(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September
2009)
Broken
Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
“Films have to be finished,” says the
director of the film within Almodovar’s film, “even if you do it blindly.” The
fact that the director actually is
blind adds to the statement’s resonance, but doesn’t it also make it seem a
little crass? Well, maybe just over-enthusiastic then, for Almodovar is
certainly one of cinema’s great enthusiasts. His films are highly entertaining,
although with minor variations they’re usually entertaining in much the same
way, and I’ve yet to have any desire to watch any of them a second time (Live Flesh sticks in my mind as my
favorite, but it might just be that this was my first discovery of him in his
lusher latter-day mode). He’s a great creator of unique structures, placing
flashbacks within flashbacks and films within films, gleefully celebrating
complications of gender and desire and health and economic circumstance; this
restlessness can seem though as if he’s always turning away from something before
it gets really difficult. The pleasure
you take from his films is usually similar to what you get on completing a
particularly challenging and aesthetically dazzling jigsaw, which is to say
that if you really wanted to appreciate the picture, you wouldn’t have chopped
it up in the first place.
All of that said, Broken Embraces is as engrossing as his best (although a little too
long). The blind director spins the
steamy story of how he got to be that way, involving a love affair 20 years
earlier with his lead actress (Penelope Cruz), while making a movie financed by
her elderly husband. It refers to dozens of other movies (explicitly or
otherwise) and clearly delights in its characters; Almodovar’s facility in
conveying his pleasure at his creations (and at his own luck) is one of his
most endearing traits.
Backstory and Cinema Museum (Mark
Lewis)
Lewis is previously unknown to me, but he’s
a notable multimedia artist (Canada’s representative at this year’s Venice
Biennale), and this rich, stimulating program of two short documentaries links
to an upcoming series at the Cinematheque. Backstory
illustrates the longstanding device of rear projection (where material shot
with actors in the studio is foregrounded against a previously filmed external
backdrop); in the current Cinematheque
program, Lewis cites its invention as the point when film “became fully and
definitively ‘modern.’” The interviewees – filmed, in an example of form
reflecting content, against an ever-changing series of rear-projected locations
– are all members of a longstanding family business: in their heyday they just
did one job after another (in the 80s in particular they owned everything from
the Rocky movies to The Naked Gun) but in the digital age
they struggle to get anything going at all.
The film is mainly a work of anecdotage –
the father and son jawbone about everything from past love affairs to Sylvester
Stallone’s directorial ineptitude, but they don’t address their contribution
other than as craftsmen. As such it’s an
entertaining piece, and oddly beguiling – the visual illusion clearly works
even though the entire film is devoted to reminding us of it, embodying how
cinema not only survives deconstruction but even thrives on it. The relationship of light and focus and positioning
in Lewis’ images gives the film a textured structure of a kind that, whether
because of new technology or relative indifference to composition nowadays,
seems inherently old-fashioned and rather poignant.
Cinema
Museum takes us through a cluttered archive of
cinematic artifacts in London (it’s called a museum, but the vast majority of
the contents – in the manner of those stacks of boxes that sat in your cellar
for decades - don’t even seem to be
practically accessible, let alone being formally displayed). The curator takes
us from room to room (the building used to be a workhouse, where the young
Charlie Chaplin briefly resided) – moving past books, cans of film, posters,
random old signs and fixtures from long-destroyed movie houses – chattering
away (with enthusiasm, but no particular insight or finesse) while the camera
sometimes follows along, sometimes wanders off, in a series of extended takes.
Cinema itself is secondary here to the medium’s immense capacity for generating
ephemera and brands and traces of various kinds; until recently at least, the
medium’s inherently social nature allowed (if not demanded) that it function as
much as architecture and science and cultural engine, and if one so chooses
(and many do), the detritus of these collateral processes becomes as
mesmerizing and consuming as the images themselves (and with the advantage that
the images can’t be grasped, whereas an old “House full” sign certainly can
be). The museum does have some (marooned-seeming) artifacts from recent movies
like Chicago, but belongs
overwhelmingly to the past, embodying a physicality that again is surely
diminishing in an online world. Lewis doesn’t necessarily suggest this
necessitates a decline in what cinema can mean or achieve, but virtually everything
we see in the film connotes an inadequately catalogued loss.
L’enfer
d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and
Ruxandra Medrea)
Another great body of cinema’s mythology
lies in its what might have beens, in films dreamed of but never realized, or
even more tragically, actually started but never completed – Orson Welles, as
I’ve written before, fascinates his followers (like me) almost as much for his
stranded fragments and cul-de-sacs as for his “official” body of work. In 1964,
Henri-Georges Clouzot, best known for The
Wages of Fear and Les diaboliques, began work on what was to
be his masterpiece, L’Enfer. The plot
was relatively straightforward – a man is consumed by jealousy at his wife’s
imagined infidelities – but Clouzot intended to create a new cinematic language
for the husband’s inner landscape, to tangibly depict the contours of inner
torment and delusion. With a generous American-backed budget, he launched into
the project in style, carrying out extensive tests, and then descending on his
lakeside location with a massive crew. But once he got there, he seemed to lose
his way (“searching with 100 people around him,” as someone puts it), endlessly
reshooting scenes already carried out or merely freezing in indecision, and his
always tough manner with actors became destructive, so that lead actor Serge
Reggiani stormed off the set, never to return. Clouzot soldiered on, but then
suffered a heart attack, and L’Enfer was
dead.
The footage survived in storage however
(although missing a soundtrack) and this documentary – also drawing on
interviews with surviving participants, and using new actors to provide vocals
for some of the scenes - gives a terrific sense of what might have been. Much
of the footage remains stunning, and the film would surely have enhanced lead
actress Romy Schneider’s already iconic standing, although there’s also a fair
chance the movie would mainly be viewed now as a somewhat dated and maybe
overwrought curio. Its final sentiment is that “you have to see your madness through”
(a reasonable restatement of the Almodovar dialogue I started with), and if
Clouzot didn’t quite manage that, his labors at least now find a more coherent
ending.
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