AFI Fest 2012: Saturday Nov. 3rd and Sunday Nov. 4th

(Disclaimer: These notes were scribbled in between screenings while waiting in line for other films. Only minor editing, for grammatical and factual purposes, occurred.) Thank God for the AFI Fest. I mean it as no overstatement to say that I was positively ecstatic to discover that the festival would be running during my stay in Los Angeles and that it was, without trickery or fine print, completely free. Here was an opportunity to check off the year's most anticipated festival films from Toronto, Venice, and New York, as well as the films I missed at Cannes, in one fell swoop. For perhaps the first time ever, I will have surveyed a year in film adequately enough to put forth a confident year-end list. I was quick to find out, however, that AFI Fest is not entirely different from Cannes – that is, not the silver platter I was unrealistically hoping for: films reach capacity abruptly, the packed schedule makes the head spin, and, most irritatingly, it’s still quite possible to wait in line for over an hour and, after standing awkwardly with confused victims as the time slot passes, be denied entry to a film. This was my start to the festival. Fortunately, it was a Kim Ki-Duk film, and I was already half-planning my first paragraph (the festival got off to a deeply unpleasant start with Pieta, because what else is new with KKK?...).

My schedule did finally begin with a bang, however, on Saturday afternoon with Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, the British director’s gorgeously shot and cut second feature about a meek English sound engineer named Gilderoy (Toby Jones) who arrives in Italy (in Rohmer-esque elliptical fashion, right at the beginning of the film) as a for-hire mixer on fictional director Giancarlo Santini’s (Antonio Mancino) giallo horror film, very much in the vain of Argento, Bava, etc. He’s expecting an inoffensive paid gig, but quickly discovers the work will be neither easy (he’s never worked on such a challenging or morally trying project) nor profitable (“money cannot be a motivator,” warns the absurdly dominating Santini). From there, Gilderoy phones in his work, begs for travel reimbursement, confesses to artistic differences, attempts to abandon the job only to be ominously turned down, and finally enters that familiar Lynchian zone of mushy disorientation where art, illusion, and reality clash and ultimately absorb one another (in this regard, Strickland's corresponding blending of image and sound through fluid transitions is accomplished).

The film hinges on a swap in female leads – a maneuver so often employed or hinted at by Lynch as a paradigm shift – and this gesture holds the key to understanding what Strickland is getting at. Berberian Sound Studio manages to be both a parodic celebration of the endless innovation and almost goofy conviction of Italian horror as well as a critical commentary on not only this particular genre but all works of art and cinema that, in aiming for so-called “brutal honesty,” end up merely perpetuating dominant and wrongheaded attitudes. Here, the target is misogyny, so carelessly flaunted in Santini’s dictatorial and borderline abusive direction, which eventually flurries into actual (offscreen) sexual offense. Gilderoy, an unwitting third-party, is finally affected by this workplace atmosphere too: after the actress switch, he begins speaking in Italian and his gestures grow remote and mechanical, the implication being that, in being swallowed up by this project, his identity has shifted, just as any artistic act must require complete commitment and immersion – one might say, the abandonment of one’s self – for it to work. Money cannot be a motivator, indeed.



In the next film I saw, very little could be boiled down to motivation. Nony Geffen’s microbudget feature Not in Tel Aviv seems to delight in its own senselessness, putting across radical tonal shifts and pieces of nonsensical dialogue with an unshakeable straight face. One might say this is a nihilistic film, but that would be disingenuous. Geffen has too much apparent joy for life and too much compassion for his wayward leads, even as he writes them into increasingly implausible scenarios. Essentially a series of non-sequiturs shared between an antisocial teacher (played by Geffen himself), his kidnapped student, and his high school sweetheart, the film has the dazed aimlessness of an Andrew Bujalski movie shot with an additional jolt of sensuality. Early on, I was bothered and even slightly put off by its incongruent approach – Geffen plays the murder of a mother as indie quirk – but slowly I found myself catching on to the film’s rarefied wavelength, and its misty light and soft pixilated black-and-white edges had a lot to do with it. Geffen’s photographic attention to his beautiful lead actresses (Romi Aboulafia and Yaara Pelzig are real finds) is near-Bergmanesque, allowing the film a genuine tenderness not often present in this kind of quasi-mumblecore exercise.

Unfortunately, the questions that were bouncing around in my head after the intoxicatingly weird Not in Tel Aviv – were the actresses actual friends of Geffen?; were the events depicted autobiographical?; to be blunt, what were the intentions? – would not be appeased as I had to ditch the Q&A to scurry a block down the street to catch Holy Motors again. Leos Carax’s hypnotic poem was resoundingly my favorite work from Cannes this summer, and I was hoping to relive some of the mystified joy I experienced watching it for the first time. Turns out that in many ways Holy Motors, by its very loony episodic nature, is designed to have a special effect on the virginal and the uninitiated (this chatty American crowd was having more of a ball with it than the French). That is not to say that I was not still deeply immersed in this dreamlike cocoon of a film, but that I lost a great deal of the shock and awe that accompanied my first viewing. In its place, though, came even greater contemplation, as Carax’s layers of association and abstraction only invite further peeling back. When I first saw the film in Cannes, I had to rush out before the credits rolled to stand in line for Amour, but this time I was able to sit through and caught Carax's dedication to the late Yekaterina Golubeva, the star of Pola X and the mother of the director's child. Knowing this placed in context the film's mournful attitude towards role-playing and the inevitability of life, and rendered Carax's self-aware sense of humor a particular bright spot.



It’s impossible to dismiss the technical difficulties that set the scheduled start time of the film back an hour and a half. When the film did begin, it was clear that the issues had still not been entirely resolved: in the moody, suggestive opening of Carax himself surveying his bedroom and then opening a hidden door to reveal a sleeping crowd at a cinema, the projectionists were still fiddling quite conspicuously with brightness and contrast, causing some images to blotch up indecipherably. When Carax finally cuts to daylight, an unflattering fog of green and a blowing out of the highlights was overwhelming for the first 10 minutes until finally the projectionists cleared up the matter. Oddly enough, this unpredictable happenstance helped bolster Holy Motors’ argument for celluloid; even though it’s shot in digital, it’s constantly calling attention to and mourning the intangible instability of its medium, the unsettling question of what exactly it means to be a digital recording in the first place as opposed to a concrete film strip. In fact, the film even offers some digital distortions of its own towards the end, as traveling views of nocturnal Paris crumble into incomprehensible fuzz and glitch. These shots are not unlike the unplanned problems at the beginning of the film (I’m sure some unknowing viewers suspected these were reprisals of the projection difficulties, or, conversely, that the issues at the beginning were intentional), and they contribute to the overwhelming feelings of sadness and loss that permeate the film – towards decay, larger purpose, and past selves.

Next up was Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air (French title: Après mai) the following afternoon, a coming-of-age drama set amidst the political turbulence of early 70s France when young, angry, and overeducated leftists were lashing out at a reactionary government stubbornly stuck in its ways after the May 1968 protests. For the most part, the film doesn't emphasize the detail of the political situation, instead allowing its explosive opening riot scene – wherein some of Assayas' most impressive and fluid visual choreography, feeling both hectic and precise, traces the beatings and chases through a thick fog of tear gas – to form the unsettling groundwork for the protagonists' bitterness throughout the film. Further acts of violence and vandalism ensue: Gilles (Clément Métayer), Christine (Lola Créton, gradually becoming the new Anna Karina in her puckish expressions, on-and-off sass, and unshowy ease), and Alain (Felix Armand) seem determined to see how hard they can push the buttons of their school officials before being expelled or arrested, and when they appear to have reached that breaking point after hurling a flaming bottle at a portable on school grounds, they decide to flee to Italy for a short time. This is precisely when the film reaches its peak (I could swoon in those picturesque shots of Italy much longer), and what follows descends slightly down a familiar path of free spirits, Pollock-inspired paintings, activist folk, agitprop filmmaking, hard drugs, and foggy religious epiphanies.



That Something in the Air ultimately coalesces into very little (or perhaps just something more elusive that I didn't catch on first viewing) after promising so much is disappointing given Assayas' track record of making seemingly simple films that expand outward to account for multiple layers of emotion and subtext. The film continues the fleet-footed cool and bright pastel ambiance of Summer Hours (both of which were lensed by Eric Gautier, a disciple of the late Harris Savides in his naturalistic lighting and confident camerawork) but lacks something as revelatory as that film's wise commentary on the value inscribed in objects or the irreconcilable divides between generations. It's expertly scored with period-specific rock and folk tunes, as always with Assayas, and there is also his characteristically rapt attention to tactility and sensations – to the feeling of breezy currents in open air rooms, of cigarette smoke wafting through fiery debates, and of thin surfaces of summer sweat lining the skin – but as I left the theater, I could not escape the feeling that Something in the Air was missing a sense of a larger purpose or a core idea other than nimbly handled nostalgia.

The next film more than made up for any disconnect I felt in the latter stages of Assayas' movie. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, in its perfect (terribly, terribly perfect) harmony of form and function, elicited the most physical response I've had to a film since either Antichrist or Irreversible. At a certain point towards the hour-mark of the film, I regrettably had to step out just to regain my gravitational bearings and walk off a growing nausea that was threatening to act up (if you catch my drift). Plunging the viewer into the nightmarish labor of deep sea commercial fishing via an onslaught of abstract imagery captured with an array of Go Pro cameras hooked to various parts of the sea vessel (chains, anchors, workers' helmets, even maimed fish), the film achieves a profound groundlessness that is the very poison of anyone prone to seasickness. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor's visuals have a lo-res harshness that occasionally bleeds into downright abstraction as it is, and when they couple that with an adventurous editing style that cuts invisibly from darkness to darkness so that one moment the camera is being pummeled underwater by the wake of the ship and the next it's staring into the gaping mouth of a bloody fish on deck, there's no ground zero to grasp on to. It's a hallucinatory succession of sensual image and sound, making the rare moments when the camera settles itself briefly (as in an amusing long take of a fishermen falling asleep to drab television on his break) a much needed repose.



Whatever my own personal physical objections to Leviathan, I cannot deny the groundbreaking accomplishment that it is. This is authorless, distinctly 21st century cinema; or rather, I should say that its author is the ocean, the wind, the fish and the seagulls aboard the ship – that is, all elements untouched by the human hand, but only made visible through technological advances in image capture. (To go a step further, the fact that some of the film's moments end up feeling so aesthetically sublime, such as when flocks of angelic seagulls seem to be flying in mystical awareness of the camera, implies that nature itself has an artful side.) The result is something vaguely akin to David Gatten's aleatoric scratch film series What the Water Said, but whereas Gatten's work points backwards and sideways to Brakhage, Thorston Fleisch, and Bruce McClure even as it paves new roads, Leviathan is even more unmatched in the history of seeing, even more progressive in its optimism for the limitless possibilities of the medium. It was fitting, then, that for some unknown reason the couple seated behind me brought their very young daughter to the screening. Her whispery pronouncements of awe ("look, the fish!", "where are we?", etc.), particularly impassioned during the short about herding in the northern hemisphere that preceded Leviathan (called Reindeer and directed by Eva Weber, who has a hell of an eye and whose future work I look forward to), put into further perspective the mysterious blank slate vision of this film.

(Note: My next screenings are tonight and Wednesday, not to mention any surprises I might throw in between, so expect a Part Two by Thursday.)

The Shout (1978) A Film by Jerzy Skolimowski

Roman Polanski has invariably been deemed the Polish Master of Paranoia, or some such variation on the term, and as a result the hypnotizing skills for suspense offered by his countryman Jerzy Skolimowski (who co-wrote Polanski's debut Knife in the Water) have often been unjustly neglected. In fact, for me, The Shout, Skolimowski's 1978 horror film, matches even Polanski's Repulsion in its mounting feelings of dread and mental collapse, and does so with an even greater degree of friction in its dynamic sound/image relationship. I place sound first because this is a film, like Coppola's The Conversation and De Palma's Blow Out, that emphasizes the role of sound in perception, directing so much attention to the vulnerability of its sonic landscape that visuals, if not quite an afterthought, feel as if they are primarily servicing what is heard.

The Shout is set largely in and around a remote ocean cottage nestled between mountains and sand dunes, and it entails the arrival of a mysterious vagabond named Crossley (Alan Bates) to the home of experimental noise musician Anthony Fielding (John Hurt) and his wife Rachel (Susannah York). Because of Skolimowski's oblique storytelling style, it's not clear at first that what ensues at this cottage is framed as a flashback, reminisced upon by Crossley as he relaxes in the verdant landscape behind an insane asylum where inmates and staff are playing a game of cricket. Crossley relates this story to an arbitrary character (Tim Curry at a time when he was a dead ringer for Chris Martin) from inside a small bunkhouse, where he is allowed a rectangular window view of the action on the lawn. That his perspective is reminiscent of a movie screen, and that his story is being directed at a passive listener (an audience surrogate?), makes it possible to read the entire film as a metaphor for the limits of storytelling, filmmaking, and art creation in general. Emerging from this unstable, cryptic source (Crossley is a patient in the asylum), the narrative proper of The Shout is entirely subject to the warped perspective of this strange man, and quite possibly partially or wholly "false."

Skolimowski materializes this shaky, unsettled world through a succession of visual and aural fragments, miniaturized snippets of experience that express a portion of what's being focused on and only rarely the complete picture. When Crossley is telling his story at the asylum, Skolimowski intercuts his chilling drone with heightened close-ups of the action on the field, so brief as to nearly be abstract – a pitcher winding up for delivery, a bat striking a ball, a patient's excited face. Later, when Anthony is introduced, there are evocative shots of his recording process, an ongoing experiment of placing microphones in close proximity to a wide variety of sonic happenings (a bee buzzing in a glass jar, the ticking of a metronome, the flicking of a piece of metal, the ringing of an alarm clock). The sounds produced are de-familiarized through heavy audio filters, just as Skolimowski's representation of physical reality is chopped up, chromatically muted, and ultimately rendered alien and remote.



In the flashback that comprises the majority of the film, Anthony and Rachel York are a comfortable, modest couple who enjoy their peace in the English countryside. They have a single guest room, but they don't seek company. If their existence is somewhat routinized and passionless, Crossley quickly represents an active force that shakes them out of their complacency, giving shape to the flaws in their lifestyles and in their relationship. After a calm morning mass (where Anthony makes extra money as the church organist), Crossley casually approaches his target draped in a long black trench coat and directs some of the out-there jargon he absorbed from experience in an Aboriginal tribe at him: "I've always found it hard to believe that the soul is imprisoned in the body until death liberates it." In this moment, Skolimowski unsettles the air around Crossley with a slow zoom, immediately establishing him – with his atypical spiritual views and shaggy look – as an outcast in this environment. Yet even before this, Skolimowski offers a shot of an arm, presumably Crossley's, reaching from behind a wall to let air out of Anthony's bicycle tires, lending the sense of a cold, premeditated attack. Sure enough, that evening Crossley effectively invites himself in for dinner, which Anthony reluctantly accepts. Over a primitive meal of boiled potato and pork chops, Crossley dryly admits to marrying an Aboriginal woman and subsequently murdering their children, claiming it the only "natural" death in Aboriginal society. It's merely the beginning of his drawn-out, invasive stay in the York home.

Despite Anthony's anxieties, however, he's also oddly envious towards Crossley's mystical purity. Anthony is, after all, a man seeking to glean larger meaning from the world through experimentation with sound, and the priest's nihilistic proclamations at church ("The foundations of our society are not firm...we're like a rudderless ship, no direction....") seem to echo the spiritual and artistic rut Anthony finds himself in. In this light, the film's titular shout – an ear-piercing guttural scream perfected by Crossley from Aboriginal teachings with the alleged ability (soon proved) to harm and even kill any living thing nearby – represents a human sound so lucid and authentic that it puts to shame Anthony's aimless quibbling. There are two moments in the film that explicitly include the shout, but only one that faces its hair-raising, speaker-bursting intensity head on: a stunning scene when Crossley escorts a hesitant Anthony to the middle of the sand dunes to demonstrate his ability and prove to him its violent powers. Crossley leans back like the Big Bad Wolf to gather his energy in an extended shot framing him against the sky before lurching forward to bellow to the heavens. After the silence that precedes it, the sheer volume and harshness of the sound is beyond startling, and it effectively makes the rest of this otherwise quiet, restrained movie vibrate with the tense expectation of sound. Skolimowski's manipulation of the audience is so powerful that at one point, when Crossley is taking Anthony's wife to bed, his body forms roughly the same orientation that precedes the shout, rendering a moment that could very well be just a harmless contortion of the body during sex unbearably frightening.

Were it not for the earplugs he fearfully inserted beforehand, Anthony would have fallen dead upon hearing the shout just like the nearby sheep Skolimowski shows meeting their demise in slow-motion shots reminiscent of Kubrick's images of dying animals in the Dawn of Man sequence. Instead, Anthony merely stumbles down the side of the dune in painful recoil, while Skolimowski's hurried backwards zoom lends iconic weight to the moment. (There's a strange plot point that grows out of the end of this scene – Anthony's discovery of a sacred rock that is to Crossley what a Horcrux is to Voldemort in Harry Potter – but it's one of the curiosities of the film rather than an essential element.) This first instance of the shout marks the moment Crossley gains complete control over Anthony, and his manipulation of the meek village musician only escalates rapidly from there; by the end of the flashback, Crossley has driven Anthony from his own home, possessing the sexual desire of his wife and insulting his "empty" music in the process.



Or, at least that's how Crossley tells the story. But it's not all megalomania. Strangely, the flashback concludes with Crossley being slowly killed by the sacred rocks right as policemen infiltrate the York home to arrest him for child murder. Simultaneously, a thunderstorm erupts back at the asylum (visualized in gloriously retro cheapie fashion), driving Crossley to madness and ultimately killing him. The dreadful shout, which Crossley uses in an attempt to fend off the police, seems to have as much of a destructive impact on its user as its audience. The powers of manipulation therefore run their course, and it's perhaps no mistake that at the moment Crossley loses control, so too does the film, its coiled energy imploding into anarchic chaos as soaked and half-naked inmates (one of which is first-time actor Jim Broadbent) scurry wildly in the rain. At the peak of the madness, the film promptly returns to its quiet opening scene featuring Rachel attending a morgue to locate Crossley's dead body. There is nowhere to go from here but back, Skolimowski seems to be saying.

The Shout is a chilling, uneasy slow-burner of a horror film that is as much about how easily life, as well as art, can be manipulated through perspective and approach as it is about the limits of control. Neither Crossley nor Anthony find the proper outlets for their spiritual searches, spreading violence and confusion at one extreme and fiddling vainly in obscurity at the other. Crossley possesses Anthony and Rachel's quiet, autopilot lifestyle, but his fear-mongering collapses in on itself. Anthony aims to give shape to the mysteries of life through his sonic experimentation, but he drifts further away from the palpable world the more he noodles. It's a perfect formula for character suspense, and Skolimowski rings every ounce of it.

New MUBI Posts

I have two new pieces up at The Daily Notebook...

1.) A tribute to the great cinematographer Harris Savides (Van Sant's Death Trilogy, Zodiac, Greenberg, Birth, among many others), who passed away far too soon on October 9th, 2012, leaving behind a mountain of some of the last two decade's most unforgettable images.

2.) A close reading of a powerful orchestration of scenes in the middle of Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna which incorporates the color red in multifaceted ways.

An Evening With Vampyr (Dreyer/1932) and Steven Severin

From the vantage point of a semi-jaded soon-to-be graduate of film school, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr embodies a film-school surrealist's idea of plot: stick a character in a weird scenario, watch as things get progressively strange. But the basis of this (some might say Lynchian) approach is Vampyr, and it was a whole lot more powerful in 1932 with Dreyer's formal innovation than it is in 2012 with half-baked conception and quasi-ironic gimmickry. The film follows, circa intertitles, "young Allan Gray, who immersed himself in the study of evil worship and vampires" and "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and supernatural became blurred," as he enters a remote European village and checks in to a dark, dusty inn. From there, Allan gets involved in the macabre history of the inn, where ages of the undead still stalk the premises and all manners of paranormal happenings occur. The machinations of Vampyr's narrative would hardly meet a literal-minded screenwriter's approval – Allan's barely developed, the spatiotemporal logistics of the world are not accounted for, characters and subplots shapeshift – but Dreyer's real accomplishment here is imaginatively recreating Allan's feverish subjectivity at a time when few films attempted such levels of paranoia and disorientation.

Dreyer wastes no time establishing the off-kilter world, letting Allan be greeted immediately by bizarre occurrences. When approaching the inn, he sees a dark silhouette beside a lake bearing a scythe, but it's not quite a Death figure; it's something less overtly sinister and more down-to-earth, a man capable of enacting physical rather than abstract violence. On his first night, a crippled insomniac enters his bedroom, circling the space slowly before reaching him as if gathering up demonic forces. Leaning over, his eyes gleaming, he offers Allan a book on the vampiric history of the village and admits to his own need to be saved from the imprisoning loop of the undead. Not long after, Allan is scouring the book for secret information about the mysteries of the inn (information that Dreyer relays via shaky intertitles), and clues from the text start to materialize around him. As an audience surrogate, Allan manages to be both overeager and fundamentally detached, lending the film the feel of a waking nightmare in which nothing can be acted upon or stopped.

Vampyr is full of indelible images, and the visions accumulate at a relentless rate: a view of the shadow of a man digging a hole displayed in reverse so that it appears as if he is forcefully burying something; a wide shot of a surface of water where the reflection of a man walking by has no above-ground counterpart; a close-up of the recently bitten innkeeper's daughter turning her head slowly on axis with a chilling grin stuck to her face; an image of Allan's soul casually leaving his body; an aerial shot of his blank face as he's carried away in a coffin as well as the point-of-view shot of the sky, trees, and imposing inn from inside the coffin. Dreyer's standout images are surrounded by unsettling blankness, a peculiar emphasis on walls and doors that suggest claustrophobic dead ends. Indeed, the film's horizontality and flatness is a bold gesture in a genre in which vast, shadowy spaces are the common route for implying dread lurking where it's least expected. Vampyr, however, still summons the atmosphere of the best horror films, a visceral effect that has to do with the indistinguishability between the real and the unreal, facilitated by Dreyer's skill in filming both tangible horror and the horror of the unseen as if there's no difference.



Technically, Vampyr was Dreyer's first sound film despite its scant use of sync sound, but for all intents and purposes, it remains an expression of silent cinema. The first time I saw the film on DVD, it was accompanied by its original monaural score, a rickety orchestral haze by Wolfgang Zeller that sounds as gloriously degraded as the image, but seeing the film again in a theater setting, I was able to witness longtime Siouxsie and the Banshees' bassist and English musician Steven Severin's intense, cathartic live ambient score, perhaps even more fascinating than the original music for the way it digests the impact of Dreyer's film and intensifies its moods from a retrospective angle. Incorporating repeating motifs and movements that emphasize the cyclical nature of the vampire history in the village and Allan's sightings, Severin's music is awash in thick synth-pad drones, reverby chimes, electronic string sections, floor-shaking bass rumbles, and amorphous melodies. Certain movements suggest the dreamy romanticism of a Badalamenti/Lynch composition with its sappy tunefulness emptied out and rendered distant and ghostly (if that sounds like I'm describing what Badalamenti and Lynch are already doing on a standard piece, it goes to show how radically this score recedes into murkiness that it outdoes even their most unconventional scores).

If pressed to choose between the original and Severin's sound, I would probably opt for the latter. Coupled with this eerie, disheveled print from the 1930's, the modern ambient music offers a compelling clash of generations and approaches to the same sense of moody atmospherics. But even beyond that, Severin's music offers a more innate understanding of Dreyer's intention, a more complex and fulfilling synergy with the moods of the film, even outlining some of its tonal and thematic progressions through musical shifts that were not as obvious in the original score. Its throbbing drone sits confidently atop the action, giving shape and depth of feeling to Dreyer's more aimless interludes, and in the rare instance that Severin makes an attempt to sync loosely to what's onscreen, it's startlingly effective, as in a creepy shot when Dreyer's camera pans along a wall of shadows of dancing patrons and Severin conjures up a bygone jitterbug reminiscent of The Shining's music. I seriously hope this soundtrack iteration becomes more widely available at some point in the future, but if it never ventures beyond infrequent appearances in live settings, it's an experience not to be missed.

Babies Again: Romance Games in It Happened One Night (Capra/1934) and The Awful Truth (McCarey/1937)

“You know this is the first time in years I’ve ridden piggy back,” ponders Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) to Peter Warne (Clark Gable) in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night as the pair trudge down a country road in Connecticut, far from the laws of civilization and the men pursuing Ellie. Peter, a hard-nosed, recently unemployed journalist, disagrees: “This isn’t piggy back.” What occurs in this moment is one character’s uninhibited expression of joy followed by another’s refusal to look silly, and it’s a dynamic that is visible across many screwball comedies of the 30’s. Ellie’s joy is a simple emotion displayed without pretense, without any attempt to conform to public convention, and it is not until both characters adopt Ellie’s perspective – ultimately, a fresh, untainted perspective, like that of an infant – that they can fully connect. For the soon-to-be-lovers in It Happened One Night as well as Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, reverting to childish behavior is not a way of evading emotional truths as much as it is part of a process of revealing them.

In fact, acting childish is not only a method for following the heart; it’s what’s necessary for characters to emerge from their stuffy social environments with their authentic selves still intact. It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth, among many other similarities, begin in the upscale world of cocktail parties and businesslike marriages before moving inexorably to the untouched wilderness of Connecticut, a stand-in for nature and a tonic that awakens otherwise sublimated feelings of attraction and sexual desire. In order for that transition to occur, however, the central male/female duo must undergo a series of conflicts with each other and with their environment (not unlike the stresses endured by a traditional married couple) that will highlight the unbreakable bond between them. In these films, the characters cannot deal with these conflicts in level-headed, pragmatic ways – doing so would mean contradicting their spontaneous sexual impulses towards one another. Instead, they must approach them through other means: physical combat, role-playing, imaginary scenarios, and all other forms of games that allow them to get closer to each other and act upon the blossoming attachment between them.

Both films, at the beginning, find their central duos in denial of the connection between them, convinced for some superficial reason that they cannot get along. In It Happened One Night, Peter has stumbled upon Ellie in the midst of her escape from her father, who has settled upon the idea of Ellie marrying a rich man she has no feelings for. Peter, immediately feeling an attraction towards her and seeing the clumsiness of her ways (she is carelessly blowing her dwindling pocket change on immediate pleasures rather than doing the sensible thing and saving it for her unpredictable bus trip across country), takes it upon himself to accompany her on her escape, ready whenever to catch her when she’s about to fall. However, Peter disguises what amounts to clear attraction with the cold approach of a disciplinarian: that is, he is only helping her to save her from herself and not for any selfish reasons. Meanwhile, Ellie outspokenly rejects Peter’s assistance even as she relies upon it every step of the way. What exists for these characters is tension, a refusal to acknowledge the air of magnetism between them, and it cannot be alleviated until something loosens them up. Is there a better tool for such a thing than a game?



Unlike Peter and Ellie, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) begin The Awful Truth as a married couple. They have the advantage of understanding each other. Or, at least they think they do. The truth (maybe the awful truth) is, if they were able to acknowledge how intimately they understand each other, the divorce they initiate at the beginning of the film and nearly consummate at the end of the film would never be a question. Thus, their situation is not entirely dissimilar to Peter and Ellie’s: they must move beyond the surface flaws of their relationship (in this case, they have trouble telling each other the truth about their respective vacations, and therefore both assume infidelity) to reach an acknowledgment of the fundamental qualities that connect them. Over the course of the film, both Lucy and Jerry develop potential partners – an old-fashioned Oklahoma oil magnate for Lucy and a materialistic sporting type for Jerry – before finding their prospect deliberately spoiled by the other person. In a way, the entire process of committing to and then rebuffing some secondary marriage is a game for Jerry and Lucy designed to illuminate the utter farce of either of them being with anyone else.

The turbulent path from detached, formal interactions to childish playfulness – a path reflected by the other progressions in the film such as from civilization to nature and from social order to disorder – is what must be traversed in these films in order for the central couples to eventually enjoy each other’s company. Peter and Ellie’s relationship shifts throughout It Happened One Night from the strict guidance reminiscent of a father-daughter relationship to a point of collaboration and equality. The first hint of this metamorphosis is a scene when they must disguise themselves as a married couple to fend off a search party who has arrived at their countryside motel room. Stunned by the sudden arrival of these men at their door, Peter must devise a strategy to drive them out of the room. He decides to pretend to be an anonymous husband in a petty argument with his anonymous wife, and the anger stemming from his argument is only expanded by the policemen’s interruption of their private space. With only slight hesitation, Ellie follows his lead, snapping back at Peter and then turning her head away in irritation while her “husband” convinces the search party that there is nothing special to see. Once they have achieved their goal of guilting the cops away, the two of them share a cathartic, hearty laughter. It is in such a moment that they mutually acknowledge, albeit non-verbally, the pleasure that can arise from this type of behavior, as well as what it can reveal about their compatible character traits.

There’s a similar moment in The Awful Truth that also tips the audience off to the intensity of understanding between its central couple, and it features Jerry and Lucy out on separate dates at a nightclub. Lucy is with her Oklahoma-born simpleton Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), and Jerry has decided to interrupt their dinner by introducing his boisterous quasi-date Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton), who shortly thereafter takes center stage to perform a corny rendition of “My Dreams Are Gone With the Wind.” At every mention of the song’s title, Dixie’s dress is blown up by the fan beneath her feet, a lowbrow joke that nonetheless charms and titillates the club’s classy guests, but Lucy and Jerry share glances of discomfort and embarrassment with each other. Crystallizing the subtext, McCarey bunches them up together in the frame, leaving Dan on the far right, suggesting their unspoken bond through pictorial closeness. Even in this moment when Jerry is feigning interest in his date to disrupt Lucy’s experience and provoke jealousy (a somewhat convoluted game in itself), neither he nor Lucy can ignore that they’re in agreement.



After these initial indications of chemistry, Capra and McCarey begin to introduce additional layers of childish behavior into their narratives. Peter and Ellie steal cars, passing through the countryside shuffling through fake names and auditioning different goofy hitchhiking gestures. Jerry plays a man who’s lost interest in Lucy but still needs to complete unfinished business, and therefore the film finds him repeatedly barging into her space, often during time alone with Dan. Peter dons the persona of a professional criminal seeking $1,000,000 in ransom money in order to scare away a naïve bus passenger who tries to capitalize on the reward for finding Ellie. Lucy facilitates a scenario in which her dog Mr. Smith steals Jerry’s black top hat, causing a mix-up with the her male friend. Ellie worries about the prospect of sleeping in a straw pile in the forest and subsequently cowers in fear when she wakes up in the middle of the night and Peter is nowhere to be found. Jerry hides behind a door and tickles Lucy while she fends off Dan. In The Awful Truth’s most pivotal moment, Lucy intrudes on Jerry’s dinner party at the home of his fiancé Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont) and gets Jerry to coax her out of the house by acting as his nonexistent French sister and performing an even more tasteless version of “My Dreams Are Gone With the Wind.” The fun and games go on.

Because of this seemingly irrational behavior, these characters appear on the surface, especially to those around them, to be in broken, dysfunctional relationships. In It Happened One Night, Peter does not have the wealth or even the desire for wealth that characterizes the men in her family’s social circle. In The Awful Truth, the fact that Jerry and Lucy are on the verge of divorce only confirms the narrow-minded suspicions of those around them they must be unfit for living together. In these films, it’s very much Peter and Ellie/Jerry and Lucy against The World (It Happened One Night builds this idea into its very narrative by using two characters on the run from society), and the question of whether or not they will give in to the demands of conformity shapes the structure of the narratives, providing the overarching external conflict to match the internal conflict. There’s no better image of the ultimate victory over The World than that of Lucy – in a gesture of hilariously disingenuous “oopsiness” – lifting the emergency brake of Jerry’s car to let it roll over the edge of a cliff, prompting their mystical motorcycle ride to the outer reaches of society. From one perspective, it’s a horribly wasteful, immature move, but from another, it’s the most romantic thing possible.



But while both films set the stage for love, they also provide the roadblock. Both It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth use some form of physical division to suggest the emotional barriers erected by the two characters: in It Happened One Night, it’s the “Walls of Jericho,” a white sheet draped on a clothing line in between Peter and Ellie’s single beds, and in The Awful Truth, it’s a door that separates the two guest bedrooms at Ellie’s grandfather’s country home in Connecticut, where they spend the evening leading up to the official annulment of their marriage. These dividers must be torn down for love to bloom, and they finally are torn down at the conclusion of both films due to a blend of natural forces and personal will. That both films end promptly at the annihilation of these roadblocks underlines the symbolic significance of the plot development: everything that occurs throughout the films – the fighting, the playing, the aggressive jabber, and the traveling – leads inevitably towards this moment.

When the bed sheet tumbles to the floor and the wind blows the adjoining door open, it’s also clear that while these characters have made major leaps in their understandings of themselves and each other, they are also paradoxically at their most childish. Like babies, they are suddenly looking at the world with fresh eyes. Peter, in the end, chooses to collect $39.60 rather than the $10,000 reward offered for returning Ellie, suggesting a child innocently arguing for a quid-pro-quo approach, not an adult tainted by greed. Jerry elects not to criticize his sister’s ridiculous behavior in the presence of Barbara Vance’s family, but rather to laugh along with her. When Ellie’s father tells her before her impending wedding at the end of It Happened One Night, “I haven’t seen you cry since you were a baby,” it’s a culminating statement that speaks to the trajectories of both of these films: once at the infantile state, these characters are free to accept the truths of themselves and love each other.

New World(s)

“But how can renewal come about?—the perennial question of reformers and revolutionaries, of anyone who wants to start over, who wants another chance. Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the world (for example, a state of marriage) until the people in it change, and the people cannot change until the world changes.”
-Stanley Cavell, "Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage"


From The New World (Malick/2005).

Bringing Up Baby (1938) A Film by Howard Hawks

In Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks delights in introducing zany element after zany element, an accumulation of absurd details so overwhelming that it's a wonder he manages never to lose sight of the film's fundamental dramatic and thematic goals. A tame leopard, a pending $1 million museum donation, a missing Brontosaurus bone known as the intercostal clavicle (this being a screwball comedy, a term that receives its fair share of repetition), a yapping dog that likes burying things deep in the ground, a rural circus and the wild leopard it mistakenly lets loose, and plenty of other details compile around the central comic entanglement of David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn). David's a prudish, even-tempered paleontologist with an impending marriage to a professional assistant that's destined to develop into a passionless coexistence, as well as a four-year-in-the-making dinosaur sculpture waiting on one last elusive bone. Susan's a prickly, siren-voiced, and utterly selfish ditzy woman gone madly desperate for love. Hawks creates two people so totally opposite that the increasingly surreal series of events and parade of oddness they collaboratively produce feels like a natural extension of the void existing between them.

This void is at first deepened, then detailed, and finally eliminated through Hawks' construction, a series of combative circumstances and childish games ever escalating in absurdity and dramatic stakes. In the early stages of the plot, mistaken identity plays a pivotal role in the combat between Grant and Hepburn. David first runs into Susan on a golf course where a mix-up occurs regarding the question of who possesses a certain golf ball that has strayed from David's hole onto Susan's. David insists that it's his, that he took a faulty swing, while Susan is insistent upon continuing to play with it. Moments later, she tries to leave the parking lot in his car, clumsily bumping other vehicles as she leaves the parking space in front of David, who pleas in irritation. Susan is plucking the objects of David's lifestyle away from him right before his eyes. If the external markers that come to define these characters are this impermanent, this liable to shift at a moment's notice (indeed, later on the very names of these characters are hilariously called into question), then the identity that they embody must be too. Hawks is aware of the duplicity of identity, the fact that humans are mere vessels for a shifting variety of potential selves that are brought about through interaction with the public world.

Susan's theft of David's possessions is passed off as unintentional yet feels oddly calculated, as if the beginnings of a compulsive longing towards David that expresses itself as the film progresses through increasingly over-the-top acts of selfishness and dependence. As outlandish, manipulative, and seemingly mean-spirited as it gets, Susan's behavior is bent on a single goal: keeping David in her company. That need is acted upon throughout in the form of conflict, which Susan explicitly refers to as being the fundamental expression of human love (though she's accusing David of creating this conflict, it's clear that it represents her inner mantra of flirtation). In order to give David a reason to be by her side, she pretends over the phone to be getting attacked by her aunt's pet leopard (the titular "Baby," which she has just been asked to temporarily care for). From there, the film proceeds in similarly loony fashion, with Susan constantly creating circumstances of a problematic nature for David so that he will be forced to spend time with her; to name a few, she parks in an illegal space in his car, she steals the adjacent vehicle, she misplaces his clothing, and she lets her aunt's dog George get a hold of and subsequently bury the intercostal clavicle. It's an awfully selfish set of actions for a character to perform, and a strange movie ploy in general, but Hepburn brings a sense of overwhelming romantic desperation to the part that prevents Susan from becoming merely a sadistic bitch.



David's goal the whole time is to recover his bone and retrieve the $1 million he had coming to him for his museum, but every time his tasks seem on the cusp of being accomplished, Susan steps in and throws a wrench in the operation. It certainly doesn't help his case that Susan's Aunt Elizabeth (May Robson) happens to be the wealthy women behind the hefty donation, and her lawyer, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), is one of Susan's good friends. What this means for David is that he has to prove to these people that he is a worthy recipient of the money while being pushed to the brink of aggression by Susan. The role of chance, such a powerful factor in the sorting out of this situation, is materialized by the traveling circus that is passing through Aunt Elizabeth's rural Connecticut town. If Baby can be said to represent a surrogate child for David and Susan – who amount to a surrogate marriage over the course of the film – then the search for the misplaced Baby and subsequent failure to recognize the right animal when presented with a wild leopard released unintentionally from the circus illustrates just how profoundly unprepared either of them are for any kind of serious adult life. Likewise, the constant roles they are forced to play, the childish games they find themselves involved in, and the lies they tell in order to avoid confronting any sort of deeper truths about themselves or about their situation, suggest the impish, chaotic lifestyle both of them seem prone to – naturally so for Susan, and perhaps beneath the surface of David's pragmatic exterior.

This move from adult responsibilities to childish tactics is mirrored by other key structural progressions in Bringing Up Baby: the move from the suburban to the rural, from day to night, and from social order to disorder. Everything in the film follows in tandem: as more craziness is dumped into the plot, the day gets longer, and the characters progress further into the dark forest in search of their leopards (shall I say, their structure?). By the end of the night, nearly all of the characters have found themselves in jail cells, and though Hawks finds a hilarious narrative justification for it (they're all recoiling from the encroaching leopard), the metaphor is about as blatant as metaphors come: not only does Susan get herself in trouble with her bewildering behavior, she also manages to swallow up everyone around her in her mad pursuit of love, which runs counter to any of the conventional methods and laws of the public world. Indeed, the success of her pursuit (and of David's) is reliant upon her(/his) ability to break from the structure of her(/his) life.



After all the dizzying layers of symbolic game-playing, there comes a beautiful shot in the final scene of the film that that suddenly crystallizes what was perhaps only vaguely visible through the overlapping chatter of Hawks’ high-velocity filmmaking: Susan breaking through David’s dinosaur and David saving her by grabbing her hand, refusing to let her fall into the rubble, a perfect visualization of a relationship that is simultaneously parasitic/destructive and productive/vital. Susan’s been clinging to David throughout the film, destroying his comfy complacency, yet the aspects of her character that so sharply contrast his persona are also the forces that agitate his sense of self and usher him towards a (potentially) "better" happiness. The bricks and mortar of Grant’s previous regressive lifestyle – after all, he's an archaeologist for God's sake, digging up bones! – have been replaced by something new, a hesitant embrace of the chaos and spontaneity that Susan represents.

But this embrace is about something less specific and less trite than love. The conclusion of Bringing Up Baby has been lambasted for the abruptness of its seeming dramatic shift – that David suddenly admits to loving Susan. However, the word "love" emerges from David out of what appears to be practical impulse: a desire to influence Susan to either get off the precarious ladder or take his hand – ultimately, to resign to safety. Yet it is significant that this is one of the few scenes in the film where Hawks shows David actively looking out for Susan's best interest. He has come around to her in some way, but how? Is he acknowledging the strangely absorbing, major influence she's had on his life? Is he, to put it simply, greeting the fact of his vulnerability? To the same extent that Grant’s final, falling-out-of-the-mouth “I Love You” is less a true statement than a verbal placeholder for a major shift within himself, Bringing Up Baby traffics in all sorts of external presentation that it proves not to be fundamentally about. In Hawks' film, everything stands for something, a dynamic alternative to a man who has built his life around empty markers of contentment.