, such as the police interrogation of several witnesses, or the day’s boat trip of Letter to Three Wives. Here, the voice-overs aren’t framed in that way, so the result is more like the free-floating musings we get in The Thin Red Line or a Wong Kar-wai film.
There are some nice trouvailles, though. The lighting in the sewer scene is purty, and it was a clever idea to use an abandoned movie theatre for a rendezvous, though the geography of the space isn’t really exploited much. I enjoyed the transition from the credits’ 1.33 format (complete with dirty projector gate) to the 1.85 one: the first shot in 1.85 is a darkened airplane hanger whose open doorway approximates the squarer ratio. On the whole, though, The Good German seems to me even more dry and cerebral a project than Solaris, a sort of film-school exercise by the deepest-pocketed kid in the class. Fortunately, the Oceans 11 franchise pays for it, but I wish Soderbergh would go back to the less showy genre riffs of The Underneath and Out of Sight.

David here:

How often do you get four chances to see a seven-hour-plus movie? In the late 1990s I went to two film festivals that were showing Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994), and I missed it both times. Not that I don’t like long, slow movies, or that I wasn’t curious about a movie so many critics were praising, but at both events I needed to see other films, like old Hong Kong classics, that were scheduled opposite Sátántangó.

My third chance to see it was a variant of this situation. I was in Brussels at the Cinémathèque Royale watching Mizoguchi Kenji movies in preparation for what became Chapter 3 of Figures Traced in Light. I had the rarest Mizo of all, Aienkyo (The Straits of Love and Hate, 1937) on an editing table for a single day, and I knew that I would be watching it very slowly. (Normally a five-reel film takes me five to six hours.) But on the same day the archive was running Sátántangó.

What to do? I compromised and watched the first installment of Tarr’s film.

The first shot, now famous, was a stunner. Cows wander through the churned mud of a village square, amble slowly to the camera and then drift to the left, the camera sliding along with them. Eventually they shamble into the distance. All the while, hollow, bell-like chords throb on. Great cow ensemble performance and a dawdling, slightly ominous introduction to a strange world: I was ready.

What followed was nearly as impressive, with a deliberate pacing and attention to detail that overwhelmed the minimal story action. Light sifted through lace curtains, and grimy people in moth-eaten sweaters talked about a mysterious deal. In a remarkable sequence, running many minutes, the obese village doctor noted down his neighbors’ comings and goings. One shot had me gaping: the camera moves from studying a mangy dog through the window, then slips down to the doctor’s sketch pad and then follows him around the cramped bedroom with perfect fluency before returning to the window and revealing, in the distance, the repetition of an early action outdoors.

I had to leave.

I spent the rest of the day and a good part of the night in front of Aienkyo. Mizoguchi’s film hasn’t survived well, and the source material was as rainy with scratches as some scenes of Sátántangó are drenched in showers.

No regrets; the Mizoguchi was superb. But still….

Other chances came up: My friend András Bálint Kovács had sent me two VHS tapes of Sátántangó, and I bought a no-name DVD that turned out to be pulled from the same VHS source. But the lustrous black and white of the print I saw in Brussels made me feel vaguely dirty about watching the rest of the movie on video dubs.

Intrepid projectionist Jared Lewis before screening the 26 reels of Sátántangó.
Photo by Tom Yoshikami So it was yesterday that I finally had my fourth chance to see Sátántangó, and Kristin and I grabbed it. Tom Yoshikami, our fine UW Cinematheque programmer, had wanted to bring it for years, but deals had fallen through until last spring, when a small Tarr package began to tour.

It would be presumptuous to talk with assurance about the film after only one pass (okay, 1-1/3 passes). I hope to read and think about it more. There’s a lot for me to assimilate, both in print and on the Internet. So far, I’ve benefited from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s influential discussion (and his early review reprinted in Essential Cinema, apparently not available online), Peter Hanes’ enlightening career survey of Tarr, some helpful Vancouver program notes, a thoughtful discussion at moviemartyr.com, and the anthology Béla Tarr (published by Filmunio Hungary in 2001 and already hard to find*).

A DVD from Facets is scheduled for release next month, and doubtless this will trigger many critical studies. In the meantime, here are some tentative comments and questions.

1. Although the villagers in Sátántangó are united within a common project (apparently) involving the sale of cattle, other characters only tangentially connected–the doctor, a little daughter of a local prostitute–are given a lot of screen time. So the film becomes a “network narrative,” in which various characters separated by various degrees thread their way through the tale. Oblique as it is, the film obeys the conventions of this form, often set in a town or neighborhood in which people know one another. Later the characters migrate elsewhere, but the script maintains the sense of tenuous connections among the characters, like the motif of the spiderweb that circulates through the second installment.

2. The overall structure of the film, split into twelve parts, apparently derives from Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel, as yet untranslated into English. Each section adheres roughly to one or two characters’ range of knowledge, and as a result several events during the first couple of days of the action get replayed, fitted together as we come to understand them somewhat more fully. (The exposition is pretty stingy, nonetheless.)

It’s interesting that the film was completed in 1994, the same year as network stories became prominent with Short Cuts, Chungking Express, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, and that the replay-retrofitting tactic is seen as well in another 1994 release, Pulp Fiction.

3. The film’s pacing, very consistent in its solemnity, is accentuated by a soundtrack that is maniacally repetitive. The nondiegetic underscoring consists of drifts and whiffs of themes floating in the manner of ambient music, but more teeth-grinding is the clanging of a bell clapper in the third installment. Even cheerful music, like the accordion melodies played in the shabby tavern, rasp your nerves by being mindlessly reiterated. The endless dance in the pub, a spectacle of unimaginative drunken mirth, starts out amusing, becomes disturbing, and ends by being annoying. Maybe this is how they dance in hell.

As a minimalist film, Sátántangó seems to exploit what Minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich have found: by pushing repetition to a limit, you can negate the sense of momentum and suggest that the action is hovering in a kind of pulsating stasis.

4. Did I say minimalism? The film consists, by my on-the-fly count, of 172 shots (including the chapter titles), across 434 minutes (not counting the final credits). That creates an Average Shot Length of about two and a half minutes. Quite a comparison with contemporary American cinema! Still, people who’ve actually seen the film probably expect the average to be much longer. (Angelopoulos’ The Hunters averages well over three minutes per shot.) Some shots of course run for many minutes, but others are fairly brief.

What sheer numbers don’t capture is the surprise of a relatively fast-cut scene coming quite early. In the second chapter, “Rise from the Dead,” Iremias and Petrina are interrogated by the Captain. This sequence of more or less orthodox shot/ reverse-shot comes as almost startling after several oblique, elliptical long-take sequences. The tight facial framings as the Captain enunciates his doctrine of freedom and order emphasize a central thematic issue. At the same time, Iremias’s deceptive air of innocence prepares us for the charisma he’ll project in relentless close-up as he delivers his quiet harangue over the dead body. He is, after all, named Jeremiah.

5. Tarr’s long takes, like the one in the doctor’s study which so captivated me years ago, are often virtuoso. What’s striking, though, is that the effects are achieved more through camera movement than through staging. Whereas Mizoguchi, Hou, Angelopoulos, Sokurov, and some others often move their actors around before a static camera, Tarr usually plants his people in one spot and lets the camera spiral around and over them. The camera probes a static space rather than records a shifting one.

True, the characters may advance or retreat from us, but I didn’t notice any of the delicate crossing of character trajectories, or the almost unnoticeable blocking and revealing of figures, that we get in the masters of ensemble staging. The most obvious movement comes when the characters set off down those endless roads or across the bleak plain, and then if the camera doesn’t hang reticently back (signaling the end of a shot or scene) it will retreat from their advance or follow patiently behind as the wind and rain lash them.

These shots are surprisingly open-ended. They could go on forever. They don’t anticipate a process of development and completion, as other directors’ long takes do, and they don’t climax in the sort of visual epiphanies beloved of Angelopoulos and Tsai Ming-liang. These directors like to build the take in stages, paying it off with a monumental spectacle (Angelopoulos) or a pictorial joke (Tsai). Tarr just charges ahead, without hinting how, when, or if, the shot will end.

Miklós Jancsó put the intricate choreography of actors and camera on Hungary’s film agenda, and his films, some consisting of fewer than thirty shots, become dizzying displays of panning, tracking, and zooming. Tarr, like many successors in any tradition, may be accepting certain premises of his elders (here the long take) but refusing others. He avoids Jancsó’s “maximalist” spectacle and turns toward something more spare, discomfiting, and attuned toward details.

6. One of the great accomplishments of the film is its tactility. Not only do you feel the blasting wind and constant drizzle, but you get to scrutinize the human face with an intensity that recalls La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Persona. If it did nothing else, Sátántangó restores the specific gravity of faces to a cinema that often forgets the weight of mottled skin, graying stubble, matted hair, and baggy eyelids.

And not just faces. Light streams through bottles and dingy glasses, reveals the smudges on an appliance switch, and traces the texture of torn sweaters and cracked buttons. Flies sweep into the shot and crawl over lapels. Objects reclaim their right to exist, refusing to cooperate with characters. When the conductor tries to lift a box onto his cart, it resists his first push and he tips it awkwardly into place. I’m reminded of film theorist André Bazin’s remark that Italian neorealism discovered a storytelling form that restored the concreteness and uniqueness of things in the phenomenal world, their obstinate refusal to fit willful human impulse.

One of Tarr’s most memorable shots coasts slowly along the body of the doctor, fallen to the floor in a stupor. We move from his face to his bloated middle, held in place by a shabby sweater, and then to his legs, finishing on the heels of his boots. As the shot ends we see a straw embedded in a clot of mud. No other boots in the world look like these.

The respect for trembling surfaces recalls not only Dreyer but Tarkovsky, supreme filmmaker of water and moist earth, and the Sokurov of The Second Circle and Whispering Pages. I’m reminded, more unexpectedly, of Aki Kaurismaki, who grants his paunchy, greasy-haired losers the integrity of living in tangible, unidealized bodies. At moments, the film’s grimly comic baring of human greed and gullibility recalls Kaurismaki, although he retains a certain optimism that I don’t find in Tarr.

7. The historian in me wants to know where this comes from. Few commentators mention that Tarr is part of a broader trend that includes György Fehér, who evidently makes rather similar films. His Passion (1998), screened for the 2001 session of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, is rather similar stylistically. It sets the situation of The Postman Always Rings Twice in a milieu as grubby and melancholy as that of Sátántangó, and its long-held takes (45 shots in about two hours) are less elegant, and carry some of the clumsiness of Feher’s overcoated, big-booted characters. At the same conference, Laszlo Tarnay of the University of Pecs also showed us a clip from Twilight (1990), which was to me even more impressive. Fehér was a producer on Sátántangó and worked with Tarr on other projects.

More broadly, it may be that Tarr, Feher, Alexei Guerman, and other post-Communist filmmakers have founded a new tradition of bleak, fine-grained realism that blends with challenging formal artifice in both image and sound.

8. There is so much to enjoy here that I hesitate to venture a qualm. I’m not yet convinced that the film needs to be so long! Some of the scenes, especially that showing the officers rewriting Iremias’s informing letter, seemed on my first look to be prolonged for the sake of filling out the pace. I’m also not sure that we need to see everybody walk into the remote distance. Moreover, I think the film (like, again, the work of Bergman, Sokurov, Tarkovsky, and so on) sometimes wobbles toward pretentiousness.

But these are very preliminary notes from a screening that was on the whole an exuberant experience. Not at all grueling!

Kristin and I went home, where I watched Inter-Pol 009, a 1967 Hong Kong James Bond imitation in lush color, with fast-cut gunplay.

It’s all cinema.

PS: Tarr has apparently resumed shooting an English-language feature with Tilda Swinton, The Man from London.

*But try the publisher: MONTAZS, Harsfa Útca 40, 1074 BUDAPEST; Tel: +36 1 461 0844; Fax: +36 1 461 0845.

For over twenty years, our Film Studies program here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has held weekly colloquia. Faculty, grad students, and anyone else who’s interested gather on Thursday afternoon to hear lectures or participate in panel discussions or sometimes just watch a film together.

The colloquium speakers are often guests. They might be scholars from other campuses; Rick Altman from Iowa kicked off this semester with a fine talk on sound in the silent era. Sometimes we get visiting filmmakers with new work, or archivists showing a restoration. Mike Pogorzelski of the Academy and Schawn Belston of Fox are frequent visitors, bringing some of their wonderful discoveries. Often as well grad students present a talk based on a seminar paper or their dissertation work, and sometimes faculty try out a new paper. My ‘transitions’ talk last week was a colloq presentation.

This week our colleague Jeff Smith gave a very intriguing paper on new ways of thinking about movie soundtracks. Jeff is the author of a major study of film music in the 1960s, and how it relates to the record industry of the time.

Jeff talked about how film theorists of the 1910s and 1920s had tried to draw analogies between a film and a musical piece. For these thinkers, cinema was less tied to theatre and literature than to music. This allowed them to repudiate the photographic realism that seemed to limit the camera to reproducing what was put before it. Theorists like Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Dziga Vertov wanted to push film beyond realism and so looked to the abstract art of music.

Jeff suggested that this analogy failed because the theorists’ conception of music was too limited to art music and nineteenth-century models. He proposed that a better analogy would be the more expansive conception of music that many musicologists hold now. Music now commonly includes spoken language, sound effects, electronically generated material, and purely ambient passages….all of which are much closer to the sort of mixtures we get in a film soundtrack.

He played examples from Brian Eno, Stevie Wonder, and other artists to back up the idea, and he also suggested that now a lot of musical composition was becoming more and more like a movie track. (John Zorn and Steve Reich come to mind.) It was a provocative idea and stimulated a good discussion, including comments from PhD students in music theory. Then we went to our bar, the Red Shed, for more fun.

Following a quick dinner, Jeff and I attended a packed lecture given by Philip Kitcher, the distinguished philosopher of science. The talk was called “Science, Religion, and the Difficulties of Democracy.” It was a thorough and careful treatment of larger issues behind the evolution vs. creationism conflict.

Kitcher distinguished three sorts of religious belief (providentialism, supernaturalism, and spiritualism) and traced out the extent to which scientific inquiry challenged each one. He argued that if scientific inquiry was to become the gold standard for reasoning–a belief he holds–then democracies are faced with the possibility of narrowing the freedom that they traditionally grant to unscientific systems of belief. That is, if the theory of evolution meets the highest standards of scientific accuracy, as it does, then a local community doesn’t really have full power to curtail its teaching in the classroom.

It was a compelling lecture, but the question period was even more riveting. Kitcher is a master of thinking on his feet, and he gave courteous, clear, and subtle responses to objections from the floor.

Days like this make me glad, and proud, to be part of a university. Eloquent and smart speakers addressing alert audiences are an irreplaceable part of higher education. Now that I spend more time in front of a computer monitor, it’s good to be reminded that colloquia and public lectures yield a unique pleasure: People meeting face to face to think together.

1) People who know Kristin primarily as a film scholar probably don’t know that she’s also the librarian/curator of the P. G. Wodehouse papers. Every couple of years she goes to England to organize and preserve the papers that the family has acquired since her last visit. She first worked with the papers when she wrote her book on Wodehouse, Bertie Proposes, Jeeves Disposes; or, Le Mot Juste, an appreciation of the inimitable Wooster novels. For the last few days Kristin has been there working on the collection, and out of the range of the Internet; so no new entries from her. When she returns, expect a followup on her “How to read the box-office figures” post.

2) During her absence I’ve been busy with research projects. One involves scene transitions in Hollywood movies. When Kristin, Janet Staiger, and I were working on the book, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, I got interested in how movies moved the viewer smoothly from one scene to the next. Often, we found, a line of dialogue, a sound, or an image at the very end of Scene A somehow linked to Scene B. We called these “hooks,” and talked a little about them in the book.

Recently I got curious about the problem again and as I was thinking about it, I saw a piece by Karl Iglesias, called “8 Ways to Hook the Reader,” Creative Screenwriting 13, 4 (2006), 48-49. (It doesn’t seem to be available online.) Igelesias spells out various ways in which screenwriters tie scenes together. Interestingly, our term hook seems to have entered screenwriters’ parlance a little bit.

I gave a rather sketchy talk on the question here at Madison last Thursday, and got helpful feedback from faculty and grads. Seems like everybody had a good example, from Jerry Lewis movies to The Family Guy. So I hope to develop this talk into a lecture I can give elsewhere. Eventually I expect it will end as an online essay elsewhere on this site.

Les Belles

Les Belles

3) My other current research project is looking into the development of anamorphic widescreen filmmaking in Hong Kong. In the early 1960s Shaw Bros. introduced ShawScope, a system similar to CinemaScope’s sprawling format. I’m interested in how directors used this new technology, and whether they followed the same paths as Americans did in working with CinemaScope. Did ShawScope slow up their cutting or staging? Did they find alternative ways to compose for this wide format?

Despite the rather tedious plots, I’m enjoying watching the films because they’re so striking at the level of lighting and color design. If you’re curious, have a look at Les Belles (1961) or The Love Eterne (1963). Really stunning color coordination, with both saturated tones and pastels popping off the screen–so different from the murky monochrome we like now. To get such brilliant, almost shadowless imagery in a period of slow film (ASA 50!), you have to drench your sets in light. How can actors remain so chipper when they’re blasted by so much light and heat? The crew had to wear sunglasses when working on these movies. This article is for a collection of essays called Widescreen Worldwide, edited by John Belton and Sheldon Hall.

4) My old friend Brian Rose writes to tip me off to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on Epagogix, the software program that purports to predict what films will be commercial hits. This program has been flashing into view in the trade papers over the last few years, but Gladwell (aka Mr Blink) is the first to give it long and detailed discussion. I hope to assimilate it over the next few days and maybe Kristin or I will blog about it.

5.) As a new blogger, I’m still learning a lot. (Okay, you already can tell that.) But as I scan our Statistics counter for this site, I’m impressed all over again by the sheer weirdness of the Web.

Take the keywords that bring people to our site. I expect to see our names, Film Art, Scorsese, and so on. But I have to admire any search engine that can fling onto our site someone typing the following strings:

jack vermee
bonfire
lingua film di toto’
Christian film
zizek mao
Chinatown first act

and my current favorite:

where can I find photos of jerry van dyke

Of course now that I’ve listed these topics, I expect a lot of repeat business for them.