Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1973-1985)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2007)

_________________________

Marcel Ophuls called at Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah ‘the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none’. It is a film of active listening made by a man trying to understand an archaeology of genocide, of the systematic destruction of Jewish people in Europe during the second world war. Its title, ‘Shoah’, comes from the Hebrew word used for the Holocaust, and which can be translated as ‘catastrophe’ or ‘annihilation’.

I’ll begin with a quote from Simon Schama, who, in his 1995 book Landscape and Memory, describes his visit to Treblinka. He says, ‘In our mind's eye we are accustomed to think of the Holocaust as having no landscape – or at least one emptied of features and colour, shrouded in night and fog, blanketed by perpetual winter, collapsed into shades of dun and grey; the grey of smoke, of ash, of pulverized bones, of quicklime. It is shocking, then, to realise that Treblinka, too, belongs to a brilliantly vivid countryside; the riverland of the Bug and the Vistula; rolling, gentle land, lined by avenues of poplar and aspen.’

This is partly what does Claude Lanzmann does in Shoah, he shows locations, people, hears eye-witness accounts – from survivors, from nearby villagers, from farmers who worked near the camps, and unremittingly pursues telling details on a human scale. These details are important. We hear from men who had to dig up the thousands of corpses so that these could then be burned. As it stands, horrific as it is, this last sentence can be read without comprehension of what this involves. The details – that the workers had to open the graves without tools, with their hands (and were told they should get used to it), that the deeper they dug, the flatter the corpses were, that when they picked up a body it would sometimes crumble in their hands, that they were ordered not to refer to the bodies as corpses or victims, but instead as ‘figuren’ – dolls, or shit, or rags, that when these bodies were burned, they burned in flames of every imaginable colour, flames of red, of yellow, green and purple – these are the details which ground the events in the everyday, making such systematic destruction of life simultaneously more comprehensible and more terrible. These are the details that should never be lost. Similarly, one of the first men we see in the film, Simon Srebnik, a survivor of Chelmno, talks of human bones that were too large to be succesfully burned, such as the large foot bones, which were instead ground to a fine powder and taken in sacks to be emptied into the Narew river. Much of Srebnik's testimony was not used by Lanzmann as it was too graphically disturbing and would have not achieved his purpose of transmission – transmission of facts, details and evidence. The fact of a foot bone is what sticks in the mind longer than numerical abstractions. As Lanzmann says, ‘Shoah is a fight against generalities’.

In this ‘fight against generalities’ we hear SS officer Franz Suchomel, secretly recorded, saying that on his first day in Treblinka, he saw people fall out like kartoffeln – potatoes – from the gas chambers. This descriptive detail is echoed by Filip Mueller, a worker in the ‘special detail’ in Auschwitz, who talks of the sight of people after the opening of the gas chambers. People, he says, ‘were packed together like basalt, like blocks of stone’. When they fell out of the chambers, they fell out ‘like rocks out of a truck’.

We learn the sardonic language of Treblinka (described by Suchomel as ‘a primitive but efficient production line of death’); the ‘infirmary’ was a 12 ft deep pit of corpses, where the elderly and infirm were taken to be ‘cured with a single pill’ – shot through the neck as they stood or sat on a board over the pit. We learn too of the signs and posters in the undressing room at Auschwitz, made to look like an ‘International Information Centre’, to persuade people that the ‘disinfection’ process was just that: ‘Rein ist fein’ (‘Clean is good’), ‘Lice Can Kill’.

Sometimes the words used in the interviews shade into the language of politicians. Franz Grassler, Nazi deputy commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto, says that although the ghetto was being ‘maintained’ to supply a working Jewish population, the fact that 5,000 a month were dying there through starvation and disease was ‘a paradox’.

Grassler also provides a valuable insight into the workings of memory, when he says that he recalls his prewar mountaineering trips more clearly than the Warsaw ghetto and the entire war period’. For him, the ability to forget is a luxury. It is certainly a luxury out of the reach of Simha Rottem, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, who says to Lanzmann, ‘if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.’

The historian Raul Hilberg sets the persecution of Jews in the context of centuries of European anti-semitism. He says, ‘I’ve avoided asking big questions, in case I get small answers’. Again, this resonates with the approach of Lanzmann, who asks simple, candid questions of those left to bear witness: ‘Where are we now?’, ‘Why did he make that gesture?’, ‘Did the farmers continue to work the fields near the camp?’, ‘Did the locomotive driver hear screams?’, ‘Did the farmer understand the Jewish language?’, ‘Was it a fine day?’, ‘What colour were the gas vans?’. By doing this he has created a film of active listening made by a man trying to create a historical record of an archaeology and an oral history of genocide, the systematic destruction of a people.

Some of the answers are unpalatable, not through detail but through a dismissive attitude. The wife of a Nazi schoolteacher in Chelmno says of the Jews chained in workgroups in the village, that it ‘gets on your nerves, seeing that every day … day after day, the same spectacle’. When asked how many Jews were killed in Chelmno she is unsure if it is 400,000 or 40,000, ‘I knew it had a four in it,’ she says. However dismaying or unpleasant the answers are, this is valuable and revealing oral history.

Lanzmann insists that his film is a work of art and not merely a documentary. Certain sequences are testament to this, for example the interview with Abraham Bomba in a barber’s shop as Bomba tells of cutting people’s hair inside the gas chamber at Treblinka. There is a palpable tension as Bomba tries to tell the details, loudly and publicly as he cuts a customer’s hair, without breaking. It is an undeniably powerful sequence that imprints his story more thoroughly on the viewer’s mind. Crucially, it does not get in the way of ‘transmission’, which for Lanzmann is key. When asked why he filmed Bomba cutting a man’s hair instead of a woman’s, as he would have done in Treblinka, he says that ‘It would not have transmitted … would have been obscene’.

There are details which beggar belief in the film, such as the Gestapo organising group or excursion fares with the German railways for Jews travelling to Treblinka, as 400 or more passengers travelling together went at half-price, as did children under 10 on normal trains. Children under the age of 4 went for free. The money for the transport came from the Jews’ belongings. It was, as Raul Hilberg says, ‘a self-finacing operation’ on the part of the Gestapo as there was no budget for such destruction.

At one point the camera accompanying Lanzmann glides into a bar to interview former SS officer at Belzec Joseph Oberhauser, who refuses to answer any questions other than how many quarts of beer he serves. The camera’s movement unnervingly recalls its earlier glide through the gate, around the building and into the Auschwitz crematorium's incineration chamber, as Filip Müller describes his first experience of the place, noticing the low building and the smokestack.

A screen of trees in Sobibor, planted as 3 or 4 year old saplings over mass graves, are filmed as mature trees in the golden hour before sunset. Again at Sobibor, the camera films the surrounding woodland, leaves rustling in the trees, on a beautiful day. ‘I suppose there were fine days like today?’ Lanzmann asks a man who worked in the railway station. Yes, even better days than this, he responds. This placing of such destruction on indifferently beautiful days is disconcerting, but is backed up by Simon Srebnik, who, when he revisits the site of the extermination camp at Chelmno, talks of how the extermination happened on some days. ‘No one shouted, everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful.’

Lanzmann walks the land of the camps, drives the roads on the routes gas vans took, rides the rails and travels the waterways. By showing us these places as they are now, he has made a film that can change your relationship with the landscape and adds significant depth to the experience of knowing Europe, from the shoreline of Corfu to the forests of Poland. It makes you poignantly aware of the memories buried in the land, in the grass, the now anonymous fields and the trees; in the buildings – the churches and synagogues where people were held, the offices where bureaucrats signed forms and organised special trains, the travel agents where special rates were arranged, the rails on which people travelled and the stations where they were processed, and the balconies of houses from where people watched Jews being collected together for transportation, and behind net curtains where people watched chained work gangs walking down the street. It also makes you aware of the memories held in people’s minds, behind the faces and expressions that you meet every day.

Throughout the film we hear the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees, as if the very land is trying to tell us its story. This happens on the river near Chelmno and in Grabow, and on the drive through the forest outside of Chelmno. The autumn leaves rustle in Treblinka, near the station and as the camera moves through the stones that form part of the Treblinka memorial, and the leaves whisper around Bełżec.

After nearly 10 hours of film and testimonies from death camp and ghetto survivors, locomotive drivers, SS men, railway workers, villagers, I am left with the feeling of just how little I have heard, how few individual histories have been told, and how many millions of experiences never now will be told.

‘Try a Little Tenderness’: Some Films by Albert & David Maysles

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2007)

_________________________

I started watching Salesman late one evening, not expecting to see it through to the end. After all, a 1960s documentary about Bible salesmen couldn’t be that interesting could it? Was I ever wrong. Within a few minutes I was hooked, stayed right to the end and then watched it all over again the next day. I should have known better of course. After all, I had seen and adored the Maysles’ films about Christo and Jeanne-Claude, but those were about a subject I was predisposed to and about artists in whom I was interested. Curiously, this blinkered me to the inherent qualities of the filmmaking involved. It’s interesting that it took a film about a subject from which I am (at least) twice removed in interest (selling and religion), to make me aware of the Maysles’ craftsmanship.

About Salesman, their narration-free documentary portrait from 1969 of door-to-door salesmen from the Mid-American Bible Company, as they go about their business of selling lavish bibles to low and middle-income Catholic families, Norman Mailer said, ‘I can't think of many movies which have had as much to say about American life and have said it so well.’ The film follows four of the salesmen, The Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit and the Bull – their names reflecting their selling styles – and travels with them from Boston to Florida as they deliver their pitch: ‘it'll be an inspiration in the home’, ‘it’s still the best-seller in the world’. Yet for all the talk of placing something of lasting worth with families, there's an air of unease that accompanies selling to those that can ill afford the $49.95 (and this is the 1969 price) for a bible (‘it comes in red or white’). At the end of the day – which is when we see them discussing their sales in cheap motel rooms – it’s all about selling bibles on commission for dollars and cents: cash, COD or Catholic Honor Plan.

One salesman isn’t delivering. ‘Any man that's not good at sellin’ should be good at makin’ excuses’ says their boss. And ‘the Badger’, Paul Brennan, has plenty of excuses. He ‘couldn't find the houses’, ‘couldn't get in the doors’, ‘couldn’t get no pitches’, ‘couldn't get the old Mickey stuff to work’. His colleagues, still pulling in the sales, laugh along for a while until embarrassment sets in and they start to fidget and avoid his eye. One says that he's putting people in a bad frame of mind. ‘You’re fightin’ em, the people can spot it a mile off.’ The Gipper takes him along on a call of his own to try and shake him out of his negative attitude. It’s all running along just fine until Paul makes a badly-pitched and somewhat desperate interjection and ruins an easy sale.

As observational documentary, or ‘direct cinema’, Salesman is peerless. Though the term ‘fly on the wall’ documentary is misleading in many cases, presupposing that the presence of a cameraman and sound recordist has no affect on the events and conversations depicted, in Salesman, it at least conveys a sense of the physical limitations of the rooms in which the salesmen were filmed. The Maysles had been door-to-door salesmen themselves and knew and understood the world. That they managed to be such a remarkably unobtrusive presence in the confined spaces of motel rooms and people’s houses comes from a crucial empathy with their subjects that allowed them to get so close. Very few people can make this kind of film as it comes from connections on a level outside of the camera. ‘I have a genuine fondness for people,’ says Albert. It shows. In combination with David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s highly-accomplished editing, it’s one of the reasons why apparently mundane scenes are so memorable, staying with you long after you have seen the film. 

Salesman is listed in the Library of Congress National Film Registry as one of America's most important films. With its portrait of a redundant occupation and its subject matter of the intersection of commerce and religion, this is not surprising. (Says the salesmen’s manager Ken at the sales conference: ‘Money is being made in the bible business…and all I can say to people who aren’t making the money – it’s their fault.’) However, despite all the pep talks in the film, what lingers from the film is a sense of melancholy borne of sham transactions. In this regard, one scene stands out. As the Bible salesmen at the sales conference in Chicago make their ever-increasing income pledges for the coming year, Paul Brennan, the Badger, is shown on his way to the conference, staring out of the train window. The speakers at the sales conference talk over his thoughts, while the sound of wheels on rails plays underneath the speakers at the conference, adding their own plangent undertone to proceedings, reminding us of the long hours, the travel, the hustling, the homesickness and the two-bit rooms reeking of stale cigarette smoke, which everyone in the sales meeting has forgotten, just for a little while.

This empathy, understanding, love, forbearance, tolerance, call it what you will, with their subjects that I have mentioned is crucial to the Maysles’ films. It’s there in Grey Gardens, their 1975 film about the Bouvier Beales – ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’, eccentric aunt and first cousin respectively of Jackie Onassis, dropouts from high society living out their mother and daughter theatricals in their dilapidated, flea-ridden, garbage and cat-filled mansion from whence the film gets its name. Continually bickering, performing their private dramas, singing, entertaining, leafing through past photographs and telling their stories, feeding their cats and raccoons, they put on a show for the camera and the tape recorder. Material like this could so easily be exploitative, and many of the scenes are almost painfully intimate, but the almost certain knowledge that the Beales would have themselves presented no other way hauls you back from making rash judgements. The Maysles were making a film with the Beales, not just of them.

Talk of making films with rather than about leads us directly to a relationship that covered 5 films and over four decades of friendship, between Albert and David Maysles and the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Said Albert of their relationship: ‘The four of us were a twosome’.

Briefly, since the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have undertaken large scale environmental art projects that temporarily transform landscapes or buildings, typically by the use of fabric of some kind, sometimes wrapping or surrounding landmarks or buildings, sometimes suspending fabric from man-made structures. Out of their many projects, probably their most well-known works involved wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 (a project that took 24 years to come to fruition) and warpping the Pont-Neuf in Paris in 1985. One of their most recent projects was The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005, in which 7,503 16ft high gates were positioned along the walkways of Central Park and hung with saffron coloured fabric panels for 16 days. In all of their projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude accept no sponsorship or donations of any kind, and finance the project entirely through the sale of preparatory studies, drawings, collages and scale models of the project. The works are temporary, and at the end of each project, the sites are restored to their original condition or better, and most of the materials are recycled. In response to a question about how much the projects cost, Jeanne-Claude responds that ‘every project costs the same thing – everything we’ve got plus everything we can borrow’.

There are five films on the 5 films about Christo & Jeanne-Claude collection; Valley Curtain from 1974, about Christo’s draping of a quarter-mile wide orange curtain in a Colorado valley; Running Fence, from 1978, about the siting and erection of a 24½ mile long drape of white nylon fabric through Sonoma and Marin counties in California; Islands (1980-83) in which eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, between Miami City and Miami Beach, were surrounded in hot pink fabric; Christo in Paris (1990), which is a record of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project to wrap the Pont Neuf in golden fabric but also a record of the couple’s love affair, and finally Umbrellas, from 1992, a project about ‘comparison’ in which thousands of large umbrellas were situated throughout two valleys, one in California and one in Japan.

There are no expert talking heads and not a critic in sight; they are all simply unnecessary to the remit of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art. Instead the films concentrate on the projects themselves and the characters involved in their creation. Take the first two projects they document – Valley Curtain and Running Fence. The first was a 381m wide by 111m high orange curtain suspended in a Colorado valley and looking like a huge happy orange grin when unfurled. Even though the Maysles were only around to film on the last two days of the project, it’s enough to see that the steel workers and engineers have made it a point of pride to get the thing up and fixed into place. They share the project entirely, share the nerves before the unfurling and the beauty and triumph when it is unfurled. 

Running Fence was a 24½ mile long, 18 ft high nylon drape running through two counties of California and on into the sea. It was up for 14 days. In the film we are taken through the planning meetings with sceptical councillors and landowners, the special hearings and get to gauge the balance of public opinion. Amazingly, down-home ranchers are soon adopting the scheme of this long-haired, heavily French-accented Bulgarian man as their own and become determined to see it through against opposition. This is all part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art of course – a democratic, public consultation of which the final works are an ephemeral expression, art in which ownership is shared and enjoyed by a community.

Time and again we see people wanting to get close to the art, enchanted by the pull of a combination of ephemeral beauty, good design and practicality. In Running Fence, one of the ranchers on whose land the fence is sited, after appreciating how firmly the poles are fixed in the ground, says ‘I think I’m going to come and sleep up here tonight, it’s so nice, sleep right up next to the fence.’ A similar sentiment comes in Umbrellas, in which a group of Japanese children agree that they would like to eat lunch under an umbrella, following it up by saying thay they should sleep under them. We then see them crying for the sheer unexpected beauty of the blue umbrellas, an effect we also see later in California as a woman looks at the yellow umbrellas, blooming like bright desert flowers after the rain.

It’s easy to see why the Maysles and Christo and Jeanne-Claude were such a good fit; Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art is about nothing if it’s not about making connections between people. In fact, there’s an awful lot of congratulatory hugging in the films between people you wouldn’t expect. Sometimes the praise is highest when it is most understated. When, in Umbrellas, a grounded Californian landowner says the words ‘Yeah, I think the man is alright’, that really is praise indeed that bridges all sorts of divides and makes a connection on the level of the heart.

I have said little or nothing about the Maysles’ filmmaking style – which only goes to show just how thoroughly self-effacing it is. However, I would like to repeat a point that Jeanne-Claude makes in her commentary on Valley Curtain, where she draws attention to a lovely piece of editing. At one point Christo is talking to an engineer on the project, who is smoking a cigarette. As they finish their conversation, he takes a draw on his cigarette, the tip of which glows orange, before the screen is suddenly flooded with the orange of the fabric that Christo is cutting. The films are filled with tiny, beautiful details such as this.

It is Jeanne-Claude who provides one of the most telling lines of the documentaries and one that goes to the heart of their art. In Islands, she says to a sceptical councillor, ‘How many children wake up early on a Sunday morning begging to be taken to an art gallery to see if a picture is still there? That’s what they will do if we wrap these islands, they will beg their parents to take them.’ For those of us who weren’t there, these heartening, uplifting documentaries partake in that same magic.

On the 5 films about Christo & Jeanne-Claude collection, there is an interview from 2003 between Albert Maysles, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in which they talk of their friendship and the flms thay have made together. It’s instructive in a couple of ways. Firstly it shows Albert Maysles sitting back listening, calmly and comfortably, not interjecting but waiting for the appropriate moment to tell a story. You can imagine his presence like that when he is behind the camera. Secondly, the conversation moves onto what is central to the films they made. As Albert says to Christo and Jean-Claude, ‘the central thing in any work of art is the love, the human affection … the love for the projects, the films and for you guys’. I want to finish though with what Jean-Claude says in response to this when they talk of the film Salesman. She says that in a discussion about the film, someone complained that in that film the characters were all so unsympathetic, to which Albert responded, ‘try a little tenderness’. Amen to that.

Norman McLaren: Camera Makes Whoopee!

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2007)

_________________________ 

When asked how he would like to be remembered, Norman McLaren said, with characteristic modesty, as ‘an innovator of new techniques, some of which led to a few distinguished or interesting films’. A dip into any one of the seven discs that comprise Norman McLaren: The Master’s Edition, which showcases the spread of his films from his work for – and even before – John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit in the 1930s, through his wartime films, his joyously free postwar interpretations of music from Oscar Peterson to Québécois folk song, his experiments with synthetic sound and his sublime late-career ballet films, reveals the complete inadequacy of this statement.

However, out of all the wonders on display in this set, I’ve found that it has been one of the least likely titles that has captured my attention and stayed with me. It’s the series of five short programmes that McLaren made with Grant Munro between 1976-78 and entitled simply, Animated Motion, in which ‘McLaren comments on, demonstrates and classifies aspects of motion which the animator employs in his everyday work’. With the aid of little more than a white disc on a black background, the two animators methodically go through the absolutely basic techniques available to the animator to create the illusion of motion, demonstrating the different effects – and crucially, the different emotional effects – to be had from varying the tempo of movement. From constant movement, showing what movement looks like at different speeds – 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 frames a second for example, they then take in accelerating, decelerating, zero and irregular motion as well as change brought about through colour and lighting. As McLaren says, it is through mastery of these that an animator brings ‘life, meaning, character and spirit’ to his work. All of this information is presented absolutely straight, with the most limited of resources and in the most methodical, even dry, manner. (It is, by the by, an essential introduction to the art of animation for any aspiring animators.)

Why did these programmes have such an effect on me? Very simply, because it was with a sense of awe that I realised that what I was watching was McLaren running through the techniques and the tools available to any animator. However, to transmute those most basic techniques into the rhythmic wonders and profound emotional content of McLaren’s work frankly borders on the miraculous and shows almost better than anything his stature as a uniquely imaginative artist.

He of course had great skills, empathy and understanding to bring to the service of his animation. This is evident in one of the interviews he gave (found on the set as one of the Window on Canada programmes) that demonstrated how he transformed a mountain landscape into one of continual metamorphosis with shadings and dabs of chalk to mark the subtle changes of the day as the sun rises and sets. It leads the interviewer to remark that McLaren could have been a quick-draw pavement artist – a statement with which McLaren agrees.

It’s evident too in the continually evolving world of his 1947 film La Poulette Grise, drawn in pastels and which calls Marc Chagall’s landscapes and fantasies to mind, or his 1966 film The Seasons, an unfinished film experiment, in which, through a series of paintings, he tried to catch the changing light and colours of Canada, with the results recalling the ethereal sky-scapes of Turner. On a different level entirely, his drawing skills are there in the flipbook sketches that form the basis of New York Lightboard (1961), designed to promote Canada as a holiday destination in a lightboard show in Times Square.

Crucially, there’s humour too in his work – plenty of it. In Rythmetic (1956) for example, numerals take on human and animal characteristics – and equals sign impatient for an answer quivers with agitation, a number 5 scratches like a dog with a flea. With McLaren’s accompanying synthetic animated sounds accentuating the humour of the sums in progress, it becomes a wonderfully funny exercise on the simplest of subjects.

The set is divided up thematically and also to highlight the various collaborations that were essential to his work, people such as composer Maurice Blackburn, animator Grant Munro and dancer Vincent Warren. One of McLaren’s most important colleagues however was fellow animator and artist Evelyn Lambart, with whom McLaren made a number of his most well-known works.

Of their collaborations, one of my favourites, and also one of the most minimal films that McLaren made, is Lines Vertical (1960). It’s accompanied by Maurice Blackburn’s perfectly fitting Japanese-styled keyboard music, and is rapturously lovely in the calm of its moving vertical lines against the subtly changing backgrounds of lilac to violet, terracotta to brick to plum. This is almost as minimal as animation can get (though as part of the experiments for the film, McLaren and Lambart did make a film with a single moving vertical line, before deciding to use several lines instead), though it’s worth remembering that this is a hand made film and also the product of months of work, in which lines were scratched into the emulsion of six-foot strips of film with three different thicknesses of knife, the finest of which kept breaking. Because of the inherent difficulty of scratching a perfectly clean line into film emulsion, which hardens as it dries, the lines sometimes have a ragged edge on one side. To me this is part of what gives it life as an exquisite film-object that represents both the thoughts and artisanal skills of its makers. 

Lines Vertical was to directly result in two more films – Lines Horizontal, in which the Lines Vertical was turned through 90 degrees and given a new accompaniment by folk singer and guitarist Pete Seeger. The filmmakers were initially drawn to the idea of this experiment because horizontal lines would implicate the existence of gravity in a way that the vertical ones would not. Because the rising lines don’t decelerate – or the falling ones accelerate – they have the effect of floating and denying the gravity that they have called up. The other film to owe its existence to Lines Vertical is Mosaic, and with this film you really do start to enter an area of innovative brilliance. Briefly Lines Vertical and Lines Horizontal were superimposed in an optical printer with only the intersections of their lines showing as clear dots. The play of these dots across the screen was then set to a selection of McLaren’s animated sounds, which here resemble a sort of cross between Victor Borge’s phonetic pronunciation, the muffled sounds of a squash court, puckered kisses and the amplified puttering wing beats of a trapped moth.

McLaren took this equivalence of image and sound even further, and probably to its logical end, in his remarkable film Synchromy, from 1971. With Evelyn Lambart in the 1950s, McLaren had worked out the different patterns of stripes that would lead to them creating different notes of animated sound on the soundtrack area of a filmstrip. In Synchromy, McLaren first composed the soundtrack music using these cards, and then used these same sound patterns to create their exact animated visual equivalant. It is a truly stunning concept which gave rise to the title of Gavin Millar’s documentary on McLaren that is included in this set and which was filmed as McLaren was making Synchromy in 1970. Millar’s film is called The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees. In his notes on the making of Synchromy, McLaren said that, ‘Apart from planning and executing the music, the only creative aspect of the film was the “choreographing” of the striations in the columns and deciding on the sequence and combinations of colours.’ Well, that and a uniquely inventive approach to the entire manufacture and use of animated sound and image.

At the foundation of all of McLaren’s art, is movement. As McLaren said, ‘every film is a kind of dance’ and being an animator was like ‘being a dancer at second-hand’. He talked of how, in his teens, before he went to art school in Glasgow, he would listen to music on the radio, shut his eyes and see ‘the play and dance of forms’. A few years down the line, this ‘play and dance of forms’ translated in to some of his most enduringly enjoyable films, among them Boogie Doodle, Blinkity Blank and Begone Dull Care.

With his exposure to surrealism, his approach to artistic creation was really liberated. He realised that ‘with surrealism you can after all change anything into anything’, and so he did, creating a world of constant transformation and metamorphosis. This is best seen early on in a film he made for the GPO Film unit called Love on the Wing. With its imagery of kisses, hearts, pillars, pipes, people, keys, locks, bees, flowers and candles, as well as teasing, mating envelopes, it was considered ‘too Freudian’ by the then Postmaster-General, who prevented its release. 

Boogie Doodle was inspired by the excitement McLaren felt on first hearing a boogie woogie tune. Here, the boogie is from Albert Ammons, and the doodle from McLaren. It’s a sort of joyfully unbridled courtship of suggestive shapes. If the Postmaster-General found the imagery in Love on the Wing a little too near the knuckle, it’s almost certain that Boogie Doodle would have incured his prohibition too. 

Blinkity Blank, which started out as an abstract film set to a mixture of Maurice Blackburn’s music and McLaren’s animated sounds, was actually the product of a flash of inspiration from McLaren, who realised that black leader didn’t need to be drawn on every frame (which was proving difficult anyhow), but could actually be incorporated into the substance of the film, thereby giving that film its special nature of images appearing in flashes that imprint themselves after-images on the retina.

With Begone Dull Care, McLaren and Lambart’s ‘caprice en couleurs’ set to jazz from The Oscar Peterson Trio, they made use of what fate sent their way too. They were working in an old dusty building, which initially they found a great hindrance to their work, especially when they dropped a section of carefully-painted film on the floor when it was still wet. On picking it up however, they found that the dust had created a texture on the filmstrip which they thought looked good. Thereafter, Lambart would collect different types of dust into small boxes, cataloguing them from smooth to rough for future use. The experience of the film is an all-embracing one of synaesthetic visual equivalence.

One person whose name I haven’t yet mentioned, but who was instrumental to McLaren’s career, was of course John Grierson. It was Grierson who, as one of the adjudicators of the Third Glasgow Amateur Film Festival, at which McLaren showed his experimental and joyfully wayward ‘symphony on the ciné-kodak special’, Camera Makes Whoopee!, derided the film as a jumble, before offering him a job at the GPO Film Unit, (and thereby ensuring that McLaren didn’t think too highly of himself when he took the position). One of McLaren’s straight documentaries for the Film Unit, Book Bargain, included in this set, about the processes behind the printing of a telephone directory, is a clearly presented, straightforward documentary that goes to prove McLaren’s statement that he learnt discipline at the GPO.

It was also Grierson who enticed McLaren from his penury in New York (where, as a committed pacifist, he had gone in 1939 to escape the war) to the National Film Board of Canada. Concerned that he may be used to make propaganda, Grierson reassured him that he was going there to inject a little lightness and fantasy into the predominantly factual nature of the Film Board’s output and he would be given the freedom to experiment. And so he did, for the next four decades of his professional life.

It seems fitting to end with a quote from Grierson, who summed up McLaren’s art by saying that, ‘If there is such a thing as pure movie, be sure that McLaren has been one of its greatest exponents’.

Norman McLaren, The Master’s Edition has 58 of McLaren’s complete films as well as numerous tests, outtakes and unfinished experiments, documentaries contemporary and modern, technical notes on the films and audio snippets of McLaren talking about selected works. I haven’t even mentioned famous films such as his Oscar-winning Neighbours, Le Merle, Pas de Deux and Narcissus. Suffice to say, if you are even remotely interested in the man and his work, this set handsomely repays the investment, as there are films here that you will be returning to time and again.

Fake! Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973)

(written for MovieMail in 2007. Taking its cue from the film, it's possible that parts of this review are not exactly four-square to the truth.)

__________________________

In 1996, the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland held an exhibition entitled Vérités et Mensonges, the name taken from the French title of Orson Welles’ film about fakery and deception, F for Fake. It collected together a remarkable assortment of forgeries and copies of paintings that were, by and large, created to deceive, confuse, or at the very least, gain notoriety and hope that resultant attention would increase the value of the piece.

All the usual suspects were there. There were van Meegeren Vermeers, including his Last Supper and Woman Taken in Adultery (past owner, one Field Marshal Hermann Goering – and how anyone thought they were the work of Johannes Vermeer of Delft becomes more incredible with every passing year). There was a de Hory van Dongen along with a brace each of his Matisse and Modigliani copies, and two David Stein Braques of similar composition, both entitled Still Life with Pitcher, with the only substantial difference being that one was signed G Braque, and the other, presumably painted during his incarceration, signed Stein, D.

These were joined by an excellent Lothar Malskat Chagall, an anonymous Courbet, a Tom Keating Degas (along with a fake Tom Keating Degas), a pair of Corots from the infamous collection of Dr. Jousseaume, (as well as a copy of the Newsweek magazine from 1940 which declared, jokingly, that ‘Of the 2,500 paintings Corot did in his lifetime, 7800 are to be found in America.’), and even a Van Gogh canvas that had passed through the hands of notorious art dealer Otto Wacker.

In sculpture, a number of fine Etruscan warriors were joined by their Chinese terracotta counterparts. Unfortunately, Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid, (a genuine fake which he artificially aged through burial in acid earth so he could command a higher price and with which he subsequently duped a Cardinal) was unavailable for display, having disappeared sometime in the 17th century, but there was instead a 19th century forgery of this earlier fake. (Interestingly, the sculptor of this later piece, Gianfranco Rinaldi, was himself a sculptor of some renown, making his piece a genuine artist’s forgery of a genuine artist’s forgery.)

Of ‘medieval’ exhibits, the finest was the fake ‘Anonymous’ (Master of Willisau) altarpiece. Or rather, the 15th-century altarpice was genuine, as were the pigments, mixed according to 15th century practice. Even the style and subject was convincing, with the daisies pricking through the grass in the manner of Jan van Eyck. The difference was of course that it was painted in the hope of monetary profit in the 20th century instead of religious benefit in the 15th.

Adding to the fun of the collection were the quotes and notes from the contemporary experts, placed alongside the exhibits and proclaiming that such a painting was ‘a notable addition to the artist’s canon’, or that it ‘demonstrated beyond question the refinement of the artist’s finesse’. Picasso’s quote that he could paint false Picassos as well as anyone else was placed next to one of his more derivative sketches – which in this case just happened to be a genuine, but rather dull, Picasso.

Anyway, of relevance to this current piece is the fact that also included in the exhibition was the painting that Elmyr de Hory did of Michelangelo on camera in F for Fake (and which he signed ‘Orson Wells’) as well as a canvas purportedly painted by Welles himself on his trip as a teenager to Ireland in 1930 (and which recalled the landscapes of Jack Butler Yeats by the by). Very few of Welles’ paintings from this era have come to light. More are undoubtedly waiting for discovery as I write.

Also included were three nudes, in oil, of Oja Kodar – Welles’s lover and collaborator on F for Fake, who is seen (along with her sister) in a little summer frock, turning covertly-filmed men’s heads as she not-so innocently walks among them throught the streets at the beginning of the film. All three of the paintings carry the signature ‘Elmyr’. The question is, did he really paint them? This would be of academic interest only if it weren’t for the fact that discovery of the actual painter would change how much the paintings are worth. De Hory pictures go for quite an amount, but if it could be proved that they were painted by Welles, due to their rarity, they would probably be worth more. As, again on camera in F for Fake, Welles signed a picture – a chalk and pastels caricature of a reclusive Howard Hughes – with the signature ‘Elmyr’, this would lend weight to this argument. Maybe we’ll never know for sure. Perhaps Welles and de Hory conspired and painted them together (which would be the best of all possible outcomes for the dealers one supposes).

The exhibition was very much in the mischievous spirit of Welles, Kodar, Graver and Reichenbach’s film F for Fake (aka Fake!, About Fakes and Truth and Lies), in which Orson Welles, proclaiming himself a charlatan with a beady twinkle in his eye, helps himself to great amusement at the expense of authority and experts. Cheerfully mixing sleight-of-hand and magic with the sharpest of editing (on which he spent a year), he concocts a multivalent work which is tricksy, complex and enormous fun. Numerous parties contribute to the conversation on the nature of fakes and fakery, with Welles, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving (and his pet monkey) and Howard Hughes (or a microphone, or Don Ameche) engaged in a playful dialogue, both virtual and actual, that crosses continents and years. In the innovative brio with which F for Fake marshals all this found footage – from documentaries, films, staged scenes and set-ups, photographs, newsreel clips, interviews and Welles’s own narration – the film thoroughly reveals the hand of its showman maker, who is at least one step ahead of us right the way through. Just when we think we have the measure of his smiling, quizzical eyes, we realise that he is actually looking right past us over our shoulder. He notices we are distracted and pulls yet another trick out of his sleeve

Noise and Silence and Smoke and Stars: Jirí Weiss’s Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1960)

(written for the Autumn 2007 issue of Vertigo)

__________________________

Prague, 1942. A Jewish family, the Würms, are forced to leave their courtyard apartment building to go to the transport. As they leave, the son asks Pavel, a fellow lodger, to look after his guinea pig. When Pavel fetches it from their apartment, he meets a Jewish girl, Hanka, who has arrived too late to meet the family and who also must leave. However, when a German officer then arrives at the building to inspect the apartment for his mistress, Pavel decides to hide Hanka in his mother’s attic storeroom.


‘Just for now’

This phrase is often repeated through the film. Pavel gives Hanka the key to the storeroom ‘just for now’ and he makes up a bed for her there ‘just for now’. The German officer’s mistress declares it fruitless to think about the following day and Pavel’s mother, a seamstress, takes on the repugnant work of altering a coat she had previously made for Mrs Würm, now in Theresienstadt, for her. It is this time of just for now in which the film takes place.

By contrast, Pavel’s grandfather spends the days at his workbench, finessing a balance wheel for the timepieces that he makes and mends. He calls his invention, which he declares he will patent, the ‘Mrazek Balance Wheel’. It is what he hopes he will be remembered by.

This is not his moment though. For now, time has been uncoupled. It can hold only the pragmatism of the just for now, and nothing for the future. Whatever is forgotten and ignored; that will survive.


Noise and Silence

There is just enough ambiguity about the very beginning of Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, as Pavel rushes into the attic and hugs the suitcase of someone who is obviously not there, to lead to wonder whether it will follow the Shakespearean line of tragically mistaken assumptions. A piece of black cloth hanging from the window gives a foreboding note, and as Pavel hears someone approach, he locks the door and reflects over the events, all set in motion by a handshake with a young neighbour, that have brought him to this situation.

This is a noisy film, not in a conventional sense, but when sounds are laid down, they pierce the film. Early on, the sound of the Würm’s cart on the cobbles of a broad, empty, sunny street, as they walk away from the camera, fills the air of the film. There’s the infernal barking dog that belongs to the German officer's girlfriend, the banging door and squeaking toy that interrupt Pavel; there’s the rumbling of military equipment, troop carriers and motorcycles as they career through the city streets, and the loudspeakers that bark out instructions across the rooftops; there’s the sound of a scuttle being filled with water and the banging on a metal door. There is also the singing of a bird in a cage, at the beginning as the Jewish family pack up their cart and leave for the transport, and later, to warn of the approach of danger and harm. If we could only understand the language of birds we would hear its message, instead of just noting a sharp trilling.

Other noises are not so threatening – there is the sound of a cherished one bathing, with water you have fetched, just the other side of a closed door.

'Have you heard silence?' asks Hanka. 'It murmurs in my head all the time'. As she says these words, from somewhere a low uncanny sound maintains a drone. It sounds like a clapper being dragged slowly around a bell’s inside, it is the sound of iron on iron, of iron wheels on iron rails. Even when Pavel and Hanka dance and when they kiss, there is still the rumble of martial drums.

Smoke and Stars

As befits a story in which young love is crushed by the time in which it tries to grow, there is a certain naïveté about the film. If there is gaucheness in the nascent relationship between the two children, well that is the way it should be. It is the time that has altered the meaning of the language of innocence: 'Imagine you are on a trip', says Pavel to Hanka as he tries to bring the freshness of the countryside into her attic confinement. It of course awakens thoughts of the transport and her parents and it cannot be unsaid. 'I would like to go to sleep, and never wake up' says Hanka.

Something similar takes place early on when a child’s simple language intimates terrible fates.  As the family are leaving, the young girl asks her father:
- Is the train already waiting for us?
- Yes, it's waiting for us, he replies.
- Is it a very long one?
- Yes, a very long one.
- Will there be children too?
- Yes, lots of children.

Similarly, as Pavel sits in his windowsill, the bars of which look like a prison, he looks out as smoke rises from a single chimney. Later, his mother’s words to Hanka, ‘you don’t know what’s going on out there’, are followed immediately by a shot of steam rising from a train as Pavel searches out the railwayman he helped, and to whom he is looking for a favour.

The naïveté shows too in the sunflowers in the railwayman's garden, which remains as just a dream of sanctuary in the country, and which are symbolised by a print Van Gogh's Sunflowers on the attic wall.

All of this is guileless visual and spoken language. Such times demand that statements are made artlessly, even awkwardly, in contrast to the sureness of barked commands.

The film ends as it begins, with the pages of a book fluttering in a breeze, unread and waiting for another time – a time of learning and creation, a time that isn’t just for now, but one that looks to the future, and to the stars.

The Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966)

(A three-way conversational review of Jan Nemec's absurdist theatrical satire on enforced one-party politics, The Party and the Guests. The review is in the spirit of Nemec's statement, 'If, from the first scene, it is apparent that any superficial resemblance to reality is not important at all, the audience will give up their favourite comparisons and concentrate on what the director really tries to convey. Written in 2007.)

__________________________

 - Now we can talk. Speak for a while, it can do no harm.
 - Yes, now you should listen. You see, this man...this Nemec, along with his friends, they made a sort of joke, a satire about the system with which we were trying to shape our country into something...effective. Together, they made, really, something unwholesome, something that criticized, made mock.
 - So?
 - What do you mean, ‘so’? It was a deviant piece of work, wholly decadent and reliant on imported forms of absurd entertainment. They were laughing at us.
 - I didn't see much laughter in the film.
 - Well that's the point you see, it was the wrong kind of laughter. It wasn't funny laughter, it was a needling kind of work.
 - Really.
 - Yes. I mean look at the actors. Who is this Rudolf in his plus fours? He is an imbecile -  a petulant, smirking, ingratiating child. And who is this man in charge, the one who resembles a dumpy Lenin? This is not constructive humour. And then to make some kind of a dissident hero out of that other filmmaker, that Schorm man, who does nothing in the film but look sceptical and disappear…well, I think you see my point.
 - You're on the wrong track.
 - How so? Look at that simpleton Rudolf again with his barrel-organ, mocking a military parade, or those caricatures of heavies who can’t even put a desk up the right way round. At least there were one or two lines of truth in the film, but that is all: 'People belong to people'; 'One for all and all for one.'

- If I could just interject...I find those statements rather ambivalent, even threatening, in the context of the film, especially the latter. Actually, if you don't mind me taking a little of your time I think it would be useful to point out a few of the meaningful characteristics of the film while I'm here. For instance, did you notice Straw Hat - Pepa - stroking his chin early on, after the guests have been rounded up, copying the gesture from Leather Hat, the man from the secret police? This is what is at the heart of the film. Forget the words that are said and watch the people. That conversation about the birds between Pepa and Rudolf - highly symbolic of the way one learns a new language - a language that uses the same words, the same gestures and the same intonation as normal language, but which carries no meaning whatsoever except the sole requirement that the words should be agreed with. It makes me think of that conversation between Winston and O'Brien in the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984, when Winston is adamant that two and two are four. Says O’Brien: ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. it’s not easy to become sane.’

- Can't you make him shut up?
 - Leave him be, he'll blow himself out soon.

- Also, it has often been remarked how all the comments between the guests in the idyllic first scene are banal, with no-one really listening to one another (they recall to me the dinner-party conversations based on advertising slogans from Godard's Pierrot le Fou - a very different context but a similar effect), but there are hints there even among the non sequiturs at how a system can take hold in a populace that desires order but relinquishes its involvement. These symbolic hints occur later too, after the charades with Rudolf, as the guests walk down through the wood, and the Host mentions such aggrandising schemes as improbably massive commemorative sculptures ('I want this rock for a garden') and inappropriate schemes on a similar scale, such as turning a wood into a playing field.

- Have you finished?

- No, not quite, I must say something about the candelabras – is this the only film in which candelabras are mentioned as a veiled threat? And the ending is chilling, with all of those candles being snuffed out one by one – by ordinary people as well as members of the secret service – as the sound of snarling dogs takes over the soundtrack. In a way it reminds me of the ending in Karel Kachyna's The Ear, made four years later and also long banned, where it is made clear exactly the process by which you gain control over someone in a position of power.

- Are you done now?

- Yes.

- Good. Have some flan. You know, I'm sure all that's in there but frankly I've forgotten most of it. Actually, I only have one thing to say now. What does ‘banned forever’ mean? I'm only asking, it's a good phrase, you see. I like it. It's a big selling point these days. And who knows, the film may come in useful all over again. Things can change very quickly you know, in the middle of a pleasant afternoon picnic among friends maybe, two bottles to the good and drowsy with the heat. Anyway, for now, have some chicken. It's cooked - right to the bone. You’ll see.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965)

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

__________________________

‘This new girl, she never warms the pot. Hm. She’s called Patrice; imagine.’

The Spy who came in from the Cold is a cold war espionage film of the highest class. Richard Burton is Leamas, station head in Berlin, powerless to prevent his agents losing their lives. Control (Cyril Cusack) asks him back to London and wonders if he should ‘come in from the cold’; then invites him to stay out in it, just for a little longer. He says, ‘Our work is based on a single assumption that the West is never going to be the aggressor. Thus, we do disagreeable things, but we’re defensive. Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can’t afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition.’ So begins a poker-faced section of elisions and uncertainty over Leamas’s actions – which is the last I’ll say about the plot.

Burton’s presence is magnetic – but crucially not at the expense of the overall atmosphere of the film, which is one of shabby existential torpor. He plays a man who has been too long in a world where the only loyalty is to expediency. Ever-watchful, at points his self-composed stillness explodes into a snarling intensity. Spies are ‘a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me’ he says. Claire Bloom plays the earnest, perkily innocent librarian who gets drawn into his connections. There’s no glamour here though – his is a world of smoky boozers and rain, the labour exchange and tinned tomato soup from the corner shop.

Other elements of the film maintain the atmosphere. A superb cast means that even relatively minor roles – Pitt, Ashe, the Personnel officer who picks up Leamas from the airport – are clearly delineated and carry conviction. Peter van Eyck’s Mundt too is impossible to forget, his characterisation based on a line from le Carré’s Call for the Dead in which he is described as having the ‘look of complete negation that reposes in the eyes of a young killer’. Oswald Morris’s camera roams softly around, laying out the geography of offices, cells and the puddly courtyards with an oily darkness to their ground. This seemingly picks up on a line from le Carré’s novel when Leamas reflects that he and the girl from the library ‘might have been anywhere – Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.’ Sol Kaplan’s score is sparing and appropriate; often though there is no sound at all except the quietness of a room in which two people try to second-guess each other, wondering how much the other knows and how much they should tell.

However, the most impressive element of the film for me is Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper’s screenplay, from John le Carré’s source novel of the same name. Their script is in fact even more impressive when compared with the original book. Their changes are wholesale – of necessity they have removed anything that would muddy or lengthen the narrative too much but they have then added scenes, such as Nan meeting Leamas when he comes out of prison, as ways of covering these gaps. Pieces of description are transposed from one scene to another and names are changed; Liz Gold becomes Nan Perry for example. Overall however, Dehn and Trosper manage to preserve wholesale the atmosphere and the integrity of the original.

Sure, in a couple of places they dot the i’s and cross the t’s (for example with regard to ‘operation Rolling Stone’, but this is evened out by those places where they leave the viewer to join the dots. As with the appearance of Mr. Pitt at the Labour Exchange. Leamas gives him a glance as he enters the building. When called he says, ‘The last time and the time before I was seen by Mr. Melrose’ to which he gets the reponse, ‘My name’s Pitt, Melrose has ‘flu.’ And that’s it, but it’s just enough to set the doubt in our minds that he is a plant and part of some larger plan. The mention that Melrose has ‘flu is the key detail though. It’s extraneous to the plot but it aids the damp and down-at-heel atmosphere of this section of the film. It’s these apparently offhand details that do so much for the atmosphere of the film.

There’s another good example of this early on, in the scene already mentioned between Control and Leamas. The line is, again, simple and offhand: ‘This new girl, she never warms the pot. Hm. She’s called Patrice; imagine.’ Everything in it is entirely an invention of the screenwriters. Le Carré’s novel makes has no mention of the girl’s name and Control serves coffee instead of tea. Yet the line works. It locates a certain time and place perfectly, marrying a certain quaintness (warming the teapot) with notions of exoticism – the name Patrice. I think the reason it really sticks though is down to Cusack’s delivery, which is masterly; his pause after ‘pot’, his nod as he says ‘Patrice’, his brief sniff at the end. And all the while Burton is staring at him intently, wondering why he’s there, trying to see past this preamble and waiting for the point of the meeting. Burton fixes our attention on Cusack and as he waits for the point, so do we and hang on his every word.

Further comparison with the book also reveals that nearly all of the memorable lines in the film are the screenwriters’ invention too. This is partly due to the difference in format of course, as long conversations need replacing with shorter, pithier remarks, redolent with meaning. Nevertheless, it’s impressive that so many stick in the mind. Near the end, Mundt tells Leamas and Nan of the the plan to get them back to their own side, adding: ‘the boy meets you there. He’s quite young but he knows the war.’ It’s another casual remark that slips by almost without notice, but it assumes terrible retrospective meaning. You could call it the conversational equivalent of a loaded gun.