This evening Brooklyn’s Light Industry screened a rare Cuban film, Sara Gomez’s De Cierta Manera [One Way or Another] (1974). I had seen this film back as an undergraduate at UCSB, in Donna Cunnigham’s Film History: 1960 – Present class, well over a decade ago. Earlier this semester, I had wanted to screen this film for my own film history class, but a couple of factors made that difficult. First, I could only find a worn out VHS copy, which it lacked the image sharpness that I so vividly associate with seeing first this film. Second, I had booked two films for the day: this and the celebrated Memories of Underdevelopment. There simply wouldn’t have been time to screen both. I gave students the opportunity to see the film tonight for extra credit. One student took me up on the offer.
One Way or Another blends documentary footage with a narrative sequences. This was one of the most common stylistic qualities of post-Revolutionary Cuban cinema. Filmmakers utilized this strategy to locate the personal impact of the Revolution on ordinary Cubans. As the title suggests, the Revolution was going to change everyone’s lives…one way or another.
In this particular film, we see the social challenges of the Revolution through two institutions: organized labor and the schools. In the opening sequence of the film, we see a tribunal for Humberto. We learn later in the film that he is being judged for loafing, as this scene is repeated. Loafing in Revolutionary Cuba has consequences since it threatens productivity and also solidarity.
We also see the social impact of the Revolution in the schools. A few delinquent students, who are unaccustomed to formal education, complicate the educational mission of the Revolution. Moreover, their parents are also uneducated and ill-equipped to supervise their children’s education. Without education, the Revolution cannot adequately lift children out of poverty.
Like most Cuban films of the time, there was a mix of personal narratives in the film, which were fictional. As the film documents the tribunal and the challenges of the labor union, we see it through the character of Mario. Mario accuses Humberto of loafing at the hearing. When the tribunal scene is repeated towards the end of the film, we don’t understand why Mario testifies against Humberto, as we see that they are friends throughout the film. However, we learn in the moments following the second instance of the tribunal that Mario struggled with the decision to “rat out” his friend but ultimately decided to do so for the sake of the Revolution. Mario’s internal conflict makes for a more nuanced view of the Revolution. While Humberto’s decision to loaf, by staying with a young woman, hurt worker productivity and solidarity, it required Mario to betray his friend.
Throughout the film, Mario courts Yolanda, a young, educated and independent school teacher. It is through her character that we see the challenges in the schools. Her education gave her the opportunity to teach children, but she is constantly frustrated by the inability of her students to learn and behave appropriately in the classroom. (Believe me, I can appreciate her frustration.) In perhaps one of the most touching moments, she admits her frustration when she describes the cycle of a young girl going through school until the sixth grade, who then marries and has her own daughter who will go to the same school for her own sixth-grade education. Her soliloquy is punctuated by a scene of young black girls in short white dresses dancing provocatively in the village. This image contrasts with Yolanda’s own dress and gestures that, by comparison, characterize her as a schoolmarm.
The most direct consequence of the Revolution in this film is the urban redevelopment projects, which were common not only in post-Revolutionary Cuba but throughout Latin America and even some cities in the United States. A recurring image is the razing of the slums, which were being replaced by shiny, modern housing units. The wrecking ball that demolishes the old blighted housing reminds us of the immediate change that the Revolution brings. However, it is the rapid pace of change that the film takes most issue. It is clear that some Cubans were unprepared for the Revolution. This is despite the seemingly good intentions of the Revolution’s architects, who were curiously never represented in the film.
Earlier today, news broke that This American Life had retracted the episode “Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory,” because Daisey had fabricated crucial parts of his report on working conditions in the Chinese factories that manufacture Apple products. The immediate reaction on the Mac Rumors message board, for example, has been almost unanimous outrage against Daisey for making false claims. I too am upset but for an entirely different reason: he didn’t break character.
Having studied documentary film at various points in my academic life, you learn that you can communicate truth with fiction. For most of film history, filmmakers such as Robert Flaherty, Chris Marker, and Errol Morris, have played fast and loose with facts to communicate a larger truth to an audience. I think Daisey, who is an essayist and not a journalist, is working in a similar vein. His monologue and performance, which I saw in November at the Public Theater, is absolutely compelling. After hearing The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, you leave with a very simple message about how our electronic stuff comes at a human cost.
Daisey’s performance is an excellent example of what art can do. After nearly two years of performing in theaters throughout the United States, January’s This American Life broadcast seemed to have an effect in the world outside of the theater. There was the New York Times series on the iEconomy. There were petitions delivered to Apple Stores protesting the working conditions in Foxconn factories in China. And there was the Nightline investigation into one of the Foxconn factories, which I found as too short and too soft. Whether Daisey was making up the facts in his performance seems almost a non-issue because he had pressed the public into action, which is what great political art should do.
However, I’m upset with Daisey because he used his exaggerated, composite, or even fabricated facts, which made for a great story, and took them to journalistic venues. He wrote an impassioned op-Ed in New York Times. He went on CBS Sunday Morning, on MSNBC on The Leonard Lopate Show, and of course This American Life. Once he leaves the theatrical environment, he’s engaging in a different form of performance. Perhaps he thought that by disclosing that many crucial facts were in fact fabricated, he would undermine the argument at the heart of his performance. Once he went to these non-theatrical venues, he must have faced a tough choice: either disclose that his report was based in part on fabrications or to avoid spreading his message beyond the stage.
Instead, he chose not to break character. He continued performing in public. Now that This American Life has retracted his story, it will sadly set back the cause of justice for the workers who make our stuff. But I don’t know how to get people to actually think about all of our electronic stuff, Apple-branded or not, and the means of their production.
As we discussed in class, the framing in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul almost entirely contains the characters in a confined space. One of my favorite instances of this is when Emmi and Ali are waiting for their order to come at the restaurant where “Hitler used to eat.”
After one of the most uncomfortable waiter-and-diner scenes imaginable, the camera framing moves from medium close-up to a long-shot. Emmi and Ali are very small, and they are dwarfed by the dining room’s structure. I see this as a way of expressing the insurmountable social circumstances that Emmi and Ali are going to face after their wedding. This is not going to be a socially sanctioned relationship. The subsequent scene reinforces this. Emmi calls her children to announce her matrimony, to which they react with utter disgust and contempt.
Do you recall any other scenes where the framing or staging expresses the difficulty of Emmi and Ali’s situation?
Today we saw two films: Daisies (1966) and The Red and the White (1967). As we discussed, in both films, the state becomes an important concept that we hadn’t yet seen in our films. More or less, the films of the European New Wave, such as Breathless, Cleo from 5 to 7, and Persona, and the American ones, particularly are more or less about personal experiences. But since the films in Eastern Europe were made under a starkly different political system than Sweden, France, and the United States.
One of the reasons you saw a film as daring as Daises in the 1960s was because of the lead up to the Prague Spring in 1968. There was a degree of liberalization happening in Czechoslovakia that made for a brief period of innovative filmmaking. However, as Thompson and Bordwell explain, the movement was short lived and many of the films made under that regime were banned after the Soviet suppression in 1968. Nevertheless, the state was a subject in each of these films. However, in no time do you see any explicit references to the state in the film, perhaps with the exception of the old men the sisters take to dinner.
As for The Red and the White, we are beginning to see some of the patterns of what makes the film great. You see the cruelty of the armies battling each other. You see the lack of focus on a single character. You see the anticipation of brutality in each scene, as it unfolds and then we pass on to another. And, of course, you see the camera function as an witness to all of the battle between an amalgam of people fighting in the Russian Civil War.
As we saw this week in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), Hollywood began to accept films that took greater risks in favor of the expensive epics it was releasing in the 1960s. As we discussed in class, with the explosive popularity of television in the 1950s, the roadshow film was Hollywood’s most profitable. Thompson and Bordwell note that almost all films released in the 1960s earned less than a million dollars at the box office.1
The drinking and the fighting made Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? a film for mature audiences.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? provided Hollywood that opportunity. It was based on a respected Edward Albee play that opened in 1963. It also drew great criticism from the same Catholic establishment that had pushed for the Production Code thirty years later. Lastly, it also gave Hollywood the opportunity to release films in a different ways.
Many in Hollywood anticipated the film for months before its release in Los Angeles and New York in June 1966. Critics were worried that the language in the film would be too much for movie audiences. However the language did not seem to offend many who saw the film in its early days. One fifteen year-old patron, who attended with his mother, quipped about the language, “I’ve heard worse,” but another patron did take note of “all that drinking, from the very beginning to the very end.”2
Since the beginning of film exhibition in the United States, film censorship was an all or nothing proposition. Either a film was released to all audiences or it was available to no one. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was unique in that it was released for “Mature Audiences” only. In fact, Warner Brothers had added a clause in its contract with exhibitors that it would not admit children under 18 without a parent.3
Hollywood was undergoing a once-in-a-generation change at the time. The Production Code had been one of the most stubborn institutions of the American Film Industry. Former MPAA chief, Eric Johnson, had argued that the Code was necessary to avoid states and localities instituting their own censorship boards. However, the new MPAA head Jack Valenti had taken a different view than his predecessor. He saw the Code as an impediment to the industry’s survival. This was a conflict between old and new. In the film industry trade Moving Picture Daily, Martin Quigley Jr. declared the “Code is dead.”2 It remains one of the great Oedipal ironies in film history as it was his father, Martin Quigley, who co-author the original Code in 1930.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? helped inaugurate a new era in film history. New York Times film reporter and critic Vincent Canby asked, “how can producers make admittedly adult films without alienating a mass audience that includes children?”4 Hollywood’s answer would be to segment its mass audience. The growth of television and the changing American culture forced many media industries to segment their audiences as a way to survive in the new 1960s media landscape. Radio did so by creating music formats, and magazines did so by specializing instead of reaching a mass audience, such as Time and the Saturday Evening Post once did. Hollywood segmented its audience by age, and by doing so, a new sophisticated cinema would emerge in the United States.
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One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take a screenwriting class during my many years of studying, especially at film schools such as UCSB and NYU. While I don’t know how to construct a screenplay, I can read one, and I do know that most screenwriters use specialized software, such as Final Draft, that makes the formatting process much easier. But as an art form, it’s lost to me.
Last night, I learned about Fountain. To put it in "pitch" terms, it’s "Markdown for screenwriters."
The great thing about Fountain, and Markdown for that matter, is that it requires no special software. You can write a screenplay or a web document with a basic text editor. This solves a huge problem for fledgling screenwriters, who won’t have to buy any special software. Every computer operating system has a text editor. You can use the dreaded Notepad on Windows, the serviceable TextEdit on a Mac, and even the cryptic but powerful vi if you’re more of a Unix geek. If you want something more featured, text editors are relatively inexpensive. I like using iA Writer for Mac and iPad, or Writing Kit for iPad and iPhone. My all-time favorite text editor for the Mac, BBEdit, will set you back $50, and I hope they build Fountain support one of these days.
Another great feature is these languages are as future proof as you can expect. We who traffic in "media", specifically electronic and digital media, lose countless hours of sleep wondering how much longer will we be able to retrieve music, movies, and text stored on such media. I hadn’t worried about this danger until I visited a audio/video restoration outfit here in New York. One of the techs showed me a ball of tightly tangled, thin wire. I didn’t know what that was until he revealed that it was recording wire, which was a consumer recording medium available in the 1930s. This shop was one of a very few that had access to the playback machine for this wire. However, he said that the wire was so tangled that "there wasn’t enough money on this earth for him to physically untangle the wire." Preservation or restoration is basically impossible.
Whenever I write a document, I wonder when all my college essays, syllabi for classes I’ve taught, and reading will end up like that wire. When in the future will some tech look at my MacBook Pro or iPad, and say, "Oh man, there’s no amount of money in the biosphere for me to figure out these machines!"?
The only real way to preserve all these documents might be to just print them out and and keep them dry. It worked for our grandparents with paper, just like it worked for medieval Europeans with parchment, and just like it worked for Egyptians with papyrus. As I tell my students, "paper is permanence."
In the short term, one of the best ways to ensure access to your documents is to save them in a human-readable form. Plain text files ensure that, for as long as humans can read and can open a file on a computer, someone can read them. They won’t have to have the latest version of some proprietary software whose vendor went bust a decade ago. If you can retrieve the file from a disk, which is a big "if" in the long term, you can read someone’s screenplay.
The other thing that I really like about Fountain and Markdown is that it lowers the barrier of entry for fledgling screenwriters and web writers by using something easy, robust, and very inexpensive to use. When you open the gates like this, you get more work. Granted, the average quality if the work will decrease because there will be some very poor writing out there, but the true value lies at the margins. The quality of the greatest work will increase.
I hope this catches on with screenwriters as Markdown has with some savvy web writers.
Gee, how did Swedish films ever get a reputation for being more sexually permissive than, say, American films?
After class, two students brought up two good points about Persona.
The David Cronenberg film Spider (2002) has a similar narrative device of a character with a split personality. Watch it, although I might have just spoiled it for you. Sorry.
Here’s the trailer for the film.
On this note, I wanted to consider what the film would have been like had it been done in a more conventional manner. For example, what if we saw the woman becoming pregnant and then deciding to either abort the child or to have it and to hate it? Would you show scenes of a doctor’s office, or a string of scenes between the mother and son? I don’t see this having the same impact as what Bergman produced. Instead, we see the internal conflict playing out in a very externalized way.
There were several scenes that suggested that the two women were going to become romantically involved. There were many moments where the women embrace, but as you noticed, they never actually kiss or otherwise consummate their affection for each other.
This might suggest that the two women are inextricably close, and in fact they are as close as any two persons can become. This is an early hint that they are in fact connected. What do you think?
Finally, all those references to the materiality of the film medium are there to remind us that we are watching a film. Bergman is using film to explore human psychology in a way that language is incapable of doing. That’s perhaps why we understand, on a visceral level, what the film is trying to explore, but we can’t quite put into words. Recall the Bergman quote I read before we screened the film.
wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover
I hope you see how the new waves were pushing the limits of what film could do and what it can explore. Persona makes it seem like no topic is impossible.
While scholars debate when the auteurist New Hollywood movement ended—it was either Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate—Hollywood began to abandon the auteur centered film for the big blockbuster in the mid 1970s. No film represents that shift more than Jaws.
The film’s theatrical trailer sets the tone using the conventions of the horror film. The trailer also mentions the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, which was the basis for the feature film. It was also curious that the film was released during the summer months, which was rare for a high profile motion picture in the 1970s. The fact that the film was about a shark attacking beach-goers undoubtedly resonated with audiences looking forward to summer recreation.
Jaws is also the first major Hollywood film to use television advertising. You can see the television spot below.
The television spot is not only a full minute in length, but it also warns the audience that the film might be “too intense for children,” taking advantage of the eight year-old MPAA ratings. Television ads such as this one ran on national television for a three-day period on an all three broadcast networks, when there were only three channels to watch on television, and bombarded audiences with such advertising. This blockbuster marketing helped to “front-load” attendance in the first weeks of the film’s release.
In my American Film Industry class, we voted on what film we would screen for our discussion of New Hollywood, or what I call “The American New Wave.” The class voted, among a list of six films, for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorcese, 1974).
Aside from talking about the cinematography in the film, I mentioned that the use of sound in the film is quite innovative, especially how the film blurred the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. You can see the mixing of the two in the clip below.
Alice’s cry functions as a sound bridge between her on the telephone and the scene of the accident. This is not something you saw in Classical Hollywood films, certainly not the back and forth between two spaces, but it was an innovative stylistic device in this film.
As I mentioned in class, the varied use of focal lengths is another technique that Scorcese manipulates, even in the same scenes. This is in addition to the heavy use of handheld camerawork, which itself was not widely used except in news and documentary filmmaking.
I mentioned that the scene with Alice and Tommy in the motel room in Phoenix contains shots with two very different focal lengths. One is a wide angle lens, which distorts the image to expand the distance between objects on the left and right of the frame. The other shot uses a telephoto lens, which distorts the image to compress the space between foreground and background objects.
The image above is the wide-angle shot, where Tommy on the left appears very distant from Alice on the right. This might have been used to visually represent the distance between the two of them as they fight.
In the very same scene, there’s the telephoto shot. Here, they have (somewhat) reconciled as Alice reassures Tommy that she will find a job and that things will (somehow) be okay. The telephoto lens compresses the space between Tommy, Tommy’s reflection, and Alice’s reflection. The framing is of course also interesting as it uses a mirror to put Tommy and her in the same plane and within a common frame.
It’s a rough but touching moment between mother and son.
