Cinema Papers no. 65 September 1987 (2025)

OCR

SPECIAL[...]

Never was there a special It responds to blue and green
effects film this special. spectra that other films — let

New 5295 delivers an accuracy alone the human eye — are not
of perforation to a tolerance half even aware of.
that of anything seen before. And it has T—Grain.

EASTMAN and KODAK are registered trademarks. 342177001 JV/T

advantages available in a special what kind of I111“

effects film for the first time ever. motion picture

5295. fil[...]

Signed articles represent the views of their
author. and not necessarily those of the
editor. While every care is taken with
manuscripts and materials supplied to the
magazine. neither the editor nor the pub-
lishers can accept liability for any loss or[...]ch may arise. This magazine
may not be reproduced in whole or in part
without the express permission ol the
copyright owner. cinema Papers is
published every[...]lishing Ltd. 43 Charles St. Abbotslord.
Victoria. Australia 3067. Telephone: (03)
4295511. Telex: AA 3[...]

CONTENTS

4 BRIEFLY

6 AFI AWARDS: The contenders

10 CHIP WITH THE LOT.- jug who is Chip Dexter?
‘ 12 THIS JARMAN MAN.- Derek _7arman on art and

money

16 JEAN-PIERRE GORIN: Have zde’es, will travel
22 WIM WENDERS: The cream pies of desire
23 CHEN IS MISSING: Why the director didn’t come

. _’__ 2, =, 6[...]S ON SCREEN.- Filmmaking ?;;}$}izé; Zziééns
28 THE STRONG SCRIPT: Who needs it?

30 NOVEL APPROACHES: Literature and the screen
34 TV TRA UMAS: A scriptwriter tells

35 GUSTAV HASFORD: Full metal book jacket

36 ANGELA CARTER: Magical and matter-of-fact

40 REVIEWS: Dim Sum, Extreme Prejudice, From The
Hip, Gardens Of Stone, Ground Zero, High Tide, La
Bamba, Long Bow Trilogy, Nightmare On Elm Street
3, The Place At The Coast, Raising Arizona, River’:
Edge, Slate, Wyn 8:’ Me, Vincent, The Wz'tches Of
Eastwick

55 BOOKS: Don’t Shoot Darling, Love Is Colder Than
Death

60 TECHNICALITIES: This and DAT
64 NEW ZEALAND: Disney to the rescue?

65 PRODUCTION REPORT: Buckley’s chance with
the miniseries

66 PRODUCTION SURVEY: Who’: making what in
Australia

73 FUNDING DECISIONS: Who got what
79 CENSORSHIP: May and fune decisions

80 BACK PAGE: September and October film buff’:
diary

Graham Shirley and Andree Wright, in their attack on the
originality and validity of my research findings (Cinema Papers,[...]ather than i
from anything I have written myself. In particular they don’t
seem to have consulted my article ‘Copyright sources for
Australian drama and film’, which is where I listed the results
of my inquiries into the copyright application files held by the
Australian Archives. This article was published in Archives and
Manuscript: in November 1986.

There were a number of media repo[...]my discoveries, but it is regrettable that Andree and ,
Graham have as a result rushed into print half—informed as to
what this research was and what it uncovered.

The Registers of Copyright Proprietors and the
correspondence associated with applications for copyright
have been used by many scholars over the years. But when I
arrived in Canberra early in 1986, one important part of the
collection on copyright ~— the many-volume Index to the
Commonwealth files (1907-1969) had disappeared. I[...]ave been ‘readily available’ to Andree Wright
in 1983; however two successive Patents Office Librarians,
working at the request of several researchers, had tried in i
vain to find this Index during the first half of 1986. I
relocated the lost Index, and it has now been moved from
Woden and placed with the other copyright material in the
Australian Archives. The implied claim that it was never lost
is wrong.

The assertion that in my other discoveries I was only covering ,
ground[...]s earlier is also wrong.
My research was based on the fact that there proved to be not
one but two para[...]f unnumbered items). Previous searchers for plays and
filmscripts only found the application forms in the first of
these series, (A1336/1) together with occasional playscripts or
filmscripts which were included in the same envelope. As I
openly acknowledged in my Archives and Manuscripts article:

some of [the filmscripts] in the A1336/1 series have been accessed
and consulted by earlier researchers. (p149)

However the Archive staff can confirm that I was the first
person to systematically and thoroughly search a major
portion of the collection, and to locate hundreds of scripts of
performed Australian stage plays, some of which were the
basis of later films, and a smaller number of original
filmscripts. As these were too bulky to keep in the same *
envelope as the application forms, they were held in the .
‘hidden’ A1336/2 series. They could not have been previously
sighted, for the simple reason that they had never been 2
security-cleared (accessed) by the Archive staff.

Richard Fotheringham 2

Richard Fotheringham is mistaken in his belief that the
purpose of our article Kelly: Hit 0r Myth, was to discredit ,
his finding of a cachet of play and filmscripts held by the l
Australian Archives Office. Our interest continues to lie not
so much in the location of such source material, but in the 1
use to which it is put. In replying to the initial
Fotheringham and Cooper articles we desired to set the a
record straight for posterity by the provision of new
material at variance with their[...]ion of Australian
cinema history.

Graham Shirley and Andree Wright

FASSBINDER COMPETITION

Cinema Papers has five copies of the Fassbinder biography by
Robert Katz and Peter Berling to give away, courtesy of
Australas[...]stion: name Fassbinder’s last three films. Send the
answer to Cinema Papers, 43 Charles Street, Abbot[...]Simpson
Le Mesurier Films (Vic);
Roadshow, Coote and Carroll
(NSW); and Taft Hardie
Productions (NSW). The AFC’s

I The Shorts Circuit column on
Australian shorts has been held
over until the next issue.

I The Australian Film
Commission has approved an
investment of $310,000 in five joint
ventures with Australian film and
television production companies,
under a new AFC script unit
program. The five companies are:
Barron Films Limited (WA); Se[...]Lansell’s byline was omitted.

Dear Mr Hawker,

In an otherwise fine article about the making of High Tide
there was an unfortunate implication that Judy Davis took the
script away and rewrote her character. This is incorrect.
Laura Jones was the sole writer of the High Tide screenplay.

The producer, Sandra Levy, Laura and I encouraged and
were delighted to have judy’s involvement during the final
drafting of High Title. She attended a couple of script sessions
and was involved in some wonderful improvisations of a
number of scenes during the course of rehearsals. Many
valuable ideas from these sessions were fed at our discretion
back into the script.

I always like to encourage an atmosphere[...]during a production but I am a great supporter
of the writer’s role. I leave the rewriting to the writer.

Yours sincerely,
Gillian Armstrong

NOTE: The article in question was a complete and accurate
transcript of an interview with Gillian Armstrong.

investment will be matched dollar

I In the review of The Screening
Of Australia in the July issue Ross

Tony Ayres is a freelance film wrfler
based in Melbourne.

John Baxter is a film reviewer for The
Australian and author of numerous
books on the cinema.

Mick Broderick works as a
publications officer with the Australian
Conservation Foundation and is a
freelance writer on film.

Richard Brown is a physicist and
writer on film.

Stephanie Bunbury is a footloose
writer living in London.

DALLAS: Three sides of the studio Jllllan Burt is a freelance writer.

ENIS DOES DALLAS

Film put Paris, Texas on the map; Denis Thompson hopes that it
will do the same for Dallas, Victoria. He is chairman of
Australian Film Studios Ltd, owners of the Pyramid and Mort
Bay studios, and the company behind a new studio complex in
the Melbourne suburb of Dallas.

The complex, on the site of a former milk bottling plant, will
have eight studios, workshops and production and
administration offices. Space will be available for hire, from the
whole studio to a few offices for pre-production. Fifty sublet
premises will complement the studio and provide on-hand
expertise during production. The businesses will include a plaster
moulder, modelmaker, electrician, set builder and caterer.

Ftaffaele Caputo is a freelance writer[...]on
film.

Fred Harden runs a production
company in Sydney called Picture
Start which specialises in special
effects.

Ross Harley is a freelance writer and
film and video maker living in Sydney.

Michael Harvey is a scriptwriter living
in Melbourne.

Studio facilities will include a deep[...]o, a water floor
studio with rainmaking equipment and an animation studio.

I The Human Rights and
Equal Opportunities Commis-
sion is offering awards in
media and film categories for
works which promote under-
standing and public discussion
of human rights issues in
Australia. Six media and two
film awards will be made, with
a value of $500 each. For more
information Contact the com-
mission at level 24, American
Express Building, 388 George
Street, Sydney. The closing
date for nominations is 16
October 1987.

I Film investment under l0BA in-
creased by 13 per cent in 1986-87
from the previous year. Feature film
financing declined by 26 per cent,[...]tary financing almost
doubled, from $19.6 million in
1985-86 to $37.9 million in 1986-87.
Approximately 50 per cent of the
drama projects were fully or
partially underwritten prior to the
reduction of the IOBA concessions.

I The Australian National
Documentary Conference will
take place in Adelaide from 15
to 18 October. For more
information, Contact the con-
ference organisers, c/o the
South Australian Film Cor-

poration, 113 Tapley’s Hill
Road, Hendon, South Aus-
tralia 5014.

THE PRIZEWINNERS
— TRIVIA ouiz, July 1937 issue p35[...]sic Collection
Videos): Richard Cami. Runners-up (The African
Queen and South Pacific, courtesy CBS Fox):
Brenda Watson, Cesare Pirone, Leslie Campbell,

D. Lewis and Chris Mead.

- THE ANSWERS

1. Brett (Garner), Bart
(Kelly), Beau (Moore) and
Brent (Colbert).

2. Gordon Chater in the
Mavis Bramston Show.

3. Roy Rogers and Dale
Evans. It was Trigger he had
stuffed, not Da[...]2 Maple Drive.

10. FAB 1.

11. Ralph Kramden i.n The
Honeymooners.

. 12. Linda.

13. To protect the innocent.
14. A housebrick. She used it
to sock enemies.

15. Nose twitching.

16. Schweppervescence.

17. The store room hi the
Daily Planet building. Less
frequently he used to

disappear down a back alley.
Never in a phone booth.

18. Arnold Feather.

19. Robert Taylor’s
Detectives and Mod Squad.
The actor was Tige Andrews.
20. Jim Anderson from
Fat[...]21. Because his ‘‘uncle’‘
came from Mars in My
Favourite Martian.

22. Z Victor 1 and Z Victor 2.
23. Dr Who in his many
guises. He has only 12
reincarnations, w[...]t‘s when
they’re Ruff ’n Ready.

26. Bailey and Spencer at 77
Sunset Strip. She was
Suzanne Fabray.

27. Rosewell.

28. Marion Kirby of the
Topper series and her dog
was Neil, a St Bernard.

29. Pepsi Cola.

30. He slid down a fire pole
then jumped onto the piano.

Tracy Hayward is a freelance writer.

Anne-Maree Hewitt is a freelance
writer living in London.

Melinda Houston is a bookkeeper
and closet wn'ter.

Simon Hughes is a writer and
playwright.

Liz Jacka is co-author of The
Screening Of Australia and senior
lecturer in film studies at NSWIT.

Linda Jaivin was formerly Hong
Kong and China correspondent for
Asia Week, and is now a freelance
writer based in Canberra.

Brian Jeffrey is a freelance writer
based in Canberra.

Paul Kallna is a freelance film writer.

Kaz is a freelance cartoonist, journalist
and topiarist.

Brian Mel‘-'arlane is a lecturer in
English at the Chisholm Institute and
author of Australian Cinema
1970-1985.

Adrian Martin is a freelance film critic
based in Sydney.

Joanna Murray-Smith is a
Melbourne writer and playwright.

Mike Nicolaldi is a freelance writer
and contributor to Variety.

Andrew Preston is a freelance film
writer based in Sydney.

Bill and Diane Ftoutt are a couple of
Melbourne academics.

Sam Rohdle is a senior lecturer in
cinema studies at La Trobe University.

Ch[...]

eading the article that
Rappeared exactly one year
ago in Cinema Papers, ‘The

AFI Awards: into the Twilight
Zone’, it is evident that 1987 has,
so far at least, been kinder to the
Australian Film |nstitute’s
endeavour to stage[...]rds than previous years have
been. This time last year there
were many doubts about the very
future of the Awards; the ceremony
had neither a venue nor a
broadcaster, there were several
significant films that didn’t show up
in competition and there were
audible grumblings about the sorts
of films that were nominated and
the very judging procedures. The
words . . if, indeed, there is a
next year . . ' was for a while at
least a realistic attitude.

Though there remain areas of
contention, the many changes to
the structure and judging criteria of
the Awards that were
foreshadowed last year by AFI
executive director Vicki Molloy,
seem to have deflected the
criticism that the Awards, as
Molloy candidly put it last year,
were ”too arty and not useful to
the industry”. Notwithstanding a
query by the Screen Production
Association of Australia over the
inclusion of one of the most
nominated films, The Year My
Voice Broke, the AFI has taken
steps to overcome the kinds of
hitches that threatened the Awards’
existence.

Amongst the changes, this year
sees the best film judged by
industry practitioners, and the
introduction of a new award
judged entirely by the general
membership of the AFI. Accredited
industry practitioners vote in their
own area of specialisation, as well
as for best film in the feature and
non-feature categories. Producers
and directors are eligible to vote in
all specialist areas, of which there
are nine (co[...]cinematography, editing, music,
production design and sound).
Through the introduction of pre-
selection procedures, accredited
members only have to see the four
films nominated in their particular
area of specialisation. According to
Molloy, there are two main
benefits of the changes. Filmmakers
and industry personnel have much
greater involvement in the judging
of awards, through the pre-
selection panels comprised of
members of industry associations
and guilds, and the peer-group

6 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

énouw[...]ften prevented industry personnel
from seeing all the films necessary
for them to vote, now they need
only see the four films that have
been nominated in each category.

The newly introduced award is a
special AFI Members Award (most
popular film) and also includes
non-feature categories (short
fiction, experimental, documentary
and animated which have also
been pre-selected by pan[...]for best telefeature (for
which 20 were entered) and
miniseries (14 entered), judged by
panels sitting in Sydney and
Melbourne, respectively, and each
comprised of eight members.

According to Molloy, good
attendances at the national
screenings would seem to indicate

that the streamlined procedures
have attracted a lot of active film

practitioners and the changes, she
claims, have been very well

)

and is proud of its association
with:

FEAT HERS

GROUND ZERO
TO MARKET TO MARKET

RAIN TING THE TOWN
SLATE, WYN& ME
THE TALE OF RUBY ROSE

WARM NIGHTS ON A SLOW
MOVING TRAIN

V?

FILM VICTORIA-

Best Performance in a Supporting Role.

‘\

THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE: Loene Carmen and Ben Mendelsohn

< received. The Awards ceremony

will be held at Melbourne's Palais
Theatre on 9 October and will be
telecast on ABC-TV. The format of
the ceremony is not yet known.
Rob Pemberton (as producer and
director) and Grant Rule (as
executive producer), both known
be[...]ntertainment telecasts of
Countdown, will produce the

show.
However, the sore points of this

year’s Awards stem from the
presence of one film, and the
absence of another. The Year My
Voice Broke, it has been claimed,
was ineligible for the feature film
categories as it was made as part of
a package of films for television.
The film carries nominations for
best film, direction and screenplay
(John Duigan), actor (Noah Taylor),
actress (Loene Carmen), supporting
actor (Ben Mendelsohn) and
editing (Neil Thumpston). Molloy
confirmed, however, that "on the
basis of information provided by
[the producer] Kennedy Miller, the
film will remain in competition”.
The film, it seems, was made on
35mm with Dolby sound on the
understanding that an exhibitor
would be sought if the film was
suitable for commercial release.
SPAA President Ross Dimsey was
anxious to hose down the
contention, claiming the
association merely sought
clarification of the AFl’s guidelines
for the film's eligibility.

On the other hand, Dogs in
Space was not entered in the
Awards, whilst several others were
entered (Candy Regentag, The
Marsupials — Howling 3, With Love
To The Person Next To Me, Shame,
Cassandra, The Humpty Dumpty
Man) but failed to receive

8 — S[...]nominations. Several other films
were not ready in time for the
screenings held during July and
August.

Dogs In Space producer Glenys
Rowe said that because the film
had already been released, there
were no direct benefits to be
gained from participating in the AFI
awards, and ”the cost of two prints
and the entry fees was a sufficient
deterrent”.

Interestingly, the four films
nominated for best film (Ground
Zero, High Tide, The Tale Of Ruby
Rose, The Year My Voice Broke)
have also been nominated for
direction (Michael Pattinson and
Bruce Myles, Gillian Armstrong,
Roger Scholes and John Duigan
respectively) and, with the
exception of The Tale Of Ruby
Rose, have figured prominently in
the original screenplay (Mac
Gudgeon and Jan Sardi, Laura
Jones, John Duigan, respectively)
and acting categories. Only four
films were eligible for the category
of screenplay adapted from
another sourc[...]amson's screenplay of
Travelling North, which, to the
surprise of many, failed to win
nominations for best film or
direction (Carl Schultz). In the non-
feature categories, nominations for
the various categories are shared
by: Friends And Enemies, How The
West Was Lost, Musical Mariner
(documentary); Crust, in Love
Cancer, 224, Worry (animation);
Landslides,[...]ort
fiction).

Paul Kalina

1987 AUSTRALIAN FILM

IN

AWARDS

FEATURE FILM NOMINATIONS

Best film:

Ground Zero

High Tide

The Tale Of Ruby Rose

The Year My Voice Broke

Best achievement in direction:
Ground Zero ~ Michael Pattinson and
Bruce Myles

High Tide — Gillian Armstrong

The Tale Of Ruby Rose — Roger Scholes
The Year My Voice Broke - John Duigan
Best original screen[...]a — Pamela Gibbons

Ground Zero — Mac Gudgeon and Jan
Sardi

High Tide — Laura Jones

The Year My Voice Broke — John Duigan
Best performance by an actor in a
leading role:

Ground Zero — Colin Friels

Travelling North Leo McKern

The Umbrella Woman — Bryan Brown
The Year My Voice Broke - Noah
Taylor

Best performance by an actress in a
leading role:

High Tide — Judy Davis

Shadows Of The Peacock — Wendy
Hughes

Travelling North — Julia Blake

The Year My Voice Broke — Loene
Carmen

Best performance by an actor in a
supporting role:

Ground Zero — Donald Pleasence
initiation — Bobby Smith

The Umbrella Woman - Steven Vidler
The Year My Voice Broke - Ben
Mendelsohn

Best performance by an actress in a
supporting role:

Belinda — Kaarin Fairfax

High Tide — Jan Adele

High Tide — Claudia Karvan

The Place At The Coast — Julie Hamilton

Best achievement in costume
design:

Bullseye — George Liddle

The Place At The Coast — Anna French
Those Dear Departed - Roger Ford
The Umbrella Woman - Jennie Tate
Best achievement in
cinematography:

Belinda — Malcolm McCulloch
Ground Zero — Steve Dobson

The Umbrella Woman — James Bartle
Warm Nights On A Slow Moving Train
— Yuri Sokol

Best achievement in editing:
Bullseye — Richard Francis—Bruce
Ground Zero — David Pulbrook

The Umbrella Woman — John Scott
The Year My Voice Broke — Neil
Thumpston

Best original music score:

Shadows Of The Peacock — William
Motzing

The Tale Of Ruby Rose - Paul Schutze
Those Dear Departed - Phillip Scott
The Umbrella Woman - Cameron Allan
Best achievement in production
design:

Bullseye — George Liddle

Ground Zero — Brian Thomson

The Place At The Coast - Owen
Paterson

To Market, To Market - Virginia Rouse
Best achievement in sound:

Belinda — Tim Lloyd

Ground Zero — Ga[...]Jordan, Anne Breslin,
John Patterson

Shadows Of The Peacock — Tim Lloyd,
Greg Bell, Peter Fenton, P[...]TURE FILM NOMINATIONS

Best documentary:

Friends And Enemies

How The West Was Lost
Musical Mariner (Part One)
Painting The Town

Best animation:

Crust

In Love Cancer

224

Worry

Best experimental:

Land[...]r An Englishman
Spaventapasseri

Best achievement in direction:
Feathers — John Ruane

How The West Was Lost - David
Noakes

The Nights Belong To The Novelist —
Christina Wilcox

Spaventapasseri — Luigi Acquisto

Best achievement in screenplay:
How The West Was Lost — David
Noakes, Paul Roberts

Spaventapasseri — Luigi Acquisto
Smacks And Kicks — Catherine Stone
Witchhunt — Barbara Chobocky, Jeffrey
Bruer

Best achievement in
cinematography:

How The West Was Lost - Philip Bull
Musical Mariner (Part[...]Spaventapasseri — Jaems Grant

Best achievement in editing:
Damsels Be Damned — Murray Ferguson
How The West Was Lost - Frank
Rnavec

Kick Start — Nuba[...]— Simon
Dibbs, Bill Leimbach

Best achievement in sound:

Friends And Enemies — Keiran Knox,
Geoff Stitl

Land[...]

...AS DELICIOUSLY WITTY I}
AND SOPHISTICATED :3

AS IT IS’ . ///I, k /1
- OUYPAGEOUSLY ‘ ~

FILM & SOUND

congratulates
the nominees of the 1987
AFI AWARDS

NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE

~ _. ~ PROUDLY PRESERVING
. ' . " @ AUSTRALIA’S FILM HERITAGE

McCoy Circuit, Acton, Canberra[...]) 29 8199

inning

awards...

Cinevex is part
of the process!

The same processing expertise
that went into ‘Malcolm’,
‘Dunera Boys’ and ‘Kangaroo’
goes into all our work. Being
asso[...]x,
after 511, you do get used to it
with 20 years in the business.

The process of bringing ideas to life.

15-17[...]

JILLIAN BURT finds out the answer from[...]oving
reporter assigned for life to
_ communicate the ideas and im-
’ 2 ipressions of Gerald L’Ecuyer. Gerald[...]a Ganadian filmmaker who
is taking part three of the chip Dexter
j‘ chronicles — a short film entitled The
¥ears — on the festivals
' t, beginning with Toronto and
He is based in New York and has
. ,. an assistant director on Andy
fifliar[...]how (including
:3] rhol’s rock video for cars) and
" orts his conversations with film-
liers for Interview magazine.
cuyer’s first ehip Dexter movie
in $50 and was a super 8 movie of
eight minutes. second chi[...]he was study-
fing cinema at Goncordia university in
"-Montreal and was till minutes long and
.’'-'cost, $800. ‘What won me a whole
fishes of ptizes. It won best cinemato-
‘egrapliy at the eanadian student film
hstival and I got the top prize at my
' university. It was like a showc[...]es, or
ltfpeple he was interviewing. some
actors and some weren't. And
fitiat got me quite a major grant from
a ratio‘ canada 6-7ounciI for the Arts to
evelop a script and keep going. They
5; with me because I ran out of[...]h
, lsomeone that long. ihhey really had
, faith and it paid off and they're really
2 '-= ecstatic adopt the film. :'l'—hey're just
‘ ‘filled to death.[...]disposal, he's more like
[ M1-complete philosophy and reflects a
4 -‘ enerally reporterly attitude that is
In if present in I2"Ecuyer’s l-le was a
. p I ‘search it radio with the canadian
3; adcasting Gorporation while at film
— . , war and ehip Dexter spilled over
. ‘ into his radio. work. “That’s when the
1 Fmixin of the ioumalism, documen-
, , fictional teats really in[...]day I was getting screamed at to be
A yfictual and to be accurate and to use
A ' ks properly and not be wrong and
*3. ; absolutely true to the facts. And
_ ‘J ,, en at school there was the opposite,
‘ ,1‘; ‘go of any precepts or concepts you
‘ _ 2 ejf what is fonnal and forget it. So
i . I wa”s"st_raddIed between the two and it
‘became a- very interesting tension. I
used Chip Dexter in political cartoon

10 —- SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

R L D

type spots°on the radio in a very
straight, factual, developed, sort of
ques[...]olutely no laugh track, so whoever
got it, got it and whoever didn't
didn’t."

After film school he moved to New
York and started working at the
Factory with Andy Warhol. In his third
Chip Dexter movie Brigid Berlin, who
appeared in many of Warhol’s movies
from the sixties, plays chip Dexter's
mother. New York performance artist
Ann Magnuson, who has appeared in
Susan Seidelman’s Desperately
Seeking Susan and Making Mr Right,
and opposite Fliver Phoenix in Jimmy
Beardon, plays the psychiatrist that
Chip visits because he is havin[...]o wanted to make a

‘funny film, even if it was in a dark

way". He shot the film on a sound
stage in New York city with “sets
modelled after old television episodes
of Lassie”. The Critical Years is a
mixture of emotional textures pre-
sented in an unusual way. Everything
is completely unexpect[...]moments from his life (he is
heard but not seen, and the narration
is by L’Ecuyer) with his analyst. The
darkest moments with Brigid Berlin, as
a defeated mother eating ice-cream in
the kitchen of chip's childhood, are
the most cruelly funny. The flashbacks
show young Chip as ridiculous and
profound and revelatory about frogs
and pieces of glass. The analyst her-
self, or the concept of analysis, is dis-
sected in a charming, disgruntled per-
formance by Ann Magnuson. It's the
sort of movie that is completely per-
sonal and complex and contradictory
and has a time-release effect; it is
memorable in the most insistent sort
of way.

“I write all of my films and one of the
things that I think‘ is kind of interesting
—[...]ou're writing for films
is that line between fact and fiction
being blurred. When you've got a
character you live with him all the time.
Chip is always there with me. I'm

always talking to him andgseeing the
world through his eyes. I'm allowed
through him t[...]at I would
normally find too embarrassing to say.
And chip is allowed to talk about his
family and things like that, where I
wouldn't dare.

“What[...]skeletons but are really a great
story. It's also in the way of telling it.
You don't have to tell a story in a tradi-
tional way to get it across. I feel that
people can fill in the holes a lot.”

L’Ecuyer talks to filmmakers that he
admires and wants to find out more
about for Interview magazine. This
year he's done the cover story about
Diane Keaton and interviewed David
I;ynch, among others. “The qualities
involved with being a good journalist
a[...]I've always felt that you either do
or you report and that's where the
danger comes in for me. I have to I
temper myself all the time and that's
hard. And also at every one of these
interviews I have to resist the unbeliev-
able temptation at the end of the inter-
views to say ‘by the way I happen to
have a tape of my work here’. You
have to resist because there is no
point in it, they've already given you
so much that the purpose of the inter-
view is an end in itself. In terms of my
own writing it helps, it really does help.
I hear so much advice along the way.
It's a very confusing kind of jungle but
I'm just making up my own rules and
so far so good.”

The Critical Years was first shown at
a private screening at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in May this
year and later that same night on cable
television in New York. As a result of
that screening I;'Ecuyer is currently
working on a treatment of the next
Chip Dexter movie as a feature. “It's
about Chip Dexter and his best friend.
His best friend is a kind of spe[...]was on every block, who used to
wear baggy shorts and was too skinny
for his age and was too smart or too
dumb for regular schools. I[...]st friends with that child.
This time chip Dexter and his best
friend go off on an adventure."

has always[...]bout ‘footpath movies’, money, British cinema and his ifilm‘

about the painter Caravaggio, soon to be released in Australia.

‘ started off being a joy and ended up being
the albatross in my own life. I began as a
happy-go-lucky home-mov[...]had a
sort of camaraderie, was horribly mercenary and
hierarchical. I’ve not really had that with my
films (I’d had a taste of it working on The Devils
with its really big budget) but in a way Cara-
vaggio pointed in that direction. You could feel
that other world hovering in and around it, the
world of financiers and money. It had taken
seven years to get that film made and in the end I
thought, ‘Is it worth spending seven years on any
subject?’ I went back to the Super 8 camera
because I realised I was not going to sit down and
write another script, which we all know is a
char[...]all. It

Caravaggio was meant to be your entry to the
mainstream, the beginning of co-option into
commercial British ci[...]ve people of my
generation (this is film, not TV) and four or five
of thethe illusion of cohesion. If there was
an industry as[...]ould follow, with people working from
one film to the next. This is not so. Go back 10 or
15 years and it’s the generation of Roeg and
Russell. Then the seventies was a very difficult
time, the cinema was in the wilderness. Where
had it all disappeared to? I do[...]oach, whose body of work
came out of that decade, and perhaps Julien
Temple. It still remains a string[...]m ‘Young British Cinema’, l’m 45
years old, the same with Stephen Frearsl We are
talking a[...]

So where are the feature filmmakers in their
twenties? I don’t count someone like Alex[...]made Sid Ana’ Nancy 10 years after it
happened and that seems a very American way of
making a movie[...]ly his-
toricising, you may as well do Caravaggio and go
back 400 years as 10! It is also the incredible
thing about British features at the moment —
hardly anyone is actually reflecting the situation
here. The trouble with my filmmaking was that I
was stuck in the seventies until Caravaggio was
made because I had[...]t, so I’d become a historic movie maker. I was,
in reality, keen to make films about the issues of
now. I read somewhere, ‘Derek Jarman equals
art film and all that renaissance stuff’, and I can
understand how that can be written. I couldn’t
catch up with the eighties as I wanted to stay with
the project. Now I am rather glad I couldn’t
because they were pretty bleak and when I did
catch up I had a better perspective on[...]s.

Yet your films seem to always have a foothold in
the present. Even when dealing with myth or
masque, the backward look at Arcadia, they
have the sense of being contemporary. Perhaps
this is due to the issues of sexuality they contain.

The thing about sexual politics is that essentially
i[...]hat it is one huge spectrum. It can divide
things in a way that is impossible, so that all you
get is[...]aughing) You know I
become ‘Peter Pan faggot’ and that’s it. Don’t
use the word ‘gay’ and if you do print it, cross it
out, because the thing about it is that although it
can distil a f[...]think
that is a much bigger issue involving half the
human race and any allies that can be got from
the other half.

I was never politically straightforw[...]icult. My background is too difficult to fit
into the patterns of English politics. The basic
political thing about my films is that I carried on
making them in Super 8. If I have made any
political gesture, that’s the one. Yes, it was for
myself struggling against the industry situation
to find a way around the blockade, yet at any
given time I was thinking th[...]g. They can see
someone who is still making films in Super 8 even
though I’ve made those films which have opened
in the Berlin Film Festival in competition.

(The determination to continue to produce low
budget c[...]ity with
young filmmakers. Not only is he working in a
similar sphere of concern, but he is accessible. To
the young actor who accosts him in the street
with a resume, or those who bring their work for
him to see, he remains friendly and enthusiastic.
This openness is part of his view o[...]product, an attitude which is a
motivating force and keeps him in contact with
changes in the film culture).

Music videos have also kept me in contact. They
are adverts really, not specifically about products
but also the people trapped inside these adverts.

Even though I’m not very good at making these
things (in comparison with the glossy promos
you see) what they have done for me is put me in
touch with all the new technology which I could
not have had access[...]were right
when you said that with something like The
Queen [5 Dead it is difficult to decide whether it
was a promotional video for The Smiths or a
Jarman film that had The Smiths music on its
soundtrack. It was much more the latter. The
record company wanted the video, not The
Smiths. I said I would make my film and asked

the band (via the promoters) if I could use their >

CINEMA[...]

Pop videos have also provided the means to
live by. Though I have not done very many, two
or three a year, they have been a stabilising
factor. I was able to employ all the people who
eventually worked on Caravaggio on the[...]sly getting together
although we weren’t making the ‘big’ film.

There is a striking difference in the eroticisation
of the image between the ‘big’ film Caravaggio
and your ‘smaller’ films, say Angelic Conversa-
t[...]er that, creating a tension.
Angelic Conversation in particular is extreme
concentration on looking, on detail, so in that
film nothing really happens yet everything i[...]narrative
when we were shooting, it moves because the
people in it move. (Laughing) I call that film a
‘footpat[...]vie. It
was, of course, shot on Super 8, just me, the
camera and a few actors, which does involve
more freedom. You can just drift through the
summer, turning your gaze on anything.

With Caravaggio there was a full crew and a
tight six-week shooting schedule, that does
cha[...]rying something different.
It’s definitely made in a more traditional
manner, in the way of a film like Joan OfArc. If

CARAGGIO: Intr[...]PTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

anything, it’s nearer to the essence of a twenties
movie than an eighties movie, in its staging. It
shares a constraint of camera mov[...]ground do
you feel your films are more interested in
staging, art direction and ‘the image’, drawing
meaning from that rather than being strongly
narrative?

What you are saying is in one sense true. With
Caravaggio I was making a narrative through the
paintings rather than his actual life. Although h[...]oing to hold
an audience! So this difference lies in the fact
that I wanted to realise the ‘story’ through the
paintings rather than the way of traditional
narrative which would be the reverse of that.

In another sense it is simply that I never have
had any money to make my films. In fact I totted
up the entire amount of money I’d spent on film-
makin[...]million pounds on my films altogether,
including the newest, The Last Of England. To
make nearly six feature films[...]t budget,
knowing that a low budget film nowadays in this
country is two million pounds, more than twice
what I’ve ever spent, I had to work out ways
around the constraints this imposed. So the
economics played a large part. It’s not possibl[...]very strong
narrative. If one wanted a car chase the film
would have had to be only a car chase. So I
worked closer to home, in areas I knew well,
developed from background infl[...]owing up on a military base, to Slade Art
College and his first film job designing the sets
for Ken Russell’s The Devils. That other running
through his own career is the constant quest for

funding and resources. The creation of the
T V/film link through Channel 4 in the eighties
was meant to alleviate the plight of independent
filmmakers, yet Jarman still remained on the
outside).

Channel Four at their inception said t[...]et independent feature films,
yet I could get all the filmmakers of the seventies
who would say ‘Why didn’t they help[...]t us all, Julien Temple, Bill
Douglas (until this year), Ron Peck, Sally Potter;
it goes on and on. I had made the most films of
anyone in the British cinema that were genuinely
low budget and genuinely independent (threel),
Sebastiane, Jubilee and The Tempest and they
didn’t support me! They did support those in
their own backyard, those in television who knew
how to manipulate it. The independents didn’t
understand it and no-one knew who they were
anyhow. What was the ‘wild west’, the open
space, where filmmakers roamed quite freely in
the seventies, was suddenly fenced off. The idea
was that they were going to irrigate it and make it
flower. The irony was, of course, that the ‘odd-
balls’ that used to wander through this area were
shut out, and I was one of them. They did, in
fact, make ‘new’ cinema but we were left to f[...]money.

There is usually a sense of amazement at the
work you produce with so little money.

It isn’[...]secret. Any-
one can make a film with five pounds and a
Super 8 camera, and with a bit more money it
can be put onto 35mm via[...]just that
people are educated to approach things in a
certain way. The notion of ‘filmmaking’ is very
antiquated and structured so that nothing actu-
ally gets done. Vast sums of money are spent in
order that producers can be in the right
restaurants, directors pull rank on set to be called
sir. All that which has nothing to do with the life
of the film, ideas of work or anything, it’s just
the big grinding industry.

My criterion for films is not whether I like
them or not but to feel that the people who made
them, really needed to make them. You can tell
that when you watch a film; whether the idea was
theirs or so close to their hearts, like The
Tempest was to my life, that they adopt it. If you
can feel that someone wanted it and their friends
got together and made it, then that to me is valid.
That’s my criterion when looking at the cinema.
Otherwise I am not interested. It is absolutely a
view from my side of the fence, for there is
nothing on the other side, it’s a desert.

In the cinema there should be many voices but
the system won’t allow it and you can’t really
change that system. It’s lik[...]failed completely, surrealism was going to
change the world but we didn’t change any-
thing’. His b[...]use it is so honest about such things. So long
as the ‘flag is kept flying’ for this small project
and that other low budget film, and it carries on
from generation to generation, that[...]ost don’t. I
don’t make my films for everyone in the world
and I’m not a TV analyst who says, ‘Sixteen
milli[...]owers are first watched by
him, then his friends, and then the whole world
knows about them. (Laughing) C[...]

and consistency.

H621 / H621 B 1-inch video tape. H5[...]lication,

FUJI

VIDEO TAPE .,,[,E,: mp;

IMAGING THE WORLD

Fuji, leaders in their field of film &
videotape technology, now offer a wide
range of products for the professionals
who demand and expect consistent
quality and top performance.

HANIIVIEX

AUD[...]

around, and then located yourself in one spot, in San
Diego for several years, just like the cross on the map that says
”You are here”. It's almost as[...]o
something or against something. So what happens now?

Now that you're winding down teaching, where does that

I don’t know. I really don’t. What can I say, I have the sense that
the kind of effort I have been involved in, more or less, in the last
10 years, and prior to that with Jean—Luc Godard, has been a[...]ed throughout his film career as a film essayist,
and the things that I do are film essays. It so happens that essays
in cinema are the most repressed sub-genre or mode of expres-
sion.[...]re absolutely ’at home’,
they're garage films and totally non-commercial. Take Routine
Pleasures: more so than Poto And Cabengo, it's a film which is
absolutely, from its inception, signalling itself by the fact that it's
not going to make a penny. Thus, your dialogue with the pro-
duction apparatus is immediately marred beca[...]re very few film
essayists; you can count them on the fingers of your hand. Jean-
Luc Godard functions in part as one. But one shouldn't forget

16 ——[...]_ .'

S

that Jean—Luc Godard occupies a place in the history of the
cinema which is akin to the place of Leonardo Da Vinci in the
history of art. So that whatever Jean—Luc says, meaning that he
casts his persona as eternally embattled and needy, Jean—Luc is
someone who has no problem in terms of production. Then you
have someone like Chris Marker who, in fact, my work is closer
to in many ways. Chris functions a little bit like me,[...]secretive man.

Then there are people like Straub and Huillet, who I think
should also be considered as[...]t their trajectories
are exemplary. They might be the most private of the great film-
makers in the sense that the type of distribution that they get and
the type of exposure that they get is more and more reduced.

In a way, the problem is that in the last 20 years the film essay
has found its possibility of subsisten[...]ctors of big television outfits that have
enabled the film essay to exist. The problem is that, to take
Routine as an example, h[...]eration or unfair emphasis on formal problems, on the
formal problems of the craft and, generally, the people who can

support the type of work that I do are few and far between
because the reality of the television outfits is also the reality of a

very conservative aesthetic. You have this situation in which

In Jean-Luc Godard, Gorin once found another
match, working with him in the Dziga-Vertov
group in 1969-70 (Pravda, Vent d’est, Lotte In
ltalia) then together on Tout Va Bien and Letter
To Jane (1972). It is however a period he[...]thing more.”

But for his two films screened at the Festival —
Routine Pleasures (1986) and the earlier Poto
And Cabengo (1979) — he has no final word. For
him, the films mark two points in an open-ended
system of inquiry, and if you can sneak in a

there is, on the one hand, the industry — Hollywood and its sub-
divisions or its subcontractors — and, on the other hand, there is
TV, but to me it's the two faces of the same coin in many ways.
Because my films are done with very li[...]a certain type of cinema, a certain body of work, and a
certain type of investigative filmmaking. I think the reason why
people are so uneasy with my films is they're essentially films
that are more interested in asking questions than offering
answers. So they h[...]tential dimension. I make
films because somewhere in the process of making the film I do
learn something about myself and the world. If I knew where I
was going to land I probably wouldn't make the film. So they're
essentially process—oriented, and by process I mean "work”.
At this stage, and this is why I say I don't know, I don't think
it's possible to find funding, which begs the question that it is
highly possible that the film essay cannot subsist as film and has
to take the detour or transform itself and find its mode of expres-
sion through the technicality of video, which I think is something
very, very different from film. So the question for me is, do I keep
doing the stuff that I am doing, or do I make an effort to find
myself in conditions of production and distribution which are
more classical? In other words, shall I produce a narrative film

IV[...]er to their suggestive
narratives.

At one level, the films are documentaries: Gorin
as narrator observing the lives of others. In Poto, it
is the life of six-year-old twins Gracie and Ginny
Kennedy who were thought to have invented their
own language and were consequently hounded by
language experts and press alike. In Routine
Pleasures, the thoughts of painter and film critic
Manny Farber are intercut with the activities of a
group of model railroad enthusiasts who explain in
great detail the workings of their miniature
landscape.

Yet Gorin[...]lf as “a drunken burn that
grabs you on a bench and is suddenly intent on
telling you his life at all costs”. He too is a charac-
ter in these films: fragmented autobiographies
which tell the story of a nomad who left France,
travelled in Mexico, Guatemala, the United States,
landed a job teaching film at the University of San
Diego (with Manny Farber), and then “stayed”.
And through the intricate imaginary landscapes
constructed in Poto And Cabengo and Routine
Pleasures, he has continued to take journeys,
mental journeys.

The hobbyists from the Pacific Beach & Western
Model Railway Association[...]r Gorin,
someone who is always shifting, refusing the
direct line. Even in interviews, as we soon dis-
covered, he favours the detour.

Kathy Bail and Raffaele Caputo

where there is classical distrib[...]eally a completely Hollywood film but what I call the sub-
contractors of Hollywood. Shall I leave or s[...]are
marked by a big question mark.

Let's move on and talk about Poto And Cabengo. In a way, it
seems Poto And Cabengo is an answer to Letter To lane. Letter
To[...]ou have
that photo of jane Fonda, you've selected the still from Tout
Va Bien, and the voice-overs seem as though they've been
already written and they're just read out. But Poto And
Cabengo is completely different, it's like you just came along
and you read this article in the newspaper and you thought,
’'well, I'm just going to grab my camera, get into the car, and
without any kind of planning or anything, I'm going to go and
shoot this film.’’

Well, I've been trained in exactly the opposite way. My scholarly
training was "I used to do my homework”, and ”doing my
homework” is really like the epigraph to Letter To lane. Letter To
lane is a film where the homework is done. I decided that I

wanted to put myself in exactly the reverse position, except that >

CINEMA PA[...]

that explains Routine Pleasures and in a way pissed me off when
I saw the reaction to Poto — Poto is a trick. Poto is a trick through
and through.

At the time I was very depressed and I had no work. A friend of
mine, Tom Luddy, who was then the director of the Pacific Film
Archive in Berkeley, told me that Ekhard Stein of ZDF (Zweites
Deutsches Fernsehen) was passing through town and that if I
wanted to do a film I had better find a subject. In the morning I
just stepped onto this newspaper where the story of the twins
was carried, and then I had a very boozed—out evening with
Ekhard and I lied to him. I said, ”l’ve got the twins. l’ve secured
the rights. I've seen the kids. |’ve got the documents from the
children's hospital. l’ve got the film. Let me do the film.” Well,
Stein either believed my lie or he[...]nt. I think that he really wanted me to do a film and he
was ready to give me the possibility to do one. But I really had
nothing. So first, I called the parents, which was really funny
because the father answered and you could hear his wife in the
background giving him directions, and at first the father was kind
of aloof, saying things like "a lot of people and a lot of studios
have asked us to do a film, etc, etc”. So I got a lawyer friend of
mine to call him back and we settled on something. It was also a

time when I was coming back into teaching in San Diego.
I went to see the twins, and the first thing that struck me was

that they spoke English. They spoke English! The story was gone.
So at that point there's two solutions: either you decide, "Well
the story's gone and the film is not going to be made” or, on the
contrary, you say, ”Wel| what's becoming interesting is pre-
cisely the fact that the story is not there.”

I believe that somewhere along the line, as an essential prin-
ciple of filmmaking, of narration in fact, whether it's narrative
cinema, fictional or[...]hould be some-
thing that is like a black hole at the centre ofthe narration. There
should be something[...]u cannot break which is precisely what allows you the
detour. In many ways, I have this vision, this idea, that language
in general, expression in general, is only possible if there is the
impossibility of expression at its core. We talk[...]s already vanished. It's going to be a film about the loss of
innocence, and it’s going to be something about intimate
langu[...]e of our dearest myths; I suspect it goes
back to the womb and to the kind of communication within the
foetus or the foetal waters of the mother. And so it's going to be
about this loss ofthe intimate language and the entrance into the
world. What really struck me about this situation was that I was
dealing with one of our big myths — the myth that all myths are
linked to, that is the savage infant. You know, what is the title of
Truffaut's film? The Wild Child. Basically it's poetic and then it
falls into the wild-chi|d—category type of myth. The wild-child
myth is basically an adult myth. It's the idea that here is this thing
that has this strange mode of communication which has to be
brought back into the world.

In the case of Poto, first and foremost, those kids were
imposed upon. They, per[...]is thing that didn’t want to go out.
Everybody! The therapist wanted them to be Nobel Prize
material. The parents wanted them to be, for reasons which had
to do with their welfare among other things, their path to the
economical betterment of their lives. I wanted them to be in a
film. The kids just wanted to go out, and in a way, the kids were
absolutely fascinated by the fact that everybody saw them as
mysterious. They didn't see themselves as mysterious, and also,
because they were very pure and naive, they were systematically
hurt by the mode of investigation they were attracting. Peopl[...]ntering their world
which had been very sheltered and very closed up, breaking into
it and then splitting. My problematic is that I came and I stayed.
So that by coming and staying I found myself completely trapped
into a whole set of ethical problems that ultimately the film kind
of explores.

But I was talking about what pissed me off about Poto And
Cabengo, and it’s that people still saw it as a ”documenta[...]t was essentially a short story; a fictional film in
which a story was told in much the same way as a short story by
Raymond Chandler would be told, with a detective at its centre,
meaning, in the case of Poto, the filmmaker. Solving a case

18 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

which is solved in five seconds flat, but then having to deal with
the consequences, the ethical consequences of having solved
the case.

There is something else which I think is rather important and
I'm going to use simplications for the sake of the argument, but
it’s that I have this sense that cinema is profoundly sexist — that's
in a rather liberal, classical sense — not only in the fact that it
depicts acts of abuse and of power which bear on women, but
even more, for[...]k that film is
sexist. What is generally at stake in film is the domination, the
relationship of power of the filmmaker over his material. Most of
the time the director of a film is relentlessly adopting the mis-
sionary position, as though he is saying, ”Here am I and my
material. Look at the way I'm humping it to death. Look at the
way I drive out of it screams of pleasure, and please, you the
audience, derive your pleasure from that voyeuris[...]into some vicarious contact with my mastery over
the material.” I have the sense, and once again this is a kind of
liberal composition and I'm really simplifying things that are
more meta—political than anything else, but I have the sense that
it would be interesting to make films in which, as an element of
the problematic, what would happen is that the filmmaker,
instead of being a dominating force, would suddenly be a
dominated force where the material would impose on the film-
maker in a certain way, the filmmaker would have to be driven
or sent around by the material. And I think Poto is that.

So what you want to do is[...]es. But I don't especially intend to challenge it in problematic
terms. The only way that I have to challenge it is to find myself
drawn into the film and then to end up flushed out of this mis-
sionary, Cod-like, power position that is initially given to me by
the fact that I am the filmmaker doing the film. It's a rather
excruciating experience in a way, which I might ultimately
decide to spare myself.

Lets say the problematic of documentary is really the
problematic of respect. You have to show respect to the people
and the situation that you describe. In order to show respect you
have to give weight; to[...]put someone down — for me they are two
sides to the same coin. It is to show the extent or the range of
emotions and behaviour that the situation necessitates in you in
the relationship to those people. So you're absolutely drawn into
the process, you become the marker that enables the audience
to locate itself in the process, which means that I do not mind
looking like a fool in the films that I make. I think it’s absolutely
essential in some ways.

In Poto the parents are described as victims and victimisers,
you get the sense that this is a milieu which is both caring and
cold, repressive and supportive, idiotic in its dreams and at the
same time with a certain type of dignity; what is important to me
is that idea of giving the range, or giving the weight. In many
ways I try to set up emotional dialectics in my films where ideas
and feelings are transformed into each other at rathe[...]important to show how much you love
your subject, and at the same time to show how much you’re
infuriated by[...]sly a coup. It
was a casting coup. There's nobody in that film that doesn't look
incredible, and the kids were absolutely fantastic to look at and
to be with. But, somewhere along the line, the subject of Poto
had its own drama. Here was a case that was recorded in the
newspaper, a little item in the daily gazettes, and it had its own
juice, it had its own drama. But because I had been in the cold
for quite a while, I wanted to make a film w[...]say, ”Wowl This guy who
had this reputation as the castrating angel of the revolution is
ultimately human.” I had no doubts about my humanity, but a
lot of people seemed to, and I wanted people to ultimately care
for the twins, or to have the sense that I was a decent human
being who was trying to do a decent job. And then I got very
pissed off with myself because I[...]ll, forget that,
next one is going to take people and a subject that is as dry as dry
toast.”[...]

How did you find the group of model railway enthusiasts for
Routine Pl[...]ct matter: you just plant your two feet
firmly on the ground, you extend your two arms and you whirl
around on your axis, and that circle defines the possibilities of
subjects that you can reach. I'm[...]to do. Initially, I wrote a text
called GI. Joe, and I knew the film was going to be about my
Americanisation. I didn't know exactly what that film was, so I
tried this and I tried that and time was passing by and money was
being spent just waiting for the subject to happen. Finally one
day I just walked onto the Del Mar Fairground, which I really
liked, for rea[...]sh, Moorish, hacienda—type archi-
tecture, like the kind of architectural fantasy that set designers
had in the 19305, and characterises a great deal of the Southern
California landscape. I just went there, and there's tons of
bizarre activities that happen on the racetrack, even during the
off season.

I wanted to do a winter California film. I wanted to do some-
thing which had to do with the notion of landscape. I wanted to
talk about geography, but I didn't have the means to go travel-
ling, so I had to talk about geography from where I was. And so
on this racetrack during the winter there's tons of activity, for
instance, dog obedience training sessions in the middle of the
night and that kind of stuff. Finally, I found those guys. The
minute I walked in I said "Wow! This is it!" For me there is
something which may be one of my defects, and it's the need of
this sort of encounter with the subject, which is a very practical,
pragmatic encounter, where you walk into a space and you
sense that you are going to have to explore that space. It's like
meeting someone or falling in love with someone where, essen-
tially, the object of your love gets always individualised on the
background of something that you eroticise at lar[...]a sense of adventure?

It was adventure, although the fear was like, "Jesus, you have to
hurry up because the film is supposed to be delivered in a
month." But more a sense of adventure. I just stumbled onto
those guys. There was this hangar, and in this hangar there was
this box, and in this box there was this landscape that was very
small, and there were all these guys that were manning this[...]or Wellman film.
This is a film about men because the other one had been a film
about women and my relationship to them. There is something
very, very personal in Poto in terms of seduction, relationships of
seduction which is something important in my life. So there was
also the idea of doing something about my relationship to men,
which, to tell you the truth, I hadn't really thought about,
because most of my connections or my access to the world, I
thought, were always transported through women and by
women. So there it was, this idea that I was going to do some-
thing about men and my relationship to them.

There was this activity which was a bizarre mixture of play and
work. There was the reality of an object — the train — which has
formed the United States, but is now out of date. So there was
this idea of this big object being reduced yet looming very large
in the minds ofthose guys. There's this idea ofdoing a f[...]n extremely tough nut to crack because if
you ask the obsessed what obsesses them, or what makes them
tick, the best they can do is smile at you, as though they[...]y I'm so obsessed by
what I'm obsessed about?" So the dialectic becomes very
dangerous in that you are suddenly forced to match your own
obsession at discovering the obsession of the other. But I'm not

someone who's obsessed by trains!

But in a different way you are obsessed with something else. If

we take Poto And Cabengo and Routine Pleasures and the way
you place yourself in the films as both character and narrator,
which relates to detective fiction, more in a literary sense than
filmic, the subject or the activity that goes on tends to stand as
a metaphor for yourself. Poto And Cabengo deals with
language and your relationship to that language, being a
foreigner who has to deal with a language that isn't your own,
and Routine Pleasures is somewhat different, it seems to have
moved on from there, and it's marked by the line ”I'm not
quite American but I'm no longer French”, and so you're
trying to identify yourself in this landscape.

The thing in Routine is that, on the one hand, this is a film about
landscape, this is about the American landscape, and in a way
Routine Pleasures is a direct and polemical answer to things like
Paris, Texas. It's saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I don't have the means,
I can't travel, I can't buy Nastassja Kins[...]'t need to go to Monument Valley. Here I
am stuck in Del Mar and I have to deal with this landscape, one
that I have all the more difficulty understanding because it
doesn't seem to unfold with the depth of history I am used to
with the European landscape.

But then very clearly a trick is played which people don't seem
to get, and which proves in a way that at a certain point the film
fails. But the trick is to say: Wait a minute! What characterises
the American landscape is not a series of coffee—tab|e book
shots. Take a good stock by Kodak and a good cameraman and
you'll get that kind of spectacular stuff which you could do in
Australia, in Malaysia, whatever. Postcards! Suddenly something
else happens. This landscape that I'm looking at is the landscape
of imagination. Wait a minute! You're s[...], that has been endlessly repeated over 25 years, in which
they play their desire, their pleasure, their conjunction, and in
which they play out this mythical position as eng[...]ngineers! Not patrons, not travellers. Engineers! The guys
that have the power to move things, and the power to move
these little objects is in some ways the power of their own
Imagination to locate themselves in this landscape. There is
something at stake here: somewhere along the line what charac-
terises the American psyche is this act of miniaturisation.

Here is a culture that is profoundly nomadic, and I don't think
that it is very different from what you get in Australia in the sense
of having to face and define yourself in this enormous continent.
Here is this tribe of gu[...]these little voodoo dolls
that they move around, and that is the thing that gives scale in
this incredible landscape which has so little his[...]re which is not simply "let's travel, let's be
on the road, let's travel from Monument Valley on down to New
York City, back and forth and what not". Instead, what is the
landscape of its imagination . . . What is that specificity of the
American imaginary?

Then something dissolves itself, that bizarre alliance, a back
and forth between the neither French nor American: it is the idea
of the foreigner because, in some ways, and I suspect there is the
same feeling here, everybody in the States is a foreigner. To be a
foreigner is the most commonly shared feeling, existential
feeling[...]a first level another
city they originated from, and then what they'll tell you is what
part of Europe[...]you're not a foreigner, you're
an insider. That's the metaphor of the box. You're inside the
hangar, but inside the hangar there is a second box. In that box
there's another box, so the dialectic becomes: How much inside
is inside? Where do you get that ultimate specificity, when in fact
what you discover is that the origin constantly recedes.

In the process of doing some preparatory work, I had sai[...]not very
smart to constantly reactivate yourself in front of those guys as a
Frenchman." Okay, we kno[...]son. But
there is something else: ultimately what the film lands onto is the
artistic imaginary. Routine Pleasures is a film that puts me in
contact with what it is to be a filmmaker or to be an artist, which,
at the level where I am, is certainly something which go[...]istic myth about creation.

Let's take those guys and some of the stuff that interested me.
One, a machine t[...]

have known have long died and dissolved themselves. Here is a
group that has ma[...]dual machine, this is a
machine which exists only in as much as it enables a collectivity
to branch it[...]ired, working class, unemployed people. They come
and they put their individually-owned object of desire in a
machine that only functions collectively, and they leave it there.
They don’t pack up their trains, they leave them there. So some-
where on the Del Mar fairground exists that object which
enables Chester, retired ex—navy man, to come every once and a
while to recharge himself in this bizarre dream in which you play
out the dialectic between childhood and work. That kind of stuff
interested me.

What is the nostalgia that you refer to in Routine Pleasures?
Does that relate to the nostalgia of those men?

I think it is a combination of everything. It's the nostalgic
machine that is on display. There's a c[...]a very short historical span about its own
past, and I would anchor it somewhere in the 1930s. The 19305
is a time where the notions of work and community had an enor-
mous importance. At the same time, I link that nostalgia to an
imaginary[...]lgia which I suspect is essen-
tial to understand the conservative times of Reagan. Reagan is
basically the same age as most of those guys; he is a kind of
Hawksian version of the nostalgic impulse that those guys have.
There's a[...]dignity to that conservatism —
what I describe in the film are profoundly conservative people,
but it's to see what this conservatism is really acting out, and it is
not only something repressive.

But there i[...]r several things: for a
certain type of narration in film, for ensemble acting, for films
that explore their own premises, for outfit films. Then there's the
nostalgia that Farber enacts. All that functioning at its own
rhythm, all that interacting in that moment of space and time, all
that trying to define what the times are.

I think one of the things at stake in the film is a feeling very
characteristic of the eighties. I feel the eighties is about a certain
sense of the province, which is worldwide. We’re all provincial
and we all feel provincial in as much as we feel that there is, or
should be, a[...]we cannot really grasp because some-
where along the line we've also been persuaded that the centre
has ceased to exist. So we'll live our provinciality in a very kind
of frustrated, anguished way. There i[...]deological,
historical or societal — from which the main bulk of culture,
ideas and production seems to come. Information is spread all
over the place. We don’t know how to make sense of it. We feel
like we're in some sort of gigantic, suburban, provincial limbo.
We’re distanced from the world by the representation of this
world. In a way the film tries to address that question.

Also characteristic ofthe eighties is the idea ofthe privatisation
of our obsession. Because the centre has stopped to exist and we
can only dream its existence, we, in the practicality of our lives,
go back onto those ver[...]eems to me impossible to think about
cinema right now without seeing the fact that very clearly people
see films more and more in the privacy of their own homes, on
their VCR.

Routine is privacy upon privacy upon privacy. You talk about
the private obsessions of a group of guys of whom you[...], ultimately. Never at any point do I give myself
the right to trespass beyond the border they themselves have
assigned to their ima[...]ry seriously. I take them
at what they want to be and at what they want to show which is
to be the engineers of the Pacific Beach & Western Model
Railway Association[...]fat daughter, his bickering wife. I don't go into the
drudge of George the 44-year-old unemployed, who lives with
his mother. I give George the glory of being the engineer of that

railroad. _
Then there's the privacy of Farber, an ultra-private painter,

who does these big narrative canvases, where the narrative is
just an arch, a certain path on the canvas which gets interrupted
by another path, full of self-involved references to checks and

20 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

‘ .
1 I
POTO AND CABENGO: The twins

counter—checks of his own life, a kind of nomadic spread of his
life, like a map. The privacy ofthis guy who is unknown. He was
the greatest filmwriter in the States but his work is unknown, and
his paintings, by and large, are not that wel|—known.

Then ultimately, the privacy of J—P. Gorin, who is like a
drunken burn that grabs you on a bench and hes suddenly
intent on telling you his life at all costs. I'm very sensitive to this.
One of the charms of life for me is to get into contact with people
who suddenly start talking in very precise and specific terms
about a life I completely ignore, and that I really don’t care that
much to hear. But[...]nse of
intimacy, or more an idea of intimacy than the reality of intimacy
explored and completed. 50 you’ve got a film which is private
on private on private, and there is something infuriating for
people in that process. But for me there are more things said, in
that film, about the state ofthings than in a lot of other films that I
have seen!

The use of the train enthusiasts, on one side, and Manny
Farber, on the other, brings to mind something R.J. Thompson
wro[...]s mode of thought is
analogic rather than binary, and, in a way, what you’ve just
said is that if you proceed by a binary mode the film is going to
be closed, and it would probably be closed from the very
beginning.

That's really the big difference. Most films function with what
you[...]ying it's an
‘either/or’ system. You progress and there's supports and you
choose either/or, this or that, and then the thing progresses by
closure, by successive closure of possibilities. In my case I have
this different sense which I see in Manny's paintings and writing.
It's more an ’and . . . and . . . and . . . and’ type of thing, which I
think has very much to do with love.

The one thing that love is about, that desire[...]

I'm someone who goes back to the thirties; it is a very interest—
ing period in filmmaking history. It is interested in work, which I
think is the last repressed notion. You can show more or less
everything in film right now, and pornography has done it for us
by essentially foc[...]rt of centrality, on short cuts:
go fast to where the explosion is supposed to be. The films of the
thirties, on the other hand, are off centre all the time, in some
ways, and one of the things I like about them is the idea of work.
It's also a very bizarre period of film where women are portrayed
in film as powerful forces, as characters able to hold their own in
tough circumstances.

It’s also a period that h[...]lms, if you can call
them that.

That's true. But the relationship is one of the things I could not

avoid. It's also why I did the film. I'm not especially passionate
about trains, but cinema and trains are co—substantial. The first

film ever shown is of a train entering a r[...]tend to be three prevalent elements or tendencies in
your films. One is the references to silent cinema, for instance,
the last shot in Routine Pleasures duplicates the well-known
Lumiere film of the train, and in Poto And Cabengo it's the way

the music works; the second element is the way the films relate
to detective fiction; and the third is the fact that the subjects of
your films are very localised. It see[...]ents form a
certain relation that tends to define the fact that you do not
want to make distinctions between documentary and fiction.

I don't believe in the dichotomy between fiction and docu-
mentary because I do not think anybody is naive enough to
believe that what's on the screen is anything else but an image of
the real and not the real itself, and that film is space on time, or
manipulation of space on time; it is not this kind of innocent and
naive activity, but behind it is a certain kind of manipulation.
The problem is to make the manipulation apparent, so that it can
be located, instead of having the audience constantly clobbered
over the head by something that pretends to be innocent. That's
fascism to me. The reality is that I don’t mind being the
manipulator, but what I want is for people to know what my
manipulation is and how my manipulation develops itself.

But what's more central to the two issues is this idea of narra-
tion. What is it to tell a story? What is it for the screen to light up,
the darkness to be felt, and the film to last for a certain amount of
time.

There is also something else at stake in those works, and it's
that I always conceived them as a certain at[...]l|, it
would be kind of interesting to do exactly the same thing in a
completely non—d0cumentary context, with actors and con-
ceiving the whole thing from the beginning."

The thing I've mainly been working on for all these years is the
idea of layering. How many layers can you put into the subject?
Because I really think that the problem we're facing right now is
this incredible accumulation, surplus, of information, and that is
the dramatic notion. How much do we know at any given
moment on any given thing? Once again the differentiation with
Jean-Luc in our recent work is he sees that surplus as overlo[...]o much accumulation of information, what
falls by the wayside is the very idea of being able to recuperate
that surplus into one coherent story. So, somewhere along the
line Jean-Luc maintains the idea of the story as the sphere of
coherence, which I don't especially maintain. For him this over-
load disjoins the narrative and it puts people in some sort of
despair. In my case, the accumulation of information reactivates
the idea of narrative, but the narrative becomes plural; instead of
‘either/or’, which is basically the narrative model which Jean-
Luc has both longed for and refused, mine is not even a
problem, you just do an ’and . . . and . . . and’ system that end»
lessly accumulates the layers. I'm really interested in layering.

You're working on another film . . .
I'm working on several things.

The film I've heard about is one where there are a number of
interviews. The first is with the wife of the guy who caused the
McDonalds’ massacre in San Diego; the second is using an
actress to portray the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. It's like
we can see progressive stages, for instance, Gorin and
language (Poto And Cabengo), Gorin and landscape (Routine
Pleasures), and with this it seems to be Gorin getting closer to
the American psyche, and it's a very dark psyche, but it's
through women.

It's the idea of the bystander. It’s about two women who lived in
the proximity of crime, and who, ultimately end up having to
bear the weight of the crime. But I don't think that film will ever
see the light of day. There is one film which is called Real Estate
which is three vignettes about the economic transformation of
the landscape. The film was going to be like a road movie
between th[...]Then, I've written a spy movie which takes place in Finland
and New York, and it's this trashy writing in a type of Phillip K.
Dick mode. Basically it's a[...]y Sam Fuller
called Pick Up On South Street. It's the story of two CIA guys
who are obliged to pose as porno filmmakers for a night in
Finland because they are passing the porno tape into Russia with
fake information about submarine warfare.

I'm also trying to secure the rights for a story called Myth Of
The Near Future by J.G. Ballard, a writer I profoundl[...]o expensive. I don't know if any of this will see the light of
day, but, I've got ideas, will tr[...]

Did you intend to go back to
Germany[...]y. I left New York after
Paris, Texas. I had been in the
United States for seven years and I
left, not in order to make a film in
Germany, but because I thought I
had finished the scenario I had
wanted to do in America.

Did you feel satisfied with that?

Yes.[...]fied. I felt that I
couldn't have very much more.
And also I felt that I wasn’t going
to go on living there much longer.
So I found myself back in Berlin,
not really because I had intended
to go back, but because my
production office was there; I had
produced all my films except
Hammett from Berlin, so I went
there to go on working on the next
movie, which was going to be a
film that I h[...]ake for almost I0 years, a
science fiction movie. And it was
only being in Berlin, in Germany
for the first time since 1977, that I
realised I was in the situation of
looking at my country and the city
of Berlin from a certain distance.
And when I was working on the
other project I realised that I
should do something about coming
home. I thought I could postpone
the science fiction movie and
thought it was now or never to do

22 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

something in Berlin, in my own
country. Another year or I would
no longer be in that privileged
position of someone coming back
and seeing things with different
eyes. Any longer and I would feel
at home again, and I wouldn't be
able to see it any more.

And where did the notion of the
angels come from?

I really can't put my finger on it.
Maybe the whole angel idea came
as a way to find a point of view for
this film about Germany and in
Germany. With the angels came
this unlimited possibility of looking
at things and being anywhere they
wanted to, and they have a very
objective way of seeing, and in
another way, it's very intimate and
subjective, they can listen to
people’s thoughts.

When did the idea that they
would want to become human
come into it?

That was there from the beginning
too, it was almost like the initial
idea of the whole thing. I also
wanted it to be some sort of love
story, and initially, the point of
departure for that film was in a
way the last thing we shot on Paris,
Texas. It was the scene where the
mother gets reunited with the little
boy and Nastassja comes up to the
room where he is waiting for her

FESTIVALS

and he walks up to her and takes
her in his arms. It was the last
thing we shot. And I felt when we
were shooting it that through this[...]Texas though didn't you?

Yes, but that was more in the
editing. But the last scene I actually
shot with Nastassja and Hunter,
that was the strongest experience
at the end, and whatever the
ending of the film was, I knew that
that would be the departure for the
next film.

What was it about that scene that
you felt had to carry through?

Maybe it was the idea of
acceptance. The boy was accepting
the woman. At the same time,
together with this scene of Hunter
and Nastassja, we shot a scene of
Travis getting back into his car and
driving off and in a way Travis was
driving off, representing not only
himself but some of the other men
in my previous movies. He was
taking off for all of them. He
disappeared. And in a way I was
left with these other two, and these
other two were accepting each
other. Everyt[...]ent when they embraced
each other. I can say this now, it
wasn't all that conscious, but in a
way it was logical that I made this
film when everything came to a
stop. For the first time Wings Of
Desire takes place in one place, in
one city, in fact everything comes
to a stop, a man meets a woman
and she says to him, ’Stop, hold it,
I have to tell you something.’ And
she tells him about her desire to

love, not as a[...]cessity.

You arrive at a very different
point at the end of this film from
points you've arrived at in the
past.

Yes. But I'm not that surprised,
because I knew that from the
outset. I knew that was inevitable. I
took this moment very seriously at
the end of Paris, Texas, I knew that
it would be very[...]Everything had to be
questioned, so to speak. At the
very end of Paris, Texas, all of a
sudden it said[...]without

having to fear that it is going to
mean the end.

Just to get back to Wings Of
Desire for a moment — did the
angels have to be male?

I seriously thought about the other
way round, and having the angels
female, but it didn't feel natural.
And in a way to have this woman
as a central character, very much
alive and doing something very
dangerous, it just felt much[...]. I wanted her to do something
dangerous, so that the angel would
look at her, would feel needed,
like a guardian angel. And I also
thought that angels should feel
attracted to the idea of risk
because it is something that they
don’t know about. And I liked the
idea that this woman was wearing
wings. So, I thought she was alive
from the beginning and I felt the
need for the man to want to
become alive, for this angel to
want to leave his eternity and
become mortal, I was more
familiar with it. And in the
beginning there were more angels,
some of them were men and some
of them were women. And then I
reduced it because the whole thing
was so vast anyway. There were 20
movies hidden in there potentially,
and I had to eliminate something.

How did your colla[...]r Handke work?

It all happened rather fast. From
the moment I stopped the
preparation ofthe other movie I
was working on to the first day of
shooting it was two, two and a half
months. I had something on paper
in two or three days, just a basic
idea, and the basic idea was these
angels, and one of them becoming
a man, and what this would mean
to him. So I called Peter because I
knew they would speak not just in
everyday language, but in a special
way, almost an oId—fashioned
language. I called him and I said,
‘You're the only one who could
write the dialogue for this, come
and work on the script with me.’
He had just finished a book, and
he said he was exhausted and
overworked, and couldn't write a
script at all, but that he would
come over and perhaps write some
of the dialogue for the key scenes.
Like the first scene where the
angels meet in the car, and they
talk about what they have seen
that day, and one talks about his
desire to end his eternity. And
that's where we started, with a
handful of scenes that I really knew
about.

We started shooting and it was
really rushed, but I knew the
whole thing was only going to
work if it was done spontaneously,
if it kept the curiosity and the

Of course, in filmmaking there
are so many other people to
consider, and you can't really treat
them like they are just paint, so it
is different. But you can keep up
the idea of spontaneity and that
was important. And we had
something solid from the very
beginning, and that was the few
scenes Peter had written. In the
first two weeks of shooting, we had
to shoot the circus scenes, because
they had to take down the tent for
insurance reasons, they had to fold
the tent in mid-November. So there
was some sort of structure there
too.

Was the ending the only one you
envisaged, the only one you shot?

We shot one other. The other
angel also became human, carried
away by the enthusiasm of his
friend . . . The scene that we
actually shot was a battle with
cream pies, and you can still see
the table with cream pies. Because
if you’ve been an angel for
eternity, and all of a sudden you

I EARTH l3runo Gnz and Peter Falk

can touch things, the temptation to
take a cream pie and throw it is
immense, l think. lt’s the first thing
an angel would want to do. But in
the end l thought it was more
important that one of them stayed
as an angel. It was the funniest
scene in the movie, and we kept it
in the cut for a long time, almost to
the end. The other ending was
more like guesswork. lt was
guesswork anyway, the whole
movie. Piloting a plane at night
with no in[...]ible. You leave with high
hopes for this couple.

The glimpses you have into other
lives in the film are very different.
On the one hand you have this
couple, and then you get those
sudden glimpses into other lives,
you see them for a second, and
then they're gone. How does that
difference work?[...]s could become another
movie. Anyone could become the
hero. The young man who kills
himself, the people in the train,
anyone of them could become the
hero, the movie could just stop
there, and you wouldn't see
anyone else any more. All these[...]iety,
so to speak. It was really a strange
thing. The motorcycle guy who
was dying in the street, we only
shot for one day, he came for one[...]thoughts, but it felt like
he had been there for the whole
movie.

The ending is in some ways a
closing off — you are given a
certainty about that couple, but
you don't have the same sense of
certainty about the other people
in the film.

But its there potentially. And those
two people, they speak for
everybody else.[...]‘S
‘xfl

Zhang
cinematographer (left) and
Chen Kaige

Yimou, Yellow Earth

CHEN IS MISSING

CHEN KAIGE, the director of
Yellow Earth, was this year's festival
guest that wasn't. The official line
handed to the festival organisers at

the end of May in a cable from Shi
Fangyu, the head of the Chinese
Film Bureau, was that Chen was
”too busy” to come. it was passed
on to the audience attending the
film '5 first festival screening by Ma
Ning, an employee of the state-run
China Film Import Export
Corporation on leave from his job
to do film studies in Melbourne.
Ma had been asked by festival
organisers to speak on behalf of the
absent director. That Chen might
be too busy to c[...]much he was looking forward to his
first trip to Australia. He also said
that he'd have no trouble taking a
few weeks off in early lune. A week
or so earlier, he reported that,
although he hadn't even been
officially informed of the festival
invitation by the authorities, as far
as he knew, neither his ”work
unit”, the Peking Film Studio, nor
the Film Bureau had any objection
to his coming.

If[...]did. That somebody may
well have been Ding Qiao, the
minister in charge of the Chinese
film industry, a man who could
never be accused of over-
enthusiasm towards the younger
generation of film directors that
Chen re[...]ly set by Hu
Yaobang, former secretary-general
of the Chinese Communist Party.

At the end of 1985, after Yellow
Earth had won awards and praise at
a number of international film

festivals, Hu banned the film from
further participation in film festivals
abroad. He reportedly did this after
an overseas Chinese suggested the
film be allowed to compete for an
Oscar — "we will not compete for
awards with the bourgeoisie,” the
Party chief was supposed to have
said. Cinema, he explained, in the
final analysis is a matter of class
consciousness[...]which went over so well with art
cinema audiences in capitalist
countries. Hu and other officials
were particularly concerned with
the image of China as presented in
the film — poor, backward and
superstitious. Never mind that the
events portrayed take place more
than 70 years before the
communists took power. Despite
the fact that Hu himself was forced
to resign in lanuary this year, his
policy has never officially been

overturned.
The print of Yellow Earth

screened in Melbourne was the one
obtained by Ronin Films for
commercial release in Australia: the
Chinese leadership hasn't let
ideology get in the way of export
dollars. The Chinese, therefore, had
no say in its participation in the
festival. They could, however, avoid
even more attention being drawn
to it by preventing the director
from coming.

Tough luck for Chen, but also for
us, as he has a lot to say about his
own movies and those of other
young filmmakers in China. He can
be quite critical of Yellow Earth.
For example, he now considers the
film to be overly conceptual, its
main characters[...]reat
raconteur, full of fascinating stories
about the special problems —
human, artistic and bureaucratic —
faced by Chinese filmmakers.

Chen grew up, literally, in the
film world, for his father is a
veteran director and their family flat
is located within the walls of the
Peking Film Studio. Like many
other Chinese in their mid-thirties,
in his youth Chen was caught up in
the radical political upheavals of
the Cultural Revolution. His years
in the countryside as a ”rusticated
urban youth” opened his eyes to
the shocking poverty and
backwardness still apparent in rural
China today, and this experience
informs Yellow Earth.

Chen doesnt like to talk much
about his second film, The Big
Parade, which he was forced to
change quite a bit of to satisfy the
censors. But he is confident that his
third, rece[...]best yet. Maybe we will have a
chance to see it, and him, at next
years festival.

Linda Jaivin[...]

ll/R

The Writer has often been the neglected figure in the

filtnniaking process.
looks at the phenomenon of the

In this issue, Cinerna Papers

critic—turned-

filmmaker, discusses the tyranny of the script and
the debate on turning novels into filrn. We also talk[...]Gustav I—Iasford, Whose novel has been

What is the relationship between iilm criticism
and iilmmaking? RUSS HARLEY considers the
question in relation to the critics-turned-directors
of the French New Wave

“Our criticism had a vested in[...]— Eric Rohmef — Roland Barthes

I fhat could the role of film criticism possibly be in
relation to the actualities of film production here,
today, in Australia? An obvious question perhaps,

but nonetheless perplexing, given the current set of deter-
minants which prevails over[...]ure. Indeed, who even hears these terms mentioned in
anything more than a passing flip comment, a vague wave in
the general direction of those more serious, and dare I say
tedious, questions which never quite get answered and yet
never really disappear. If film culture, or perhaps more
correctly the cinema per se, is essentially a living, breathing[...]films, audi-
ences, ideas, money, places, myths and material forces ~ it
certainly often appears to have no discernible logic. Its logic
is that of the chance connection, and try as certain sectors
might, the connection between criticism and filmmaking
remains lost more often than it is fou[...]formulate, make sense of, or else try to rethink the relation
between what is written and what is made on film. The
writings of Sylvia Lawson, Scott Murray, Meaghan[...]ermody, Liz Jacka, Adrian Martin, Rolando Caputo

and others have on a number of memorable occasions pre-
sented well-considered arguments for, and critiques of, the
practices of reviewing, criticism and commentary as they
relate to our local film cult[...]ies.‘ Although this
kind of work is by no means the striding victor over some
imagined or real enemy, it has provided the ground upon
which rests much of what I have to say. My comments and
reinvocation of the Cahiers du Cinema and nauvelle vague
stories are not presented outside the context of the present
local film scene, but in a sense rely upon it. My fundamental
argument is that the making of criticism and the making of
films need not necessarily be considered as mutually exclu-
sive, and moreover, that this kind of interaction is not
without historical
precedent. That the
Cahiers group developed
a particular way of con-
ceiving the relation
between thinking and
doing cinema is not of
course reason enough for
us to take it as an
exemplary model either.
The local film scene has
had more than its fair
share[...]lete overhaul —
which is what it really
needs.

The last thing that I
would want to see is the
forced imposition of yet
another model which is
incapable of thinking and
working in its own
environment. What I am
suggesting[...]

filmed by Stanley Kubrick, learn about the trials and
tribulations of TV scriptwriting, and hear from
novelist Angela Carter, who has Written screen-
plays for two of her books- In the next issue, we will
hear from some ofAustra1ia’s leading screen Writers
and continue the debate on literary adaptation-

how critical reflection on the cinema gave rise to a new and
invigorated national cinema cannot be devoid ofre[...]mous maxim, “War is politics by other
means”, and consider the possibility in true Godardian
fashion that “Filmmaking is Crit[...]nversely, of filmmakers
producing critical texts. In Russia, at the start of this
century, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov were each con-
cerned in different ways to reflect theoretically on their own
cinematic practice as well as the broader problems of cine-
matic form and film sense. During the forties and fifties
Lindsay Anderson and
Karel Reisz wrote on
American cinema and
film practice in the
British journal Sequence,
while in America, people
like Peter Bogdanovich,
Paul Schrader, Jonas
Mekas and Stan
Brakhage wrote serious
film criticism either
before or during their
own filmmaking careers.
The study of filmmakers
who write and writers
who make films is worth
a couple ofbooks in itself,
but I mention them here
in passing to convey the
sense that criticism and
film practice have at least
occasionally existed side
by side?

However, it is the
group of critics who
wrote for the French
journal Cahzers du
Cinema from its
inception in April 1951

here, ifnot for the theoretical rigour oftheir writing then for
the insightful accuracy and passion with which they argued
their polemics. And of course it is this grouping of Ca/ziers
writers[...]uffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Luc Moullet and
Pierre Kast — who provided the major impetus behind the
much vaunted nouvelle vague of the early sixties. To the
critics writing at Cahier: in the fifties, the French cinema
was culturally, politically and aesthetically impoverished.
The notable exceptions were maverick directors like R[...]Clair, Clouzot, Becker, Astruc or Leenhardt (both
the last two occasional writers for Cahiers) who were able to
make interesting films against the tide of French cinema,
which according to Jacques[...]o very different from our own situa-
tion. Caught in a context where genres have no immediate
connection to cultural reference points, as say the gangster
or the western films did in America, a national cinema
would have to invent some other way of gaining a life of its
own. The task that Cahiers set for itself was nothing shor[...]ngement ofthe pieces which go together to make up
the cinema was to be realised, it had to be on the grounds
that cinema itself demanded. The new could only be con-
structed out of the ruins of the old. According to Rohmer:
“For the cinema to have a future, its past could not be
allowed to die.”3

And aware of the history of the cinema they certainly
were. The Cinematheque Francaise provided a venue for
the films of the past to make their entry into the present. To
know the cinema is to watch it, listen to it, pull it apart,
dream on it, talk about it, review it, to place one film in rela-
tion to another. Although an excessive cine[...]lville would claim that you
couldn’t understand the full significance of Griffith, Hawks,
Lubitsch,[...]inally released“ —— as of course he had — the
Cahiers critics tirelessly learnt and absorbed the filmic
lessons into their writing and memory. Time spent watch-
ing movies was Considered as an investment in a future film-

who gain our attention making, whereby the machinations of the cinema would >

Paris Nous Apparr/en!

CIN[...]

Godard’s statements are similarly angled towards the ideal
of criticism by other means: “Frequenting cine-clubs and
the Cinematheque was already a way of thinking cinema and
thinking about cinema. Writing was already a way of
making films, for the difference between writing and direct-
ing is quantitative not qualitative . . . Today I still think of
myself as a critic and in a sense I am more than ever before.
Instead of Writing criticism, I make a fi1m.”3

The debt to Andre Bazin, the ‘father’ of Cahiers du
Cinema, and more importantly here, the writer/filmmaker
Alexandre Astruc, are perhaps obvious. The potency of the
underlying term “camera-stylo” cannot be underestimated,
for it was the concept that most caught hold of the nouvelle
vague’s imagination. As a way of re-thinking the relation

26 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

between writing and the cinema, it was particularly useful in
providing an alternative to theatrical and literary terms
which predominated much film criticism of the day.
Astruc’s seminal essay “The Birth of the Avant Garde: Ia
camera-style”, appeared in 1948 in the Communist spon-
sored journal Ecran Francais, announcing that this was “the
new age of cinema, the age of the camera-stylo (camera-pen).
This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that
the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of
what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the
immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to
become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as
written language.’’9 The aim of breaking free from the
demands of narrative was, however, only possible via a
learning of the language of cinema. Its acquisition came via
the combined processes of seizing upon useful groupings of
films, analysing and assimilating them, and then reinvoking
them by means of the camera itself. For this reason, none of
the Cahiers’ critical stances or devices were written in stone
as it were. Their published reappraisal of the American
cinema in the fifties turned attention towards a large
number of neglected films and filmmakers at the same time
as this work gave rise to a number of k[...]my intention to give an adequate account here of
the use and significance of these crucial terms — mise-en-
scene and politique des auteurslo — for which I would recom-
mend Jim Hillier’s excellent Introduction to the Ca/tiers du
Cinema: The 19505 Collection. These terms were hotly con-
tested within Cahiers at the best of times. For the purposes
of this article we can take mise-en-scene to be the way in
which a scene is put together — its disposition, the camera
movement and placement, the transition from shot to shot
etc. As a form of cr[...]as a working method by which films
were analysed and made. So too la polizique des auteurs
(roughly, a[...]auteurism was basically concerned with evaluating
the work of particular directors whose individuality could be
discerned across separate films and indeed whole oeuvres.

At this level, the two terms are inextricably linked. “It is
with the mise-en-scene that the auteur transforms the
material which has been given to him; so it is in the mise-en-
scene . . . that the auteur writes his individuality into the
fi1m.”“

But auteur status did not necessari[...]rticularly true of Cahiers’ attitude to much
of the American cinema in the sixties. Whereas in the fifties
people like Anthony Mann, Robert Aldrich, Otto Pre-
minger and especially Nicholas Ray had been almost beyond
rebuke, in the sixties they were responsible for megaflops,
and hence not as valuable to the Cahiers project. Jerry
Lewis, John Cassavetes and Arthur Penn were virtually all
that was left of the American cinema, at least if Cahiers best
film l[...]than bad directors cinema” —
may seem strange in the light of Cahiers oft-vaunted
enthusiasm for auteurism, but in actuality represents the
degree of healthy pragmatism which permeated their
approach to theoretical constructs.

The reason why Cahiers critics liked the American cinema
in the fifties had to do with these films’ technical virtuosity
and non-European stylistics. By the early sixties Cahiers was

By this time Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard and
Chabrol had all made their first films. In many ways the
connections between their criticism and their filmmaking
practice were, as mentioned ear[...]an adventure where “no idea can hope to
explain the world, or exhaust by itself all the possibilities of
the real”13; Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge is distinctively Hitch-
cockian in tone, point of View and effect; and Les 400 Coups,
according to Godard’s Cahiers review in 1959, invoked just
about all the qualities of the films on Truffaut’s ten best list
for 1958! It would be quite a task to determine the degree to
which these tendencies were pursued or[...]eers. Though such a task
would, I suspect, reveal the degree to which this grouping of
critics subscribed to certain critical and theoretical formula-
tions for as long as they could be tried out, proven, or else
Cast aside in their own cinemas. In marked difference to the
academic theoreticism often associated with many contem-
porary efforts to couple theory and practice together, the
Cahiers group maintained a playfully adventurous approach
to rethinking the limits of cinema’s possibilities.

In this light it’s interesting to conclude with the instance
of the ongoing discussion on film language throughout the
sixties. Rohmer’s approach framed the question in terms of
stylistics, insisting that the idea of cinematographic
language required the filmmaker “take up a position vis a
vis cinema which is neither that of the auteur nor that of the
spectator”'4 whereas Godard tended to weld the insights of
linguistics and philosophy of language into his own cine-
matic work from the early sixties onwards. But it is Rivette’s
discussion with Roland Barthes in 1963 which best exempli-
fies Calziers’ response to the seduction of film theory. The

1

MELVILLE: The director in his own Deux Hommes Dans Manhattan

GODARD: Anna Karina in Bande A Part

relation between technical and critical or theoretical know-
ledge of the cinema is after all a linchpin in Cahiers’ pro-
posed problematic, and the Cahiers group was in fact one of
the first coherent groupings to begin discussing the rele-
vance of semiotic and linguistic theories to the study of the
cinema. Remember, this is only a year before Metz wrote
the first chapter of Film Language. How easy it might have
been to seize upon this newly emerging discipline and make
of it the new all-embracing critical explanation, as might
have been the case at another time and place.

But Rivette’s engagement with Barthes is as enthusiastic
as it is reserved in its praise of such a project, always aware
of potential pitfalls, reductionisms and shortcomings. He
could agree that “every critic[...]le to define
an art by its technique”15, but at the same time felt com-
pelled to voice his apprehensions: “The idea of the cinema
as a language may never perhaps be fully workable; but we
have to pursue it all the same, if we are not to fall into the
trap of simply enjoying the cinema as a meaningless object
— as an object of pleasure and fascination which cannot be
explained. The fact is that the cinema always has a language;
so that an element of language always comes into play.”“"

The idea may not be fully workable, but “we have to
pursue it all the same”. Perhaps it’s not such a bad way of
loo[...]ES

1. See for example, Sylvia Lawson, “Not for the Likes of us”, in A.
Moran & T. O’Regan (eds), An Australian Film[...]urray, original Cinema Paper: manifesto reprinted in Cinema
Paper: 44-45, March 1985, Meaghan Morris, “In-Digestion: A
Rhetoric of Reviewing”, Filmnew: June 1983; Liz Jacka & Susan
Dermody, The Screening of Australia Vol 1 1987; Adrian Martin &
Rolando Caputo, “State of Film Criticism”, Filmnews Ian/Feb 1985.

2. The mention of these people has a certain arbitrary f[...]larger list of writer/filmmakers which would
add the following to those already mentioned. In no particular order:
Susan Sontag, Noel Burch, Ro[...]Laura Mulvey, Andre Techine, Mick Eaton, Corinne and
Arthur Cantrill, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Albie Thorn[...]Bonitzer, Roberto Rossellini, Bertrand Tavernier and
Andre Tarkovsky — for starters.

CINEMA[...]

11.
I2.

l3.

l4.

15.

16.

Quoted in Jim Hillier (ed), Cahierrs du Cinema: the 1960:, Harvard
University Press, USA, 1986, p31.

Melville would boast “I think I am the last living witness in France
who can testify on behalf of pre-war American cinema . . . The film
which was released in April 1934 . . . isn’t at all the same thing when
you see it now some afternoon or evening at the Cinematheque,” in
Rui Noguereira, Melville, London, Secker & Warburg, 1971, p7.

. Jean-Luc Godard, “Speech Delivered at the Cinematheque Francaise

on the occasion of the Louis Lumiere Retrospective in January 1966:
Thanks to Henri Langlois”, in Godard On Godard, Secker &
Warburg, London, 1972, p236.

For a more detailed account of the questions at stake in the notion of
mise-en-scene, see Jim Hillier (ed), “Introduction”, Cahiers du
Cinema: The 1950:, BFI, London, 1985.

Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed), Rivetle: Texts and Irzrerzzie-ws, BFI,
London, 1977, pl.

Jean-Luc Godard, “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard” in Godard On
Godard, op. cit., pl7l.

Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant Garde: la camera-
stylo”, in Peter Graham, The New Wave, Secker & Warburg, 1968.
How “auteur policy” became “auteur theory” is the subject of much
dispute. In general, however, we can say that auteurist approaches to
criticism served the polemical function of being able to mark certain
sorts of films from others. The distinguishing characteristic of
auteuristn is that it posited the film’s meaning in direct relation to the
degree to which its author/director left their pe[...]illier’s
“Introduction”, Cahier: du Cinema: The 1950:, Andrew Tudor,
Theories of Film, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1974, ppl20-31, and
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, Dutton & Co., New York,
1968.

J[...]heories of/luzhorship, RKP, London, 1981.
Despite the mammoth proportions of Sarris’ book, it still had only
skimmed the surface of Hollywood film history. Todd McCarthy and
Charles Flynn (eds) Kings of the B5 represents one end of the
spectrum of trying to at least list everything that Sarris’ book had
neglected, while Tavernier and Coursodon’s 2-volume Dictionary of
American Film Directors extends the critical analysis of many figures
only briefly d[...]s.

Jacques Rivette, “Paris Nous Appartient”, in Rioezze: Texts and
Interviews, op. cit., p92.

Eric Rohmer, “The Old and the New”, in Ca/-tiers du Cinema: The
1960:, p84.

Roland Barthes, “Towards a Semiotics of Cinema. Barthes in
interview with Michel Delahaye and Jacques Rivette”, in Cahiers du
Cinema: The 1960s, p279.

ibid, pp280-81.

-_-m. E '1 A
TRUFFAUT: Fancy footwork on the set of
Domicile Conjugal

28 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

THE WRITE STUFF

“We need better scripts,” has become a catcbcry
in talking about Australian cinema. SAM RUHIJIE
argues that so-called ‘better scripts’ are often the
recipe for worse movies.

n the 1950s in Italy there was a kind of guerrilla war

carried[...]nioni, Fellini, against la sceneggiatura diferro (the
strong script). It was fought in order to gain control of their
films from producers (the script was an instrument for
governing the film) and in order to free the cinema from the
tyranny of the script, of the narrative rules it imposed, and
the experimentation and innovation the script seemed to
prevent.

What I would loosely like to call the modern cinema, and
which I will give some examples of in a moment, has
reduced the central place of the script as the key element in
the determination of the structure of the film, of its look, its
movement, its meanings. From solid outline, often with
‘literary’ values, the script has become more and more a
sketch, bare notation and in instances has completely dis-
appeared. The script belongs to a highly narrativised
‘dramatic’, novelistic cinema which is by now old and tired.
By contrast, in Australia, there has been for some time a call
for better s[...]ter scriptwriters, better dramatic
writing, as if in headlong flight from everything that is new
and interesting toward all that is conformist and mediocre.

A number of films particularly impressed me at the last
Melbourne Film Festival: The Beekeeper (directed by
Angelopoulos), Routine Pleasures (Gorin), Le Rayon Verr

(Rohmer) and Hurleoenz (Rivette). In none of these films
does the SC1'1pt have any particular status.

In 7715 Eeekeepefs which is a long film, script elements are
few: the dialogue is spare, dramatic events are minimal, the
plot is thin, the movement of events is indirect, meanings
are subtle and unstated. Much of the pleasure of the film is

visual: settings, light, gestures of characters, gestures of the
camera. The camera suddenly interests itself in things
independent of either narrative or character, things at the
borderline of the fiction itself: the light in a window, the
shape ofa roadway, a landscape framed by power lines, the
diagonal of a stream redefining scale and density in the shot,
the temps morts of spaces before characters appear in them
and a ‘drama’ begins, or after characters have left them and
there is no longer any drama ‘to take place’. What is viewed
is narratively empty, what is felt is the actual duration of
that regard. There are shots w[...]ection of light, a compulsion or fascina-
tion of the instant, none of which could have been planned
in advance and which the filming could then reproduce. The
Beekeeper frequently moves away from its n[...]

POST SCRIPT: Le Rayon Ven,‘ The Beekeeper, Hur/event

the subject of the fiction there is the subject of its filming
which has a life ofits own, its own directions and intensities.
The Beekeeper has no narrative core to bind and dictate every
other activity and level of the film and no hard and fast
script to bind that narrative.

The other films I mentioned are similar in this way, in
their spontaneity, fragmentariness, in their structuring a
relation towards the narrative rather than simply expressing
it, in the fact that they are formed in the process of their
making, not beforehand, not made according to plan.

The ‘drama’ of Routine Pleasures depends on the relations
between the filming of it, which implicates the very person
of the filmmaker, and the apparent subject which is filmed,
the model railroaders. These relations, of necessity, are
created while the film is taking place and largely dictate the
film’s directions and moves. What becomes fascinating is
the shifting line between the subject and its apprehension,
between a documentarism and its fictionalisation and the
cutting across of these by the objectivity of a reality and the
subjectivity of the search for it. These relations change,
become unb[...]e; they are neither fixed,
nor clearly nameable. The film is made of the simplest of
elements: the model railroaders, Gorin moving through
their miniature landscape, the autobiographical landscape
paintings of Manny Farber, Gorin’s search to find himself
in the landscape of America. But as these elements move
toward and against each other new things form, new com-
plexities occur as the direct result of that activity of relating,
of filming, of editing, of criticising. The sense of Routine
Pleasure: comes in the very process of the film and there is
nothing before that; it gets worked out as it moves along.

The story of Le Rayon Vert concerns a young woman who
is in search of something which she will only know when
she finds it; that thing is both material and spiritual, an
object and a vision, the eternity of a moment. The film has a
plan, but the plan is only a sketch (it too is looking for some-
thing). Within the plan almost everything is improvised —
the narrative-bound script leaves nothing over, nothing any
more to discover. The film exists between its plan and the
improvisation of its details (which forces one to change
direction); while the plan tightens its grip, moments and
instances disrupt it, re-route it; for if the film is sensitive to
the improvisations of the heroine, the heroine is sensitive to
the vagaries of whatever may happen to her, from which she
seeks and forms a plan and to which she reacts . . . and to
which the film reacts. There are the pressures of a world
(the word, the script) and the dissolving pressures of desire

(the particular, the unspeakable, the not-yet-found). In this
philosophic tale of great elegance and intelligence there is
another tale, or one that I am imposing on it, a discourse on
narrative, on thethe
Bronte novel Wutherz'ng Heights as its pretext; the theatrical-
isation and mise-en-scene of the action of the novel to
include the decors, the settings, costumes, the looks and
gestures of the characters, who are double characters (of the
novel, of the theatre of the novel) though this doubling goes
for everything; and the third element, which is the film of
this theatricalisation. So there are three of everything: the
novel, the theatre, the film of the theatre. Nothing at all is
stable in Hurlevent, nothing stays in its place. While each
element is marked separatel[...]h thing, each element, each character, every
line and every gesture is potentially trebled, but rather[...]iples, into an over excess, a plurality
of worlds and times.

Rivette manages this play of simplicity and complexity, of

difference and its dissolution very well indeed; as with the >

CINEMA PAPERS SEPTEMBER — 29

practice, in formation, in ‘the act’. In most conventional
narratives, actions are consequential and organised in
advance; in these films consequences are more varied, more
explosive and they can only be known after. In these films
everything moves; in the others nothing moves, all is fixed,
set, centred.

Antonioni called films of this kind (like his own) the
‘vices’ of the cinema compared to the ‘virtues’ of popular
commercial production which permitted the existence of
‘vice’, both materially, from the proceeds of ‘virtue’, and
less materially, as the very reason for there to be a cinema at
all. Anto[...]own
would be intolerable. What troubles me about the Austra-
lian film industry is that it is so virtuous, and, so terribly
afraid of vice, with the result, as Antonioni predicted would
happen in such cases, that it has become intolerable. The
very last thing it needs is more virtue in the shape of better
scripts. Besides, I believe that[...]bably no such
thing as ‘better scripts’ since the best script would be one
that would not exist (the absolute of vice) whereas to seek to
write the better script is to seek conformity, which could
not, by that very fact, be much good at all.

The ambition of the Australian film industry, at least
since the mid-19705 (about the time of Picnic At Hanging
Rock), has been to make[...]inter-
national commercial framework whose rules and values have
been derived from the model of the American cinema (and
in part dictated by that cinema). Largely for this reason
there has been a demand for better scripts.

In the film-industrial situation there is an established
order for the realisation of a film: from idea, to treatment, to
screenplay, to mise-en-scene, to filming. The order implies a
specific division of labour, of experts, of stages, of rational-
isation for which the script functions as the essential plan for
that order; it forms the basis for the calculations of cost, of
outcome, of equipment, of personnel and it contains the
procedures for following out its order, of turning words into
images, a story into pictures, and pictures structured and
linked into a story. It defines the very function of things in
the film.

In a relatively new and inexperienced film industry such
as the Australian industry, unsure of its talents but cl[...]ks usually
dictate a high degree of conservatism. The script is not only
the key element in a dramatic spectacle, but the evidence in
advance for the finished film (the basis on which finance is
often sought). To control the script in these circumstances is
to control the film. And the line of control, a control exer-
cised by producers, financiers and funding bodies, is almost
always toward the known, the predictable, the safe.

I don’t wish to make a contrary call to the call for better
scripts, nor to beat ‘virtue’[...]al narrative tradition against what is being
made and considered in Australia, but I do want to suggest a
difference, not a com[...]all ‘vice’ would be
equally intolerable), but the fact of difference, the support,
alongside and within a commercial-narrative-dramatic-
spectacle[...]nised, scripted,
fixed, another cinema which, as in the old days, actually
moves. Besides, and once again to refer to Antonioni, only

such a cinema provides the reason for there to be a cinema at
all.

30 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

STUFF

You've read the book, now see the film: from Tolstoy
to Nora Ephron, Mary Shelley t[...]have been raided for film scripts. But what
does the transition from page to screen involve?
in the first of a two-part series, BRIAN McFARtANE
looks at the discourse an adaptation.

comment, at levels ranging from the gossipy to the

erudite, on the nature and success of the adaptation
involved. That is, the interest in adaptation, unlike many
other matters to do with film (eg, the deployment of the
cinematic codes or questions of authorship), is not a rarefied
one. And it ranges backwards and forwards from those who
talk of novels as being “betrayed” by boorish filmmakers to
those who regard the practice of comparing the film and the
novel as a waste of time.

As to the filmmakers themselves, they have been drawing
on literary sources, and especially novels of varying degrees
of cultural[...]shed itself as pre-
eminently a narrative medium. In View of this fact, and
given that there has been a long-running discourse on the
nature of the connections between film and literature, it is
surprising how little systematic, sustained attention has
been given to the processes of adaptation. This is the more
surprising since the issue of adaptation has attracted critical
attention for more than 60 years in a way that few other

E :'7veryone who sees film[...]novels feels able to

\.

GRIFFITH: Mae Marsh and Henry B. Walthall in Birth Of A Nation

.. ‘I ‘.-

In considering the issue here, I want to begin by drawing
attention to some of the most commonly recurring
discussions of the connections between the film and the
novel.

Conrad, Griffith, and “Seeing”

Commentators in the field are fond of quoting Joseph
Conrad’s famou[...]n: “My
task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the
written word, to make you hear, to make you feel[...]is recorded by film historian
Lewis Jacob as “The task I am trying to achieve is above all
to make you see”? George Bluestone’s all-but—pioneering
work in the film-literature field, Novels Into Film, draws
attention to the similarity of the remarks at the start of his
study of “The Two Ways of Seeing”, claiming that “. . .
between the percept of the visual image and the concept of
the mental images lies the root difference between the two
media”.3 In this way he acknowledges the connecting link of
“seeing” in his use of the word “image” and, at the same
time, points to the fundamental difference between the way
images are produced in the two media and how they are
received. Finally, though, he claims[...]d by verbal stimuli can scarcely be distinguished in the
end from those evoked by non-verbal stimuli’’,4 and, in this
respect, he shares common ground with several other
writers concerned to establish links between the two media.

By this, I mean those commentaries which address them-
selves to crucial changes in the (mainly English) novel
towards the end of the 19th century: changes which led to a
stress on showing rather than on telling and which, as a
result, reduced the element on authorial intervention in its
more overt manifestations. Two of the most impressive of
such accounts, both of them concerned with ongoing
processes of transmutation among the arts, notably between
literature and film, are Alan Spiegel’s Fiction And The
Camera Eye5 and Keith Cohen’s Film And Fiction/The
Dynamics Of,Exchange.° Both of these offer a rigorous,
questioning approach to ways in which the novel appears to
have been influenced by the film. Spiegel’s avowed purpose
is to investigate “the common body of thought and feeling
that unites film form with the modern novel”,7 taking as his
starting point Flaubert whom he sees as the first great 19th
century exemplar of “concretis[...]im to James Joyce who, like Flaubert,
respects “the integrity of the seen object and . . . gives it
palpable presence apart from the presence of the observer”?
This line is pursued by the way of Henry James who
attempts “a balanced distribution of emphasis in the
rendering of what is looked at, who is looking, and what the
looker makes of what she (ie, Maisie in What Maisie Knew)
sees”,9 and by way of the Conrad-Griffith comparison.

CONRAD/COPJDOLA: Mistah Sheen, he damp, in Apocalypse Now

Spiegel presses this comparison harder than Bluestone,
stressing that though both may have aimed at the same point
— a congruence of image and concept — they did so from
opposite directions.[...]to understanding, Conrad, Spiegel claims,
wanted the reader to “ ‘see’ in and through and finally past
his language and his narrative concept to the hard, clear
bedrock of images”.1°

One effect of the stress on the physical surfaces and
behaviour of objects and figures is to de-emphasise the
author’s personal narrative voice so that we learn to read the
ostensibly unmediated visual language of the later 19th
century novel in a way that anticipates the viewer’s
experience of film which necessarily presents those physical
surfaces. Conrad and James further anticipate the cinema in
their capacity for “decomposing” a scene, for[...]rom a stage presentation).

Cohen, concerned with the “process of convergence”
between art forms, also sees Conrad and James as significant
in a comparison of novel and film. These authors he sees as
breaking with the representational novels of the earlier 19th
century and ushering in a new emphasis on “showing how
the events unfold dramatically rather than recounting
them”.“ The analogy with film’s narrative procedures will
be clear and there seems no doubt that film, in turn, has
been highly influential on the modern novel. Cohen uses
passages from Proust and Virginia Woolf to suggest how the
modern novel, influenced by techniques of Eisensteinian
montage cinema, draws attention to its encoding processes
in ways that the Victorian novel tends not to.

Dickens, Griffith, and Story-Telling

The other comparison that trails through the writing
about film-and—literature is that between Griffith and
Dickens, who was said to be the director’s favourite novelist.
The most famous account, of course, is that of Eisens[...]l for story-
telling’’”, a quality he finds in American cinema at large,
their capacity for vivifying ‘bit’ characters, the visual power
of each, their immense popular success, and above all their
rendering of parallel action, for which Griffith cited Dickens

as his source. On the face of it, there now seems nothing so )

CINEMA PAPERS SEPTEMBER — 31

A;

GRIFFITH} Intolerance

remarkable in these formulations as to justify their being so
frequently paraded as examples of the ties that bind cinema
and the Victorian novel. In fact Eisenstein’s discussion of
Dickens’ “c[...]ticipation of
such phenomena as frame composition and the close-up, is
really not far from those many works[...]l poses, without giving
adequate consideration to the qualitative differences
enjoined by the two media, to one of which the concept (eg,
language, frame composition) is literally applicable, to the
other only metaphorically so.

Later commentators[...]r instance, states boldly that:
“Griffith found in Dickens hints for every one of his major
innovations”;‘3 and Cohen, going further, points to “the
more or less blatant appropriation of the themes and content
of the 19th century bourgeois novel”.” However, in spite of
the frequency of reference to the Dickens-Griffith
connection, and apart from the historical importance of
parallel editing in the development of film narrative, the
influence of Dickens has perhaps been over-estimated and
under-scrutinised. One gets the impression that many
writers, steeped in a literary culture, have fallen on the
Dickens-Griffith comparison with a certain relief, perhaps
as a way of arguing the cinema’s respectability. They have
tended to concentrate on the thematic interests and the
large, formal narrative patterns and strategies the two great
narrative-makers shared, rather than to[...]led questions of
enunciation, of possible analogy and disparity between two
different signifying systems, of the range of “functional
equivalents”15 available to each within the parameters of the
classical style as evinced in each medium.

Film and the Modern Novel

As film came to replace the representational novel of the
earlier 19th century, it did so through the application of
techniques practised by writers at the latter end of the
century. Conrad with his insistence on making the reader
“see” and James with his technique of “restricted conscio[...]th with their playing down of authorial mediation
in favour of limiting the point of View from which actions
and objects are observed, provide obvious examples. In this
way they may be said to have broken with the tradition of
“transparency” in relation to the novel’s referential world so
that the mode and angle of vision were as much a part of the
novel’s content as what was viewed. The comparisons with
cinematic technique are clear but, paradoxically, the modern
novel has not shown itself very adaptable to film. However
persuasively it may be demonstrated that the likes of Joyce,
Faulkner and Hemingway have drawn on cinematic
techniques, the fact is that the cinema has been more at
home with novels from —[...]good deal of their fluid

representation of time and space when transferred to the
screen.

Adaptation: The Phenomenon

As soon as the cinema began to see itself as a narrative
entertainment, the idea of ransacking the novel —— that
already established repository of narrative fiction — for
source material got underway, and the process has continued
more or less unabated for nearly 80 years. The reasons for
this continuing phenomenon, as far as filmmakers are
concerned, appear to move between the poles of crass
commercialism and high-minded respect for literary works.
No doubt there is the lure of the pre-sold title, the expecta-
tion that respectability or popularity achieved in one
medium might infect the work created in another. The
notion of a potentially lucrative “property” has clearly been
at least one major influence in the filming of novels, and
perhaps filmmakers, as Frederic Raphael scathing[...]like known quantities . . . they would sooner buy the rights
of an expensive book than develop an original subject”.“"
Nevertheless, most of the filmmakers on record profess
loftier attitudes than these. DeWitt Bodeen, author of the
screenplay for Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962[...]is, without a doubt, a
creative undertaking, but the task requires a kind of selective
interpretation, along with the ability to recreate and sustain
an established mood”.” That is, the adaptor sees himself as
owing allegiance to the source work. Despite Peter Bog-
danovich’s disc[...]ith that kind of reverence”“‘), for much of the time
the film is a conscientious visual transliteration of the
original. One does not find filmmakers as[...]

Whatever it is that makes filmgoers want to see
adaptations of novels, and filmmakers to produce them, and
whatever hazards lie in the path for both, there is no
denying the facts. For instance, Morris Beja reports that,
since the inception of the Academy Awards in 1927-28,
“more than three-fourths of the awards for ‘best picture’
have gone to adaptations . . . (and that) the all-time box-

office successes favor novels even more”.21 Given that the
novel and the film have been the most popular narrative
modes of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, it is
perhaps not surprising that filmmakers have sought to
exploit the kinds of response excited by the novel and have
seen in the novel a source of ready-made material, in the

_‘ . A i an.‘ ' -/ .5‘
NOVEL APPROACH: Great Expectations — The Untold Story

crude sense of pre-tested stories and characters, without too
much concern for how much of the popularity of the
original novel is intransigently tied to its verbal mode.

1. Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger Of The Narcissur, J.M. Dent
and Sons Ltd., London, 1945, p5
2. Quoted in Lewis Jacob, The Rise Of The American Film, Harcourt,
Brace, New York, 1939, p[...]les, 1957, pl
. Ibid, p47
. Alan Spiegel, Fiction And The Camera Eye: Visual Consciaumerr In
Film A nd The Modern Navel, University Press of Virginia, Char1ottes-
ville, 1976
Keith Cohen, Film And Fiction/The Dynamic: Of Exchange, Yale
University Press, New Haven and London, 1979
7. Spiegel, pxiii
8. Ibid, p63
9. Ib[...]in, Film Form (trans. Jan Leyda), Harcourt, Brace and
World Inc. New York, 1945, p196
13. Bluestone, op[...]Cohen, ap.cz't., p4
15. David Bordwel1’s term, in The Classical Iiolly-wood Cinema,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, Melbourne and Henley, 1985,
p13
16. Frederic Raphael, “Introduction”, Two For The Road, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1967
17. DeWitt Bodeen, “The Adapting Art”, Films In Reruie-w, vol XIV, no
6, June-July 1963, p349
18.[...]“An Interview with Peter Bogdanovich”, Sight And
Sound, Vol 43, no 1, Winter 1973/4, p14
19. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Sigmfier, Indiana University Press,
Bloomingdale, 1977, p12
20. Anthony Burgess, “On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books
into Films”, New Yarlz Times, 20/4/75, p15
21. Morris Beja, Film And Literature, Longman, New York, 1979, p78

U1»J>

."‘

Part two will continue the exploration of the discourse
on adaptation, and propose some new directions for
discussion[...]

learning[...]t-
ing a downed enemy airman. Shock, uncertainty, and then
the final realisation that someone who moments ago was an
unseen, unknown face capable of wounding from afar was
now the mortal, vulnerable soul standing before them. A
prize to be picked at, examined, interrogated, and either
summarily dealt with or paraded through the streets as an
object of curiosity and derision.

The last such time was at a wedding. A perfectly amiable
conversation about midwifery, or running a milk bar, or the
short term prospects of industrial lubricants was followed by
the seemingly harmless enquiry “So what do you do?” I
recall murmuring something about Television and express-
ing immediate interest in the cheese and lettuce sandwiches.
Too late. I had already become a speck on the radar. “Tele-
vision? You mean, repair them?”[...]ake it.”
I desperately switched my attention to the sausage rolls,
casting about as if looking for the sauce, but by now the
speck had become a throbbing blip, the missile launched
and locked on. “Oh, yes? What . . . news, documenta[...]NEMA PAPERS

“Er, drama . . . you know, serials and things.” It was now
just a matter of seconds. “Oh, really . . . and do you act,
produce?” “Well, actually . . . I write them.” Bang.

In that brief pause of realisation, parachute slowly unfurl-
ing, I braced myself for the inevitable ordeal. The person
would hardly ever watch TV and what they did watch they
would generally find to be rubbish, apart from the occa-
sional good British program. In vain would I agree that
Britain produced the best television in the world . . . it also
produced some of the worst, just that we tended to see more
of the former than the latter. That year in, year out Austra-
lian programs regularly headed our ratings lists. That given
similar budgets and schedules, Australia (which on a per
capita basis was already the most prolific and most efficient
drama producer) could match it with the UK, the US, or
anywhere else in the world for that matter, and indeed often
did. All to no avail . . .

The arguments exhausted, the revolver pressed to my
bowed neck, I would comfor[...]few private
thoughts. Deep down, a certain pride. The pride in per-
forming one’s craft. In making an unworkable story work,
an impossible sub-plot possible. In setting a love scene on
the stairs because there was no money for an extra bedroom
set. In undertaking an entire re-write in five days because
one of the actors, God bless them (and to think writers have
problems), had collapsed from exhaustion. A pride in
working (literally) through the night to complete an episode,
walking out the front door for a breather at 5.30 am to find
one’s car had been stolen in the interim, and not ringing the
police until 9.30 am for fear of interruption (it happened).

The weapon cocked, there would be a few wry memories[...]ur
scenes earlier, only to find upon viewing that the actor had
changed the set-up and not bothered to change the pay-off.
Cutting back some 10 minutes from a draft because the
script editor had timed it so, only to witness the cast per-
forming the work in permanent slow-motion like some
Greek tragedy because the episode was now 10 minutes
under. Spending an entire weekend (at the cost of all social
engagements) writing a lengthy[...]t later dropped because there was no money to
buy the rope for the flying-fox.

The trigger pressed, the hammer falling, there would
perhaps be just enoug[...]w debts.
Awful, clumsy lines, written at speed or in sheer despera-
tion, turned into pure gold by som[...]action. Yet
another car-chase somehow given life and originality
because the production team have again managed to make
$1000 look $100,000. And above all, despite the trials and
traumas, carps and criticisms, the joy of seeing the result of
one’s labours, if only for a brief moment, actually working

. . . real drama . . . the right stuff. . . working before one’s
very eyes and the eyes of countless how many others . . . in
hundreds of thousands of homes . . . people captu[...]about my captor’s face.
It was almost smiling. And the hand was not holding a
revolver, rather a bottle,[...]od, I’m an addict. Can’t resist them.” Then the realisa-
tion hit me. I had drifted beyond the enemy, come down
behind friendly lines. It[...]

'3'?‘ -~_ -

THE

What happens to a novelist whose first book
bec[...]asford, whose
first novel has been filmed as Full Metal laclref

“Poe fought to make the world safe for “Americans Invented Commumsm

hWam'5y. v __ The short Timer; when they ran out of Indians. ” — The
Phantom Blooper (Unpublished).

he Short Timers i[...]Parriss

Island — “an eight-week college for the phoney-
tough and the crazy-brave” — and his 385-day, short time,

tour of duty of Vietnam”.
The book was published in 1979. It had taken the author

seven years to write, and three years to find a publisher.
Vietnam was not a popular topic only five years after the
war, in a country that still wishes it had won. Even after
publication of what is considered one of the best works of
fiction about the war, Hasford was still living in his Volks-
wagen and working as a security guard in California. And
then Stanley Kubrick decided to make a film about it . . .
Full Metal jacket, Kubrick’s title, is a reference to the

Geneva Convention requirement that military bullets be
fully-coated in steel or copper, so that they cannot expand.
Hasford wrote the script with Kubrick and Michael Herr,
the author of Dispatches. The film was shot in England.
Acres of land and an abandoned gasworks in Essex were
transformed into Hue City at the time of the Tet offensive.

My copy of the Bantam edition of The Short Timers has a
blue texta scrawl on the title page: “For Tracy from Gus
Perth May 1986”. Gus brought Publisher’: Weekly; in stacks
of 50 — articles on writers’ contracts — to the photocopying
counter where I worked in the West Australian State
Library. We got talking; Gus likes to talk. “What am I
doing in Perth? Actually I was going to go to Geraldton, but

t

MARINE BOY: ustav Hasford in 1968

I decided that Perth was small town enough. I had a leave
here [while he was in Vietnam] but a senior officer swiped it
just befo[...]nt to Vietnam. I’m writing into my contract for
The Phantom Blooper (the sequel to The Short Timers) that a
copy is sent to each of the 200 Congressmen . . .

“The image of the Vietnam veteran as a Cold-blooded
psychotic is something the US government started when
men were coming back saying, ‘The war is wrong — we
shouldn’t be there.’ US s[...]were
traumatised from seeing our friends blown up and didn’t
know what we were saying. Even us, ‘the callous and
dehumanised’. I’ve often been asked in interviews ‘How
many people did you kill inIn an article published in American Penthouse earlier this
year Gus wrote: “Looking back now with flawless
hindsight, I hope I hit nothing but trees, and I hope the
trees lived. If I did kill a human being in Vietnam, it was a
tragic accident or self-defense; I regret it, but I do not
apologise.”

The Short Timers is not an autobiography; however, the
main character, The Joker, played by Matthew Modine, has
many similar[...]on short time at 19 (he had heard from a local on the
Draft Board that his number was coming up). After Marine
training at Parriss Island in North Carolina, he was made a
war correspondent with Leatherneck, the Marine magazine,
and served with the same Division as The Joker, though I’m
not sure about the Peace Badge on the battle fatigues . . . I
have a photograph of Gus[...]at first was of
Martin Sheen; he is 19, handsome and grim, wearing a flak
jacket. There are sandbags and munitions crates in the
background; it is the Tet offensive, and he has just been to
battle. It is an interesting contrast to the other photograph:
the 39-year-old Gus, speculative, still grim-looking, still in
fatigues and something of a crewcut (“Once a Marine,
always a Marine”) on the shoot of Stanley Kubrick’s latest
project.

The film had been scheduled for Christmas 1986 release,
but when Modine broke his arm during shooting and the
schedule was thrown by about six weeks, the date was
changed to summer 1987. “They only ever launch major
films in the US in summer or at Christmas —— they get the
best box office from college kids on holiday.”

Gus says he expects to make about $1 million from the
sale of the film tie-in The Short Timers. “Even a dud film
will sell about two million copies in the US — even Benji
sold two million! If Stanley was to make the worst movie
he’d ever made, it’d still be a S[...]e. Most
of my friends are middle-aged accountants and solicitors,
not writers or actors. They make about $50,000 a year. I’ve
been writing for 20 years — I’ve really just made the same as
they have, but in one lump sum.”

By Christmas Gus was still in Perth, not in Lagonda
Beach in California as planned. He and Kubrick, having
settled a disagreement about credits, were still discussing
payment. He had finished The Phantom Blooper, and was
waiting for a response from publishers. I was given a copy,
neatly bound in pieces of Swan Lager carton. The Phantom >

CINEMA PAPERS SEPTEMBER — 35

It was two in the afternoon: Gus had just got up after
writing all night, when it is quieter, and there are fewer
distractions. He talked me into g[...]cted to.

“There were a lot of complaints about the language in
that, and Marine officers dissociated themselves from it. I
got the language complaints too, but I actually toned down
the language — everything a Marine says is dirty.”

Gus had just begun to write detective novels, and they
seemed to be coming along easily. When he gets back to the
States he wants to work on a project about Ambrose Bierce,
and plans a novel — the Confederate answer to The Red
Badge Of Courage. There is a third book about The Joker,
involving the Vietnam Veterans Against The War
movement, of which Gus was a part. Then he’ll have that
out of his system.

We talk and talk; the sky lightens over the city skyline;
five o’clock joggers appear. Gus suggests we walk back
around the river and get some breakfast in the city. I haven’t
slept for 20 hours, and I’m turning green. “You’ve hit the
wall,” says Gus proudly. A helicopter hovers over the river;
Gus gets edgy. It reminds him of having a rations drum land
on his head during a supply drop.

In McDonald’s, the first place to open, eating flapjacks
out of sty[...]Fried lunch offers for eight months. I
was living in a closet in a friend’s art gallery — I had my
typewriter in there, a bed and a shelf. Another time when I
was broke I intervie[...], he’s
a science fiction writer, he wrote A Boy And His Dog. He
didn’t mind what I said about him,[...]er from Gus; he was

about to leave, finally, for the States. “The little blizzard of

tinfoil stars is about to bury me. The trailer to Stan1ey’s
movie is showing in America now, and it mentions my
name, so the cyborg journalists will be after me to chew all
the juice out of me like a piece of gum.” He had just seen
Platoon (“it’s really depressing, the sort of movie I’d like to
make about Vietnam”), and enclosed an article he’d written
for The WesrAuszralz'an about the Current run of Hollywood
Vietnam films. Unfazed by the numbers, or the

competition, he is delighted that veterans inste[...]ces
heard. It has taken this long, he thinks, for the war to be far

enough away to be considered history; but, as he said in the
last line of the article in The West Australian: “History is not
over yet, and history collects its debts.” On the back of the
letter was a photocopy of a telegram from London, saying,
in only slightly different words, “The cheque’s in the mail.
Best regards, Stanley Kubrick.”

36 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

Novelist and writer Angela Carter has had two of
her works transferred to the screen. The film
based on her novel The Magic Toyshop will
shortly be seen in Australia. STEPHANIE
BUNBURY talked to her about screenplays,
dialogue, adolescence and the supernatural.

AX“ r

CHOKE HVO[...]

and shonky insurance joints with educative pictures

of household fires poked in front of the venetians. These

days, Clapham, grisly old Clapham where Nell Dunn broke

middle-class bounds in the sixties to go Up The Junction,

has a wine bar too. A wine bar, Lord love us. And it’s not
the Cotswolds; it’s Clapham.

Clapham also has Ange[...]hop, an

celebrated socialist, feminist, novelist and, more recently,’

screenwriter on subjects fantastic, but she’s not going to
change in a hurry. Her old house is still a renovator’s dream,
with bicycles in the hall and piles of washing on the chairs.
The front room is lined with enough toys to dress the set of
The Magic Toyshop, her second novel back in 1967 and now
her second film script (the first Was A Company Of Wolves).
Good cheer prevails among the mess. Her person has not
fallen prey to the decorators either. Her hair is a defiant
silver bush, and her body, which has clearly spent most of
its time behind a desk while the brain buzzed, slips comfort-
ably into the undulations of the couch. She speaks slowly
and musingly. Come what may, she is luxuriating into[...]has changed a good deal. She thinks
wistfully of the lean post-war days before youth culture hit
town, let alone yuppiedom. The Magic Toyshop is set in
those years and is full of nostalgia.

“London had a sort ofhau[...]ry rich. There were free classical
music concerts in public parks, everyone had enough to eat
but not too much . . . It was always rather cold and uncom-
fortable under Attlee, but it was kind of[...]from this
Woman, not from this writer whose stock in trade is the
bizarre: women with wings, vampires, werewolves,[...]flickering candles,
stories full of extravagance and volupté. The Magic Toyshop
is the story of three children who are orphaned suddenly and
are sent to live with strange Uncle Philip, arch-manipulator,
his dumb wife Margaret and Margaret’s dancing, fiddling
Irish brothers. Philip makes ingenious toys and marionettes
and confines the family to his dungeon of make-believe. His
most distorted desires are projected on to 15-year-old
Melanie, who is compelled to act the role of ravished Leda
opposite a huge swan marionette.

In the book, Philip’s creations are drenched in the horror
of his character. The film makes this latent threat manifest
with the help of the supernatural: the swan has its own
appetites, pictures move, puppets come to life and run riot,
and Melanie’s brother Jonathan runs away to sea through
the painted beach that forms the backdrop to the Leda
tableau. It is magic of the wand-waving variety; more or less
what you might[...]s a surprise how forcefully down to earth she is,
in person. She is not, she says flatly, interested in the occult.
She did once go to a geomancer in Japan, but what inter-
ested her about it was tha[...]ple with black hair, when he himself was Japanese and
very black of hair indeed. She likes that sort of[...]*2

.5 ..
.. ' v U :~
PUPPET MASTER: Uncle Philip and his marionettes

student of human folly,” she says, “and, you know, the one
thing we can be sure of is that whatever those people had
been up to they were not guilty of the crimes of which
they’d been convicted, which I think is a salutary thing to
remember.” These are the facts — she is a stickler for fact.

She likes fairy stories too, because they are the fiction
handed down by those who left no other trace: the illiterates,
the ahistorical masses. They are the only historical tangibles
of people who have vanished. Now the publicists for The
Magic Toyshop are trying to dub her the magical realist of
English letters, and, in her mild way she won’t have it.
Gabriel Garcia[...]holic South
America. She came out of South London and the Welfare
State. Different history altogether. Let’s get this straight.

The supernatural elements in The Magic Toyshop, she
says, came largely from the director, David Wheatley, who
had genuine working[...]it
happens. “He likes doing it,” she says, “and I was easy.”
And something had to crystallise the menace of the story
into concrete images. She is humble in the face of the
demands of the medium. The story itself was full of holes,
which gaped once the novel’s language was stripped away.
“The holes can’t be left empty for the reader to imagine
what’s going on, because that’s not how the cinema works,”
she says, then adds “It could be how the cinema worked, but
it would be cinema of a differ[...]ative movie.”
There were certain pressures from the Granada producers,
who insisted everything should[...]fun, she says. It gets her
out of a chair, out of the house, and she meets different
people, non-bookish people, like the ones who made the
ghoulish werewolf transformations for The Company Of
Wolves and were, she says with relish, “extremely add”. So
she will not do more than mutter vaguely and darkly about
producer interference, apart from un[...]r this, you know”
when anything strange came up in the dailies. Her fault, she
says breezily, for engaging with capitalism. It’s not for her to
whinge and moan.

The toys of The Magic Toyshop, however, certainly come
from her. Toys are real enough. The novel before The Magic
Toyshop, The Shadow Dance, was set in a junkshop. “I like
things,” she says firmly. “I could have gone into the second-
hand business in those days. I spent a lot of time at auctions
and swapping things around. I had a passion for automata at
one stage; I think it’s the simulations of human beings that
I’m interested in. I stop short of being interested in robots.”
Her three-year-old son Alex, who romps around her like a
dolphin throughout the interview, has quite a collection of
art toys from mother, but sadly “he prefers small metal auto-
mobiles”. She watches indulgently as he whirrs the wheels
of two little cars against each other.

At the centre of The Magic Toyshop is Melanie, virginal >

CINE[...]

with a bit more spunk in the film than in the original.
Melanie is pure Carter: her stories are[...]ressing
up, striking out, taking their desires by the horns. The fact
that Melanie must grapple with puberty in a hothouse of
make-believe is a mere variation on the real struggle, as the
writer remembers it.

“I yearned to grow up,’ she smiles. “Yearned and
yearned. And I thought the adult world would come as some
sort ofaccession ofgrace . . . One day I’d wake up and I’d be
like Jeanne Moreau in a black dress.

“But many things about the adult world seemed to me
profoundly strange. I didn’t know what was going on at all
. . . The whole business for me of growing up was very
much tied up with going to work. I was a reporter, and the
Whole super-nursery atmosphere, the little temper tantrums,
the jockeying for position, the business about by-lines — I
thought I’d left all this behind at primary school. Theand bully-
ing in the book, he is lean and predatory in the film, an acci-
dental result of casting. Tom Bell in his Philip Flower guise
looks alarmingly like Norman Tebbit, Chairman of the Con-
servative Party. The actor, originally chosen for his ‘mad
eyes’, apparently studied Tebbit, a dour, grim public figure,
and has projected a brand of cruelty much more subdued
than the sort depicted in the novel: it has become the tight,
silent cruelty of the torture chamber electrics expert. Yet his
sham empire, according to Angela Carter, is “not as bad as
the real world”. This she exclaims as if it were en[...]Among her earlier writings, she says, it was only the

a

38 — SEPTEMBER CINEMA PAPERS

fantasy novels which demonstrated an understanding of the
power men had. The more realistic novels, the novels about
people she knew when she was young and intensely un-
happy, have much shakier sexual pol[...]ntice-
ship works.

“I did everything on a wing and a prayer,” she says. “You
can’t use the word ‘bad’ about them; they’re not bad nove[...]vels; they’re doing something else . . . One of the
really difficult things about making a script out of The Magic
Toyshop is when I read it again I realised it didn’t have a
plot.

“It had a vague beginning and an end but not much
middle. And one of the things this particular kind of film
needed was a coherent narrative structure, so one had to re-
assemble the novel in that form.” Character, dialogue, all
the workmanlike things of the realist novel were mysteries to
her, although she thinks she has improved these days, partly
under the regimen of film and radio drama’s formal
demands.

“I used to be[...]tea . . . some sugar? . . . Yes thank you’ — and expected
me to pay money for this!” She chuckles. Angela Carter
laughs vigorously and often, especially at her own short-
comings. The dialogue in this film, as it happens, is very
much like that in the book and it seems to stand up quite
well to being spoken.[...]ts easy
with them. I might find it puzzling that the writer who
delights in portraying the underbelly of sexuality, undercut-
ting decent expectations, is disturbed that the central charac-
ter in The Company Of Wolves is only 14 and that there were
frissons of kiddiporn, she believes, in the film. But she does
not. Literature is different.[...]rs seek
romance; her polemical writings warn that the sentimental
caress is as domineering as sadistic bondage; back in the real
world, all she can say about it is that ever[...]so sceptically. Her most recent novel,
Night: At The Circus, featured an anarcho-syndicalist witch,
Lizzie. The witch is the inheritor of a joke: when Angela
Carter, in her bemused way, asked a friend why he thought
th[...]ants
which made left-wing treatises lie down with the occult,
which could be guaranteed to stock the Communist
Manifesto and the Tarot Pack, he suggested it was because
everyone knew that neither worked. She liked the idea,
hence Lizzie.

But in the novel Lizzie’s necromancy and subterfuge are
both successful. Of course. Stands[...]ife. Not about what we are, but what
me might be. And we might be, I like to think. I get more
cheerful[...]can’t think why!”

She smiles benignly out at the grey sky over Clapham.
Alex walks up and down with a washing basket on his head.
A builder is looking at the bathroom which had been
squeezed in under the stairs. We are a long way from The
Magic Toyshop.

e
Australian
leaders

Cinesure is changing at the
top.

John Hennings — with 16
years experience of the film and
television industry — is taking over.

And seasoned insurance
executive, Bill Clifton, has b[...]vel of
service to Cinesure.

They’ll still have the backing
of the same substantial and
dependable group which founded
Cinesure . . .[...]I1: I xiii uunluuuu-f,”

Film /\/\dI<e-up
. . .The group which has

guaranteed the service and rates
which have made Cinesure
Austra|ia’s leading film and
television insurer.

ure

THE SCHOOL FOR PROFESSIONAL
TRAINING IN FILM AND TELEVISION
MAKE-UP

Training commences with straight
corrective make-up for studio lighting
through the various stages of character
make—ups, beard and hair work. The
course also covers racial and old age
make-up techniques, basic hairdressing,
as well as all studio protocol.

FILM MAKE-UP TECHNOLOGY
in conjunction with
KEHOE AUSTRALIA

The Australian Film and

Im orters and su pliers of professional _ _ _ _
p p Television Insurance Specialists

film, television and special effects

m3k9'UP f0r the I”dU3tVY- A Division of The Lipman Insurance Group,

Sentinel House,

49-51 Falcon Street, Crows Nest,
Sydney 2065, Australia.
Telephone (02) 929 0611.

Telex AA24696 ([...]

0 Dim Sum

0 Extreme Prejudice
oFrom The Hip
OGardens Of Stone

0 Ground Zero

0 High Tide[...]e On Elm

Street 3: Dream Warriors

oThe Place At The Coast
0 Raising Arizona

0 River’s Edge

oS|ate[...]OTHE WITCHES OF
EASTWICK

Late one stormy night in a little town
called Eastwick three uncannily bea[...]en meet over a pitcher of
martinis to bitch about the shortage of
eligible bachelors within cooee.

Alex (Cher) is a leggy, raven-haired
widow with one child and a cottage
business in roly-poly clay figurines. Jane
(Susan Sarandon), the timid, childless
divorcee, is music instructress at the
local primary school. And Suki
(Michelle Pfeiffer) is a sensitive but
rather vapid abandoned mother of six
and reporter for the local rag.

“He should be handsome.” “But n[...]got to
have great eyes.” “Intelligent.” “And

sensitive.” Feature by fantastic feature
they dream up the perfect male until
_]'ane, to the amazement of her com-
rades, concludes that he should ride into
town on a big black steed. Cut to outside
and the driving rain as a big black

JACK NICHOLSON: Liberator

Mercedes barrels through the gates of
Eastwick.

The Witches Of Eastwzic/c is a thoroughly
entertaining movie. With jack Nichol-
son in the lead role as the devil himself,
fine performances by the three witch-
ettes, and a stellarjob by Veronica Cart-
wright in the supporting role as East-
wick’s local ‘sensitive’ and prude,
there’s plenty of professionalism.

Maybe a bit too much. Everyone con-
nected with the film is a Hollywood
hero. The director of photography,
Vilmos Zsigmond, won an Oscar for
Close Encounters; the composer, John
Williams, composed the music for,
among other things, Star Wars, Superman,
and E. T.; the production designer,
Polly Platt, is the ex-wife of Peter
Bogdanovich, with whom she made The
Last Picture Show. And the director is
Australia’s own George Miller of Mad
Max fame. There’re no flies on this film.

The Witches Of Eastwick, based on the
novel by john Updike, is according to its
publicists, “a supernatural thriller set in

A MUST FOR LOVERS
F AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

The Documentary Film In Australia 1

Was $1295 Take a close look at the history of
Australian documentaries from the 1890s

$5.00 through to the present day. The book also

- - ' documentary production case-
I .[ examines ,
(lml éd stocks) histories, the documentary market and
(Foreign: $15 surface; themes and gives some useful contacts in
$24 airmail), this fascinating area.

The New Australian Cinema ‘

It’s certainly one of the most thorough was $1495
insights into Australian[...]s as diverse as Social Realism,
Fantasy, Horror and Suspense, and (limited stocks)

Historical Films, to name but a[...]20 an-maj|)_

"WW8 - ‘

Ii}.

Motion Picture Year Books 1980 and 1981/82 :8}

Were $25 each NOW each (limited stocks)
\ or$18-O0 for both volume[...]Both these books are an invaluable record
of the films and the people of the early
1980s: films like Mad Max, My Brilliant
Career, Puberty Blues, The Last Of The
Knucklemen, Breaker Morant, Harlequin

and more. 'I'here’s also plenty of
information, analysis andNOW

(AUSTRALIAN) WOMEN AND FILM — INTERVIEWS

ANSARA, Martha
Changing the Needle: Martha Ansara and
Mavis Robertson

By Barbara Alysen

ARMSTRONG, Gi[...]e Campion Interview
By Mark Stiles

GIBSON, Sarah
The Body in Question: Susan Lambert and

Sarah Gibson Interview

CP Mar 1983 No.42

CPJul[...]Dermody CP May 1987 No. 63
HARTMAN, Rivka

Women in Drama: Meg Stewart, Rivka Hartman
and Clytie Jessop

By Mark Stiles CP April 1982 No.37[...]re Koeser CP May 1985 No.51

HOFFMAN, Sonia
Women in Drama: Briann Kearney and

Sonia Hoffman
By Mark Stiles CP Feb 1982 No.36

HUGHES, Robin
Rocking the Boat at Film
Australia: Robin Hughes
By Mary Colbert

CP Jan 1987 No.61[...]By Victoria Treole CP Mar—April1984 No. 44-45

and see GIBSON, Sarah

MORRlS,Judy

Changes: Jill Robb, Robyn
Nevin and Judy Morris

By Debi Enker

MORSE, Helen
Helen Mo[...]49

ROBB.Jill
Jill Robb Interview
By Terry Plane

and see MORRIS. Judy

ROBERTSON, Mavis
See ANSARA, Ma[...]and Interview
By Scott Murray

TASS, Nadia
Cinema In The Round: Nadia Tass
By Kathy Bail CP Nov 1986 No.60[...]2
ALBIETHOMS CPJuly-Aug 1979 No.22
SUBJECTS

FILM AND TELEVISION

By Adrian Martin CPFeb-Mar1980 No.25
THE FILMS OF IAN PRINGLE

ByJohn O'Hara CPFeb-Mar1985[...]icketson CP April-June1978 No.16

STRAUB/HUILLET: THE POLITICS OF FILM
PRACTICE

By Susan Dermody CP Se[...]No. 42
ORSON WELLES CP July 1986 No.58

SUBSCRIBE NOW AND WE WILL EXTEND YOUR SUBSCRIPTION

I’

No. 17 (August-Septe[...]lle Huppert, Brian
May, Polish cinema, Newsfront,
The Night The Prowler.

No. 19 (January—February 1979):
Anton[...]onalism, Japanese cinema,
Peter Weir, Water Under The
Bridge.

No. 29 (October-November 1980):
Bob Elli[...]ka, Stephen
Wallace, Philippine cinema,
Cruising, The Last Outlaw.

No. 30 (June 1982): Geoff
Burrowes,[...]ry, Phil Noyce, Joan Fontalne,
Tony Williams, law and insurance,
Far East.

No. 47 (August 1984): Richa[...]hael Pattinson,
Jan Sardi, Yoram Gross, Bodyline,
The Slim Dusty Movie.

No. 53 (September 1985): Bryan[...]Hector Crawford, Emir
Kusturica, New Zealand film and
television, Return To Eden.

No. 54 (November 198[...]ord, Bob Weis, John Boorman,
Menahem Golan, Wills And Burke,
The Great Bookie Robbed/, The
Lancaster Miller Affair, rock
videos.

BY TWO I

CINEMA PAPERS

The Documentary In Australian Film

B $5.00

The New Australian Cinema

El $7.00

PUBLICATION[...]APERS SUBSCRIPTION
Cinema Papers is published six times a year.
Subscribe now and you’ll receive two further issues at no extra cost. Prices

include postage.

El 1 year at $25 E] 2 years at $45 El 3 years at $65. Plus[...]reign orders should be accompanied by bank drafts in Australian

dollars only. All prices are

I enclose a cheque for $...

in Australian dollars.
TOTAL $ ................ ..

Please debit my Bankcardlmastercard to the amount of $ .....................................[...]g Limited
43 Charles Street
Abbotstord 3067

Vic. Australia

OF FORTHCOMING THEMES IN

Writers and Cinema 0 Theatre and Cinema
Interviews 0 News 0 Reviews 0 Features

E and the only comprehensive survey of

' who’s making what in Australia

INTERNATIONAL RATES

6 issues 12 issues 18 issues Back issues
1 year 2 years 3 years (Add to the price
of each copy)
Zone 1: New Zealand Surface S[...]29 $191 $7.20

Overseas subscribers, please remit in Australian dollars

Daryl Van Horne (Nicholson) is a
middli[...]ocks up to East-
wick (was he summonedi’), buys the
local heritage home, installs his seven
foot valet, and sets to work making the
three women’s dream come true. To
each of them he is just what the doctor
ordered: a good fuck, a nice guy, a
liberator and a temptation.

At least that’s what the devil is sup-
posed to be. But in a fabulously comic
scene with Cher in which Nicholson
leads her on a tour to the master bed-
room, every convention of the seduction
scene is blown wide open. Cher’s no
d[...]longer looks like any-
body’s idea of a knight in shining
armour, and Cher doesn’t care if she
tells him so.

But if there’s no getting around the
fact that jack Nicholson no longer looks
like anybody’s hero, there’s also no get-
ting around the fact that that’s exactly
what he still is. His performance is, as
always, fantastic. His mood shifts, the
range of expression, the timing — he is
endearingly corny and menacing by
turns. You’d almost think that the
movie was a paean to his skill and
accomplishments as an actor.

Not that this is the best thing he’s ever
done. But there are echoes of all the
other Nicholsons we have known and
loved, not least of them the totally
demonic “Here’s Johnny” of The
Shining. In fact, there are lots of echoes
in this film. Like the best of the contem-
porary Hollywood’s productions, The
Witches Of Eaxtwiek is meta-filmic. It’s
even b[...]ary Poppins.

it came as no surprise to find that the
producers of The Witches Of Eaxtwic/r
were responsible for the comic horror
movie, An American Werewolf In London.
That’s the genre we’re dealing with. But
this is a much gl[...]ardrobe, to begin with. As befits
a man of wealth andand no
mistake. Not a penny spared in, to

JACK NICHOLSON: Temptation

begin with, the search for the right loca-
tion. Polly Platt and the location
manager, we are informed, logged over
20,000 miles throughout the north-
eastern US and northern California (ask
me why) in their search for the perfect
New England village. At length they
found the ideal spot: Cohasset, Massa-
chusetts, right next[...]ystery only Hollywood can solve.

But you get all the pay-offs of the big
expense. It wouldn’t do to underplay the
devil’s powers and some of the effects
are first-rate. If there are some lavishl[...]travaganza seems less than essential)
it’s only in keeping with the generally
luxurious mood of the film.

If there’s anything to mutter about it
might be the broad politics of The
Witches Of Eastwiek. You could say, for
instance, that we hardly need another
demonstration of the irresistibility of
unadulterated masculine domination.
Or that Cher, Susan Sarandon, and
Michelle Pfeiffer, at least two of whom
are proven and formidable talents, are
reduced in this film to legs and fluffy
hair. That there is not much scope for
anything more than the reiteration of
the most conventional and oppressive
sexual relationships. Even that the jabs
the movie takes at the puritanism of the
average New Englander are predictably
cliched.

The answer to these charges is pre-
sumably to be found in the reversal of
fortunes conclusion which makes a
gesture toward self-determination and
lifting of the patriarchal yoke. Sort of.

Actually, this kind of analysis, though
theoretically applicable to anything and

everything, seems essentially out of
place when it comes to The I/Vitches Of
Eartwic/c. In a world in which there are
three kinds of movies: the Dreadful, the
Interesting, and the Fun, there is no
mystery as to which category thi[...]ly,
I don’t see why we should do any
different. And, really, you could do a
hell of a lot worse with a rainy after-
noon.

Christina Thompson

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK: Directed by George
Miller. P[...]cades ago if Diane Arbus had been
asked to direct the Road Runner
cartoons. Whether consciously or not,
Ethan Coen (the producer) and Joel
Coen (the director) owe plenty to both
Arbus’s teratogenic view of the ordi-
nary, and the Road Runner’s ability to
zoom blithely across the surface of the
Western flatland. This analogy is only
one of a series of unlikely conjunctions
and pastiches of cinematic modes which
Rairing Arizona employs in telling its
story of ex-con H.I. (“Hi”) Mc-
Donough, his wife, ex-policewoman

Edwina (“Ed”), and their calamitous >

CINEMA PAPERS SEPTEMBER — 41

< attempt to complete the family unit with

a “little critter” (baby).

In an extended prologue, which uses a
highly skilled[...]conventions, we witness Hi’s sorry track
record in “rambunctious behaviour” —
he ineptly robs “convenience stores”
(the American equivalent of our 7-11s)
with an unloaded gun and a locked
getaway car. Each time he is caught he
woos policewoman Ed (Holly Hunter)
in the 15 seconds or so it takes for her to
snap his mug shot. He goes to prison,
gets paroled, and then the cycle starts
over. The fourth time around, Hi
(Nicolas Cage) decides to “go straight”.
He marries Ed and they move to a small
house in the middle of a prairie where
they spend their “sal[...]ks at a factory drilling holes into
small bits of metal, Ed gives up work
and starts wearing frocks. The only
thing missing is the child which will turn
their happy union into a family. But Ed
discovers that she is infertile, and they

can’t adopt because of Hi’s record.
The[...]begins to fall apart.
That’s when they hear of the Arizona
quintuplets ~ five babies born to
Nathan[...]urniture stores. They get a
terrifying idea . . . The titles appear, the
film ‘begins’.

By this time we have become familiar
with the style which the Coens are
employing. A succession of distorted,
colourful comic images, often shot in
wide angle, emphasise the bizarre or
wacky (a term the Coen brothers use),
such as Hi and Ed on vinyl banana
lounges watching the sun set across an
empty horizon. Naturalism flies out the
window, replaced by a kind of hyper-
realism with[...]mple, Hi would
have spent a minimum of four years in
prison between the first shot and his
final parole (all within the first 10

minutes) but not only does he appear the
same age, he wears the same clothes!
Humour is often situated between the
ironic humility of Hi’s point of view —
he wa[...]st man but
struggles against both his weak nature
and the call of the convenience store -
and the hyper-real exaggerations of
normal social behaviour: Ed’s version of
a lullaby to the baby she and Hi have
kidnapped is a ballad about a man
condemned to hang.

The style constantly refers back to
children’s cartoons where bright colours
and naive, literal logic mix it with
violence and implicit sadism. It is a
world where wackiness reigns, and the
character competes with the visual gag
for attention. Actually there is little
attempt to make ‘real’ characters.
Notions of ‘the real’ are tossed playfully
into the air. Everyone is essentially cari-
catured, as flat and as bright as the
abundance of visual sensation surround-
ing them. Children’s cartoons, however,
have the good sense to last for no more
than a few minutes, and this is where
Raising Arizona starts getting into
trouble.

The film is operating in terms which
are, at their root, alienating. We ar[...]t a distance. For
instance, we are distanced from the
characters by their lack of credibility.
Our mode[...]ceptable logical boundary,
it begins to move into the realm of cari-
cature. It becomes increasingly di[...].
Instead, we observe them, more
critically, from the outside.

The general tone of Raising Arizona is
ironic detachment. Often the force of the
humour comes from a play with
sincerity. The style emphasises self-
consciousness — the careful placement
of objects and colours — and authorial
presence. Given that its primary asset is
the way it mobilises the unfamiliar,
Raising Arizona substitutes charm for[...]is
succeeds to a point. There would be few
scenes in the contemporary cinema as
charming and full of pure delight as the
one where Hi first tries to kidnap one of
the five Arizona babies. But there is
always the threat of that charm wearing
thin and, after half an hour or so, it
does. You become immune to the
barrage of highly-crafted, beautifully art
directed, self-consciously photographed
scenes.

In choosing to use highly-stylised
visual exaggeration, the Coens find
themselves with a critical distance
beween the film and the audience.
Instead of using this to some effect, they
spend most of the film trying to counter-
act the structures which they themselves
set up within the first 15 minutes.
Raising Arizona seems to undergo a series
of shifts in mode, from absurdist to