Death of a Cyclist

It starts with a cold and cold-hearted opening scene. On a fog-shrouded road amid a desolate, Godot-like landscape, a cyclist appears in the foreground and heads toward the horizon where the road bends and vanishes. We hear a car swerve and a quick cut presents us with a close-up of the bicycle, twisted and broken with one wheel spinning. A couple steps from the car and the man kneels over the unseen cyclist as his lover stands at a remove, urging him to get back in the car. He does and the car pulls away. 

Juan Antonio Bardem knew how to get an audience on the hook. At a time when the younger generation of European directors—in France, in Italy and in his native Spain—were breaking away from the American influence, Bardem embraced it. The filmmakers of France’s nouvelle vague and Spain’s neo-realist movement were establishing a more intimate, more auteurist style, forsaking light commercial fare for a more topical approach, delving into social and political commentary. While he shared their inclination to make more substantive films, Bardem used different methods, employing all the conventions and devices of conventional Hollywood storytelling in pursuit of a more engaged cinema. 

In Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released on DVD by Criterion, Bardem starts with a perfect Hollywood plot device: a stark, dramatic event which leads to a dramatic shift in fortune for his two lead characters. Only gradually will we piece together an understanding of these two, of their social milieu, their relationship, of their origins, motives and desires. There is a bit of Hitchcock here, a bit of noir, and plenty of A-movie Hollywood, with the luminous Lucia Bosé as a sort of self-absorbed femme fatale version of Ingrid Bergman, and Alberto Closas portraying a coddled ne’er-do-well with a bit of the droll, world-weary nobility of Humphrey Bogart. It’s Casablanca turned on its head, stripped of its romance and pervaded instead with cold calculation and bourgeois disillusionment. 

Out of this tale of adultery, manslaughter, nepotism and blackmail, Bardem spins a story more meaningful and complex, as Closas finds himself on “a journey back to myself,” a long, difficult climb out of the morass of privileged narcissism toward absolution. Though the censors demanded an amended conclusion for Death of a Cyclist, the compromise is handled with great aplomb, coming full circle with a final flourish in which a cyclist must decide whether to report a fatal accident or simply keep pedaling. And in the end the film packs as much punch as any of the more overtly topical films of Bardem’s contemporaries, but with a style that retains all the gloss and sheen of the slick entertainment those films rejected. 

There is one curious moment, however, that I have yet to see explained or even mentioned in discussions of the film. Toward the end, in a shot from the back of a car looking over Lucia Bosé’s shoulder, a mysterious gloved hand appears briefly in the corner of the frame. It’s more than likely an accident, the director or cameraman briefly intruding on the image—though how it could have gone unnoticed in the editing process is anyone’s guess. But could it have been intentional? Could it have meaning? Nowhere else is it suggested that there is someone else in the car, not before and not after, but the subtle suggestion of collusion, of an unseen partner, could greatly alter one’s interpretation of the film’s closing sequence. 

Death of a Cyclist (1955). Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem. Starring Lucia Bosé, Alberto Closas. 88 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

Indiana Jones Loses His Footing

If the Indiana Jones films were never exactly realistic, they were at least grounded; they were rooted in archaeology, in the earth—in the discovery of things ancient and mysterious, yes, but always terrestrial. Jones himself was grounded too, an unlikely hero by turns deft and incompetent, benefiting from equal doses of intelligence and dumb luck. And that made him all the more charming and his adventures all the more appealing. For the wide-eyed child in the audience, there was no need to conjure images of outer space, of aliens or monsters or supernatural powers; all you needed was a hat, a jacket and a rope. The fantasy was all the more effective for containing the illusion that it was within reach.

Throughout the first three films, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg kept the series fairly close to that essential premise. As much as possible, they kept Indiana Jones’ feet on the ground, or at least somewhere beneath—in tunnels, in caverns, in crypts and caves. And that’s precisely where the latest installment loses its footing.

As entertainment, it’s good enough. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is pleasant viewing for two hours, with all the ingredients you expect from the series: ultra-villianous villians who, despite all their diabolical powers, simply can’t shoot straight; mysterious rites and riddles encoded on crumbling parchment; plenty of self-effacing humor, even if it isn’t always all that humorous; and that familiar, charming self-awareness, an attitude that shamelessly embraces the inherent absurdity of the whole enterprise.

The series began as a throwback to the old serials that accompanied the feature each week at movie theaters across America. It was both an homage and a modern update of those cliffhangers of yesteryear, a wild, silly ride through unlikely scenarios, with thrilling action and an utter lack of pretentiousness. It’s hard to expect a series to retain its allure through one sequel much less three, but with nearly 20 years passing since the last film, expectations run abnormally high. So while there’s really not all that much to complain about—it’s still better than much of what passes for action entertainment these days, and takes itself far less seriously—Crystal Skull still manages to lose sight of one of the franchise’s essential charms.

Almost from the start, there’s something not quite right. There are hints of the supernatural waiting at the heart of the mystery, and the plot always seems poised for a plunge into Erich Von Daniken territory. But there’s always the hope that the inherent pragmatism of the character and his creators will reign in the excesses and that the solution will ultimately prove to be terrestrial in origin.

And yet, after two hours of chases that are three minutes longer than you’d like and four minutes longer than necessary, fight scenes with so many punches thrown that it seems there’s a quota in place, and three—count ‘em, three—waterfalls through which John Hurt never loses his grip on the prize, we come to an absurdly un-Indy-like ending that almost renders the hero obsolete during a spectacularly unspectacular special effects sequence. As a swirling paranormal maelstrom of destruction swirls overhead, Jones stands small and silhouetted in the immediate foreground, a mere observer of digital effects that are meaningless, emotionless and, despite all their fury, dramaless. Cast in shadow and virtually inanimate, Indiana looks, for all intents and purposes, like one of us, like a member of the audience just a few rows ahead—and just as irrelevant to the action on screen.

Despite the whirlwind of gimmickry that has been added to the formula, it is the old standbys that still deliver—the snakes, scorpions, quicksand, and, in one of the film’s most effective sequences, a swarming colony of man-eating ants. Lucas and Spielberg could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble had they stuck with the creepy-crawlies and stayed clear of the close encounters.

Three Films Examine the German Conscience

First Run Features has released three provocative films on DVD that delve into the complex consciousness of the German people. From the atrocities of the Holocaust to the repressive post-war socialist government of East Germany, these films offer fascinating glimpses of artists and historians struggling to come to terms with their nation’s past while battling forces—in the form of both the government and the people—who would rather keep such horrors hidden. 

The Second Track 

Joachim Kunert’s The Second Track went unseen for decades, only recently resurfacing and taking its rightful place among Germany’s greatest films. This 1962 noirish thriller examined the burden of the Holocaust on the German conscience at a time when the country as a whole was eager to forget and move on. 

A freight yard inspector stumbles upon a robbery but does not inform the police that he has recognized one of the perpetrators, a man from his past whom he is eager to avoid. This sparks a chain of events in which the inspector’s daughter begins delving into her father’s past as well as her own, uncovering a debilitating cache of Nazi-era secrets. 

The movie is filled with spectacular black and white photography, juxtaposing emotional close-ups with stunning imagery of trains and railroad tracks, of steam drifting across black skies, of glistening cobblestone streets, and impressionistic shots of industrial architecture: freight yard bridges, passageways, stairwells, and gleaming tracks that merge and separate and crisscross the frame. 

The film has been compared to the dark tales of suspense crafted by Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, but its most apparent influence is Carol Reed’s English masterpiece, The Third Man (1949). Traces of that film can be seen in the angled shots, atmospheric nighttime photography and zither score, and most decidedly in the closing shots, which seem to deliberately draw a parallel with the earlier film. But whereas Reed’s film ends with a single long take of the heroine walking toward and past the hero in what amounts to a romantic rejection, The Second Track closes with a much more troubling and ambiguous rejection, as a woman walks along railroad tracks, toward and past a man who turns to follow her until they approach a gate. The gate may represent passage to another plain, but does it lead to a purgatory in which the German people acknowledge and do penitence for the past, or does it mark entry into a hell of recrimination and reproach? And will the these two figures pass through the gate at all? The image fades to black before we find out. 

Extra features include a short film about Second Track’s cinematographer, Rolf Sohre, and an essay and newsreels about the film. 

The Rabbit Is Me 

A few years later, Kurt Maetzig’s The Rabbit Is Me (1965) shined a light on the opportunism, careerism and political calculation that undermined the professed principals of the repressive East German socialist government. 

A young woman’s brother is imprisoned for subversion, though his crime is never revealed to the public or to his family. The sister embarks on an affair with the judge who sentenced her brother, and eventually the truth behind the sentencing is exposed. Though the film was made with solid studio backing, the final product proved too hot to touch, the film’s politics, sexuality and frank moral discussion deemed too dark and skeptical by government censors. 

It was not the only film to draw the government’s ire that year. Many more were likewise banned in the wake of Rabbit Is Me, the whole lot of them thereafter referred to as “the Rabbit films.” The Rabbit Is Me was not screened for the public until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Rabbit calls to mind the films of the French New Wave, and anticipates the edgy youth-centered films of America in the 1950s. The movie not only challenges the validity of government institutions but sets up a generational conflict between the young heroine and her much older lover, between the energy and idealism of youth and the stodgy, self-interested avarice of the establishment. Maetzig delights in some of the new tools available to filmmakers, most notably the zoom lens, which would become a common fixture in American films of the 1960s and ’70s, allowing the director to create both establishing shots and close-ups without a cut. 

The disc includes a 1999 interview with director Kurt Maetzig and an essay and brief documentary about the banning of the Rabbit films. 

The Unknown Soldier 

First Run has also just released an intriguing documentary, The Unknown Soldier (2006), that tracks the volatile controversy surrounding a museum exhibit that first opened in Germany in 1996. The Wehrmacht Exhibition documented the complicity of the German Army in the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Waffen SS and the Gestapo. For decades, the accepted portrait of the German soldier was that of an innocent pawn, who knew nothing of the crimes being carried out by the Third Reich. While many were oblivious to the horrors of the Holocaust, many were fully aware, and the exhibit featured evidence, in the form of personal letters, photographs and film footage, of knowing collaboration between the army’s common foot soldiers and Hitler’s Nazi forces. The exhibition sparked riotous protests from an outraged populace and revealing a split in the German psyche as the nation struggled to pay tribute to its veterans while confronting once again the horror of its past. 

It wasn’t only the neo-Nazi skinheads who were angry; World War II were incensed, as were the children and grandchildren of deceased soldiers who felt the memories of their loved ones were being tarnished. A second exhibit a few years later, which sought to correct a few troubling issues with the first, elicited a similar response. Michael Verhoeven’s film captures the pain and conflict of a nation caught in the midst of an identity crisis. 

First Run Features. www.firstrunfeatures.com.

The Artistic Restraint of Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers sought to exploit cinema’s unique properties. From the moment they could, directors were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. 

And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques. 

Yasujiro Ozu, rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Not for Ozu the moody shadows and vertiginous angles of the expressionists, or the heightened reality and stylized melodrama of Hollywood fare. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. 

Criterion has just released a three-disc set of Ozu’s early, silent films, called "Silent Ozu." The set is the most recent in the company’s line of Eclipse boxed sets, highlighting lesser-known works, and follows the recent release of "Late Ozu," a five-disc set of films from the last few years of the director’s career. Together the two sets form the bookends of one of cinema’s monumental oeuvres. 

It is a body of work consisting of more than 50 films, nearly all of them created in the same mold, with Ozu’s patient camera calmly observing his characters. He was not interested in dense plots or edge-of-your-seat melodrama; his work was almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.” 

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and very specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects included families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness. “Intellectually we may be different,” said film scholar Donald Ritchie in reference to Ozu’s work, “but emotionally we’re very much the same.”

The three films on this set display Ozu’s remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama.Tokyo Chorus starts with a long comedic sequence that soon seems like a wild digression as young men engage in a series of pranks and gaffes under the stern gaze of a schoolmaster. But once the sequence is over and the Chaplinesque hijinks have concluded, the film takes on a more somber tone, following the hardships of one of the young men as he grows up, struggles to support a family, and in the process learns humility, compromise and the value of friendship. But eventually, Ozu brings the film full circle, and the connections with the earlier scenes are made not only clear but dramatically satisfying. 

These early films also give us a glimpse of a side of Ozu not visible in his later, more well-known work. A clever use of the moving camera draws parallels between the toil of children at school and the toil of clerks at the office. And a sustained bit of Lubitsch-style humor plays up the methods by which the workers attempt to glean the details of each others’ end-of-year bonuses. 

I Was Born, But... examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon. 

On display in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing greater identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective. 

The End of Summer, from the "Late Ozu" collection, demonstrates the tenacity with which Ozu stuck to his principles of filmmaking throughout his career. In this, his penultimate film, we see Ozu and his actors spin the same complex web of dreams and desires, motives and secrets. The family patriarch, a widower, seeks the company of his long-estranged mistress in his twilight years, much to the chagrin of his children. Meanwhile the next generation is struggling to maintain the family business he has left in their care. The film examines the issues faced by three generations of the family as they clash, argue and try to understand one another. There is no ill will involved, just the understated spectacle of people at different stages of life, trying to get on. Along the way, we see them share, deceive, sacrifice and scheme, but they are always human, always sympathetic and always compelling. 

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.” 

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work—the awareness of the inevitability of change and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings. 

"Silent Ozu." 3-disc set. $44.95. 

"Late Ozu." 5-disc set. $69.95. 

www.criterion.com.

Scorsese and the Stones: Shine a Light

You may ask, Why another Rolling Stones concert film? Aren’t they a tad past their prime? And haven’t these guys had enough camera time over the past 45 years? 

The answer is simple: Not only is it unprecedented for a rock ’n’ roll band to stay together this long, to keep recording and performing well into their 60s, but the Stones are undoubtedly a better live band today than they’ve ever been. 

Martin Scorsese’s new concert film, Shine a Light, showing at Shattuck Cinemas and in an IMAX version at San Francisco’s Metreon, captures the latter-day Stones in its current incarnation as the hardest-working band in show business. 

The dynamics of the band’s performances have changed over the years, and at nearly every significant stage of their development they’ve had a great director drop in to document the proceedings. In the early 1960s they were a British white-boy blues band, with much of their repertoire drawn from the songbooks of their Chicago blues idols: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy. By the late ’60s, the band was something quite different, having carved out its own identity with a unique sound that blended their influences into an idiosyncratic new brand of rock. The band’s image had grown darker, and their live shows began to take on a somewhat menacing air—the Stones seemed genuinely dangerous. The era reached its conclusion with the infamous free concert at Altamont in which a man was murdered by Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage, a harrowing moment caught on film in the first of the great films about the Stones, Gimme Shelter. 

By the early ’70s the aura of danger had faded a bit, and the Stones took on an air of camp rock ’n’ roll decadence, dabbling in reggae and disco, glitter and makeup, and staging ever more outrageous live performances. Once again, they were put on the big screen in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. In the 1980s, the Stones set out on rock’s first stadium tour, proving that even while pushing 40, they were still the biggest band in the world, and the great director Hal Ashby caught it all on film in Let’s Spend the Night Together. Since that time, as the band morphed into a smoothly run global enterprise, they’ve been competently filmed by a variety of lesser-known directors for the band’s various DVD releases. 

But here they get another great director, one able to go beyond the mechanics and craft of a concert film to strive for something more, to attempt to capture the essence of a live performance and transform it into something distinctly cinematic. 

Critics have complained that Shine a Light isn’t a documentary, that it neither seeks nor provides much insight into the inner workings of the band and the secret to its longevity. These critics are missing the point. There is no shortage of documentaries about the band’s storied career. Perhaps it is true that the definitive Stones documentary has yet to be made, and perhaps Scorsese, coming off well-received films about Bob Dylan and blues, is just the man to do it. But this is not that film. Here Scorsese is simply interested in the performance itself. The Stones have never been particularly introspective, never sentimental, never prone to dwelling on the past. Thus it is entirely fitting that Shine a Light should simply focus on the moment. 

A good concert film first requires a good concert, but more than that it requires an understanding of what makes that concert good. Most of the ingredients are here: a great band at the peak of its form; a great venue, New York’s Beacon Theater, intimate and packed to the rafters; and a great director to capture it all. What is missing from Shine a Light is a true Stones crowd. The occasion was a benefit concert for Global Warming Awareness, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and their vast entourage taking up the center of one balcony. But the real problem is the floor crowd, which Scorsese decided to fill with a bevy of photogenic 20-something women—hardly the Stones’ prime demographic these days. As a result, much of the first few rows are filled with young fillies more focused on being photographed than on the band and the music. Their conspicuous placement and posturing only detracts from the film. 

Still, you’ve never seen such a beautifully photographed concert. Scorsese matches the movement of his cameras to the pace of the band, following guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood around the stage, registering the crack of Charlie Watts’ tightly controlled drumming, and relentlessly pursuing singer Mick Jagger as Jagger relentlessly pursues the audience. Scorsese built a team of top-notch cinematographers to man the 17 cameras that relentlessly traverse the theater to keep pace with the whirling dervish that is Jagger. Low-angle shots transform the lights and ceilings into a dizzying pattern that swirls above the heads of the band as they roam the stage and dart in and out along the catwalk. Close-ups of the guitarists give a glimpse of the band’s unique dual-guitar attack, in which both trade off playing lead and rhythm. And plenty of screen time is given to the cast of backing musicians, most of whom have been touring with the Rolling Stones for at least 20 years, and, in the case of saxophonist Bobby Keyes, for nearly 40. 

And Scorsese never loses sight of the crowd, keeping them dappled in warm light and misty shadow, as much a part of the tableau as the gilded theater and set design. 

Though the set list begins and ends with stalwart Stones classics, 12 of the concert’s 18 songs are lesser-known or at least less-often-performed tracks. After the behind-the-scenes prologue, which, in the IMAX version, is projected at standard movie size, the frame immediately expands to full IMAX size at the first notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the frenetic pace, rapid editing and flashing lights make the experience a bit overwhelming. But things settle down a bit with “Shattered,” as the Stones settle into gear and highlight album tracks and overlooked gems, with a special emphasis on 1978’s Some Girls album. And in between, Scorsese peppers the film with brief archival clips from interviews with the Stones through the decades, most of them adding a light comedic touch to the proceedings. There is just one misstep, as Scorsese interrupts Richards’ rendition of the rarely performed “Connection” with clips of interviews with the guitarist. 

Fittingly, the one moment where Scorsese’s restless camera comes to a stop, if only for a few seconds, is for a prolonged close-up of guest star Buddy Guy. Fitting because Guy, as one of the still-living icons of the Chicago blues sound of the 1950s, is at the very center of what the Stones are all about. He joins them for a cover of “Champagne and Reefer,” a song by the great Muddy Waters, the man who more than anyone else inspired the Stones’ music and identity. They even took their name from a Waters song. Sure, most of their signature riffs are based on the guitar work of Chuck Berry, and there were myriad other influences along the way. But it was Waters, along with the rest of the electrified, urban, plugged-in Chicago blues masters, that led the way for a quintet of English white boys in the early 1960s. 

The Stones have always been loyal to those roots and paid homage to them, sharing the stage with their idols and helping to bring greater fame to those elder gentlemen, even when it means getting blown off the stage by them. For all of Jagger’s manic energy and cheeky posturing, for all Keith Richards’ swaggering attitude, it is Buddy Guy who summons the essence of the hard, driven sound that inspired them, with his deft, soulful guitar work and powerful, resonant voice. As Guy solos, standing firmly at center stage, the band circles him, surrounding the man like worshippers paying tribute to the sound and spirit which launched them on their five-decade journey.

B-Movie Shakespeare: Orson Welles' Macbeth

With just a few exceptions, when we talk about an Orson Welles film we talk about a tangled mess of topics all at once. We talk about the film as it exists and the film as it might have been; we talk about intentions and motivations, disagreements and compromises, edits and changes; we talk about artistic integrity versus commercial considerations, about the rights of the artist contrasted with the rights of studios, stockholders, producers and distributors.

When left to his own devices—or, more accurately, the devices of himself and his chosen collaborators—Welles created great cinema. Yet Citizen Kane is perhaps the only one of his films to reach theaters entirely without compromise. A couple of others survived with only compromised production values as opposed to compromised content, but most of the Welles filmography is the story of films that are at best approximations, and at worst mere remnants, of the dreams that gave birth to them.

The Orson Welles of caricature—of bloated budgets and extended, meandering production schedules—would come later. In the 1940s his films were produced in the same manner in which he had produced his stage and radio projects. Budgets were relatively small, schedules were adhered to (though always pushed to the last second); planning and rehearsals were thorough but open to last-minute changes and improvisations. And in this climate he produced two of his greatest works: Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

After Kane nearly brought down RKO studios in 1941 by taking on William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful media mogul of his day, Welles’ career took an unexpected turn. Though RKO and Welles survived the battle with Hearst, the studio became wary of its star director. But it was ultimately the gloom of Ambersons and the freewheeling experimentalism of Welles’ South American documentary project It’s All True that finally derailed Welles, and he spent the next few years struggling to win back the trust of his benefactors.

His reputation—some say justly, some unjustly—became that of a troublemaker, an arrogant, budget-busting, non-commercial maverick. Having conquered Broadway at 20, radio at 21 and film at 24, he was not used to failure, or to playing the supplicant. And he must have found it galling that he, whose genius had always included the successful marriage of commercial entertainment with high art, should be branded an unbankable risk.

The Stranger (1944) was a purely commercial product, delivered on time and under budget for International Pictures. With the exception of a few flourishes here and there, it is the least Wellesian of his films and thus the least interesting. Lady From Shanghai (1947) was begun as payback for a loan that Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn had given Welles for one of his stage productions. Shanghai too was a commercial film, with a few twists. But it was those unwanted twists that angered Cohn, who re-edited much of it and added a cheap score.

It was at this time that Welles, looking to find a studio that would back him as RKO had with Kane, joined Republic Studios, a low-budget producer of B movies, mostly westerns. Republic was willing to support a pet project of his: a stark, spare adaptation of Macbeth. Shakespeare was Welles' foundation as an artist: As a teenager he had published a series of guidebooks for adapting the works of the Bard to the modern stage, and as a young man he had made his reputation with the so-called “voodoo Macbeth,” a Roosevelt-era public works project in which he staged a sensational Haitian version of the play in Harlem with an all-black cast consisting mostly of first-time actors. Shakespearian tragedy underlies much of Welles’ self-written dramas, and he would return to the plays themselves on stage, radio and screen for much of his life.

Welles concocted a multi-faceted approach to the new Macbeth that would hold down expenses while maximizing rehearsal. He took a cast consisting largely of players from his own Mercury Theater on the road to Salt Lake City, where they would stage the play three times a day for four days as part of the Utah Centennial Festival. The festival would pick up the tab for the costumes, Republic would pay for the sets. When the theatrical run was over, the company would adjourn to the studio where, with three cameras operating at all times, shooting several scenes simultanously with the actors miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack, they would shoot the film in just three weeks. It would be a semi-radical but inexpensive experiment in stripped-down, streamlined filmmaking. (This is in marked contrast to his next project, the nomadic, globe-trotting four-year odyssey that would become Othello.)

Welles first adapted Macbeth to a screenplay, using his own guidebooks to fashion a dramatic restructuring of the play, emphasizing the witchcraft and heightening the horror and melodrama in the creation of a sort of high-art B picture. It is not so much an adaptation as a re-imagining, for Welles had no interest in simply filming the play; his goal was to rediscover much of the brash, barnstorming fun and frolic of Shakespeare, qualities he felt had been lost over decades of stuffy academization of the Bard. His intent was to use Macbeth as a starting point for something quite different, for something purely cinematic. He then adapted the screenplay to the stage for the Utah performances.

Much of Welles’ vaunted innovation throughout his career stemmed from necessity, from improvisation in the face of less than perfect circumstances. His radio shows conjured whole worlds on a merciless weekly deadline; the shadowy photography of Kane was conceived primarily as a method of concealing the lack of sets; and the staging of a famous scene in Othello amid the swirling steam of a Turkish bath was another inspired bit of improvisation, compensating for the fact that Welles’ supplier failed to deliver the costumes. From the beginning, Macbeth was essentially built on a framework of improvisation amid low-budget circumstances, its design consisting of papier-maché sets rising above a bare soundstage, its staging and photographic angles organized around the necessities of the quick three-camera shooting schedule.

Republic released the film in Europe to good reviews, but tested it only in select cities in America. They had already required Welles to cut about 20 minutes from it, but now they cut still more and insisted that as much of the dialogue as possible be re-recorded without the Scottish accents. (Welles had sought to return the play to its roots by abandoning the hybrid English accents that had become standard for interpretations of Shakespeare with a Scottish burr.) When this highly compromised version was finally officially released in the States after a lengthy delay, critical reception was largely hostile. While some of the footage has been replaced since then, and the Scottish-accent soundtrack restored, the film, like so many other Welles films, is still not quite the film he intended.

The film still draws mixed reviews. Joseph McBride, one of Welles’ most sympathetic biographers, bemoans the lack of subtlety of Welles in the title role, the weakness of Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth, and what he considers the budget-hampered photographic style, in which the actors move more than the camera. Meanwhile, David Thomson, generally one of Welles’ more critical biographers, describes the acting as “heartfelt and liberated” and flatly states that “no film since Kane had had so profoundly organized or expressive a photographic style.”

Welles’ films, like the man himself, retain the power to polarize his most ardent fans, even after 60 years.

Theater and Magic: The World of Orson Welles

The myth of Orson Welles has outlived its usefulness. The man has long since passed on, as have those who sought to undermine his achievements. He was jealously branded by Hollywood as the wunderkind-turned-enfant terrible of the cinema, the man who took on a media titan, and Hollywood itself, in Citizen Kane and then squandered his own career with his proclivity for self-destruction and artistic excess. The standard line on Welles was that he created just that single masterpiece before embarking on a long downward slide.

However, reports of the artist’s slow-motion death have been greatly exaggerated. Though there’s an element of truth in the criticism of Welles—he was, by most accounts brash, difficult and at times self-destructive, yet immeasurably charming—the decline was not in his work but in his relations with those who controlled the purse strings and the means of production; artistically he remained vital until his death in 1985.

Pacific Film Archive will present a retrospective covering all of the director’s major cinematic work, in roughly chronological order, through April 13. Citizen Kane shows tonight (Friday) at 7 p.m.; his follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, screens Saturday at 5 p.m.

Much of the criticism of Welles, now as well as then, stems from a profound misunderstanding of the man and of his art. While it is true that Welles was a restless innovator, his innovations were, for the most part, at the service of a classicist’s art. He was far more conservative in his sentiments and affections than the image of the bold, relentless, iconoclastic youth of Kane would indicate.

To begin to understand the trajectory of Welles’ career, one must keep in mind the polarities of his influences: traditional theater and magic.

Welles was an accomplished magician, often performing tricks for cast and crew. And during World War II he traveled the country performing for the troops and sawing Marlene Dietrich in half before their very eyes. He was a consummate showman who took great pleasure in startling and dazzling an audience.

But he was also a serious actor, writer and director, trained in the classics of literature and theater from a very young age. As the creative force behind the Mercury Theater in New York in the 1930s, he forged his reputation, at the age of 20, by reviving classic works with a bold, modernist aesthetic. And on radio, with the Mercury Theater on the Air, he focused on the same sort of material, adapting the classics to one-hour and half-hour dramas. (His groundbreaking theater career may survive only in photographs and second-hand accounts, but virtually all of Welles’ surviving radio work can be found on the Internet, cheap if not free, in MP3 format.)

But Welles’ traditionalism was often overshadowed in the public mind by his showmanship, by his attention-getting forays into more melodramatic projects. While he established his presence on radio as the original voice of The Shadow and presented his share of thrillers on stage and on radio, the bulk of Welles’ oeuvre, in every medium in which he worked, was far more serious in intent and execution.

It was his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that really launched the myth. The controversial broadcast relocated the Martian invasion from England to New Jersey and presented the drama as a series of breaking news announcements interrupting “our regularly scheduled program.” The show set off a nationwide panic that might have destroyed any other director’s career; instead it earned the Mercury a sponsor (the program would soon be renamed the Campbell Playhouse) and earned him the chance to make a movie.

The result was Citizen Kane, a brash, bold film that featured Welles’ trademark blend of commercial entertainment, high art and sleight-of-hand chicanery. Its effrontery to everything Hollywood was evident in every shot; Welles ostentatiously brandished his mastery of the medium: unusual camera angles; dramatic visual and thematic contrasts; complex tapestries of sound; long takes followed by startling cuts and transitions; and of course Greg Toland’s deep-focus photography. For better and for worse, the film made Welles’ reputation: a showman with pretensions to Art.

He would go on to complete just 11 more films, several of them truly great, most of them groundbreaking, and at least one or two fascinating failures. Many of them were taken away from him and re-edited without his input or consent; some were hampered from the start by low budgets and a lack of resources as a result of Welles’ self-imposed exile in Europe as an independent filmmaker. But if one fact stands out above all in PFA's restrospective, it is that Welles never stood still stylistically. Though every film is stamped with his peculiar visual style, his body of work ranges from expressionist to classical, from period pieces to modern-day noir, from Shakespeare to documentary and personal essay.

The film that might have been his true masterpiece came immediately after Kane. The story of the making and unmaking of The Magnificent Ambersons is nearly as tragic as the film itself. Welles rather faithfully adapted Booth Tarkington’s novel, using a style much more restrained and fluid than the genre-busting flash and disjointed narrative pyrotechnics of Kane. The result, as Francois Truffaut put it, is a film “made in violent contrast to Citizen Kane, almost as if by another filmmaker who detested the first and wanted to give him a lesson in modesty.”

Ambersons is a nostalgic dream dissolving into a jaded, weary reality check, a portrait of a vanishing epoch, of the passing of time and the coming of change. To modern eyes, it may seem like an old-fashioned Hollywood film; it is stately and somber and lavish in design. Even a film as showy as Kane may, in these times, require an educated eye to fully appreciate its innovation and audacity, but Ambersons can be even more vexing to the modern viewer, for the workings of its innovations are carefully concealed. Welles wasn’t aiming for shock and awe with this film, as he was with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast and, to some extent, with Kane; he was instead offering a beautifully crafted and seamless film, rich in novelistic detail, which employed its innovations purely in the service of the tale.

Welles borrowed many techniques from his predecessors, including the iris—a common device from the silent era—and images burnished at the edges, like the more sentimental works of D.W. Griffith. He also incorporated much of his radio experience, narrating the film himself as he did in his Mercury broadcasts and using radio’s bridging musical cues to provide fluid transitions between scenes. Also evident are elements of classic theater, such as the gossiping townsfolk who act as a sort of Greek chorus.

Ambersons employed Welles’ much-vaunted long takes, his camera dancing along with the guests in the ballroom scene or gazing patiently as the delicate psyche of Agnes Moorehead’s Aunt Fanny finally collapses in the kitchen scene. And Welles’ editing talents came to the fore once again, most evidently in the opening montage that establishes the setting with humor and delicate irony. As in all of Welles’ best work, he brought together a wide range of styles and influences and melded them into a personal vision of great depth and complexity, but this time the seams and stagecraft were more carefully hidden from view.

RKO previewed the film for an audience, and though the comment cards contained many remarks that were ecstatic, many more were severely critical. It was war time, and the average moviegoer wanted escapism, not gloom. The studio panicked and, while Welles was shooting another film in Brazil, began to carve away at his most personal film. Nearly an hour’s worth of footage was scrapped; several scenes were re-shot, re-written or re-edited; and an attempt at a happy ending was tacked on. In the words of critic David Thomson, it is a film “so dark and mournful that it would not be shown properly to the American public.” It’s a testament to the power of Welles’ vision that the butchered 88-minute film is still widely considered a masterpiece.

Shooting scripts, memos, photographs and first-hand accounts provide a fairly complete picture of what is missing from the film as it exists today. In addition to the original ending, the loss of one particular scene is especially galling: As the family’s fortunes decline, young George takes one last walk through the decaying mansion as the camera follows in one long, unbroken take. The shot went on for several minutes, allowing the character time to mourn the passing of an era as he moves through each room, past pieces of furniture shrouded in sheets like the ghosts of ballroom dances past. It was a technical tour de force, with crew members frantically pulling apart sets and doorways and sliding others into place and laying dolly tracks just beyond the view of the camera as it traveled through the house. It is the essence of the art of Orson Welles: the magician’s hand, deft and graceful and invisible in the creation of a seamless and elegant illusion.

Noir City 6: The Dark Side of American Film

There is no shortage of great film festivals in the Bay Area, celebrating the cinematic heritage of every corner of the globe.

However, there is just one San Francisco festival that focuses purely on American film, or at least on a purely American film genre. For despite the Frenchified name, film noir is uniquely American in origin and in tone.

The annual Noir City festival begins today (Friday) at the Castro theater in San Francisco, screening double features every day—20 films in all—through Sunday, Feb. 3.

Film noir was not a self-conscious movement. Indeed, it was only defined in retrospect, and by outsiders, hence the French term. And yet, nearly 70 years since its genesis, it is still not easily defined.

The genre stems from the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s, when the Great Depression rocked the foundations of the devil-may-care America of the Roaring ’20s. Writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice, stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes, self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

The genre didn’t spread to film until the 1940s, where it took on the darker undercurrents of the American psyche during and following the horrors of World War II. And while there is still some debate over which film deserves the mantle of the first noir, the most influential of the early efforts was John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, in which Humphrey Bogart captured the cynicism and weariness of San Francisco private eye Sam Spade as he fell into and then delicately extricated himself from a web of deceit spun by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), though not itself a noir, had a strong influence on the visual side of the genre, with its shadowy sets, striking German Expressionism-derived camera angles and somber tone. And Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s 1944 thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, is frequently cited as the film that essentially codified the genre and its dominant characteristics, including the ruthless femme fatale as personified by Stanwyck’s icy Phyllis Dietrichson.

Noir City, the festival and the foundation, were founded by Eddie Muller and Alan Rode to present and preserve this cinematic legacy. And it is a legacy greatly in need of preservation, for although noir has enjoyed a great resurgence in recent years, many of these films were B pictures, cheap studio products created simply to fill out a double bill, and then forgotten days after they closed. The Film Noir Foundation helps to rediscover, preserve, and strike new theatrical prints of these neglected classics so that they can be presented in all their tawdry glory.

The festival starts Friday with a two-film tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who will be interviewed on stage during the intermission. Repeat Performance (1947) is the first of the festival’s many rare films, none available on DVD, many not available even on VHS, and some which have not screened in decades. Leslie stars as a young woman given the opportunity to relive the past year of her life, and the chance to opt this time not to kill her husband in what the festival program describes as a noir version of It’s a Wonderful Life. The Hard Way (1943), directed by Vincent Sherman and photographed by the great James Wong Howe, is what the festival has termed an “honorary noir,” for though it doesn’t quite qualify, it is certainly one of Leslie’s darker films.

Other highlights include Saturday’s tribute to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, featuring The Prowler (1951), presented in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, and Gun Crazy (1950); Hangover Square (1945), a quintessential noir featuring a melodramatic plot of madness and murder, beautiful but dangerous dames, Wellesian camera angles, and an ominous and evocative score by the great Bernard Herrmann; a double feature by director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton (Jan. 30); D.O.A. (1950), set in San Francisco (Jan. 31); and Conflict (Feb. 1), one of Bogart’s lesser-known noirs.

Saturday Feb. 2 will feature three films, including the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), the most recent production on this year’s program, along with (schedule permitting) an onstage interview with actor Billy Bob Thornton. And the festival will close Feb. 3 with a screening of Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), one of the darkest films in the genre.

Noir City 6. Through Feb. 3 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com. 

I Am Cuba

When art dabbles in politics it runs the risk of its politics subsuming its art. No matter how great the artistic achievement, there is always the danger that critical and popular reception may be held hostage to considerations that go far beyond artistic merit.

Such was the case with I Am Cuba, an extraordinary 1964 Cuban-Soviet production that deserves a place alongside Triumph of the Will (1935) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) as a landmark of political filmmaking. The movie’s vast ambitions, which it largely fulfills, ultimately fell victim to the very politics it espoused. After just a few screenings it languished in a vault for 30 years before finally receiving its due recognition in the 1990s. And now it finally gets a DVD release worthy of its grandeur in the form of a three-disc set from Milestone Films.

The project began just after the Cuban Revolution, as Castro’s government was settling in after the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The Soviet Union, eager to show support for the budding socialist nation, sent writers and artists and intellectuals to help foster Cuba’s burgeoning cultural movement.

Included among these cultural ambassadors were film director Mikhail Kalatozov and his cinematographer Serguey Urusevsky, who had collaborated on several films already, and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. They set out to make a sort of cinematic epic poem about contemporary Cuba and about the revolution itself. Yevtushenko and Cuban writer Enrique Pineda Barnet were put to work on a script, but with strict instructions from Urusevsky to keep the words to a minimum—this would be a visual film, not a verbal one.

The result is one of the most stunning and inventive visual feasts ever put on film. It relates four separate stories of the suffering and rising political consciousness of the Cuban people, the episodes united by a narrator, “the Voice of Cuba,” who reiterates the themes and provides the transitions between the tales.

Kalatozov and Urusevsky took a bold visual approach that expanded on their previous work. The film consists of stirring, swirling camera movements that flow effortlessly from one indelible image to another. Long, unbroken shots lure us further into this highly stylized world, into the reality of its unreality. The camera moves relentlessly, following characters around corners, up staircases, through open fields and crowded nightclubs; it views them from extreme angles, high and low; it floats up the sides of buildings, through windows, over streets and even into swimming pools.

When asked why his sentences were so long and at times convoluted, novelist William Faulkner replied that he was trying to fit everything into one sentence, to fit the entire sweep of history on the head of a pin. I Am Cuba’s sustained shots and graceful, engrossing camera movements serve a similar purpose, taking us on a journey through a political and social landscape where history itself is unfolding, where a revolution is igniting, where a certain political consciousness is enveloping the land and its people.

Some of the shots seem to defy logic. Even an experienced filmmaker like Martin Scorsese was dumbfounded after his first viewing of the film, unable to figure out how several shots were achieved. An accompanying documentary reveals a few secrets, but not all. But although the film’s style is bold and intoxicating, it is never gratuitous, for its distinctive form is wedded perfectly to its content.

One facet that goes unexplained on the DVD’s extra features is Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s use of the wide-angle lens throughout the film. Its distortions call to mind the expressive shots from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, in which the wide-angle lens seems to represent the distorted visions of grandiosity of the film’s title character—reality seen through a fragmented snow globe. Perhaps Kalatozov and Urusevsky saw it as another method by which to establish the film’s heightened poetic tone. Or perhaps they simply liked the aesthetics of it, for it allowed them to take in as much of the landscape as possible. 

But in retrospect, four decades after the revolution, the imagery takes on an entirely different quality, that of the distorted lens through which participants and idealists saw the revolution at the time, before the utopian dream settled into disillusionment, before the hopes and dreams of a nation faded into day-to-day subsistence and struggle. Cuba, vast and glorious in black and white, bends at the edges of the frame, curling inward like facts bending to fit the beholder’s vision.

There were great hopes for the project—as a symbol of the revolution, as a plea for international support, and as a sign of collaboration between the Soviet Union and the nascent socialist island state. But when the film opened, after two years in production, Cubans and Russians alike were disappointed. The Russians saw it as naive and tepid; the Cubans felt the filmmakers had misunderstood and stereotyped their people, infusing characters with a distinctly Russian brand of slow deliberation. As actor Sergio Corrieri put it, the film was “Cuban reality seen through a slavic prism.”

The film showed for a week, then disappeared for three decades, never screening outside the nations that produced it.

I Am Cuba finally got its first screenings in the West in the early 1990s. It was soon brought to the attention of New York’s Milestone Films, who secured the rights, and, with the help of Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, gave the film a theatrical release in 1995, whereupon the film was hailed as a masterpiece. Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman said the film’s rediscovery was “like finding a preserved Siberian mammoth in the sands of a tropical island.”

Now Milestone has released the film in a lavish DVD set (packaged in a cigar box) that includes a beautiful new transfer of the film and extra features which delve into the production and its legacy, including a documentary about the film itself (called I Am Cuba: Siberian Mammoth), another about the distinguished career of director Mikhail Kalatozov, and interviews with Scorsese and poet Yevtushenko.

This is one long-forgotten classic that is more than deserving of the praise heaped upon it—a truly revolutionary film that might have radically altered the cinematic landscape had it been distributed in its time. As Scorsese says in his introduction to the film, if I Am Cuba had been widely seen when it was originally released, “movies would have looked a lot different a lot sooner.” 

The Talkies Learn to Move: Pabst's Threepenny Opera

When Bertolt Brecht and G.W. Pabst decided to collaborate in bringing the former's Threepenny Opera to the screen, both men were at the peak of their careers. But the collaboration would be anything but smooth. Indeed it was fraught with conflict, as so many Brecht projects were.

The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a two-disc edition that features a beautiful transfer of the German film along with a host of features, including commentary by film scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler, the French version of the film, and a documentary and essay on the adaptation from stage to screen.

Brecht drafted the original screenplay, but delivered something far different than he was asked for. Rather than simply bringing the original play to the screen, he drastically altered it, adding and removing scenes, rearranging the structure, and greatly altering the content and focus of the tale.

Brecht had already clashed with composer Kurt Weill over the play itself, each man claiming credit for the production's success. Now he clashed with Pabst, who took Brecht's script and bent it to his own aims. But as Bathrick and Rentschler point out in the disc's commentary track, the two men may not have been so far apart as they claimed. Each was perhaps reluctant to credit the other with the film's better qualities and reserved the right to scapegoat the other should the critics be unkind.

Shortchanged by the film, however, is Kurt Weill, for few of his compositions made it onto the screen.

The final product, though it may bear relatively little resemblance to the stage production, is an excellent film and a milestone of early sound cinema. Pabst often replaces scenes of dialogue with imagery, with long gazes, with near-silent shots in which the actors convey the plot without words. 

And at a time when the camera had been rendered almost stagnant by cumbersome sound equipment, Pabst's camera roams through the sets with fluidity and ease. If the camerawork at times seem similar to Fritz Lang's M, released that same year, there is good reason: Both films were shot by legendary cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner.

There are other similarities between the two films. Both examine the criminal underworld, and do so with a blend of humor, intrigue and distaste. And both feature wonderfully sustained sequences of cat-and-mouse amid the squalid streets. One image in Threepenny Opera is especially striking: One of Mack the Knife's henchmen has stolen an armchair and is running through the streets with police in pursuit. He crosses a courtyard, invisible beneath the chair, looking like an ant carrying its booty back to the nest. He scurries across the courtyard and out of view, only to appear again with the police right behind him, firing bullets into the upholstery.

In America, the reaction to synchronized sound technology had been extreme. The first couple of years worth of American sound films were filled with wall-to-wall talk; the audience was rarely given a break from the endless chatter of showgirls and dandy men about town. It seemed everyone was a wit, armed with a ready punchline for every situation. In Germany, by contrast, sound was being used more judiciously and with greater sophistication. Filmmakers like Pabst and Lang did not give up the virtues of the more image-focused cinema of silent pictures. Rather than treating sound as an end in itself, they used it as a means to an end, as another tool in the creation of compelling cinema. Sound was used as atmosphere, or fused into the story as a plot point, and often employed in one sequence merely to draw greater attention to the silence of another sequence.

The result is a film of richness and depth, with sound and image combining in the creation of a sharply rendered underworld. The words of Brecht, the music of Weill, the images of Pabst and Wagner — a fruitful collaboration of some of Germany's greatest talents.

Threepenny Opera. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.