Escape To Reality

When the world gets to be too much for me, I pull out one of my video collections and escape for a couple of days.  I have Angels In America, all of The Sopranos, Rome, Lonesome Dove, and a ton of Bergman.  Most of the time they'll do, but, when things get really rough, I turn to my John Cassavetes Criterion Collection.

More than any other director, John Cassavetes portrays people at their limits, bound up, boxed in by their marriages, their friends, their sex, their race, their age, the limits of their talent, and any other cage or corner Cassavetes can cram them into. And they usually don’t get out. They find their salvations, if they find them, inside their cages. Even if a Cassavetes character appears to escape, we can’t be sure. When Cassavetes and Peter Falk leave Ben Gazzara in London at the end of Husbands (1970), it doesn’t feel like Gazzara has slipped out of his cage. It feels like his friends have left him on the battlefield to die.

Although it doesn’t include Husbands, the Criterion Collection’s boxed set of five Cassavetes films provides an easy, though expensive, way to acquire a taste for Cassavetes. The set has Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977) and the 2000 documentary, A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes. Or you can watch most of Cassavetes’ films and the documentary individually on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Cassavetes was, arguably, the father of American independent film. His first film, Shadows, was made at about the time French directors were creating the New Wave. It's a beat film.  Cassavetes, like the French, subordinated plot to the mise-en-scène. His films weren’t about the narrative. The story was often beside the point; just something to hang the film on. To Cassavetes and the French auteurs, film was synthesized experience, and the story was just an occasion for that synthesis. The French bought the rights to dime store novels for their plots. Cassavetes invented situations. His films have beginnings and ends, but they are, like direct cinema and cinema verite documentaries, essentially situational and episodic. The end of each episode and the way it’s resolved are determined, not by the requirements of a plot, but by the inner workings of the episode itself. Affairs end. Men go home to their wives. Women who have nervous breakdowns come home to their families when they get out of the hospital. They put their kids to bed, clean up the dishes and go to bed with their husbands. Strip joint owners who get mixed up with the mob get killed. And the play must go on.

To the cinema verité style and structure, Cassavetes added improvisation.  He worked out scenes in collaboration with his actors instead of forcing his view of the scenes on them. Cassavetes’ approach to directing let his actors bring their own life experiences to situations and allowed him to add their sense of what is authentic and what is not to his own. The tension between rigid direction and improvisation, between conformity and self-expression, is a recurring subtext in Cassavetes’ films, from Shadows to his Pirandellian masterpiece, Opening Night.

Cassavetes' first film, Shadows, features Lelia, a young, black artist, cornered by race, gender and family. She’s the kid sister of Hugh, a singer who can’t sing, and Ben, a horn player who never plays for us. Hugh and his agent, the only person who can stand the way Hugh sings, tour second-rate clubs in the Midwest. Ben listens to jazz from the corners of rooms; cruises New York City bars and cafes with his friends, trying to get laid. Lelia hangs out with Ben and his crew, and with artists and intellectuals, older guys who know things Ben and his friends don’t know. She falls for a good-looking white boy, who dumps her when he meets brother Hugh, because, unlike Lelia and Ben, Hugh is obviously black. Lelia ends up on a dance floor in the arms of a middle-class black man she meets at a party, the kind of man Lelia and her brothers think of as a square but others might call solid. Cassavetes leaves her there, moves on to watch Hugh go off on another road trip, and to watch Ben and his pals get beaten into unconsciousness in the men’s room of a bar when they try to pick up the wrong women. Cassavetes crammed that action and the feeling of the beat Fifties into one black-and-white box in 1959. It was ten years later before he was able to make his next independent film, Faces, a portrait of a marriage on the rocks.

Faces was Cassavetes’ film for the Sixties, and the first Cassavetes and Rowlands collaboration. It was the beginning of a body of work that eventually exhausted the themes Cassavetes took up in Shadows: women on the edge, the way families and friends tie us up but make us strong, the life and death struggle to be authentic and spontaneous instead of phony. Faces is Cassavetes' least successful film, although it's his most accessible and appreciated effort.  It's his least filmic and most photographic film.  In Faces, an L.A. executive leaves his wife for a prostitute, played by Rowlands. His wife, Lynn Carlin, tries to commit suicide after a one-night stand with Seymour Cassel, a hipster she picks up in a club. The executive goes home to his wife and, in a scene that breaks the static, monotonous repetition of faces that dominates the film, chases the hipster out of the house.  In addition to Rowlands, Carlin and Cassel, the cast of Faces included Fred Draper, Val Avery and Elizabeth Deering, actors Cassavetes worked with for the next ten years. Faces was Rowland’s first shot at portraying a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Her second shot came six years later in A Woman Under the Influence.

There is something almost unbearably edgy about the young Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. It’s as if somebody has jammed a 220v wire into her brain. It takes her about two minutes to convince me she’s the most troubled woman I’ll ever see. Her relationship with Peter Falk is tense. There is an acceptance of violence against women in the film I find deeply disturbing. And yet, A Woman Under the Influence is about the kind of people I know well. Working class people. Never enough living space. Not much education and culture. Sometimes not enough money. They fight at the dinner table. But there is redemption in the physicality of these Cassavetes’ characters, in their muscle. It’s a punch, a roundhouse right, that brings Rowlands down to earth and restores her to her family. To her kids. To the dirty dishes that, when all is said and done, have to be taken from the table to the sink. In A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes shows us a family coming together, closing the doors on the outside world and making what they can of their lives. A Woman Under the Influence added Lady Rowlands and Katherine Cassavetes to Cassavetes’ troop of actors.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the fourth film in the Criterion set, is Cassavetes’ film noir classic. It’s the darkest of Cassavetes’ films, not just visually – most of it was filmed at night with available light — but emotionally as well. It’s Cassavetes’ most bitter film. When the mob decides to kill him for his club, escape is never an option for Cosmo Vitelli. He has no real family or friends. The most important thing in his life is a third-rate floor show he created for his tawdry strip joint. Vitelli, played by Ben Gazzara, gets shot in the gut while he’s trying to murder a Chinese bookie to pay off a debt to the mob. He manages to kill most of the mob, but he ends up bleeding to death, slowly, while he paces the sidewalk outside his club.

Opening Night is Cassavetes' last film.  Gena Rowlands stars as an aging actress, struggling with her age, her relationship with her co-star, played by Cassavetes, the demands of her director, the limits of the script, and the death of a young fan who gets hit by a car while she’s watching Rowlands leave the theater. Rowlands is haunted by the girl’s ghost. On the verge of breaking down, Rowlands murders the girl’s ghost and her own youth. Playing a scene with Cassavetes, she saves the show and her career with an improvised performance on opening night. The film is a triumph for Cassavetes. As the writer and director of Opening Night, he can do what he was never able to do in the real world. He can direct the play’s audience and their reaction to him and his wife.

The audience loves them, of course .

I guess I do, too. The easy explanation for that is to say I like melancholy moods, dark streets, and the rain. I like redemption. I like to see the old order brought down and to see chaos reign. I like reluctant heroes and the kind of women who work retail. And there’s plenty of that in Cassavetes. But it’s more than that.

Cassavetes knew that it’s not what you see, but what you remember that counts. It’s the way films live in our memories that matters. And he gave us a lot to remember. He gave us close-ups, and he gave us enough time with his characters to get to know them well.

I remember Ben Carruthers in Shadows, walking down the street in a coat that’s too light for New York City in the wintertime; Seymour Cassel fleeing down the hill in Faces; Gena Rowlands dancing, Peter Falk climbing a hill with his crew, Katherine Cassavetes guarding the stairs to keep Rowlands away from the kids in A Woman Under the Influence; Ben Gazzara in the dark, getting his orders from the mob, and Gazzara in the light, standing in the spotlight with Mr. Sophistication and his strippers in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I remember Rowlands, beating her youth to death in a hotel room, crawling toward her dressing room, putting her dukes up when she’s improvising with Cassavetes in Opening Night. And I remember John Cassavetes, laughing and bounding around the stage in Opening Night, while the audience laughs out loud and applauds.

When I watch Cassavetes’ films I feel I’m in the presence of myths.

Can I name the myths? Can I say who Cassavetes’ characters remind me of, who the major and minor deities are in Cassavetes’ pantheon? Who is that with the wound that will not heal? Who is that, chasing the suitor from his house? Who is that, leading his men out to work? Who is that, leading the women out to dance? Can I name them? Not a chance. It was Cassavetes’ achievement to create a pantheon of characters who suggest mythic figures without names. I could no more name them than the Greeks, gathered around the hearth to listen to the poet spin his yarns, could say who Achilles and Odysseus reminded them of.

Waste Land (2010) Everybody Has To Serve Somebody

Lucy Walker took some risks when she made Waste Land. There were physical risks -- dengue fever and kidnapping -- and there were artistic risks, too, hazards in the landscape that could have tripped up an emerging talent, seriously damaging her reputation as a filmmaker. She had to make her way carefully, avoiding sentimentality on the one hand, cynicism and exploitation on the other. She played with scale, filming the landscape from a great distance, so that the catadores, working the garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho landfill, looked like ants, until, gradually, as she approached them, coming closer and closer, they were revealed as beautiful people. (But that could have gone the other way. Had she slipped, she might have filmed interesting patterns, moving across a colorful landscape, that, on close inspection, turned out to be grostesque. Walker had to trust her cinematographers -- Dudu Miranda, Heloisa Passos and Aaron Phillips -- and they delivered.)

Walker tried, unsuccessfully I think, to contrast the poverty of the catadores with the conspicuous wealth of Rio's south zone. Ironically, in a film that makes a point of the enormous gap, separating rich Brazilians from the poor catadores who dig through their waste for recyclables, the only rich people in the film are the artists and the collectors they serve. Waste Land starts out promisingly enough, with shots of Carnaval and a short montage that follows the costumes and other garbage from Carnaval as it's loaded into garbage trucks and hauled off to the landfill. But after that, to contrast rich and poor, Walker uses the artists, auctioneers and art collectors who move Vik Muniz's images of the catadores through le monde. That narrows the field considerably. (But don't you worry, Reader. Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010), another Oscar contender, has enough rich people to go around.)

In a blog she wrote while she was making the film, Walker distances herself from le monde. She says Muniz describes Rio as St. Tropez, surrounded by Mogadishu. The "garbage-clad open sewer" favela her catadores live in is the worst in town. The landfill is the place where "posh rubbish from the south zone mixes with the cheap trash from the favelas."

"Evenings we return to the south zone, she writes. I sulk as I head to a delicious dinner in a bulletproof car, I'd rather be with the catadores than these billionaires moaning about the price of contemporary art. These are the people who are going to buy the art work that Vik is making in the garbage at our charity auction at Phillips. And these are the people whose garbage will be part of the piece. We're going to trace all these comings-and-goings of things."

Does she? Well, not quite, but if you've been around le monde a little, you can fill in the blanks. I remember wandering around the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston one afternoon and coming across a cocktail party in the sculpture garden. I asked the guard, a tall woman in a dark, blue suit: "What are they celebrating?" "Being so rich, I guess," she said.

All right. There always has been tension between artists and the patrons they serve. Why go to the dinner parties? Better yet, why not go and take a camera along? Even a little Flip would do. Or, best of all, why not broaden the scope of the film and give us a look at the life-style of the fat cats who live in the south zone? All of them, not just the collectors of art.

Walker does step in a hole now and then.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, she comes through the Jardim Gramacho landfill and the making of Waste Land with her artistic limbs, her integrity, and her reputation intact. Lucy Walker is an increasingly important talent, and Waste Land is a timely and engrossing film.

Early in Waste Land, while Walker's crew is filming the catadores who separate recyclables from the garbage at Jardim Gramacho, a catador, noticing the cameras, calls out: "They're filming Animal Planet!" Walker includes the remark in the film to confront the issue of exploitation head on, but the catador could not have been more wrong. Nature films are pure direct cinema. Lions maul a baby elephant. The film makers don't interfere. They record the kill and move on. Walker is up to something else.

In a statement about Waste Land, Walker tells us documentary filmmakers can't help interfering with their subjects. "Your presence is changing everything," she says, "there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility." Walker tells us Waste Land, like all of her work, is about getting to know people who you do not normally meet in your life. She aims, she says, to create an opportunity for the audience to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. That's actually a pretty limited goal. In fact, she has done much more.

Walker and her collaborator, photographer Vik Muniz, have made a genuinely anti-Fascist film.

It is the intention of Fascist art, architecture and film to reduce individual human beings to insignificance, to make them feel small. (Visit the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., or watch Leni Riefenstahl's Fascist documentary Triumph Of The Will and you'll see what I mean.) Walker and Muniz have the opposite in mind. The footage of Vik Muniz flying into Rio to make portraits of the catadores out of the recyclables they collect at Jardim Gramacho is strikingly similar to Riefenstahl's footage of Adolf Hitler flying into Nuremberg for the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. (The similarity could be a coincidence, but Walker is a student of film as well as a maker of films, and my guess is that she -- on some level -- made that connection.) The intention of the Riefenstahl film is the glorification of Hitler and the Fascist Third Reich, while the intention of Waste Land is homage to the little "guy," to the working poor. If anything is glorified in Waste Land, it is humanity.

Vik Muniz wanted to find out if he could change the lives of a group of people, using the same materials they dealt with every day. Muniz showed the catadores at Jardim Gramacho how to get big bucks for their recyclables by repackaging them as art. He put together a social experiment, and Waste Land documents that experiment. Unfortunately, the Pictures of Garbage (2008) series doesn't come through in the film. The process Muniz uses to create the work is complex and abstract. He photographs catadores, posing as figures in well-known works of art, La Mort de Marat, for example, then projects a giant image of the photographs on the floor. The catadores use recyclables to realize paintings -- collages really -- from the projected images, and Muniz photographs the catadores' "paintings" to make the final work of art. There are seven of them in the Pictures of Garbage series.

Tiao as Marat Muniz Studios

(Oddly enough, "Pictures of Garbage" -- as a title -- is most interesting in English, where it picks up some real complexity from the play on the word "garbage." The pictures are of people, not garbage. And the materials used to paint them aren't garbage either. They're recyclables. The recyclables are used to outline and shade -- you might say they are where the people are not -- so the people seem to emerge from the materials, from what Muniz calls: the "garbage." All of that nuance appears to be lost in Portugese. I checked around, and I hear Brazilians never use the word lixo to refer to people. Muniz is lucky to be working in the U.S.A., a mean country that has the idioms it needs to adequately express it's meanness.)

It doesn't matter. The Pictures of Garbage series isn't about art anyway. It's about action.

And, if Muniz's images don't come through, Walker's do. And, for me, they deliver what Walker promised, an opportunity to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. Walker makes that connection in an exceptionally filmic way. I want to show you a segment of the film. It's a little long, but for anyone who wants to understand what direct cinema can be in the hands of a gifted filmmaker, it's worth seeing.

The situation is this. When Walker started filming Waste Land, she met a catador, Valter dos Santos, riding his bicycle, and, Walker says, right then she knew she had a film. She describes Valter as the landfill's elder statesman, recycling guru and resident bard. He's been working at Jardim Gramacho for 26 years. "It's not bad to be poor," Valter teaches. "It's bad to be rich at the height of fame with your morals a dirty shame."

Vik Muniz doesn't make a portrait of Valter, and, while Vik and young Tiao dos Santos, the charismatic president of the pickers co-op, are out on the art circuit, Valter is back at the landfill. Take a look.

Waste Land by Lucy Walker Almega Projects and O2 Films

That's how documentary filmmakers synthesize experience and make emotionally moving films. It's how a filmmaker like Lucy Walker can "just tell it like it is" and still take sides. (Walker dedicated Waste Land to Valter dos Santos.)

Look. We need more artists like Lucy Walker and Vik Muniz, artists who have the power to remind us of who we were, back when we had a sense of community.

And -- at the risk of sounding too nationalistic -- we need American filmmakers to give us a James Agee, Walker Evans look at America -- and, yes, a Lucy Walker look at America -- and at the sore -- to borrow an image from Agee -- the hard, flat, incurable sore of poverty that is spreading across America.

We need American filmmakers to point the steady, unafraid lenses of their cameras at the real face of America, and we need to have faith that something magnificent can come from the simple act of seeing one another as we really are.

After watching Waste Land, I realize that I have chosen not to see, too often I have chosen not to even look. I have chosen not to look, because, if I looked, I might have seen, and, seeing, I might have had to do something. I have chosen not to look, just as you, Reader, and you, Mr. President, and you Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen have chosen not to look. But my eyes are wide open now. Are yours?

Next week, Inside Job (2010).

This has been a good year for documentary film. The five documentaries the Academy's mysterious nominating system picked are so good that I honestly can't say which one I'd vote for. Fortunately, I don't have to vote. The Academy, in its infinite wisdom, has not given me a vote, just as the universe has not given the ostrich the power of flight.

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)

Whether or not Exit Through The Gift Shop wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary, British artist Banksy's light-hearted romp through the world of underground street art is shaping up as a win for Banksy, for his fellow street artists, and even for the collectors who, according to Banksy, bought $1 million worth of kitsch, conceived and produced with Banksy's help by the documentary filmmaker turned street artist: Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash." If the eBay value of the work the L.A. art geeks bought at Mr. Brainwash's massive 2008 Life Is Beautiful show is rising and falling with his fame, the geeks should be in better shape now than they were before Banksy released his chronicle of MBW's rise to stardom. MBW himself has made out quite well. In addition to the cash from his 2008 show, he landed a Madonna CD cover -- thereby meeting the minimum requirement for consideration as a serious graphic artist -- and he treated himself to a NYC show last year. But the biggest winner of all is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' mysterious "demopol", the nominating system that filled the Academy's hand in the category of Best Documentary by including Banksy's comedy among the five contenders.


Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Trailer banksyfilms

As the voting draws to a close, Academy members can choose from a list of documentaries that includes exposés of the global financial system and the natural gas industry, a film portrait of a rifle platoon on the ground in Afghanistan, and, remarkably, two documentaries about artists and the impact art has on people's lives. One of them is Waste Land (2010), Lucy Walker's sensitive study of Brazilian-born artist Vik Munoz and the catadores who separate recyclables from garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho, the biggest landfill in the world. Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is the other one. It is, at the same time, an entertaining recollection and an "exposé" of the art scene. Lucy Walker had to walk a thin line between portraying her subjects and exploiting them. Banksy never had that problem. He just had to have fun.

Exploitation and expropriation is the main -- if not the only -- point to street art, formerly known as graffiti. The streets are the canvas, and, in Banksyland at night, they belong to art and to artists in search of a perfect wall. Exit Through The Gift Shop puts Banksy's permanent mark on street art and the L.A. art scene. It's a clever expropriation of underground street art and the artists who make it, especially Mr. Brainwash, who set out to document Banksy and got documented himself. The streets and street art belong to whomever can control them, and, in Exit Through the Gift Shop at least, Banksy is in full control.

Artists synthesize experience. The successful ones also manage to create self-sustaining systems in which the sale of their work fuels the creation of more work until the balance tips in their favor and they are making enough money to expand the scope of their work. They become a brand. Banksy, of course, is there. He's able to sustain his own work, run an art factory, finance the work of other artists, and move out into new forms. And, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Banksy has a flair for film.

Exit Through The Gift Shop is the most personal of the documentaries up for an Academy Award this year. It's cinema verité that is exceptionally well done, and it neatly demonstrates the power of narrative to structure time and to entertain.

Banksy has the conventions of the exposé film down pat: the hooded sweatshirt, the pixilated faces, the voice-over that ties fragments of film together. He understands the use of foreshadowing as well as he understands what Tom Wolfe called "le monde", the insular little world of art makers, art dealers and art collectors. The first time we meet Mr. Brainwash, he's pawning off cheap clothes with unusual stitching as expensive designer clothes. The last time we see him, he's just sold a million bucks worth of art that's as questionable, from Banksy's point of view, as the money Banksy forged -- with Princess Di's face in place of the Queen's -- but was afraid to distribute. There is no law against the sale of bad art. As Wolfe famously noticed, le monde is very small, and collectors have always been driven to get in on the ground floor, running the risk of buying bargain basement clothes at designer prices, or near art -- the equivalent of the peripheral junk you pick up when you exit a museum through the gift shop.

But it is the brilliance of his editing, the way he alters reality by juxtaposing events, sequencing and resequencing time and space to sculpt a reality that never was or could be in the so-called real world, that finally sets Banksy apart. Somehow, from fragments of experience, recorded on hundreds of tapes, Banksy pulls together a complete narrative that, really, could not be any other narrative and still fit together so well. What's real and what isn't? Does it matter? I doubt there are two viewers anywhere who would agree on how much of Banksy's documentary is "made up" to provide continuity and context, or just to make a point. (Personally, I doubt Mr. Brainwash's grilling at the hands of Disneyland security after Banksy -- in one of the film's funniest scenes -- inserts a life-size, blow-up doll, wearing a black hood and orange Gitmo jumpsuit, into the Disney landscape. But I enjoy the Disneyland footage anyway.)

If Exit Through The Gift Shop -- and Banksy's work in general -- has a weakness, it's that his work is political. Banksy has a message. It's a cool message, but a message nevertheless, and Banksy has to lock it down. He can't leave room for the viewer to miss the point. He can't chance the kind of complexity that would make his art polyreferential, the kind of work that points to a multitude of things at once. Maybe that kind of work -- work that empowers the viewer to participate more in making the art -- would require Banksy to give up more control of his turf than he's willing to do right now.

And, finally, there is this.  The Life Is Beautiful show's success is all the more remarkable, because it occurs in 2008 when the American economy was already in free fall and the fault line, separating rich America and poor America -- a fissure conservatives had been hammering on since Reagan -- finally split, sending the two Americas drifting apart, though not so far apart that the poor Americans can't still see rich America and the American dream sailing away, forever out of reach.  Will the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences be able to ignore that coincidence and judge Banksy's work on its artistic merits alone?

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is available from Netflix and Amazon.

Films

Alfred North Whitehead once said: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."

Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover a world that underlies all the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not?

Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter?

Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg -- Red Mountain and Green Mountain -- le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the Fifties and Sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't even seeing the same things.

Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.

What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelettes.

The only thing I can make accessible to anyone is what I remember I saw and heard and thought when I watched a film.