50 ans de cinéma américain: Henry King (1896-1982)

The following is a translation of the entry on Henry King in Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s 50 ans de cinéma américain (1991).

 

KING Henry

1896-1982 

This was the revelation of the Zanuck retrospective at the Cinémathèque in the mid-1960s. Taken by French criticism to be an anonymous technician on the basis of his last films, often mediocre, although The Bravados [1958] and even Tender Is the Night [1962] weren’t negligible, King should in fact take his place among the greats. From 1919 (23 1/2 Hours’ Leave, produced by Thomas Ince) until O. Henry’s Full House (the episode The Gift of the Magi, the best of the lot) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro [both 1952], he directed a large number of films, always decent, sometimes inspired. Academic on his bad days, classical on his good ones, he perfectly represents a generation of American artists, now extremely rare, more interested in exaltation than critique, in the noble emotions than in human wickedness, more attracted by romantic stories than by action.

The modern genres don’t interest him and, faced with Hemingway or Fitzgerald, he privileges the sentimental aspect and clouds the meaning of their works. He’s more comfortable with less decadent chronicles, rooted more in History or the American spirit—that of the founders, not the skeptics. Not that he refuses to evolve, as evidenced by The Gunfighter [1950], several years ahead of High Noon [1952]; but he won’t sacrifice to fashion, which could be his negative: inversion of myths, degradation of genres. Moreover he has always preferred evocation to violence, melodrama to drama. In his filmography we find very few westerns, no crime movies and, even in a pirate film like the delightful Black Swan [1942], sadism disappears behind good humor.

Under contract for many years at Fox where he was the model director, King mainly sang of the events and gestures of exceptional characters: leaders, inventors, proud souls, from Fulton to Berandette Soubirous by way of Wilson and Stanley, without counting fictional characters like Johnny Ringo. This passion for special individuals who, at the same time as their own destiny, forge that of the community that surrounds them and makes it progress, is married marvelously with a lyrical generosity, while not excluding lucidity. King doesn’t hide from us Stanley’s wrongs, or the cruelty of the orders given by Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High [1949], who sends dozens of pilots to their deaths and knows it.

King overwhelms us with a sentimental biopic (Wilson [1944] remains the beautiful archetype in astonishing color) as with a melodrama (the first two-thirds of Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie [1952]), with the troubles of Fulton (Little Old New York [1940], very much forgotten by histories of cinema) as with the life of Irving Berlin (Alexander’s Ragtime Band [1938], of which at least two sequences are sublime). In 1950 he directed his two best films, The Gunfighter, a very moving chronicle of the last hours of a gunman whose presence provokes wherever he goes, and Twelve O’Clock High, which contains one of the most beautiful flashbacks in the history of cinema.

This panoramic which, starting from Dean Jagger, depicts a field, the grass of which is gradually flattened by the wind originating in the land of the super-fortresses, thus takes us into the past. An admirable shot, prelude to scenes of very strong tension, with few cuts, where it never manipulates our emotions. Gregory Peck is exceptional in it, as often with King (the other actors also, Millard Mitchell and Hugh Marlowe) who rewrote the script, achieving a scenario that Zanuck considered the best he had read. A simple nuance: we would now hesitate to affirm that these are “his two best films,” other titles that come to mind, from State Fair [1933] to Margie [1946] by way of Stanley and Livingstone [1939] and Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie which, reseen, is truly splendid. But this hierarchical classification is a matter of personal taste and therefore not important. What matters is that the oeuvre of King is beginning to be estimated at its true value. Long gone are the days when all of the editors of a magazine quitted the Nickelodeon hall, in the ‘60s, rather than see The Black Swan. The qualities, the originality that we used to boast about (along with Jacques Lourcelles in Préscence) impose themselves more and more each year. They situate themselves at the antipodes of frivolity, of the stirrings of socialites and snobs, and testify to a profound attachment to beliefs, to a morality inherited from Griffith who, moreover, went crazy over Tol’able David [1921]. Virginian filmmaker par excellence, King defended values, a culture, typical of Southern civilization, at the same time rooted in tradition and open to the world. Director of a rural America (the shots of little cities, of prairies, abound in his work) attentive to the passage of time, to the rhythm of the seasons, to the importance of a journey or a discovery (cf. the number of scenes of separations and reunions), he places his camera at the height of feeling—like Hawks, at the “height of man.”

Gregory Peck, in a very interesting prologue to the monograph by Walter Coppedge, reveals to us that two of the primordial twists of The Bravados were put in and written by King, which made the men that Peck revenged innocent of the rape of his wife and added the final confession. Profoundly religious, King refuses to champion the notion of revenge, even justified. One of these ideas is brilliant, the other more debatable: both testify to a vision, to a culture. This culture, openly sentimental (his Griffith remake is moreover a lot less bad than has been claimed), often draws inspiration from a literature which one easily suspects the limits and conventions of. Thus, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain [1951], a very personal project, adapts a novel that Walter Coppedge classes among the soap operas of the Saturday Evening Post. Nevertheless, despite the lackluster performance of William Lundigan, the film transcends its point of departure, so great is its force of conviction, so passionate the attachment the director bears for his characters. With King, to cite James Q. Wilson, “the habits of the heart are never subverted by the ambitions of the spirit.” It’s interesting to compare this work with Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown [1950] which remains more external, more detached relative to certain feelings, certain values: the best shots of Tourneur are engraved, the best moments the instances of weariness. In King, everything that exalts the notion of sacrifice is carried by the mise-en-scene. He magnificently renders the attachment to the soil, to the home, notions which may seem simplistic or antiquated, in this close to Ford, a Ford who privileged rootedness relative to rootlessness. One finds all these themes again in his biopics, typical of Fox and often remarkable given the conventions of the genre: Wilson, Stanley and Livingstone, and in the historical films which are similar, one of the best of which remains Lloyd’s of London [1936] where he imposed Tyrone Power and George Sanders. The sensibility of King, his attention to detail, a genuine sense for historical atmosphere—provided that the period coincides with his culture—often enables him to move beyond reconstruction towards recreation, especially in his American works where the peaceful rhythm of the mise-en-scene seems to be born from the feelings of the characters.

Like all successful historical films, they also speak to us of the era in which they were made: thus, I’d Climb reflects as much on the 1950s as on the beginning of the century, Wilson revolves more around World War II. Nellie is the only work where King deals with in the present, implicitly, the change of mentality which upsets America. He tried to impose Marilyn Monroe in the title role, which would have reinforced the timeliness of the theme, but the studio refused. This in no way restricts the originality of a work devoted to a male character who constantly makes mistakes and causes misfortune for his loved ones, a rarely addressed subject which anticipates The Bravados. Margie is one of those little miracles which seems to have everything to make it sink into mawkishness and yet barely brushes up against it. King directs—superbly—a bland debutante, Jeanne Crain, remarkable in this role of the schoolgirl “awakening to love” in a little town during the 1920s. The relations, very well treated, between the mother and the daughter, make this “little slice of Americana” one of King’s best films.

He's less at ease when he treats foreign stories. His style becomes more stiff, more conventional (Captain From Castile [1947]). Even a historical fantasy like Prince of Foxes [1949] doesn’t escape from stasis despite some excellent action scenes: a battle in the forest, the assault of a city, the final duel. Formally, the film is spectacular, King finding in Leon Shamroy the ideal cinematographer, passing with mastery from real exteriors (of which he made himself the ardent advocate of in 1922) to studio décor, brilliantly utilizing depth of field and short focal lengths. Orson Welles, for once, doesn’t look like he’s simply chasing after any paying work. It’s him and Everett Sloane who actually dominate the film, which is paralyzed by the presence of Wanda Hendrix and a predictable scenario. On several occasions, a bad choice of actresses (where the studio must have played a large role) will freeze the historical works of King: Susan Hayward in David and Bathsheba [1951], a very literary but somewhat inert scenario by Philip Dunne, Simone Simon (Seventh Heaven [1937]), Terry Moore (King of the Khyber Rifles [1953], otherwise totally bleak and out of fashion). It’s a defect absent from his melodramas and pastoral chronicles, but which suffers from a more neorealist story like A Bell for Adano [1945] where it’s difficult to accept Gene Tierney as a blond Italian. This stasis disappears as soon as he can root the story in a context he knows or in feelings which are close to him, everything that touches or tears apart the family unit. Thus, in Adano the return of the prisoners constitutes an anthologizable sequence.

Even a western like Jesse James [1939] turns into a family chronicle, into an elegiac poem. King films the back of reality, interested only in the myth he is filming, with the help of a clever scenario by Nunnally Johnson close to a Griffithian romance. Jesse James is closer to Tol’able David than the westerns of Ford or Walsh. It’s the apology and defense of the values attached to rural America as against the capitalists of the East, the corruption that the city brings. Jesse James isn’t so far from Ford’s young Lincoln. The moral of the film, as noted by Walter Coppedge, also concerns the America of the post-depression era, which this apology for heroic and provincial individualism could only resonate with. His late period is less catastrophic than that of Negulesco, although the CinemaScope succeeds rather poorly and he signs a good number of formidable “turkeys,” as the Americans say: Carousel [1956], Beloved Infidel [1959] and especially the dismal This Earth Is Mine [1959], a sad foreshadowing of television soap opera. However, we would love to see two works that Coppedge considers misunderstood masterpieces: Over the Hill [1931] and Remember the Day [1941], which seem very personal, akin to State Fair, Stella Dallas [1925] or The Song of Bernadette [1943].

A Biography of Michael Cimino, or What Should Film History Do

Whether or not it actually was, the publication of the first biography of Michael Cimino last week felt like an Event—for me, if nobody else. In one of those weird instances where a word becomes associated with something completely unrelated, whenever I heard the word “ample” (not a word you hear too often) over the last few years I thought of the prospect of a Cimino biography—an odd fact that can be traced back to my reading of Richard Brody’s memorial piece on Cimino in 2016, where he says that he’s “impatient to read a good and ample Cimino biography.” Is Charles Elton’s Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and The Price of a Vision (2022) that biography? Yes and no. It clocks in at 346 pages (and that’s including notes, index, etc.), a fact which is unremarkable were it not that in my mind’s eye I had imagined my “ample” Cimino biography closer to the 600 page range, a dense tome that I could lose myself in poring over every little succulent detail of the Cimino universe. But enough of what I had imagined. The book itself has much to recommend, simply by virtue of being the first of its kind. The notoriously secretive Cimino had kept his life story close to the chest, but it’s pried open here to an unprecedented degree—which, all things considered, still isn’t that much. But much is sorted out about his personal life, and the facts are untangled as best as they can be from the little—often distorted, embellished, or just plain untrue—that Cimino chose to share during his life. Author Charles Elton has certainly done his fair share of legwork in tracking down and talking to as many people he could who knew Cimino, and besides simply setting down a full timeline of Cimino life happenings in one place with many interesting details, this is probably where most of the book’s value lies. Through this assorted oral history, an image of the actual man Cimino was gets a little less opaque, including more or less revelatory information gleaned from never-before-interviewed figures re: both Cimino’s changing appearance later in life and his relationship with his immediate family, both of which contradict Cimino’s public statements about the matters while adding additional hints of sadness to an already melancholic figure. The melancholy that already shrouded the legend of Cimino being due to the reception of Heaven’s Gate (1980) and the subsequent difficulties Cimino faced in the film industry. The book was marketed as a kind of historical correction to the myth of Cimino’s fall, told most notoriously in producer Steven Bach’s “tell-all” memoir of the Heaven’s Gate fiasco, Final Cut, published in 1985. In this it does its job well enough—as we learn, Heaven’s Gate did NOT actually bankrupt United Artists. But part of the Cimino myth, and I would argue a more important one that needs dispelling, is the assumption that his last few films—The Sicilian (1987), Desperate Hours (1990), and The Sunchaser (1996) in particular—aren’t any good. However, one is more or less left with this exact impression, and for the casual reader picking up this biography, little incentive is provided to give these films a first or second chance. This is really where my main disappointment lies with this biography: it is largely absent any cinephilic passion, and is content to do the bare minimum in the sections on films not mentioned in the title. Granted, this is straight biography through and through, and the author’s own views on the films probably take up less than half a page total. But I would argue that it’s impossible to do a biography of Cimino without making it a critical biography, because for a man for whom there is so little biographical information available, it feels like an imperative to look at the soul he left up there on screen if anything approaching a true picture of the man is to be painted. Even so, the book only spends four pages—literally four pages, out of over 300—on Year of the Dragon (to say nothing of the literally six pages accorded to Desperate Hours and The Sunchaser combined). This can’t even be chalked up to the relatively smooth productions of these three films relative to something like The Sicilian’s complex production, battles over final cut and script credits and all. Just the other day I started to listen to Cimino’s director’s commentary on the Year of the Dragon DVD, and in 45 minutes I was given a tale more engrossing, soulful, and full of interesting detail than anything in this biography. I wouldn’t call Elton a cinephile, and nothing I can find contradicts that verdict; his quick sketches of conceptual ideas like “auteurism” and “New Hollywood” leave much to be desired. He himself admits in the Acknowledgements that before embarking on this endeavor, he had strictly been a writer of novels. A quick internet search shows that he’s worked in television for the last thirty years. I don’t say this to discredit him, but I have to wonder if there was somebody better to write this book. (For example, F.X. Feeney, for a long time Cimino’s sole American champion amongst professional critics and later one of his closest friends, who unfortunately passed away in February 2020 before any project of the sort could be undertaken.) For a filmmaker who went so denigrated in American film culture for so long (and is still waiting on mainstream critical appreciation beyond Heaven’s Gate), I’d think that any book on Cimino put out in America would need to have “impassioned defense” as some part of its DNA. In fact, Elton isn’t even American—he’s British. Anyways....once again, we are all so far behind the French. There are a few references to the French adoration of Cimino throughout the book, and it even includes the first paragraph of Cimino’s 2001 novel Big Jane (written in English, but solely published in French) in translation. Clearly some level of access to French thought on Cimino was available, so it becomes ever more disappointing that reference to the contemporary French reception of the films couldn’t be included opposite the always and forever obligatory pull-quotes from Ebert, Canby, et al. that no published book on film can ever seem to do without. All this makes it sound like I hate this book more than I do; in truth, I enjoyed reading it immensely, if sometimes only for the things that I was learning, and would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in Cimino or his films. In fact, I don’t hate it at all; I’m merely disappointed in thinking about what it could have been. Far be it from me to arrogantly suggest that I could have done better, but in my mind’s eye I can envision a more dedicated version of myself creating a Michael Cimino (critical) biography for the ages. And maybe one day I will, and I’ll have Charles Elton to thank for providing additional information that I never would have had without his work. Regardless of whether that unlikely thing ever happens, I’ve still been given an opportunity to ponder the question of just what I think constitutes writing good film history. In fact, I’m in the midst of doing some version of that right now (my project, more or less a sort of critical biography about James Gray, I would optimistically estimate is ~15% finished; after a long break, it has been reconceptualized and when complete will appear on this blog, hopefully in weekly installments leading up to the release of Gray’s new film Armageddon Time.) Just in brief, I think any good critical film history has the job of not only providing as much context as possible, but spinning it into a web that demonstrates the complexity of history cinematic and otherwise, and always towards an end goal of increasing reader edification about the films at hand, in whatever way possible. I’d had in mind to twist this little post more in the direction of film history and the subject of biographies, including reference to a video on Francis Ford Coppola that I watched the other day, but I can’t quite remember what significance that video had, or what exactly I wanted to say about biographies. Maybe I just wanted to say that I like reading them, because they’re just about the only way I can get perspective about a person’s life, and by extension, if I use my imagination a little bit, about my own life. Where will I be in 50 years? I had this thought today: in terms of my contributions to film culture, I think I would be content if I attained a status such that just one random 24-year-old on the internet felt compelled to make a small, barely-viewed blog post about me. But this isn't about me; it's about Michael Cimino, a titanic American artist that, even if no word was ever written about him, would live on as a legend, an epic poet of the silver screen, whose images speak all that needs to be said.  

Cry Macho / Drive My Car

Cinema is not my life. Living is. – Ermanno Olmi

The two best films I’ve seen that premiered in 2021 are Cry Macho and Drive My Car.

But that statement means nothing, really, except for announcing something subjective about myself which mostly remains invisible.

I say that because it’s difficult for me to believe that all of the reasons why I like Cry Macho are the same as all of the reasons why other people like Cry Macho (which some people like, but not a ton) or that all of the reasons I like Drive My Car are the same as all of the reasons why other people like Drive My Car (which a ton of people like, except some). This may seem obvious, but I mention it not only because I imagine the reasons why I like them differs from others, but because I don’t think I would even agree with others about what they are.

To me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car are beyond cinema. I don’t like calling them “films,” except as a shorthand, because my personal experience with them went far beyond what I imagine when I think of what a film is: let’s say, sounds and images spread across a certain length of time. A movie ends when it’s over. For me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car didn’t end when they were over.

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I saw Cry Macho four months ago and I saw Drive My Car four days ago. Both in theatres (a local multiplex for the former, a local arthouse for the latter). I was quite moved at points during both films, but both times somewhat soon after I left the theatre I became absolutely, undeniably emotionally overwhelmed just thinking about the films. The first time I was sitting in my car in the driveway of the place where I was staying the night. The second time I was walking the city streets in a kind of post-screening reverie. The point is, the incredible profundity that I find in these two works didn’t hit me until I re-entered the world, both literally and figuratively. I had to think about them not as films but as things which exist vis-à-vis my own life, my own existence.

Doing this immediately puts to rest any thoughts of “best” or “good” or “bad” or, God forbid, “grade” or “score” or “star rating” or “ranking” or anything like that. No—there is merely a film in front of you (wait—not “film,” but rather, let’s say, an encounter) which exists in the world in which you live. What does it mean for my life. What does it offer to me—or, what can I offer to it. In other words: how can I maximize my vulnerability in order to maximize my edification, or, how can I make this mean the most for my life as possible.

I’ve had four months to sit with Cry Macho (and I’ve watched it again just now), and I’ve already occasionally thrown some thoughts out there on ways I’ve been thinking about it. But one point that keeps coming up, in contradistinction to ways I’ve seen some other people think about it, is that it doesn’t need to be “good” to be good. It has no requirement to be the kind of movie, or even the “quality” of movie, that one thinks movies are or should be.

This is easy enough to point out with a somewhat obviously misshapen (“misshapen”) film like Cry Macho, but something about Drive My Car has led me to think of it in a somewhat similar manner. As hinted at before, the fact that it has earned seemingly universal praise (the reason for which I have an inkling, see below) doesn’t mean the praise I wish to give it is necessarily of the same kind, or for the same reason, that others have. So I shy away a bit from the overwhelmingly positive response for that reason, and perhaps also because of my natural distaste for “awards” being given to works of art, or to anything or anybody for that matter.

Is Drive My Car “deserving” of all of the awards it has won? Sure. But recognizing this fact irks me a little bit, because that immediately legitimizes not only the idea of artistic competition (objectively nonexistent, ontologically) but also of Drive My Car being a “film” in the first place (subjectively objectionable, phenomenologically). It feels wrong to reduce an irreducibly complex encounter that I had to a tidbit fact about what random city’s voting body officially recognized the work as “best” whatever.

But Drive My Car seems to be so solidly and elegantly constructed, as opposed to Cry Macho’s apparent bumpiness, so it seems a little odder that I would also call into question that film’s need to be “good” in order to be good. Maybe the reason is already clear: it’s because this fact stands for all films. I merely choose these two because they both catalyzed a specific kind of emotional reaction in me, in a specific kind of way, that I can’t recall any other films ever doing. Of course, there are a million complexities that go into these reactions occurring completely unrelated to the films themselves, but I digress....

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The reason I chose to look at these two films together doesn’t stop there. Yes, they’re both 2021 films. Yes, they’re my two favorite of that kind. Yes, they even both have commands as titles, and largely consist of two people driving in a car.

To me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car make the world seem bigger. (This statement is some kind of attempt to offer a vaguely poetic remark that secretly encompasses a thousand things that I don’t have the time to articulate right now....)

It’s maybe interesting to note that Eastwood has perhaps been the most beloved American filmmaker in Japan for the last half-century, and that Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who was a teacher of Hamaguchi’s and with whom he co-wrote the script of last year’s Wife of a Spy (2020), is on the record as an admirer of Eastwood, or that Hamaguchi himself put Hereafter (2010) on his list of his ten favorite films from the last ten years, or that Hamaguchi’s 38-minute Heaven Is Still Far Away (2016) could very well be seen as a remake of that same film.

Here’s a cliché that I’m simply going to use untouched and ask that the reader become vulnerable to its truth nonetheless: both films are about the value of human connection. I was very struck, in Drive My Car, by the use of language. Of languages, plural, that is. Of Japanese, English, Korean, German, Tagalog, Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Malaysian. And Korean Sign Language, which much of the film’s beauty in its dealings with language hinge on, as it both acts as a kind of punchline to the film’s funniest joke as well as the medium by which the profound climax of the film is communicated. Sign language plays a small but beautiful role in Cry Macho as well: one of the little girls that Clint befriends is deaf, and he understands her signings—“just a little something I picked up along the way,” he says modestly.

Of course the use of English and Spanish, and of broken English and poorly accentuated Spanish, permeates Cry Macho, and becomes beautiful in a similar way to Drive My Car in how language exists as a barrier to communication and yet can so easily be overcome—by translation, by looks, by gestures, by intuition, etc. I say it as the highest compliment of both films that they make me eager to continue and expand my language studies, just as they make me want to talk to strangers more, just as they make me want to do my best to love everyone I encounter on my path through life. They make my heart feel more open, and I don’t feel embarrassed to say something like that which could so easily be misconstrued as cloyingly sentimental.

The apotheosis of this idea of language and communication shattering borders thought to be closed comes in the form of a light joke in one of the final moments of Cry Macho: as the young boy walks to his father and is reunited on the other side of the Mexican-American border, Macho the rooster crows something and Clint looks at it and says, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” It is as if the final language barrier had been crossed. I guess he picked that one up along the way, too....

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If I still haven’t offered much that could be considered concrete as to why I value these two movies so deeply, at a certain point it becomes an issue of how much one is willing to share.

This gets at a bigger problem, which I would call the impossibility of writing about film in public forums. I can write about films at some length, if I choose to, without divulging personal information or sharing details of my personal beliefs. Some hints of these things naturally come through; how could they not. But at a certain point I have to stop simply because there is a time and place for sharing these things, and doing so online to a bunch of strangers with wildly converging belief systems is rarely one of those places.

Of course these deeply personal things are inseparable from my reactions to films, these two especially. The contents of my thoughts and emotions during the half hour or so after seeing these two movies is something that will only ever be known by myself and maybe some of my closest friends. They are intensely subjective.

I can perhaps hint, via one small and seemingly trivial example, at what I mean. If you’ve seen Drive My Car, you’ll know that the age of 23 becomes significant for the story. I myself was 23 when this film was first released. To deepen the subjective resonance even further, I, too, like the character of that age, have spent much of my working life driving a car. This is just one example of something small, and which of course will not be a shared resonance with all viewers.

But even something bigger—like, let’s say, the theme of bearing one’s suffering, and longing for rest from it—can, although certainly an experience shared by everyone (here’s where I suggest we could maybe locate the near unanimous love of the film), can still be a theme experienced intensely subjectively, so much so that one’s personal takeaway is unlikely to be something necessarily intended by the film, and almost certainly something not believed by the film’s maker himself.

At the beginning of Cry Macho’s most moving scene, Clint and teenage actor Eduardo Minett hole up in a Catholic shrine. “Do you believe in God?” Clint’s answer of “I don’t know” is consistent with what he know of Eastwood’s beliefs, a question at the very foundation of his making of Hereafter, which I recall him answering in a similar fashion as he does in Cry Macho on a special feature of the film’s DVD.

Drive My Car’s interpolation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, especially the final monologue communicated via Korean Sign Language, is very much about God, too, and His relation to human suffering. To me, these final lines become very much a profound expression of the Christian faith, that for the Christian, earthly suffering will one day find its cessation in the eternity of heaven—“we shall rest.” To another, these lines probably mean something else, or something less specific, or in any case something less theological. Far be it from me to let Armond White speak for anybody, but I just googled “Ryûsuke Hamaguchi religion” and stumbled upon this suggestion from him: “Adding a deaf-mute actress to deliver Sonya’s famous closing lines is shameless, but PC reviewers don’t respond to the beautiful Christian faith, only to this production’s emphasis on pity. Or as Yusuke summarizes it: ‘We’ll be okay.’”

Just having his words in this piece makes me a little ashamed, but it was mostly coincidental and it offers a good enough suggestion as to what other people might be responding to. Which isn’t to say they are wrong for responding to it in that way, as by all indication that’s probably closer to what Hamaguchi’s intended meaning was. (Chekov’s, too—by all accounts it seems he was an atheist in the final years of his life in which Uncle Vanya was written.) One can only respond to something through the medium of one’s own worldview. It just so happens that my own worldview stumbled upon an idea so profoundly important to me that I didn’t care whether or not it was intended to be read that way, and simply chose to embrace it as I would if it were. This is part of how we make the art rather than the art making us, so to speak, and goes back to everything I’ve been talking about re: subjectivity and what makes a film “good” and/or good.

But to continue along the lines of my subjective thinking, there’s something about both Cry Macho and Drive My Car that moves me to not segregate myself from those of differing beliefs than I, but rather to see them from a perspective more divine than my own. In that Cry Macho scene I was taking about the kid goes on to mock the idea that “we’re all God’s children,” to which Clint responds, “Well, we’re all somebody’s children, kid,” an evasion of the question that also accidentally answers it in the affirmative. And in Drive My Car’s final monologue, there’s the line that “when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us.”

These two moments, these two parallel ideas that were never intended as direct statements of belief, become for me some kind of accidental—and therefore beautiful—reminder that every single person at every single second exists under God’s infinite mercy, and therefore should exist under whatever mercy and love I possess as well.

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I’ve accidentally found myself treading further than I intended into areas of thought which are unfashionable and perhaps controversial if not outright objectionable to some. And which directly contradict my previously stated desire to not get too personal. Forgive me.

But while I’m here I’m going to end with a quote from Søren Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de Silentio, from his Fear and Trembling, the quote which I recalled as I walked along the streets after seeing Drive My Car, which I attempted and failed in the cold to bring up on my phone in the form of the screenshot I had taken over two years prior, which—if nothing else—provides a very odd and probably unheard-of closing point for a piece of writing about two so-called movies, which should at the very least be interesting if not a tiny bit edifying to anyone who is still reading at this point:

But he who loves God has no need of tears, no need of admiration, in his love he forgets his suffering, yea, so completely has he forgotten it that afterwards there would not even be the least inkling of his pain if God Himself did not recall it, for God sees in secret and knows the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.

Personal Update / Blog Therapy

Consider this a little personal diary entry made public. Long story short: I’ve hit a snag in the project I’m working on, and after some floundering I’ve decided to write about it as an attempt to do away with it. Some authorial self-therapy; maybe, if someone happens to have pertinent advice, an attempt at a communal outsourcing of my current hang-ups.

For reasons I may or may not get into here, I’m currently writing a book on filmmaker James Gray. After many months of research I’ve finally started “writing” it; but my trouble has been, or has become, my inability to be satisfied with what it means, practically speaking, to “write” a book. Over the years my writing methods have evolved—through a combination of repetition, intuition, and sheer disgust and boredom at what passes for film writing these days—into some weird, indescribable technique. For example, last year I wrote a pretty long piece on Brian De Palma’s Domino (which can easily be found elsewhere on this page) which, for everything else it may or may not be, is certainly the most pertinent example to date of the way I wish to and try to write.

A peak behind the curtain: that piece was written, from conception to completion, in about two months’ time. I’d estimate that the first month and a half was spent doing what could be termed research and pre-writing. First—bathing in the subject matter, in areas both pertinent and peripheral to the specific topic at hand, amassing fact knowledge while simultaneously letting my emotional knowledge of the subject grow; an immersion, in other words, via reading and thinking. Second—compiling information, jotting down notes; anything I came across, or thought up, that seemed to be of potential value to the final piece, everything from nuts and bolts production information to the farthest flung half-baked philosophical musings of mine that felt spiritually relevant to the project. Third—what I call the “vomit” stage; a process learned both negatively from my post-collegiate distaste for “proper” writing and positively from a few short-lived bouts of intensely diaristic and private film writing that I (very) occasionally did in the past; basically, this vomiting is a kind of glorified and chaotic freewriting where I let loose and try my best to channel my most intimate and poetic inclinations in relation to my thoughts on the particular film/subject at hand—essentially, an attempt to squeeze out everything contained in me that’s interesting, edifying, insightful, thought-provoking, etc. on the film at hand; an attempt, at all costs, to not be boring. I don’t stop this third step of the process until I’m fairly satisfied that I’ve gotten it all out. This usually results in a Word document filled with word vomit, a collection of mostly complete gibberish sprinkled throughout with a surprising amount of coherent and cohesive patterns of thought and even, for my standards, some respectably decent strings of words. And that’s that—all that remains is to trim, polish, and organize it into something resembling publishable material. Very little official editing is done; I prefer, for the sake of reader excitement, to leave the piece with the feeling that it could have just tumbled out of my head, “flaws” and all—which to some degree it did.

In all candor, I was really pleased with what I was able to achieve with that Domino piece. Beyond “good” or “bad,” I firmly believe that it was at least interesting and edifying; people seemed to respond to it in a beneficial way. I detail my process with that piece because, after a few years of finding and refining that particular philosophy of writing, I felt that I had once and for all proven its worth to myself.

I don’t like getting too autobiographical online for many reasons, but a reasonable degree of openness may be necessary to explain what led me to attempt to write a book as my next project. I “graduated” from college in spring 2020, the last two-plus months essentially lost to early pandemic-era shut downs. The amount of leisure time I possessed from the months of March to August was unprecedented in my adult life—I used much of it exploring ideas for different personal projects that, to make a long story short, ended in me starting my Domino piece that August. I moved out of my parents’ house shortly after into my current living situation. All this time, the realities of what the present world was asking of me stared me down, summarized as getting a job—“job,” of course, meaning something society could easily smile upon, preferably attained via the self-advertising of one’s collegiate degree. (Mine happens to be in English, a recognizably useless degree, not that I really cared, and yet still a degree more useful than my other degree, which is so useless I won’t even mention it—again, not that I really cared.) Other ideas for a “career” came and went, in varying degrees of serious consideration, but at year’s end I was left with the increasing certainty that I had no desire to have a “career” doing anything that smelt, to me, of cog-in-the-system soul-sucking respectability. I was satisfied enough with the old summer job that I’d retained for the purposes of sufficiently life-sustaining cashflow that in January 2021 I basically said screw it: I’d work my job and in my free time I’d write a book, specifically one small enough to be completed in a relatively short amount of time and yet big enough to potentially make a decent sized splash upon publication (which, I decided, I wasn’t going to actively think about until I had finished it.)

I landed on James Gray simply because he’s one of my very favorite filmmakers and existing literature on him, at least in book form, is slim to non-existent—plus his filmography is small enough to make the project a reasonable size for a first book. Anyways, if you recall steps one and two of my writing process above, that’s what I’ve spent the greater part of the last ten months doing—pleasurably and without overwhelming amounts of issues, project- or life-wise. But as I’ve entered step number three, I’ve found myself skipping to step four more often than I’d like to. I mostly think this has to do with the problem of size and genre. For an essay length piece like my one on Domino, these steps mostly flow smoothly. But for a book length piece—one that tries to take the form of an essay while including more biographical and informational type writing—these steps have been getting tangled up. I find myself slipping back into the kind of academic form that I used to write papers with in school, which isn’t an inherently bad form, but one I’ve increasingly found unexciting and lacking the spark I’m looking for. This usually happens when I skip the vomit stage and try to write things straight—poetry disappears, dull functionality replaces it. So I’m left with the question of whether my desired writing style is even compatible with book form; perhaps I feel a subconscious pull towards a certain refined style simply because of the way I’m imagining the final product. I wonder if I were simply writing it to publish on this dumb little blog of mine I would still be running into the same mentality problems. Or, rather: I think I’d like to simply not care. Who’s to decide whether “internet writing” is up to snuff to find a place in paperbound form—it’s all arbitrary anyway.

So my internal struggle is really one of practical philosophy. I would like to lean, if at all possible, towards a process of pleasure & poetry rather than one of prescription & perfection. I want to be willing to sacrifice everything in the name of reader edification, even it means alienating myself from everything that the average person associates with the concept of a book. And I wonder, for example, if the people who would be interested in reading a book about James Gray even care what form it takes; or if they would actually prefer it to take the form more closely resembling my here-and-there internet ramblings....

An important part of this project’s inception comes from my life situation—left in a position to take creative risks that won’t harm anyone else in their failure but myself, I feel emboldened to try this at this point in my life as a first last-ditch attempt to carve out some sort of space where my passion for film writing doesn’t just become a nights-and-weekends hobby. There are a million complexities to the past, present, and future of this desire, many of them having absolutely nothing to do with the small community of online cinephiles that I feel not only connected to but, in a way, responsible to. For the time being, however, I just want to put my head down and get this project out of me and into the world, and deal with everything else afterwards. Hopefully writing this blog post has contributed in some miniscule way or another towards getting me there.  

In Memoriam: Monte Hellman

I 

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

II 

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.

III

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.

Alexander Horwath on Absolute Power (1997)

The following is a review of Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power (1997) by Austrian film critic Alexander Horwath originally published in the German newspaper Die Zeit on May 30, 1997. Translation by me; I am not qualified to do this but randomly felt like doing so because I thought it would be fun to share this nice little piece on an underseen and underrated Eastwood film. Enjoy! 

Cinema: “Absolute Power” of and with Clint Eastwood

In the center of power an older man sits and draws in front of himself: in Washington, not in the White House, rather in the National Gallery. Before him the painting of a master, El Greco, Jesus on the cross, adored by a disciple. The man, played by Clint Eastwood, tries to transfer this image onto his sketch pad. A young blonde woman, played by Clint Eastwood’s daughter, steps up to him. Somewhat amused by his efforts, she says: “Don’t give up.” And he: “I never do.” Then she takes a closer look — he has exclusively, repeatedly, and carefully drawn the hands and eyes. She realizes: “You work with your hands, don’t you?”

The man’s name is Luther Whitney, like a founder of a religion and an American museum. He lives alone, in an unassuming townhouse, the house key lying in a flower pot in front of the door. Slowly he prepares his dinner, slowly he reaches for his glass of red wine, slowly he leafs through his pad: eyes, hands, and then a magnificent, stately house. Like every good craftsman he has first drawn this house, studied its structure and form, understood it with hand and eye, to then, by night and fog, enter and conquer it. Because Luther Whitney is a master thief.

“For the society for whom art is only ornament, art that insists on being work appears as a mere gimmick” (Frieda Grafe). So it was also with the films of Clint Eastwood for a long time. Only a narrow fringe of film critics saw in them the distinctive expressions of a film-author embedded in the bustle of the industry. He himself never speaks much of art when he talks about his films, rather stressing the work, the craft — even today, after his official canonization in the light of Unforgiven (1992). What it is to simultaneously be a man of action and a man of art, however, is what his works tell of. More and more often his films circle around an artist or craftsman: country singer, jazz legend, film director, photographer. The art thief and amateur illustrator Luther Whitney, who gets in the way of the U.S. President in person, asks old Eastwood questions accordingly bolder (although in the end less subtle) than ever before: What is absolute power? What use may it have in the course of politics, physical violence, or creative work? And what are its consequences?

The question of power in the cinema is inextricable from the question of the gaze, which is connected to visibility. Absolute Power quickly finds a fascinating image for this relationship. Luther Whitney has felt around the room he’s entered. On the top floor he finds a hidden “treasure room.” Suddenly the light goes on in the believed-to-be-abandoned house, steps and voices approach, and Whitney is just able to close the chamber from the inside before the young homeowner accompanied by the president (Gene Hackman) enters the room. From the outside the chamber is now a mirror and thus invisible; from the inside a window, through which Whitney can follow the happenings. A love-game begins and also a game of gazes. In the mirror the president fixes his tie and sees it thus, without seeing in, head-on with the burglar. The burglar in turn behaves like every voyeur, like us in the movie theatre too: silent and empathetic he reacts with little head movements at the presentation. The love-game becomes increasingly violent, in the end the young woman lies covered in blood on the carpeted floor. The president’s bodyguards and his chief of staff (Judy Davis) sort it out; only Luther Whitney’s gaze remains on the evil deed and will never be detached from it.

How Eastwood and his team of craftsmen narratively handle this sequence and the entire first half of the film is without comparison in contemporary entertainment cinema: how spatial and temporal development converge, measured pace, but nimble; how secondary characters are brought into play as actors beyond their mere functionality, furnished in just a few strokes with motives, doubts, flaws; how finally in the middle of the film a showdown in an open place, brilliantly assembled from five different perspectives, to an interior view of paranoia and betrayal, all of these are practical evidence of an ethics of form that has become rare in genre cinema. As actor too, in gait and speech, Eastwood and Henry Fonda become more and more alike.

In its moral and political attitudes the film draws on two — quite contradictory — earlier strands of the 1970s. The representation of corrupt politics and paranoid security systems, which have become completely opposite and independent from their public mission, recalls Coppola’s The Conversation or Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. In the figure of Hackman, whose escapades with the wife of his political father moreover yields a quite particular Oedipus variant, there is mingled well-known traits of “Tricky Dick” Nixon with several rumored of “Tricky Bill” Clinton. It is likely no coincidence that Luther Whitney begins his individualistic crusade against the presidential gang in the “Watergate Hotel.”