Speaking From His Island

Vinterberg on Bergman:

“At film school, we did a Bergman course where we saw his first 12 films. Then, later on, I saw Fanny and Alexander and some of the more popular ones. I could tell this was a film-maker who was fantastically precise, with deep psychology, and that he was giving me insight into human beings I hadn't seen before. Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since.

After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was. We invited him once to do a Dogme film, but he didn't want to do it. I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad.”

Though Bergman’s my favourite director I’m not sure I agree with him that Dogme was “silly”. I’m sure he knew how self-mockingly Puritan were its strictures about film-making. And he must have recognized in it the same back-to-basics aspiration that drove a Truffaut or a Godard. There’s something in the low-tech beauty of a film like Through a Glass Darkly that actually shares much in common with Dogme. But I’ll forgive him for the comment. And I’ll forgive him for his latest (and last?) film, Saraband, which is somewhat disappointing. But even Bergman’s bad films are good.

Comments

[jason]

Yass, LA Confidential was toned way down. It's been sometime since I read I perused LA Con, but isn't the Kim Basinger character a prosty and porn model (ala Betty Page) who pleasures herself with her 13 yr old son or something?? And the queer DA was not developed, nor his contacts with the quasi-Disney like heir. The guy who did the sadistic irish dick--Dudley whatever--was not bad, in fact quite effective, but he hardly matched the level of malevolence of the fictional character; and the whole subplot of th LAPD slinging confiscated heroin to South Central was not present (was it?), or barely hinted at. But the mood was good, the nocturnes, and Kimmy B suitably tasty-trollopy (though I thought the character was brunette).

Yes his rips of Turner and other celebs are hilarious: is it White Jazz with the scenes of Joan Crawford enjoying a hearty lunch of Italian sausage?

Noir: c'est vie.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

There was not much about the SC heroin part, but maybe a bit more (I believe there was heroin talk but not much SC talk) than leaving out the whole smut racket, queer DA definitely not developed (with the fragile parties and all that stuff about 'definitely on the Q.T.'). Books had great stuff about weirdness of SC, because as New Yorker, I've almost gotten stuck in there since some of it doesn't look as dangerous as it is (our crime holes also look as rough as they are.)

I read all these in summer 1998, so they've run together somewhat. But I do remember how 'Joanie Fucking Crawford' was caught 'running bare-assed' out of some place after a helping of some kind of sausage. I hope it was in 'Black Dahlia' because that's what she looks like with that mouth. Turner in real life said hilarious things, but so stupid she didn't know it. Claimed she didn't appreciate sex till her 6th husband, and began her explanation with 'No, I'm not frigid...' I once saw her signing her terrible autobio with her hairdresser escort at Bloomingdale's, and he had died their hair the same platinum to match--that was truly a hoot. That girl that sang the voice of 'Snow White' did some time with Stomp's 'Oscar,' too, if I recall correctly.

[Matt]

Amie,

No, of course I don't.

Well if it's something "in line with an authentic political aesthetic" you want, forget Citizen Kane, FFS.

http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2005/09/ms_smith_at_cul.html

Godard certainly did seem to be more responsive, "authentically" in line with the material conditions of the medium itself, etc.

[jason]

Joanie's favorite repast may have been Inglewood sausage for all I knows. It's still au courant on Westside as you probably are aware.

The successful film or novel doesn't need a marxist critic to justify it. In fact most reductive analyses will most likely miss the specifics of experiencing a decent movie or book (wasn't that Sontag's idea in Against Interpretation? ). Moreover, what writer or filmmaker is say addressing the real "people's history" of Los Angeles form 1950 to present? (Mike Davis does do some of that in a non-fictional format). But it may require non-academic writers and directors to reveal the city's proverbial seamy underside, or the venality and corruption of urban professionals or Ho-wood insiders. Someone like Chandler or a later neo-Chandlerian like Ellroy thus is sort of performing the historian's tasks; offering via a pulp medium an alternative, unofficial history which I do not think is so far from what Foucault (with all of his errors and failings) was also pointing to. No?

[jason]

E.g. until the sanctioned academic repositories begin offering classes in Bugsy Seigel and his Legacy 300, or maybe La Cosa Nostra/Vegas 500 or Manson Girls 400 or any number of other glimpses of crime and the sordidness of American life some humans will rely on Ellroys and Chandlers and even Beattys and Peckinpahs for some historical and cultural information, instead of on the essentially narcissistic and elite tradition of academic and European history; and what passes for "marxism" be damned

[George]

Grosz--there's an authentic political artist, regardless of what any Adorno du jour might have to yawp. Grosz protested (and satirized and lampooned) the nazis and corrupt German aristos and industrialists more than any other critic or writers I can think of. I'd say a book of Grosz's drawings is worth a collection of Bergmann or Godard's cinematic indulgences or some windy Adorno essay.

Viva Grosz!

(delete me and all my scheisse if you want)

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Agree on all that, and especially Mike Davis's stuff being good non-fiction and very muscular (especially what you find out Vernon in 'Dead Cities' how it's owned by this one family and run like a big sweatshop), but also think Didion did fine essays on the 60's in 'White Album' and 2003 'Where I Was From' has very fierce, rigorously researched section on early 90's Lakewood lay-offs of McDonnell Douglas employees. Some people don't like her, but she does very thorough research despite her elitism. She's getting old now, though, and huge personal tragedy in last 2 years, with entire family dying or sick.

Thom Anderson's 'Los Angeles Plays Itself' is probably hard to find, I was lucky to look at the paper when it was on at Film Forum. Only 2003, maybe on DVD. This is a good documentary on the way L.A. started consciously using pieces of itself in films, places you'd know, rather than just stand-ins for other places.

That noir poetics cannot even be told in non-fiction anyway, and one of my points through this thread is that 'L.A. noir' has developed into the definitive noir because Hollywood produced a huge subculture of wannabe stars, and every year I get out there I see some new ones. Where else would you see 70-year-old dwarfs dressed as Little Red Riding Hood or a carefully coiffed and dressed 'princess' carrying nothing but cosmetics that you find out is homeless only when she has an insane yelp at a perfectly normal request from another bus passenger and then gets up and you see her filthy shoes? Our homeless in New York do not have an identification with a decorative culture, since Broadway no longer has any vitality at all--Broadway without some natural wonder like Ethel Merman coming around once in awhile (and nothing like that ever happens anymore) is just another theme park. A New York Noir play I saw in 2004 was not even real noir at all, although it was advertised as such.

[jason]

Mr. Mullins, I thank for your conments on the noir. I may not share your enthusiasm for pre-1935 or so Hollywood Babylon or for most French film, but I am sympatico with your views on Chandler, Ellroy and the rest. Additionally, I am quite jakes as they say with New Journalism. As you might tell from my scribbling I do admire the high-powered post-Hiroshima prose of Didion, Mailer, HS Thompson, Talese, even Wolfe. There are excesses; Didion's world-weary Freudianism does get old, but her essays in "Bethlehem" are a great antidote to any new age or countercultural aspirations; Wolfe too is all about surface and velocity and that will surely irritate those searching for angst kicks or social realist heroes fighting the Oppressor.

I have used the writings of both Didion and Wolfe (enjoy their essays on Vegas) in comp. classes; I think it's good for the new students to be exposed to tough, hard-headed realism and sarcasm. I'm not so down with HST as I was say 15 years ago, and think he was sort of a sportswriter gone mad on drugs and Wild Turkey, but there are worse things one could read.

City of Quartz was, as some cheap pundit might say, an eye-opener--a LA political history that might have been written by say Ray Chandler himself. I don't agree with all of Davis' sort of Trotskyite conclusions (or his sympathy for the gangs or LA catolicos) but his discussion/analysis of the downtown power players and LA old-money was great.

[jason]

Apologies if that sounds a bit too self-congratulatory and Amer-u-cun. So be it.

Nice to find a few people online, neither rabid conservatives or marxists, who actually have read writers such as Ellroy and Didion. I thought they were all dead or in prison.

I shall not taint YH's Berg-mann's post any further.

Bastante

[Patrick J. Mullins]

I thought it was worthwhile too. Making final posting mainly because of your mention of Wolfe, because I am in disbelief at most of the criticism levelled at him. His is a major contribution, I don't know how anyone couldn't see what was in 'Bonfire of the Vanities' and that Mailer and Updike would gang up on him like that.

A tout a l'heure.

[Justine]

My, wasn't that sweet.

[Kitty Carlisle]

Does your wife know about us?

[adam ash]

Just wanted to say that if you take Bergman's best -- Persona, The Shame, The Silence, Cries and Whispers, The Virgin Spring, Scenes from a Marriage -- what comes close? I mean, really, even close? I find the desire to invest genres like noir with all sorts of pretentious critique possibilities -- instead of enjoying them mightily for what they are -- baffling. Not that I don't think Robert Mitchum is art. He's the best of the I-could-give-fuck-about-even-giving-a-fuck screen presences.

[Matt]

I'm with you, Adam.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

I'm so glad I caught this before signing off a huge hunk, if not all, of this general constellation of the blogosphere for which I am simply too old to any longer tolerate the faux-highbrow posturing.

Because, even if you don't have sense enough to know what Hollywood's profundity is (and few theorists do), there is even an enormous amount of European film alone that is the equivalent of Bergman. And 'Scenes from a Marriage' and 'Cries and Whispers' are not even particularly good. 'Scenes' is good for pointing out the 'lack of fellow-feeling' if you hadn't heard of it before; 'Cries and Whispers' is really only striking for Harriet Anderson writing a letter that says, among other things 'I am in pain...' and that Ingrid Thulin cuts her vagina with a piece of glass, to then obviously recuperate and go on to make sure when the house is being dismantled that 'certain furniture' is disposed of properly (that was certainly interesting prioritizing.)

'Les Enfants du Paradis' is better than anything Bergman ever did or could ever dream of (except maybe 'The Virgin Spring'); and so are '8 1/2,' 'La Strada,' and 'La Dolce Vita.' 'Last Year at Marienbad' is light-years of film-as-itself beyond Bergman's prosaic depressives.

Such atrociously condescending and internally self-contradictory considerations which try to have Robert Mitchum and eat him too, are truly the mark of a mockery of thinking stuck in a delusional mind/body problem, with only the academy as the stabilizing fetish; this is actually even undeserving of being pointed out. Because the collective, sloppy, even lewd (as David Thomson calls it) process of film-making has not got a thing in the world to do with studying film as though it were another form of literature that you could have in front of you in the same way as you have a book.

A year spent here has been enough to prove to me that academics, even more than I already knew, as opposed to artists, are drawn to the wizened by and large (although certainly not 100%), they are highly suspicious of the abundant; after all, their texts are generally parasites of more fundamental texts. Let them have such dubious pleasures. That's bound to make them more comfortable since it reminds them of themselves. Of course there's also the prestige attraction of big European names that is parallel to those musicians who deify late Beethoven and merely 'appreciate' the 'sensuality' of Debussy's late Etudes for Piano or the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. (But how could it possibly be as great as Beethoven or Mozart, and we must decide, mustn't we? After all, categorization is so much more fun than art, now really, isn't it?--because 'art isn't easy', as the Stephen Sondheim song goes...)

Admittedly, there's little in the culture to allow anyone to actually discover works of art without an absurd amount of exterior guidance. Too bad.