Art College in the early 1980’s was gloriously anti-academia.  It was the type of atmosphere where even a hint of succumbing to systematic, structured, aesthetic thinking could lead to excommunication.  You learned what you had to learn, or rather you learned what you were exposed to, and got the hell out to face the mercenary art scene while you worked random piss jobs.  This was the calling and nature of your priesthood.

Although nothing, no one, was sacred, we did have artists, those prophetic voices, we intensely identified with.  David Lynch was one of the new, exciting, unrelenting voices.  He was one of our two Davidic prophets, the other being David Byrne, who ignited our excitement when he appeared in oversized suit, singing to a swaying lamp in front of projected poetry in Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.

When we saw Eraserhead (1977), we had braced ourselves beforehand.  Of course, we had heard the rumors even before someone obtained a print for screening at The John Herron School of Art.  Naturally, some of the VC (visual communications) students showed up, long enough to tear themselves away from their whipped cream dreams of illustrating X-Men comic books and listening to Duran Duran, to launch their all too predictable assaults.  It would have been disappointing if they hadn’t.  It only took a few moments for those monotonous, robotic voices belonging to the religious cult of linear thinking to spew their dull bitching.  As always, they did it obnoxiously loud when their fragile, conformability zone had been too easily threatened.  It was slightly disappointing that there were no punches thrown, but it came threateningly close to that.  One female voice whined out, “This is so unrealistic!” That was followed by several calls of “f*** you” and “shut the f*** up.”

Of course, there just had to be one feigning voice that uttered the predictable ‘”Man, I think I’d love this if I just had some acid.” That was followed by several more calls of “f*** you”, and “shut the f*** up, you idiot.”  Lynch had done it.  The only other screenings that had pulled that off were John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion.  The showing of Eraserhead intensely surpassed both of those esteemed screenings.  The screening had been unpredictable, dangerous, something akin to a chest-shoving match.

After the conservative VC wimps had departed, we were bristling with conversation and excitement.  Sperm, Jack Nance’s hair, grime, industrial waste, animated roast chicken, sperm, seedy banality, smoke, wood, odorous sex, dark intestinal fluid, sperm, mutated fetus flesh, dirt, rusted metal, crackling Fats Waller songs, black humor, sperm, a Radiator Lady, rusted metal, alienation, feverish masturbatory dreams, more sperm, and Jack Nance’s eyebrows, were all sculpted in Lynch’s enigmatic, dangerously perverse, phantasmagoric nightmare.  Interpretations were fast and furious, nervously bandied back and forth.  Was it post-holocaust, surreal dehumanization?  Was it post-modern, second coming allegory?  You did not make the mistake of saying that you “got it,” which would have violated the art school biblical code of anti-elitism elitism.

Lynch had been a painter and he made film like a painter.  He spoke our language and was a bonafide, artfag antidote to status quo Reaganism.  We sought out Elephant Man (1980) and yes, he could make a straightforward narrative, this one being the needed “f*** you” to the VC crowd who whined out lame defenses for their inability to evolve past their comprehension levels; defenses like “You call that art? My grandmother could do that and she’s 83,” or, the even more predictably common defense, “pretentious bulls***.”

The underrated Dune (1984) came next and that was hotly debated.  The sci-fi geeks were amusingly offended.  Even Lynch himself felt it was a disaster, but the film is replete with flashes of undeniable and unforgettable brilliance.  It may yet garner its due recognition.

Blue Velvet (1986) turned Lynch into a semi-cult star and was a comeback of sorts for Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.  Hopper’s “You’re so f***ing suave” was mimicked for days after.  Even some of the mainstream critics and VC students, now fearing to appear “unhip” (like we gave a goddamn anyway) got caught up in the film’s instant popular cult status, soliciting a well deserved “F*** you. Told you so,” when they belatedly, feebly attempted to acknowledge Lynch’s potential validity as a filmmaker.  Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Kyle MacLachlan were true blue, on the edge sex symbols (an extreme rarity).  On reflection, it was probably the film’s pronounced sadomasochism that made it an accidental hit in the first place.

The 1980s overstayed its welcome.  Divine and Edith Massey were dead, David Bowie was securely in a blonde pop phase, Pee Wee Herman was banished for something that surprised none of his long term fans, David Byrne was transforming into an egotistical monster, and, while he and John Waters were still clever, they were both losing that fun, obsessive art edge.  David Cronenberg and George Romero still counted, but would Lynch?

1990’s Wild at Heart was an indication that he would.  It was possibly his best film to date.  This 1960’s type sexually charged, surreal Oz road trip actually brought out good acting from Nicolas Cage and featured Laura Dern at her trashiest, sexy best.

Then came the mercifully brief, frenzied phenomenon of “Twin Peaks.”  It was hip, eventful, and jolted television audiences (who forever deserve to be jolted).  “Twin Peaks” was also quite good (well, it started out that way), but its faddish, mass popularity was far more unpredictable and more unsettling that the show itself.  Less surprising was its amazingly quick fall from grace, and there was probably a sigh of relief when it did crash.

While Lynch whittled away time desperately trying to salvage the train wreck of “Peaks,” the utterly bland 1990s was coming to a close.  Lynch broke his long silence with the uneven, compelling Lost Highway (1997), followed by the superbly narrative Straight Story (1999), but he no longer really mattered.

Lynch could and did still produce vital work, but he had settled into a quiet work habit.  He no longer, electrified, ignited or excited.  Lynch had, of course, developed a considerable fan base, which, in itself, was embarrassing.  For those of us that had followed his pre-”Twin Peaks” work, while it was new and fresh, the very idea of a Lynch fan base was an oxymoron.  Lynch seemed the type to defy ever inspiring a fan base or religious following.  With “Twin Peaks,” Lynch had simply become too symbolic a figure for the trendy “cutting edge.”  Most of those hard-line fans denied any flaws in his work, any missteps.  For them, “Twin Peaks” was Lynch’s misunderstood gospel, something akin to Palazzeschi’s accepted, then criminally rejected Man of Smoke.

But, Lynch had flirted with, and been ostracized by, television, of all things.  One could accept Spielberg working in television, but Lynch was slumming it, despite whatever intentions he may have had.  There could be no greater symbolism of mainstream acceptance than the unimaginative, assembly line production of television.  Never mind that, perhaps, Lynch’s goal was to bring to that aesthetically dead medium, an Ernie Kovacs-like spirit at the edge of the improvisational event.  Never mind that he failed.

The post-”Twin Peaks” Lynch fans were hollow and faddish, preeminently recognizing Lynch’s originality through his, ultimately weaker, work in television.  In the film school circuit it was no longer couth to “study Lynch.”  He lacked the feverish introverted obsession of Cronenberg, and was, unforgivably, a rich man’s Buñuel (Buñuel was acclaimed, but never lost touch with his underground, dirt status).  Lynch had promised and failed to deliver a new, messianic-like purity in the artistic medium of film (i.e., he wasn’t Tarkovsky).

2001′s Mulholland Drive, excellent as it was in its Kenneth Anger like sodomizing of a decadent Hollywood, insultingly garnered an Academy Award nomination (Hollywood loves to appear hip by nominating films critical of its industry), and this was a further source of embarrassment for and concerning Lynch.

One could feel Lynch’s pain at the nomination nod and empathize with the subsequent paths he has taken.  Lynch followed this with a few chamber-like collections of shorts, which his fans practically wet themselves over in expressing their “alternative” adulation.  In reality, the shorts appeared to be Lynch “reaching.”

It was a bit like David Bowie, trying to get back to his roots.  Thankfully, he escaped his larger appeal stage, but was unable to re-capture the influential glory of the “artist unplugged.”  In the meantime, other voices had emerged from the wilderness.  It was perhaps only fitting that Isabella Rossellini was now making the hailed surrealist artwork of the day with Guy Maddin rather than David Lynch.  Maddin and Lars Von Trier possess a true, indomitable, quirky auteur quality that could compete with, and eclipse the David Lynch of the 1980s.  They could, quite readily, be considered more potent, more vital forces in the art film medium of the near, foreseeable future.

For 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch went one step further in proclaiming his “underground status” by shooting the film on video.  If he was reaching in the shorts, then he was grasping with Empire.

Empire divided even the most dedicated of Lynchians 50/50.  In one camp, there are those who consider it a pale, muddled, repetitive rehash of all the Lynch films that came before.  In the other camp, are those who feel Empire is the most crystallized, most evolved example of Lynch’s art.  I agree with the later, but regardless of stance, Laura Dern is amazing.  She gives the film its organic meat and heart with an indisputably humanist performance, not an easy task to maintain amidst abstract expressionist chaos.

Since 2006, David Lynch has seemed to be on yet another sabbatical and may jolt us again, but in art one must kill one’s father, as Picasso killed his many fathers and as De Kooning killed him.

Try as he might, Lynch is not the equivalent of a wild-eyed, aged Xenakis, or a 101-year-old Elliott Carter still inserting pins underneath our nails.  Von Trier and Maddin are among the new prophetic crop that has rendered Lynch’s a hopelessly quaint, comparatively impotent art.  The 21st century David Lynch might identify with the 21st century Simon Rattle.  Once, he could do no wrong.  Now, he can do no right, regardless.  David Lynch is dead now, and that might just free him.

DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE:

By Irina Goncharova, edited and additional material by Greg Smalley.  Original research and Russian translations by Irina Goncharova.

- What is your father’s occupation?

- My father writes poetry. That’s all he does. He is one of the greatest unknown poets of the world.

- And when does he get money?

– Never. It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it.

The quote above is an exchange from Rustam Khamdamov’s V gorakh moyo serdtse [My Heart’s in the Highlands] (1967).  When he was a third year student of the All-Union Institute for Cinematography (VGIK in Moscow, USSR) Khamdamov shot this movie that was called “the work of a master” and was included into the list of the best Soviet movies.  The movie swept the VGIK internal festivals. Although Khamdamov is mentioned in the credits only once, along with other students, everybody knew he was the one and only author of the movie—not just its director, but the one who wrote the original screenplay (after William Saroyan’s play), who wrote the absurd dialogue, who made all streamers and costumes with his own hands, who selected the best actors when doing the casting.  The response to the film was polarized and conflicting. The VGIK Communist Party Committee—just imagine, at that time the Communists decided destiny of everything and everyone in the country—introduced ideological censorship on the works of the VGIK students straight away.

Really, it’s not so easy to write for an American audience about a director such as Rustam Khamdamov.  I believe there are very few people in the USA who have ever heard his name, although it may be found by googling or searching the Internet Movie Database.  Still, this search would hardly clarify the situation.  The list of his movies is incredibly short, and practically each one has a very sad production history, but those critics who mention his name do so with much respect and even a kind of devotion, often calling him “legendary.”

What makes this director so legendary?

Rustam Khamdamov is of Uzbek descent and took his film production course from the renown Russian film director Grigori Chukhrai.^[1]  As mentioned above, his first movie was the student work (some critics say it was his graduate project) My Heart’s in the Highlands (1967), a short, approximately 30 minute black and white film. This was the first film where viewers saw the beautiful Elena Solovey, a future Soviet movie star.

Elena Solovey in Raba Lyubvi, 1975.

My Heart’s In The Highlands (1939), initially a play by William Saroyan, was a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family.  Khamdamov used the play’s plot, but recycled it and made a poetic film, or better a non-narrative one, and did it so masterfully that Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Sergeo Paradjanov^[2], and Kira Muratova all praised him for it.  In Polina Barskova’s words, Khamdamov shows “qualities that may easily be called decadent: the obsessive aestheticization of all aspects of life, including the goriest; the eroticisation of the Other—the other space, the other epoch, the other sex; the eschatological quest for the ultimate, the final, the last in the series.” The Italian directors were so impressed by Khamdamov’s student work that they mentioned his name as if he was already one of their equals on the cinematic Olympus.  So did Andrei/Andron Konchalovsky^[3], in his book The Enlivening Deception (M., 1999).

Elena Solovey and Natalia Leble in a surviving still from Khamdamov’s Nechayannye radosti (1972).

What was so special about the film that brought its director from nowhere to the spotlight?

I think that for the American audience, Khamdamov’s films are one more example of the strangeness of the Russian cinema, and of European cinema in general (see 366weirdmovies’ review of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia), because they almost lack the action which is so attractive for American moviegoers.  Khamdamov’s movies are different.  One can hardly write a paragraph on the plot.  As a postmodernist—but a distinctly Russian, non-narrative postmodernist—Khamdamov freely adapts the plot of the Saroyan play. For Rustam Khamdamov what matters is not so much WHAT HAPPENS, but IN WHAT ENVIRONMENT and HOW he shows it.

The images that later became Khamdamov’s trademarks first appear in My Heart’s in the Highlands^[4]: the room cluttered with every sort of art object in every space, ladies stockings hanging over a balcony rail, the peculiar, elegant ladies hat with the white band and feathers, and always visions of women and the Feminine.  The short film begins with a man playing a piano in a silent movie style.  The piano and its player rolls down the street.  The camera follows several characters—a smiling prostitute, two young wealthy girls, some boys on a bicycle, a black woman carrying a basket of flowers—through both the rich and the poor streets of a town before finally finding its main characters, a boy and his father and grandmother.  The grandmother is a retired opera diva (or so she claims), and the father is a poet who has been writing a single poem for his entire life.  The family wishes to entertain a visitor, the actor/musician MacGregor, who they meet in the street, but they have no money for breakfast.

They send the boy to get food from a local grocer.  The shopkeeper has loaned them food on credit before and is reluctant to do so again.  The boy must scheme to melt his cold heart to get food for the party.

The owner asks the boy when his father will have money to pay for the food. It is at this moment the phrase “It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it” is spoken. The boy is not just shrewd, he is a philosopher.  He understands that his father will never get any money for his “great poem.”

It seems to me that the entire film was made just to pronounce these words: “It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it.”

The boy eventually gets some breakfast and returns to his family and their visitor.  The group feasts and gets a little bit drunk.  They tell stories, MacGregor plays a song on his trumpet, the old woman dances the can-can.  The camera pans around the home and shows art objects stuffed into every corner.  The scene dissolves, and suddenly we see another woman in a garden sitting in a rocking chair.  Then she disappears, leaving nature alone.  Then the movie returns to the prostitute, Rosa, learning to ride a bike in a vacant lot with the help of some boys.  The piano from the beginning of the film rolls by, this time with a young girl sitting at it, playing a duet with the original pianist.

It ends here, a poetic, nostalgic movie without any special plot or idea. And we ask ourselves: “Why, why it is so appealing, charming, even compelling?”  A. Konchalovsky asks similar questions in one of his interviews: “I will say more: the picture My Heart’s in the Highlands influenced me greatly―while making Dvoryanskoe gnezdo [A Nest of Gentry]^[5] I found myself under its spell. I watched the picture several times and each time I could not understand, why it impressed me so much, why it disturbs me, and I do not fear to ask, what is so special in it?” Later he goes back to this question, and comes to the conclusion: “It was very beautiful, though there was some mannerism in it… Alas, but My Heart’s in the Highlands happened to be [Khamdamov’s] only listed work.  Later, there was a sad story with the unfinished film Nechayannye radosti [Unintentional pleasures] (1972), which was recycled and reappeared as Raba Liubvi (1976) [A Slave of Love] by Nikita Mikhalkov.  And then goes one more sad story―with Anna Karamazoff, which nobody has ever seen but at Cannes. Where it is now?  It is amusing, that A Nest of Gentry was made influenced by Fellini and Khamdamov. A great classicist and a student of the VGIK!”^[6]

Rustam Khamdamov is first of all an artist. An artist who is fallen in love with life, once and for ever. For him life is the eternal Feminine, in the vast diversity of the female imagery, from a simple young prostitute Rosa who dreams to meet a man that will take her abroad, the young girls with the nurse, the black woman with the flower baskets, and the lady in the rocking chair in My Heart’s in the Highlands (1967) to the neglected opera divas of Vokaldy paralelder [Vocal Parallels] (2005).

As mentioned before, after the success of My Heart’s in the Highlands, Khamdamov made a movie based on the poetics of Russian silent film, Nechayannye radosti [Unintentional Pleasures] (1972).  It was unfinished due to some conflict between the director and the production managers.  Furthermore, the part of the film that was completed was banned. The managers of Mosfilm, the major movie production studio in the USSR, ordered the camera negatives destroyed in 1974. Twelve years later three and a half boxes of the work material were found. They were rescued by Ilya Minkavetsky, the project’s cameraman. What survives today is about 30 minutes of a rough cut and a dozen production stills. Meanwhile the screenplay was rewritten. Nikita Mikhalkov recycled the story, the costumes, and the main actress Elena Solovey, for his popular film A Slave of Love [Raba liubvi] (1975).  This was a new blow for Khamdamov.  He left Moscow.  For many years nobody in Moscow knew where he was or what was he doing.

It took Khamdamov about 16 years to recover from this blow, and in 1991 he completed his new film Anna Karamazoff, described by Mike Haberfelner as “less a narrative piece of film but a metaphoric and bizarre, even surreal journey through 1940′s Russia and beyond that makes its point through impressive images rather than a coherent story…”  Khamdamov cast the iconic actress Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim, 1962), as the female lead and inserted the remains of Unintentional Pleasures into this new film.  This caused another scandal and led to one more disaster for the director and his films.

At times, the saga of the production of Anna Karamazoff reads like a detective story.  Moreau and the producers had a falling out at Cannes, and Anna Karamazoff was never released to the general public; but even before that, a lot of strange and inexplicable things happened in the production.  The production quickly ran over budget, and foreign investment was sought to complete it.  The French producer Serge Siberman and the French firms Pairmedia and Victoria-Film-Production were brought in to help complete the film.  (As you might know, Serge Silberman was at that time one of the greatest international film producers. He worked with Becker and Kurosawa, and made five or six pictures with Buñuel.)  With Moreau on board, Silberman had high hopes for the film and wanted to exhibit it at the Cannes festival in 1991.

At this point things turned even stormier for the already troubled production.  Silberman requested cuts, particularly asking for the deletion of a dream sequence that Khamdamov thought essential.  He also requested adding a prologue explaining that Moreau was a prisoner returning from the Gulag.  Khamadamov made some cuts and resubmitted the film, only now with new added scenes.  Silberman was exasperated.  He  had promised to deliver the film to Cannes and it seemed like it would never be completed.  Eventually he gave Khamdamov a twelve day ultimatum to complete the editing, and flew the director to Paris.

In the meantime there were problems between the French and Russian producers.  Mosfilm had a right to keep the original negative, but Silberman convinced them to release it to him so he could have the print struck in Paris, arguing that the Russians would do a sloppy job.  Silberman arranged to have a new agreement signed on short notice at the airport as he was leaving for Paris.  Rumors circulated that he had secretly changed the terms of the contract at the last moment, to Mosfilm’s financial disadvantage.  Also, according to representatives of Mosfilm’s Krug studio, the folder with the production papers had mysteriously disappeared from the studio archives.  In the end it appears the film was exported from Russia without any legal authorization except the oral agreement of Mosfilm’s administrator, who seemed was happy to get rid of the crew, the film and the producer. The USSR was still in shock from what it saw as a tragic “divorce with its partners”, i.e. the former Soviet Republics.  Movie producers, along with many other industries, found themselves heading towards an abyss.  The negative was never returned to the Russians.

Meanwhile Khamdamov and his editor slaved day and night to edit the film in twelve days so it could premier at Cannes.  Khamdamov says that the polite requests Silberman made to make cuts in the film turned into rude demands once they arrived in Paris.  In the end, the two agreed to assemble two cuts of the film: Khamdamov’s long version, and the shorter edit Silberman preferred, which was to be shown at Cannes.

The film was highly anticipated, but Cannes turned into a disaster.  A few days before the festival was to begin, Khamdamov contacted the organizers and said that he would remove the film from competition unless his cut was screened instead of Silberman’s preferred version.  The French producer had no choice but to cave in to this ultimatum.

During the first screening, Khamadamov’s assistant went into the projection booth and placed his finger in front of the lens so that the explanatory captions Silberman had ordered added to the prologue could not be read.  This was scandalous, but it was nothing compared to what happened at the crucial press screening the next day.  The audience began walking out after ten minutes.  The main reason may have been the behavior of star Jeanne Moreau, who began to shout “merde! Merde! Merde!” as the screening went on.  She had not seen the director’s cut before, and was shocked to find that her starring role had been de-emphasized.  Khamadamov had made the unused black-and-white footage from his unfinished Unintentional Pleasures the centerpiece of the film.

After the fiasco at Cannes, Anna Karamazoff was never released to theaters, and to date has not been issued on home video. This make it essentially a lost and legendary film.

Why am I providing such a detailed account of the situation around this movie? Because in my view it explains much of Rustam Khamdamov’s behavior.  He appears to make something extraordinary, extraordinary films that for some reason (each time different) disappear and for practical purposes do not reach their audience. Any other person would be completely destroyed as a creative personality. But not Rustam Khamdamov.

After each new blow he disappears for several years, only to appear again like the legendary Phoenix.

On writing this last sentence, I am reminded of his latest movie, Vokaldy paralelder [Vocal Parallels] , which happily has reached its audience, but only after nine years of production due to numerous obstacles and stoppages. What is THIS film about?  Again, no definite plot, but a kind of a concert-film.  You most probably exclaim in astonishment, absolutely disappointed: What?! A concert?  Yes, it’s a surreal, impressionistic concert of classical opera pieces performed by several retired Soviet opera divas: Roza Dzhamanova, Araksiia Davtian, Bibigul’ Tulegenova, and the late Erik Salim-Meriuert (Kurmangaliev), a fantastic countertenor.

Erik Kurmangaliev in Vocal Parallels costume and makeup.

Those of you fascinated by or at least curious about this undoubtedly weird movie may read the short but very accurate review by Polina Barskova (University of California, Berkeley): “…shot in Kazakhstan, the land to which the film pays homage, with its snow-covered mountains; the language of the narrative; and the strange sensation of freedom, desolation, and spaciousness produced by the vacillating image of this ancient country… But it would be very wrong to say that Khamdamov’s film takes place in Kazakhstan or is about it! The space of Vocal Parallels is an imaginary locale of lost memories and ambitions….”

Kamdamov is no doubt one of most interesting and enticing personalities in Russian cinema, and was until recently absolutely underrated both at home and abroad. His style may be compared to Sergey Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates).

His movies are spectacular, striking, eye-catching, astonishing, and gorgeous, such that they may be described by one word: STUNNING.

Although neglected as a film director, there is no doubt Rustam Khamdamov is respected as an artist and painter.

Rustam Khamdamov’s watercolor “Nina”

In 1992 Rustam Khamdamov was granted the Jacques Chirac Grant by Paris City Hall as an outstanding contributor to world culture.  Until 1995 he lived in Paris, where he worked anonymously making designs for the haute couture houses of Milan, Paris and New York, worked as an artist, and designed jewelry for the American company Russian World Gallery. In 1997 he was awarded the prestigious Russian “Triumph” prize for his work as an artist, playwright, and film director. In 2003 Khamdamov was honored with the Russian Grand Prix as a national cultural hero (Academician Piotrovskiy, Director of the Hermitage Museum, was commission chairman).

In 2003 he became the first living Russian artist in history whose work was officially included in the Hermitage Contemporary Collection.  Artists, art theorists, art historians and international critics such as Francesco Pellizi, David Ross, Valeriy Turchin highly estimate Khamdamov’s aesthetics and his artistic style. His works are also included in the collections of the State Teriyakov Gallery (Russia), the Zimmerli Museum of Rutgers University (USA), the National Gallery of Ravenna (Italy), and numerous private collections all over the world.

In an essay on Rustam Khamdamov^[7], theater critic Inna Solovieva asks with bewilderment: “May a person gifted by the Creator be present in the world without turning anything in it into cash, without profiting by his gift (let the profit be the artistic one: a film or a book)?” Her question refers to Khamdamov’s absolutely non-commercial attitude to directing films.

“It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it,” Rustam Khamdamov replied, as early as his student years.

APPENDIX 1: COMPLETE PLOT SUMMARY OF THE SHORT FILM V GORAKH MOYO SERDSTE (1967) [MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS]

My Heart’s in the Highlands starts with piano music, played in a silent movie style.

Still from V gorakh moyo serdtse

We hear a female voice reading the credit: “Improvisation on William Saroyan’s short story ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands.’” We see a very old street car leaving the depot. The piano is just inside the yard of the depot, and the performer continues to play his simple melody. The street car driver drives his trolley past the performer.  And the movie starts.  We read the caption: “It is early morning in the town” and see how the city awakens: a lady leaves a beautiful building with a Russian wolfhound and meets another young lady with a similar dog. Then we see a pair who are most likely marine college students, a young man and a young girl dressed in special marine uniforms, he in the typical black jacket and white short pants, while she in a white blouse and black skirt. They wear white marine caps. The pair walks by the sea quay. They stop, and begin competing at throwing small stones. A homeless, elderly musician with a trumpet goes by, sits on the steps of the quay, and starts playing just few notes on his instrument, as if a herald announcing his arrival in the town.

Then we are on a new street and again see the same performer and his piano, but now there is a new character: a young girl, most likely a prostitute, in a 1920s style hat with a black and white feather boa. It looks like she is returning home in the morning in a very good mood. She appears from out of the morning mist and goes down an empty street of a rich residential area. She approaches the piano and sits at it, taking place of the performer, and starts playing.  She plays the same melody but in quite a different style and rhythm―in the can-can rhythm.  Two young girls, most likely sea port workers, also in marine uniform blouses with kerchiefs tied around their heads, ride their bicycles down the same street. A black woman in a black dress with a white collar and hat carries flower baskets down a clean street, most probably in a wealthy area.  She walks to the rhythm of the music, smiling wide and showing her beautiful white teeth.  The elderly musician in his long black overcoat and old hat walks down another street, carrying his trumpet under his armpit.  He looks very weary. We see an old woman beating the dust off of pillows and placing them on a rail of the balcony of a dilapidated building to dry.

Again Rosa, the prostitute, appears, still in good mood.  It looks like she is always in good mood, smiling, revealing her big teeth and horsy upper jaw.  She walks, also in the rhythm of the music, down a slope paved with old stones, and a person (it is hard to tell the sex, most likely a female) carrying a big box looks at her and curses.  A young boy dressed as a choirboy is hurrying to the church sermon.  The black woman with the flower baskets walks in a ragtime rhythm.  Two little girls walk out of a wealthy home with their nurse, wearing very big hats decorated with white bands and feathers. (Hats of this style appear in each and every one of Khamdamov’s movies; it’s a trademark of his). Later, in the finale, we will see the elder of the girls playing a piano duet with the main performer.

But soon Rosa, the musician and the two young women riding the bicycles arrive at the crossroads where three streets meet, Rosa coming from one direction, the musician coming from another, and the young bicyclists from the third.  One of the bicycle riders makes circles around Rosa, almost riding over her shoes. Then they all continue to go their own ways.

Soon we see Rosa, the musician, and a new character, a boy, on a narrow street with dilapidated residential houses. We see white bed linens and curtains hanging across the street to dry, and it is clear we are in the district where poor people live.  With all the white linen hanging across it, the street is reminiscent of an Italian city.

A bridge crosses the street from one decaying house to another, and on the bridge we see a strange couple.  She looks like an elderly female clown with weird makeup, dressed in a vintage dress. Later we learn that she was an opera singer who toured all over the world―according to her; it’s possible she only imagines herself to be a retired diva.  Her son is an elderly man who informs us he is presently writing a poem; it later appears that he writes this one poem for his entire life.  His mother presents him as “one of the greatest unknown poets of the world”.

The musician presents himself to the couple telling them that he is a great actor McGregor whose “heart is in the highlands;” at the moment he is thirsty and asks for a glass of water.  Rosa teases the boy, asking about his grandmother, but the couple on the bridge invite MacGregor to their home to share a meal with them.  But it comes out they have nothing for breakfast, nor any money to buy it. Thus, they send the boy to Mr. Kozak, the owner of a small grocery/pub who used to give them food on credit.  They tell the boy it is his job to get the food, and we understand he does everything so that his parent and grandparent will not starve.

The boy goes to the grocery and approaches Mr.Kozak, but is smart enough not to ask him straight away for some food, again on credit.  He begins “Hello Mr. Kozak. What would happen if you found yourself in China alone and without a penny in your pocket?”

But Kozak wants to get his money and replies quite curtly, “What do you need?  Have you brought money?”

But the boy knows what he needs. His goal is to get some food for the family and the guest.  So his reply is: “Money? We are talking about a man in China. How would you feel in China in such a situation?”

“But you’re not in China and neither is your dad. I will not give you anything on credit anymore.”

A question comes to one’s mind: how do these people survive?

At that moment a young and very beautiful girl, Mr. Kozak’s daughter (Elena Solovey) appears, cordially greeting the boy.  The proprietor’s attitude changes to the opposite, especially after the boy asks the owner how his “beautiful daughter” is doing after she disappears into an office behind some curtains. The father’s heart melts and he starts to pack food for the boy―a pound of cheese, two loaves of white bread, and a bottle of wine.

“What’s your father’s occupation?” asks a visitor to the pub who was sitting at the table and listening to the discussion.

“My father writes poetry.  That’s all he does. He is one of the greatest unknown poets of the world.”

The latest words make Mr.Kozak even more generous.  He opens the cupboard behind his back and adds two additional cans of food for “the greatest unknown poets of the world”.

“It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it,” is the answer the boy gives when the owner asks when the father is going to pay for the foodstuff. 

The boy returns home and the feast starts.  They are getting full and a little bit drunk, or better to say, more relaxed feeling free to say what they think. And each person says what he or she has dreamt to say aloud for a long time. They are in the company of equals―a hypothetical former opera diva, an actor-musician, and a poet.  But the paradox is that they are talking to themselves. The lady tells about her success in Morocco, Egypt, China, etc. while she was a young opera singer. She recollects her contracts and lovers, but his husband and the son tease her. At that moment her son (grandson?) climbs up on the chair tells MacGregor several times that she lies; he is tremendously happy to be, as he thinks, the focal point of the adults’ attention.  The poet says: “Oh, she is a great woman!” And we understand that she was his Muse.  But from his tone we feel that “only a great woman could be next to the great poet.”

The lady decides to go to her bedroom and to put on her old gown.  But she is too fat now to fit into it.  She even asks the boy to pull her corset tighter.  But alas!  She grew irreversibly fat.  She is upset and cries, lying down on her bed. But all of a sudden she gets up from her bed and starts dancing a can-can dance with the boy (being already appropriately dressed in the underwear of that epoch). Then she comes out to the dining room in her regular dress, keeping her wonderful old white gown in her hands as if evidence of her youth and beauty, and she starts dancing with the gown.

MacGregor, who has just stolen a piece of bread with meat and cheese to eat when he leaves the house, takes his trumpet and starts playing “a song of happiness”. The song is heard on the street, and the people walk out from their houses. Mr. Kozak and his daughter leave the pub to listen to the  melody that is performed by MacGregor, a melody “that makes hearts to tremble with sorrow and happiness,” as he says. He plays the same tune that has been heard during the entire film.

The camera pans around the room showing different objects: paintings of famous artists, some simpler paintings, sculptures, crystal wineglasses, books, shovels hanging from the ceiling, porcelain jars (some of them broken), a pair of lady’s stockings being dried on the balcony, a live white chicken on the balcony rails, etc., etc. (Actually, ladies stockings hanging and the balcony rails appear in practically all of Khamdamov’s films as a symbol of frailty, the feebleness of feminine beauty, and life in general—because beyond the rails lies the abyss.) The room is jam-packed with paintings and pictures hanging or simply leaning on the walls, antique furniture pieces, books, vases. In that artistic mess we perceive that the director is fascinated by the beauty of the world in all its forms, especially in the ‘fin de siecles’ aesthetic.

The decorations of the room are excessively aesthetic. There isn’t any empty wall or space. Such is the artistic language of the director, starting from his very first picture. We will observe the same in his other movies, such as Unintentional pleasures (1972).

All of a sudden we are taken to a garden where we see a lady sitting and rocking in a rocking chair. Water falls from an unknown source. The lady wears a beautiful hat, similar to the hats two little girls wore at the beginning of the movie, and similar to the one the old singer keeps in her bedroom. The rain stops, but the lady has disappeared from the garden. And we see the everlasting nature, the thick green garden (forest?) without any human presence, which again reminds us of the fragility of the human life irrespective of how beautiful it may be, and the undying nature of the world.

We now see Rosa, the prostitute, who is learning to ride the bicycle aided by a gang of little boys on the vacant land. Her first attempts look very comical.  Music is being played on a piano by the performer from the opening in a duet with a little girl in the typical Kamdamov-style hat, one of the girls from the rich house.  The piano goes down the city street while Rosa rides her bicycle accompanied by the boys… and the film ends.

Mr. Kozak and his beautiful daughter at the door of the pub listening to the music performed by MacGregor.

APPENDIX 2: SELECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF INTERVIEWS REGARDING THE PRODUCTION OF ANNA KARAMAZOFF (ORIGNIALLY PUBLISHED IN “Сеанс” №9: SEE  http://seance.ru/n/9/rustam-hamdamov/rustam-hamdamov FOR COMPLETE RUSSIAN TEXT)

Sergey Solovyev (film director, and art director of the Krug studio): I found Rustam in 1986, when Krug was established…. I said to him: “Make what you want.”  Soon he proposed the scenario of the opera movie “The Snow Maiden.” I told him: “OK, write a screenplay.” His response was: “What screenplay? Everything is clear.”  Three months later he declared that it was not “The Snow Maiden” he wanted to make but an entirely different scenario, and “it cannot be put short.” I asked him how much money would it cost, but Khamdamov did not know. We allocated about three million rubles. Then money was not any problem for the studio.

Lilia Ogienko, actress: It was so unexpected, like in some fairy tale…. Solovyev invites him to the Krug Association. He writes a screenplay, friends translate it into French.Somehow the screenplay gets into Jeanne Moreau’s hands. It’s not Khamdamov who selected her, but she who selected him. She reads the screenplay, sees his drawings, arrives in Russia, and they begin work.

…For Rustam everything is hard after sixteen years of complete neglect…everything is extremely hard and sometimes even unbearable―the need to have real, actual relations with the people… his inability to tolerate, his incapacity to bridge the gap between the desired and the real, the concept and its physical realization; and an absolute lack of understanding the money problems… And yes, a great actress, but a foreigner in the lead role, and there is no harmony between her and the mise en scene… he undoubtedly understands all this, he is man of a rare intelligence, but he is nervous. And all this continues ad infinitum, it lasts for long, too long…

Despite all the difficulties, he continues to work under conditions Western directors cannot imagine. However, no one can stop the collapse.  The situation continues to aggravate. Every day the production costs increase, and Mosfilm cannot afford it anymore. All of a sudden some western firms appear that are ready to help finance the completion of the project. They become the saviors of “Anna Karamazoff.”

Lyubov Arkus, journalist: On March 18, 1991 the Krug Association of Mosfilm studios signed an agreement of partnership in the Anna Karamazoff production. The agreement was signed by the representatives of Mosfilm and the Director of Parimedia, Mr. Mark Ruscar.,, The Agreement began March 28, 1991, after the initial sum was agreed.  According to this Agreement, Mosmedia, a French-Soviet joint venture, represented the interests of the Soviet Union and took upon itself rights and responsibilities of Mosfilm, which had been outline in a previous contract with the firm Victoria-Film-Production. In my view, from this point on the situation becomes confusing and ambiguous…

Sergey Solovyev: After the initial budget was exceeded, the financial situation of the production was extremely complicated and the production approached catastrophe. At that moment appeared a gentleman with a cigar from the Mir Theatre (Mark Ruscar) and the famous French producer Serge Silberman.

Mark Ruscar: Silberman arrived at Jeanne Moreau’s request.  He was her friend. He watched the unfinished film, and liked it. It ran about two hours and thirty minutes. Silberman talked to the director and the crew, and they agreed to cut it shorter.  Silberman had already decided to show the picture in Cannes. He flew off to Paris, returned in a week and watched it for the second time.  Silberman did not understand and was irritated: the director made some cuts, but at the same time added more material which was not in the previous version.

Inna Brozhovskaya (editor):  He [Khamdamov] called me and said that it is necessary to finish the picture in 12 days… We worked until two-three A.M. without days-off. We had an electric teapot… Once I saw Rustam sitting in front of the teapot, which had fogged up his glasses.  He said: “Inna, I think I’m blind from the fatigue.”

Sergey Solovyev: The French predicted success at the Festival and called for us to complete the picture as soon as possible, as soon as possible. I hoped these people would make Rustam finish it. I understood that there is no limit to his shamanic tricks with the film, but he did not know how to stop himself. I hoped that the people, as tough strangers, would be able to persuade him.

Lyubov Arkus:  Earlier negotiations had been held in Moscow on April 28, 1991 between Mr. Dostal’, the managing director of Russia’s Mosfilm, with Silberman and Ruscar representing the French. They merely discussed technical issues about the handing over of the original negative by the Mosfilm laboratory to the French part without the preliminary production of the intermediate positive and second negative. The management of Mosfilm yielded to Silberman’s request and agreed to hand over the negative. This violated a contract term regarding the unconditional retention of the original by Mosfilm, the production studio.

Mark Ruscar: Silberman turned directly to Dostal’, the Mosfilm administrator, and told him that it was necessary to take special measures for the picture be completed in time.
- Did Khamdamov share the desire of the producers to exhibit the film at the Cannes Festival?  – asks the interviewer

It was impossible to understand what Khamdamov wanted. He gave impression that he was indifferent to the future of the picture, provided they did not interfere with him and he could proceed editing the film…. Mr. Silberman makes the following proposal to Dostal’. He invests additional 1 million francs and takes all the materials to Paris.  They take Khamdamov, his assistant and the editor as well.  A standard print is printed in Paris.

Sergey Solovyev:  Silberman insisted the copy be printed in Paris, arguing Moscow would make it carelessly. He requested the negative, promising to return it to the studio as soon as the copies are made… Dostal’, who never trusted anyone under any circumstances, bit and signed the release, accepting Silberman’s word of honor.  It was late April, and the Festival was to begin May 9.

Lyubov Arkus: On April 29, 1991 in the Sheremet’yevo Airport, Mosfilm offered Silberman the previously approved contract to sign. There is a theory that Silberman had changed the text, already signed by Mr. Dostal’, changing the terms of the contract and affecting the future income of Mosfilm… According to the same account, Moscow customs had a copy of Silberman’s written obligation to return the exported items back to Russia within three months.

Rustam Khamdamov: While in Moscow, Mr. Silberman asked me to cut an entire dream sequence from my film Anna Karamazoff, a piece that had been included in my 1974 material and saved by my cameraman, Ilya Minkavetsky.  Mr. Silberman was aware of the fact that I believed the omission of this most important scene would make the film less understandable. I respect him, but it seemed to me that such anti-artistic proposal on his part could not be intentional. Most likely, he took this decision impulsively. Leaving for Paris, I was convinced that we would be able to find common language. Moreover, when we were in Moscow, it was just a proposal, but not an order. In Paris the situation became tougher. Mr. Silberman demanded I cutting out dream sequence, no matter what. I refused to comply with his requirements. He forbade me to approach Éclair factory and standardized the copy himself.

Mark Ruscar: In Paris, Silberman and Khamdamov could never come to an understanding regarding the editing. As a compromise, they decided to make two versions of the film: one long and another short.  Silberman was sure that the short version would be shown at the Festival… Then, a standoff happened, like in a Western. On the eve of the screening we learned that Khamdamov had talked to Jil Jacob, the director of the Festival, and declared his intention to remove the picture from competition if the short version was shown. Negotiations began an hour before the film was to be screened. Silberman didn’t have any way out and agreed…

There are usually three screenings for a picture in competition: the first on the eve of the main day, then a second in the morning – for the press, and in the evening – the main showing. There is a ridiculous anecdote from the first screening. At the last moment Silberman had ordered that at the beginning of film there should be a caption explaining to the viewers that Jeanne Moreau’s character is a woman who had just returned from a Gulag camp to her native city. We considered that without this caption it would be impossible for the audience to guess what was the movie about. When Russians learned about this caption Khamdamov’s assistant went to the projection booth and shut the projector with his finger so that the caption could not be read. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Cannes Festival. The next day the picture suffered a disastrous fiasco.

Rustam Khamdamov: During the screening a whistle was heard in the hall, and after 10 minutes spectators started leaving. Those who stayed to the end applauded fervently. But even the applause was a symptom of the total crash, for it was the applause of solidarity of those who go against the established view… The public opinion … had been already formed. However, I hardly remember this screening because of Jeanne Moreau’s behavior.  As soon as the black and white film started, she, who had been my devoted friend immediately turned into my merciless enemy. She yelled and demanded to stop the showing. I was scared something bad might happen to her.

Inna Brozhovskaya: Ms. Moreau shouted: “Merde, merde, merde!” and stomped her feet. I understand why she was so infuriated.  It was to be her film, but all of a sudden the black-and-white footage from Unintentional Pleasures turned out to be the centerpiece. Really this piece and its expansion were always more important for Rustam.  Jean Moreau had not seen the director’s final cut…

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

ENDNOTES

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Chukhrai, best known in the West for such his movies as Sorok pervyy (1956) [The Forty-first] and Ballada o soldate (1959) [Ballad of a Soldier].
2. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964) [Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors], Sayat Nova (1968) [Color of Pomegranates], Arabeskebi Pirosmanis temaze (1985) [Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme, Ashug-Karibi (1988), etc.
3. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0464846. Konchalovsky (as Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky) later wrote the script for Khamdamov’s never-completed Nechayannye radosti (1972).  He wrote the same scenario again for Nikita Mikhalkov’s Raba lyubvi (1976) [A Slave of Love], a kind of remake of the earlier unfinished film.
4. A complete shot-by-shot plot synopsis of this movie appears as Appendix A to this article.
5. Konchalovsky invited Khamdamov to be a designer for A Nest of Gentry.
6. Andron Konchalovsky, “The Enlivening Deception” (1999).
7. Magazine “Сеанс” №9, http://seance.ru/n/9/rustam-hamdamov/rustam-hamdamov

That was THE prevailing thought from the 60′s until quite recently and accurate only in theory because, like Beethoven, Chaplin really can’t be overrated, while Keaton certainly is (i.e., The General).

That doesn’t mean the above comparison has no truth and, naturally, it would be preposterous to say that Chaplin did not make some truly terrible films (King of New York and A Day’s Pleasure are people’s exhibit A).

However, Keaton’s  experimentalist stature is grossly exaggerated.  He was certainly the most innovative of the “A” list silent clowns, but was nowhere near as much so as either  the recently re-discovered Charlie Bowers or Harry Langdon, who, as blasphemous as it may sound, really had more memorably etched, modern characterizations (Chaplin did say he only felt threatened by Langdon).

In hindsight, Keaton’s innovation, which  surfaced  only  sporadically, seems suspiciously unintentional, even if his best films are indeed brilliant and highly innovative—The Playhouse and Sherlock Jr.

Years later, when working with Samuel Beckett on Film, Keaton revealed his  impatience with experimentation by loudly grumbling.

One walks away from Keaton’s best films feeling impressed.  One walks away from Chaplin’s best film unforgettably  moved.

There is hardly a more profoundly artistic, emotionally overwhelming ending than that of City Lights .  It remains the most memorable ending in screen history.  Montgomery Clift declared it the  greatest screen acting he had  seen (that’s saying quite a bit from an actor of Clift’s caliber, but perhaps he had not seen Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which is hardly acting in the gauged sense).

City Lights deserves all the acclaim it has received.  It is Chaplin at his most spiritual and at his most expertly balanced (the pathos does not draw attention to itself, as in many of the later films.  It is a sublime film in which truth and beauty go equally in hand).

Chaplin also ventured into the surreal, as witnessed in the stylish heaven sequence of  The Kid (which threw off many critics of the time).  The sets, the incomparable acting of Jackie Coogan (who remains the yardstick of child actors), the scene of the Tramp debating whether or not to drop his newly found orphaned infant into a street grate, and the heart-rending scene of faceless officials tearing the son away from his surrogate father will stay in the viewers’ minds long after the credits roll.

The Gold Rush ventured into surrealism as well, in the famous scene in which the starving Mack Swain imagines the Tramp as a sumptuous chicken dinner (thus, providing much later humor in many a Bugs Bunny cartoons).

There is also the surreal dream sequence of the Tramp frolicking with wood nymphs in First National’s SunnySide. Unfortunately, SunnySide‘s dream sequence is all too brief and the film, like most of Chaplin’s First National films, suffers from fragile construction, due mostly to studio interference and pressure (that studio honestly earned it’s notorious reputation).

By today’s standards, the Tramp is occasionally unlikeable, hardly politically correct, callous, mocking of conventions, selfish, and even cruel.  Yet, this eternal vagabond  remains  a deeply religious figure.  The Tramp is quite possibly the most truly religious of screen figures, which also makes him one of the most enduring.  Amidst all the misery and suffering, there is the Tramp, a bit like Luke’s Christian gospel, always standing up to the elite, affluent, beautiful ones and doing so, not just with humor, but with profound humor.  Chaplin’s Tramp is the most human of all clowns, and that all-identifying humanistic quality is the core of his enduring greatness.

Chaplin nearly stood alone among the silent clowns in refusal to wear blackface (Keaton and Langdon had no such qualms), but his character was not above pushing a hobo down in a frenzied effort to grab a cigar butt off the street, ashing a cigarette into a snoring man’s mouth, or contemplating stealing the church’s collection plate.

In an actual community church setting, the Tramp always seemed the proverbial fish out of water.  Naturally, there’s the famous opening  in Easy Street (his best film); and in The Pilgrim, the Tramp convict disguised as a priest does a unique pantomime David and Goliath, very much to the delight of a child and to the complete dismay of  the startled church elders (one of his greatest strengths was in tackling hypocritical pieties).

Chaplin was lucky in having two remarkable on-screen leading ladies, Edna Purviance and Paulette Goddard. Goddard is Chaplin’s most perfect partner (while Eric Campbell was his most perfect foil).  With Goddard (whom he married off-screen) we have a couple, the Gamin and the Tramp, who are as much an ode to the iconic American language of romance as is Sinatra’s “Hello Young Lovers.”

In his silent swansong, Modern Times, Chaplin and Goddard walk together, arm in arm into the expanding Hollywood sunset.  It is the last time we will see the Tramp as we have come to know him, and there’s comfort in knowing that this all embracing horizon welcomes this husband and wife.  Beyond that sunset all the misery, rejection, heart break, struggling and poverty are forever vanquished for the Tramp in all of us.

*Dedicated to long nights with Chaplin on the couch.

There has always been an uneasy relationship between avant-garde and outsider art. In 1985, Tim Burton and Pee-Wee Herman brilliantly thumbed their noses at any pretense of tension between the two with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Herman and Burton seemed refreshing fresh air to a relatively young medium that was dangerously growing stale with mass manufactured Hollywood product.

Of course, Herman went on to produce what was possibly the best television program in the last twenty years with Pee Wee’s Playhouse, that is until some uptight Florida cops busted him when they caught him pleasuring himself in an adult theater (which is bit like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500, one would think). This was during the heyday of the now practically extinct video store. Panic ensued and everyone from the Blue and Yellow Giant down to drug stores yanked every Pee Wee video from the shelves. Oddly enough, not too long after O.J. Simpson was accused of decapitating two people, those same video chains were in a panic trying to get every O.J video into their stores, which is quite a commentary on American mores: Hmmm, let’s see, it’s much worse to masturbate than to kill people. Now would I rather my child grow up to have a healthy sex life, or be a mass murderer?  (PS: On September 12th, 2001 those same corporate video chains were hustling to get all the Nostradamus videos in, feeding off American paranoia).

Meanwhile, Burton showed much promise.  The flawed Beetlejuice and Batman lived up to that early promise. Despite the absurd Hollywood fight ending, Edward Scissorhands was a much needed scathing satire on suburbia and was the work of a visionary working within the system.

Burton topped himself with a near masterpiece in Batman Returns; a grand guignol superhero burlesque with Michael Keaton in top form and, yes, the underrated Keaton made a much more complex, interesting Bruce Wayne than does the one note playboy act of Christian Bale (much in the same way George Reeves’ Clark Kent was far more compelling than Christopher Reeve’s tripping over the banana peel caricature Kent). Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny Devito consistently surprised as well in a film that threw in every kitchen sink metaphor into the mix with homages ranging from silent film (Walken’s Schreck and Phantom of the Opera), to the bible (killing of the first born).  Returns was so edgy that, according to rumour, it costs Warners their beloved Happy Meal deal.

Then came the long overdue Ed Wood. There has never been a better or more charming film about an outsider artist and, for better or worse, Wood symbolizes the quintessential outsider. Burton, along with stars Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Jeffrey Jones, and girlfriend Lisa Marie were “perfect.”   Ed Wood remains Burton’s greatest achievement, a sincerely heartfelt valentine to a fellow misfit.

Mars Attacks was a star studded misfire that should have forgone the big names and been much worse ( therefore making it much more memorable), but it seemed an honest misfire with some stand out scenes, including Lisa Marie’s alien.  The same could be said for Sleepy Hollow which reunited Burton with Depp and added Christina Ricci in for good measure. Despite some interesting set pieces and a few memorable performances, Sleepy Hollow was little more than a late 90′s Hammer film and took itself a bit too seriously even for that.

The end came with the ill-advised remake of Planet of the Apes, even if it too showed some promise, unfortunately ruined with the worst, most predictable ending of recent memory. Of course, this was also the film that ended Burton’s personal and professional relationship with Lisa Marie, after hooking up with Apes star Helena Bonham Carter. Perhaps Burton should have stuck with genuine eccentric Marie, as Carter; a complete weird-on-the-sleeve bore, seemed to have terminally rubbed off on him.

Big Fish was absurdly overrated and hardly the comeback film all the critics were predicting, because then came the overblown Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That was unfortunate, because the original, near classic Willy Wonka seemed ripe for an even better re-make. Depp was on-the-sleeve obvious, paling in comparison to Gene Wilder’s under the skin eccentric performance.

If Depp seemed horribly miscast and blatant in Factory, then he was an even paler, synthetic imitation of George Hearn’s made for TV, 1982 Sweeney Todd. Sadly, Depp seemed to personify the Hollywood trend of casting the “prettified.”

Predictably,and all too obviously, Burton and Depp are now teaming up for Alice in Wonderland.

Tim Burton: “Pseudo Avant-Auteur” is pure hype. Despite the claims of his rather annoying and tiresome school, he is, essentially, an auteur of a pop drivel which caters to very particular crowd consisting mostly of pulp comic book hounds wallowing in their illusion of pseudo intellect.

As much as Burton seems to have lost his nerve and all traces of originality, Johnny Depp has lost even more. Depp is another figure in Hollywood whose reputation is wholly undeserved.  He is hopelessly complacent, as his recent resume indicates. Depp is hardly the actor of ‘daring choices’ that his publicists make him out to be.  Besides Ed Wood, Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man are about the only roles of considerable interest. At at least, those films strived for something other than hawking a Disney ride.

Pauline Kael once speculated that Depp may be the next Brando.

The late Brando certainly made some misfires, but even during what is considered to be his lowest ebb, he appeared in a number of films that at the very least could be considered conceptually interesting failures: The Nightcomers (1971), Night of the Following Day (1968), Candy (1968), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Ugly American (1963) and One Eyed Jacks (1961, with Brando starring and directing).

Of course, the prospects of a Pee Wee’s Playhouse: The Movie certainly isn’t going to conjure up comparisons to anything Brando-like, but unless Mr. Reubens really screws it up (and he very well might) it’s going to be a damn sight more colorful than anything from the dull, hopelessly old hat combination of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.

While a number of prominent film critics, historians and luminaries have rightly praised the “Ranown” series (named after Boetticher’s production company), attention is often paid to the fact that Boetticher produced the series on a shoestring budget.  Thus, despite praise, the series and Boetticher himself are relegated to a second tier, “B” level, as if the monies poured into these films somehow affect and dictate their intrinsic value.

To the contrary, the Boetticher/Kennedy/Scott westerns are in every way equal to the larger budgeted collaborations of Ford and Wayne, Daves and Ford, Leone and Eastwood.

With these sparse, psychologically complex works, Boetticher did as much for the American western as Val Lewton did for the American Horror film in the 40′s.

The breakthrough Seven Men From Now (1956) was a long way from Ken Maynard’s white hat and bottle of milk atop a horse named Tarzan. It’s also far more aesthetically modernist, more taut, more complexly developed in character than the later, ultra-stylish westerns of Peckinpah and Leone (the exception being Peckinpah’s slightly overrated Ride the High Country, also starring Randolph Scott with Joel McCrea). Very few films in the genre can boast as richly developed characterizations. The Delmer Daves/Glenn Ford films along with the Anthony Mann/James Stewart cannon can arguably be mentioned in the same breath.

Seven Men From Now establishes Boetticher’s Ranown canvas. Randolph Scott was an actor of beautiful limitations and the director utilized Scott’s mere presence to compositional advantage.  The actor’s weathered face parallels the expressionistic, Cezanne-like rocky terrains.  Boetticher takes equal advantage of his hero’s range to etch a morally ambiguous personification.

Scott, out for revenge, seems, at first, to personify the mythological old west code of right and wrong.  He is ancient, laconic, sips coffee, and projects a virtuous nobility with a mere shifting of the eyes.  That is until his foil, Lee Marvin (superb here) astutely recalls how Scott had no qualms about stealing a friend’s wife.  Even Walter Reed, as Gail Russell’s weak, cowardly husband, surprises in an act of redemption. The power in the Boetticher films lies in the riveting conversations and in a shrewd slicing of viewer expectations.  There is a disconcerting, hushed quality throughout the film, even in those conversations, which project a tense, quiescent air of revelation.

Next week: perhaps the bleakest film of the cycle, The Tall T (1957).

“We must be cultural omnivores and raid all the art forms to enhance our own art”- Pierre Boulez; Modernist French composer.

Although, the meaning of postmodernism is replete with vagaries, one prominent characteristic of the so-called movement is that it abounds in eclecticism.  Pierre Boulez’s advice for artists to mantle a mental state of being cultural omnivores seems tailor made for much that is pronounced in postmodernism.  In that light, the movement had one of it’s most well-known, brilliantly driven, unofficial spokespersons in the late Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick, of course, patterned his body of film work after a Beethoven aesthetic.  Each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies had an individual theme.  The Eroica was Beethoven’s initial support, later renounced, bio-portrait of Napoleon.  The 4th, according to Robert Schumann, was a Greek maiden between two Norse gods.  The immortal fifth was THE anti-war statement.  The 6th , a pastorale; the 7th, a series of  rhythmic movements; the 8th, more abstract, is a favorite among modernist conductors; and, of course, the mighty Ode to Joy.

Kubrick wanted to create a work in each of the genres and it’s unfortunate he never got to make his western (Marlon Brando foolishly took over directing One Eyed Jacks, after having Kubrick sacked).  Regardless of genre, each Kubrick film is filtered through his own unique sensibilities (i.e., the dehumanization of man), thus rendering the idea of applying something as superfluous as a genre akin to hopelessly trivial labeling.  When it comes to Kubrick, the genre/subject is almost incidental.  Kubrick defiantly stamped his personal vision onto everything he approached (as author Stephen King would discover, to his complete dismay, when Kubrick took on The Shining.  Kubrick was no assignment director).

Volumes have been written about Kubrick’s body of work with wildly varying and opposing opinions, but the almost unanimous conclusion that can be drawn is that Kubrick’s films are not designed for casual viewing.

Indeed, upon repeated absorption, Kubrick’s films reveal the degree to which Kubrick was a cultural omnivore.

Kubrick’s rep as being a “supremely controlled” artist is a misnomer.  He was just as apt for experimentation, improvisation, and utilizing ideas from actors, etc.  Hence, Kubrick’s reason for disallowing the publishing of his scripts (which he often deviated from) and ordering the destruction of all unused footage.  In it’s rough cut, Clockwork Orange was originally a four hour film.

One of Kubrick’s most compelling scenes in Clockwork Orange was, by turns, supremely controlled and experimental, yet gives compelling insight into Kubrick’s multi-hued layering and eclectic aesthetics.

Alex and the droogs appear at an ultra modernist home, which welcomes visitors with a lit sign, marked simply “Home.” Kubrick’s customary symbolic red and white design work is as heavy laden here as it is throughout the rest of the film.

Husband Patrick Magee types away at his typewrite when the doorbell rings.  The doorbell sounds of the overly familiar first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth: Fate knocking at the door.  However, those four notes sound deceptively innocuous here, almost tinkling.

The camera pans across the room revealing Magee’s redhead wife, Adrienne Corri, dressed in red pajamas, sitting comfortably in a white, plastic chair in the next room.  Husband and wife are detached from one another, echoing the barrenness of the house.  Corri answers the door to hear Alex proclaim “there has been an accident outside” and his request to use the telephone.  Corri is reluctant, but Magee instructs her to let the visitors in.  With the unlocking of door, Fate enters in like a Beethovenian storm.

The “Singing in the Rain” beating/dance was not scripted and was improvised, worked, and re-worked until Kubrick was satisfied with the flowing tone.  Adding this element was a brilliant instinct on Kubrick’s part.  Without it, the breaking-in would have felt more like a tempest than a storm.

After Magee is tied up and beaten, Alex and the droogs turn to Corri.  They take her in front of painting on the wall and begin to rape her.  The visuals in this vignette reveal a homage narrative, akin to developing patterns in an unfolding puzzle.  The design of the painting on the wall has a pronounced familiarity.  In it’s colors and forms, it is a homage to Gustav Klimt and bears striking resemblance to Klimt works like “Farmhouse with Birch Trees”.  Corri appears as a Klimt model personified.  She is Klimt’s mysterious red head, pale and thin (i.e., “Hope 1″).  She and the scene call to mind imagery from Klimt’s “The Beethoven Frieze” (especially in the sections, “The Longing for Happiness Finds Repose in Poetry” and “Hostile Powers”).  In essence, Kubrick is paying homage to Klimt paying homage to Beethoven.

Kubrick is always at his most provocative when employing aesthetics.  Indeed, this is what will give Kubrick his longevity, since shock value alone, naturally, dissipates with passing of time.  The provocative aesthetics of cinematic works like Luis Bunuel’s 1930 L’ Age D’ Or or Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon are just as provocative now as they were when they were new, the same applies for Kubrick films such as 2001, and even Disney’s Fantasia.

Kubrick’s The Shining was initially a disappointment to many Stephen King fans and King himself voiced his complaints regarding the film, but the decisions Kubrick made in filming The Shining elevated it well beyond it’s initial pulp source.

The character Danny has an imaginary friend named Tony, who lives in Danny’s mouth and reveals psychic visions to him.  In the novel, Tony is revealed to be Danny’s future self.  This revelation warrants the predictable cynical groan of “Oh, I saw that coming a mile away!”  Wisely, Kubrick dispensed of King’s revelation and chose never to explain the presence of Tony.  The Danny/Tony relationship hints at something akin to the imagined, haunted relationship between Irene and Amy in the Val Lewton/Robert Wise Curse of the Cat People (an unjustly underrated film).  Another Kubrick deviation from the novel concerns the Scatman Crothers character of the cook, Dick Hallorann.  In the novel, Hallorann returns to the Overlook Hotel, a bit like Mighty Mouse proclaiming “Here I come to save the day.” Again, Kubrick made a wise decision in not going for that bit of drama.  Instead, Kubrick sets the situation up and then pulls the rug out by having Jack kill Hallorann almost instantly.

However, the most haunting and provocative element of Kubrick’s “The Shining” is in the nearly hidden aesthetics.

Kubrick repeatedly utilized the aloof, detached conducting of Berliner Herbert Von Karajan, albeit, pre-recorded.  Kubrick was one of the few directors who favored pre-recorded music over a new film score, adding a collage-like element to his films.  He pre-assembled the score at a fairly early stage, often choreographing a scene to the music, hence his fear that a new score would seriously compromise his vision.

Kubrick had previously used Karajan’s recording of Johann Strauss in 2001, juxtaposing “The Blue Danube” against the image of two spaceships, essentially having intercourse in space (an image repeated from Dr. Strangelove).  He chose Karajan’s supremely controlled recorded performance of Bela Bartok’s “Music for strings, percussion and celesta” to create one of the most under the skin, disturbing narrative elements of The Shining.

Kubrick used the music’s adagio movement to emphasize dramatic patterns and contrasts repeatedly.  The symmetry of the hedge maze, Danny riding his big wheel (first against static carpet, then hard tile, then static carpet again), Jack bouncing a ball against the wall (improvised) and Jack repeatedly typing page after page of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (eachtyped with individual structures) are juxtaposed against the patterns and contrasts found in Bartok’s music.  These elongated, almost static moments are well suited to the music chosen.  The psychological terror, like the music, builds slowly, inexorably.  These moments evoke something far more disturbing than an image of blood flowing from a wall, or ghostly girls in the hallway.

Pablo Picasso once said “I do not find, I steal.“ Kubrick would certainly have related to that remark, but like the painter, what Kubrick stole wound up being a mere tool, a kind of metaphoric diving board from which he sprang, only to re-emerge from the pool awash in his own individuality.

These are but a few meager examples of the rewards reaped during the discover of Kubrick’s riches.  His body of work will continue to provoke debate and discussion for years to come.  It is almost impossible to overrate him.