When I was in Paris the other week I came across the poster for Robert Bresson's brilliant A Man Escaped (1956). That made me want to look around for posters of his other films, and here are some examples. They are all French and quite wonderful!
Sunday 28 October 2012
Thursday 25 October 2012
Anthony Asquith
A critic once called Anthony Asquith the most
underrated British filmmaker of all time (although considering how underrated
British cinema in general is many filmmakers can plausibly claim that dubious
honour). The one thing that Asquith's name brings to mind is of course theatre
adaptations, from Oscar Wilde to Samuel Beckett, and in particularly plays by
Terrence Rattigan and George Bernard Shaw. He did three adaptations on Shaw's
plays, with the version of Pygmalion from 1938 the most famous. But it
was with Rattigan he worked most closely. Together they made 10 films, and they
are among Asquith's best, especially The Browning Version (1951) with
its heartbreaking performance by Michael Redgrave. However, there is a lot more
to Asquith than adaptations. When I began looking at his films one thing I felt
was that they had a musical sensibility, that music was important to them, and
it did not come as a surprise when I later read that he was passionate about
music, and apparently had an encyclopedic knowledge about composers. He also
played the piano and would perhaps have become a musician if a teacher had not
told him he lacked the necessary skills to become great. So instead he
discovered the cinema. He has said that during his time in Oxford, as a
student, he went to the movies constantly, learning the technique and trying to
come up with his own ways of telling stories. He also went to Hollywood to closely study how the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch worked (there is a similarity there between him and Hasse Ekman).
Asquith's career had its ups and downs. He began in the late
1920s very successfully with four silent films, including Underground (1928) and the expressionistic A Cottage at Dartmoor (1929), Then in the 1930s he was less
successful, although some of the films are of interest, with Pygmalion being both a great success and
a great film. This is a multi-authored film, with Asquith, Shaw, Leslie Howard
and David Lean, who was editor, and others all contributing with their own
ideas and talents to the finished film. This too is a remarkably
expressionistic film, in editing, framing and lighting, and what is so impressive,
besides Wendy Hiller’s performance, is that it does not fall apart but actually
holds itself together as a sustained piece of bravura filmmaking. It is a
testament to Asquith’s skills and boldness, as well as his patience and
kindness, that it all comes
together in the end. A film made during the war, Cottage to Let (1941 aka Bombsight
Stolen), is also something of a marvel. It is a film that is part comedy,
part thriller, part romance, and yet it too works surprisingly well, including
John Mills performance as a Nazi agent posing as a RAF pilot. It also has
rather stylish visuals. This film, and others, shows Asquith’s love for the
medium and his eagerness to try out new things, visually as well as
narratively. However, for the next phase of his career, he changed style. Now his
films becomes more restrained, even austere, and this phase holds most of his
great films. One brilliant example is The
Way to the Stars, (1945), one of the films he made with Rattigan. It is
exquisitely shot, framed and edited, and tells the story of the life and
frequent deaths of pilots, British and American, on an airbase somewhere in
England. It is told in flashbacks, beginning with tracking shots across the now
empty airfield, where only the ghosts and the memories of the pilots and the
crew remains. Other films to mention from this phase are The Winslow Boy (1948), The
Browning Version and Carrington V.C. (1954).
Then in the late 1950s Asquith somewhat changed track again and the films
become more glossy and “international”, where before they had been distinctly
English, both in themes and in setting.
It is tempting to see Asquith as a British equivalent of
George Cukor. Although Cukor shows more coherence, not least in terms of style,
and is the better director, there are strong similarities. The focus on acting
and adaptations is the most obvious link. But like Cukor Asquith, at least from
the 1940s and onwards, does not try to “open up” the adaptations but instead
use the source material as a strength, and with exquisite sensitivity in his handling
of the movement of the actors and the camera on the set, or the lack of
movement when called for, make the films cinematic without being flamboyant. (Our notions of what is cinematic and what is not are often still rather crude.) Take
a film like The Importance of Being Earnest (1954). It begins with an
audience settling down at a theatre to watch a stage performance of the very
play the film is based on. Here Asquith has foregrounded the film's theatre
roots, and the film is done as if it takes place on a stage. At the end it
returns to the theatre in the beginning, with the curtain coming down. By
deliberately staying so close to the theatre the film makes for an interesting
case-study when discussing stage adaptations and notions of what and what is not
cinematic. The use of editing and close-ups are techniques that the theatre has
not got. Something else that differs between cinema and theatre is the use of
framing. It is not that the theatre does not use framing devices, but the
cinema can use framing in different ways, and this is something the skillful
director can work wonders with, and in so doing distinguishing the filmed
version of a play from a stage version of the same play. The Browning Version is an example of how a director’s precision in
framing can add layers of meaning to the words and the performance, and make a
film cinematic without having to include opaque camera movements or outdoor
scenery.
Among the noticeable things in Asquith’s films are the uses
of mirrors. Asquith puts them in his images to add frames to the larger frame,
to give a sense of larger world, or for startling effects, visual or
psychological. The ending of Cottage to
Let even takes place in a hall of mirrors. The films are also full of wit
and irony, which sometimes has a slight subversive effect. The effective and
morale-boosting film We Dive at Dawn (1943),
about the crew on the submarine Sea Tiger,
has several hilarious scenes, but the most surprising thing is the last line of
dialogue. Some officers are watching the submarine come and go in the bay, and
an admiral says “It's like I'm running a bloody bus service.” This kind of wit
effectively counterpoints the often heavy subjects Asquith deals with.
His passion for innovation, of taking every film as an
opportunity to try out new ideas and approaches also means that they are almost
all of them interesting in some ways. This is very much the case with The Woman in Question (1950 aka Five Angels on Murder). It is on the one
hand a not very exciting detective story about the search for the murder of a
woman called Astra, played by Jean Kent. But the way it is told is remarkable.
The detective, played by Jon Linnane, interviews several people about the woman
and what happened the night she was murdered. Each flashback is narrated by the
witness that is being interviewed, and they all have a completely different
take on Astra, and what kind of woman she was, and why she was killed. What she
says, how she says it, what she wears, and how she behaves in the various
flashbacks are all different and when the film is over we will have to guess
ourselves which of the many versions of Astra’s personality was the closest to
the truth. It is the same idea as Akira Kurosawa would explore later in Rashomon (1951), letting an event being
told from each interested party’s own subjective view.
There is a lot more to discover about Asquith himself too,
and his films. This has only been an introduction. He is ripe for
retrospectives and critical discussions of his career. Suffice to say for now
that he was much loved by his cast and crew, and that he left a body of work
which is emotionally rich and filled with both great acting and creative
boldness.
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2013-07-11 I've changed two words that were incorrect. I'd also like to add that it is interesting to look at Asquith's films (at least some of them, such as The Browning Version) from a queer perspective.
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2013-07-11 I've changed two words that were incorrect. I'd also like to add that it is interesting to look at Asquith's films (at least some of them, such as The Browning Version) from a queer perspective.
Friday 5 October 2012
Reading Bazin (#3)
It is time for the third post in my series Reading Bazin. Today's post is about Death Every Afternoon, a perhaps lesser known piece. It is not included in the translated What is Cinema books (although it was in the French original) but is to be found for example in the anthology Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal Cinema, translated by Mark A. Cohen. (The title of Bazin's text is of course a reference to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.)
Death Every Afternoon is about a French documentary called The
Bullfight (La course de taureaux 1951). The piece is not very long but it is of interest for two reasons. First because it is a celebration of the
art of editing, relevant since Bazin is often thought of as being against editing, and second because it is a formulation of Bazin’s ideas
about death’s relationship with cinema.
The review begins with an appreciation of Myriam Borsoutsky’s skills
as an editor. Among the films on which she worked Bazin mentions another documentary, Paris 1900 (1947) and The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry 1936). She also worked on a number of other films by Guitry. After emphasising the brilliance of the editing, Bazin
declares that “[w]hen it is good, the art of the editor goes well beyond its
usual function – it is an essential element in the film’s creation”, but he makes the distinction between the Russian form of montage and
his own preference for découpage. Whereas montage is based on the idea of
symbolism and, as Bazin puts it, “the collision of images”, in The Bullfight the aim of the editing is realism and to
“fulfil both the physical verisimilitude of the découpage and its logical
malleability.” Here it is not a case of contrasting images to create new
effects out of the very collision but instead of having complementary editing,
where one image grows naturally out of its predecessor and in turn grows
naturally into its successor, and the technique is based on “precision and
clarity”.
As is only to be expected from Bazin, what he praises here
is the way realism is heightened by way of editing. Although he has primarily
written about the long take and deep focus, seamless editing is also shown to be able to serve the same master, the much vaunted realism. It is worth pointing out that Bazin's heroes, such as Wyler, Renoir, Welles and Fellini, cut more frequently than you might think, or that Bazin seems to remember. While he is right to argue that editing is " an essential element in the film’s creation" I think he is wrong in suggesting that it is only when it is particularly good. Editing is always an essential part, good or bad.
Bazin then goes on to discuss death and its relation with
cinema, even its profound centrality in the medium’s being. He suggests that death “is surely one of those rare events that justifies the term /…/ cinematic specificity.” This is partly
because cinema is the “[a]rt of time”, and not only “aesthetic time” but “lived
time”, and he refers to Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. The
point he wants to make is that on film, death, unlike in the
real world, is not a unique, once-in-a-life-time event. As soon as a death is
captured on film, in moving images, it can be repeated over and over again. For Bazin, death, and
sex, is something unique and special, and something which can never be
represented, only experienced. With cinema having the capacity to show death,
and then also resurrect the dead, as well as show the same person dying again
and again, our treatment of death, and perhaps relationship to it, has changed
because “nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our
possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal
dead-again of the cinema!”
And of course, it is only natural that such a discussion
should arise from a film about bullfighting, where not only bulls but matadors
are killed, and death, perhaps the art of death, is what the game is about.
Bazin ends the article with the following statement: “On the screen, the
toreador dies every afternoon.”
Reading Bazin #5 is here.
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A companion piece to Bazin's article is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Observations of the Long Take from 1967.
Henri Decaë, who would later be cinematographer on several of the most important films if the French New Wave was also cinematographer on The Bullfight, together with Jimmy Berliet.
The exact meaning of the word découpage has been elusive, and frequently misunderstood, but it can be said to mean the organic relationship of all shots, how they all contribute to the overall effect, which should be the "physical verisimilitude". Hence to equate découpage with editing, as has often been done, is missing the larger picture (literally). Découpage can exist already in the filmmaker's head prior to shooting, and can be written into the script.
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A companion piece to Bazin's article is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Observations of the Long Take from 1967.
Henri Decaë, who would later be cinematographer on several of the most important films if the French New Wave was also cinematographer on The Bullfight, together with Jimmy Berliet.
The exact meaning of the word découpage has been elusive, and frequently misunderstood, but it can be said to mean the organic relationship of all shots, how they all contribute to the overall effect, which should be the "physical verisimilitude". Hence to equate découpage with editing, as has often been done, is missing the larger picture (literally). Découpage can exist already in the filmmaker's head prior to shooting, and can be written into the script.
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