Cinema Hops Express Train, Conquistador Left Behind

Alone in Paris in the early seventies, high and dry, I didn't know what to do next, so I turned to my friends. The oldest among them were beginning to show their ages. Citizen Kane —who had taken me by force from behind, with frightening abruptness and violence, during my senior year at Putney,

when he was twenty and I was eighteen, and with whom I had consorted quite a few times thereafter—still retained most of his charisma, but the tricks up his sleeve were becoming increasingly familiar.

Sunrise, who had first unbuttoned my shirt and given me her gentle velvet touch while cushioning her chin in the hollow of my neck, toward the back of the downstairs section of the McMillan Theater at Columbia during my sophomore year at NYU, when she only cost a dollar, purred almost subliminally in my ear and tenderly carried me into and through her soft and shimmering 1927 lap dissolves, along her sultry and obsessive and unpredictably exciting and frightening camera movements (like the one superimposed over dozens of sleepless nights in Florence, when and where I imagined she lived only a block or so from my house, so that I could faintly hear her whistling for me, a sound that sighed across the field in the summer air that breathed into my room, sucked in by the attic fan, a reedy note of summons that told me to join her at our customary meeting-place near the marshes, toward the water; and I would rise from bed, steal into my clothes in the darkness, leave by the screen door, and make my way across the soft, damp field under the light of the moon, following the path that led me over a fence and through one turn after another while the thought of her waiting seemed to draw me to her faster, even ahead of my own footsteps—reeling me in like a fish, straight through the thicket instead of circumventing it, libido outrunning even the Conquistador and thus allowing me to arrive invisibly, like a voyeur, ahead of my own body, landing in the clearing where she twirls a flower under the moon, looking off to the left and awaiting my arrival on the path, waiting to tell me about the City ), into luscious pools of light and dark. She was in fact becoming a little cranky after our nine years of intermittent close contact (including two memorable visits she paid me at Bard, when most of the other students in Sottery Hall had jeered and hooted at her age and her affectations, which were no more silly to me than their own). Once, in London on a visit, I thought for sure I could overhear her behind me in the small auditorium at the National Film Theatre, NFT-2, March 26, 1973, as I watched the beginning of They Live by Night , the first film of Nicholas Ray, about whom I was writing an article for a book that Richard Roud was editing. The film begins, even before the credits, with a shot of

the two major characters, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), kissing, while a subtitle introduces them in consecutive phrases, parsed out like the lines in a folk ballad: "This boy . . . " "and this girl . . . " "were never properly introduced to the world we live in . . . "

"Maybe," I heard Sunrise titter, "that's because this boy was never properly introduced to a decent barber. Y'know what I mean?" Her nasal voice sounded like Ruth Gordon's. "And do you see that spot of grease on his neck?" Alas, what happened to Sunrise was happening to a lot of film criticism

around the same time. (By the time Nick Ray died in 1979, the critical grease that had congealed around him had gotten so thick that no knife could cut through it all. I'll try not to soil these pages with any of its traces. )

Eclipse—whom I met and later revisited the following winter at the Little Carnegie—started off by snoring in my ear with languid indifference, continued by rapping to me about economics and alienation, and then began to tell me a love story that he cut off abruptly in order to slam a powerful set of depopulated concrete city chunks at me, one shot at a time, culminating in the pitiless glare of a streetlamp, leaving me scared and stupefied.

Last Year at Marienbad—who was as spanking fresh as I was when we met in March at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the same spring that I met Sunrise—whispered sweet nothings in my ear, pinched me, giggled, enveloped me in her perfumed arms, mockingly repeated the same silly jingles in my face, drew me down into her soft crevices and then, in one of those standard S&M reversals, ejected me from her grasp like a wheezing jack-in-the-box suddenly sprung loose from its container and left to rattle, dry and desperate, on the floor. She was such a graceful tease that for a while I kept coming back, despite the warning and disapproval of several Putney friends, who called her a pretentious bore. Eventually she shrieked for me to get out of her sight, which I did for several years, including those spent in Paris and London, until I looked her up at the Thalia last August, to find her as smooth, sweet, saucy, slick, sexy, and scary as ever.

Playtime was a different story entirely. After meeting him at an airport—a locus of transitions, like the railroad terminal to which Sunrise had transported me in her opening shot—I encountered him again in an ugly restaurant crawling with tourists and other plastic types, all of whom seemed to mesmerize him with delight. At first I couldn't understand him at all. "What keeps you so occupied?" I demanded over the din and the undercooked fish. "Or should I say, preoccupied?" "Everything," he said. "Whereas you go looking indiscriminately for something to catch your eye and quickly find that everything becomes tiresome, I take it all in at once and see a beautiful ballet of interlocking parts." His special insight—which taught me, finally, how to live in cities (just as surely as Gertrud—the last great classic narrative film and the first great modern one, as David Ehrenstein recently pointed out to me, undistributed and unavailable and scarcely mentioned, discussed, or remembered in these enlightened United States in 1979—taught me what a refusal or an inability to compromise finally meant in long-range, lifelong terms )—was that you could be sitting or standing somewhere, anywhere, and suddenly, on the other side of a pane of glass from you, a bus could stop, and you and all the passengers on that bus, for just an instant, could enjoy a sacred togetherness in the frame of a spectator's vantage point—or maybe it was an aesthetic congruity, made sacred only by worship—even though neither you nor the passengers (nor the bus driver, nor the Conquistador, who was sound

asleep) was aware of that conjunction. And what if occasionally you were able to become that privileged spectator, that divine voyeur and secret play-master, while remaining yourself at the same time?

Finally, in the remaining months before a friend's lawyer helped me to acquire a work permit for a job as assistant editor on Monthly Film Bulletin in London, I called on Céline Et Julie Vont En Bateau —first introduced to me by Eduardo de Gregorio, one of their playmates—who were taking turns projecting movies for one another in their split-level flat. "Come sit with me and watch the movie," Céline squealed; "No, dammit, sit over here and help me project it," Julie growled. When I left, they were still squabbling and had exchanged seats and duties several times. I knew exactly how they felt.

Moving across the Channel, a profound difference in the cinematic climate becomes immediately apparent. How could it be otherwise, considering that the life-styles that go with each city are so strikingly antithetical? Paris is all adrenaline and shiny surfaces, hard-edged and brittle and eternally abstract, the capital of paranoia (cf. Rivette) and street spectacle (cf. Tati), where café tables become orchestra seats as soon as the weather gets warm—the city where everyone loves to stare. London is just the reverse, a soft-centered cushion of comfort where trust and accommodation make for a slower, saner, and ostensibly less shrill mode of existence: relatively concrete and prosaic, more spit and less polish, a city more conducive to eccentricity than to lunacy.^[*]

February 28, 1975. Heathrow Airport, London. As soon as I step on the plane, TWA's Muzak system has seen to it that I'm already back in America. Listening on the plastic earphones to blatant hypes for Gold On two separate channels, the soundtrack of Thunderboltand Lightfoot on a third (where "fuck" is consistently bleeped out, but "fucker" and the sound of Jeff Bridges supposedly getting kicked in the face are dutifully preserved), it becomes evident once more that America starts and stops where its money reaches, and that "going there" means following the money trail. It's over two years since my last visit—my longest sojourn abroad, during which I've had to miss the splendors of Watergate and depend on such things as Michael Arlen's TV column in The New Yorker for accounts of shifts in the national psyche—but TWA tells me in its own quiet way that nothing essential has changed . . . 

Later in the weekend, in Long Island, I try to tell my friends Bibi and Allan about Rivette's Out 1: Spectre , which they'll probably never be able to see—doing what I can to describe the overall structure, the scenes between Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bulle Ogier, the content and experience of the last two shots. No critic alive has yet begun to do justice to that film—not even John Ashbery in the SoHo Weekly News last October, when he started off by remarking that "it seems to mark a turning point in the evolution of the art of film," and then never got around to explaining why; certainly not myself, when I was hasty enough to call it a "dead-end experiment" in Sight and Sound last fall. But how

can it ever become the turning point (or the dead end) of anything when no more than a handful of people will ever have a chance to encounter it, much less return to it, live with it? Which is why I must keep speaking about it . . .  In the room the women come and go, speaking of Airport 1975  . . . 

March 10. Florence, Alabama. Lots of urban renewal has been going on in my home town over the past few years, and now that I've spent exactly half of my life—sixteen years—away from it, some of the streets are only semi-recognizable. The town's first large movie theater, which my grandfather helped to build in 1919, was leveled long before my last visit to expand the parking lot behind the First Presbyterian Church, and the pawnshop a block away has become the House of Guns; but the plastic flowers and Muzak on the main street and Spry Funeral Home are still intact.

The Shoals Theatre—which my grandfather also built, and later sold—has been remodeled, and I go to see The Strongest Man in the World there mainly in order to take a look . . . 

Despite the heroic and successful efforts of Eve Arden to remain herself in spite of everything, I leave after an hour and walk home, wondering how crazy it is to write about movies most people can't see when I can't last profitably through the movies that most people see. Is there a connection? As Out 1: Spectre suggests about a lot of things, I suppose there is a connection and there isn't. And whatever people are seeing—now that America seems to be inching its way ever so slowly toward the experience of most of the rest of the world—I guess it means something that people are going to movies again, proceeding wherever the money trail takes them. My family's theater business racked up during the last Depression, and maybe—with a lot of luck and forbearance—a few good filmmakers won't starve to death during this one.^[*]

What Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (L.A. County Museum, 11/20/77) shows me today that I didn't recognize as such in 1955 is the discontinuity of the separate décors, the isolated surreal landscapes stretching off at oblique angles to one another. Like the dark well in the movie that's weirdly and improbably "lit" by a candle wedged into a recess halfway down, each of the characters seems to be isolated by the upholsteries of slightly different genres, no two viewpoints ever quite coinciding. They seem to inhabit a once-ordered universe whose father-god-director is drifting away from his children, lost in his own dreams, taking all the connective narrative tissue with him  . . . 

But most of this particular column is concerned with disintegration, and the sorts of clarity that it can make possible. Which leads me ineluctably to the subtitled 35mm prints I see of Lang's Der Tiger Von Eschnapur and Das Indische Grabmal (British Film Institute, 1/3/78), his penultimate films [movies that have yet to be shown in their original form in the United States, twenty years after their initial release ]  . . . 

What are the signs of disintegration? (1) A conscious naivete that is sought and achieved, aimed at a child's sensibility [close to the 1919 Die Spinnen, the earliest surviving film of Lang, seen at a Film Forum press show in New York,

10/30/79 ], and easily read as camp. (2) A naked artifice of props, actor-props, color schemes and schematic plots laid bare, so that even the wires holding up the fake snake in Debra Paget's religious dance inside a cave temple are visible. (3) A displacement (or misplacement) of narrative interest shortly after the beginning of Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb ), Part II of the story, when Berger (Paul Hubschmid) is placed in chains at the bottom of a pit a lot like the "dark" well in Moonfleet , while Seeta (Paget) is confined to her chambers in the same palace.

The hero and heroine are then replaced by another couple, more klutzy and ineffectual, who implicitly parody the roles of Hubschmid and Paget, meanwhile consuming eons of screen time. The effect of this is such that when at the conclusion Berger and Seeta are finally freed and united—and the villain Chandra (Walter Reyer) suddenly renounces his palace and villainy, without prior motivation or warning, to study with a holy man—the characters are still present on the screen, but they no longer exist . [The Conquistador dies a noble death at the conclusion of his long journey—all stories have an end—and after a short, wistful sigh, the cinema ceases to function. ] (4) A series of structural arrows drawn by one of the disintegrating couples (I forget which) on the wall of an underground labyrinth before they separate, to find their way back to each other, but which wind up confounding all sense of continuity and direction—like the architecture in Playtime , or the décors in Moonfleet —losing characters and spectators, readers and writers and filmmakers alike.

What are the signs of clarity? All of the above, and more. London probably hasn't seen so much "baring the device" since copies of Viktor Shklovsky's Third Factory turned up at Compendium Books. Straub's point that Lang offered his producer a film instead of a golden calf is well taken. But it is, of course, a film about a golden calf that we call cinema—made by someone who knows more about the subject than most—and a game that is played honestly. Critics hung up on "craft" and intentionality [like little Johnny calling for his Uncle Remus ] will probably never be able to see it as a dazzling achievement  . . .  but there is nothing in cinema like it. I'll go even further: it has the only cave in movies that's worthy of Plato's.^[*]