In Memoriam: Monte Hellman

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I wasn’t planning on writing this, but the fact that I ended up doing so seems to me a sign—a sign that Monte Hellman, who died last Tuesday at the age of 88, was and is a very rare filmmaker; that is, the kind of filmmaker who doesn’t just make films, but comes to represent something to a certain kind of cinephile (such as myself) beyond the confines of the material realm of cinema—a kind of metaphysical laceration, an ineffable poetry, a hidden beauty, in which the cinema whispers to us the secrets of the world. It’s really not a quality that one can point to on the screen; rather, you feel it in your gut. If this smacks of some kind of cinephilic mysticism, well, so be it. I prefer to err on the side of beauty. With some filmmakers, speaking in hyperbole is not only justified but necessary; for as Kent Jones has said, “the reality is that anything written about Monte Hellman in America must be a defense.” Whether that is more or less true today is besides the point. The fact is that we Americans live in a country in which our greatest artists have never been treated with the respect they deserve. But this isn’t about that (at least only tangentially). This is about Monte Hellman. When I watch a Monte Hellman film I stare existence in the face. People have said his films are about the “in-between” moments, and I suppose that’s true. But every moment is in-between something, between birth and death if nothing else, and Hellman films souls as they roar along that continuum. But he does this by filming bodies. By filming people, places, things. His is a deeply material cinema, and in all of film history his are the films I would feel most content to place alongside the late color films of Robert Bresson. This association mostly began subconsciously for me: when I looked back in my mind, the James Taylor of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) had merged with the male protagonists of Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) and The Devil, Probably (1977). The lanky figures, the matching hairstyles, the embodiment of a certain youthful loneliness—these characters were lodged together for me, and if I tried I could not separate one face from the others. The association has stuck, and it is no longer lost on me that the three young people of Two-Lane Blacktop—James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird—are all non-actors, and thus, to use Bresson’s term, models. For me, these models of Bresson, and thus of Hellman, have always been associated for me with silence. One rarely learns who a character really is, who that person is, by what they say—it is always a question of a body, of a face: the way they carry themselves, the way they look at whatever they’re looking at, the way they simply exist—or, what Jones says of Warren Oates, “an actor who knows how to do dead time.” So of course Hellman, with his trusted actor Oates, had to go and make one of the greatest films about silence. Cockfighter (1974) for me is not just about living silently in the literal sense; it reminds me of when I was a child and used to promise myself on any given day when I felt like it, that I would not speak a word for the rest of the day, week, etc.—I never ended up keeping those promises to myself, but I still occasionally feel the urge, and Cockfighter exists alongside that urge in my mind. It is difficult for me to transfer into words the profundity of silence, and what the concept means to me (along with the concept of waiting—both main themes for me in Cockfighter), but perhaps that is apt. [Insert five seconds of silence here: or, read what Antoine de Baecque says about Hellman’s cinema: “Sobriety is brought to its rudest completion and the quality of the silences is incomparable. Cinema is the art of ‘almost nothing’.”] But speaking of silence: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989), a TV film sequel to a sequel which, to throw aside all restraint at playing at critical niceties, I am going to call a perfect film. Beautiful and stark in its mise-en-scène, the pacing and mood of this doomed-to-be-underrated movie nears the sublime, and is proof that one’s emotional vulnerability to auteurist association will never not make a film more edifying. But this is the gift of the cinephile, who sees beauty where others see trash. Perhaps that’s the difficulty for some with Hellman, who often filmed in traditionally “low” genres: westerns, slashers, creature features, pirate movies, etc. These are the kind of films one might have seen on the back end of a double feature, or discovered on television late at night. Silent Night, Deadly Night has a significant relation to another famous television item: Twin Peaks, an artistic riff on the “low” genre of the cable soap opera, and with which it shares two actors (Richard Beymer and Eric DaRe). (Not to mention a third Hellman shares with Lynch—Laura Harring, of Mulholland Drive fame—or a fourth, to bring things back to Twin Peaks and add in Hellman’s Iguana (1988): Everett McGill.) But to move back a few years, I can’t leave out a word on China 9, Liberty 37 (1978)—a film which, through lapse of memory, I can hardly remember the plot of at all. Nonetheless, I might wish to say, if John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) didn’t exist, that it is the most beautiful western ever filmed. What I do remember is that after watching it I thought of what Pedro Costa said of the last films of Chaplin, Ozu, and Ford: “It’s just a dash. It speaks of one thing: life.” Monte Hellman was only 46 at the time of the film’s release. From late in spirit to late in actuality: when Road to Nowhere (2010) was released Monte Hellman was 78. From an interview done at the end of last year: “My most personal film was Road to Nowhere. If I didn’t have any other film, that’s the one I would keep.” I’ve only just watched this film on the Tuesday night one week after Hellman’s passing, and yet I have no doubt in my mind, and can feel it deep inside my gut, that what he says here about this brilliant film is absolutely true. One must always beware of confusing what is personal for what is autobiographical, and yet: the film’s labyrinthine meta-narrative ends, in some layer of reality, with the filmmaker protagonist in jail. And, if one stays for the very end of the credits, after the usual legal disclaimers have scrolled by, just before the film’s runtime is officially over, one sees—“This is a true story.”

From an interview:

Q: Would you describe Two-Lane Blacktop as a love story?

A: Yes, I always felt it was a love story.

Q: Who loves whom?

A: The Girl loves The Driver; The Mechanic loves The Girl and The Driver and he can’t decide between them and can’t accept his love for either. And The Driver wants to love The Girl, but can’t.

(...)

[The Driver is] a guy who is so involved with his own existential dilemma, in just dealing with himself as a person, that he throws away the thing he wants most, which is love. He can’t deal with those needs in time—realizes too late—and that becomes his tragedy.

...

In discussing how Hellman sees Two-Lane Blacktop as a romance Kent Jones tells us that his principle prototypes were “Minnelli’s The Clock, Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme and Wilder’s The Apartment.” Some don’t see it, but I believe Hellman here wholeheartedly. In fact, most of Hellman’s films are romances in one way or another. And so it all comes back to love. And it all ends with love. Indeed, a project that Hellman had been nurturing for years and tried to get into production in the 2010s was called Love or Die, in which “a man and a woman destined for each other, but who never met whilst they were alive, are sent back to earth to fulfil this love.” Perhaps this would have been another film, à la Road to Nowhere, which would not so secretly be about Hellman’s difficulty in getting films made throughout his life, and about his love for making them. Love—it is love that makes the films, and it should be love that watches them. Our love. In this sense, after I rewatched it the other night, I realized that Two-Lane Blacktop could perhaps be read as a film about cinephiles. What is the “car freak” but a version of the cinephile, niche expertise, argot, and all? Yes, sometimes we put too much stock into the objects of our love—films, filmmakers, etc.—and miss out on what’s around us. And yet the metaphysical connection here—driver/road, cinephile/cinema—is still a beautiful thing; one could search out the sublime in much worse ways. And one can not only search for it but find it, and in spades, in the cinema of Monte Hellman. It’s there even in Hellman’s final work, his 1 minute 33 second long contribution to the 2013 omnibus film Venice 70: Future Reloaded, titled “Vive L’Amour”—one may safely presume after the 1994 Tsai Ming-liang film (a director he is on record about admiring), a film whose long and beautifully drawn out final shot is more or less remade in Hellman’s short after his own style, with the same actress (Shannyn Sossamon) whose enigmatic image closes Road to Nowhere in a longer zoom-in, that one ending in a deeply entrancing digital abstraction. So with final feature to final short, an image of the same actress closing both, I wish to end this brief remembrance in the same way that Hellman closes Road to Nowhere (“For Laurie”—Laurie Bird, who died in 1979 at age 26) and Iguana (“For Warren”—Warren Oates, who died in 1982 at age 53); that is, with a dedication:

For Monte

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A few links to writings on Hellman that I’ve found informative and edifying in the last week or so:

In a piece from 2011, David Davidson at the Toronto Film Review offers a great overview of Hellman in the form of a review of Brad Stevens’ 2003 book Monte Hellman: His Life and Films.

Andy Rector has gathered a few of Bill Krohn’s writings on Hellman over at Kino Slang.

A great piece from Film Comment on Hellman by Chuck Stephens, “Moebius Dragstrip” (from the March-April 2000 issue), is available on their website.

And here’s a link to a PDF of Kent Jones’ long essay on Hellman entitled “The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name,” included here in the 2004 anthology The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s.

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The following is a translation of Pascal Bonitzer’s “Lignes et voies,” an article on Two-Lane Blacktop (known as Macadam à deux voies in France) that appeared in Cahiers du cinéma no. 266-267 in May of 1976. Four years later the film would be named the magazine’s 4th favorite film of the 1970s.

Lines and Lanes

by Pascal Bonitzer

Even delayed, one must talk about Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. This wonderful film, released on the sly and no sooner withdrawn from theatres, went virtually unnoticed. We too, we missed it, we talked about Milestones [Robert Kramer & John Douglas, 1975] and we didn’t talk about Two-Lane Blacktop. We, on a similar and different ground, we can almost—in my opinion—prefer the latter.

We can almost prefer it because Monte Hellman is less deluded than Kramer about truth, about intersubjective communication, about tribal speech, about revolutionary messianism. Certainly, the object isn’t the same, nor the way of filming, the type of production, of working, of storytelling, of editing. Monte Hellman doesn’t treatise-ize a mosaic-like crossing of the Red Sea, he doesn’t assemble a scattered memory, a speech blown to the four winds. He only features three or four little characters and two cars that we don’t let go for a single instant: about the pasts of these characters, we will never know anything: it’s cause they don’t have any. Obviously, for Monte Hellman, the notion of the past, of memory, of recollection of burnt past lives, is a completely ridiculous thing, a deception: isn’t that what “GTO” (Warren Oates) clearly says, who for every hitchhiker he picks up uses a different version of his life story, as true, as false as the previous ones, and who has no other purpose than to destroy these, of this comical, mythomaniacal repetition? Isn’t that also what the final self-devouring image signifies, image of the burning filmstrip (of an effect similar to that one, famous, of Persona, but here richer and stronger), as if to say: “Oh well! yes, a film is a film, a sort of memory too, an apparatus to preserve an image of the past, of dead events and fictitious events, and it’s nothing, nothing but a band of flammable celluloid, it’s your turn to play now, it’s your turn.”

So why compare Milestones and Two-Lane Blacktop? Why contrast two films which I began by saying were so different? Because it is also a question, in Two-Lane Blacktop, of the crossing of white America, or even the white girl, of measuring the conflictual gap between the great drifters of the ‘70s, the social dislocation that produces, or reflects, them, and the reproduction of some social stereotypes of white and fascist America. The conflict has here the form of a duel, of car races for money: by no means of conventional “duels” (I mean from the cinematographic and narrative point of view), or of the imaginary and ridiculous fight to the death as illustrated, for example, and precisely, by the film Duel: it is here about a duel, as it were, of two lanes.

It is constantly evident, although never stated, that these car races whose conflicting and even ideologically conflicting nature is obvious, don’t have the same meaning, ever, for the adversaries involved. It is evident, albeit hardly utterable, that the two boys in the Chevrolet, although playing the game wholeheartedly, are absolutely elsewhere than in the all-American competition of the struggle for life which over-determines sporting competitions, and which involves the imagined reciprocity of the competitors in regards to the goal. What these races, these competitions illustrate, is not the more or less antagonistic conflict, the fight to the finish between two faces of post-Vietnam America, it is the lack of connection. Blacktop with two lanes, not two parallel lanes, not two-lanes-two-lines antagonists, two lanes without connection because one is both straight and circular and the other is all over the place.

But that’s already saying too much, that’s presenting a picture still too conflictual, contradictory, binary, of a film which is so small, whose calculated narrative drift multiplies simulacra with encounters: even America’s massive image of little white fascists doesn’t stand up to it, unravelling: we do come across a few heads of butchers with short-cropped hair, a few anxiety-provoking faces, but what’s behind them isn’t always what you might expect: thus the very “country” cowboy that GTO picks up turns out almost immediately to be a nice gay, timid and forward at the same time... Similarly the virile laconicism of the occupants of the Chevrolet, which can be believed at first to express a male proficiency, a hypercompetence of adventurers of the New Hollywood style, loses that sense with the arrival of the girl.

The encounter, the encounter around which the whole film turns, is here dispersed, fragmented, dehydrated, molecularized. Two-Lane Blacktop is the anti-Easy Rider. The success of Easy Rider was based on a New Hollywoodian heroization of the marginal, the voyage was oriented—the tragic descent towards the Deep South, and the ineluctable destiny of the heroes,—this was a tragic film, linear, “molaire” [molar] as Deleuze and Guttari would say, at bottom traditional and reassuring. The spectre of the “bad encounter,” which haunted the film, manifested itself; violence finally exploded. In Two-Lane Blacktop, also a journey into a supposedly hostile country (see the wonderful sequence of changing license plates), it never explodes, the big bad encounter of the dramatic narrative, the Catastrophe, doesn’t occur. Not that violence isn’t present: we sometimes stumble onto an accident, a death. But this is never entered in the register of destiny, of tragedy, of myth. It’s a micro-event in a constellation of micro-events; the narrative is molecular and in principle unlimited (this is also what the inflammation of the film at the end means).

The law of this anti-tragic limitlessness of events is carried by “the girl” (it should be noted that the characters have little or no names: “GTO” is named after the brand of his car, for example; we forget those of the others, and moreover, they hardly speak to each other; the verbosity of GTO is likewise an equivalent of silence). She goes from the one to the other but with a sort of seriousness, or rather rigorousness, which suffices to exempt the character from any derisory dimension (nothing like the so readily contemptuous gaze of Altman on the constellation of lowlifes, simpletons and fools of Nashville, a constellation falsely dispersed, perfectly balanced and centered in the gaze of the master). The men of the film pretend to be tempted, or are actually tempted, to bind themselves to her in some way, to do away with nomadism, to territorialize somewhere. But she who comes from anywhere—of her we will know nothing more than her actions, there is here an implicit challenge to the audience: would you like to find out more, pin the knowledge to a model, a group, a class, an identity, a memory? rather see that there is nothing to see,—she who comes from anywhere: and ceaselessly, without words, makes and breaks bonds, constantly establishes new contacts, expands the network of connections and of course disappears, ensuring with the wound of her disappearance the law of ephemeral encounters: nothing after her allows the film to end, and it’s this that perhaps gives to those left behind this mask of bitter resentment, before the film itself burns up, and at the moment of beginning yet another race, this time with the short-haired occupant of a black car marked with the letters SS. Coincidence, no doubt. But coincidence and indifference are likewise the driving force of this film, which imperceptibly settles account with the old cinema of acute difference and mortal necessity.