“Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s" at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 12 February 2024 16:15

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Big Red One

From January 26th to February 4th, Film at Lincoln Center presented a series titled “Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s,” in conjunction with the publication of Footlights, the English translation of that critic’s 1983 collection of essays from Cahiers du Cinéma, La Rampe. (The retrospective was co-programmed by Madeline Whittle and the book’s translator, Nicholas Elliott.)

One of the greatest films screened was also the earliest to be made, Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men, which—as interestingly documented in Bernard Eisenschitz’s useful biography of the director—had a very complicated genesis and was a somewhat difficult production. Dave Kehr’s capsule review for the Chicago Reader provides a fine summary and an accurate assessment:

A masterpiece by Nicholas Ray—perhaps the most melancholy and reflective of his films (1952). This modern-dress western centers on Ray’s perennial themes of disaffection and self-destruction: Arthur Kennedy is a young rodeo rider, eager for quick fame and easy money; Robert Mitchum is his older friend, a veteran who’s been there and knows better. Working with the great cinematographer Lee Garmes, Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair—trailer camps and broken-down ranches—that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security. With Susan Hayward, superb as Kennedy’s wife.

The Lusty Men was extravagantly praised by Jacques Rivette in his review in Cahiers du Cinéma to which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum alludes in his insightful comment that “One suspects that what Ray represented for many of the younger Cahiers critics was [ . . . ] a florid romantic imagination, dramatic intensity, and visual bravado that could make The Lusty Men evidence of an obsession for abstraction equal to [Robert] Bresson’s,” while Robin Wood had this to say about Susan Hayward’s performance: “Nicholas Ray's use of her in The Lusty Men is, on the contrary, fascinating in its perversity: her aggressiveness is allowed its full expression (including rage and physical violence) but exclusively in the interests of home and settling.” Several distinctive deep focus compositions highlight Ray’s debt—like that of several other major postwar Hollywood directors such as Paul Wendkos—to Orson Welles. It was projected in an excellent 35-millimeter print.

When Akira Kurosawa undertook to direct the Japanese-Soviet co-production Dersu Uzala, an adventure film from 1975—which, according to the Film at Lincoln Center program note, is about “an unexpected friendship [that] arises between a Russian military geographer and the Nanai hunter he has hired to guide his expedition across the Siberian taiga”—he had been removed in 1968 from the production of Tora! Tora! Tora! by 20th Century Fox and his independent—and first color—feature Dodes’ka-den (1970) had been a commercial failure. Photographed magnificently in 70-millimeter Sovcolor with abundant reliance upon the telephoto lens—and recorded in six-track stereophonic sound—Dersu Uzala eschews the intricate montage andmise en scèneof earlier Kurosawa films like Ikiru (1952) or High and Low (1963) for a simpler, more classical approach. The important critic, Noël Burch, defending a materialist, modernist aesthetic in his seminal 1979 book, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, expressed a negative view in a footnote there—“Dersu Uzala is lovely literature . . . but can scarcely be said to bear any of the hallmarks of Kurosawa’s maturity”—but such hostility to commercial norms seems narrow in the wake of the revolution in sensibility represented byla politique des auteurs.It was also shown in a very good 35-millimeter print.

Film at Lincoln Center’s description of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, another release from 1975, includes this précis:

Among world cinema’s most infamous works, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film transposes the Marquis de Sade’s seminal 1785 novel about the depravity and perversity of the French ruling class to Italy in 1944, one year before Mussolini’s death and the end of World War II. Divided into four sections (drawing inspiration from The Divine Comedy), Salò chronicles four wealthy brutes—referred to only as the Duke, the Magistrate, the Bishop, and the President—as they abduct a group of prostitutes, teenage boys, and their own daughters for a bacchanal that rapidly becomes a shocking and grotesque experiment with the limits of human cruelty (and pleasure).

About the film, in an interview with French television before its premiere, Pasolini stated: “I believe to give scandal is a duty, to be scandalized a pleasure, and to refuse to be scandalized is moralism.”

Salò has had many noteworthy admirers besides Daney, including critics Wood and Richard Roud and filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé. Roland Barthes famously objected in an appreciation of the film that it was an error to render Sade as real and fascism as unreal. Rosenbaum said about it: “It’s certainly the film in which Pasolini’s protest against the modern world finds its most extreme and anguished expression.” One of the most revealing comments on Salò is from the outstanding director, Michael Haneke, in an interview from the Paris Review, in response to a question about whether he had seen it:

Forty years ago, that was a key moment in my career as a viewer. Now Salò isn’t much like Funny Games at all. Funny Games is unbearable for its ­relentless cynicism — I don’t actually depict much physical violence. But in Salò, there are people tied up naked on dog leashes, they are force-fed bread stuffed with thumbtacks, blood runs from their mouths while their tormentors are boiling up shit in massive pots to be served up, eaten, and of course they all end up puking. It is unbearable, and Pasolini shows everything. After watching that film I was devastated and unresponsive for several days. Yet Salò was how I realized what you can do in cinema — what the true possibilities of the medium are. That, to me, is still the only film that has ­managed to show violence for what it is. All these “action movies” are merely spectacular. They make violence a consumable good. They may be scary, but they’re still a turn-on. Salò won’t turn you on at all — it will turn your stomach. Funny Games was meant as a counterpart to Salò, except that I tried to treat violence in a different way — in the context of a self-reflexive thriller that doesn’t depict physical violence but works through psychological cruelty alone.

One of the most unsettling films I have ever seen, after several viewings, Salò for mestill resists definitive evaluation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Numeró deux was originally proposed as a remake of Breathless (1960) but any specific connection with the earlier work is not discernible. After Week-end in 1967, the director temporarily abandoned commercial filmmaking for a more guerrilla approach; in that period, he undertook only one more commercial project with stars—Tout va bien in 1972 with Yves Montand and Jane Fonda—before returning to the mode with an amazing series of movies beginning with Every Man for Himself in 1980. Numeró deux, one of Godard’s most radical works, is illuminatingly described here in a capsule by Rosenbaum written for the Chicago Reader:

Often juxtaposing or superimposing two or more video images within the same ‘Scope frame, Jean-Luc Godard’s remarkable (if seldom screened) 1975 feature — one of the most ambitious and innovative films in his career — literally deconstructs family, sexuality, work, and alienation before our very eyes. Our ears are given a workout as well; the punning commentary and dialogue, whose overlapping meanings can only be approximated in the subtitles, form part of one of his densest sound tracks. Significantly, the film never moves beyond the vantage point of one family’s apartment, and the only time the whole three-generation group (played by nonprofessionals) are brought together in one shot is when they’re watching an unseen television set. In many respects, this is a film about reverse angles and all that they imply; it forms one of Godard’s richest and most disturbing meditations on social reality. The only full ‘Scope images come in the prologue and epilogue, when Godard himself is seen at his video and audio controls.

Rosenbaum’s and Daney’s were not the only distinguished voices to have defended this film—others who have include Wood, Harun Farocki, Kehr, and J. Hoberman—but after several viewings over a few decades, I remain unsure of its significance, although I look forward to seeing it again someday.

The other masterwork under review here, Bresson’s astonishing youth film, The Devil, Probably—from 1977—is one of only two professional features by the director that has an original screenplay—the other is Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966. The two films are linked by their titles—the later one originates in a line of dialogue about who or what governs the world and it might be judged a correction of the earlier idea that it is chance that does this. Such suggestions explicitly thematize the director’s invitation to seek the clues that might account for the crucial actions undertaken by his characters—in The Devil, Probably,the key action in question is the suicide of the protagonist, Charles. (Bresson has with absolute consistency resisted facile explanations.) The director had dramatized this subject before in Mouchette (1967)—adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos)—and Une femme douce (1969)—from a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and with the emergence of this preoccupation one might discern a deepening pessimism in the director’s work which in The Devil, Probably takes the form of a jaundiced and maybe despairing view of radical politics, ecological destruction, drug addiction, progressive Christianity, and psychoanalysis. In more ways than one, then, inThe Devil, Probably,the director seems to be in dialogue with his earlier works. For example, the protagonist’s announcement of his own superiority recalls the similar claim of the main character, Michel, of Pickpocket (1959)—itself derived from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—but in the earlier film, events conspire to disprove that proposition even as the character is redeemed; in the later film, by contrast, Charles’s statement is if anything affirmed even as his death scarcely seems to bear any redemptive connotation, unlike that of the titular figure of Bresson’s early masterpiece, Diary of a Country Priest (1950), adapted from the extraordinary novel by Bernanos.

The conclusions of Bresson’s next three films—A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)—were also redemptive, but with Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, the prospect of salvation seemed to recede as the endings became more ambiguous, even tragic. Bresson has been commonly interpreted as ideologically aligned with the austere, Jansenist strand of Catholicism, and in that almost Manichaean tradition, suicide is a mark of grace and saintliness since the rejection of this fallen, diabolical world is a holy act. However, with Bresson’s last five features—Une femme douce, another Dostoyevsky adaptation, Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot du Lac (1974), The Devil, Probably, and L’Argent (1983), from a short story by Leo Tolstoy—the endings seem unremittingly bleak.

Bresson’s incomparable command of the possibilities of color in this film owes something to the cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis—the brother of the notable Italian director, Giuseppe De Santis—who is famous for his remarkable collaborations with Luchino Visconti. The Devil, Probably was presented in a beautiful 35-millimeter print.

Finally, one of the supreme filmmakers whose work was selected for the series was Samuel Fuller—his The Big Red One was screened in the 2004 reconstruction overseen by Richard Schickel. The late Positif critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon valuably discussed the movie—in his entry on the director from his indispensable book, American Directors—by way of comparison with the superlative Budd Boetticher:

Fuller's Arruza is The Big Red One, the autobiographical World War II saga that was his most cherished project since the fifties and that finally became a film in 1980. It is far from being the major disappointmentArruzaturned out to be, to be sure; it can even be described as one of Fuller's better war pictures. However, much of his war experience had gone into his earlier films—especially The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, and Merrill's Marauders—and The Big Red One strikes one more as a recapitulation of themes and scenes than as an entirely original work, although some familiar statements do come across more successfully than before. Thus, Fuller manages to convey the horror of the concentration camps through a method that is the exact opposite of the one used in Verboten! (i.e., showing as little as possible and relying on suggestion). The theme of childhood, too, is more convincingly integrated, as it becomes one of the film's leitmotifs (there is a child in almost every sequence). In The Big Red One, as in his other war films. Fuller is more interested in what takes place in between battles than in combat itself, yet some fighting scenes stand out—not as spectacle (Fuller eschews the spectacular, lyrical violence that most war films exploit and that culminated, a couple of years before his film, in [Sam] Peckinpah's Cross of Iron) but because they emphasize the plight of the individual soldier. Perhaps no other scene in the history of the genre conveys the terrifying vulnerability of the foot soldier in an attack with as much power and immediacy as the Normandy landing sequence. On the whole, however, the film does not add much to Fuller's body of war pictures; most of what he had to say in the genre he had said before.

Auteurist critics have objected that a narrative in which several characters seem to be in no physical danger on the battlefield is profoundly antithetical to Fuller’s vision of the world but others have replied that the perspective is justified because the subject of the film is survival. In a review in the Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum clarified that Fuller’s first cut of The Big Red One “was 260 minutes, his second two hours.” He added:

Schickel and producer Brian Jamieson recovered as much of Fuller’s footage as they could — some of the cut footage had been lost — and they had his script. Their 163-minute film isn’t so much a restoration of either of Fuller’s versions as a more thoughtful and nuanced reworking of the 113-minute release.

He went on to offer some background:

We also have his posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking(just out in paperback), which is an account of the real experiences that inspired the novel and script.

In that book Fuller wrote, “I was driven to turn my wartime experiences into a movie in order to convey the physical and mental upheaval of men at war. That’s how I ultimately came to grips with my experiences. Tactics, strategy, troop movements on maps were for military historians. My screenplay reduced the war to a small squad of First Division soldiers — a veteran sergeant and four young dogfaces — and their emotions in wartime. Each fictional character was an amalgam of real soldiers I’d known.”

And further:

Fuller’s stint in the Big Red One took him to North Africa, Sicily, England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, where he helped liberate a concentration camp in Falkenau and shot his first film footage, on a 16-millimeter camera. His experiences were too various, extreme, and traumatic to be contained in a single feature, particularly given that he wanted to move beyond his combat unit and include scenes with French and German characters, underlining the idea that all soldiers are in the same boat. In The Big Red One he was obsessed, as he was elsewhere, with the moment when a treaty is signed, when what was formerly deemed killing becomes murder — a reality he highlights in the black-and-white prologue devoted to the end of World War I as perceived by Lee Marvin’s character, known only as the Sergeant.

As a consequence, The Big Red One— despite all the framing devices and self-imposed conceptual limitations, such as the decision to omit basic training and flashbacks to home life — comes across a bit more as a compendium than as a single story. Adding to that impression are the bold stylistic shifts from realism to surrealism, from action to horror to lyricism to black comedy to allegory and back again.

About the reconstruction, he judiciously averred:

Schickel’s cut is incomparably better than the 1980 release, though it only reduces rather than eliminates the offscreen narration Fuller objected to. There are defensible reasons for keeping it, such as making the action easier to follow and identify with, but I can’t help wondering what conceptual aspects of the original it obscures.

After a few viewings, despite the enthusiasm of critics like Rosenbaum and Kehr, I still agree with Coursodon thatThe Big Red Oneprobably does not rank with the director’s greatest achievements—it seems to me less formally rigorous than most of Fuller’s films—but once again I remain open to reconsidering its true stature.

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