A CONVERSATION WITH KENT JONES

Posted on by Mick McAloon

This interview was conducted at Film Society of Lincoln Center in June 2015 and originally published online at http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/june-08th-2016

Mick McAloon: So at what stage did you realise you wanted to be a writer?

Kent Jones: That’s funny that you should ask me that because I resisted the idea. Because I had people telling me you’re a wonderful writer. And of course when you’re young—at least that was the fashion when I was young, but that still seems to be the case because I see it in my son—but when you’re young and people tell you, “You’re great at this, and you should do this…” the response is: check: I’m not doing that. That’s off the list. Nobody gets to define me but myself. You all get to do it in public. I get to do it in private. Here’s what I’m doing. But of course: that’s just telling yourself something. So: I started writing when I was very young. And then I kept writing…

MM: What kind of writing? Was this fiction? When did the move towards writing about film happen, because I gather you’ve always loved film?

KJ: I’ve loved films since I was a little kid. But writing was separate, I think, in the sense that it was separated in the way that people talked about it. People never linked writing and film: they were two different kind of things, two different enterprises, two different worlds. For me cinema started as the faces of actors, movies on TV, and starting to see them in the theatre. But writing—I really liked just to write. It’s like Robert Creeley says: it’s not what you write; it’s the act of writing. I don’t know. I really liked writing stories, I liked writing plays. When I was a little bit older I got into writing criticism.  And then I got into criticism and was hired as a critic when I was 19.

MM: You must have been a great reader as well as a watcher of movies.

KJ: Yeah. I suppose that I was. And again it was sort of like. Why don’t you read more? OK I’m not going to read more. But, of course, I guess I did. I really loved Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler when I was kid.

MM: In Physical Evidence you write of discovering or being given Andrew Sarris’s “The American Cinema” and Manny Farber’s “Negative Space”.  Both make for sophisticated reading, especially for one so young. Was the impact immediate or was it felt later?

KJ: With Andrew the impact was immediate. But it wasn’t just Andrew… it wasn’t Andrew’s writing; it was the categories, the hierarchies. As a writer, Andrew stayed within a very circumscribed territory. Even though I enjoyed reading his writing, it didn’t inspire me as writing. It was Andrew’s hierarchies and categories that got me, and they were connected with Richard Schickel’s TV show, The Men Who Made the Movies. Because the whole idea what is a director—that’s interesting, you know. What does that mean, that there’s a director? And then Manny, that’s something else. I saw the book. It had this cool cover. I bought it. And for years I would crack it open every once in a while and look at it. I had no idea what the fuck this guy was talking about. But I am intrigued. And that’s the way that it should be. If you read something and you don’t understand it, that’s fine.

MM: The intrigue is interesting to me. I didn’t discover Farber until the reprint of Negative Space in 1998. And one of my first thoughts on reading him was: Who is this guy?  Then there seemed to be a lot of activity: Chris Petit made a film…

KJ: Yes, Negative Space.

MM: …You wrote about Farber in Film Comment. He received a citation for his contribution to film criticism (1999). There was the NYFF poster 2001. Did your intrigue lead to look back and look for more? Because he wasn’t writing then…

KJ: He was teaching, in California. I lived in Massachusetts. I wasn’t going to hitchhike across the country to meet Manny Farber. But I did look for some of his stuff. I didn’t see his lecture in New York. [Farber gave a lecture at MoMA in the 1980s]  But I did look for some of his pieces in Film Comment. But that’s much later. I bought that book when I was 15. At a certain point it clicked. And again you’re dealing with the issue of understanding something. So I would read…. I would look at it on the page and [see] that’s a very attractive rhythm. That’s the thing: if you read and you try to understand absolutely everything then you’re not reading it. If you understand that writing is a matter of rhythm, and that a writer is engaged in rhythm and not just the translation of thoughts into language then you’re dealing with writing. With Manny as opposed to 90% of other critics—Pauline Kael being an exception—you’re thrust into the deep-end of rhythm right away. I related to him much more than Pauline Kael.

MM: He also had the capacity to describe movies in a tremendous visual way. Do you think that was because he was a painter?

KJ: Well, that question comes up a lot. It came up a lot for him, and he would always answer it in his combative, recalcitrant, barbing way. I think when he would say “well the two things were interchangeable”, I tend to agree with him, you know, having spent a lot of time with Manny in the last few years of his life, and Patricia [Patterson]. I think that he—he thought about writing in the same way that he thought about painting, sometimes to the detriment of the painting in the sense that some of the images that he painted were—during the period when he was relating movies to paintings—I think that those paintings were a little bit less interesting than the later stuff once he stepped away from teaching and he devoted himself to painting and he was just working with stuff from the garden and he wasn’t making calculations about how new it was, and how hip it was, and what the space was. Then I think it was different and freer. And I do think that something similar happened with the writing at a certain point. It got very self-consciously positioned in the way that it winds up in the very end, that those very last few pieces, being a little bit more dated than other pieces that he did simply because he was so conscious of what he was reacting against. Cause Manny was a very reactive guy. It was always: Who else is in the room? How can I get the drop on everybody?

MM: You recently wrote an essay about actors and film criticism which, among other things, looks at how Pauline Kael’s love of actors was central to her criticism. It also chimes with what you were talking about earlier. As actors become more career-oriented, so famous from such a young age, are the faces with experience coming through?

KJ: Every time is different, and every time has its own configuration. Those configurations are changing so quickly that people can’t always adequately describe them as they’re happening. For my generation, when we were growing up…My father was in World War II. Most people that I knew, their father was in either WWII or Korea. The faces that we identified with, the people that we identified with, Bogart in particular, whose work was very beloved on college campuses and by younger people at the time, you would see those movies in theatres playing for little runs here and there. Those were the faces that we identified with and the films that we identified with. And that was part of the idea of the world of movies—the past. Those movies were on TV all of the time.  There were posters all over the place of those guys, particularly Bogart, Cagney. I forget who else. And then you would have the actresses like Rita Hayworth, and things like that. And that was very present: Classic Hollywood, the Golden Age of Hollywood. There was the nostalgia industry. The people from WWII were getting older…And it seemed like that was always going to be there—that would be there forever.  And of course, when you’re young you think everything is going to be there forever.  And then of course as you get older you realize that things that seem like they’ll be forever won’t—may not be. Some things that seemed like they were going away come back in another form. All different kinds of things, you know, it’s the way you apprehend life. And so you had the memory—for me—I have the memory of those faces and the way that I related to them. And of course, part of it is that I’m older so I don’t relate to the face of Jake Gyllenhaal or Paul Dano the way that I do Bogart and Cagney. On the other hand, I have a different kind of relationship to Paul Dano. I’ve crossed paths with him personally a couple of times but beyond that—I’m talking about Paul Dano because I just happened to catch Love and Mercy the other night and I was amazed. I’ve always liked him. And he’s somebody who genuinely likes movies, which you can’t say of every actor. He knows his way around movie history; he reads film criticism. But I was staggered by what he did in that movie. It gave me a vision of Brian Wilson that I hadn’t really had. It’s a pretty striking movie. But he’s pretty astonishing in it. I guess it’s that sensation of getting older and the sense of time you hear people talking about. When I hear people talking about for instance Soundgarden in nostalgic terms, I find that so comical. Cause Soundgarden never meant anything to me to begin with and the idea that they’re already over and that they’re somebody to get nostalgic about is very funny. And then kind of poignant. The same thing with certain movies. I had a conversation with a cinefile that I know once and she was talking about how much she loved watching those great old 90s prints. And so, all four words together: Great. Old. 90s. Prints. She was just a younger person experiencing an emotion in the same way that I when I was younger would talk about the 1970s, when people started looking back at the 70s. That was the first series I ever programmed. [KJ programmed a series, “Out of the 70s’: An American New Wave” for Bruce Goldstein at Film Forum.] I guess that my answer to your question is that the faces that haunted me from when I was young still do pretty much. Bogart always will.  And I suppose that some people do now more than others but it’s not just their faces. I respond to the physical interaction between those people in The Best Years of Our Lives, for instance.

MM: Of course, there will always be faces coming through that we can’t take or eyes off. Joaquin Phoenix.

KJ: That’s true. You’re right. This is me personally: when I think of Joaquin Phoenix, I don’t think of his face. I think of his body in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. I like him in other people’s movies. But in his movies, they’ve worked out something between them that I find very moving in and of itself in addition to the movie around them.

MM: In the introduction to Physical Evidence you write: “The good films in our midst—Rushmore, The Departed, Café Lumiere, Zodiac, A Scanner Darkly—are made by people who don’t so much transcend their moment as bypass its clichés, its institutionalised inhibitions and prohibitions. They fight their way through the movie, past their own certainties, preconceptions, and tricks, until they arrive in territory that is unchartered, for them and for their audience as well…” That sounds like There Will Be Blood.

KJ: I agree with you.

MM: Have you spoken to Paul Thomas Anderson about the leap he made after his first three films— with Punch Drunk Love seemingly a bridge—and which he has kept going with his recent films?

KJ: It’s astonishing. Well, in that book there was a piece I wrote about Magnolia that’s reflective of a certain time, and things that were floating round at a certain time. I felt the same way about David Fincher’s movies: I didn’t like them. It’s not true that I didn’t like them, I liked Fight Club—but Zodiac was a real shock to me. I went to see it because people were saying, “Hey, this movie is really different.” I went and for the first half hour I was like…I don’t like this. And then about 40 minutes in I had this experience that people like Schrader talks about having with Faces by Cassavetes …He said, you know, I thought I hated this and then I realized I don’t hate this at all. I think this is amazing. I remember feeling exactly the same way. With PTA it’s a little bit different in the sense that I was armed with all this cinephilic stuff. He’s copying Marty, bla bla bla. I really liked Punch Drunk Love. I thought it was a really beautiful film. There Will Be Blood I thought—as you say—I thought it astonishing. I wasn’t convinced by the ending. I now am. It’s a very unusual ending. It’s a very unusual way to think about how to end a story and what it is. And it telescopes down in a way. And it’s such a particular story that it’s almost like, you almost think to yourself: that’s a weird story for somebody to want to tell. You know, because up to the point before he’s in the mansion, everything is like, OK, I get it, the humiliation…After that, why does he want to do this?  But then there are reasons that one could get into. It is something that exists—that way of living, that way of approaching things.  I thought it was an amazing film, but I did I have that reservation. But when I saw The Master I didn’t have any reservations. And have I spoken to him? Yes.

MM: Did he read your piece?

KJ: He read my piece and he talked about it, in an interview with Cahiers Du Cinema, I think. I wrote to him and I thanked him for mentioning it.

MM: Was this the piece on The Master?

KJ: Yes. And he and I started corresponding. People have talked to me about that piece and said, “Well, you know, that’s your response to the movie. All I know is that wasn’t the movie that I saw.” Wait a minute, it wasn’t the movie that I saw either. It’s the world that the movie lived in. That’s very clear to me. All of those things that I was talking about in that piece are very much present behind the action of that movie.

MM: When I read your piece on The Master, and the way you foregrounded the film’s action, it reminded me of Greil Marcus and Invisible Republic and his writing on Dylan and The Band, particularly on the origins of The Basement Tapes. You talk about this in “Physical Evidence” where you say “the intention is to simply describe the movie itself or enlarge that description by including the circumstances under which it was made or exhibited; in other words, to describe the territory of and around and within and without the movie.” I also liked the insight that frames the relationship of the two men in the context of Lee Strasberg and Marilyn Monroe. Which comes back to acting.

KJ: They were on my mind because we were making this film about Kazan at that time.* But that led me to thinking about that stuff. Greil is involved in positing things within [the] historical continuum in a different way. But I get the relationship. Manny did something similar, but…he would do it sentence by sentence, and sort of bring in things that were outside the movie so he could give you the framework of the movie, an ever expanding framework in theory. He was very involved in that as a teacher. And then he was deeply involved in it when it came to the era when he was growing up, which was the 30s, and he gave a lecture at MoMA, in the 80s, where he actually spent a lot of time talking about movies carrying the DNA of their era. He had his own particular way of going about it.   In my case, part of what led me there in that piece is that I just thought—and there was the piece I wrote on The Tree of Life which was sort of similar in that sense—the older that I get the less I think that there is a separation between the arts. With movies people are always trying to stake out the ground: this is cinema. But that’s within the five second moral framework within human history in which cinema has existed. 100 years is nothing, or 120 years—whatever it is. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don’t even have to elaborate on that. I think that trying to figure out how the arts relate to each other—Manny was involved in that too. I just think he had a late 60s-ish, against-the-grain kind of way of going about it than I do. But I think he was right in his general orientation. When he’s describing the 1930s and what goes on in 1930s movies he’s relating it in his notes for this lecture to what Faulkner what was doing in The Sound and the Fury, what Russell Lee and Walker Evans were doing in photography, what he was seeing in the world, with the people getting in line for food and the very tight relationship to jobs. You needed a job. It meant everything. Those things are…Good criticism: there’s not an abundance of it. Let’s put it that way. But there’s not an abundance of good anything.

MM: Is there a sense also when you wear multiple hats does the programming and criticism all feed in—that you’re programming the audience in a way to come out to bat for a film? A way of saying: somebody is making valuable work here that needs to be seen, without necessarily being a salesman on its behalf.

KJ: It’s important to keep them distinct. You know, in my case there are three hats.

MM: You’re making films…

KJ: Right. One thing: On an ethical level, for instance, when I made the movie about Hitchcock and Truffaut I thought to myself, Gee, I guess if said to the selection committee, “OK, this one’s up to you…” Then I thought, wait a minute: I can’t do that. I’m not even going to entertain that. This film can’t get near this festival. It’s just that simple. How can I possibly look a documentary filmmaker, or any filmmaker, in the face and say “Sorry, I’m going to show my move but yours isn’t good enough.” …It’s just not possible. So that’s one thing. But then the other thing is what you’re talking about: which is the activity. What is it? Is it salesmanship? It’s…I mean, yeah, but not really. Salesmanship is having a job.  Here’s what you have to sell, go do it. What you feel about it is of no consequence whatsoever. Doing what Andre Bazin defined as communicating the original shock that you feel when you see something—I can get with that: that’s something else. That’s writing. It’s film-making too. There’s rhetoric about keeping stuff alive and making sure that people remember the past, or that they get to experience a film that they wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere. But really, it’s not about that in terms of the [programming] choices or in terms of the writing. If it were then it would make for a very dull film festival; it would make for very dull writing. I wouldn’t want to read it. I can’t stand it when people say to me: “I support this film for these reasons.” Why bother? But they’re distinct activities. They can blend in in one way and then in another way, because it’s all me. But they’re distinct activities.

MM:  How do balance the demands of all three activities? Or is it a case of—I came across this great Susan Sontag quote—“the day has pockets.”?

KJ: You know, I don’t believe in …what’s the line in The Age of Innocence? “How are you going to spend your day?” “I thought I’d save the day rather than spend it.” I could quote that.  I could quote the Buddha saying that you have to live your life like your hair is on fire. I remember I was with Olivier Assayas and we were in Minnesota a few years ago, and we were just kind of touring around. And we saw a neighbourhood that people tend to retire to. And he said: Can you imagine anything worse than retiring? It’s like Shangri-La by the Kinks: you’re stuck in your rocking chair. I mean, the idea of retiring is of course part of an idea of life and what it is and what it is to live life that I just have no relationship with whatsoever. So the idea that work is distinct from life is something that is not just part of my being. I share it with my children. I share it with the woman I live with. She and I both work in film. We spend a lot of time talking about movies, writing about them. But more to the point: there is no distinction between work and life. So for me, to be able to move back and forth from one thing to another, focus on multiple things, multiple projects, multiple strands—is just the way that I live. I guess for other people it’s different. They need to focus on one thing.

MM: Has making films changed your criticism?

KJ:  Making films has changed my criticism in the sense that…it’s also…I think—and I really started to think this a long time ago, and my opinion has only grown stronger as the years have gone by—that 90% of film criticism is just divorced from the actual practice of making movies. It just is. When you talk to a filmmaker about what a movie is, they’re talking about one thing. When you talk to a critic about what a movie is, you’re actively talking about something completely different. And when I say critic, what I mean is a particular stripe of critic. And this again is contingent on the time question: what era are you from. There’s the era of cinefilia—you know the lineage of it just as well as I do. And so you wind up with something that’s kind of like its own world, distinct from actual movies. It’s crossing paths with movies. But when you read a description of it, this has nothing to do with what a filmmaker is hoping for, working toward, trying to achieve, the way that they’re thinking. When you read a lot of criticism—and it’s a kind of criticism I’ve written myself, plenty of—it’s as if you’re in geometry class and you’re looking at a diagram with different points on it, and how they relate to each other spatially. Now when somebody says Jacques Tourneur has a marvellous sense of space, I know what they’re talking about. And to a certain extent I agree. But then it only goes so far. And that’s not very far at all.  And then it’s not useful anymore.  Eventually what winds up happening in the world of cinefilia is people twisting themselves into pretzels and twisting the movie into a pretzel along with them. And denying what’s right in front of them, and conjuring something that isn’t there at all.  Now I’m not saying that this happens all the time. But I’m just saying it happens more than it should. And so, I guess that I’m not sure if there ever is such a thing as a tradition of criticism—you know, I think that there probably isn’t. I don’t know if there was ever a great community of critics. I don’t think that that ever existed in any art form. There are just individuals. There’s Ruskin. Coleridge. Edmund Wilson. Manny. Geffrey O’Brien. One can remember certain instances. Obviously Cahiers Du Cinema is one of them. But that’s just like a brief moment with this genius who was dying of leukaemia surrounded by these younger men who were also geniuses for the most part, or something like that, on their way to taking their writing and using it as a declaration. But I think that by and large the way that films are generally talked about, regardless of all these bigger questions, are just off from the way that they’re made.

MM: What is it you like about Geoffrey O’Brien? Does he bring another kind of eye to it?

KJ: Geoffrey has got a completely different orientation than me. He’s very involved in the ghostly kind of after-image. He writes so movingly about that. He generates a real excitement. He does it with movies and with literature and with music.

MM: Towards the end of your essay on actors and film criticism, you write: “Film criticism skews in the direction of predictability and control and multiple conflicting fantasies of ultimate order, while film-making has been skewering over the last 40 years in the opposite direction, reaching a series of peaks with Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Jackie Brown and Paul Thomas Anderson’s last three films.” Take me through some of these peaks and what is it that these films have, particularly with regard to the acting?

KJ: Well, I have to do something immodest and talk about my film. But I’m talking about it because in my film—about Hitchcock and Truffaut—the question of acting comes up. Because of course that conversation started in 1962, and they had a little bit more of it later. You know, Hitchcock tells a very famous story about working with Montgomery Clift. “Please look up at the hotel sign.” “Well, I don’t know if my character would be looking up at the hotel sign.” “What do you mean? You don’t know if your character would be looking up at the hotel sign. You need to. And the reason you need to is that because I need to establish for the audience that the hotel is across the street, cause that’s where the rest of the movie is taking place. So please do so.” So that was Hitchcock’s first exposure to that. I know that things never work in a straight line dramatically that way. There’s always stuff that happens. But let’s say that before the 50s, before Brando and the Actors Studio, the relationship between actors and directors, the common picture was: the director said here you go, this is what I want, give it to me, Lubitsch pantomiming, bla, bla, bla. So here’s Hitchcock—and PS: Cary Grant, he’s one of the most brilliant actors in the history of the medium, but, you know, he’s not Marlon Brando; his relationship to the craft of acting is different. So with Brando, with James Dean and with all the people who came after them, with the spotlight put on acting, with the exultation of acting as an event in and of itself, as an avenue of exploration in and of itself, you’ve got a new reality to deal with. Now Hitchcock saw it and he also thought about the questions of cultural legitimacy, you know, “people might take my movies more seriously if I made a different kind of film and worked with actors in a different way.” I think he’d been thinking about this stuff before because in the 30s…as a producer, Hitchcock wanted to give John Van Druten a year to just play with a camera and microphone and some actors and develop something—the kind of thing that he himself never would have done. So that’s interesting. But the point being that [Hitchcock] arrived at this moment. And how did he deal with it? By taking an actress who was involved in that kind of thing, Eve Marie Saint, but making her into something else; by finding Tippi Hedren; by working with people like Frederick Stafford; around the edges with people like Roscoe Lee Browne. Taking Bruce Dern and not really doing much with him that was that adventurous. And I think that when the younger generation—Marty, Paul Schrader, Spielberg—came along, what made their films feel different—one of the many things that made them feel different—was that they responded to that reality. In a way that was different from say Arthur Penn and Robert Mulligan, because they both have their own ways of working with actors. So with Arthur Penn, with Cassavetes, and with Ulu Grosbard—let’s take those three directors—you’re seeing a new kind of response to acting. It’s like when the Velvet Underground came along and they mixed the drums up front, and the guitars in the background. Suddenly the acting occupied a different position in the film. With Marty, it’s absolutely staggering that he was able to take acting in Mean Streets—and it really starts with Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, you can really feel it there—but in Mean Streets he really arrives there. And he’s able to take that electricity and work from it and respond to it immediately and build the scene around it and filter it through the original impulse behind the making of the movie…and give it form and shape so that it all arrives as a piece. That’s something that nobody had done before. Coppola did something different. He yoked something big around the energy of actors. It’s a different kind of feeling. And as much as I… I guess Raging Bull is a movie where you feel like you’re in the middle of the raw essence of it. You really do.  It’s every second. Because every single gesture in that movie feels like they waited until the climate was created, the actors were allowed to fail, that they had an idea in mind that they stuck with, that the energy was cultivated very carefully. And then they hit a point, and then somebody would do something that was surprising, and they would build on that. It’s like in the Love & Mercy movie, when Brian Wilson says: “How did you just play that?” One of the musicians says, “I made a mistake.” And Brian Wilson says “You make the same mistake every four measures and it’s not a mistake anymore.” So I think that’s the kind of thing that went on with acting. I’ve never had that conversation with Marty. But you can just tell when you’re looking at Raging Bull, that’s kind of what went on.

MM: I always liked that moment where Jake watches Vicki (Cathy Moriarty) leave… and then Jake helps a bouncer evict someone from the dance. It’s so casual, seemingly off-the-cuff, but so well judged, exactly what Jake would do…

KJ: Well, it also slows down. And the speed of the music. And the slowing is different from the speed of what you’re seeing, and what he – Jake – is seeing. And they’re creating their own…they have their own relationship. The car drives away in slow motion and the guy tosses the cigarette. We were talking about rhythm and language before—that’s the kind of thing that happens in language and poetry when you have that kind of little scintillation happens with a word. And so the cigarette gets tossed, and it’s kind of to the rhythm of the music and it falls in and out of step with that rhythm. And then it shifts away from slow motion and back and the sound comes up again. Suddenly it’s, “Get the fuck…” And that guy comes out. And it’s one of those things where you see that guy’s face and you see it for about three and a half seconds and you never forget it. I can see that bouncer. Every single moment of that movie is 100% alive to every possibility of everything that’s happening. Maybe things get a little—in the scene where he’s knocking his head against the wall in the stockade—it’s a little different. It shifts registers a little bit. It shifts registers during the fight scenes too. The rhythm becomes more…What can I say? There’s a dominant idea of what the rhythm should be. And those scenes were obviously so complex to shoot they had to be stuck to more than in other scenes. But other moments, like when they’re in the hotel room, and Jake is wearing that jet black shirt, and the way the black and white is timed, it’s just a field of black. And he’s just pacing back and forth like an animal and he spits on the carpet. And there’s the shot of Vicki.  You can feel her reaction to it but she doesn’t do anything to enact it.

MM: Jackie Brown is one of those peaks you mentioned.

KJ: That’s one of the great films made by anybody anywhere. And you know, it’s so funny that it’s his best film and whenever he talks about it he speaks of it in disparaging terms, and it’s because I’m sure that he knows…

MM: I’ve seen him take issue with other critics who’ve said that to him. It’s a tremendous film.

KJ: It’s staggering. Actually, we were talking about Paul [Thomas Anderson] before. He and I did a thing here [at the NYFF] last year, a conversation. We have directors who come show scenes from other people’s movies that have affected them. And so he showed clips from other stuff. But he showed a clip from Jackie Brown. Any given moment in that movie is staggering. I enjoyed Pulp Fiction, but it was too much of a movie lovers’ grab bag for me. It was aimed too much at me. He wasn’t doing that consciously, it was just his thing. I might like it more now. I don’t know. I enjoyed it. But Jackie Brown I wasn’t excited to see it, but when I saw it, holy shit. But Robert Forster really excited me. Looking at it again, the whole movie excites me. It’s the same kind of thing as Raging Bull.

MM: I was also struck by something you said about acting teachers’ contribution to American film in the 1970s. Was there contribution one of tone / texture / energy?

KJ: Well, when you stop and realise that almost every actor, if you think about the seventies, and you think about DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Robert Duval, James Caan, James Coburn. You think about all those names and then you realize that every single one of them went through went through one of four, maybe five, acting teachers. I’m talking about Strasberg, Adler, Sanford Meisner, Sandra Seacat, and Jeff Corey in California. Jeff Corey: every single God-damn actor in Roger Corman’s…

MM: Nicholson, Robert Towne?

KJ: Nicholson. Robert Towne, yes, was very much involved. Jeff Corey was an actor who was blacklisted so in order to make money he gave acting classes and the Hollywood studios that were blacklisting him were sending people to his classes. I don’t think Bruce Dern went to him, I think he went to the Studio. They weren’t all adepts the way Paul Newman was. I think DeNiro went from place to place. It’s like Kazan said: they all had something to offer but don’t think that any of them was the way.  But really, Meisner, Strasberg, Adler, Corey and Sandra Seacat—that’s where most of the energy was. That’s why that movie In the Spirit—I don’t know if you know that film, but it’s a little film with Peter Falk and Elaine May, and Elaine May actually directed it but for some reason I think she took two years in the cutting room with it but for some reason it’s credited to Sandra Seacat. But it’s all part of that world. So when you realize that, that’s pretty staggering. Then you think to yourself, then that’s something that must be paid attention to. It just hasn’t. (He laughs.)

MM: I just want to end with a quote from Randall Jarrell from an essay called The Age of Criticism:

“Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”

KJ: I think that that’s generally true though. I think it’s true of criticism in a very particular way, and he’s right. When the critic becomes the central event, they’re not writing criticism any more. When they become the central event because of what they’re doing as opposed to the way they’re positioning themselves, that’s different. So Manny—and I’ve quoted this many times—but he said the idea is to get yourself out of it so that the object itself takes on religious awe. And he was talking about painting, but same thing with the writing. I think it’s absolutely true. It also rhymes with Bazin—prolonging the original shock of the work of art. But then at the same time, one of the things that Andrew Sarris just spent so much time promoting and a lot of people spent time promoting—I understand why it happened. We all understand why it happened in relation to the history of cinema. But along with certain pieces of terminology, one thing that I don’t think is of much use anymore is the idea of expressing your personality. Howard Hawks’ movies aren’t interesting because he expresses his personality. The expression of his personality is incidental to what is great about his great films. John Ford too. John Ford’s personality—who cares? John Ford himself probably didn’t care about his personality. Nobody does. You don’t want people to come away from a movie thinking wow what a great guy, I’d really like to meet that director. What you want them to come away from the movie is to forget that you’re there. Terrence Malick I’m sure is not thinking to himself, “Gee I want people to see The Tree of Life because I really want to be loved.” That’s not the idea. The same thing with The Master. So different things happen in your life and you have certain vanities. But the point is where you’re going, and when you’re not going there then your art isn’t interesting. I think the same thing that’s true of criticism is true of art in that instance, in that area.

—Mick McAloon

*A Letter to Elia (2010) – Directed by Martin Scorsese

A profile of Kent Jones

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Kent Jones is not the first film critic to turn filmmaker. But as director of the New York Film Festival, a role he has held since late 2012, Jones’s increasingly prolific output behind the camera can, on occasion, put him in an awkward position. He has already had to recuse himself from the selection process due to his creative involvement on one film under consideration—Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P, on which Jones shared a screenplay credit. But with his new film, Hitchcock / Truffaut, Jones took the matter out of the selection committee’s hands. As he told me last summer, between announcements of the festival’s main slate, “This film can’t get near this festival. It’s just that simple. How can I possibly look a documentary filmmaker, or any filmmaker, in the face and say ‘Sorry, I’m going to show my movie but yours isn’t good enough?’”

Given the film’s subject matter—the meeting of Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut in 1962 that yielded one of the great books about cinema—this might seem harsh on New York’s committed cinefile audiences. But Jones’s integrity as a programmer is consistent with his modesty as a critic, a modesty which in no way negates his passionately held positions. (He took Tarantino to task for slighting John Ford.) As a critic, Jones, to paraphrase James Wood, does not show a lot of plumage towards his subject: he is not in competition with the film under discussion. In this he follows in the footsteps of two film critics whose names crop up several times during our conversation, Andre Bazin and Manny Farber.

It was Bazin, founder of Cahiers du Cinema, who provided a stage for the most notable critics-turned-filmmakers in the history of cinema, and a rare moment, says Jones, of a critical fraternity with Bazin framed as “this genius dying of leukaemia surrounded by these younger men…on their way to taking their writing and using it as a declaration.” Those young men—Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—were instrumental in elevating the artistic reputations of Hollywood directors who had previously been considered light entertainers, Hitchcock being a case in point.

Manny Farber had been doing much the same thing: writing about the unseen merits of American filmmakers, though long before La politiques des auteurs made its way across the Atlantic in the guise of Andrew Sarris’s Notes On the Auteur Theory. Jones, who was born in 1960, was a teenager when he discovered both Sarris’s The American Cinema and Farber’s Negative Space, books that would affect him in different ways. “With Andrew the impact was immediate. It was [his] hierarchies and categories that got me. Because the whole idea what is a director—that’s interesting, you know. And then [Negative Space], that’s something else. For years I would crack it open every once in a while and look at it. I had no idea what the fuck this guy was talking about. But I am intrigued. At a certain point it clicked. If you understand that writing is a matter of rhythm, and that a writer is engaged in rhythm and not just the translation of thoughts into language then you’re dealing with writing. With Manny as opposed to 90% of other critics—Pauline Kael being an exception—you’re thrust into the deep-end of rhythm right away. I related to him much more than Pauline Kael.”

The lone wolf of American film criticism, Farber emerged out of one tradition of American critical prose—he replaced Otis Ferguson at the New Republic and James Agee at Time respectively—but ended up in an altogether different place. Susan Sontag called him “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic [America] ever produced”, and in her landmark essay Against Interpretation praised him for his ability to describe films in terms of their surface and texture. But then Farber was a terrific painter who came at movies with an innate sense of the visual, and an understanding of how something is put together. If Jones has sought to emulate (though never imitate) anyone, it is Farber, as much for his approach (detail-oriented and exhaustive) as well as his style.

Jones is not a weekly reviewer as such, so he is spared from having to write about everything he sees. At Film Comment, where he is also deputy editor, he is blessed with a long lead-in time and given ample space to cover the ground of a given film or filmmaker. (And covering the ground was a Farber imperative.) His pieces are rigorous, serious without being dry, and often richly conceived. He can evoke a film’s mood or a director’s style in a sentence, which in the case of Sofia Coppola amounts to the same thing:

“Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at the articulation of something so fleeting and ephemeral that it seems to be on the verge of evaporating on contact with her hovering, deadpan, infinitely patient camera eye.”

One can see that Jones has also been rigorous about his choice of subject matter: critical appreciations of leading contemporary filmmakers (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wei, Abbas Kiarostami, and Lucretia Martel) account for over half the pieces in Physical Evidence, his debut collection. When he began writing for Film Comment, in 1996, articles about ‘the death of cinema’ were very much in the air. But as far as Jones is concerned, the medium is still in its infancy, still vital. The writer Phillip Lopate, who included one of Jones’s essays in the Library of America’s American Movie Critics anthology, calls him “…the film critic most alive to this moment”.  Physical Evidence, published in 2007, was proof enough, but in the years since Jones’s writing has grown in authority, while his newly divergent path as a filmmaker (he co-wrote Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy and A Letter to Elia) has perhaps permanently marked his approach to writing criticism. “Making films has changed my criticism in the sense that—and I really started to think this a long time ago, and my opinion has only grown stronger as the years have gone by—that 90% of film criticism is just divorced from the actual practice of making movies.”

In terms of the position Jones presently occupies within contemporary film culture, he reminds me of Mark Cousins: wearers of multiple hats, both have run major festivals; each are quick to challenge critical orthodoxy and / or received wisdom; and while they are devoted students of film history, they are always making the case for cinema now. And as with Cousins, it’s clear that each activity—writing, programming, and making films—feeds the other. “There’s rhetoric about keeping stuff alive and making sure that people remember the past, or that they get to experience a film that they wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere. But really, it’s not about that in terms of the [programming] choices or in terms of the writing. If it were then it would make for a very dull film festival; it would make for very dull writing. I wouldn’t want to read it. I can’t stand it when people say to me: ‘I support this film for these reasons.’ Why bother?”

This uncompromising and passionate approach informs Hitchcock / Truffaut, which like Jones’s criticism, is deeply engaged and carries no extraneous weight. Jones is neither seen nor heard—there’s that modesty again—but then he doesn’t need to be. His material is gold, and he knows it. Truffaut’s book was the culmination of a kind of pursuit and an artistic debt repaid, with Hitchcock flattered and bemused, as well as moved, by the younger man’s ardour and attention. What strange path led Truffaut to Hitchcock? Well, Jones answers that too. And through the use of the original audio tapes, their voices can now be heard. Nuance, lost to the inevitable limitations of translation and transcription, is restored. We hear for ourselves how Hitchcock’s curiosity about Truffaut’s comfort with actors and improvisation led to his famous remark “actors are cattle”. It sounds far more benign on tape than it looks in print. Hitchcock, in effect, is rescued again.

But Jones opens up—extends—the conversation in another way. By turning to those filmmakers who devoured and absorbed its contents as though it were a sacred text, the film reveals the extent of the book’s (ongoing) impact—on Hitchcock’s reputation and those who followed in his wake. As you’d expect, Jones’s long-time collaborator Scorsese is on hand to talk about the book’s radicalising effect on his generation. But no less illuminating are Peter Bogdanovich, himself a great critic, Paul Schrader (ditto), Olivier Assayas, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, and Wes Anderson.  Fincher is particularly good on Hitchcock’s mastery of time and space. He also mischievously wonders how a DeNiro, Pacino, or Hoffman might have flourished under Hitchcock’s “iron umbrella”.

Jones, who writes with great insight about actors and acting, believes that Hitchcock was aware of the shifts that had taken place in American film post-Brando and “the Method”, or as Jones puts it—“the exultation of acting as an event in and of itself.” But like many of Hollywood’s old-guard, Hitchcock struggled to accommodate the modern actor’s quest for authenticity: directorial design trumped motivation; his process trumped theirs.  And the struggle made for an interesting tension in Hitchcock’s films, particularly in the era of arguably his greatest work.

Says Jones: “Hitchcock arrived at this moment—and how did he deal with it? By taking an actress who was involved in that kind of thing, Eve Marie Saint, but making her into something else; by finding Tippi Hedren. Taking Bruce Dern and not really doing much with him that was that adventurous. And I think that when the younger generation—Marty, Paul Schrader, Spielberg—came along, what made their films feel different was that they responded to that reality. It’s like when the Velvet Underground came along and they mixed the drums up front, and the guitars in the background. Suddenly the acting occupied a different position in the film.”

I get the impression that Jones could talk about cinema all day, and probably does. But he has a festival to run, and I have a plane to catch. Before I leave, I quote a passage from Randall Jarrell’s essay The Age of Criticism:

“Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”

Jones agrees. “I think that that’s generally true. I think it’s true of criticism in a very particular way. When the critic becomes the central event, they’re not writing criticism any more. So Manny—and I’ve quoted this many times—he said the idea is to get yourself out of it so that the object itself takes on religious awe. It also rhymes with Bazin—prolonging the original shock of the work of art.”

And this is where Hitchcock/Truffaut succeeds—as both a movie and as an example of criticism in action. As the film builds towards the peaks of Vertigo and Psycho, the conversation stops, and Jones returns to those images and moments that have lost none of their power. Kim Novak, say, emerging remade before James Stewart’s eyes, her appearance filtered through that strange, vertical shaft of aqua green light.  A moment that best explains, but never quite reveals, itself. And we forget we are watching a documentary ostensibly about a book, a movie about cinema, but one that effortlessly, passionately—and modestly—achieve Bazin and Farber’s critical objectives.

—Mick McAloon

To read the full interview go to http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/june-08th-2016

Program Notes: Julianne Moore

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Julianne Moore had already won an Emmy for her work in television by the time Hollywood caught up with her. A supporting role in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) received stand-out reviews, but her real breakthrough came in The Fugitive (1993), where she played a doctor suspicious of Harrison Ford’s strange behaviour. Utilitarian in blue scrubs, and on screen for less than five minutes, Moore’s resolute presence still registered within the confines of a ‘wrong man’ pursuit. She stood out again in a fine ensemble cast in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), a portmanteau of Raymond Carver stories transplanted to LA. In one scene, a marital argument with co-star Matthew Modine, Moore appeared naked from the waist down, drawing accusations of prurience on the part of Altman. But Moore was undaunted by the level of intimacy the scene was really about, and, as she’s repeatedly shown, emboldened by challenging material. The underwriter of her own risks, Moore early on established a pattern of working that continues to this day: roles in Hollywood movies offset by candid portraits of troubled women in films by auteur directors.

Vanya On 42nd Street (1994) began as an Andre Gregory/Wallace Shawn theatre project in 1989, but was transformed by Louis Malle into an unusual hybrid: a rehearsal of ‘Uncle Vanya’ that turns into a full-on performance. Moore won Best Actress at the Boston Society of Film Critics’ Awards, as well as the attention of a new wave of American filmmakers. In Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), a suburban, existential horror film, Moore seemed to collapse in on herself as her character succumbed to ailments real and imaginary; while in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), she was maternal and bereft as a 70s porn star in the San Fernando Valley. The Coen brothers were next, with The Big Lebowski (1998), where Moore infiltrated the Dude’s (Jeff Bridges) bowling pin dreams. Of all Magnolia’s (1999) desperate characters, Moore’s anxious young wife seemed the most attuned to the film’s looping hysteria. Besides, her presence in Anderson’s sprawling LA story acknowledged the film’s debt to Short Cuts—though this time Moore remained in a fur coat throughout and still appeared naked. She was glamourous, God-fearing and guilt-ridden in The End of the Affair (1999), and perfectly at home in the Nova Scotia setting of The Shipping News (2001). But her finest performances of the new decade came in The Hours (2002) and Far from Heaven (2002), where Moore encapsulated the despair of two 1950s housewives, and in the process was nominated for Oscars in leading and supporting categories.

A ‘supporting actor’ in the best sense of the term, Moore is by now such an established figure that her presence immediately enriches a project, whether mainstream  or ‘independent’. Soulful, incandescent and fearless, Moore is once again in contention for Best Actress for her performance in Still Alice (2014).

—Mick McAloon

Notes on actors: Marlon Brando

Posted on by Mick McAloon

As Stanley Kowalski in the original stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Marlon Brando forever altered the landscape in American theatre and film. Often cited as the leading exponent of “the Method”, the acting system derived from the teachings of Stanislavski, and promulgated in America by Lee Strasberg, what Brando had—or possessed—could not be schooled. Even though he had studied with acting coach and Group Theater breakaway Stella Adler, the nature of Brando’s gift was too large, too poetic, and ultimately too mysterious to be attributed to any one movement. David Mamet was right to surmise that a talent like Brando would have succeeded anyway—regardless of the gurus who sought to claim his success a result of their expertise as opposed to his.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924, Brando was educated at Shattuck Military Academy, where he was expelled for insubordination—an early warning—though not before impressing in a school production. There had already been intimations as to where his future might lie: Brando’s older sister had moved to New York to pursue an acting career; his mother had been a member of the Omaha Community Playhouse, where she had appeared onstage with Henry Fonda. After expulsion from Shattuck, Brando briefly returned home before joining his sister in New York, where he attended Erwin Piscator’s Drama Workshop at the New School. It was here, in a class that included Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters, that Brando met Stella Adler. On seeing Brando for the first time, Adler is reported to have said: “Who’s the vagabond?” As first responses go, Adler’s is remarkable in that seemed to intuit what future audiences would feel—or a variation thereof—whenever Brando appeared on stage or on screen. In her review of Last Tango in Paris (1972), Pauline Kael writes fondly of seeing Brando in what was only his second Broadway production, Truckline Café, in 1946: “…the young man who brought me grabbed my arm and said “Watch this guy!…” We’ve been watching him ever since.

He made his screen debut with The Men (1950), as a returning war veteran and paraplegic. In what was considered unusual practice at the time, Brando spent weeks at a veterans’ hospital in an attempt at understanding as well as verisimilitude. His performance was warmly reviewed, but the film was a disappointment at the box office. Still, Brando had made his mark. He followed with the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), directed by Elia Kazan, the play’s original director and Brando’s most vital collaborator. Tennessee Williams’s poetic masterpiece was always too florid for the screen, but Brando is still electric. And as the closest thing we have to a record of his famous Broadway performance, it should be cherished.  Something in the clash of acting styles—Vivien Leigh’s theatricality, Brando’s immediacy—suited the material and brought out the conflict in Williams’s drama: the old world versus the new. Stanley Kowalski may have been a brute, and Brando had access to all his uncouthness and vulgarity, but there was something about his presence—deeply masculine, strangely feminine, a poetic delicacy always beneath the surface—that seemed if not to subvert the archetype then to co-exist within it. Perhaps it was a matter of Brando’s extraordinary physiognomy, combined with casting that was simultaneously ideal and contradictory. For Brando made Stanley interesting and not just alluring, which ran counter to the playwright’s intentions. Williams envisaged Stanley as a meathead, comfortable in his own skin, but without a trace of sensitivity or a flicker of poetry in his soul—qualities that Brando had in abundance. And it was these qualities and contradictions that coalesced around Brando’s film appearances in the early 1950s. In his own way, Brando opened the door for a subsequent generation of rebels—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. But those genuine American firebrands could never be confused with the biker rebels in The Wild One (1953). Laslo Benedek’s film was dated even before the cameras rolled, though its iconography remains potent, if only for t-shirts and bedroom walls.

Viva Zapata (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953) saw Brando extend his range, doing John Steinbeck and Shakespeare respectively. But in On the Waterfront (1954), and back with Kazan, he gave one of his greatest performances. As ex-fighter and longshoreman Terry Malloy, Brando exemplified “the Method” at its most poetic. Two scenes in particular are justifiably lauded: Brando picking up Eve Marie Saint’s glove and putting it on his hand—a moment of improvisatory genius; while his “contender” speech in response to his brother’s betrayal remains one of the most moving and memorable scenes in cinema: “It was you, Charlie. It was you.” Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro would pay tribute to this scene in Raging Bull (1980), though they refrained from the emotion so evident in Brando’s delivery. Pauline Kael called Brando’s speech “the great American lament…” after she’d been quick to claim him as “our most powerful young screen actor, [and] the only one who suggested tragic force…” In hindsight On the Waterfront can be seen as the culmination of Brando’s genuine engagement with Hollywood, and the precise moment he delivered on the promise of his Broadway arrival. After three successive Academy Award nominations (1952-1954), he won Best Actor, as though anyone needed to be told.

Brando himself became indifferent towards acting and ambivalent about fame. He made some poor choices, though he was still capable of a surprise like Guys and Dolls (1955). He directed himself in One-Eyed Jacks (1961) after falling out with—and firing—Stanley Kubrick. But directors who fit the Kazan mould, such as Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn, and who had come up through the theatre and live television, elicited something like his best work: The Fugitive Kind (1959), and The Chase (1966).

But then in the early 1970s, Brando made a spectacular comeback. The Godfather (1972) reaffirmed his status as America’s greatest actor, while forever linking him to the generation he had inspired—Al Pacino, James Caan, and, by way of his young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (1974), Robert DeNiro. Last Tango in Paris (1972) saw Brando at his most naked and personal before he withdrew from public life altogether, aside from the occasional cameo or supporting role in films such as The Missouri Breaks (1976), Superman (1978), A Dry White Season (1989) and The Freshman (1990). His final film was The Score (2001), with DeNiro and Edward Norton. But his last great film was Apocalypse Now (1979), where Brando’s rogue colonel anticipated the actor’s self-imposed exile from the profession he had done so much to redefine.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Amy Adams

Posted on by Mick McAloon

One of Hollywood’s most versatile actors, all of Amy Adams’s transformations emanate from within. For the most part recognizable from film to film, it’s as if Adams is forever divesting herself of unwanted layers. Over the course of her career, and in her most revealing work, the masks keep falling away.

She made her screen debut in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), and followed it with supporting roles in long-running television shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2000), Smallville (2001), and The West Wing (2002). She seemed on the verge of a breakthrough as Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend in Catch Me If You Can (2002), and the first time she was paired with a major director (Steven Spielberg). She lent her voice to multiple characters in King of the Hill; and was a sister to Debra Messing in The Wedding Date (2005). But it was not until Junebug (2005) that she gave the sense of having truly arrived. The role of Ashley, an unworldly and pregnant young wife, tapped into those qualities that appear genuine and integral to Adams herself: wholesome and good. But her character was also very complex, and within the film’s family dynamic—a successful brother returning to his family home with his sophisticated wife—Ashley understood, or at least intuited, more than she was letting on. Adams won a prize at Sundance, as well as outstanding reviews, and received the first of her Academy Award nominations—for Best Supporting Actress. She returned to television, with a role in The Office (2005-2006), and then took on an out-and-out and comedy, Talladega Nights (2006), with SNL alumni Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. But then with Enchanted (2007), Adams drew on her musical theatre background and embraced the challenge of a Disney live action/ animated adventure: her Disney princess, Giselle, was an unadulterated delight.

By now her range was becoming apparent and her ascension to the A-list inevitable. A supporting role in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) paired her with Philip Seymour Hoffman for the first of three films together. Doubt (2008) saw her conflicted and on shifting moral ground as a young nun caught between Hoffman’s priest and Meryl Streep’s bitter principal, Sister Aloysius. In The Fighter (2010), her Boston-Irish barmaid was just as tough as Mark Wahlberg and the quiet centre of David O. Russell’s voluble film. She took a supporting role in On the Road (2012), and was arguably the most interesting and least explored character in The Master (2012), which saw her back with Hoffman. There, as in all her best work, Adams’s complexity clouds the outer disposition that is sunny and bright—her musical theatre optimism. It is this capacity that leads many of her directors to entrust her with the emotional centre of their films. That is certainly the case in American Hustle (2013), even in a cast with mesmerizing (Christian Bale) and firecracker talent (Jennifer Lawrence). Transparent in the best sense of the word, Adams’s vulnerability is perhaps her greatest strength.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Harvey Keitel

Posted on by Mick McAloon

The unacknowledged patron saint of first-time directors, Harvey Keitel has given his blessing to a remarkable array of embryonic talent. Starting with Martin Scorsese in 1965, Keitel’s extraordinary run of luck extends across four decades. Other filmmakers to feel the benefit of his participation in their inaugural projects include: Paul Schrader, Ridley Scott, James Toback, and Quentin Tarantino. Whether Keitel considers himself lucky is another matter. A student of myth, Keitel’s career—or journey—has been defined by its openness to risk and experience. If it is hard to imagine other actors in Keitel’s signature roles—in the “personal” films of some of the above directors, as well as those of Abel Ferrara and Jane Campion—then that is surely down to the nature of Keitel’s performances and the sense that he has spared nothing of himself. At his most fearless, Keitel is the embodiment of William Hazlitt’s maxim: “actors are the only honest hypocrites.”

In 1965 Keitel was working as a court stenographer when he saw an ad in a trade paper. An NYU student was looking for an actor for what was then intended as a graduation project. The student was Martin Scorsese, and the film—four years down the line—would go on to become the director’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1969) Although the film did well on the festival circuit, its real significance lay in its fraternal pairing of actor and director. Raised in different boroughs, under different faiths, the two New Yorkers had enough of a shared background to realise Scorsese’s Lower East Side story. A bond was forged.

Mean Streets (1973) saw Keitel reprise his role as Scorsese’s alter ego, making up for his sins not “in the church but on the street.” He appeared in Scorsese’s next two films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976). The latter took him away from Scorsese’s neighbourhood streets, seemingly forever, and closer to hell, or at least Hell’s Kitchen. Exchanging one inferno for another, Keitel began to show his range and his appeal to first-time directors: he was undaunted by difficult material. The films he made with Ridley Scott (The Duellists 1977), Paul Schrader (Blue Collar 1978) and James Toback (Fingers 1978) represent a high-watermark in Keitel’s career. By comparison the 1980s were something of a fallow period, though he emerged from the wilderness with the role of Judas in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He began the next decade alongside Jack Nicholson in The Two Jakes (1990), though the much anticipated sequel to Chinatown (1975) performed poorly at the box office. But then Keitel embarked on a terrific run of films: Thelma and Louise (1991), Bugsy (1991), Bad Lieutenant (1992), Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Piano (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Smoke (1995). And with recent roles in Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), he seems to have found a place in Scorsese devotee Wes Anderson’s repertory company—a home from home.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Gary Oldman

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Gary Oldman led the way for a generation of British actors—among them Daniel Day-Lewis, Alfred Molina and Tim Roth. Schooled in the theatre, Oldman and his coevals claimed as their rightful inheritance the screen legacy of the “Method”, thus extending a line of influence that runs from the Moscow Art Theatre to British film in the 1980s and beyond. What happened in between—the formation of the Group Theatre and the subsequent emergence of the Actors Studio—was crucial to this development, as were the remarkable films that came out of the New Hollywood, and especially the work of Robert DeNiro.

Like DeNiro, Oldman was capable of extreme physical transformations. Already a versatile and award-winning stage actor, Oldman enhanced his reputation with a run of films that showed a talent for deep immersion. He made his screen debut in Remembrance (1982), followed by a supporting role, alongside Tim Roth, in Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983). The latter hinted at Oldman’s capacity for danger and volatility, albeit with an innate sense of comic timing—qualities that would go on to serve him well. But it was his performances as Sid Vicious, in Sid and Nancy (1986), and as Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), that Oldman revealed the depth and range of his talent. Putting flesh on the bones of biography, Oldman went beyond impersonation. The distinctive manner in which he inhabited both punk and then playwright led Roger Ebert to hail Oldman as “the best young British actor around.” With his ear for accents and a great vocal facility, Oldman now laid claim to roles that previously would have gone to an American. His migration to Hollywood was inevitable and desired, though the films he made on his arrival, Criminal Law (1989) and Chattahoochee (1989), were unremarkable.

Not that Oldman had finished with England. In Alan Clarke’s The Firm (1989), he was exuberant, menacing and funny as an estate agent-cum-football hooligan. He brought the same unpredictability to his Irish-American gangster in State of Grace (1990), which saw him go head to head with Sean Penn. Both actors had drawn from the same wellspring of artistic influence, though it was Oldman who landed eye-catching roles in films by Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola. In JFK (1991), Oldman vanished into the void that was Lee Harvey Oswald; while as the lead in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), he lowered his voice an octave and made the “undead” soulful in perpetuity.

For the rest of the 1990s, Oldman lit up big budget movies with extravagant star turns and in the process typecast himself. But he delved deep for the autobiographical Nil By Mouth (1997), his directorial debut and return to South London roots. Benevolent but pivotal roles in two franchises, Harry Potter (2004 – 2011) and The Dark Knight (2005 – 2012), established his cumulative box office eminence. And as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), both actor and spy came in from the cold.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Sean Penn

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Sean Penn arrived in American movies fully formed and iron willed. Confident and charismatic from the start, he drew early comparisons with Robert DeNiro, his most significant influence as an actor. Unfortunately for Penn, he came of age when American cinema was in the doldrums. High concept movies, exemplified by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, ruled the day and defined the era, while the “personal” auteur-driven films of the previous decade found fewer champions in a Hollywood underwritten by multi-national conglomerates. Still, Penn flourished in a way that seemed to be entirely self-generating, his intransigence apparent from his big-screen debut in Taps (1981). Penn stood out in a cast that included George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton (fresh from an Oscar win), and Tom Cruise in what was only his second movie. If Cruise went on to enjoy spectacular box office success, Penn, with his roiling complexity, was quickly regarded as the best actor of his generation. Pauline Kael singled him out as early as Bad Boys (1983): “Each time, Penn comes as a complete surprise.”

He had already demonstrated his range with an influential comedic turn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), a rare feat in itself for a heavyweight talent conscious of his place within a tradition of sullen but poetic American actors: Brando, Clift, and Dean. But what Penn the tragedian needed—great material, a Scorsese to his DeNiro—was simply not there. Instead he gravitated towards mavericks and mentors, befriending John Cassavetes, Marlon Brando, and Dennis Hopper, while conspiring to act opposite the previous generation’s best actors. One by one they all lined up, as though at a passing-out parade: Christopher Walken in At Close Range (1986), Robert Duvall in Colors (1988), DeNiro in We’re No Angels, and Pacino in Carlito’s Way (1993). And on each occasion Penn acquitted himself. The torch had been passed, and then he threatened to quit acting altogether in favour of directing.

But his absence only seemed to incite a clamour for his return. He began to work with directors deserving of his talent: De Palma, Fincher, Malick and Woody Allen. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in Dead Man Walking (1995), directed by his fellow actor-turned activist Tim Robbins. He received another nomination for his egotistical though oddly endearing jazz guitarist in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999). Here Penn offered a rare instance of an actor dominating an Allen script without recourse to Allen’s mannerisms. He won his first Oscar for his performance in Mystic River (2003), where he was turbulent and vengeful, as well as tender. And then in Milk (2008), as the eponymous gay rights activist and politician, Penn reminded audiences that he could be light on his feet and no less sorrowful. In recent years acting has taken a back seat to his own activism and humanitarian aid work. But he “suited up” again for This Must Be the Place (2011) and Gangster Squad (2013), where he blazed brighter than the pyrotechnics.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Gena Rowlands

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Gena Rowlands is best known for the remarkable films she made with her husband John Cassavetes. Although she appeared (uncredited) in Shadows (1959)—Cassavetes’ astonishing debut—and had a supporting role in A Child is Waiting (1963), it was not until Faces (1968) that their collaboration began in earnest. Gena’s is the first face we see after that film’s post-title sequence: closer than close-up, looking straight into the camera, and every inch a movie star. The grain and gauge of the film is like one of Warhol’s Factory movies—unvarnished, black & white, 16mm—but Rowlands’ face, presence and beauty evokes 1950s Hollywood glamour. She once told a journalist that without Cassavetes her career “might very possibly have been doing Pillow Talk…” But Rowlands was always closer to Bette Davis (her idol) or Gloria Grahame than to Doris Day: the glamour came with an edge. What Rowlands said of Davis applies equally to her: “she was tough in the right way.”

Like many New York-based actors, particularly in the early 1950s, she came up through live television in such programmes—or telecasts—as Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents. But it was on Broadway, in Paddy Chayefsky’s ‘Middle of the Night’ (1956), where she made her name. Cast as ‘the girl’ opposite Edward G. Robinson, her performance received critical raves as well as attention from Hollywood and a contract with MGM: The High Cost of Loving (1958); Lonely Are the Brave (1962); The Spiral Road (1962); in Sinatra’s orbit in Tony Rome (1967); and Machine Gun McCain (1968), with Cassavetes in the lead role. But then from 1968 to 1984, she acted almost exclusively in her husband’s films: Minnie and Moscowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), and Love Streams (1984). With the exception of the generic Gloria, all of them could be described as “home movies”, albeit on an elevated artistic scale—even Minnie & Moscowitz, which puts its own heady spin on the “screwball comedy”, feels “personal” if not downright autobiographical.

The sense that this singular body of work was very much a family affair is intensified by the way the films were made. Cassavetes and Rowlands mortgaged their home to fund each project; friends, family and associates were cast in significant roles; in-laws’ houses were commandeered as locations; and at the heart of this enterprise—Gena Rowlands’ galvanic presence. To see her in her prime is to realize how much her influence has been absorbed by other filmmakers and actors. Pedro Almodovar had her (and Bette Davis) in mind when he made All About My Mother (1999)—the film directly references Opening Night as well as All About Eve (1950). Blue Jasmine (2013) and Cate Blanchett’s ‘woman on the verge’ had traces of Rowlands’ Mabel Longhetti—but then Woody Allen had worked with Rowlands on Another Woman (1988), where Sven Nykvist’s camera drew on the expressive power of her face. After Cassavetes’ death in 1989, she began to work more regularly for other directors: Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth (1991), Terence Davies’ The Neon Bible (1995), and then for her son Nick Cassavetes, Unhook the Stars (1996), She’s So Lovely (1997), and The Notebook (2004). She lent her voice to the English-language version of Persopolis (2007), and further family support—this time for her daughter, Zoe Cassavetes—to Broken English (2007). But it is the films that Cassavetes wrote for Rowlands which will be remembered and that cry out for an Almodovar-inspired rubric: All About Gena.

—Mick McAloon

Program Notes: Boyhood

Posted on by Mick McAloon

By virtue of its unusual production history, Boyhood gives us two films in one: a work of fiction spanning twelve years in the life of a young boy growing up in Texas; and a shadow-documentary which escorts its fictional counterpart each step of the way. How could it be otherwise given Richard Linklater’s singular decision to shoot the film over a corresponding period of time, and with the same cast? The actors age before us, though it is the evolution of Ellar Coltrane (who plays the boy, Mason) and Lorelei Linklater (his sister) that has the most resonance.

Like Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films and Michael Apted’s Up series, Boyhood’s power is accumulative, though Linklater’s longitudinal study is a lesson in compression: he gives us the incremental bloom of Mason’s life, and all of its attendant experience, in less than three hours. The seamless and unannounced transitions that introduce each phase of his development elicit from the viewer a commensurate gasp of delayed recognition: look how he has grown! But underpinning it all is a feeling of concern and even suspense, no doubt generated by our awareness of the cast’s deep investment, as well as the onset of time: what will become of Mason/Ellar?

As we follow Mason through the commonplace rituals of an American childhood, we begin to see that one of Linklater’s achievements is to have created something unerringly specific, deeply personal, and universal. And whilst the film is something of a paean to parenthood (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are both subtle and true as the boy’s divorced parents), Boyhood’s real subject is time, unfolding as it does in a perpetual present tense.

—Mick McAloon