The New Yorker

It started with a joke on Twitter and turned into something seriously good. Glenn Kenny (of MSN Movies and the formidable film blog Some Came Running) posted something about Charmin toilet paper and the actor who played its squeeze-blocker, Dick Wilson. Knowing that Glenn is a fellow jazz enthusiast (he recently tipped me off to the musically excellent—though sonically deficient—1972 Thelonious Monk Village Vanguard recordings), I responded by asking what the swing-era saxophonist—there was one by the name of Dick Wilson—had to do with those commercials, and included a link to a performance of him playing with the Andy Kirk band, from 1936. But instead of merely tipping my hat to the familiar name with the unfamiliar music, I actually listened to it and was, as people say, blown away. (The clip was this one.)

Since then, I’ve been listening to a lot of Wilson, though in truth, there isn’t much—he died in 1941, at the age of thirty, and spent most of his career with Kirk, in the 78 era, and rarely got to solo on record for more than a handful of bars (though his work with the septet of Mary Lou Williams, another Kirk veteran, gave him a few more chances to stretch out). Most of what there is, though, is astonishing, a true buried treasure of jazz history. I’d describe Wilson as a swing-era precursor to Eric Dolphy—his tone has a metallic shine; he has a surprisingly leaping, agile interval repertory all his own; and he favors short, angular, off-balance phrases with sudden shifts, interpolations, and amazingly even mercurial runs. Like Dolphy’s, Wilson’s playing is less narrative and discursive than it is abstract and private, intensely expressive and searching.

Here’s a stunning solo, from the 1936 recording of “Christopher Columbus” (which is better known in versions by Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman). Wilson comes in midway through, and opens with a phrase that quotes both Rossini’s “Lone Ranger” theme and Harold Arlen’s melody for “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” before taking off into exhilaratingly fancies. I want to hear all the Wilson I can; there isn’t a single grand compilation of his work, or, for that matter, of Kirk’s. I’ve been listening to these two single-disk collections (there’s a little overlap) and reading the fanatically devoted Wilson “solography” by Jan Evensmo.

Wilson died in November, 1941, weeks after his thirtieth birthday. The last recording of his that Evensmo lists is of a jam sesssion in September of that year from Monroe’s Uptown House. Though it was a swing date, featuring Count Basie and Harry “Sweets” Edison, Monroe’s was a breeding ground for bebop, one of Charlie Parker’s regular haunts in the early forties. It’s terribly sad to consider how Wilson’s advanced artistry might have flourished and grown in such new and visionary company, had he lived but a little longer.

“I was never shown a script, and, besides, everything was usually changed on Mr. Hawks’s yellow pad,” says George Plimpton, near the beginning of this clip about his reportorial-existential cameo in Howard Hawks’s last film, “Rio Lobo,” from 1970. (Plimpton had, of course, made participatory Walter-Mitty-style journalism his specialty.) Here, Plimpton’s moment of glory becomes the object of precise violent choreography by his co-star in the scene, John Wayne, as well as of Hawks’s on-the-set rewrite of the ringer’s one line. Then, with the scene seemingly complete, the director reaches into his virtual paintbox and adds an extraordinarily florid touch of spontaneous invention—and the little documentary reveals the technical trickery that makes it possible. Plimpton ends up surprised by the process: “Put together, it seemed hard to believe that this brief sequence had utilized the energy and imagination of over one hundred people for two days.” And, of course, it’s hard to believe that a filmmaker such as Hawks was able to deploy such massive resources, human and mechanical, with such an improvisational lightness. It’s one of the hallmarks of his art.

There’s cleverness in Ralph Fiennes’s adaptation of “Coriolanus” but little beauty. It would be an insult to prose writers to say that his filming is prosaic rather than poetic; rather, the movie is filmed merely functionally. Fiennes updates the story—of a great and proud Roman warrior whose contempt for commoners results in his exile, where he makes common cause with the city’s enemies, the Volscians, and prepares to make war on Rome—to a current-day “place calling itself Rome” (a reference to John Osborne’s 1973 adaptation; also, a place where Serbian graffiti is legible on walls). Working with a script by John Logan that slices and dices Shakespeare’s text to fit (as well as starring in the title role), Fiennes borrows tropes of political thrillers, war movies, and domestic melodramas to offer approximate contemporary equivalencies (television screens and talk shows in lieu of heralds and assemblies, for instance), that might be assumed to render the play relevant to viewers’ own experience.

But Fiennes is no image-maker; his images have no Shakespearean power. Rather, in relying on familiar genres, he also leans on their visual clichés—and his method strangely carries over to performance. He and the others in his formidable cast (including Vanessa Redgrave, as Volumnia, Coriolanus’s fiercely martial mother, and Gerard Butler, as Aufidius, his respected Volscian enemy) press Shakespeare’s verse into familiar inflections of the cinematic genres he relies on. Rather than a Shakespeare rendered in common speech, it’s Shakespeare reprocessed as mediatized banalities. Logan’s compression of the text, as performed, doesn’t merely reduce the play, it diminishes it; the movie leaves the impression of a lack of confidence in language itself, whether Shakespearean or otherwise. The movie would lose little if Shakespeare’s verse were ditched altogether and the play were treated merely like a narrative framework with dialogue done entirely by Logan or another screenwriter. Aufidius, make my day.

It doesn’t have to be so. Michael Almereyda, in his updating of “Hamlet,” from 2000, compresses the text while thinking in highly inflected images that seem to frame the language as much as the action and guiding his actors to an ear-catchingly provocative fusion of common speech and poetic grandeur. (Here is Ethan Hawke, as Almereyda’s melancholy New Yorker.) And, of course, nothing against cutting and pasting: Orson Welles’s Shakespeare films (including “Macbeth” and “Othello”) depend on his shortening of the plays, and his “Chimes at Midnight” goes farthest—it’s an ingenious cut-and-paste job centered around the character of Falstaff, played by Welles. But Welles is, after all, himself a Shakespearean character—he is even the cinema’s Shakespeare, and his images have a rhetorical and psychological power that is a worthy counterpart to the language of the plays.

“Coriolanus” is one of Shakespeare’s later works; it’s marked by an unusual foregrounding of action, and the absence of soliloquy is itself an extraordinary character trait: Coriolanus speaks his mind, and does so with a cavalier, flamboyant aggression. His inability to cloak his harsh thoughts in soft words proves the fundamental lack of mercy, of charity, of fellow-feeling that leads to his doom. In “Othello,” a warrior comes to grief through his insensibility to a woman’s words, through his ear that’s open only to the insinuations of seeming comrades-in-arms. “Coriolanus” gives the warrior a woman—a chicken-hawk mother who adores blood without shedding any—whose hortatory flattery he’s all too keen to heed. (The best thing in Fiennes’s film is the military uniform that Volumnia dons for public events.) The protagonist is a sort of loose cannon—but the people, the masses whose humanity he dismisses, are also sorts of small-bore weapons too easily turned, and what Shakespeare depicts is, in effect, civil war, the division of a state’s powers against itself, due not to any intrinsically political rift but to failures of the heart. Without a single sign of religious practice or spiritual doctrine, Shakespeare offers a stark and radical critique of the pagan world and, as such, the body of myth and tradition upon which much of the Western world’s culture—and much of his own work—depends. Don’t bother looking for anything radical in the movie; it isn’t just a popularization, it’s a crib.

I wish there were better news to report about the animated series of “Napoleon Dynamite,” the first two episodes of which premièred on Fox this past Sunday evening. It has too many cooks, albeit good ones—the movie’s creators, Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess, were joined by Mike Scully and Max Pross (full disclosure—a family friend from way back in childhood), both of “The Simpsons” (and the latter, of “Seinfeld” and “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), and the results are just a pastiche; the cartoons take the characters from the Hesses’ movie (voiced by the same actors) and embed them in hectic and absurd situations and endow them with more blatant jokes. The big question is elsewhere: Why have the Hesses not made a movie since “Gentlemen Broncos”?

Or, to put it differently: Is Jared Hess his generation’s Elaine May? Her career was broken by nearly criminal critical dismissal of what is, after all, a masterwork: “Ishtar.” “Gentlemen Broncos,” which the Hesses wrote and Jared Hess directed, is a similarly extravagant masterwork, which met with a similar fate. It’s true that “Broncos” didn’t face the trumpets of celebrity-centric journalism and the irrelevant chatter about the movie’s high cost of production that loudly preceded the film’s release (irrelevant, that is, to the movie’s artistic worth). It faced something worse: near-silence. I still remember the day I got an e-mail from the studio publicist about a last-minute screening of the film; I left the office a little early, expecting that—given the excitement generated by “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre”—critics would be jostling for seats. Instead, there was one other on hand, along with three or four college students. Even Manohla Dargis, one of the few critics to have taken “Nacho Libre” aptly seriously, was among those who missed the boat here. (I discussed her review at the time.) I’ve written about the movie on several occasions; for now, it’s worth considering that the movie is one in which the artists reached heights of invention so rarefied that they left most critics behind—and, as a result, viewers were also discouraged from taking in the view. I suspect that the experience was a terrible blow to the filmmakers, both professionally and personally, and I’m glad to see that they’re pushing ahead with their careers, but I hope that they won’t be discouraged from attempting, once more, works of greater originality and audacity. It would be our loss.

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut” (which I discuss in this clip), impressed and moved me, at the time of its release in 1999, as an unpeeling of the veneer of marital concord to reveal a fury of unfulfilled, often unacknowledged, and nearly inexpressible desires—and as a wise acknowledgment of the reconciliations on which an enduring marriage depends. But the scenes that take place in a private sex club in a Long Island mansion struck me as a peculiarly banal set of erotic fantasies for an elderly man (Kubrick was seventy) to entertain. I got it wrong. The scene of the club doesn’t exist to gratify or project Kubrick’s fantasies about the sexual acts themselves; rather, their subject is the theatre of sex, the very idea of sex (even the varieties ordinarily considered ordinary) as a realm of experience so extraordinary, so deep and dangerous and uncontrollable, that it both demands observation in a context outside the exploitational domain of pornography, and becomes a theatre of living terror, one of unbearable power. As Kubrick shows, it’s a theatre of such devastating force that the spectators, rather than the actors, need to wear masks. And that’s the overwhelming impression that, this time, I felt while watching the movie: I’m glad it’s available on DVD, to watch alone; because, watching with others, I’d want to be in the dark.

After checking out my colleague Ben Greenman’s reference-book playlist, I put my two cents in with a glance back to my untimely early-teen kick, doo-wop, for “Book of Love,” and then went to the sidebar recommendation—the Coasters, doing “Searchin’,” which, if not quite on theme (the singers are “gonna find her,” a search beyond the scope of encyclopedias), is a cooler and wilder musical thrill, a blend of hypnotic-erotic rhythmic obsession and a wailing blues drag.

But as I watched the clip, my eye was caught by the incisive three-dimensional diagonal of the framing—the way it highlights both the lead singer’s insinuating stage attitude (catch his sidelong glances offstage) and the group’s percussive motion (and note the delicate imbalance that comes from him snapping fingers with his left hand while the others use the right), the aptly timed dolly in (at 1:10) and back (toward the end)—and by the fact that the performance unfolds in a single long take. It felt like an image trouvée in which Busby Berkeley meets Jean-Marie Straub and Dani&#232le Huillet. And then I watched it again and my astonishment increased: the host, Steve Allen, is part of the same continuous shot: he shuffles off-screen as the curtain parts behind him to reveal three Coasters already in action, juking toward camera and taking their places—while the lead singer, Carl Gardner, comes in from the other side of the frame toward the foreground. Here, for the span of two minutes and sixteen seconds, the director, the choreographer, the set designer (note the unseen pedestals) and the camera operator—forgotten craftspeople of the early television industry—were artistic geniuses, creators of the highest order.

Last summer, in this space, we were discussing mise en scène and whether the term means anything at all; well, if I needed to define it—as the exquisite use of space over time to capture motion in a way that goes beyond dramatic content to provoke a complex, quasi-transcendent emotional effect (or, to use a camera in a narrative or documentary context as if it were a musical instrument)—I could hardly do better than to show this clip.

P.S. Gustav Leonhardt, the harpsichordist who plays Bach (in both senses) in the film by Straub and Huillet cited above, died Monday at the age of eighty-three.

P.P.S. The song is one among the wondrous array of rock classics written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Leiber died last August, at the age of seventy-eight.

Stories are how we make sense of what we live; which is to say that they’re everywhere, and that we don’t have a story. We exude them at an almost bewildering pace, making it astonishing that so many filmmakers seem to have trouble coming up with them (they buy other people’s novels and memoirs and remake films from overseas and from the past). Or, rather, it’s not astonishing at all: the story is merely the framework for a movie; it doesn’t really matter where it comes from, because the art of the cinema (indeed, the art of art) isn’t in the story but in how it’s realized. As I said a couple of nights ago in a discussion with colleagues at the Public Theatre, the story of “War and Peace” is a Wikipedia entry. On the other hand, modernity is permeability: first, modernists make the framework visible through the elaboration; second, they make themselves visible through the artifice. One of the crucial modes of cinematic modernity is the personal film, the story that derives from the filmmaker’s life. It’s no guarantee of quality, no meritorious act in and of itself, but it is often a springboard to distinctive and original results.

So it is with Joe Swanberg’s films; he has the intuition of a journalist or diarist regarding the narrative richness of his life and the lives of the people around him, and he comes up with distinctive, ever-evolving ways of capturing the details, the inner experience, and the social context of these stories. His latest film, “Marriage Material,” is available for free on Vimeo for the next two weeks (and embedded above), and it’s a substantial and memorable piece of work. It finds Swanberg and his wife, Kris, dropping their infant son, Jude, off for an overnight stay with friends so they can have some “adult time” together. The friends, Andrew (played by the filmmaker Kentucker Audley) and Emily (Caroline White), have fun babysitting—but Emily, who talks with Kris about the practicalities of parenthood, finds herself wanting to start a family, and she raises the issue with Andrew (they’ve been together for years but are not married).

The core of the movie is a remarkable fifteen-minute sequence, three shots (two long ones punctuated by a brief interlude), in which the Andrew and Emily discuss, in an apocalyptic evening of romantic conflict, the direction of their relationship. It’s a sort of “living theatre,” a brief span in the life of the couple, but one in which the thread that binds them is pulled to a potential breaking point. Time has become Swanberg’s medium, even his subject—the characters’ age is at the heart of the matter, as is their sense of being in a hurry (or not); for Joe and Kris (I’m thinking of the characters), their new life seems to be “measured out in coffee spoons,” so to speak, but also expanded beyond its immediate demands (the sketch of parenthood is true and sure and done with a light brush). Writing last month about the recent release of Swanberg’s film “Caitlin Plays Herself,” I said that “the sixty-nine-minute sketchbook implies a novelistic amplitude of experience.” The same is true of “Marriage Material,” and even more so. There are films in which the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the characters do in the gaps between scenes, but here, because Swanberg has a full sense of the unseen action, he’s able to tell a good, long story quickly, deftly, and simply; he seems to have a novella in mind, and he deploys, with curiosity and confidence, the cinema’s power to show—to bring character and context, detail and world together in a frame and in a continuous moment—as a way of achieving what the writer achieves with description.

The long-awaited trailer for Wes Anderson’s eagerly-awaited new film, “Moonrise Kingdom” (scheduled for release on May 25th)—his first since “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which came out in 2009—reminds me of an entry in Robert Bresson’s book “Notes on Cinematography” on “economy,” citing a note from Racine to his son Louis: “I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name.”

The images alone would do the trick—the frontal, often symmetrical compositions, the delicate and expressive clothing, the formality of social gestures, the decorative stationery, the cinephilic references (“Pierrot le Fou,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” “M*A*S*H,” even “The Scarlet Letter”), the presence of precocious young artists (theatre, drawing), and the distinctively disciplined performance style of actors already in the director’s universe (Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman) or others newly attuned to it (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton), bear Anderson’s mark throughout. So do the Franco-pop music (Françoise Hardy singing “Le Temps de l’amour”), the protagonists’ names (Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, reminiscent of the Tenenbaum clan’s connections), the world of three brothers (as seen at the end), and, of course, the story of ardor for rebellious adventure—about a twelve-year-old couple (played by Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, both of whom are making their movie début) who run away from a New England summer camp and become the object of an organized search. It’s obviously a Wes Anderson movie, with its aesthetic delights and moral challenges, its singular negotiations of order and freedom, refinement and danger. The spring will be a good one for movies—add this one to Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress,” Terence Davies’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” and Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam,” and we can wonder whether Oscar season shouldn’t just be pushed up to summer.

It’s symptomatic of the world of movies that the longest piece in The New Yorker involving Roberto Rossellini (whose 1954 film “Voyage to Italy” is our DVD of the Week) actually had to do with the crush of paparazzi to get a glimpse of Ingrid Bergman and their newborn son, Roberto Ingmar, in Rome in 1950. (It’s by the great reporter Janet Flanner.) The imbalance—indeed, the injustice—is emblematic of the aspect of the movie industry that Rossellini found inimical: the part that had to do with show business. A 1949 Talk of the Town piece by Daniel Lang that coincided with his arrival in New York and his contractual agreement with Bergman for what would be their first film together, “Stromboli,” mentions the story outline for that film, which

runs to about a dozen pages. A revision of this will comprise the script with which he will start shooting, and it won’t be much longer. Rossellini’s method is to begin with the rudiments of a story, develop his scenes as he goes along, and work out the dialogue on location. “Always, there is the danger that too much talk will stop the movement,” he told us, “and if the actors got the dialogue too early, they would go home and think how they would like to do it, not how I would like them to do it.” Rossellini uses very few artificial settings for his pictures. “When I am in a studio in England recently,” he said, “I see a big wood battleship in front of a painted curtain of a colored sky. ‘This,’ I say to myself, ‘is the corpse of the movie industry.’ ”

In 1974, Rossellini was in New York again, for a series of discussions at the New School, and Wallace White spoke with him for Talk of the Town:

“I am out of filmmaking now,” he said. “That is in the past, and I don’t like to look back. Now I am doing mainly historical documentaries for television. In any case, we have emphasized art too much. Artists have become like demigods in our society. It is better that they return to being what they were in the past—before the beginning of the Romantic period. Artists used to be humble, and that is what they should become again.”

Rossellini died in 1977. In 1989, Adam Gopnik wrote a Talk piece concerning a visit by Isabella Rossellini (one of the twin daughters born to Rossellini and Bergman in 1952) to Wesleyan University, where her mother’s archives were housed. Among the documents on hand was what Adam describes as

a gentle, perfect letter from Jean Renoir, urging Isabella’s mother not to give up acting: “The cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession.”

Both Renoir and Rossellini urged humility on the artist; they had a different conception of what the term implied. Speaking at the New School in 1974, as reported by White, Roberto Rossellini said, “The reason for life is reason, not beauty.” I doubt that Renoir would have concurred. In 1956, Bergman starred in Renoir’s “Elena and Her Men”; she never worked with Rossellini again. (They divorced the following year.)

Somehow yesterday’s biggest story flew in under the radar, though it was reported prominently in the New York Post by Kirsten Fleming. She speaks with Jason Wu (the young designer whose creations are among Michelle Obama’s favorites) about his upcoming new line for Target, about which he says:

My inspiration came from the French new wave films—in particular the women who defined this movement, such as Anna Karina and Jean Seberg.

Those two women, of course, aren’t just any old New Wave icons: Seberg is the co-star of Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” and Karina (to whom Godard was married from 1961 through 1964) appeared in most of his films from 1960 through 1967. (Their last feature together was “Made in USA,” which was followed by the short film “Anticipation: or Love in the Year 2000.”) And what’s surprising (though it’s already a familiar state of affairs) is that the films of Godard, among the most deeply and radically intellectual works in the history of cinema, should also be—to this day—enduring style statements. Godard himself was a style statement in those days, as I learned in the course of interviews for my book about him and his work. Not just his movies but his way of carrying himself, his mode of public self-presentation (and Godard was ubiquitous in French media then), were immensely popular with smart young French people. Indeed, even when he was young and broke, he had a distinctive way of dressing and was considered something of a dandy as well as a natural performer, which is why, around 1950, his friends Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer called on him to act in their short films.

In general, I’ve often thought that great directors are usually also great actors—albeit ones who deliver their performances behind the scenes and off-camera, for cast and crew—and also that one of the things that makes directors great is the ability to create great actors. Godard styled and dressed and directed his actresses to reflect his own desires and ideals, which, no less than his ideas, are part of his distinctive sensibility, which his movies so thoroughly embody. What’s more, Godard’s sense of style reflects his sense of existential engagement. Style is the mark that a person makes while meeting the immediate challenges; it signifies being fully responsive to the moment, and no filmmaker in the sixties was more alive to the times than was Godard. He offered, to quote Joseph Mankiewicz’s great script for “A Letter to Three Wives,” “always the right thing at the right time”—and, like the character about whom it was said, he became an outsider. His movies—now addressing a great historical arc of time from a precise personal standpoint—are still exemplars of style, but not of ones that have kept much of a toehold on popular modes.

Nonetheless, some of the fashions in his most recent film, “Film Socialisme,” leap out: a little boy’s T-shirt, a young woman’s striped dress, a camerawoman’s spare tenue, and, above all, Patti Smith’s hieratic garb. We’ll see which of these styles will prove inspiring and marketable fifty years from now.

“Voyage to Italy” (which I discuss in this clip) is the third of the five feature films in which Roberto Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman, who was his wife at the time. The actress had sought out the director in 1948 after seeing his films “Open City” and “Paisan.” During the shoot of their first film together, “Stromboli,” they fell in love; Bergman left her husband for Rossellini, and the resulting scandal left her a Hollywood untouchable for a few years. Meanwhile, the films they made together cost Rossellini a large measure of his critical reputation: he was famed for films that were called “neo-realist,” which, beside being filmed on location, dealt expressly with political and social matters. Of course, his interests weren’t limited to current events, as seen in his 1948 adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play “The Human Voice”—and the films he made with Bergman represented an extraordinary new artistic turn in his career. He made the very fact of Bergman’s style, her natural grace and her unimpeachable glamour, a part of his films, which looked to the bourgeoisie as the new center of energy in a society tending toward increased industrial and informational abstraction. He borrowed her aptitude for melodrama in order to splice Hollywood-style dramatic compression to a documentary-based realism in the interest of a personal and philosophical cinema.

The critics who were most enthusiastic about what he was doing were the young ones at Cahiers du Cinéma, the future French New Wave; Jean-Luc Godard said that “Voyage to Italy” taught him that he could make a classic-style film on a low budget with just “a man, a woman, and a car”; and Rossellini quickly returned the favor: in the mid-fifties, he sought to organize a series of low-budget productions that these critics would themselves write and direct. The project came to nought. Bergman and Rossellini divorced, and she returned to the Hollywood fold; but the connection between them and the New Wave—and the modern cinema as such—remains unbroken.

In an open letter that ran as a full-page ad in Variety yesterday, Kim Novak, who’s seventy-eight, did what divas do: she exaggerated, declaring, in all capital letters, “I WANT TO REPORT A RAPE”:

I FEEL AS IF MY BODY—OR, AT LEAST MY BODY OF WORK—HAS BEEN VIOLATED BY THE MOVIE, “THE ARTIST.”

She explains, of course, that she’s referring to the fact that brief excerpts from Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Vertigo” are used in the soundtrack of Michel Hazanavicius’s film. The fact that she feels herself to be the film’s defender (“I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SPEAK NOW”) is ultimately less interesting, except from a psychological perspective (it’s an amazing episode in the life of a great actress) than the overall point she makes, in her final, all-caps paragraph, regarding those who would “USE AND ABUSE FAMOUS PIECES OF WORK TO GAIN ATTENTION AND APPLAUSE FOR OTHER THAN WHAT THEY WERE INTENDED.”

And that really is the question, because the modern cinema, as arising with the French New Wave (and Hazanavicius is, after all, a French director), is a cinema of quotation, of reference, of intertextuality. Sometimes the quotes are more or less the director’s own secret (there’s an anecdote about Jean-Luc Godard, on the set of “Breathless,” telling his cameraman that—I approximate—the left side of the frame refers to a shot by Preminger, and the right to one by Nicholas Ray) and sometimes they’re blatant, as when Godard borrows, with instantly recognizable near-precision, a sequence from Samuel Fuller’s “Forty Guns,” or François Truffaut cites the hair-dye scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie.” Martin Scorsese makes frequent and clear use of cinematic quotations, as do younger filmmakers, such as Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen brothers, among many others.

Whether it’s called quotation, appropriation, or some more invidious term, it’s at least as important in the world of art overall, and may be a defining trait of the “post-modern.” (Why cinematic modernism and artistic post-modernism converge in such surprising ways is another story altogether—I think it has something to do with the youth of the art, the medium’s inherent modernity.) Godard has even made a grand, profoundly analytical and passionately personal series, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (newly available here on DVD), based principally on video clips from a vast array of classic movies. (The project, which he started planning in the mid-seventies, took more than a decade to launch and another dozen years to complete.)

The problem with Hazanavicius’s use of the music is that he does too little with it. He doesn’t analyze it, doesn’t challenge it, but merely borrows its emotions and cites its greatness. There’s something distinctive about the director’s decision to make a silent film, even if his approach to the subject is unduly mild. (The silent-era screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas died last week, at the age of one hundred eleven; her 1999 autobiography, “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim”—which I haven’t read yet—seems infused with the frenzy and excess that Hazanavicius can’t handle.) But his use of Herrmann’s music comes off more as a branding of the film—the simplest response to which would be, “in your dreams.”

When the New Wave quoted Fuller or Hitchcock, they were both asserting the existence of a school and suggesting that it was cutting-edge. By treating their Hollywood heroes as artists, they were fighting uphill against the weight of tradition. When Hazanavicius refers to Hitchcock, he’s coasting—in effect, putting on a lapel button that nobody in his audience could object to. It would have been different if he had paired the music with images that in some way questioned the value or meaning of Hitchcock’s film or even the very weight of tradition—or maybe even put an electric guitar in the orchestra, done something to rub the quotation against the grain. But Hazanavicius, an intelligent and well-meaning filmmaker, doesn’t seem to have such provocation in him.

P.S. Last night, I tweeted about the film’s musical quotes, and got a good response from the critic Calum Marsh: that they “counterpoint [the film’s silent star] Valentin’s aversion to the advent of sound—it celebrates what the form will bring.” I agree—but it does so with an implicit nostalgia, stopping in 1958, as if suggesting that the subsequent fifty-three years—precisely those dominated by the filmmakers who did the hard work of establishing Hitchcock’s greatness and the fecundity of his tradition—have been a disappointment or a botch.

The trailer for “The Devil Inside” offers enough inspired craziness to lure a viewer (indeed, this one, along with his first-born child, who’s nineteen) to the neighborhood multiplex, and we weren’t alone. The movie did remarkable business this weekend, though if word-of-mouth has anything to do with it, the decline in the second week will be virtually alpine: I can’t remember ever hearing so many exasperatedly vehement complaints from fellow audience members at the end of a movie. It’s got an unsuccessful trick ending that blasted away the few traces of good will that the story’s anodyne passage may have left in its wake.

Yet, strangely, “The Devil Inside” is not that bad—it offers a few memorable moments of religious madness arising from unwise exorcisms, and it sticks with an admirable thoroughness to its premise: a faux-documentary about a young woman’s effort to free her murderous mother from demonic possession. The absurd premise is pursued logically, as the girl goes to the Roman asylum where her mother is being held, insinuates herself into a Vatican exorcism class, and makes contact with a pair of freethinking priests (one of whom is also a practicing physician) to do the deed. One moment was exemplary: it’s a sequence that finds the woman and two cohorts (one of whom is the documentary filmmaker who works with her) in a car. I noted three angles—including one on the driver—and was prepared to call “gotcha” when, in subsequent shots, I caught glimpses of small video cameras affixed to the windshield and the rear window in exactly the places that would yield the scene’s trio of perspectives.

The film is indeed pretty bad—there’s nothing by way of character, context, or emotional insight, no wider development of the movie’s silly yet intriguing connection of the medical to the metaphysical—yet it’s bad in a strangely old-fashioned way. In the mid-sixties, Jean-Luc Godard travelled to Algeria to present some of his films, and, at a point in his career when he was taking a greater interest in political activism, he discussed with local filmmakers a way of making political films. He advised them that, when Hollywood distributors offered them films, they should take them—and then substitute their own dialogue, and their recording of it, for the films’ original soundtracks. In effect, he was proposing a a sort of Situationist détournement, a leftist “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” avant la lettre. But that practice calls for archetypes, for a story of straightforward, even over-explicit action (that stodgily theatrical scene from “Downfall” is ready-made for parody), and “The Devil Inside” is a film of that sort.

Despite the faux modernity of its premise, it’s a bad Hollywood movie, nineteen-fifties style—the kind of movie that Samuel Z. Arkoff might have made for the adolescent crowd in the age of high hair, before he brought Martin Scorsese, John Milius, James Ivory, and Vincente Minnelli into the fold). What’s different now is that this latter-day parallel to “Earth vs. the Spider” or “The Brain that Wouldn’t Die“—these specimens of undercooked excess that kept me glued to after-school TV in the sixties—is being released by a major studio and is playing across the lobby from “War Horse” and “The Artist.” And it’s noteworthy that, at least for the first weekend, people are going—and their disappointment suggests that the audience for populist entertainment is even more spontaneously and automatically modernist than are many nostalgia-drenched critics or viewers of more refined spectacles. It wouldn’t have taken much to turn “The Devil Inside” into a regular riot of symbolic fury and street-level philosophical speculation; its pulp classicism awaits a mere turn of the screw; whereas “War Horse” or “The Artist” invite nothing but silence; they are dead ends.

The first shot of the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” is so audacious, in conception and in substance, that I wondered how it could keep going in that vein. It’s a medium two-shot of a still-young married couple, seated side by side, in a bare room, facing and addressing the camera, which is in the place of the judge who is heard questioning them as he weighs the wife Simin’s plea for divorce on the grounds that her husband, Nader, is unwilling to follow through on the couple’s plans to emigrate with their young daughter. They’ve gone to great effort and expense to obtain visas (for an unnamed country) which are soon to expire, but the man now prefers to remain in Tehran to care for his father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. When Simin—whose headscarf is loose enough to show that her hair is dyed reddish—tells the judge that she wants to emigrate because she doesn’t want to bring her child up in such “circumstances,” the judge asks, “What circumstances?” Simin’s silence is one of the most daring and sublime silences in the recent cinema, because what she, and Farhadi, imply is: “You—the religious authority, and the fact that I have to plead to you—are the circumstances.”

I wondered how it could keep going in that vein—and, unfortunately, it doesn’t. What follows from this setup is a series of moral puzzles, arising from the couple’s separation, that involves their daughter, Termeh; the woman whom Nader hires to care for his father while he’s at work (in a bank); that woman’s husband; Termeh’s tutor; another judge; by implication, the web of political and religious authority that holds Iran together; and, even more than that, the power of family ties and the lengths that a family member will go to protect them. It’s a hard movie to talk about, because it’s all plot, and virtually any mention of the action comes off as a spoiler. But the plot is set in motion by conservative religious practice—the hired caregiver’s concern over attending to the elderly man’s bodily needs—and it turns on issues of truth and falsehood, as well as of law and justice and whether indeed they always coincide.

Yet none of the audacity, of the visual tension, of the political abyss of the opening scene survives the kicking-in of the intricate script. Farhadi relies on point-of-view shots and partial or obstructed perspectives to conjure a world of elusive appearances, and his puzzle-like plot invites—even demands—viewers to reconstruct, in retrospect, the steps in thought that the characters take in order to reach their conclusions and determine their actions. Farhadi’s intelligence and empathy are unimpeachable; but it isn’t enough for actors to embody characters with warm-hearted engagement, nor for a director to pose questions, editorially, made for discussion in the lobby or the living-room. Imagine “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” without John Wayne calling James Stewart “pilgrim,” without Stewart in an apron propping up his law book beside a washtub, without a shooting lesson at the horse farm or an orotund, alcoholic newspaperman to apostrophize the doings or a cactus rose or a literacy class—a moral lesson without symbols, without resonances, without context, without fantasy or imagination, without vectors pointing toward the past and inducing a future. “A Separation,” in presenting a collection of events as they fit together, loses the sense of presenting a world.

Of course, there’s some elemental documentary value to the depiction of these events—as, for instance, when the action shifts, on several occasions, to courtrooms, and plaintiffs and defendants find themselves interrogated, all together and in close quarters, by a judge—and with no lawyers there to intercede on their behalf or to represent their interests, even as, at a moment’s notice, testimony puts even plaintiffs at risk of facing charges themselves. Farhadi offers a schematic view of life in Iran—a sort of bulletin-board sociology of educated folk who are relatively prosperous and relatively liberal, poor folk who cling to religious ways and bend them only in the face of desperate circumstances—and his nuanced, naturalistic direction comes off as a costuming of stick figures. The silence in the first shot of “A Separation” is more eloquent than the talk that follows, and what Farhadi doesn’t show there is the most revealing thing in the film.

Could the absence of the inner life reflect Farhadi’s despair of the possibility of even having one in Iran as currently constituted? Could the absence of symbol and visual invention evoke the very censorship of artistic expression that Iranian filmmakers endure? Could the schematic storytelling suggest the stark moral choices, in the face of oppressive and unjust authority, that every ordinary Iranian is forced to make as a part of just getting by? Could the silencing of telling silences, the obscuring of revealing absences mark the heavy hand of repression? Could the absence of past and future be exactly the point? There’s doubtless a vast amount of social detail that an Iranian viewer would pick up, and that I don’t, and that might offer clues as to whether Farhadi has, in effect, defaced his film in order to project a higher-order political-aesthetic critique—or whether the movie’s failings are entirely its own. It’s also worthwhile comparing Farhadi’s film with those made by other filmmakers in Iran as well as in other places, such as China, where political criticism and personal expression are similarly repressed by the government.

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of France’s pay-cable channel Canal Plus’s program “Le Journal du hard” (“Hardcore News”)—which is exactly what it sounds like it is—Le Monde features an interview with Henri Gigoux, the channel’s “director of acquisitions for adult programming,” who laments the state of the industry:

I watch one or two [pornographic films] a week, not more, because there aren’t more than that many to be bought. When I started [in 1993], I had four or five presentable films each month. Today, I’m lucky when I have eight in a year. On the one hand, the quality has decreased monstrously. On the other, all the films we broadcast show protected relations [i.e., protected by condoms], whereas most of the worldwide production is done without protection.

Gigoux explains how the related news broadcast came into being: “Nicolas Boukhrief, who was the editor in chief, wanted it to be film journalists who did the show with the same respect and under the same conditions as a report on a classic film,” and he says that it “was the first program to treat the question without excuses, without mockery—when we have to laugh, we laugh—while trying to show its qualities.” But the interviewer, Olivier Zilbertin, misses the money shot: Gigoux refers to the “quality” and the “qualities” of pornographic films, and Zilbertin never asks Gigoux what he’s looking for in a hardcore film. That would make for a good story.

For more than two decades, George Lucas has been fascinated by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen—the outfit of African American fighter pilots who fought in Europe during the Second World War—and has wanted to make a film on the subject. It’s almost here: “Red Tails” (the title refers to the pilots’ decoration of their airplanes) opens January 20th; Lucas put up, according to this report by Marco R. della Cava in USA Today, $58 million of his own money to get the film made, and he hired Anthony Hemingway to direct it—but took care of the aerial footage himself:

“I love dogfights and I know how to do them,” he says. “I told Anthony, ‘You worry about the actors and the story on the ground, and I’ll worry about the one hour we’re in the air.’”

Here’s the way that Lucas describes his approach to the project:

“For me, Red Tails is like ‘Flying Leathernecks,’” he says, the 1951 John Wayne charge through Guadalcanal. “It’s corny. It’s über-patriotic. And it’s a really exciting action-adventure movie. As for the racism in our story, it’s embedded in the material, so we just had to be careful not to overdo it.”

“Flying Leathernecks,” of course, is Nicholas Ray’s 1951 movie about the Marine air corps’ role in the battle of Guadalcanal and its innovative tactic of providing close air support for ground troops. But it’s also a few other things. It stars John Wayne as Major Dan Kirby, who is brought in from the outside to take over a command for which the outfit’s highest-ranking officer, Captain Carl Griffin (Robert Ryan), was deemed unfit. It opens with a group of pilots drinking and cracking wise in the absence of superior officers, who are shocked to find that “Griff,” who is one of their buddies, hasn’t been promoted. The movie is filled with conflict between the two officers, both personal and professional: Griffin dislikes the hard-nosed Kirby’s disciplinarian ways and finds him insensitive to the flyers’ emotional needs. He also finds him cavalier about the flyers’s very lives: he thinks that Kirby sends pilots into battle without regard to their chance of survival and blames him for combat deaths—and it’s precisely this close personal relationship with his pilots that renders Griffin unfit for command. The great Ryan, a poet of involuted fury, brings an extraordinary clenched torment and anger to his scenes with Wayne, and Ray captures his expressions and his gestures (as when Griffin refuses to shake Kirby’s hand) with mercurial, anti-melodramatic touches. (I’m reminded of Howard Hawks’s first sound film, “The Dawn Patrol,” about commanders who are agonized by the duty to send flyers to a sure death.)

It’s not one of Ray’s best films—these scenes are pared down in length and number to make room for an awful lot of hortatory pomp, and the behind-the-scenes story of how top brass became convinced of the new tactic’s efficacy is tossed off lightly—but there’s also some surprising “Catch 22”-like humor about the necessity of theft to keep the outfit running, as well as a remarkable use of documentary war footage, which Ray integrated powerfully into the action. In their biographies of Ray, both Bernard Eisenschitz and Patrick McGilligan make the connection between Ray’s leftism and his desire to avoid blacklisting by directing such a frankly patriotic film, and both downplay Ray’s personal engagement with the substance of the drama. But what’s good in it is passionate, ambiguous, painful, and full of conflict that outruns the project’s patriotic fervor. I haven’t seen “Red Tails”; I’m looking forward to doing so; and I hope that, if Lucas took it as a model, he didn’t shy away from its non-celebratory essence. (I also wonder what it will mean to the film for one director to handle the drama and another, the “dogfights.”)

Image from “Flying Leathernecks.”

A quick word to mention a forthcoming release that will merit the fuller attention it will doubtless get when it opens this spring: Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam,” a comedy that stars Michel Piccoli, as a newly elected Pope who is hesitant about taking office, and Moretti himself, as the psychiatrist who is summoned to the Vatican to help him. It’s a triumph of tone—Moretti turns loopy doings practical and makes the ordinary seem deliciously strange—and also of time. A fundamental virtue of the cinema, and maybe even the founding one, is that it makes time ebb and flow: that it conjures a sense of time, of time as such, that isn’t necessarily that of the real-time events onscreen; that it puts apparent continuities out of sync with themselves, layers tempi, unfolds instants into rising arcs, drops slow unfoldings into shocking free fall. This sort of metaphysical instinct, physically achieved, is a defining trait of the art of the director, and it can’t be willed into being by way of script construction or visual strategy.

Not every project, however, fosters the exercise of this art. All sorts of other considerations—emotional, psychological, political, industrial—come into play; some make for open fields, others for hurdles, and still others for stumbling blocks. The trace of the artist isn’t the same as important art. In “Habemus Papam,” Moretti lays practical time on historical time on thoughts of eternity and makes a movie that, despite some dubious script elements, achieves an astonishing grandeur, in jolting disproportion to its comic simplicity. Official release date, April 6th, at IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, and, soon thereafter, via video on demand.

Let the kvetching begin: the runup to Oscars is upon us, as is the inevitable criticism of the process (and, of course, of their significance or lack thereof). But since there’s an intrinsic pleasure in seeing virtue rewarded and vice returning home with its tail between its legs, let’s look at the nominations for Best Foreign Language Film—which, as I’m reminded upon reading Larry Rohter’s post today at the Times about certain patterns in the entries, are made by the countries themselves. Here’s how the Academy puts it:

Each country shall be invited to submit its best motion picture to the Academy. Selection of that picture shall be made by one organization, jury or committee that should include artists and/or craftspeople from the field of motion pictures. A list of the selection committee members must be submitted to the Academy no later than August 1, 2011.

What this means, in practice, is that the governments of most of the countries of the world exercise a disproportionate, often grotesquely misguided and even censorious, power regarding the Oscar. China, for instance, has never nominated a film by Jia Zhangke, who has made some of the best films in the world over the past decade and a half. And when a filmmaker such as Lou Ye falls afoul of the authorities for making such a potent work of political rage as “Summer Palace,” it’s morally repellent for the Academy to ratify, tacitly, his persecution by the regime; it’s exactly the sort of film which, being justifiably well-received here at the time of its release, ought to have been in the running for a nomination.

Why doesn’t the Academy adopt a procedure for foreign-language films that resembles the one they rely on for documentaries? Let an Academy committee, a “Foreign-Film Branch” akin to the “Documentary Branch,” focus its attention on the year’s foreign-language releases and make pre-nominations that would be winnowed down later. That way, beside cutting out governmental fiat, an extra peculiarity could be avoided—the inability of two great films from the same country to both be nominated. The award, after all, isn’t for best foreign country, just for a movie.

I can’t help but wonder, though, whether the inclusion of foreign governments or quasi-governmental organizations in the Oscar process is part of an implicit reciprocity regarding Hollywood’s access to foreign markets, its fight against piracy, and the close, albeit unofficial, ties between the U. S. government and the Motion Picture Association of America (which is currently headed by former Senator Chris Dodd).

P.S. Turns out that there’s another silent feature in the running for an Oscar alongside “The Artist”: the Slovenian feature “Silent Sonata” (though it seems that the Slovenian government didn’t file its paperwork in time).

Abraham Polonsky directed his first feature, “Force of Evil” (which I discuss in this clip), in 1948; he made his second, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” in 1969. Between them came the blacklist. He tells the story of his life and his art in an extraordinary interview by Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin that appears in their book “The Director’s Event.” Polonsky establishes on the page a voice that’s as remarkable as the virtual one he confirms on the screen—and expresses his frustration with the difference: “A great deal of just plain living goes into making a film—that’s the pleasure of it—and the interviews never reflect that.” In this clip, I highlight a scene involving a telephone; Polonsky discusses its surprising significance:

The telephone is a dangerous object. It represents dangerous kinds of things. I don’t like instant communication. I like it to take a long time before I understand you and you understand me. In the film, it forms the structure of the characters’ relationship…. I had a big telephone made so that it would loom very large in the foreground of those close-ups. I guess the telephone was an easy symbol for the connections between all the different worlds in the film. These worlds communicate with each other through telephones instead of feelings. We’re getting our messages in signals, not feelings.

Polonsky describes the film (aptly, I think) as “experimental in a way, deliberately experimental”; it’s a tragedy of the cinema that he took so long before getting back to work on his ideas and his feelings (though he reports that, while on the blacklist, he made a good living working as an anonymous script doctor). And he wonders why he “didn’t go right down and start working in the underground-film movement which was in existence then.” I imagine Polonsky coming up all over again in the same way that John Cassavetes began his own directorial career, with “Shadows”—but Polonsky was nineteen years older.

The new year starts with a subtle bump to an old story that yet remains forever new. Shortly after noon on New Year’s Day, glancing at the Web site of Le Journal du Dimanche (which is what its title says it is, France’s Sunday paper, since the main dailies publish six days a week), I was struck by a trend in the day’s biggest entertainment stories, or rather, a mighty current that’s still tossing whitecaps to the surface: the classic films of the French New Wave and their filmmakers—and, in particular, Jean-Luc Godard—are still big news in France.

First, at the top of the news feed, the unpleasant report that the Parisian townhouse of Jean-Paul Belmondo—the actor who was propelled from obscurity to instant international stardom by Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” which was released in France in 1960—had been burglarized this weekend. Then, a breezy review of a new biography of Brigitte Bardot is headlined, “Marie-Dominique Lelièvre devotes a celebratory book to the actress of ‘Contempt’ ”—the 1963 film by Godard in which she starred. And the headline for the January edition of the novelist Philippe Sollers’s monthly chronicle declares, “Godard, 36 years old, is in the process of veering leftist, whence ‘La Chinoise,’ aided by Mao’s little book.” (It’s a report on an autobiographical book by the co-star of that film, Godard’s second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, “Une année studieuse”—A Studious Year—that will be published this month.)

Ever since the age of André Malraux (France’s Minister of Culture when the French New Wave rose), French movies have been promoted (i.e., subsidized) by the government as part of the national patrimony, and, since the arrival in power of François Mitterrand, in 1981, the New Wave itself has been canonized officially (as it had already been by critics, viewers, and other filmmakers) as the new core of the tradition. And the subsidies that issue from official bodies sometimes go to films of a stunning modernity that perpetuate and extend the work of the New Wave—as in Chantal Akerman’s latest film, “Almayer’s Folly,” which will be shown this Friday at Museum of the Moving Image. (The Cineuropa site reports on its financing.)

But, at least as often, works of a bewildering mediocrity enjoy generous official financing, and many young filmmakers learn to pursue such official financing as the path to a filmmaking career. For that matter, filmmakers who started as audacious outsiders don’t always manage to keep their footing on the subsidy tightrope, as the director Jacques Doillon told me several years ago; his remarks on the vagaries of subsidies remain noteworthy. The result is a system of conservation, in the literal sense: some of the most important established artists are able to continue working in a way that would likely prove impossible in the absence of subsidy—but subsequent generations are encouraged to proceed with a firmly retrospective gaze. There isn’t much of an independent cinema in France; though rumors of declining subsidies due to budget cuts is cause for worry regarding venerable filmmakers whose films aren’t often big box-office draws, they also hint at the sort of madness-by-necessity, the wild production of independent, self-financed or hardly-financed movies, that has always been one of the great cauldrons of cinematic art.

P.S. American independent films are often welcomed in France with greater energy than at home, as with Matt Porterfield’s “Putty Hill,” which opened far more widely there this year.