Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was wondering aloud in his blog the other day: What is it about the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal that made them look more like characters from Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World than, well,  journalists?

"All of this is par for the course," he mused.

“The WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth—one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed. The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?”

The people commenting on his blog piece come up with the usual suspects: money , power, greed, ambition—slavery, even. But that's an oversimple response that really misses the point: As a journalist—as a guy who has to punch the keys of his word-processor, and who knows how difficult it is to actually write anything worth reading—Krugman really wants to know, how can you grind out untruths day after day after day without your head exploding?

He's asking the wrong question—although it's a good one, and one I used to ponder myself when I'd try to read a Globe and Mail editorial. I don't ask that question any more because I'm pretty sure now that editorial writers live in what pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty called a "post-philosophical culture", where the truth about what you do means less than what you think you're doing. They're long past something you might think of as "knowing that you're lying, but carrying on for some higher purpose".

The question we should be asking sounds rhetorical but cuts closer to what matters: "Who do these people think they are? What do they think they're doing?" They obviously feel beyond of honesty and dishonesty, truth and lies, or "higher truths".  They've made what Rorty referred to as "the slow and painful choice between alternative self-images". To understand them (without merely dismissing them as insane) we need to know how they see themselves. 

First off, they see themselves as carrying on their end of an argument in defense of Western Civilization.  Every day, every editorial, they're in a fight.  Argument is not intellectual process, but warfare; their very existence is at stake and so they will use any argument they can not to lose; even arguments they don't believe themselves, so long as they are arguments their opponents can't adequately respond to. They're not in the game to advance any new ideas, push the conversation to a higher plane or any of that crap; they're trying simply to advance a knock-down antithesis. Concluding the discussion is when the other guy shuts up or walks away. That's a WSJ editorial.

A piece of writing like that is less about the truth or falsehood of some a philosophical position than it is the presentation of a psychological profile—you've met a guy like this in every workplace; at every drunken party and in every philosophy seminar: Smart but isolated, resentful, pugnacious, blinkered, lacking sympathetic imagination, susceptible to the Nuremberg Defense. In short, damaged goods.

Even so, not to feel at least rationally dishonest  when you pile what Krugman would argue as falsehood on top of falsehood takes an especial discipline: The ability to ignore about 99% of reality and be unmoved by it. So a philosophical notion of truth doesn't really enter into it—it isn't lying if you have your eyes screwed firmly tight. This is a religious skill, so we'll add one more idea to the self-image: they see themselves in a holy war as well.

So to sum up: WSJ editorial writers are a particular character type we've all met—the incommensurable made flesh. They see themselves in a no-holds-barred defense of business culture; and they will use any argument they can to bring the conversation to a close. Rather than being blatantly false, their arguments mostly simply ignore any reality that stands in their way. God is also on their side.

But their self-image? Simple: They are centurions, and they're trying to save Rome from the barbarians. Remember that the next time you read them; it'll make sense of what until now may have seemed merely nonsensical.

Learning Curve, July 8, 2009

Bring me the head of Kevin Costner

It’s only the 20th of February, and I have already seen the worst film of the year. It is called Revenge, and that is precisely what the moviegoing public should wreck upon its director, Tony Scott; its star, Kevin Costner; writers Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Fiskin; executive producer Kevin Costner; (the same one) and the entire management board of Columbia Pictures. Every one of them should be clapped in manacles and marched down Hollywood Boulevard to a public strangling, to be carried out by outraged moviegoers wielding celluloid nooses made from copies of this wretched film. These are desperate measures, I know, but we live in desperate times.

Revenge is dull, gratuitously violent, moronically written, woodenly acted, and directed like a bad condom commercial. To save you the trouble of seeing it, here is a short summary of the proceedings, transcribed from my notes over a big glass of Metaxa:

Closeups of retiring Navy pilot Kevin (Tom Cruse grown up) are inserted into footage left over from Top Gun. Retirement party. Manly tears and manly emotion. Is everybody in the navy an idiot, or is it the script? Kevin's off to Mexico to visit his pal the Mafioso.

Mexico. He meets a beautiful woman on the road. Could it be... why, yes, it's Mr. Mafioso's wife. (Right.) Kevin meets the feller, and hey, it's Tony Quinn playing a guacamole Don Corleone. Audience orientation dialogue. Boy, his wife's cute. Tony’s not, though; he throws his dog into the pool.

Tony and the Mrs. are not happy. She wants kids, he doesn't. "We've talked about this a hundred times," he says, which explains how they just happen to be talking about it when the camera's there.

A dinner. Dull conversation. Boy, Mexican politicians are sure corrupt. Dumb, too. So are their wives. What is this all in aid of? Tony blows out some brains while Kevin and the Mrs. stare into each other's eyes in the library. Why are half the closeups out of focus?

They meet at the beach next day. His dog does tricks. He tries to make her lemonade. They fondle the limes. Is this going to be the dumbest seduction scene in cinematic history? Nope. A Party. Kevin is leaving. The Mrs. meets him in the coatroom. Here they go! Just like Sonny Corleone in The Godfather!

They're in love. They arrange to meet, but the Don eavesdrops. Trouble's a-brewin'. They drive to Kevin's cabin. Heavy music. (This is how Tony Scott conveys passion.) At the cabin, they roll around and exchange banalities. Whoops! The Don and his thugs bust in and Kick Ass. She's sold to a bordello, he's left in a ditch to die. He's found by a noble peasant and nursed back to health while the Mrs. undergoes the foulest degradation possible, with only Kevin's navy dog-tag to give her strength.

Healthy and handsome again, Kevin sets out to find the Mrs. and kick some ass himself. In a country of 80 million, he by coincidence runs into—and kills—the two thugs who beat him up. He finds the Don, confronts him, and what, he lets him live? Damn, he does!

He finds the Mrs. in a convent. She's in a coma, but she wakes up for him. "I love you," she says. She dies, and his dog-tag falls to the floor. Kevin is sad. He sniffles. Process shot of the convent and a mountain in the background.

The End. Credits. "Hands up", I yelled out as the theatre lights came up, "all those of you who came to see a Kevin Costner movie and were savagely disappointed." And as if they had all been one person, the audience drew down its trousers and mooned the screen.

--Published in Between the Lines, 1990

Samuel Fuller

Writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller, who died last October at the age of 86, has been something of a paradoxical cinematic figure for the last 30 years. While revered by film professionals, and a profound influence on contemporary filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Wim Wenders, years of forced inactivity have cost him his audience. Nobody out there knows who he is any more.

Starting tonight, Cinematheque Ontario will take a crack at redressing that situation, presenting a complete retrospective of Fuller’s writer-director work, Pulp Fictions: The Films of Samuel Fuller. Twenty-two features will be screened, virtually any one of which will feel like a good bottle of bourbon smashed over your head.

Fuller was undoubtedly American cinema’s greatest master of what might be called the two-fisted school of writing and directing. His movies have Army-tough titles like Fixed Bayonets and Pickup on South Street, and are populated by hard-boiled criminals and hard-bitten dames, soldiers and prostitutes, cocky journalists and crazies. Stories appear to have been ripped straight from the pages of yesterday’s dime-store novels; dialogue is notable mostly for it’s utility and economy of means. (A sample from Underworld USA: “It was a pretty tough break you had, being born in prison and your mother dying there.”)

But let us not confuse two-fisted with ham-handed: if this is moviemaking reduced to its most basic terms, Fuller gives it the virtues a good pulp novelist would. A Fuller project starts with a bang, moves along at a good clip, has a sound emotional structure, snappy dialogue and ferocious attitude. All of the above are brought to the screen with a visual chutzpah that recalls Orson Welles on PCP. All in all, it takes you places you cinematically never dreamed existed—what Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Luc Goddard played at, Samuel Fuller actually was.

This is not to say that after a steady viewer diet of recent Hollywood filmmaking, his cinematic universe doesn’t take some getting used to. For example, 1957’s China Gate might seem to the Fuller neophyte to have been made by a crazy person. A hard-boiled romance-adventure set in 1954 Vietnam, China Gate begins with the disconcerting words: “this movie is dedicated to France.” Shot with such visual economy that the studio had to insert fake closeups into the location footage with an optical printer, China Gate features Angie Dickenson as an alcoholic half-Chinese prostitute leading a multi-lateral group of commandos to destroy a cache of weapons somewhere in North Vietnam—weapons guarded by a Vietnamese chieftain portrayed by Lee Van Cleef.

Fuller claimed cinema was “like a battlefield.... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion!” A collateral benefit is that his battlefields sometimes feel like domestic melodrama. (Imagine John Wayne casting Maureen O’Hara as his romantic lead in The Green Berets and you’ll have a ghost of an idea what China Gate feels like.) And as in a battlefield, narrative feels confused, elliptical, sometimes nonexistent. A Fuller story jumps all over the place and often the only continuity left to a viewer is an emotional one. Two questions constantly force themselves upon you as you watch: First, what on earth is going on here? Second, why am I enjoying it so much? After a while, you stop asking the first question.

It’s a wise course of action to take if you plan to watch a lot of the man’s work. A lot of potentially unsettling things await the unwary, like the almost absurd cold-war cant of many of his 50’s movies, or the alarming tendency of a lot of his films to briefly turn into musicals for no particular reason. (Sometimes both happen at once—In China Gate, Nat King Cole, not long after crooning the title song, says he’s fighting in Indochina because there are “still a lot of live commies around.”) Romance doesn’t develop between characters so much as it simply occurs, without explanation, excuse, or credibility.

Reading the reviews of 30 and 40 years ago you get a sense that critics more happy in the company of directors like Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer found this kind of thing all very embarrassing. Seen today though, it arouses awe more than anything else (you move beyond wincing about five minutes into your first film); it seems wonderful that in an age of such false sophistication as the 50’s that anybody would be so brazen—Holden Caufield would have gone nuts over this stuff.

He would have been particularly fond of 1963’s Shock Corridor, Fuller’s history of postwar America from the point of view of an outsider pushed to the screaming point. Here an egomaniacal reporter gets himself committed to an insane asylum in order to solve a murder; once there he slowly goes crazy himself. The extremely high-temperature melodrama sometimes camouflages Shock Corridor’s seriousness of purpose: Fuller makes it clear that what has made the inmates insane in the first place is post-war America. Shock Corridor skates along the edge of hysteria for most of it’s running time, and once falls gloriously off the edge into what must be the single most surreal episode of anti-racist filmmaking ever to appear in an American movie.

1964’s The Naked Kiss is virtually all over the edge, as if Blue Velvet had arrived on the scene 20 years early. Something amazing happens in it just about every 90 seconds: Absurd bursts of fantasy, handicapped children breaking into song; from one moment to the next you have no idea where the director is going—it’s as if the screen has been hard-wired directly to his id. Naked Kiss is Fuller’s most gloriously out-of-control exercise, and it pretty well killed his career.

One can’t help but see parallels between Fuller and another director whose Hollywood career ended at about the same time, fellow melodramatist Douglas Sirk (although Fuller is Sirk only by way of the Army stockade). Both had trouble finding critical support because of the perceived cheeziness and lowbrow appeal of their work. Yet to dismiss Fuller’s cinema as mere pulp fiction is like dismissing Douglas Sirk’s melodramas as big-screen soaps: superficially accurate but profoundly untrue.

Fuller and Sirk actually share many of the same virtues: the—sometimes shocking—emotional immediacy of their direction (and if you think it’s easy, have a look at what happens when Steven Spielberg tries it); the beauty of their images; the propulsiveness of their storytelling and the simple, almost insane watchability of everything that they put up on the screen. Their movies are designed to overpower audiences: Sirk with a tug at the heart, Fuller with a sock in the kisser.

You go with the tools you’ve got, I guess. Fuller is revered by film people for his great cinematic eye but even more for his authenticity; his courage to utterly and uncompromisingly be his crazed self when he makes a film. As an employable filmmaker this probably cost him the last thirty years of his working life. But they are also the qualities which makes virtually everything he has ever shot compulsively viewable for those of us on the other side of the movie screen: He gives us everything there is up front and holds nothing back. We love Samuel Fuller because he wears his guts on his sleeve.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Ring-a-Ding-Ding

For me, it all started at about 3:00 am on February 9th, 2008.

At that moment I woke up coughing so ferociously that I ended up injuring a whole set of muscles in my chest. Over the next 10 days, I had every classic flu-like symptom you can name, with one particularly obnoxious addition: a persistent, irritating ringing in my ears. The flu-like symptoms gradually packed up and moved on. The ringing, unfortunately, moved in to stay. At the walk-in clinic up my street, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was pretty bite-down-on-this-bullet about my situation: “At your age, it's probably tinnitus,” he said, pausing gravely after giving the ringing its clinical name, “and that can be a real pain in the ass. You'll just have to get used to it.” The ear, nose and throat guy I ran into sometime later confirmed this standard medical advice: “You've got the kind of tinnitus that either goes away or doesn't,” he said.

Depending on whose figures you read, anywhere from seventeen to thirty percent of humanity has tinnitus in some form, the majority of them being older people. This at first seemed an outrageous figure to me, since I'd almost never heard anybody talk about it. But now that it's happened to me, it seems that everybody my age has a tinnitus story. Whenever I complain about it, the response invariably is “Oh, I've had tinnitus for years”, or “I know somebody who's got it.” It's like the elephant in the doctor's waiting-room: Either we're dealing with a scourge that has cowed a large part of the older population into silence, or we're looking at a condition where its denial is simply a part of being able to lead a normal life---like the schizophrenia sufferer who's learned to ignore the FBI agents following him everywhere.

Tinnitus is a perceived sound without any external source; a phantom perception like the “phantom limb” sometimes felt by people who've had amputations. Tinnitus most often comes in tandem either with the hearing loss you can expect when you age, or---paradoxically---an oversensitivity to noise called hyperacusis. In the less aged, it's usually the result of long-term exposure to loud noise---a phenomenon the Hearing Loss Association of America may some day dub Ozzy Osborne syndrome. Whatever its efficient cause, it's a product of the nervous system: Bits of the nerve pathways normally associated with hearing fire off phantom signals which your brain interprets as sound.

Unfortunately, it's usually irritating sound as well: sufferers have reported it as a clanging, hissing, roaring, or whooshing; like breaking glass, clicking, shrieking, banging, or owls hooting; as a ringing, buzzing, chirping or sizzling; or the sound of rushing water and chain saws. So far nobody's complained of it sounding like Britney Spears covering Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, but it'll probably happen sometime.

It's a very private affliction: Most people won't notice anything wrong with you, at least partly because when you're with other people, the problem's not as bad---you're distracted, and talking seems to drive your private noise into the background as well. (In fact, if you're a complete party animal, tinnitus is probably no big deal for you---most of your day you're either completely distracted, or unconscious.)

Tinnitus intrudes when you most want quiet and repose; when you're alone, with your Self. You have no peace, no solitude, nowhere to simply withdraw---there's always this obnoxious reminder of everything that's bad about the world constantly buzzing in your head. What's particularly maddening is that since this interior noise is most effectively suppressed when you're in the presence of others, it soon begins to feel like you exist only for others. At its worst, tinnitus robs you of your sense of self.

Whatever else you may say about Google, it does allow you to achieve a state of futility in research far more quickly than you ever used to be able to. For the most part, the web offers little scholarly information for people who want to do something about an illness. You're given unparalleled access to people offering quack cures, prayers, and exhortations to Nietzsche-like acts of will. But you're given no theory; no method. Nothing to do.

That's why the phrase 'Tinnitus Retraining Therapy' caught my eye when I was trolling through Google Scholar for something worthwhile to read about tinnitus---it sounded like work, and that sounded good. The reference turned out to be a Cambridge University Press title: Tinnitus Retraining Therapy: Implementing the Neurophysiological Model by Pawel Jastreboff of the Emory School of Medicine and Jonathan Hazell of University College, London. What I was able to read of it on Google Books introduced me to a thoroughly scholarly analysis of the my problem, whose chief virtue was that it gave me something to do; a disciplined hand in my own recovery. (Publishers worried about the access Google Books gives online readers to their product can also breathe a sigh of relief---I ended up buying the book.)

The gist of the authors' argument runs something as follows: There are a lot of people out there with tinnitus, but only about a quarter of them find it troubling enough to go and see a doctor about---the rest experience it but don't suffer from it. What are they doing right?

What their brains have done right is to habituate themselves to the phantom sounds: their limbic systems (that section of the brain responsible for emotions) have learned to be unperturbed by the dissonance, in turn allowing their autonomic nervous systems to place the tinnitus on a sort of Do Not Call list of neurological signals that can be ignored. People with brains thus habituated can call up their tinnitus sounds if they concentrate, but the signals themselves no longer intrude on everyday life. Their tinnitus has become, in effect, background noise.

How do you get from something as irritating as seagulls screeching on your balcony and as persistent as an automated telephone bill-collector, to background noise? Ideally, what you want to do to make a nerve impulse less offensive to your limbic system is simply turn the volume down. Unfortunately, that option isn't available.

But you can turn the background noise up. In my case, I bought a $20 MP3 player, transferred a file of wide-frequency white noise onto it, set it on “repeat”, and listened to it throughout the day through a pair of ear-bud headphones. The volume is set just below the level that would cover up the tinnitus completely: You want it to be there still---after all, you're trying to get accustomed to it, not pretend that it doesn't exist.

And it's not much more complicated than that. The process of habituation can take months, but the relief is almost instant---however the retraining process proceeds, the background noise you're now carrying about with you certainly helps you get through your day.

So, in a sense, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was right---I am just going to have to get used to it. But I've acquired a tool that at the very least makes my days a lot easier to endure. Results at the moment are still up in the air---every day still seems a new adventure---but a good attitude helps. Like the chain-gang captain said to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, “you have to get your mind right.”

-Published in Zoomer Magazine, Winter 2008

Michelangelo Antonioni

In an era where movies about ocean-liner catastrophes make hundreds of millions of dollars at Christmas, how shall we make a case for an art-film writer-director whose chief claim to fame was being a middle-class soul in anguish? It may be hard to remember now, but thirty-five years ago Michelangelo Antonioni may well have been the most acclaimed filmmaker in the world. It is a spirit that Cinematheque Ontario is clearly out to rekindle in their exhaustive retrospective, Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni.

In a career spanning 16 feature films—he is 85 years of age but apparently at work on another movie—Antonioni’s critical reputation rests for the most part on three he made between 1960 and 1962: L’Avventura, La Notte [The Night], and L’Eclisse [The Eclipse]. These are the movies where he succeeded most completely in the two chores he set for his cinema: to chronicle the breakdown of modern emotional life, and to do so in a way uniquely cinematic and firmly under the control of the director on the set.

From a three-decade remove he looks to have been more successful in the second chore than the first. The critique of modern life running through Antonioni’s work can be summed up in a single phrase: “it won’t work”. The archetypal Antonioni film resembles soap opera for intellectuals who have been unlucky in love: it is full of love affairs that go nowhere and marriages that run on for no reason; people so emotionally delicate that a loud conversation might make them explode, and people so emotionally dead that the explosion probably wouldn’t wake them.

People in Antonioni movies don’t do normal, sensible things—like call the police when they find dead bodies in the park, or refrain from attempting impossible love affairs. They seem beyond rational self-control, as if life to them is just a movie they’re watching, where they are powerless to affect the plot and changing channels is not an option. Antonioni’s characters—and by extension, his idea of most participants in modern life—are quite simply unequipped to properly handle matters of any moral consequence. We merely go through the motions of a moral life, unaware of what we do and unhappy about it.

Introducing his classic L’Avventura to the public at Cannes in 1960, Antonioni was quite explicit about this, speaking of the “heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help, they create problems without offering us any possible solutions.”

Thus the main characters in L’Avventura are a man and a woman who become romantically entangled while searching for a missing person: his lover—and her best friend. “It can’t be right. It’s absurd,” cries Claudia. “Good,” Sandro replies. “It’s better if it’s absurd. It means there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Virtually all of Antonioni’s characters are similarly ill-equipped for surviving modern life, if not so similarly forthright about it: In Blow Up, a London fashion photographer whose life is as glossy and as emotionally substantial as a photographic negative is paralyzed with inertia when he realizes he has photographed a murder. L’Eclisse is an apocalyptic version of A Man and a Woman where a couple enters a relationship both know is doomed. In La Notte, a burned-out writer tries to convince himself that he still loves his wife—but his wife knows better.

(You get the feeling that if Antonioni had directed Casablanca, Bogart would have had an adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman, suffered massive guilt, and then walked into the Atlantic ocean while Paul Henreid and Claude Rains got drunk at Major Strasser’s headquarters. What’s frightening is that it would probably have worked.)

Antonioni’s is a depressing attitude (and not even a particularly original one, reaching back to Neizsche and possibly even to St. Benidict) yet one so beautifully presented that it is utterly convincing—at least while the theatre lights are down. No other director hitches his philosophical wagon so completely to the image he puts on screen, and no other director gets as much benefit from it. A lot of Antonioni’s films look perfect because they look perfect.

It’s that look that stays with you, and it’s intended that way. The images, not the actors, carry the emotional load: what characters do is less important than the spaces the director puts between them. To a viewer raised on the orthodox Hollywood style (i.e., all of us) Antonioni’s camerawork looks self-consciously artsy, almost self-parodying. Yet, look at a still from any of his films, and you know exactly what’s up between his characters.

This is the most elemental communication cinema is capable of and it’s Antonioni’s bread-and-butter. He wants to use film the way we use English; not as a medium for the expression of an idea, (we don’t think up an idea and then express it in language) but with the medium as the idea. The man talks with his camera—what’s up there on the screen is exactly what he’s saying, not describable in terms any more basic than the images. You look, and you understand. (You may have trouble explaining to somebody else what you have understood, but that comes with the territory.)

What he talks about with that camera, in a word, is isolation. His frames are full of empty space, inhumanely and architecturally divided. Streets and public spaces always seem to be empty; his characters alone in the world, isolated for closer observation. People cling unhappily together for comfort against the isolation, fearful of solitude yet unable to handle intimacy. You get the feeling that Antonioni’s ideal film set would be a desert, populated by two people who are afraid to look at one another.

Sooner or later, though, enough alienation is enough. Two decades ago, critic Pauline Kael wrote that she wished Antonioni would, just once, use his talent frivolously—perhaps in a trashy mystery or something.

He came close in 1975’s The Passenger. Here, Jack Nicolson inhabits what for another director would be an action movie scenario: a journalist, sick of his life, trades identities with a dead man he fortuitously resembles. The dead man unfortunately turns out to have been an arms dealer, and dangerous people soon come calling. Things proceed at a very leisurely pace (this is a movie that you can transcribe in longhand as you watch) towards an enigmatic conclusion that makes you wish Antonioni would go even further and do a movie with Bruce Willis—Die Hard: An Outline of Identity.

That not likely being in the cards, we are left with a canon of unmatched seriousness, best taken in moderate doses. At his best (which is often) Antonioni has made films that are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and—provided you are a delicate liberal—emotionally engaging. If they are old news they are at least true news; beautiful artifacts produced by the best eye for cinematic composition since Orson Welles.

How will the hard-nosed 90’s respond? Antonioni might note that all the problems he speaks of are still with us—perhaps even more acutely than ever. On the other hand, easy transcendence seems to be a way of life for us now. If Antonioni were to show up for a press conference in front of CITY-TV tomorrow, the Speaker’s Corner crowd would probably grab him by the shoulders, give him a gentle shake and say, “hey, just get over it, buddy!”

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Pietro Germi

In all the standard cinematic reference books, one looks in vain for the name of Pietro Germi. A popular and renowned filmmaker in Italy during his lifetime, he achieved international fame during the 60’s, winning an Oscar for Divorce, Italian Style and the Cannes Palm d’Or for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. Yet after his death in 1975 Germi seems to have vanished from the collective memory of international cinema—passed over especially by those of us whose business it is to remember.

How can a filmmaker who made so many memorable movies have been so easily forgotten? Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso and The Legend of 1900, recently hazarded an explanation: “Germi’s offense was that he made films that the public at large wanted to see. An Auteur was somebody who devoted himself to a single theme right from the start and stuck with it to the end. A director who moved around, changed, and then went back to a previous theme or genre wasn’t considered ‘deep’.”

Germi was dubbed “the great carpenter” by Fellini, a co-screenwriter of several of his movies from the early 50’s, and the tool-belt fits: Germi’s movies are splendid works of craftsmanship—structurally taut, visually striking, and possessing a splendid sense of time and (especially) place. His cine-carpentry produced distinctive films in a variety of genres—the neo-realism of The Way of Hope; In the Name of the Law, a western with debts divided equally between John Ford and Sicily; the detective story (The Facts of Murder), and the series of dazzling social satires with which he closed out his career (Seduced and Abandoned et al.)

Yet even a brilliant carpenter can raise a sense of unease in the heart of the Auteur taxonomist, partly because he resists integration into the grand scheme of authorship by which so many critics understand cinema. Critics like their great filmmakers to be artistically obsessed—all else is mere craftsmanship.

Such a critic’s plight is not an unsympathetic one. Confronted as a series, Germi’s is not an integral body of work; you don’t get much help understanding the artistic merit of a particular film by looking at any of the other movies he made. After a while, they start to look like the product not so much of a distinct artistic sensibility, as they do of a particular psychological profile—many seem to be the work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

There is therefore no benevolent artistic place to pigeonhole the films that don’t connect with you; you tend to write them off, rather than think them through more carefully as you might the work of a capital-A Auteur. Robert Bresson’s weakest film can still ride the credibility of the rest of his catalogue. Pietro Germi’s weakest films have to stand on their own.

Consider The Railroad Man—a 1958 entry in the strange and hard-to-adapt-to genre of the Italian political weepie. An amalgam of neo-realism, bitter libertarian politics, and industrial-strength Hollywood-style soap, The Railroad Man is a popular entertainment seemingly designed to drive proletarian Italian family men to tears. (Enough tears were elicited to make it one of the most popular films in Italy the year of its release.)

A man commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The unfortunate engineer who was in control at the time—Germi cast himself in the leading role—is demoted for his negligence. His union doesn’t support him, and during a subsequent labor dispute, the engineer briefly becomes a strikebreaker. For this, he suffers terrible guilt and his life falls apart. As seen today by a North American, there’s little for a modern viewer to fasten onto; the tension between Hollywood-style melodrama and Italian slice-of-life begins to feel anachronistic and the film becomes a curious time capsule; neo-realism brought to the level of television.

By all accounts a solitary and difficult man to deal with (off the set he would often respond only to notes pushed under his door), Germi made films that feel like the work of an outsider. He displayed a great sympathy for the worker thrown out of a job; the man forced by poverty into crime; and above all for people whose lives are made absurd by their country’s even more absurd laws and codes of honor. His comedies were bitter and satirical; his dramas pessimistic. Billy Wilder said that he found in Germi a kindred spirit; probably because the work of both filmmakers points to a universe largely broken beyond repair.

His style was deliberately out of step with the international Italian cinema of the time; he was unsympathetic to Visconti (to whom Germi’s melodramas are often unfavorably contrasted) and downright hostile to Antonioni (for whom the feeling was apparently mutual). Yet if his yoking of popular Hollywood forms to local cultural realities was largely a device to please his audience, the combination also produced some unique artifacts of international cinema.

For example, In the Name of the Law, Germi’s third film, is an out-and-out western set in contemporary (1948) Sicily: A new magistrate comes to an isolated town and finds it’s local government corrupt, and the local aristocracy in cahoots with the Mafia to keep the citizens unemployed and powerless. In the classic western tradition, the lone man cleans up the town. But the film’s charm comes mostly from its confounding of our expectations: this is a western where there is no concept of a frontier and where strapping on the guns is not an option for the law-and-order man. It is both Hollywood and Sicily; perhaps the only real Italian western ever made.

Made a year later, The Way of Hope follows a dirt-poor group of Sicilian miners as they make their Grapes-of-Wrath way to France. It is a singular film—not least for its combining the ethical urgency of neo-realism (Rossilini called it “being on the side of those who suffer”) with a sense of visual composition that would find a home in Battleship Potemkin, and a Hollywood sentimentalism worthy of Spielberg at his ickiest. The Way of Hope is both brutally frank about the misery to the Sicilian poor—the best hope of a Sicilian is to escape to France—yet it ends with what in cinematic terms amounts to a miracle. Hollywood wins out over neo-realism in the end: the good guys must win, even if they really couldn’t.

Best of all is The Facts of Murder, dubbed by Variety magazine on it’s 1959 release as “the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy”. This is faint praise: Hollywood-tough and Italian-characterful, The Facts of Murder is as good as any detective movie ever made, and better than most. If it’s cinematic cabinet-making, it’s great cinematic cabinet making—you wish the man had turned out more of them.

The list could probably go on. The collection currently being presented includes just over half of the films Germi directed and makes a respectable case for the carpenter as worthy subject for a retrospective—although not without a certain irony. Taken as individual films, a gratifying number of Germi’s works stand the tests of both time and watchability. But as a body of work, they are collectively just obscure enough for the man who made them to be lost between the frames.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

Marcello Mastroianni

It is rare for a cinema-society to stage an actor retrospective, but Marcello Mastroianni was a rare actor. He was pretty, prolific, and profound, and starting tonight Cinematheque Ontario presents 22 Mastroianni titles selected by Anna Maria Tatò, his companion of 22 years. It is a presentation that goes a long way towards illuminating Mastroianni’s particular genius: the actor emerges cinematically triumphant while portraying every imaginable human failing.

Is Mastroianni the most important actor in the history of cinema? He has certainly left the most attractive legacy. More believable than Bogart; more attractive than Brando, he has bequeathed to us the truest cinematic icon of the 20th century’s closing half: the ineffective male in all his many varieties.

No other star has been so attractive exhibiting doe-eyed inadequacy, although Cary Grant was occasionally allowed to came close. Mastroianni’s stock in trade is being overpowered and overmatched, whether as the intellectual labour organizer out of his depth in The Organizer; as Sophia Loren’s hopelessly outclassed ex-lover in Marriage, Italian Style, or in Dark Eyes, as a wastrel at the end of his life who has abandoned romance for simple inertia. What emerges from his work as a whole is Mastroianni’s closely-observed three ages of Man: as perplexed by the world, by women, and ultimately by himself.

Mastroianni is most famous in North America for two collaborations with Federico Fellini from the beginning of the 60’s: La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. 40 years later, both movies provide a startlingly up-to-date portrait of the man of today—or at least the way the man-of-today feels about himself. Mastroianni gives us men to whom things happen, who have lost the power to meaningfully initiate action. In 8 1/2 he is Fellini’s self-portrait: a burned-out filmmaker no longer in charge of his life or his creativity, who desires nothing more than to stay upright in hope that somehow, clarity will reassert itself.

It does not—although Fellini is more optimistic about the consequences at the close of 8 1/2 than by the denouement of La Dolce Vita, where the battle against disorientation is deemed hopeless. There, one character sums up the struggle: “We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside time, detached.” Unfortunately, they succeed. All that’s left to do is give up on life altogether.

As intractable (if ultimately more bemusing) a struggle is the Mastroianni Man’s tortured association with women—call him the reluctant ladykiller. If he seems bewildered by women, women are certainly not bewildered by him: Matinee-idol good looks, a voice so beautiful as to make the dubbing of foreign-language films seem a crime, a sense of worldliness held in check as if by memories of pain.... What’s to resist? The Mastroianni Man can have any woman he wants—except, as it turns out, the one he loves.

Take Visconti’s White Nights—a superior weepie from the director of such light classics as The Damned and Death in Venice. This is soap-opera for guys, with Mastroianni suffering in the Jane Wyman role: Boy, out wandering the evening streets, rescues girl being harassed by bikers. He’s interested in her, but she’s preoccupied. We learn that she’s carrying a torch for Mr. Wrong—a tall, tough and handsome guy who had to go on the lam from the law but who promised to meet her on a bridge over the local canal at ten o’clock some night in the indefinite future. Every evening, she goes there. So does our boy, who gradually sways her towards himself. Then, the very night she finally falls for Mastroianni, who should show up and whisk her away? No, it’s too terrible to even contemplate....

What is surprising is how easily the second-billed Mastroianni dominates the movie, even though he’s in the passive, secondary role. Showing a kidnapper’s ability to get his captives emotionally on side, he effortlessly co-opts us into his suffering.

It is a skill he relies on, nowhere more effectively than in Il Bell’Antonio, another good, healthy measure of industrial-strength suds. (Confounded by the Catholic guilt attending every good Italian boyhood, Antonio can perform sexually only with women he doesn’t like. With the woman he loves, he is impotent. In a society that demands children, he must therefore renounce love.) Yet, with an alchemist’s expertise, Mastroianni turns this purplest of melodramas into the purest white satin.

There is technique to his alchemy as well as truth. The technique is simply the actor’s knowing exactly how to make himself look cinematically good. When he’s on, he doesn’t simply look good, he looks perfect. He is the only possible subject in the frame, and he draws your eye, no matter who’s around him. (This is an extremely useful ability in a movie like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, where an actor could any time be upstaged by a group of singing and dancing midgets.) Your sympathy is his, and he will make you care even when you shouldn’t.

It’s an ability he found even more useful in his later career. Actors, unlike directors, must grow old, and with age it seems the Mastroianni Man gives up the fight against bewilderment. The wolf, having worn sheep’s clothing for so long, decides he likes the life, and settles in to the role of the philanderer aging gracefully. “Let me tell you a story” he says to a stranger in a restaurant in Dark Eyes. And he tells us of the time where he almost experienced the great love of his life but that somehow it slipped from his grasp.

He has a great storytelling face, and the director returns to it again and again, the face now providing the counterpoint to the matinee-idol’s skill. Suddenly we notice the truth in that face, especially at the climax of his story, when it displays a sudden self-awareness that, for reasons he still can’t fully grasp, our narrator has just lost everything of real value to him. It is the semi-perplexed look of a man realizing that he has had the best moment of his life, but he has mostly missed it. It is a look of amusement and regret, of mastery lost and not to be regained, a look of farewell.

It is the truth in that look, more than anything else, that connects him to us. It sums up a character’s life, and it sums up Marcello Mastroianni’s career. His screen life documented for us the passing of credible cinematic manliness. His face on the screen is a snapshot of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999