It's GROUNDHOG DAY...Again

Monday, January 29th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Groundhog Day were written by Madison Barnes-Nelson, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Groundhog Day, courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, will screen on Friday, February 2, at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular screening space, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Madison Barnes-Nelson

“What would you do, if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?” asks Phil Connors (Bill Murray) to a pair of bowling alley barflies. “That about sums it up for me,” retorts one of the drunks. Anyone who has ever felt miserable, run down, or even just stuck at home during the long winter months may find this to be an extremely relatable sentiment. For Phil Connors, however, this scenario is not a metaphor for the drudgery of daily life, but a very literal predicament with no end in sight. 

When misanthropic Pittsburgh weatherman Connors begrudgingly travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the town’s annual Groundhog Day gathering, he does so in hopes that it his last trip to the sleepy little burg. Phil treats everyone in his life with sarcasm and disdain, including his beautiful news producer Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell) and wry cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) who accompanied him on the trip. Phil’s disdain only intensifies when a massive snowstorm (contrary to Phil’s own weather forecast) traps the trio in Punxsutawney for the night. When Phil awakens the next morning, he’s still in Punxsutawney, and worse, he’s still in Groundhog Day. So begins Phil’s unexplained cosmic quest, as he experiences the longest winter of his life and re-lives Groundhog Day, always unchanging, without consequences or means of escape. Of course, Phil does what any person with no care for others would do—use the time loop to indulge in sex, junk food, and petty grudges against local townsfolk, such as obnoxious but well-meaning insurance salesman Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky). But indulgence wears thin quickly, and soon Phil must figure out how to spend his days in this provincial purgatory, a journey that will force him to look plainly at himself and how he treats those around him.

Reaching a point of true misery, Phil finds himself drawn to the earnest Rita, a romantic with a penchant for poetry seeking a connection of her own. But even Phil’s (sometimes slimy, sometimes sweet) stabs at romantic love aren’t enough for him to break free. Instead, he must turn outward and let go of his own selfish desires. Over (an indeterminate amount of) time, he learns to experience the real, transformative love that can come from helping and caring for others, a feeling that may resonate for anyone lost and looking for greater meaning in their life.

Between Ramis’s work as a writer/director and as an actor, Groundhog Day was his sixth collaboration with Murray. Ramis helped launch Murray’s career as a leading man, co-writing 1979’s Meatballs, and his work as both a writer and co-star on Ghostbusters (1984) launched Murray to stratospheric heights of stardom. However, Murray was not the initial choice to play Phil Connors. Both Tom Hanks and Michael Keaton passed on the role, while screenwriter Danny Rubin suggested Kevin Kline. Chevy Chase, who Murray had replaced on the second season of Saturday Night Live, was also suggested as an option. As fascinating as they are to consider, it is arguable that none of these actors would work in the role as well as Murray, who imbues his usual sly, sardonic presence with a deep well of melancholy, in some ways presaging his future dramatic work with Wes Anderson and his Oscar-nominated turn in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). Despite arguably career-best work from both men, Groundhog Day would prove to be their final collaboration. The two butted heads throughout the difficult production, leading to a decades-long rift that would only be resolved shortly before Ramis’s death in 2014.

Groundhog Day opened in wide release on February 12, 1993, (strangely a full 10 days after the holiday) to box office and critical success, grossing over $100 million worldwide. The long-term legacy of the film has been even more impressive. In 2017, a stage musical adaptation with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin transferred from London to Broadway, earning seven Tony Award nominations. The film also launched a veritable subgenre, with several films and shows adapting its time loop conceit across different genres, such as the sci-fi action film Edge of Tomorrow (2014), the college horror-comedy Happy Death Day (2017), and the Netflix dramedy series Russian Doll (2019-2022) to name a few. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film began the career of acclaimed character actor and Oscar-nominee Michael Shannon, who makes his screen debut in a small role as a WrestleMania-loving newlywed. Over thirty years later, what has made Groundhog Day endure is not its (thankfully unexplained) high-concept premise, but its simple yet poignant philosophical message. Sometimes all it takes to fix a selfish heart is a single day, even if some days are longer than others.

Waking Up to PEEPING TOM

Wednesday, January 24th, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Peeping Tom were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A new 4K DCP of Peeping Tom will screen on Friday, January 26 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. Admission is free!

By Josh Martin

Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) sits in the dimmed private screening room of cameraman Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm), watching anxiously as the young, unsettling gentleman shows her horrifying and inexplicable home movies. She pleads for answers with a telling line: “I like to understand what I’m shown.” One can imagine a viewer encountering Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in 1960 and feeling quite similarly to Helen, begging for explanations as they experience a work of unprecedented sexual frankness and violent desire. That the film only burrows further into its world of depravity and perversion, without compromising its vision of our participation in dysfunctional practices of viewing, is a testament to its disturbing power.

The production and reception history of Powell’s film is now the stuff of legend. Prior to the film’s release, Powell was best known for his partnership with Hungarian-British director Emeric Pressburger. Paired as The Archers, working a stable of collaborators including cinematographer Jack Cardiff and stars Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook, Powell and Pressburger produced Technicolor confections that help to expand and refine the possibilities of the cinematic medium, including classics such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1949). Following the conclusion of the Archers’ partnership in the late 1950s, Powell turned his attention to Peeping Tom.

The film follows Mark Lewis, an amateur “documentary” filmmaker who is also a fanatical serial killer. Unlike the equally psychologically damaged Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a frequent point of comparison in critical studies of Powell’s film, there is never any mystery about Mark’s murderous habits. Peeping Tom begins in a heightened version of the streets of London, where young Mark, camera in hand, solicits and begins following a streetwalking sex worker. Anticipating later killer POV sequences in films like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), the opening scene progresses from the merciless point-of-view of Mark’s camera – which, as Helen correctly identifies later in the film, is essentially an “extra limb,” inseparable from our protagonist. 

As we approach the young lady’s apartment, she becomes aware of the apparatus filming her, frightened by the bright lights as Mark and his camera close in for the kill. She lets out a terrified scream, culminating in a sudden cut to Mark as a spectator in his screening room, rewatching the film of the murder. In just a few short minutes, Powell’s film establishes its economy of motifs and devices: the ever-watchful eye of Mark, the unrelenting gaze of the camera, and the emphasis on spectatorship, on the act of cinematic viewing itself.

With decades of pictures influenced by (and often imitating) Powell’s violence and style, the opening scene may not feel as scandalous now as it did in 1960. Yet at the time, the film was vilified and lambasted, labeled as degenerate filth and “perverted nonsense” (Nina Hibbins, The Daily Worker). It is commonly understood to be the film that destroyed Powell’s career in the United Kingdom for good. As noted by Elliott Stein in Film Comment, the director once observed that, “The reception of the film was a disaster for me… This film ruined me. After Peeping Tom, it was impossible for me to get backing for other projects.” The response of the British tabloids is perhaps unsurprising, but more shocking is the lack of support from more cine-literate publications: Stein notes that even the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma “panned it unmercifully.”

Of course, the film is now properly regarded as an essential work. Critic Dave Kehr, writing upon its initial release in Chicago in 1979, called it “a shattering experience – it wakes us up from the movie-dream… and leaves us face-to-face with our own dark motives for movie-going.” Laura Mulvey, the landmark film theorist who initially posited the psychoanalytic theory of the “male gaze” in cinema, notes that Peeping Tom “[foregrounds] its mechanisms of looking, and the gender divide that separates the secret observer (male) from the object of his gaze (female).” Indeed, psychoanalysis, even in its most basic, pop Freudian form, is essential to an understanding of Peeping Tom. The film positions Mark’s “scopophilia” – which is defined by a psychologist late in the film as a sexually-driven “morbid urge to gaze” – as a hereditary perversity engendered by childhood trauma. The film reveals that Mark’s biologist father experimented on him, filming his studies of “fear and the nervous system” on the young boy. More importantly, the elder Lewis gifted his son his first camera, providing his outlet for engaging with the world and establishing his psychological and sexual malaise.

However, a refresher on the finer points of Lacan or Sigmund Freud is not required for Powell’s film to be vivid and involving. The film’s world is lurid and sensational, but it approaches these matters with a harsh, critical lens. Perversity is almost inescapable in the film. The line between Mark’s snuff films and the gaggle of tabloid journalists who feverishly photograph his murder scenes is portrayed as extraordinarily thin. A seemingly docile British gentleman grows quiet and sheepish as he asks for the pornographic images illegally sold at a neighborhood newsstand; “he won’t be doing the crossword tonight,” quips the shop owner. These transactions of commodified and objectified sexuality are direct and open in the film, a sharp contrast to the excruciating repression that eats away at Mark.

In the end, it all comes back to the camera itself. “It’s only a camera!” exclaims a policeman during the film’s climax, dodging the device thrown at him by a frantic Mark. The policeman’s partner responds: “Only?” A camera is never just a camera in the world of Peeping Tom: it does not take a perverted mind to see the clear symbolism in the apparatus, which Mark strokes, caresses, and grips with an orgasmic fervor. Yet far more than just a phallic substitute for our stunted killer, Powell’s film takes seriously the camera’s ability to observe the ineffable – or perhaps even nightmarish things that should remain hidden. Mark’s goal is to capture the human face at the moment of death – and to turn that image in on itself, forcing his victims to watch themselves as they die. “Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism,” noted Roger Ebert in his essay on the film, but “this one exacts a price… it doesn’t let us off the hook.” Ultimately, Kehr, Ebert, and Mulvey each identify this disruption of voyeurism as a central cause for the explosive controversy over the film. Much as Mark forces his viewers to watch their own reactions, Powell turns the camera back onto us, presenting viewers with a distorted mirror of spectatorship. Gazing upon the twisted faces of death, we see faces that reflect our own horror at what Powell’s film reveals.  

Sound and Image in THE ZONE

Monday, January 22nd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on The Zone of Interest were written by Nick Sansone, PhD Student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Zone of Interest has its first Madison-area screening at the UW Cinematheque on Thursday, January 25 at 7 p.m. The screening takes place at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. Admission is free.

By Nick Sansone.

There’s an immediately striking image early in writer/director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest that speaks to the film’s intended tone and message in a stark and chilling fashion that defines the film’s formal approach. A man we will soon come to know as Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), German SS officer and commandant of Auschwitz death camp, is beside his beaming wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) while their children play in the backyard of their house. The sun shines down on them through a clear blue sky that dominates the top of the frame. But this image of domestic bliss is intruded upon by a massive wall topped with barbed wire and a watchtower poking over the other side of it. The sounds of children at play are most prominent in the sound mix, but underneath we can hear an aural tableau of screams, gunfire, trains, and furnaces coming from the other side of that imposing wall, the sounds of human destruction as efficient machinery. This contrast, between what we are directly shown and what lies just out of frame, is the animating tension of The Zone of Interest, a film that foregrounds small-scale domestic drama amidst one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest is only the fourth feature film in 23 years for Glazer—a former music video director—and his first since 2013. While Glazer’s previous two films, 2004’s underrated Birth (2004) and 2013’s Under the Skin, both demonstrate an almost Kubrickian stylistic discipline and gift for mounting dread, there was little in his career that pointed toward historical drama as his next outlet. However, Glazer’s formal approach should be immediately recognizable here, particularly for fans of Under the Skin. For example, in both films, Glazer begins by foregrounding the importance of score and sound design to the work, displaying a black screen as the soundtrack builds in volume and intensity before the first image is even shown. (As in his prior film, Glazer worked closely with composer Mica Levi and sound designer Johnnie Burn, to similarly chilling results). In doing this, Glazer conditions the spectator to be as attentive to sound as they are to image, to similarly scan their soundscape as they would the frame.

Johnnie Burn has discussed the film’s two distinct and clashing soundscapes that creates the chilling dichotomy that drives the film. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he discussed creating the first soundscape, that of the Höss family’s menial domestic existence. According to Burn, the sound department planted “20 hidden directional microphones” on set that would “capture the real sounds of the actors simultaneously performing in long takes across many rooms and spaces” and would limit the need for ADR, lending a sense of specificity and authenticity to what we hear. For the second soundscape, that of the horrors taking place in Auschwitz, Burn utilized a massive database of sound effects as well as a Poland-based foley team who would record the sounds of “20 prisoners being marched by a guard who is shouting,” along with period-appropriate guns and motorbike engines. All told, a single sequence in the film “ultimately used over 500 different incidences of sound.”

In addition to the careful, layered approach to the film’s sound design, Glazer also worked closely with cinematographer Łukasz Żal on crafting a historically accurate yet tonally alienating visual aesthetic for the film. Glazer and his crew were given the uncommon privilege of filming on location in Auschwitz, or rather right along its outside edge. The filmmakers also studied the real Höss estate in exhaustive detail to construct a historically accurate replica of how it would have looked in 1943. However, Glazer was adamant that he did not wish to glamorize the estate or the people who lived there, describing it as a desire for the images to seem “authorless”, devoid of style or artistic grandeur. Similar to his use of hidden cameras on Under the Skin, Glazer placed 10 cameras (and hidden microphones) at various places throughout the set, both immersing the actors on set and giving the film its enveloping and omniscient aesthetic, one that forced the viewer to bear witness to the banal quotidian lives of those committing unspeakable evil. The few moments when Glazer does break from his hyperrealist aesthetic, such as a series of stunning sequences shot in infrared, it is all the more shocking, as it pulls us violently out of the disquieting, yet almost placid rhythms of what has come before.

With The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer has taken a well-trodden prestige subgenre, the Holocaust drama, and radically revived it in his own formal milieu. Rather than directly confront or wallow in images of inhuman violence and degradation, Glazer conjures overpowering moral dread by mere suggestion and implication, constantly asking us to look and listen closer and forcing us to consider how any human being could live so blissfully alongside such depravity, let alone perpetrate it against their fellow man.

Favorites of 2023: Lance St. Laurent

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

By Lance St. Laurent, Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival Project Assistant and Programmer

My favorite movies released in 2023, in ascending order:

15. BARBIE (Greta Gerwig)

14. ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET. (Kelly Fremon Craig)

13. THE IRON CLAW (Sean Durkin)

12. THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL (William Friedkin)

11. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 (Chad Stahelski)

10. MAY DECEMBER (Todd Haynes)

9. FERRARI (Michael Mann)

8. THE BOY AND THE HERON (Hayao Miyazaki)

7. THE KILLER (David Fincher)

6. POOR THINGS (Yorgos Lanthimos)

5. ASTEROID CITY + THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR/THE SWAN/THE RAT CATCHER/POISON (2023, Wes Anderson)

4. THE ZONE OF INTEREST (Jonathan Glazer)

3. ALL OF US STRANGERS (Andrew Haigh)

2. OPPENHEIMER (Christopher Nolan)

1. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese)

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

AFIRE (Christian Petzold)

ANATOMY OF A FALL (Justine Triet)

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)

THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne0

MAGIC MIKE'S LAST DANCE (Steven Soderbergh)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (Christopher McQuarrie)

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (Nicole Holofcener)

The movies on the following list of favorites were all originally released before 2023, but I saw them all for the first time last year. In alphabetical order, they are:

LA DOLCE VITA (Federico Fellini, 1960)

THE DRIVER (Walter Hill, 1978)

THE FEARLESS HYENA (Jackie Chan, 1979)

JOURNEY TO ITALY/VIAGGIO IN ITALIA (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

ORLANDO (Sally Potter, 1992)

RUGGLES OF RED GAP (Leo McCarey, 1935)

THE SCARLET EMPRESS (Joseph von Sternberg, 1934)

THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Bela Tarr, 2000)

THE WIZARD OF SPEED AND TIME (Mike Jittlov, 1979)

Favorites of 2023: Ben Reiser

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024
Posted by Jim Healy

By Ben Reiser, Cinematheque Programmer & Director of Operations and Programmer, Wisconsin Film Festival

In alphabetical order, here is a list of 23 movies I saw that were released in 2023 (unless otherwise noted). These are the movies that stuck with me. 

THE ADULTS (Dustin Guy DeFa)

AFIRE (Christian Petzold)

ANATOMY OF A FALL (Justine Triet)

BEAU IS AFRAID (Ari Aster)

BOTTOMS (Emma Seligman)

CREED III (Michael B. Jordan)

DAD & STEP-DAD (Tynan DeLong)

THE DELINQUENTS (Rodrigo Moreno)

FALCON LAKE (Charlotte Le Bon)

FAST X (Louis Leterrier)

FREMONT (Babak Jalali)

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Takashi Yamazaki)

THE GOOD BOSS (2022, Fernando Leon de Aranoa)

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 (James Gunn)

THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne)

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (James Mangold)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 (Chad Stahelski)

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese)

ONE FINE MORNING (Mia Hansen-Løve)

OPPENHEIMER (Christopher Nolan)

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers)

TEACHERS LOUNGE (Ilker Catak)

WHEN EVIL LURKS (Demian Rugna)

Favorites of 2023: Jim Healy

Sunday, December 31st, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

By Jim Healy, Director of Programming, UW Cinematheque

In 2023, I viewed 468 movies that were all new to me. These ten features, presented in alphabetical order, were my favorites:

GODZILLA MINUS ONE/GOJIRA -1.0 (2023, Takashi Yamazaki)

THE GOLDEN BED (1925, Cecil B. DeMille)

THE HOLDOVERS (2023, Alexander Payne)

THE IRON CLAW (2023, Sean Durkin)

IVY (1947, Sam Wood)

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023, Martin Scorsese)

LIVING (2022, Oliver Hermanus)

THERE’S NO TOMORROW/SANS LENDEMAIN (1939, Max Ophuls)

THE SWEET EAST (2023, Sean Price Williams)

UNA VITA DIFICILE (1961, Dino Risi)

There were many, many movies I enjoyed, so here is another list of titles that are well worth mentioning. Some haven't been widely released yet, and are worth checking out when they are:

ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023, Justine Triet)

ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET (2023, Kelly Fremon Craig)

ASTEROID CITY (2023, Wes Anderson) + THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR/THE SWAN/THE RAT CATCHER/POISON (2023, Wes Anderson)

BEAU IS AFRAID (2023, Ari Aster)

CONCRETE UTOPIA (2023, Um Tae-hwa)

DREAM SCENARIO (2023, Kristoffer Borgli) + SICK OF MYSELF/SYK PIKE (2022, Kristoffer Borgli)

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS HONOR AMONG THIEVES (2023, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein)

GREEN BORDER (2023, Agnieszka Holland)

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3 (2023, James Gunn)

JENNIE GERHARDT (1933, Marion Gering)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023, Christopher McQuarrie)

THE NOVELIST’S FILM (2022, Hong Sang-soo)

OPPENHEIMER (2023, Christopher Nolan)

ORGASMO/PARANOIA (1969, Umberto Lenzi) + A QUIET PLACE TO KILL/PARANOIA (1970, Umberto Lenzi)

PICTURES OF GHOSTS/RETRATOS FANTASMOS (2023, Kleber Mendonça Filho)

POSSE FROM HELL (1961, Herbert Coleman)

RIDDLE OF FIRE (2023, Weston Razooli)

SEVEN SINNERS (1940, Tay Garnett)

SPAWN OF THE NORTH (1938, Henry Hathaway) + THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936, Henry Hathaway)

THE UNGUARDED MOMENT (1957, Harry Keller)

RAGING BULL and the End of '70s Cinema

Tuesday, December 5th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Raging Bull were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD student in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored 4K DCP of Raging Bull will screen on Saturday, December 9 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Garret Strpko

Raging Bull is often remembered today as the swan song of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. Noted film critic Peter Biskind invokes it as a sort of bookend in the title of his definitive written history on the period, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Indeed, the film is a prime example of the type of actor-driven project that is difficult to imagine getting produced in quite the same way today. “Although Raging Bull was later selected in a Premiere magazine poll as the best movie of the ‘80s,” Biskind writes, “it was very much a movie of the ‘70s.” While his peers of the “movie brat” generation such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were busy helming the kind of high-concept, high-budget, and high-return films which define the industry still to this day, Scorsese once again turned to a personal, upsetting, and moving portrait of damaged and damaging American masculinity.

Scorsese, however, was not the originator of the project now discussed as one of his greatest. Raging Bull is based on the memoir of Jake LaMotta, a boxer active in the 1940s and 50s known for his ability to withstand beatings and take punches to wear out his opponents. Robert De Niro read LaMotta’s memoir while filming The Godfather: Part II and developed a strong interest in the character. He immediately pursued translating the book to film. De Niro first approached Scorsese about directing the film on the set of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), although it took some time before he came to share De Niro’s enthusiasm. He initially passed on the film on the grounds that he had little interest in boxing, let alone sports in general. As Biskind puts it, “Besides, LaMotta wasn’t much of a boxer. His singular talent lay in his ability to absorb punishment.” Eventually, however, De Niro brought the project to producer Irwin Winkler, who, riding high on the recent success of the boxing film Rocky (1976), agreed to produce the film if Scorsese could be attached to direct.

This did little to pique his interest. Scorsese was undergoing one of the darkest personal and professional periods of his life. His most recent film New York, New York (1977), a tribute to classical Hollywood musicals starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, was received poorly both among critics and at the box office—his first major failure. To cope, he dove deeper into his increasingly debilitating drug habit. Creatively frustrated and personally dissatisfied, Scorsese put off working on the film, handing it off to frequent collaborator Mardik Martin, a co-writer on Mean Streets (1973) and New York, New York, to develop a first draft of the screenplay. Scorsese and De Niro struggled with Martin’s initial script. Both sought to bring in a more personal angle on La Motta’s story, and so enlisted another collaborator, Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver (1976), to perform some significant rewrites.

Schrader’s reworking of the script found the angle that De Niro and Scorsese were looking for. Rather than focusing solely on Jake’s story, Schrader’s rewrite oriented the story around the relationship Jake and his brother/manager Joey. Drawing on his own troubled relationship with his brother and sometime-collaborator Leonard, Schrader imbues the film not only with a personal factor, but with a sense of the gloomy edginess for which he is known (indeed, the filmmakers speculated that the film as written in Schrader’s rewrite would be rated X).

Meanwhile, Scorsese’s health only continued to decline. In Fall 1978, after returning from the Telluride Film Festival, he was rushed to the hospital hemorrhaging and severely underweight, with a potent mix of prescription and recreational drugs coursing through his veins. A doctor informed him he was in danger of dying any moment. With intense treatment and the support of his close friends, including De Niro, he finally came back around with a full sense of purpose for Raging Bull. Scorsese now saw that LaMotta’s story, like his own, was one of self-destruction, its effects on oneself and the people one loves. Scorsese emerged from his near-death experience determined and reinvigorated. He had finally found the personal angle that would make the film meaningful for him to make.

Raging Bull began shooting in 1979. The filmmakers cast two relative newcomers in career-making roles: Cathy Moriarty, in her film debut, as Jake’s wife Vickie and eventual Scorsese mainstay Joe Pesci as his brother Joey. Typical of his method style of acting, De Niro prepared for the lead role by immersing himself in the boxing world, even participating in three fights in New York, with the real-life Jake LaMotta serving as his trainer. For the bookend scenes set in the 1960s, De Niro gained nearly seventy pounds to play LaMotta in his period as a washed-up nightclub performer. Shot by cinematographer Michael Chapman and edited by Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the film’s boxing sequences remain some of the most impactful and commented-upon of Scorsese’s career, including the surreal and now-iconic fight against Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes). His distinctive approach to camera movement, editing, and sound design communicates the impact of each jab, hook, and uppercut. Easily the most striking stylistic feature of the film, however, is its arresting use of black and white photography, a creative choice which Scorsese made, among other reasons, to give the film a ‘tabloid’ feel.

The film was released by United Artists in late 1980. It was initially met with low box-office returns and mixed reviews, but it performed well at the 53rd Academy Awards, where it was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, Best Editing and Best Actor for Robert De Niro. The actor’s intense and uncompromising interest in the character of Jake LaMotta paid off with prestige. Furthermore, the film is regarded by many as the finest of Scorsese’s career. A remarkable and devastating portrait of a self-hating narcissist led by a tour de force performance, Raging Bull is a fitting end to a stylistically, narratively, and thematically daring period in American film history.

Oliver Stone's JFK: A Controversial Filmmaker at His Peak

Monday, November 13th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Oliver Stone's JFK were written by Lance St. Laurent, Project Assistant for the Cinematheque and PhD candidate in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of the original theatrical release version of JFK will screen as the final film in our "Cinema in the Shadow of the JFK Assassination" series at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, November 19 at 2 p.m. The Chazen is located at 750 University Ave, and admission is free!

By Lance St. Laurent

No Hollywood film should be held to the standard of an objective historical text, so it’s no knock on the quality of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy epic JFK to say that one should not approach it as a work that unearths great historical secrets or conclusively blows the lid off the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Historians and journalists were quick to criticize Stone’s film even before its release, and one can easily find a litany of rebuttals, denials, and officially sanctioned counter-narratives to most, if not all the bold claims that Stone’s film makes over its dizzying three hour run time. Stone, never one to shy away from self-aggrandizement, went as far as to claim, “Never before in the history of movies has a film been attacked in first draft screenplay form. All the established media seem to be terrified of my movie.” Stone may overstate his case somewhat, but he has a point. Hollywood has always played fast and loose with history, so why did this film warrant Newsweek to preemptively assuage its readers with the headline “Why Oliver Stone’s New Film Can’t Be Trusted?” Is it because of the film’s perceived lack of historical rigor, or because it touched on something deeper? Newsweek was right to say that JFK can’t be trusted, not because of its historical inaccuracies, but because it weaponizes the language of Hollywood into a truly destabilizing work of A-list agitprop that dared to ask the average American viewer to glimpse behind the veil of American power.

By the 1990s, Oliver Stone had already established himself as one of the most successful and politically charged filmmakers of his generation. Stone had managed to parlay his career as an Oscar-winning screenwriter (for 1979’s Midnight Express) into an even more successful one as a director, fictionalizing his own experiences as a Vietnam War veteran into the Best Picture winning Platoon (1986). Platoon was not Stone’s debut, but it—along with his other film released the same year, Salvador (1986)—established him as a filmmaker specializing in melodrama with an edge of left-wing agitation. His run of hits in the 1980s further cemented this reputation, with films like Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) garnering both mainstream success and critical plaudits while challenging prevailing cultural trends and social mores of 1980s America.

It was during Stone’s successful run in the late 1980s that Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of Assassins was first published, and Stone quickly secured the rights. Like many in his generation, Stone saw the Kennedy assassination and the subsequent investigation surrounding it as formative events in his own political development, a primal scene of Baby Boomer disillusionment. In adapting Garrison’s book, Stone also purchased the rights to another JFK assassination book, Jim Marrs’ Crossfire, hoping to do justice to not only the story of Jim Garrison’s quest for the truth but also to the larger, more insidious machinations that, in Stone’s telling, suppressed the truth about the assassination. Despite its controversial subject matter, Stone’s reputation helped secure him a $20 million budget from Warner Brothers and a massive cast of recognizable stars.

Stone had made political films before, and he had made films that were logistically complex, but JFK was something different. Stone’s initial draft of the screenplay suggested a 4½ hour film budgeted at $40 million, twice what WB had promised. While Stone was able to pare down the screenplay to a more acceptable runtime and secure outside financing for his expanding budget, JFK represented a huge step up for the filmmaker, not just in terms of scope, but also narrative and stylistic ambition. What begins as an almost Capra-esque slice of American domesticity quickly spirals into a swirling gyre of conspiracy—a barrage of names, locations, events, connections, varying film stocks, and alternate angles (both literal and metaphorical), all somehow wrangled into a legible form by the film’s two editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia.

Guiding us through this descent into madness is New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner at his most wholesome. As characterized by Stone, Garrison is an idealized figure of American innocence, a man of unwavering moral fortitude and belief in the American system of justice and governance. That moral core never falters, but his belief in the American system—like the beliefs of so many of Stone’s protagonists—is shaken to the core by the magnitude of what he uncovers, and by the depths of its depravity.

There’s an animating tension at the heart of JFK; it feels as if it’s being pulled in multiple directions at once, seemingly by design. It’s a sprawling epic of national disillusionment that somehow also functions as a rousing, old-fashioned man against the system story. It’s both romanticized and deeply cynical, as if Stone himself can’t fully decide if the fundamental decency of the American people can overcome the sins of its corrupt systems. And try as he might, Stone himself can never fully reconcile these conflicting visions; they collide and conflict but never coalesce into a fully coherent point-of-view. There’s a sense that something has been achieved by the film’s end, but it’s never entirely clear what that is. Jim Garrison has his day in court, but all these years later, the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory remains the official story of the JFK assassination.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the firestorm of controversy surrounding JFK, the film proved to have strong box-office legs after a soft opening, ultimately grossing over $200 million worldwide. The film was also a major player at that year’s Oscars, earning 8 Oscar nominations and winning 2 for Cinematography and Editing. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for Stone’s career as an A-list director. The rest of the 90s would see him attempt to hit the same highs as JFK, either through similar style and subject matter of earlier work—as in the Vietnam drama Heaven & Earth or 1995’s underrated Nixon—or through outright provocations—such as 1994’s exhausting Natural Born Killers. His 2000s were plagued by a string of high-profile films that failed to capture the attention of critics or audiences. By 2021, the release of his documentary JFK Revisited felt less like the victory lap of an acclaimed auteur than a desperate bid to relive the glory days.

Still, Stone’s influence on contemporary filmmaking is readily apparent. One can see resonances with Jim Garrison’s quixotic quest for justice in a film like David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which similarly follows a wholesome protagonist through a disillusioning years-long obsession with an unsolved crime. More recently, several critics cited the influence of JFK’s frenzied, elliptical structure on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, another star-filled epic of American innocence lost. Culturally, JFK’s influence is even more palpable. Conspiratorial thought has become the norm, with every harebrained theory imaginable little more than a click away for anyone who desires them. In an era where the very definition of truth is up for debate, the public pearl-clutching and outrage surrounding JFK seem almost quaint. Removed from controversy, all that remains is the film itself, and on that front, Stone ultimately prevails. Even today, JFK retains the power to grip audiences and pull them through the looking glass, dazzling with its narrative ambition and formal complexity long after the shock of infamy has worn off.

Terry Zwigoff Presents WICKED WOMAN!

Wednesday, November 8th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

We asked filmmaker Terry Zwigoff to select a favorite film to screen alongside his own work as he visits the Cinematheque this weekend. Given that his movies frequently examine the dark side of American life, we were not surprised that he selected a terrific film noir, Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman (1954). Rouse's marvelous social drama, The Well (1951), co-directed by Leo Popkin, screened at the 2016 Wisconsin Film Festival. Wicked Woman is a movie ripe for rediscovery, and we are delighted to present an excellent 35mm print. This screening of Wicked Woman will be followed by a discussion with Terry Zwigoff.

The following notes on Wicked Woman were written by Mattie Jacobs, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison.

By Mattie Jacobs

Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) is too much for this world. Too tall, too seductive, too full of dreams for any town to hold her. She steps off a bus at the start of Russell Rouse’s Wicked Woman and every head turns, following her down the sidewalk in the small California town where she’s washed up. Michaels dominates the screen with physicality, warping and slowing time around her as she moves. She dresses only in white, and the camera follows her with an irresistible pull. Rouse showcases her intimidating presence, framing her to barely fit in small rooms, like the run-down boarding house she lands in, and stages her against the small men she finds in the small town.

As the door of her shabby apartment closes behind her, she switches from a slinking seductress to a tired, angry woman, fed up with the leers and gropes of the men that use and abuse her. She throws her weight around in the visually lived-in, almost documentary-realistic spaces she inhabits, knocking furniture and tossing clothes around. Noir is often embodied, sweaty, and manifesting physical presence, but rarely does the genre showcase a woman’s sensuality beyond her sexual effect on men. Here Billie’s “wickedness” comes out behind closed doors as she takes an evening shot, puts a song on repeat, and indulges in dreaming of another place.

Wicked Woman avoids many of the patterns familiar to the noir by 1953, foregrounding Michaels’s character as a femme fatale but also as a woman with desires and agency of her own. She’s desperate to get somewhere far away where she can “dance and make love and be serenaded. And lay out in the sun all day.” Instead of resting in sun-soaked Acapulco, though, she’s the protagonist of a grim, pulp tale: a complicated wicked woman who uses sex appeal to seduce the handsome, granite-faced, and frustrated bartender she works for, Matt Banister (Richard Egan). Still, she’s human and there’s little shock when she also immediately falls in love with him, even as she plays friends with his wife Dora (Evelyn Scott), the bar’s alcoholic co-owner who hired her in the first place. A sympathetic woman who knows the wariness their world requires, Dora warns her of customers: “Be nice to 'em, but not too nice.” But Billie’s seemingly been here before; she can handle a crowd of easily shrugged-off men and says so. While the last girl may have quit after a day, Billie is confident: “I'm not the last girl.”

The Strip Mall Wasteland of GHOST WORLD

Tuesday, November 7th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Ghost World were written by Sarah Mae Fleming, PhD Student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Ghost World will be screened at the Cinematheque on Saturday, November 11, presented in person by Director and Co-Screenwriter Terry Zwigoff. A discussion with Mr. Zwigoff will follow the screening. The screening is at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Sarah Mae Fleming.

“It was held together by hair and spit,” remembers Daniel Clowes, on co-writing the screenplay for 2001’s Ghost World with director Terry Zwigoff. Clowes, a cartoonist and illustrator, wrote the anthology comic book series Eightball, which spawned the comics (and later graphic novel) Ghost World. When Clowes and Zwigoff were able to work together on a film adaptation, Clowes began by transcribing the comic into the screenwriting software Final Draft before realizing that adaptations don’t quite work that way. Zwigoff, too, was a Hollywood outsider. Born in rural Wisconsin before transplanting to Chicago at a young age, he fell into filmmaking to tell a story no one else wanted to tell. Both Clowes and Zwigoff, untethered by Hollywood conventions, have an interest in shining a light on society’s underbelly–characters that don’t fit in and don’t want to--until they do. Ghost World, a hybrid of a teen girl coming-of-age story and a quirky indie comic adaptation, fits neatly in neither category. Instead, Clowes and Zwigoff give genuine voice to adolescent malaise–snarky and suffocating under American monoculture.

Zwigoff became a film director somewhat unintentionally. His filmmaking origin spawned from blues musician Howard Armstrong, who Zwigoff profiled for a magazine. After spending two days with him and reaching out to uninterested filmmakers about producing a documentary, Zwigoff did it himself resulting in 1985’s Louie Bluie. Ten years later, Zwigoff’s next documentary, Crumb (1995), was released, and this time the subject famous underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional family. Crumb was met with critical raves but was snubbed at the Academy Awards, resulting in a media frenzy that pressured the Academy to alter the documentary nomination process that had previously been controlled by distributors. Zwigoff was then approached by Jean Doumanian, Woody Allen’s former producing partner, to make his third film: a documentary about Allen’s jazz band on tour in Europe. Zwigoff passed on that opportunity, instead opting to direct his first fiction film–Ghost World.

Ghost World stars Thora Birch as Enid Coleslaw and Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca Doppelmeyer, with Steve Buscemi taking on the role of Seymour–a character created solely for the film whose misanthropic personality and collection of rare 78s suggest a stand-in for Zwigoff himself. Others have also pointed to Enid Coleslaw (whose name is an anagram for Daniel Clowes) as a stand-in for the author. However, rather than suggesting that these characters act as mere ambassadors for Zwigoff’s and Clowes’ thoughts about America, consumerism, and faux-retro diners, the characters of Ghost World are lived-in and true to the world they inhabit. Clowes and Zwigoff faced resistance from producers who argued that teenage girls would never speak the way Enid and Rebecca do. The experience of talking to a teenage girl (or being one) begs to differ.

“Look at all these creeps,” Enid loudly sneers in an adult video store. “Some people are okay, but mostly I just feel like poisoning everybody,” Rebecca states flatly at her barista gig. Enid doesn’t allow the conformity of her strip-mall saturated hometown to smother her quietly, while Rebecca’s monotone suggests that she allows her ennui to wash over her. This crucial difference in outlook is what drives the two best friends apart. Rebecca starts to want a small slice of the American Dream–namely an apartment to call her own. Enid can’t hold down a job or sell her belongings (e.g., a hat from her “little old lady phase”) to make enough money for one. And she’d rather spend her time with social outcast Seymour, anyway. While Rebecca finds joy in the wall-mounted ironing board in her new place, Enid dreams of disappearing.

Employing a slightly over-saturated palette, Ghost World’s cinematographer Affonso Beato studied Clowes’ comic books to create the visuals of a consumerist world. The heightened colors of Enid’s hair, or Rebecca’s clothes, invoke the constant hovering of strip-mall signage that floats around the characters. The film emphasizes emptiness and aimlessness, and often, background players wearing legible clothing wander zombie-like, seemingly serving little purpose in this world other than as walking billboards or as consumers of “delicious yellow chemical sludge” and other junk foods. In other sequences, the lack of extras is palpable, and instead of humanity, Ghost World’s backdrop is filled with storefronts. Alienated by the world and then by each other, Enid and Rebecca drift and search for something to hold on to. For Enid, Seymour becomes the object of her fascination. The dynamic between Seymour and Enid may provoke apprehension from some viewers, but as journalist Hayley Campbell puts it, “to call Seymour and Enid’s friendship ‘problematic’ is to be reductive and unimaginative about who or what teenage girls might find interesting.”

Zwigoff is drawn to characters–real and imagined–who intentionally exist on the margins. Clowes and Zwigoff found creative success by operating against the grain of convention. While this approach may have challenged the sensibilities of Hollywood studios and executives, it perfectly suits the angst and listlessness experienced not just by moody teenage girls, but by anyone who has felt the weight of modern isolation–a loneliness that grows heavier with every purchase with which we surround ourselves. Ghost World remains an achievement of resilient filmmaking, as well as a monument to the search for meaning–through friendships, records, traditional jazz or maybe ragtime, or through waiting for the bus. 

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