The Uncanny Undead of PARANORMAN

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Laika Studios' ParaNorman (2012) were written by Tim Brayton, PhD Candidate in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of ParaNorman, from the collection of the Chicago Film Society, will screen on Sunday, October 27 at 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art, part of hour Halloween Horror weekend and our ongoing Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series.

By Tim Brayton

Stick around through the credits of any of the five features made by Oregon-based animation studio Laika – including ParaNorman, the company’s second film – and you’ll be treated to a short “behind the scenes” snippet. Here, the filmmakers lay bare their process, showcasing the loving labor that goes into crafting and manipulating the puppets and physical sets that are photographed one frame at a time to produce the finished animation. These tiny, impressionistic snippets of backstage activity are part of Laika’s larger strategy of selling itself as a scrappy little artisanal outfit, fussing with the wildly labor-intensive medium of stop-motion animation, a lone hold-out of traditional craftsmanship in a world where everything is made on computers.

The reality is a bit more complicated, naturally enough. Laika’s house style is a far cry from the simple clay animation of earlier decades; it’s a sophisticated, elaborate hybrid form combining hand-made puppets dressed in hand-stitched clothing posed on hand-built sets, with the precision and detail made possible on computers. ParaNorman itself was one of the most important films in defining and developing this style, perhaps most notably in its creation of replacement heads for its characters. Extending at least as far back as director George Pal’s short fairy tales from the 1940s, a common technique in stop-motion puppet animation has been to build one body with several different heads that could be swapped out to express all of the necessary emotions of the story. Crafting a new face for every single frame is, unsurprisingly, an inordinately time-consuming process, and for this reason stop-motion animation has historically tended to rely on slower changes of facial expression, or having characters repeat the same face multiple times across the film. In making ParaNorman, directors Sam Fell and Chris Butler were anxious to give their adolescent heroes access to a much wider range of feelings than had previously been available, even in the same studio’s first feature, 2009’s equally boundary-stretching Coraline. To that end, they designed faces for lead character Norman and the rest of the cast in a computer, using similar software to that used in computer animation. These faces were then printed on a 3D printer and swapped out every frame, with the seam between the face and the rest of the head being painted out later on a computer. As a result of this effort, ParaNorman boasts some of the smoothest, most emotionally wide-ranging character acting in the history of stop-motion animation.

The filmmakers also used computers to help create the inhuman world of ghosts and zombies of the film’s kid-friendly horror. Towards the end of the film, Norman encounters the realm of the undead directly, in a sequence that bends physics and reality to emphasize the otherworldly qualities of the story. Much of this material could never be achieved using physical puppets, and so the animators relied on the same techniques as live-action filmmakers: they staged everything in front of a green screen. The computer-generated elements were then added to the completed footage later. There was still a desire to match the CG imagery to the stop-motion footage, however, and to this end the filmmakers animated reference versions of props and certain characters at the time they were animating the “live-action” material. The computer was then able to match these reference items frame-by-frame, replicating the distinctive movements of stop-motion puppetry in the final computer animation.

None of this means that ParaNorman has somehow become a “computer animated” film. While Laika’s insistence on the hand-crafted artisanal qualities of its projects oversimplifies the method by which they are produced, it only takes a few minutes of watching the end result to understand that there is something unusual and special here. The film depends heavily on the creation of a particular atmosphere, one that’s saturated by damp leaves and low fog and a sense of campfire-story spookiness. The physicality of the characters and the sets is a vital part of creating that atmosphere. The tactile qualities of ParaNorman’s forests and old buildings give it a presence that even the best computer animation would be hard-pressed to match, while the occasional stiffness and lack of fluidity inherent to stop-motion animation imbues the film with just a hint of old-fashioned charm. As the film itself attests, the best ghost stories are the ones that come down with a whiff of history hanging off of them, and ParaNorman’s hand-made aesthetic makes it feel a little bit out of time and archaic even with its bleeding-edge use of technology.

As the action transforms more fully to CGI spaces with CGI ghosts, so does the atmosphere. Images made in a computer are often criticized for being “uncanny”; that is to say, they almost look like reality, but something about them isn’t quite right. In ParaNorman, the uncanny is very much part of the appeal. This is a story about the undead and other malevolent psychic forces attempting to corrupt the world; a little hint that something is “wrong” with reality is exactly the right fit for this stage of the story. The gap between the computer animation and the stop-motion animation is used to signify the gap between the living and the dead, using technology in service to the story rather than as an end itself.

And that, ultimately, is the point. While Laika’s habit of calling attention to its own craftsmanship might serve to break the illusion of its films’ stories, the ultimate purpose to all of this technical wizardry is to create a rich world of vivid characters, the better for us to enjoy the comic and spooky adventures of Norman and his friends (and enemies). What Laika is best at isn’t creating tech demonstrations, but creating beautifully macabre genre tales for the whole family, and ParaNorman is one of their greatest successes in that tradition.

The Gill Man is Back: REVENGE OF THE CREATURE 3-D

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Revenge of the Creature (1955) were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD Student in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts and co-organizer of the Antwerp Summer Film School. A 3-D version of Revenge of the Creature will kick off our Halloween Horror series on Friday, October 25, at 7 p.m., in our regular venue at 4070 Vilas Hall. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Bob Furmanek Founder of 3-D Film Archive, the organization responsible for the digital 3-D restoration of Revenge of the Creature. After the talk, at 9 p.m., Bob Furmanek will introduce a screening of the 1982 3-D horror movie, Parasite, also restored by 3-D Film Archive.

By David Vanden Bossche

During the thirties, Universal shaped the emerging genre of horror films by releasing a slew of now canonical titles: Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) both starring Boris Karloff, The Mummy (Karloff yet again) in 1932 and Tod Browning’s iconic Dracula in 1931. By the 1950s however, monsters had taken different shapes. They became alien invaders (Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped into the fear of Communism in 1956) or gigantic beasts (most famously ants in Them and the Japanese lizard Gojira, both from 1954 and premised on man’s scientific hubris and nuclear experiments leading to nature’s revenge).

When Universal released Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954, it was thus a decidedly old-fashioned and outdated take on the genre, with 3-D as an extra element to attract the targeted teenage movie viewers. The film turned out to be a success and the studio quickly commissioned director Jack Arnold to direct a sequel. Arnold had built a career out of similar fare from 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man to episodes of the disco-in-space television show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981).

Like its predecessor, Revenge of the Creature ventured into the use of 3-D to lure viewers to theatres. The use of the format became popular from the early fifties onwards, as part of Hollywood’s effort to combat the rise of television and the subsequent dwindling attendance at movie theatres. 3-D became associated with horror films and youthful audiences, even though some more prolific directors experimented with the format, as Alfred Hitchcock did with Dial M for Murder (1954). Technical limitations prohibited 3-D from growing into a real marketable asset and it faded out quickly. It only returned very sporadically over the next few decades, until it was revived on a somewhat larger scale in the early eighties, which led to horror sequels like Friday the 13th Part III: 3D (1982) and Jaws 3-D (1983). It was not until new technical developments improved the process, that a film such as The Polar Express (2004) hinted at the renewed potential of 3-D and James Cameron’s record-breaking Avatar (2009) convinced theatre chains to invest in the equipment. With some auteurs (Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, Werner Herzog and even Jean-Luc Godard) experimenting with the format and studios still launching tentpole pictures in 3-D, it seems the third filmic dimension will stick around this time, even though recent articles have shown that its market penetration is very different in various regions of the world and definitely on the decline in the USA.

Arnold finished the 3-D sequel in quick fashion and delivered another efficient monster romp. The Gill Man is now captured during an Amazon mission and transported to Florida, where it is chained to the bottom of a pool, helplessly drifting in between dolphins and sharks, until it – obviously – breaks loose and takes a page from King Kong’s book in pursuing the blonde female scientist who was conducting the experiments. The film contains numerous endearing 3-D shots of maritime life (sometimes it is hard to actually spot the creature among all the fish that float towards the viewer). Look for a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it performance by a very young Clint Eastwood as a laboratory assistant.

WAVES screening added to Fall Cinematheque calendar!

Monday, October 14th, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The UW Cinematheque has added a sneak preview screening of Waves to our Premiere Showcase series, on Thursday, November 7.

The latest film from writer/director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha, It Comes at Night), Waves has been garnering critical acclaim since its first screenings at the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals last month.

Set against the vibrant landscape of South Florida, and featuring an astonishing ensemble of award-winning actors and breakouts alike, Waves traces the epic emotional journey of a suburban African-American family—led by a well-intentioned but domineering father—as they navigate love, forgiveness, and coming together in the aftermath of a loss. Waves is a heartrending story about the universal capacity for compassion and growth even in the darkest of times.

The November 7 screening will begin at 7 p.m. at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free and limited seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis.

Electrifying Dysfunction: Jane Campion's SWEETIE

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Jane Campion's Sweetie were written by Tim Brayton, PhD Candidate in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Sweetie from the Chicago Film Society collection will be screened as part of our ongoing Sunday Cinematheque series at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, October 6 at 2 p.m.

By Tim Brayton

If you know the great Australian-New Zealander director Jane Campion only through her biggest hits – the 1993 Oscar-winner The Piano, or the 2010s TV series Top of the Lake – elements of Sweetie will seem familiar. Like many of her later projects, Campion’s first theatrically-released feature (after a handful of short films and the 1986 telefilm Two Friends) is a psychodrama about a difficult, at times unknowable woman. It does not ask us to like its protagonist, and indeed it puts some real effort into making sure we don’t like her, yet she comes across as a sympathetic and recognizable human throughout.

But it is a much more compact, small-scale film than her best-known work. If we consider only the one-sentence summary of the story – a woman in her twenties is forced to deal with the intrusion of her  pathetic sad-sack father and terrifyingly uninhibited sister into her staid life – it doesn’t sound especially far away from the genial domestic comedies that were about to become Australia’s most commercially reliable export, films in the Muriel’s Wedding (1994) model. There’s something concise and intimate about the scenario, enforced perhaps by the limited resources with which the first-timer was obliged to work.

Still, no matter how many different films we might call up as being similar to Sweetie in some way, or which might somehow contextualize it (in a directorial career, in a national cinema), it will always remain the case that this is a tricky, singular work, one that’s almost impossible to fully unpack. As seasoned a film viewer as Roger Ebert openly admitted that his first experience with the film left him confounded and unsure about his emotional reaction. This is a perfectly reasonable response: as small as it is, Sweetie is a daunting work, asking much of its viewer as it subjects us to the extremities of human feeling embodied by its two main characters. Summing up his second viewing, Ebert noted, “Most movies slide right through our minds without hitting anything. This one screams and shouts every step of the way.” That’s a fair synopsis: this certainly does scream at us, mostly through the raging emotions of its title character. But it also whispers and sometimes remains silent altogether.

Sweetie is named after one of its characters, Dawn (Geneviève Lemon), a titanic life-force whose childish greed and indifference to other people manages to cause significant pain to every other figure onscreen, but it’s actually the story of her sister, Kay (Karen Colston). It’s close to the one-third mark before we’ll meet Dawn, in fact, during which time we’ve seen Kay discard one romantic relationship and go a good long way toward sabotaging a second. It would be going too far to say we’ve gotten to know Kay. Indeed, one of the most significant facts about Sweetie is how successfully it prevents us from ever getting a good peek into the main character’s head. Dawn, in contrast, is an open book, her whims and appetites declaring themselves loud and clear at every beat. But pithily summarizing this as “one sister is closed-off, one is exuberant” is of no help at all; Kay’s opacity is much more complex than that, and much more dramatically compelling. The lead character’s unknowability is the story, in a sense: We spend the entire running time of Sweetie trying to figure Kay out, and other than implying that anybody growing up with Dawn for a sibling would tend to embrace an arm’s-length detachment from the rest of humanity as a survival instinct, the film never even feints towards providing an answer.

That arm’s-length remove is a literal one, by the way: one of the very first images of the film is a shot of a human arm jutting towards the camera, attached to a body that has been pointedly kept out of focus by cinematographer Sally Bongers. It’s almost as though the limb has been disconnected from the body it belongs to, and this fragmentary approach to depicting the human form will persist throughout Sweetie. Despite the everyday setting, Campion and Bongers are not at all interested in aesthetic realism: Sweetie is rife with weird distortions caused by atypical lens choices, unnaturally close shot scales that reduce characters to hands, legs, and parts of faces, and disorientingly rich colors, far bolder than the scenario or conventions of domestic character drama-comedy would seem to require. Simply put, we are not meant to be comfortable watching Sweetie. We are meant to be struck, over and over again, by the fundamental oddness of this world and these characters, with the visuals forcing us into a gut-level appreciation of the unstable, even dangerous situation at the film’s heart. The motif of bodily close-ups – a trope Campion uses elsewhere in her career – here seems to be primarily about emphasizing the isolation between the characters by visually demonstrating that they can’t even exist as complete human organisms, let alone as a satisfactory, functioning family unit.

It’s a demanding film, to say the least, but Campion isn’t looking to punish us. For all its severity,  Sweetie is ultimately a comedy – one of the bitterest, blackest comedies you’ll ever see, but a comedy even so. This is, at heart, a quintessential Australian tale of offbeat eccentrics, and simply from the incongruous physical appearance of the sisters, Sweetie is happy to lean into that eccentricity. Even more than it is an acute psychological study, this is primarily a very peculiar film, and that can at time means that it’s a bit goofy. It’s like Dawn herself, in that regard; thorny, unpleasant, maybe terrifying, but it also has a magnetism that makes the destruction in its heart somewhat alluring. It’s all too much for Kay, who shuts herself down in the face of this energy, but Campion has kindly allowed us to experience this electrifying dysfunction through the safety of the movie screen, in one of the most constantly surprising films of the 1980s.

AND LIFE GOES ON: Kiarostami and Neorealism

Monday, September 30th, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Abbas Kiarostami's And Life Goes On (Zendegi va digar hich, 1992)  were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD Student in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts and co-organizer of the Antwerp Summer Film School. The second film in Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy," And Life Goes On will screen in Friday, October 4, at 7 p.m., in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By David Vanden Bossche

The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gained international attention in 1987 with Where Is The Friend’s House? after spending a decennium working on documentary shorts at the ‘Kanun’ institute for youth education in Iran. In his breakthrough film, a young schoolboy is looking for the house of one of his classmates in order to return the book he took with him by mistake, a crucial item the friend will need to be able to hand in an assignment the next morning. The film was shot in Koker, a small rural village that was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1990. Kiarostami returned to the village and, inspired by the display of human resilience he witnessed there, instigated this belated sequel (the second part in an unofficial ‘Koker’ trilogy that ended with 1994’s Through the Olive Trees). And Life Goes On ingeniously evokes the multilayered relation between reality, fiction and filmic construction, that became Kiarostami’s trademark. 

The film’s set-up is deceptively simple. An actor playing Kiarostami (the irony of the director ‘directing’ himself is only one of the movie’s clever reflections on the ontological role of the filmmaker) travels by car through Iran with a (fictitious) son in an attempt to reach Koker in the immediate wake of the earthquake. The entire voyage is presented as a search for the youngsters that featured as the leads in Where Is the Friend’s House?  and continuously recalls set-ups and situations from that film. While Kiarostami did in fact inquire about the faith of his young actors, we should definitely not look at And Life Goes On as a documentary. As pointed out by Tom Paulus in the Photogenie article “Truth in Cinema: The Riddle of Kiarostami,” Kiarostami is searching for a way in which ‘the lie of the cinematic construction’ can uncover the deeper truth of reality. The interaction between those two conceptions of reality is already on full display in the opening scene that uses the ritual of a car entering a tollway as a metaphor for the experience of the movie theatre, a similarity that is strenghtened throughout the film: the ‘frame’ of the car’s window is the equivalent of the cinema’s ‘framing’ of reality – a similar movement that guides the viewer’s eye.

Because the Iranian master has a tendency to record reality in a seemingly neutral way, he is often called a heir to the Italian Neorealists. Most arguments for this approach (non-professional actors, ‘realistic’ narratives) fail however in embracing ‘de-dramatization’ as the essential element of such films as Umberto D. or Paisà. As Gilles Deleuze has put it, the Italian movement meant the shift from film as an art of movement to film as an art of pure time and – like his Neorealist predecessors – Kiarostami does indeed ‘de-dramatize’ time by allowing ‘real time’ into the essentially artificial time of the filmic construction. That this perception of ‘realism’ is just as much a part of the ‘lie’ of the filmic construction is something we are asked to acknowledge time and again when the film makes us aware of the act of filming (and watching) itself.

Those instances also emphasize the aestheticization of reality, be it through a breathtakingly subtle color-palette, as well as the ‘flat’ imagery that stems from Kiarostami’s use of long lenses – a technical choice that merges the characters with the surrounding landscapes and recalls the ‘flat’ stylism of traditional Persian visual arts.

Behind the Blue Door: Kiarostami's WHERE IS THE FRIEND'S HOUSE?

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Abbas Kiarostami's Where is the Friend's House? were written by Zachary Zahos, UW-Cinematheque Project Assistant and PhD Student in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. The first film in Kiarostami's "Koker" Trilogy, Where is the Friend's House? will screen in a newly restored DCP on Friday, September 27 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. The second and third films in the trilogy, And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, will screen October 4 and 11, respectively.

By Zachary Zahos

When he died in 2016, Abbas Kiarostami left a body of cinema unique for its beauty, insight, and profound cohesion. His wonderful “Koker Trilogy,” consisting of the films that first won him laurels at European film festivals and launched his reputation among Western film critics, best exemplifies the artistic progression and omni-directional ballast of his oeuvre. The first film in this informal trilogy, Where Is the Friend’s House? (Khane-ye doust kodjast?), tells the story of an eight-year-old boy, Ahmad, trying to return the notebook that belongs to his beleaguered friend from school. The second film, And Life Goes On (Zendegi va digar hich), casts a Kiarostami-like director returning to Koker, a town in northwestern Iran, to search for the first film’s child actors, following a real-life, devastating 1990 earthquake. The third film, Through the Olive Trees (Zire darakhatan zeyton), builds a gentle romantic comedy plot around two actors playing newlyweds on the set of And Life Goes On. The geographic unity and reflexive games between these three films have led critics to group them as a trilogy, though Kiarostami himself drew a line around the latter two films and his 1997 Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass). However you split them, Kiarostami’s films speak to one another on levels of subject, form, and theme, not merely referring back to earlier films but seemingly anticipating future projects and signaling lifelong preoccupations.

To further illustrate his filmography’s backwards-and-forwards integrity, Kiarostami paired Where Is the Friend’s House? with his 1989 documentary Homework, having said the following: “In Homework the children talk about what is then seen in Where Is the Friend’s House?; and Where Is the Friend’s House? shows that what the children say in Homework is true.” What the schoolchildren discuss in Homework is, as one might guess, the burden of homework, even if the on-screen subjects in that film are conditioned to never voice their displeasure. The causes for that conditioning are on full display throughout Where Is the Friend’s House?, which features emotionally fragile children, the threat of corporal punishment both at school and at home, and an authoritarian schoolteacher straight out of a Louis Althusser case study. Developing ideas introduced in his first two films, The Bread and Alley (1970) and Breaktime (1972), Kiarostami thrusts the young protagonist Ahmad into a frightening world of negligent adults, labyrinthine architecture, and threatening impasses.

Thankfully, like his early short films and the rest of the Koker Trilogy, Where Is the Friend’s House? builds to an optimistic, if still ironic and suggestive, end. The specifics of the film’s ending aside, which I will not spoil, the overarching narrative charts the development of Ahmad’s intellect and moral sense—his dawning of conscience. The plot, again, follows Ahmad (Babek Ahmadpour)  as he seeks to return a notebook to his peer, Mohammad Reza (Ahmad Ahmadpour, Babek’s brother), who lives in the nearby village of Poshteh, though where specifically Ahmad does not know. Between his family’s village of Koker and Poshteh, Ahmad encounters a series of adults, who fail to help him whether due to ignorance, overwork, or loneliness. Kiarostami focuses on Ahmad’s lived experience during this trial through an empathetic approach to scene coverage. Here, Kiarostami punctuates long shots of Ahmad darting up and down stairs and across landscapes with shallow focus close-ups of Ahmad’s restive glances and pleas. The tight shots of Ahmad processing the world around him often lop off the heads of adults around him, filmed or angled as they are to the boy’s height.

While the symbolic dimension of Kiarostami’s work can be overstated, doors and doorways serve as thematic linchpins and even animate characters in Where Is the Friend’s House?. Two male adults Ahmad encounters on his journey craft doors as part of their trade, surely not a coincidence. The first is a brusque middle-aged salesman who hard-sells iron doors; the second, meanwhile, is an older man who likes to hear himself talk, droning on to Ahmad about his traditional, artisinal wooden doors. The disparity between the two indicates modernizing forces at work in rural Iran, and two narcissistic modes of masculinity for Ahmad to avoid.

As far as doors ‘behaving’ like characters, the first shot of the film consists of opening titles over a blue door, which flaps noisily for about a minute and 20 seconds. The yells of children off-screen indicate that this door just barely seals off a classroom, and the brisk swinging-open of the door after the credits announces the teacher’s arrival. The film’s climax similarly entrusts a door with an eerie sense of agency. While I will again refrain from disclosing the choice Ahmad makes here, the scene’s striking mise-en-scène positions a doorway at the center of the frame. In a long shot, a gust of wind flies the door wide open before Ahmad, who soon becomes transfixed on the doorway and the billowing sheets his mother placed on the clothesline beyond it. A fondness for aperture framing runs through Kiarostami’s career, up to his posthumous film 24 Frames (2017), as does the use of doors and windows to subdivide space and lend graphic impact, typified in his masterful Certified Copy (2010). The climax of Where Is the Friend’s House? and the final shot a few minutes later both showcase Kiarostami’s lifelong genius for transforming everyday objects (a door and a notebook, respectively) into reflective indices of his protagonist’s inner life. The heady, electric charge one feels leaving this film affirms the miracle, and just-dawning immortality, of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema.

Unknown Legend: THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019
Posted by Zachary Zahos

These notes on Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) were written by Ben Donahue, Associate Director of Alternative Cinema at WUD Film. A 35mm print of this film will open our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series for the Fall 2019 semester, "Chicago Film Society Presents!" this Sunday, September 1, at 2 p.m in the Chazen Museum of Art's auditorium. Free admission!

“I can’t tell if you want to be like me, or if you want to be me.” — Jesse James, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Most often, genres are not defined by the location in which the story unfolds but by a series of recognizable narrative and stylistic elements. It’s this small detail about genre that makes the western so unique. Relegated entirely to one region, the western transforms the vast landscape of the American frontier into a character just as vital to the genre as the ones John Wayne portrayed. The character of the frontier is instantly recognizable for its rough, empty, and unforgiving landscapes. This void demands to be filled by larger than life characters, outlaws and rangers alike elevated into mythical figures. Perhaps the most infamous of all the idols that ever occupied the sprawling expanse of the western frontier is Jesse Woodson James.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not concerned with the sensational crimes or daring robberies of Jesse and the James gang. Andrew Domink’s quiet western epic from 2007 focuses on the man at the center of the myth. Brad Pitt gives a career best performance as the enigmatic but cautious outlaw. The film operates almost as a behind-the-scenes look at a rock star on tour. From the perspective of the audience, the life of a touring pop icon is glamorous, but we only see what’s on stage and never what’s off of it. Watching this movie, we fit comfortably into the shoes of Robert Ford, who is portrayed by a perfectly wide-eyed and awkward Casey Affleck. In the same way that moviegoers idolized John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, or Clint Eastwood for decades, Robert Ford idolizes Jesse James; he is more demigod than he is human to Robert. It’s easy for us to understand how excited Robert is to meet Jesse, but almost easier to relate the feeling of being let down when he learns his idol is human after all.

Westerns were always about brave and strong heroes of the story, but The Assassination of Jesse James changes the focus from idols to the act of idolatry itself. The film isn’t focused on one man, but instead on the relationship between two men: one infatuated with the other and one wary of the other. Robert’s obsession turns him into a shy puppy dog staring, following, and doing everything that Jesse does. When Robert tries to take Jesse James’s place, by killing him, he makes the mistake of assuming that his feet could possibly fill Jesse’s larger-than-life boots. Jesse James was a villain to some, a folk hero to others, but a legend to all. Robert may have assassinated the man known as Jesse James, but in doing so, he only bolstered the vitality of Jesse’s legend. Being unable to replace or become Jesse James, Robert is forced to repeatedly live out his role as the man who killed him. Robert now realizes the true loneliness Jesse lived in, and he becomes a mere footnote at the end of Jesse’s saga. Jesse and Robert’s relationship of idol and worshipper reveals something quietly sad about the western genre. Even at their most solemn and dirty, westerns share the idea of grand men who could fill the emptiness of the frontier. Dominik’s film is a humbling and humanizing film that strips back the legend of the Wild Wild West and reveals the lonely reality in which people lived.

Just as it tweaks well-established western themes, this film also builds on the aesthetic tradition of other westerns. Gorgeously shot on film by famed cinematographer Roger Deakins, The Assassination of Jesse James is truly a sight to behold. The open deserts and dusty hills of The Searchers have been replaced with rolling grassy plains right out of Days of Heaven and frozen tundra reminiscent of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. With the same reverence for nature that can be seen in all westerns, Deakins incorporates a stunning degree of natural light and darkness. With warm and dreamy sunshine and night that actually looks pitch black, Deacons lends the film an oneiric quality. This is best exemplified in the now famous nighttime train robbery scene early on in the film. By performing a bleach bypass on the film’s negatives, Deakins achieves a pitch black color that allows the bright light mounted on the train to cut through the forest and smoke with extreme contrast. Every shot in the movie is impressively realized, pitching men against the environment as well as each other through a powerful mix of light, color, and composition. The potent beauty and dreaminess of the visuals help to reinforce the rose-tinted glasses through which we and Robert view legends of the west like Jesse James.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the quintessential modern western. Evoking the stylistic elements of the classics while simultaneously proposing a more nuanced perspective, this film is not just about the characters in the story, but about the nature of the western genre itself. It interrogates the old and builds off it, increasing our appreciation for previous westerns and the part they played in defining the American frontier.

HORSE FEATHERS: Goofs Gone Wild

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019
Posted by Zachary Zahos

These notes on Norman Z. McLeod's Horse Feathers (1932) were written by John Bennett, PhD student in UW-Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A newly restored DCP of Horse Feathers will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Saturday, August 31, at 7 p.m. Free admission!

Late August has arrived, that period of the year in which we struggle to squeeze in last minute summer activities and reading as the days grow noticeably shorter and cooler, knowing damn well that the daily grind of the school year lurks, in all its terrible banality, just around the corner. For those of you plagued by end-of-summer ennui, you will no doubt find 68 minutes worth of respite in watching the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers, a perfect collegiate comedy to ease you, chortling and guffawing, into the last semester of this dizzy decade.

The plot of Horse Feathers is advanced in the tiniest pauses of the film’s general cascade of vaudeville shtick. You will be laughing too hard at any given gag to catch these fleeting moments of narrative orientation, so I will do you the kindness of summarizing what little plot the film has. Groucho Marx plays Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the newly appointed president of Huxley College. As Wagstaff’s son, Frank, Zeppo Marx pitches woo to Connie Bailey (Thelma Todd), the young college widow (incidentally, you will be forgiven for having no idea what a “college widow” is or does). As college president, Wagstaff takes up the noble, time-honored academic tradition of devoting a disproportionate amount of time and attention to the university football team, for which Frank plays. As Huxley College’s football team lacks enough quality players to beat their rival, Groucho ventures to a speakeasy (Horse Feathers was released in the waning days of Prohibition) to recruit a couple strapping players. But wouldn’t you know it, the actual football players elude Wagstaff, and he mistakenly recruits Baravelli (Chico Marx), the foreigner who speaks almost exclusively in malaprops, and Pinky (Harpo Marx), who does not speak at all. Once united, the three brothers cause general pandemonium in the Huxley community up to and throughout the big game—even if some characters, like the college widow, try to thwart them in the process. Everyone remaining true to type, Groucho wisecracks circles around vexed stuffed shirts, Chico misunderstands every statement put to him and bungles every statement he must make, and Harpo gleefully unleashes a torrent of mute, truly chaotic physical comedy. The latter two find opportunities to showcase their virtuosic musical talent along the way.

The Marx Brothers’ cinematic career can be divided into two periods: Paramount and post-Paramount. In the five films they made at Paramount Studios between 1929 and 1933, the brothers’ surreal mayhem—mayhem that they could kick up as naturally as they could breathe—was not especially constrained by the exigencies of coherent storytelling. In later Marx Brothers’ films, the brothers become more goal oriented, and romantic subplots take up greater portions of running time. Horse Feathers, released in 1932, is a Paramount Marx Brothers’ film through and through. Yes, we do get traces of the kind of syrupy romance that, in the later films, stops the cartoon chaos dead in its tracks. But in Horse Feathers, such moments go by quickly, allowing the brothers to resume the madness for which they are known and loved. At one point, Zeppo (the straight man of the four, who left the act when the brothers left Paramount) serenades Connie with the lightly silly song “Everyone Says I Love You.” The gooeyness of this moment quickly subsides, however, as we cut to Harpo cheerfully whistling the same tune. But then things get weird. Harpo proceeds bemusedly to eat flowers and horse feed while sitting on the side of the road. The sound of horns gradually mounts, and we realize that the dogcatcher wagon he drives is holding up a great deal of traffic as he idly enjoys his inedible snacks. He briefly confounds a cop before the sequence dissolves into a cacophonous and surreal traffic jam that rivals the famous sequence of Godard’s Weekend. If you suddenly find yourself bored by a moment of peace in Horse Feathers, don’t worry—it won’t last long.

There is one absence in Horse Feathers of which the Marx Brothers’ most ardent fans will be acutely aware. Horse Feathers lacks the presence of Margaret Dumont, the matronly character actor who often served as the befuddled eye of the Marx’s (especially Groucho’s) category five hurricane. Yet Horse Feathers is graced with a performance by another skilled comedienne: Thelma Todd. Todd, like Dumont, serves as an excellent foil for the brothers’ whirlwind. A wide-eyed starlet of the pre-code era, Todd plays the college widow with a sense of flirtatiousness and duplicity that complements the Brothers’ own lechery and perfidy much better than, say, the milquetoast virtuousness of Kitty Carlisle as the romantic heroine of A Night at the Opera, which the Brothers made at MGM three years after Horse Feathers.

Watching a Marx Brothers film, one can’t help but see the quartet (or trio after 1933) as the principle authorial voice of their work. In his landmark book The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris dedicates some time to the Marx family in what is otherwise a strict taxonomy of directors. Still, we should make space for a word or two about the film’s director, Norman Z. McLeod. McLeod is noteworthy for his direction of vehicles for many of Hollywood’s most famous comedic actors of the 30s and 40s. Indeed, it is hard to think of another studio era director who worked with as many clowns and cut-ups as McLeod. Two years after Horse Feathers, he directed W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift. In the screwball heyday of the late 30s, McLeod directed both Topper and Topper Takes a Trip, the former of which starred Cary Grant. In the 40s, he directed films starring Red Skelton (Panama Hattie) and Danny Kaye (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). After helming Road to Rio, the fifth installment of the popular Bing Crosby/Bob Hope Road to… series, McLeod worked regularly on Bob Hope comedies, most notably directing 1948’s The Paleface. McLeod’s filming style lacks any obvious flourishes, but one can’t help but imagine that the experience of directing Groucho, Harpo, and Chico was valuable in forming McLeod’s ability to foreground different kinds of comedic performances.

Naturally, the big set piece in Horse Feathers is the climactic football game. Of course, the brothers’ ostensible goal is to win the big football game for Huxley College. But the game itself serves as an excuse for Groucho, Harpo, and Chico to repeatedly, baldly cheat in creative ways that would put the Harlem Globetrotters to shame. As we marvel at the sheer mischievous invention of the innumerable gags of this climax, we may once again be reminded of the upcoming school year. Though going back to school can be a drag, we can at least watch Horse Feathers and be grateful that our teachers and students could not possibly bamboozle us as thoroughly, as devastatingly, or as deftly as the Marx brothers are able—much to our delight—to bamboozle any force of authority or normalcy up there on the screen.

PINA: A Dance Elegy in 3D

Wednesday, May 1st, 2019
Posted by Zachary Zahos

These notes on Wim Wenders' Pina were written by Matt St. John, PhD candidate in UW-Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A 3D DCP of Pina will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, May 3, at 7 p.m. Free admission for this semester's final 3D screening!

Before he ever recorded the first shot of his 3D documentary Pina, New German Cinema auteur Wim Wenders had been planning a collaborative film project with German choreographer Pina Bausch for more than two decades. Her striking, dramatic choreography immediately appealed to him when he attended a retrospective in 1985. The filmmaker and the choreographer soon began discussing the possibility of a film together, but Wenders hesitated to produce the project until he felt film technology could adequately capture her art on camera. This long delay in production tragically caused Pina to become an elegy, instead of just a collaboration.

Bausch passed away just two days before a final rehearsal shoot for the film in June 2009, after a period of substantial, detailed preparation with Wenders for the film’s 3D production. The director realized the potential of the format when he saw a screening of U2: 3D at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. In an interview with Collider’s Sheila Roberts, Wenders recalled expecting to see a gimmick, but instead finding the solution to his decades-old obstacle to making a dance film: “I saw the answer to 20 years of hesitation and 20 years of not knowing what to do... There was a tool that allowed me to be with Pina’s dancers and to be in the water swimming with the fish and not just looking from outside at the aquarium.” After this unexpected inspiration, Wenders and Bausch planned their 3D film for two years, selecting four of her works that would be performed in a single season by her dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal and filmed for the documentary. He worked with technical experts to troubleshoot the complication of filming real locations and live actors in 3D, with the persistent problem of jerky motion that had to be overcome before they could begin filming a documentary about dance.

After Bausch’s passing, Wenders canceled the film’s production until her dancers convinced him to continue. They shot the four performances as planned, but their bulky equipment required Wenders and his crew to film the dancers and stage for a few days outside of the public performances. To produce the effect of being in the performance, Wenders hoped to capture shots from almost any position on stage without disrupting the dancers, so his crew used an enormous crane with a remote-control camera. The crane blocked the view of over half the auditorium, creating a need for their private shoots. The cumbersome equipment does enable surprising perspectives in even brief moments, like the early low-angle shot that causes a red cloth to fill the foreground during Bausch’s version of “The Rite of Spring,” and the crane memorably makes the 3D even more vivid in the performance of “Full Moon,” capturing falling, splashing water from all over the stage.

Even with the 3D technology and full access to the stage, Wenders was not content to include only the four performances. In the Criterion commentary for Pina, Wenders explains that it was no longer a film made with Pina, but now for Pina, and he wanted to collaborate with the dancers to honor her work and explore its impact on them. Wenders intersperses the four stage performances with portraits of the dancers and vignettes of other pieces by Bausch. For these new selections, Wenders tried to replicate her singular artistic process. In rehearsals, Bausch would ask her dancers questions, but they could only answer with movement, instead of words. Wenders recounted his adaptation of this method in the Collider interview, saying, “I started asking the dancers questions, like Pina in the rehearsal room, and they all gave me lots of answers about Pina, about how Pina had seen them, how they had seen Pina’s eyes on them, how Pina had seen something in them that they didn’t even know themselves, and each of them answered very personally…” But Wenders added a rule: the dancers could not improvise. Instead, they were only allowed to answer with movements they had created with Bausch. Wenders and the dancers transfer these movement-answers to locations all over Wuppertal, the city that is home to Bausch’s company. The dancers take her work to tram cars, busy streets, open fields, and creeks, opening up an array of rich spaces for Wenders’ 3D recording, and they perform with odd accessories, from a barking dog to a leaf blower. Both puzzling and powerful, the vignettes are loosely grounded by intermittent portrait shots of the dancers, with brief voiceovers about the directions they received from Bausch.

After Wenders, his crew, and the dancers faced challenges and complexities throughout the film’s production, Pina was praised for its impressive execution. This film arrived during a spate of poorly shot or converted 3D films, following Avatar’s success in 2009, and critics welcomed a thoughtful use of the format. In her Variety review, Lisa Felperin appreciated “proof that the latest 3D technology is good for a lot more than just lunging knives and fantastical storylines.” Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum writes, “So this is what 3-D is capable of when used for art rather than the commerce of hiking ticket prices and repurposing cartoons… Wenders uses this old/new, interesting/gimmicky technology to play with the human perception of dimensionality as something subtle and profound, and not just a snazzy trick.” Even Roger Ebert, who frequently disparaged 3D as superfluous, acknowledged the quality of the technology in this film, writing that Wenders “only uses it when he knows why and how it should be employed.”

The technology in Pina is remarkable, but the film is also powerful because of its elegiac, collaborative form. Pina Bausch was frequently quoted as saying, “I’m not so interested in how people move as in what moves them.” In Pina, Wenders is interested in both. The 3D cinematography surveys even the most understated movements of Bausch’s dancers, and the performances allow the dancers to mourn Bausch, by translating her work to new contexts and a new medium.

DANGEROUS GAME: Madonna Looks Into the Mother of Mirrors

Thursday, April 25th, 2019
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game were written by Leah Steuer, PhD student in the Media & Cultural Studies division of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Dangerous Game will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, April 26 at 7 p.m. The screening will be followed by a discussion with J.J. Murphy, UW Professor of Film and author of Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay. Free admission.

By Leah Steuer

Is the power that a star radiates onscreen equivalent to a performance? How far does one need to step outside oneself in the act of acting? And how accurately does a camera capture The Work, turning a private human moment into movie magic for millions? Abel Ferrara’s twisted, troubled Dangerous Game (1993) is ruthless in its pursuit of these complex questions about what it means to be an artist. Game debuted to mixed reviews, vicious controversy and infighting among its creative personnel; lead (and producer) Madonna bitterly distanced herself from the project before the film hit theaters, while Ferrara continues to blame its bad publicity on her performance to this day. The turbulent history of its production is evident in Game’s every grainy, dark shot and bit of angry dialogue. It’s not a fun watch, but it’s a daring cinematographic experiment with oddly compelling performances at its center from Madonna, Harvey Keitel, and erstwhile 1990s bad boy James Russo. This movie-within-a-movie shows us the fallout of an unlikely collision between two artists - Ferrara and Madonna - with completely different auras and careers.

Game cuts close to the bone, thinly veiling Ferrara’s self-portrait through Keitel: sporting a ragged haircut and weird indoor sunglasses, Keitel’s Eddie Israel is a masochistic auteur who’s caught between the dull illusion of family life and the siren song of sex, film, and art. Though his look evokes parodic machismo a la Tommy Wiseau, there’s nothing funny about Keitel’s raw, furious performance of a man who’s bad, mad, and dangerous to know. He alternates between physically and emotionally abusing, then sexually coercing Sarah (Madonna), the lead of his marital drama Mother of Mirrors. Meanwhile, Israel struggles to elicit artistry from his other lead (Russo) while deflecting, and then eventually sabotaging his relationship with, wife Madlyn (played by the director’s real-life wife Nancy Ferrara). Both Mother of Mirrors and its host-film Game end up messy, unsuccessful, and fragmented, denying the audience closure for the trauma of bearing so much mutual abuse and suffering. Madonna bears the brunt of the brutal script, and it’s hard not to wince at the nature of Israel’s insults towards Sarah (“You commercial piece of sh*t!”). Critiquing her performance in 2002, Ferrara made clear his vitriol towards the kind of charisma that both Madonna and her character embody: “She has the confidence to get on stage and sing, but she ain't got...a different kind of confidence, that ability to look into the eye of the camera without looking at the camera.” His take was echoed by contemporary critics, but 25 years and a change in cultural perspective on femininity and stardom have encouraged fans to consider Madonna’s surprising range of improvisation, steeliness, and vulnerability in a difficult role.

Movies about making movies can go to dark and reflective places — look no further than the genre’s most iconic entry, Sunset Boulevard (1950). Meta-narratives like Dangerous Game’s require the audience’s attention to the unraveling of two simultaneous stories, and an abandonment of the pleasure that passive reception of a fiction can provide. There’s something bittersweet about seeing how the magic is made, even in fun and fleet-footed fare like Adaptation (2002) or Get Shorty (1995). But Ferrara’s Game uses this story layering to make even more nihilistic observations about human connections than he did with previous films like neo-noir King of New York (1990) or Bad Lieutenant (1992). By cutting quickly between film stock and video footage, by allowing the camera to shiver while actors dig dejectedly for lines they can’t remember, by allowing the lens to linger on actors-playing-actors-playing-directors, this film strips away the smooth and illusory quality of the cinema itself. For better or for worse, Game exposes the chaotic subconscious of both the movie-maker and the performer; the results are rarely pleasant, but consistently spellbinding.

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