A few words on clichés

There is a scene in the Argentinian film The Puzzle (2009) where a couple is seen in bed at night, husband and wife lying side by side, apparently sleeping. I thought to myself "She will open her eyes ... now." And she did. It is such a well-established convention that I might have been tempted to make a bet, had I watched it with someone.

In the beginning of the first Bond film with Daniel Craig, Casino Royale (2006), Bond has had a fight with a man in a public toilet, and apparently killed him. But as he catches his breath after the fight the "dead" guy suddenly wakes up and reaches for his gun. This is a well-established cliché, although it may or may not be used so I would not have made a bet, unless I was a gambler.

Complaints about clichés in films is almost as old as the medium itself. Yet even though most would in all likelihood say that clichés were a bad thing more or less all films are filled with them, and it could not be any other way. Our lives and our speech are based on clichés, and consequently so is art. The trick is to learn to separate the invisible and necessary clichés from the bad and annoying ones. Or, as has been suggested, separate the clichés from the conventions, where clichés are just bad conventions. But I am not sure that all clichés are bad.

If I say "You broke my arm!" to someone, that is not a clichéd thing to say. If however I say "You broke my heart." that is a cliché. This is partly because "You broke my arm!" is literally true, the person did in fact break my arm. But the person who betrayed my love did not literally break my heart, my heart is pumping away oblivious of any emotional agony I might have. It is a metaphor, one that is used over and over again, and thus a cliché. However, few would get upset and say "Oh please, must you be so clichéd?" to the person who used that metaphor. It is acceptable. Similarly, to say "I fell in love with you." is not clichéd, to say "You stole my heart." is, but again perfectly acceptable.

I recently went to a photography exhibition and according to the curators the exhibition challenged and changed our conceptions of what a photo exhibition is. Obviously the exhibition did nothing of the sort. Also, I am not sure that those who went to see it had strong prejudices as to what a photo exhibition is anyway, besides it being an exhibition containing photographs. What the curators had done was writing down an art gallery cliché, and of the kind which is used regardless of its relation to the actual exhibition. (I suppose the only kind of photography exhibition that would be really challenging would be one without any photographs at all.)

But in order for a person to notice this that person must have been to many exhibitions and frequently come across that expression (such as I have). Repeated exposure is an essential aspect of clichés. That is why we are much more likely to condemn Hollywood films for being clichéd than films from most other countries, whereas a indigenous audience, or an expert on a particular national cinema, might find it just as clichéd as Hollywood cinema. Only different clichés. (Personally I feel that modern Danish cinema and so-called American independent cinema are about as clichéd as cinema gets.) You are in a much better position to judge the number of clichés in Swedish or Hungarian or Thai cinema if you are really familiar with their cinema and culture. What somebody might feel is a fresh approach is to another a boring cliché.

Often-times clichés are used because it is convenient. If instead of saying "She broke my heart!" I said "She strangled my ankles!" nobody would understand, even though both statements are equally nonsensical on a basic level. Many clichés pass by without being judged, or even noticed. But some stand out, and often annoy. I think one thing that is needed for a cliché to become annoying is if it is meaningless exactly because it is a cliché. That is the case with the killer who appears dead but is not really, as in Casino Royale. Something unexpected becomes expected after it has become a cliché. And they are so easy to avoid. It is the same as when some unexpected family secret is suddenly revealed by some drunk member at a wedding (which seems to happen in most, if not all, Danish films for example). What would be unexpected is if the wedding was an event of pure joy with not a single misstep or embarrassment.

Clichés come in all shapes and forms. A style of acting can be clichéd, a type of lighting can be clichéd, a twist in the plot, a setting, a title, an ending. In all kinds of films these different kinds of clichés are being used, even in much of avant garde cinema. And that is as it must be. A common mistake is to deliberately be anti-cliché, something which is often even more annoying than the original cliché because it is obviously made to be anti-clichéd, which is a bit of a cliché in itself. But, if it is good, and works, it can only be used once, or else it just turns into a new cliché. In North By Northwest (1959) Hitchcock wanted Thornhill (Cary Grant) to be attacked in the most unlikely and unclichéd of places so he sent him out in the countryside in broad daylight, to an immense flat field on which corn is grown. There, completely alone, he was attacked by  assassins. But that scene can not be repeated, because it would immediately be considered a copy or at best an homage to Hitchcock. It is too much of an anti-cliché as to be unusable thereafter. But there will always be scenes where people are attacked in dark alleys in the city.

A collection of essays and criticism by Martin Amis is called The War Against Cliché, but I do not think it is possible to avoid clichés, at least not if we want to make ourselves understood. What we should do is avoid the clichés that only draw attention to themselves as clichés.

Hill Street Blues

"When does it stop Francis?"
"I wish I knew that."

When I grew up my favourite television series was Hill Street Blues, about a police precinct in a non-specified town in the U.S. It was an MTM production which ran from 1981 to 1987 and I do not know what it was like in other countries but in Sweden it was a huge hit. The actors became rather famous, especially Michael Warren (I still remember how excited the media was when he visited Stockholm). Steven Bochco, who created it and wrote it together with Michael Kozoll, also became rather well-known, much like Michael Mann became known after Miami Vice. (Anthony Yerkovich, who was a major force behind Miami Vice, was also part of the creative team of Hill Street Blues for a few years, as was David Milch, now famous for Deadwood, among other series.)

As I have written before, Hill Street Blues was a key development in the history of television, and its impact of subsequent TV and cinema has been substantial. TV critics in general have remarkably short memories, but still occasionally Hill Street Blues is mentioned in passing. My own memory is rather long, but I decided to look at it today and see what I would think of it. It is hard to come by but I have been able to watch all of season 1 and a substantial part of season 2 (there are seven seasons), and it is just as good as I remembered it to be.

The Wire (2002-2008) is usually held up as being about as good as television gets, and there is no denying the power and quality of it. It is often said that it is like a snapshot of society, an anthropological study. This is exactly what Hill Street Blues feels like, and this is one of the things that make it so good, and so fascinating. It is as if the creators wanted to capture the conflicts in the underbelly of an unjust society, some kind of Marxist exposé of Reagan's America. It is not a pretty picture that is painted here, where the role of the police is not necessarily to combat crime but rather to control the lid on a pressure cooker, just making sure that too much steam is not let out at once. The police force is not pretty either, riddled with abuse, racism, sexism, corruption, alcoholism and violence. But it is not all bleak (it would not be as interesting if it was), there are also good men and women trying to do the best they can, even if it means negotiating a truce with a gang rather than locking them up for whatever crimes they have committed.

One remarkable thing about Hill Street Blues is that there are hardly any beginnings or endings. Things happen constantly, but nothing ever settles or comes to rest. Each episode is filled with a number of stories, some which lasts a whole season, some that lasts for a few minutes, but often they are somewhat opaque, and unpredictable. Things that seem unimportant suddenly escalate, things that were important suddenly fizzles out. A sequence might be funny but ends with an unexpected and tragic death, or a scene that begins dramatic ends with black humour. And you never know who might get shot. There is a real sense of urgency and desperation in the episodes, which is sometimes close to unbearable.

Hill Street Blues is filled with vignettes that can be quite powerful. In one episode a detective, Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano), helps a woman carrying her grocery shopping up a flight of stairs. When he is about to leave, she starts to cry. She is living alone with her mother (after the mother had a stroke), her husband left a year ago, and nobody has hold her since then. So she asks for a hug. Such moving snapshots of broken lives contribute to create a broad canvas of a whole society. The quote that opens this post (said after a pointless shooting) is also an illustration of the tone of the series. Sometimes despair is the only possible feeling.

The style of shooting is connected with the content. It has a rough edge, with jittery and "ugly" camera work, keeping close to the characters but constantly moving, as if trying to capture everything at once. It often misses the action though, as some things seem to happen just before the camera gets there. It has that quality which is often called "documentary", with people and things blocking the camera, dialogue hard to hear, and what we do hear is often just fractions of what is said, as people pass the camera. Sometimes the camera follows characters A and B, and then suddenly starts to follow character C and D instead. Important information is often mentioned in passing, and might not even be taken up by the spectator if she is not paying attention. It is a fair assumption to make that the makers have been influenced by Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet (Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) for example).

Race places an important part of the series, and is a constant source of tension, between white, blacks and Latinos in particular, but East Asians too. The police force itself also consists of a number of different ethnicities. However, it is partly here that the show shows its age, particularly the somewhat shrill acting among some of the Latino gang members.

As I said above, Hill Street Blues does not tell a conventional story and neither do the individual episodes stand on their own. There is hardly ever any kind of closure, and there is a constant sense of confusion and lack of payoff. Yet stories are told. One example in season 1 is the decline and fall of one of the plain clothes policemen, J.D. LaRue (played by Kiel Martin). In the beginning of the first episode he is confident, good-looking and something of a ladies' man. At the end of the season he has become a drunk who gets humiliated and thrown out of bars. This fall from grace is handled very subtle, so that there are small changes from one episode to another, until his unshaven face becomes so pronounced as to be unmissable. Just by watching one episode you will not get it, it comes from watching the whole season. No particular reason is given for his decline; it is a combination of bad habits and stress. Then in the last episode of season 1 he attends an AA meeting, sent there by captain Furillo (the police chief). 

That AA meeting is also an example of what is so good with Hill Street Blues. Because at that meeting is also Furillo. This is good because it is a complete surprise yet makes perfect sense. There has not been any mentioning of the fact that Furillo was a former alcoholic, but there has been scenes sprinkled through the season that now takes on a new meaning (such as a lunch when Furillo had orange juice instead of beer). These scenes though have probably been forgotten by those that saw it on TV, one episode each week. By watching a whole season over a weekend on DVD or online, all these hints, suggestions and connections will be remembered and they add to the impact of the series. It is important to pay attention to all that is going on since you do not know when something happens whether it will be come back in a later episode.

Speaking of Furillo, he is one of the best things about the series, and Daniel J. Travanti's performance. He is soft-spoken, like Lt. Castillo (Edward James Olmos) in Miami Vice, but fearless and filled with integrity. Whereas the rest of the police force is somewhat unruly and frequently do the wrong thing, or even illegal things, Furillo can be seen as the voice of reason and moderation. But the integrity can be a two-edged sword. He is the true hero of the series but his integrity sometimes works against his better interests, or even against the interests of the community. Sometimes he can come across as naive, yet he is also sometimes seen filled with rage (a rage he does his outmost to control). And, of course, he is a recovering alcoholic.

Furillo is not alone, he is having a relationship with a public defender, Joyce Davenport (played by Veronica Hamel) and due to a potential conflict of interests they keep their relationship a secret. But their relationship is a highlight of the series, because it feels real. It has the right combination of tenderness and resentfulness, since it is hard to have a relationship when you are always on call, and when you cannot show your affection in public. Some of the best writing and acting in Hill Street Blues is to be found in their intimate scenes together.

Davenport is a powerful and successful female character, but also is the only major character who is a female, although I think one of the female cops (played by Betty Thomas) develops into a major character as well, at least that seems to be happening in season 2. There is also to ex-wife of Furillo, Fay (played by Barbara Bosson) but she is more of a comic relief, at least in the beginning. Eventually she becomes more forceful.

So Hill Street Blues is a major series of considerable importance and need to be included when the history and development of TV is discussed. I hope all seasons will be released on DVD or online in pristine versions soon. As it is now, the title sequence, with Mike Post's great theme, is perhaps more known than what happens after. But the gloomy weather, the melancholic music and the decidedly unglamorous milieus is a great introduction to the world as it is presented in Hill Street Blues.

Robert Bresson posters

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!

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.
---------------------
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. 

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 #1 is here.
Reading Bazin #2 is here.
Reading Bazin #4 is here.

Reading Bazin #5 is here.
-----------------------------------------------------

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.