Jules and Jim

Jules et Jim aka "Jules and Jim" (François Truffaut, 1962) If only the folkies who saw Jules and Jim in 1962 had read it correctly, maybe the free-love era might not have overcompensated with drugs and disco in the '70's.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Truffaut's third film is a sprawling time-spanner that starts in 1916 and falls just short of World War II and tells the story of a menage a trois that can't be managed by the participants. Jules and Jim (Oskar Werner, Henri Serre) are two life-long friends, whose friendship is complicated by war and the woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) who comes between them. Their bohemian life-style flaunts society's more's, but living without rules means walking an imaginary line while drunk—even if you knew where you were going, you're unsure of how to get there.

The two boy-men (one French, one Austrian, which makes things difficult during the First World War) live an apparently work-free life pursuing art, until they encounter a Greek statue with a magnetic smile—on a whim they seek it out—only to see it appear in the flesh on Catherine. Both men are drawn to her, but Jules—the one unlucky in love—wins her, while the non-committal Jim hangs back and observes and, as always, bides his time.

He observes, but he doesn't see. Catherine is fascinating, but there's a shadow to that smile. She lives in the moment, and her mood can swing with the wind. She carries vitriol (sulfuric acid) for "lying eyes." And it's too soon in the relationship for him to make anything of the fact that she catches her dress on fire while burning love letters. Jim snuffs it out before there can be a complete "bonfire of the vanities."

On one of their excursions, Catherine dresses in men's clothing and draws on a mustache. On this particular outing, she will be a man, living a man's life. But she's already doing it, making her rules, living by them and chucking them when they restrict her, the men following her because they can't keep up with her instincts. It will intensify when she marries Jules after the war, becoming the dominant one in the marriage, Jules almost slavishly putting up with her infidelities, brought on by the yoke of motherhood. For all the perfect happiness they seek outside of conformity, they end up perfectly miserable, and when Jim and Catherine begin an affair, something psychic snaps.

For being a part of the French "New Wave," it is very much a cautionary tale (taken from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché), old-fashioned in its insights warning of the dangers of an unconventional life-style.* Made on a limited budget, but with a large scope, Truffaut makes use of news-reels and other period chronicles (and movie-tropes like irises and wipes) to create a multi-media presentation of the period, and Truffaut starts his movie hyper-kinetically to show the puppyishness of youth, then gradually tapers the speed off to show the arc of a love affair and a life.

That arc has only one way to go, and it leaves all three adrift: Jim, his choices taken away from him, Catherine, her freedom from her, and Jules loses the captains of his fate.

Un sourire peut enchanter mais également séduire. Prenez l'attention.

* And, "of course," the woman is "the problem," but she is also the driving force—the vitality—that informs the lives of two rootless and feckless men.

The Bride Wore Black (1968)

The Bride Wore Black aka "La Mariée Était en Noir" (Francois Truffaut, 1968) Like most film-scholars turned directors, Francois Truffaut spent a fair amount of his early years paying tribute to films he loved in the film he was the author of. This film, and to a certain extent, Farenheit 451, were part of his chilly "Son of Hitchcock" period, using strategies, if not direct shots, from the Master of Suspense in his own films. But where Hitchcock's films had an eerieness derived from the rigid structure of his films, Truffaut's seemed sterile, artificial, aping Hitchcock's structure, but without the lengths to which Hitchcock would try to simulate life. For example, in The Bride Wore Black, there's a sequence where Jeanne Moreau is walking around a bachelor's apartment that she describes as cluttered, but it is personified by a single tie hanging over a rod. Pretty specific clutter! Compare that to The Master's meticulous recreation of real locations on-set. Hitchcock did not start out directing; he began as an art director in films and worked his way up.

Truffaut began as a critic.

It's for that reason that his plot structure for The Bride Wore Black has the deliberate pace of a funeral dirge. One by one, "The Bride" seeks out disparate men who seem to have nothing in common and devises intricate ways to win their trust and take their lives, each crime premeditated and carried out with a cold efficiency--Moreau barely registers any emotion at all. But, why? What's the reason? Why these men? Truffaut takes his time revealing everything, but by that time the audience may be getting impatient with so many murders and no punishment. Truffaut even has an answer for that in his movie machinations.

One can see Truffaut still experimenting with his medium with varying results. For example, the frightening of a chamber-maid by "The Bride" would play a bit better if Truffaut hadn't insisted on a flash-cut of only a couple of frames. Moreau barely registers before the angle has changed immediately, and the maid has spun around (impossibly fast, given the split-second amount of time that bridging shot took).

And after utilizing Hitchcock's best composer, Bernard Herrmann, for the earlier Farenheit 451, here Herrmann's score is a bit too lush for the visuals that Truffaut has shot. It's heart is on its sleeve, whereas the rest of the movie doesn't seem to have any heart at all. Perhaps Herrmann was over-compensating for the movie he saw, and went over the top to express the emotions that Truffaut keeps submerged.

Finally, one can't watch the movie and help but think this is where Quentin Tarantino got his inspiration for Kill Bill, only tarted it up with his obsessions--prolonged violent sequences, cribbed movie styles, and the expected but ultimately pointless comic-book discussion. Somehow, "The Bride Wore a Yellow Track Suit" just doesn't cut it.*

*no pun intended.

Lost in Translation: What They Really Said...Part 1: Orson Welles/Alfred Hitchcock

Visiting the laundromat recently I found something that would excite....well, only me. Someone had left in the junk-a-book shelf a book on tape of "This Is Orson Welles," a fairly-encyclopedic series of interviews between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. These four cassettes contained not Bogdanovich reading from his account, but highlights from the actual Welles interviews that made up that highly entertaining book.

Interviews of this type are always subject to interpretation ("He was feeling this way, when he said that"), but here was a chance to actually hear the original conversation, and the all-important inflection of the speaker. And when that speaker is Orson Welles...it promises to be at least entertaining, and probably enlightening, no matter how carefully Bogdanovich (who is extremely precise)* can parse the emotions.

It also brought to mind the famous "Hitchcock/Truffaut" book, where Francois Truffaut conducted an exhaustive (and no doubt, exhausting) career-spanning interview with Alfred Hitchcock. Reading through the book, one gets the sense of a polite, fact-based meeting of minds, as the two film-makers deconstruct Hitchcock's body of work. It's all quite proper. It's all quite academic.

But it wasn't. Truffaut, working through an interpreter, got quite a bit of what Hitchcock said wrong, and more importantly, left out any sort of indication of emotion or inflection. When the tapes of those already-fascinating interviews were released, an entire new sub-text of meaning came forth--no longer English translated to French back into English, but the actual words, unfiltered. And Hitchcock's emotions (one gets the impression he was unflappable, when his movies suggest the polar-opposite) come to the fore; he gets irritated with Truffaut's questions, and certainly, with his opinions. Hitchcock becomes tired and testy, while Truffaut plods on like a machine.

So, below is the link to the portions of the interviews that have been aired publicly, courtesy of the always useful and fun Alfred Hitchcock Wiki. For added enjoyment, grab a copy of "Hitchcock/Truffaut" and follow along. It's like reading the original version from a favorite book.

Hitchcock/Truffaut Interviews

* And as with the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews, the Welles/Bogdanovich exchanges have their own unique dynamic apart from the book. Culled from several interviews with Welles over the years (including when he was playing Gen. Dreedle on location in Catch-22), the interviews are not the chummy, informative chats that Bogdanovich has streamlined in his editing. Welles comes off as diffident, donnish, and frequently impatient with Bogdanovich's line of questioning, interrupting him with a chorus of "Yes...Yes...Yes!" Still, in the segments that Bogdanovich has included, the questions are full of apocrypha that Welles is only too willing to dispel. (Ya know, that novelization of his Mr. Arkadin? He didn't write it, though it's his name listed as author in every translation. Nor, he says, did he ever read it.) Still, it's interesting to hear the conversation, especially when Welles remembers something that cracks him up, his laugh is always full and infectious.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut, 1966) As long as we're looking at movies with dystopian society speculations, we should look at an unusual one from the 1960's with a different "take" on things. "Fahrenheit 451" is Ray Bradbury's conjecture, inspired by past Nazi practices during its Third—and final— Reich, the then-current McCarthy era (at the time of its writing) and future projections of thought-control, of a society where the written word is banned as subversive, and "firemen," in a time when houses are fire-proof, are, instead, tasked with burning contraband books. That is, all of them.

In the society of "Fahrenheit 451" (supposed to be in the American mid-West post-1960), books are considered bad, as they offer a different perspective from the government's social engineering efforts to keep the populace passive and controlled. Books stir everything up, confuse and enervate (and inspire), so they are suppressed to keep people placid and "equal" (although some more than others).

Bradbury's book was first published as a novella "The Fireman" in the Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in early 1951 (written on a rented typewriter in UCLA's Powell Library) and expanded for Ballantine Books in 1953. It became a classroom perennial to teach students metaphorical concepts and to keep a wary eye on sponsored group-think (in a time before they all graduated to Facebook).

In 1966, French director Francois Truffaut, part of the French "New Wave," chose Bradbury's book to be the subject of his first English-language film (a language barrier that created a slight frisson with the European actors taking direction from an artist (talented, though he may be, visually) for whom English was an unfamiliar language (is that the reason the dialogue is all dubbed?). On the top of that, Truffaut's version of the future is clean, sterile, upwardly mobile, very "white" and slightly robotic, and heavily influenced by Albert Speer's monolithic, concrete city blocks. 

The film's title sequence is a nifty introduction to the concept; over tinted zoom shots of roof-tops with broadcast aerials with no title-text, the credits, instead, being narrated by actor Alex Scott. It sets you up for a world without words, and the movie-proper starts with a call to the local fire-house and a small team of fire-men raiding a book depository, finding hidden books, creating a pile of them and setting them ablaze with ruthless efficiency.

Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Montag (played by Oskar Werner, whose role in Truffaut's Jules et Jim made him an international star), who mans the flame-thrower on the fire-man raids on hidden libraries. He is mentored by Capt. Beatty (Cyril Cusack), who coaches him on the purpose and philosophy behind their fiery task. But Montag is pulled in other directions by two women: his wife Linda (played by Julie Christie), a willing product of the government's propaganda and desirous of an easy, uncomplicated life; the other is Clarisse (also played by Christie), an optimistic and inquisitive teacher who questions the status quo, and who elicits suspicion from the government.

Clarisse's curiosity infects Montag, who begins to question what he's doing, and even smuggles away a book during one of the raids, hiding it from his wife and painstakingly teaching himself to read.

He also begins to see the other side of what he's doing. seeing the devotion of the book-keepers, one of whom (Bee Duffel) chooses to be immolated, monk-like, with her beloved books. It shakes Montag right down to his bindings and he begins to see the whole society as having a broken spine, devoid of the passion that the books engender, and he begins to feel more isolated from his co-workers and his wife. After all, he is now a criminal...in his own mind, and in theirs, as well.

Truffaut's film is flawed—his published diaries reveal that is was a difficult "shoot," especially in dealing with actors (especially his former star Werner) and he was never satisfied with the English translation of the script, preferring the French version. Perhaps that is why the film seems to come most alive when he languishes his lens on all those montaged shots of books, as they explode into flame with an almost sensual fervor. Pages crisp and blacken among the collections of controversial books—and even an issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the magazine where Truffaut began his film criticism career—with all the unblinking fervor that Carl Theodore Dreyer used filming The Passion of Joan of Arc. Truffaut mixes the titles notorious at the time of the film with familiar classics long past their time of controversy ("David Copperfield" for instance) to show the wide spectrum of time and how it can outdistance objections of long-ago melted snowflakes.

There are moments that are dodgy—technically, on the effects side, the jet-packed police are clumsily wired in front of a projected back-drop that exposes the searchers as not moving independently in flight. But, on the other hand, the movie does forecast flat-screen television monitors (interactive ones!) and the way the media can invade one's life. Such things are much less jarring in current perspective than jet-packs (however poorly supposed).

Fahrenheit 451 does have an aspect to it that makes me regard it fondly, seeing past its flaws—its ending. In it (FLAMING SPOILER ALERT), once Montag has escaped his puppeteered pursuers—and is dramatically and fraudulently "killed" for the cameras—he makes his way along an abandoned railway track to his ultimate destination—a secluded wood that has become the home of the "book-people" who each devote their lives to a single book, memorizing it, archiving it in their minds, so that it can never be destroyed except by death (and even that is maintained with a hand-me-down oral history to the next generation).

It is one of my favorite sequences in film* augmented by an exquisite strings-only score by Bernard Herrmann. As the spken words commingle, Herrmann, whose score has previously gone turgid in moments of action and pursuit, breaks free and creates a delicate melancholy theme that is one of his loveliest compositions, certainly one of the most beautiful in cinema since the sound era. That he ends it with an unresolved blast of strings that resembles a cry of anguish finishes the film with an appropriate flourish of emotion previously not realized in the film. 

It moves me no matter how many times I've experienced it. 

After a couple of decades of an update being planned, HBO has produced a new version starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella and Keir Dullea to be directed by Rahmin Bahrani (director of Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo) which sounds very intriguing. They'll start showing it May 19th of this year.

*

Hitchcock/Truffaut

Master Class
or
Tremble With Fear/Quiver with Love

I've done a LOT of writing about Alfred Hitchcock. I've seen all of the movies that anyone could see (the remaining ones from the silent era, if completed, may show up smoking in a warehouse somewhere) and written about them extensively.

So, I've been very much anticipating Kent Jones' documentary about one of the "bibles" of film makers and scholars, Francois Truffaut's "Hitchcock/Truffaut," which was published in 1966. It was the result of Truffaut's week-long interview with the director in 1962, and featured analyses of each film focusing on major themes and craft and was liberally illustrated with screen-shots of the films, sometimes even showing Hitchcock's elaborate cutting schemes for key sequences. At the time of the interview, Truffaut was 30 years old and had made three films. Hitchcock was 63 and would only make three more films. One was just starting his career and the other winding down, and Truffaut's intent was to do a scholarly work to rescue Hitchcock from a reputation as a brand-name creator of popular entertainment and show him to be a film artist of the highest caliber. And to shame American film critics for neglecting what they had right under their noses.

I bought my copy in 1974 at the University Book Store in Seattle, which had a good, if sparse, film section at the time—if a new book hit the shelves, it was immediately noticed. I still have it, now yellowed and a little brittle, scuffed and dog-eared. And it is one of the few books that I've carried through moves and marriages. It is indispensible. I've also listened to the interviews—they're available online—and have been amused at where the translation fails and where the measured script of the text in Truffaut's book does not show the moods of Hitchcock during the process—mostly engaged, sometimes sad, at times peeved, sometimes bored or perplexed where Truffaut was going with questions and analyses. Also, like outtakes, it's interesting (and sometimes telling) what was left out.

The book of the films is now a film of the book of the films, with film scholar Kent Jones' Hitchcock/Truffaut, which is a good primer on the book and does a nice job of collating interviews with many prominent film-makers about the influence the book had on their understanding of film (via Hitchcock) and their subsequent careers—Wes Anderson says his copy is now just a stack of pages held together with a rubber band. The film is a nice collage of remembrances by Truffaut, snippets of the interview itself, augmented by generous segments of illustrative film and a large dose of talking white guys weighing in on their own theories, some of which might be valid, but usually revealing more about the theorist than the subject.

James Gray says that there is no reverse angle on this shot, because the most
important elements from the observer's POV is the curl in the woman's hair
in real life and the painting.

As I said, I was anticipating this one and looking forward to it with great enthusiasm.

In fact, probably too much. It might be fascinating if you've never heard of the book or knew that it existed, and it's a nice little distillation of Hitchcock's career (as well as Truffaut's) and touches on the major themes that influenced The Master—his Catholicism, his exploitation of fears, use of color and architecture, the delicacy in finding the most illustrative and emotive angle (no matter what the actor was doing, acting) and matching it with the next, his dependence on film craft to the forsaking of performance and its nuances, and his focus on the audience and how they would respond in the acting of seeing and reacting.

Peter Bogdanovich says that on this shot, audiences could no longer be complacent
and "going to the cinema became dangerous,"

There's a lovely little section of tape where Hitchcock explains why "logic is dull," which is tied up with his artist's desire to surprise his audience, to one-up their sophistication of "I know what will happen next..." "My reply should be "Do you?" The puckish contempt in Hitchcock's voice at that point is lovely.

Moments like that made it worth seeing, but I found it slim. A highlights reel with extra emphasis in the later stages on Vertigo and Psycho, masterpieces of one sort or the other, as high art or manipulation—with Hitchcock, the two were part and parcel (it's just that he was so singularly GOOD at it). A digest for mass-audiences to absorb easily and without offense.

Gray considers this "the most important shot in motion picture history."

Don't get me wrong, it is good that it was made. Hitchcock, with his daughter Pat out of commission to protect his reputation, has taken quite some hits lately, mostly on the gossipy side, with attempts to tarnish and sully in broad strokes in mass entertainment (his favorite weapon). It was about time somebody came out and said "you can speculate all you want about the man, but look what he produced." There was a stringent discipline there in technique, a precision in craft. That he produced them out of his recognition of his frailties and being so attuned to them is rather amazing. For a man who exploited his own fears, he was, in many ways, quite fearless in using them.

I should face it, I wouldn't be happy unless there was a 12-part series, along the lines of "Cosmos," going over Hitchcock's career. He did, after all, create his own filmic Universe and attuned us to its idiosyncracies and peculiarities. He was a great communicator, sharing our knowledge and taking advantage of it. He was also (and this isn't mentioned in the movie except in example) just fun. Inventive to the extreme (and when some claim "typical Hitchcock" to his movies, they're not saying that it's atypically more sophisticated than most film technique), with an eye toward humor even in the worst circumstances, even a "bad" Hitchcock film is a jolly ride, even when it invites us to stare into the abyss. Even though the term "thriller" evokes a generic response, the films of Hitchcock still thrill, either by content or technique, which ever suits your fancy. 

James S. Wilson thinks this shot is emblematic of Hitchcock's innate desire
to satisfy audience's requirements in entertainment (half-jokingly)