Curio: Trevor Gutherie's Charcoal Drawings

Alexa here to bring a bit of contemporary art to your Monday evening. Trevor Gutherie is a Zurich-based artist who is well-known for his large-scale, photorealistic charcoal drawings that appropriate art history, found photographs, and imagery from contemporary culture with an often mordant wit.  “Appropriation for me is a subtle business,” he explains.

"Musterknabe", 2011, charcoal on paper, 110 x 80 cm

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Introducing... In "Vertigo"

I've only written about Alfred Hitchcock's immortal Vertigo (1958) once for an episode of the old series "May Flowers" so I thought I'd dig up that old piece now that Vertigo is in the news having been named "The Greatest Film" by Sight & Sound. I always think of Vertigo as an early summer movie. What other movie besides its closest descendants Robert Altman's Three Women and  David Lynch's Mulholland Drive feel more ruled by twin sign Gemini? Hitchcock films generally deserve complete dissertations but we don't have Scottie Ferguson's (Jimmy Stewart) stamina when it comes to fetishizing doppelgangers. So today let's merely glance back at his introductions to Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak).

Ferguson has been hired to follow Madeleine and as he first spots her in a deep rose red restaurant. [Click here to open a panoramic shot in a new window]. Hitchock slow zooms out from Scottie (far right) at the bar and pans left, following his gaze, into the dining area filled with flowers and well heeled customers and even a painting of a floral arrangement framed by floral arrangements before it finally stops at Madeleine (tiny, far left) in her emerald green dress.

As she leaves the restaurant we get Kim Novak's first bewitching close up, carefully calibrated and emphasized by Hitchcock's editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks. Scottie likes what he sees but this is a job.

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Distant Relatives: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Assassination of Jesse James

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

What is it about the American West that endures? No other specific time and place has been so ubiquitous in film that it's spurred its own genre. There's no genre for colonial films, or films about the depression. There's no genre for medieval movies or ancient Egypt. The closest we come are "period films" (more of a general catagorization than a genre), epics (a designation that depends on more than mere setting) and war movies (narrowly limited depending on the war, but so many wars to choose from) but none of them have the same lure as the Western. America being as young as it is, was founded during a time of general civility. Yes it was born out of Revolution, but the civilization itself was defined by men in suits and manners and polite society. We had no knights on crusades, no mythical quests, no wild lawless wilderness to tame... except when we did, out in the West. And thus, the Western has become the defining genre of American Mythology. Our two films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are about a time when what was known as "The West" was dying and thus in order to endure had to be mythologized. Both feature the symbolic death of a figure who represents the times. And both start with the arrival of an outsider.
 
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is less about James (Brad Pitt) and more about Bob Ford (Casey Afflect), a young man who grew up on tall tales of the legendary outlaw Jesse James and now finds himself part of the man's much diminished gang. Call him the original fanboy, obsessed with a reality and an excitement that cannot possibly exist outside of his own imagination. Ford learns that James, despite being well over the hill crime-wise is still quite dangerous and out of fear and paranoia becomes the man who shoots James dead (no spoiler needed I hope) and comes to play a new part in the legend he believed in when he was young. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance follows James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, who arrives in Shinbone a town being menaced by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Stodden befriends a local (John Wayne), falls for the woman he's courting and eventually sets up residence in the town determined to help nurture it into the union through representative democracy but not until an inevitable showdown with Valance, in which, as legend came to have it, the ernest amateur Stodden prevailed over the evil gunslinger.

 

Stylistically these films couldn't be more different. Jesse James with its langorous pacing and expressive Roger Deakins' cinematography draws comparisons to Terrence Malick. Liberty Valance was one of the most workmanly crafted films from great workman director John Ford. This was no The Searchers with its sweeping vistas and color photography. Valance was shot on sound stages and most of the action takes place indoors or within the confines of city limits. Structurally they're more similar. Our outsiders enter into the waning days of an already mythologized west and find that the reality is not what they've been lead to believe, take action to affect that reality and get lost again in the myth. About this process, both films are deeply cynical. And where better to start finding this cynisism than in their titles. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a "wink wink" reference to the central mystery of the film and the fact the man who "shot" Liberty Valance is not most likely the man who actually shot Liberty Valance. The Jesse James title is even more incisive, inserting loaded terms like "assassination" and "coward" into it's otherwise expository explanation of the entire plot.
 
From there it gets worse. Jesse James postulates as Bob Ford learns that the west wasn't filled with adventures, just rampages and Liberty Valance suggests that the time's celebrated heroics were really acts of desperation. Our "heroes" (in the heaviest of quotes) suffer not only from the lawlessness and chaos around them but from the world's determination not to believe anything but the mythologized old west they've come to love. In Liberty Valance, after the old west and it's human embodiment dies, all that's left is an emasculated old public official, not much more useful than the world he came into. In Jesse James, after the death of Jesse and subsequently the west, all that's left is the reviled Ford, celebrated because he's reviled and then reviled more because he's celebrated. A murderer of a murderer more despised than the man he killed because the man he killed represented something exciting and romantic. What Ford represents is the banal truth, which people will refuse to believe at any cost. Similarly Stodden's vanquisihing of Liberty Valance is a great story, the truth of which couldn't matter less. "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," declares a newspaperman to him at the end of the film.

 

Just as there's no other genre quite like the Western, no other genre is quite so fond of deconstructing itself. We're almost to the point where the de-mythologizing of the Old West has circled back and become part of the myth again. But in all of cinema history, few Westerns are as self aware, self-referential, and self-contained as these two stories about infamous legends, and the men who killed them.
 
Other Cinematic Relatives: My Darling Clementine (1946), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968), Three Amigos! (1986), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

Personal Canon #100: "ROPE"

This article was originally published in 2006 when I kicked off the Personal Canon Project but I'm trying to get all the articles back online. 'The 100 movies I most think about when I think about the movies.'

Rope (1948)  Directed by Alfred Hitchcock | Screenplay by Arthur Laurents, Hume Cronyn, and Ben Hecht based on the play "Rope's End" by Patrick Hamilton | Starring: James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger and Cedric Hardwicke | Production Company Transatlantic Pictures and Warner Bros | Released 08/28/48

Hitchcock and the Continuous Shot
Alfred Hitchcock served as auteur-theory training wheels for me. I doubt I'm alone in this. Perhaps it's the confines of his chosen genre that throw his presence as a director into such unmistakable relief. Or maybe it's his celebrity, cultivated through that famous profile, press-baiting soundbites, celebrated fetishes, and television fame. But what it comes down to is this: when watching a Hitchcock film, even uneducated moviegoers, even movie-loving children can suddenly wake up to the notion of the man behind the curtain. Movies do not merely exist. They are built. The realization can be thrilling: Someone is actually choreographing this whole spectacle for my amusement!

And on the subject of choreography I give you Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. I gave myself Rope, actually, it being the first Hitchcock I sought on my own as a budding film fanatic. 'Let's see what else this man behind the curtain, this wizard, can do.' In this case what he could do was quite a lot. Though Rope obviously represented a complex coordinated puzzle for the filmmaking team, the plot is unusually simple. Two former prep school mates kill a third for the thrill of it (this is no spoiler, just the opening scene). They chase their "perfect murder" with a cocktail party to which they've invited the victim's loved ones.

The film's claim to fame for whatever meager fame it has managed --and I'd argue that that's disproportionate to the elaborately perverse buffet it serves up as well as its pivotal place in the director's career (first color film, first post-fame failure, second attempt at a confined space thriller, a form which would reap perfection for the auteur on his third attempt: Rear Window, 1954) -- comes from Hitchcock's formal experimentation. For Rope he uses one camera, one set and only nine actors. And then, here's the famous part: Hitchcock films it all in one continuous shot. Or thereabouts --there are five or six noticeable edits (and a few more I'm told) but why quibble? Jimmy Stewart's reliably grounding charisma aside, Hitchcock is Rope's true movie star and Rope's continuous shot is the mythmaking close-up. It just happens to be stretched across the entire 80 minutes.

the soundstage filming of Rope

The continuous shot is not for the feint of heart. It requires mad auteurial skill and also, one could argue, exhibitionist tendencies: These days when we see lengthy tracking shots we're most likely looking at an opening sequence meant to show off (think The Player's smug Hollywood-mocking) or a climactic setpiece (Children of Men provides a strong example), but they're never demure filmmaking tools. Filmmaking without coverage, without the escape of "we'll fix that in the editing room" is a highwire act, much closer in spirit to live theater than regular old movie-making and as such, it feels expectant of your applause. The performers and crew must be perfectly in synch to pull this showmanship off. While Rope's technical bravado looks quaint when compared to a recent epic like Russian Ark, and its jaw dropping parade of a hundred extras, it isn't an entirely fair comparison. That art house hit doesn't have much in the way of plot points to navigate and it wasn't out to please the mainstream either.

 

To Hitchcock's credit, Rope never feels much like a stage play despite the lack of edits and its apartment set. It's too alive for that. It's a movie through and through. The director dresses it up in every possible way he can: the sound design is particularly smart, splitting the party into separate conversational layers. There's a great sequence with only one actor, the hired help, walking to and from the foreground cleaning off the living room chest cum coffin as the murderers and the guests continue their conversations. The amount of tension Hitchcock manages to build by doing so little is admirable. He also makes elegant use of music. Another great moment occurs in a conversation between James Stewart and one of the killers, with the canny use of a metronome to add to the time bomb effect of the deadly evening. Light is also put to clever mood-enhancing work by varying the amount the curtains let in, and allowing artifical light from neighboring signage to enter at crucial moments.

My point, though I meander is this: Hitchcock doesn't even need editing, one of the chief tools of movie making, to breathe life into his creation. Thrillers these days often use editing as a crutch, particularly sharp jagged cutting which serves as a shortcut to provoke fear in the audience. But it's really only disorientation and startled seat jumping that's achieved: this kind of fear almost never outlasts a movie. Once the lights have gone up, equilibrium is restored. Unless you carry a working strobe light around with you, your life has no jump cuts. Outside the theater the world is lived in one long continuous shot again. For my moviegoing dollar, there's nothing as enduringly disturbing as something you're allowed a good uninterrupted look at. Whether a film is traipsing in true horror territory: I think of "Bob" stepping over the couch --fully lit (!) --to strangle Maddy in Twin Peaks or Samara emerging fom the TV in Ring for one last murder, or working a psychological nightmare: I think of that hypnotic endless close-up of Nicole Kidman in Birth, a woman on the verge..., nothing beats a movie that refuses to let you look away. Rare are the directors with the balls to say: This, and this alone is what you'll stare at. Though it pains you to look, this is what you'll see.

I hadn't watched Rope in a very long time and returning to it I found it sicker, funnier, and a bit sloppier than I remembered. Today it plays a little like an indie black comedy with a nasty dollop of winking gay panic. The relationship between the murderers is of the Leopold & Loeb school of evil homosexuals. Though this thriller was made in 1948, it could only read gayer if the men where shirtless or wearing leather harnesses.

This, for instance, is how the post murder scene plays out...

Two men, having just done the dirty deed, argue. The more aggressive man, Brandon, complains that they couldn't do it with the lights on, in the sunshine. His partner in crime, Phillip, has instant regrets. He could only do it in the dark. A cigarette is lit. More small talk and then they stand uncomfortably close together popping the cork (yes, really) on a bottle of champagne. 

Phillip: [guilt-ridden] Brandon, how did you feel?

Brandon: When?

Phillip: During it.

Brandon: I don't know really... I don't remember feeling much of anything. [suddenly excited] Until his body went limp and I knew it was over!

Phillip: [trembling] And then...

Brandon: And then I felt...tremendously exhilarated. [Pause] H-h-how did you feel?

Dirty. Hitchcock, the mainstream's most reliably twisted auteur, clearly intends for this post-murder dialogue to double as post-coitus chatter. Sadly, Rope was neither the first film nor the last to casually demonize two of Hollywood's favorite targets: the homosexual and the intellectual. Both types, according to Tinseltown's ignorant mindset, are prone to acts of violence. Combine the two and bingo: You've got a serial killer! Rope is but one movie in a long chain of them, a continuous shot of Hollywood fear-mongering if you will, that shamelessly harness audience phobias of 'the other.' Even now, though, this troubles me less within the confines of a Hitchcock film than it would anywhere else. For let's be frank: What is any Hitchcock film without dark psychologies, sociopathic behavior, and sexual crises of multiple varieties?

When I was younger, most of Rope's sexual content slipped by me, anyway. The contact high I got from it was unrelated to adult naughtiness. It provoked no juvenile tittering. No, the thrills came from Rope's easy to grasp experimentation. I simply loved the gimmick. I caught another glimpse of the man behind the curtain. I still feel the same way when I watch it: give me more of this. Provide me with an uninterrupted supply of auteurs who want to challenge themselves. Give me more Hitchcocks, Von Triers, Haynes, Soderberghs. Experiment with the form. And then I'll feel... tremendously exhilarated.