Werner Herzog’s 1968 film Even Dwarves Started Small has a very specific and demanding vision dominated by extraordinarily long takes, the camera mercilessly watching as to what might unfold, be it a truck driving in an endless circle…Dwarves looking at pictures of nude girls…Or a chicken eating a dead mouse.Much is demanded of the audience, too much, throughout this drifting narrative in which dwarves yell and laugh maniacally as they wreck everything they can find.Says Herzog: “Film is out about our collective dreams and also our collective nightmares, something that cannot be extinguished from our minds.”
Just finishing the third draft of Paint, the second part of a trilogy of coming-of-age screenplays, and this scene had to be switched out: DAVIS, coming down off a bad mushroom trip, is sitting with his crush, ELLEN.
DAVIS: Let’s watch Swiss Family Robinson.
ELLEN: Really? It’s the Disney film, right?
DAVIS: I love that film.
ELLEN: You watch it with your father?
DAVIS: No. (Pause) I don’t know. He read us the book. I remember that. He sat in his old rocking chair. It creaked as he stretched back, the light over his shoulder.
ELLEN inserts the tape and sits on the other side of the couch.
DAVIS: He had a deep voice. It was good for the book.
Dramatic orchestral music plays on the television. A ship drifts across the screen in a hurricane winds and high seas.
DAVIS: (Watching the film intently) I had my first existential moment watching this film.
ELLEN: (Sleepy) Yeah?
DAVIS: When they finish the tree house and they take the mother upstairs. (Pause) It was so amazing, so perfect. It looked like a perfect place. DAVIS: (Looking at ELLEN, who sleepily looks back) And then it wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was fake or something. I don’t know. I had to the leave the room. My step-mother made me go to bed because she thought I was sick.
The Swiss Family Robinson is revealed trapped below decks, yelling for help but still looking orderly and respectable. The ship grounds out on a rock.
DAVIS: (Pause, sighing deeply) You don’t remember doing something amazing as a kid – your absolute favorite thing in the world – and then feeling like it was pointless? You thought it was this thing. And then it isn’t.
DAVIS continues to watch the film.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): Hans, help your mother!
HANS: If I had been captain, I would have fought the pirates instead of running into storm. The Swiss Family Robinson climbs to the top of the ship’s decks and sees that the ship is grounded near an island.
Close up on DAVIS as he watches intently.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): At least we’re not too far from land.
MRS. ROBINSON: Then there’s hope.
FRITZ: Maybe we could build a raft. There’s enough wood.
DAVIS: Of course they can build a raft! Of course they can.
Smiling, DAVIS looks over at ELLEN and sees that she is asleep. He stares at her naked shoulder, moves forward and looks as if he is about to kiss it when she opens her eyes.
ELLEN: Just watch your movie.
DAVIS awkwardly looks back at the television screen.
KEVIN ROBINSON: Look what I found! The captain’s dogs! Are they glad to see me!
The Robinson Family begins to cut barrels and wood and construct a raft to go to shore.
DAVIS looks around at ELLEN again, who looks angelic in her sleep, and considers touching her shoulder again, but pulls the blanket over her instead. He turns back to the film and watches as a raft is built and lowered into the ocean from the ship. DAVIS falls asleep.
“You ever see Capricorn One? You ever see that, Nico?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “James Brolin, O.J. Simpson. I fucking loved that movie.”“The mission to the moon that went wrong. They faked it because they didn’t have the budget, and then the capsule dissolved in re-entry. And so they had to kill the pretend pilots. It turned stupid in the end, little evil black helicopters chasing them around.”
Nico hunched over his screen and turned a switch. “There will be something else tomorrow, Dee, another slaughter, another crime against humanity. And we all know exactly that. We wait for the next thing. And it’s always worse than we can imagine.”
“What about Twilight’s Last Gleaming? The gang that hijacks the nuclear silo, with Burt Lancaster.” He looked around at Dee. “Burt Lancaster claims that there is some kind of secret doctrine about the Vietnam War being fought to prove to the Soviets that they could sacrifice their men. Yes, I remember it.”
“You know, I used to believe all of that.” She spoke too fast, shorthand for what was in her head “It was a revelation. I believed it. I couldn’t understand why the government didn’t fall. It took me a long time to realize it’s not like that. I’m still not there. People are people. We are just who we are. There is no evil emperor, no star chamber, nothing. It’s just us and our demons, pretending that all of this is decided by someone different. And it’s just us.”
Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ 1983 film The Right Way features their mascot icons Rat and Bear journeying through the Swiss Alps. Rat and Bear drift through caves, glaciers and swamps, less a representation of the world as our fears, hubris and inability to focus.Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Rat and Bear dally with a primal essence that comes out in moments of loss, confusion and incongruous observations. Their aimless path drifts from the brink of death to congratulating each other on being at the top of the food chain to trying to kill each other, caricaturing the men inside the outfits.
Whatever sense can be made of Rat and Bear, I do wonder how much it might damage a child to see and hear any of this.
I finished a bag of chips as we started to watch Jafar Panahi’s Taxi. I was about to get up and throw it away but waited.
The opening shot held too much promise, a point of view from Panahi’s car as he started through Tehran. I folded the bag and held it tight.There is so very much to say about Panahi’s film Taxi – searing political statement, marvel in story-telling, profound celebration of life, comic odyssey into sordid realism (a phrase repeated throughout) – but what struck me most is the advice given by Panahi to a prospective filmmaker who sits in the back of the car. After being told that the young man had read many books but could not find a good subject for a film, Panahi replies: “Those films are already made, those books already written. You have to look elsewhere.” If only Hollywood and the rest of the film-making world would listen to that; it’s the ideas that matter and not the budget. Imagine what the Oscars might look like then, with none of the Mad Max, Gravity, Lord of the Rings nonsense. Actual films instead…what a world that could be.
The film ended as suddenly as it had began, the camera removed, the screen now black. I realized that I still held the plastic bag tight and, at long last, stood to throw it away.
A deer and then another run across the road. L swerves hard, misses the first, but catches the second and seems to about to lose control, cutting across the shoulder and then stops.There is a long moment. No one says a word. (Description details digging into the trapdoor of fear, the foundation of what it is that terrorizes the back of the brain, freezes the heart and lungs when the deep steps loom down, sucking everything in, stepping deliberately into it, terrified of the monsters and evils that haunt the shadows and walls, and continue into the dank cut-out pit, pressing face and limbs forward to look into the long rectangular holes where it lives, wanting to scream and scream and run but looking down into it, expecting the claws and horned head, the hunched back, the bloody arm to wrench you down and find nothing, nothing, but still held in the black, knowing that it will come from somewhere.) L opens the door to search for the deer. It is raining hard. H follows her with a flashlight and then R. They can hear a rustling in the brush. L moves toward it. Three cars pass by. H continues to move toward the bushes, but she can’t hear anything. H shines the light. Another pair of cars (mobile homes) pass. R catches a glimpse of the animal fleeing. It is quiet. R mentions going after it. H disagrees. L says nothing and goes back to the car. H and R get back in. H offers to drive. L refuses. They continue on.
I’m a sucker for film. Most of all, I love the opening moments, the dimming of the theater lights, the black of the screen, the slow fade in of sound, the distributor’s logo coming in. All of that magical promise lies ahead…a feeling which lasts maybe five minutes, when the realization sinks in that this is just another wooden story that will go on and on, dull and predictable, films like The Martian and The Revenant torturing viewers with the the same ups and down until – surprise, surprise – our hero triumphs again. Goody.Accoladed films like Carol and Youthmoan down a similarly dreary course, a tedium of monotonous reflection and ordeal until everyone, including the audience, runs out of gas.And these are supposed to be the worthwhile films of the year, all nominated for the gold statuettes, making me realize that there’s no point in going to the movies.
Ah, but then, out of the dim, arises Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, a film also focused on life’s futility, excessively so, and yet turns out to be a wonder. The wonder of the film is not in the characters, not the dialogue or the story, nor even the stop-motion animation. Instead it’s in the craft of the moment, the startling realization that all of the secondary characters have the same face and voice, the awkward interactions of sex initiated and carried through, the brief terror elicited when the protagonist picks at the seams in his face, seeming ready to pull it off to reveal…what? This is why I go to the movies, to find films like Anomalisa, where I forget about my uncomfortable seat, even dreary old time, and am transported, just as promised.
Not surprisingly, Kaufman’s crowd-funded film is not nominated for Best Feature at the Oscar, but instead for Animated Feature, which it will likely lose to Pixar’s Inside Out.
Tad Friend’s recent New Yorker article The Mogul in the Middle reminds us that movies are like everything in this life: a business. Friend focuses on STX Entertainment founder, Adam Fogelson, who “is not interested in movies where they all talk too much, that Sundance shit of jerking off on the screen.” Instead, Fogelson is celebrated for taking risks on films that larger distribution companies are scared of: “In 2012, If you asked a roomful of people ‘What’s “Ted”?,’ some might have said, ‘A conference’. Four months later, all around the world, a giant portion of people would have said, ‘A movie about a magical bear who comes to life.’ That is an exciting, terrifying, magical truth.” Friend goes on to explain that “the six major studios have bet that the future on films that are predicated not on the chancy appeal of individual actors but on “I.P.”—intellectual property, in the form of characters and stories that the audience already knows from books or comics or video games. 29 sequels and reboots came out last year, many of them further illuminations of a comic-book universe. Friend cites one studio head as to claiming, “Movies may not have gotten better over the years, but they’ve gotten more satisfying.”
Or to put it in laymen’s terms, they have become much bigger and far more dumber, exemplified in recent Oscar nominations forMad Max, Fury Road and The Martian. Following the logic of these nominations, the 1981 Oscars would have expunged The Elephant Man and Raging Bull for Road Warrior and The Empire Strikes Back. Humanity, it appears, requires a better marketing department.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me, Earl and the Dying Girl is an awkward tale featuring an irritating high school senior who is compelled by his mother to spend time with a girl dying of cancer. The awkwardness is trite and purposeful, portraying the world of teenagers with some accuracy, and is wearing in the end. The exhausting atmosphere is best seen in the protagonist’s obsession with cinema, making countless references to art house films, featuring no less than three from Werner Herzog. As endearing as this element is intended, it falls flat, trying too hard, while pretending not to, and concluding with a shrug, despite a dramatic and emotional end.
Dwarves looking at pictures of nude girls…
Or a chicken eating a dead mouse.
Much is demanded of the audience, too much, throughout this drifting narrative in which dwarves yell and laugh maniacally as they wreck everything they can find.
Says Herzog: “Film is out about our collective dreams and also our collective nightmares, something that cannot be extinguished from our minds.”
