Category Archives: THE BLOG

Some thoughts from The Other Side of the Wind

(Originally posted October 21, 2018)

Yesterday I celebrated a culmination of sorts: I saw Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind courtesy of the Philadelphia Film Festival. I’m one of those people who’s been anticipating this film for years, and I’ve read pretty much everything written about it. Lately I’ve been obsessively monitoring wellesnet.com for reviews and updates and uploaded conversations that sometimes border on the vituperative.

So kudos to Peter Bogdanovich, Filip Jan Rymsza, Oja Kodar, Bob Murawski et al for completing the film without getting in its way: I’m awestruck at their brilliant restraint. The movie is a confounding barrage of questions and fury and accusations, a scramble of profundity tossed to posterity interspersed with witty, deadly party conversation. It’s all about the business of creation and the fate of the creator, the artist compelled to transmute terror into beauty and so extinguish it. Artists, the movie tells us, are machines destined to use up more than they can ever produce. Shot between 1970 and 1976, Wind is also an extraordinarily prescient essay on intrusive media, with cameras illuminating every unwary expression, and phallic microphones brutally thrust into every private corner. It’s a vicious satire on pretension, and an open attack on that insatiable consumer of everything palliative and trite.

I’m not going to repeat the history of calamity that dogged Welles production; see Morgan Neville’s documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead for that incredible story of despair and near-miraculous recovery. And I’m not sure I can offer a rational review at this point: I empathize with the commentators who came out of the theater ‘gobsmacked.’ This one demands multiple viewings, and even at that, I suspect it’ll remain elusive but beckoning. Not that it matters: it obviously doesn’t care what you think.

Anyway, some initial thoughts:

Despite warnings out of Venice and Telluride, I had no problem with the quick cuts and shifts from black-and-white to color comprising the cobbled-together mockumentary. The sound was fine. The film-within-a-film segments provided a welcome relief from the intensity of the party scenes and were neither too long nor at all tedious.

It’s all about the tragic descent of Jake Hannaford, once-legendary director adored but ignored in modern Hollywood, returned to L.A. to make his comeback film, and I’d love to know how much of the autobiographical nature of the film Welles privately conceded, how much he consistently denied. I thought it noteworthy that Hannaford shot John Dale, his leading man, absolutely gorgeous. after all, the film implies that Hannaford is at least bisexual. “Directing with a mask,” Welles said of his directing Hannaford’s film. As to Hannaford’s movie, Welles’ parody of new cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriski Point is universally cited as a target) is a deliberately terrible movie, visuals without meaning bridging on camp. Jake Hannaford (John Huston in Chinatown mode) doesn’t do symbolism, and it shows. Worse, he’s insisted on using Dale, his supposed discovery, instead of a name star: no wonder he can’t get funding. Then he goads Dale into deserting the film; everything he does conspires to his own destruction.

Again against expectations, I found the plot well-paced, coherent, and involving, building or rather descending naturally toward the inevitable climax: Dale is revealed as a trained if merely adequate actor rather than the beautiful lost boy Hannaford thought he’d rescued; the money runs out, and even Hannaford’s protégé Brooks Otterlake (wonderfully acted by Bogdanovich) won’t finance him; his dear friend Zarah Valeska (Lilli Palmer) kindly denies his virtual plea for emotional support; and the press, led by Susan Strasberg’s Juliette Riche (based on Pauline Kael), are ruthlessly bent on deconstructing Hannaford’s fragile psyche (nothing in this visceral film is more of a gut-punch than his expressed disgust of homosexuals). The power goes off but the alcohol continues to flow. Which isn’t to say this film is anything short of insane, only that there’s an expertly told story unfolding within the overall chaos. Welles does do symbolism, and the finale at the drive-in is magnificent.

But – and despite the fact that Oja Kodar was a second creative force behind this film, particularly the soft-porn aspects of Hannaford’s movie – there’s just so much of her. Is it  Welles overpowering Hannaford again? Dale’s probable homosexuality and Hannaford’s presumed repression would seem to make her secondary. It’s said she represents Hannaford. Does her mysterious, observant presence represent the creative force itself? That works better, as Welles himself said Dale represented him, and Kodar draws in and coldly uses the bewildered young  man. This is very much a film about men with men, about machismo, originally inspired by and intended as a takedown of the Hemingway type Welles loathed; maybe that’s why the feminine is triumphant while the men crumble. But as creators themselves, both Welles and his avatar evince that same ruthlessness, making use of whatever or whomever comes to hand and, as the closing narration insists, destroying as they go until finally they destroy themselves.

Now that’s a tidy ending to an essay, don’t you think? Rather cheap, rather marketable, suitable for a blog. I have a pretty good idea how The Other Side of the Wind will be reviewed by Netflix viewers, but I do love a film with a high critics’ score and low audience approval: that ratio indicates something worth seeing. The first comment I heard leaving the theater (it was loud) was: “There’s two hours out of my life I won’t get back.” What I think is: you go, Orson. Confound ‘em. Leave it what it is with all the omissions and emotions, don’t explain it into some neat narrative box. Chaos is always the beginning, and there were never any answers to this tragedy anyway, so leave all the shattered beauty alone.

Photo credits: Orson Welles by Chris Weige CC BY-SA 2.0 / Nicolas Sanguinetti, Oooh, Orson Welles, CC BY-SA 2.0

About Anne, and about Oscar

(Originally posted October 7, 2018)

Last week I was browsing in that bored-at-work way when I stumbled on the topic of Holocaust films, specifically Sidney Bernstein’s lost documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. The project was shelved because its recorded horrors clashed with Britain’s post-war policy regarding Germany, and perhaps also due to a fear of further inciting Zionist fervor. One article led to another until I found myself deep into a consideration of Hollywood’s near-obsession with prestige Holocaust movies, despite the arguable obscenity of creating something beautiful out of a topic that should, by all that’s decent, remain irrefutably ugly.

That intricate dilemma caught my attention.

I know there are libraries of literature on this topic, but this is just a blog, and anyway I’m about talking popular culture here, the moral and aesthetic impulses that rule the entertainment business. Easy enough to understand why these movies exist: Hollywood is Hollywood is the rest of the film industry, and these are important movies, right? They force us to remember, and we have to remember, so a well-deserved pat on the back to the filmmakers and the filmgoers, too. No need to rudely dismiss such noble efforts as self-serving and pretentious Oscar bait.

Take my own introduction to the genre, the film version of Anne Frank’s fairly typical teenage journal, and the sublimity of its final expression of faith in the essential goodness of man. How beautiful is that declaration, repeated as it is at the finale against that poignant score, and that shot of seagulls soaring free above the deserted secret annex? Or how about a little girl in a bright red coat? It’s a beautiful shot. Life is Beautiful!

Should such horrors be transmuted into beauty? Is it simply a matter of degree? And what exactly does it mean, anyway, to make something beautiful? What, if anything, is objectively accomplished? Does beauty by definition make the terrible more acceptable? Does it somehow encompass and make manageable its subject? Does it reveal truths we never realized before? The below from Ruth Askew in my own novel Worthy of This Great City:

“Whatever the medium, a statement is just that – a statement. Art requires more.” The taunting was mitigated by obvious fondness but still uncomfortably acerbic. She might be furious.
There followed a lengthy pause, but Thom must have tacitly, graciously encouraged a renewed assault, because she resumed her argument with that same condescending, outsized patience. She was wearing a very unfortunate shade of bright blue. “Art has a purpose: it’s about making things beautiful so they can be grasped, incorporated, and left behind. That’s what beauty means. You can’t just appoint something art if it doesn’t work. You do not have that prerogative.”

Well, a questionable opinion from a questionable character.

Holocaust movies often invite us to identify with a victim; after experiencing one, we dutifully struggle to multiply our empathy by many millions, but the fact is we can’t, our minds refuse such alien numbers. Fictionalized accounts humanize the inhumane solely on an individual basis; documentaries that study the whole speak only in the tolerable abstract.

We’re told these films serve as a necessary reminder – but of what, exactly? Not of the events leading up to the main action: the significant political ploys and poisonous resentments that no one understood or anyway checked. And they rarely if ever visit the minds of the perpetrators, because who would pay to see that, who would dare to identify, and yet what other information is more urgently required? Movies are all about the dramatic culmination, the visual horror, the ovens and the careless piles of emaciated bodies and the extracted teeth. The possibilities, I suppose. Valid enough.

But here’s what I think: If everyone in the world were legally required to watch every Holocaust film ever made on a regular basis it would not in the least mitigate the global recurrence of genocide. Granted, probably not everyone in Rwanda caught Sophie’s Choice, but even so I feel pretty confident here. As promulgators of tolerance, as cautionary tales, these movies are utterly useless.

And I suspect that’s because it’s impossible to make the Holocaust itself beautiful. I can’t imagine what it would mean for humankind if we could: would it signify our salvation, or instead lead to the extermination I sometimes think we seek? Maybe it would it make no difference whatsoever. I wish I could claim that history offers hope, but an optimistic example eludes me right this minute.

Not that it matters: artists have a job to do, and they’re relentless. I know; I am one.
Based on which admittedly shallow analysis, supported by natural inclination, I don’t think it’s at all unforgivable to pull a work of art from a Holocaust story. For one thing, history demands constant verification these days. And movies show that this terrible thing really happened, and that it was really terrible: Anne Frank, that’s the Holocaust; that was awful, she died, but she thought people were basically good, so that makes it all very sad.

It’s only Anne’s story, you see. And it’s inadvertently, tragically beautiful, which is why we remember it.

Photos: Anne Frank; Auschwitz TSAI Project CC by 2.0

Her name was Florence Sally Horner

(Originally posted September 23, 2018)

Here’s an undated photograph of Florence Sally Horner of Camden, NJ.

Florence Sally Horner

As an adolescent, she tried to shoplift a notebook, and a fifty-year-old man caught her at it and misrepresented himself as an FBI agent. Abducting her, he traveled the country with her for just under two years, until she managed to call home, Rescued in 1950, she returned to her home and school, where as I understand it she was covertly judged the vixen of the piece, a predatory and sluttish young woman. She died, unbelievably, in an unrelated auto accident in 1952, and was thereafter forgotten but for a brief mention in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”

All this was brought to my attention courtesy of a new book by Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita, out now. I read Lolita years ago, because it was salacious and therefore brave. Now I’ve ordered a new copy so that I can see that horrible relationship for what it was, discover the self-serving tricks of its narcissistic narrator, and ultimately reach toward Nabokov himself. And because I owe it to that little girl who found a way to survive and was blamed for it by everyone, including me.