Cinematic Overtures Read online

  FIGURE 2.1  Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) behind the windshield in The Conformist. All images in this book are digital frame enlargements taken directly from the BluRay or DVD versions of the films.

  This is supported when Marcello subsequently recounts to Manganiello the dream he just had: with a windshield wiper in the hazy foreground, Marcello is framed behind the car’s window. Through a shift of focus, his face fades as the wiper suddenly becomes sharply visible. This self-conscious visual manipulation suggests that perception is one of the film’s key concerns: if a windshield wiper is that which clears vision, in this scene it becomes a metaphor for The Conformist as a whole. In Bertolucci’s words, “Shooting the Plato scene, I had the feeling that the cave was talking about the invention of the cinema. Plato, not Lumière, is the inventor of the cinema. That exciting morning in 1970, we were still in the 1960s, with the idea that a movie not only had to tell a story, but investigate and analyze cinema—with the revolution made by the New Wave, especially Godard.” The lighting throughout the film is self-consciously dramatic and often intermittent. For example, Marcello hits a swinging overhead lamp that casts momentary light in the back of a Chinese restaurant, expressing his wavering resolve about killing Quadri. Bertolucci proposes visually that we can see only what is illuminated for us. This is true not just for movie viewers but for citizens of any state: dictatorships don’t reveal everything to the people. In interviews, he even admitted that he might be a fascist filmmaker because he manipulates everything we see. Is there not a form of fascism in the tyranny of our own expectations? But there is also great freedom in watching The Conformist: we are invited into active participation because we have to stay on our cinematic toes. Many shots are ambiguous, their meaning becoming apparent only in retrospect. Bertolucci adds to Moravia’s story scenes of witnessing or peeping, choices that serve to make us aware of our own voyeurism; as a character in Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution puts it, “Style is a moral fact.”

  It was after shooting The Conformist that Bertolucci decided to replace chronology with flashbacks. “I said to [Franco] Arcalli, my editor, ‘Why don’t we change the linear structure and make a long flashback?’ Before, I called them ‘the castrating scissors of the editors,’ and I shot long takes that were impossible to intercut, like in Partner. But I shot the trip of Marcello and Manganiello in a way that could have become intercut.” Bertolucci uses breathtaking cinematography, sensuous music, and deft montage, turning the verbal narration into an exploration of sexuality, politics, and cinematic style. We enter the tense rushes of Marcello’s mind through flashbacks—moving from past to present and from fascism to freedom.

  Bertolucci acknowledged his debt to the French New Wave, which ushered a new visual complexity into the early 1960s, augmented by the New German Cinema in the 1970s. By the end of that decade, it was possible for Volker Schlöndorff—a German-born, French-trained filmmaker—to use all the tools of the cinematic arsenal in bringing The Tin Drum to the screen. The Academy Award winner for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1979 is an epic, blending cinematic artistry, psychological insight, political vision, and a symbolic richness that defies any single interpretation.3 The screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Franz Seitz, and Schlöndorff is a remarkable reworking of Günter Grass’s first book. It tells the story of Oskar Matzerath, who decides at the age of three to stop growing. He thus becomes a privileged witness to the rise of Nazism, which the film presents in terms of infantilism. It begins with a riveting sequence that has nothing to do with the novel’s opening scene of a man observed behind a door’s peephole (see clip).

  In a vast field, a peasant woman allows a fugitive to hide under her huge skirts, even concealing from policemen his sexual penetration of her. She keeps eating potatoes, hot from the coals, while they pierce carts of potatoes with their bayonets. Once they leave, he emerges sheepishly from her clothing, zipping up his pants: she seems to have enjoyed the surprise and, in accelerated motion, they continue together through the field. The scene is audacious—not only in terms of the apparent rape, but also the presentation—fulfilling Carrière’s assessment, “Bruegel meets Chaplin.”4 The cinematography of Igor Luther has a fairy-tale quality, slightly speeded up like celluloid in the silent era. Schlöndorff likened the effect to “a picture book for children” when he visited my film class at Columbia in 1987, adding, “Oskar wouldn’t know how things looked before his birth, so we decided to use a camera of the time. But the lens for these cameras wasn’t made for color stock. Because it wasn’t color-corrected, we used a colorization filter.” The haunting music of Maurice Jarre fulfills Schlöndorff’s desire “to hear the earth-mother principle in the score,” including a Jew’s harp.5 And the chilling voice-over narration of Oskar combines a child’s timbre with an adult’s comprehension. On a secondary level, it also reminds us of the film’s literary origins.

  Oskar conjures up a time before his birth, his omniscient voice occasionally suggesting a demonic presence. The opening image turns out to depict his own grandmother being impregnated by his grandfather. Schlöndorff thus introduces the themes of fecundity and adaptability that will recur throughout the film. In fact, the man crawling into the multiple skirts offers a reverse image of birth. By inventing the peasant woman, and ending The Tin Drum with the same figure, the film assumes a cyclical form that is quite different from the novel’s linear structure. Schlöndorff thus foregrounds female continuity within nature, unlike Grass’s focus on a solitary male. The film revels in elemental imagery, juxtaposing within one frame the nourishing earth, billowing smoke (fire and air), and finally water in the form of sudden rain.

  Picking up on the novel’s first image, the director uses an iris shot throughout the opening sequence—a black circle closing to end a scene, or an iris into the action to open the next scene—creating a peephole effect that grows comic. Oskar hypothesizes that his grandfather escaped and became a millionaire in Chicago—we therefore see the grandfather, Joseph, as a rich American—while his grandmother ages in Danzig, selling geese in the market. The final iris into a shot of the old woman shows that she now has a heated brick under her skirts—rather than a lusty man—to keep her warm. Thus, the opening sequence moves not only from a long shot of the landscape to close-ups of our characters but also from the smoke of the field to the contained fire of Joseph’s cigar, to the muted heat of the brick.

  The film’s fresco then grows vast, bursting with juxtapositions of political and psychological acuity. Oskar narrates that he was born in 1924 Danzig, “between faith and disillusion,” a time when a credulous people believed in Santa Claus—not realizing “that Santa Claus was really the gasman.” Oskar (David Bennent, who was twelve when the film was shot) is the narrator of his own tale—a point of view dazzlingly reinforced by the use of subjective camera at his birth: the lens emerges from darkness to unfocused lights and sounds, finally delineating his mother, Agnes, and his two fathers (Agnes’s husband, Alfred, and his biological father, Jan). Schlöndorff alternates between subjective and objective camera: in an eerie touch, the baby is also played by David Bennent. That he can see into the future is suggested by the superimposition of three-year-old Oskar with his drum onto the infant.

  FIGURE 2.2  Oskar’s birth in The Tin Drum

  When he falls down the basement stairs at the age of three, the fall is expressed by a subjective camera that swirls around—just as it did when he was born—in slow-motion. We hear Oskar’s piercing scream and also see him from the eerie perspective of a wide-angle camera underneath him. Oskar is, in a sense, giving birth to a new version of himself. In a Freudian context, he chooses to remain tiny after observing sexual contact between childish grown-ups; in 1945, at the age of twenty-one, he decides to grow again only after indirectly killing both his fathers. By this point, he is a father himself, and his son Kurt throws a rock at Oskar that leads him to fall. (The camera takes on a circular movement even before the little boy throws the stone, a visual echo of bo
th Oskar’s birth and his willful spiraling down the basement stairs.)

  Throughout The Tin Drum eroticism is presented from a child’s perspective as secretive: first, adults engage in concealed sex while eating potatoes or playing cards. Later, it is under the guise of “running errands” or crying, expressed through Schlöndorff’s self-consciously voyeuristic camera angles. Agnes leaves Oskar in a toy store with Sigismund Markus (Charles Aznavour), but the child suspects that she is not going shopping and secretly follows her outside. Although he cannot see the hotel room where his mother and Jan (Daniel Olbrychski) fall into a heated embrace, the camera acts like an extension of his pulsating eyeball: we become privileged spectators, entering the room as if projections of Oskar’s voyeuristic desire. His revenge is to climb to the top of a building, from which he emits a scream so loud that it shatters windows.

  Once Oskar is of age (if not of size), he seduces the family servant Maria (Katharina Thalbach) with a fizz that is licked off one’s palms. Indeed, the film is filled with images of people being fed (and often force-fed): after the opening of the peasant woman nibbling on a burning potato, a group of children give Oskar a nauseating “soup” that includes excrement, Alfred forces his wife to eat eels, and Oskar leads Alfred to swallow his Nazi pin when the Russians arrive. One of the film’s most striking scenes is that of Agnes reeling from the sight of a severed horse’s head on a beach: filled with eels, it is a stomach-churning image of birth as well as death. Moreover, it evokes another horrifying emblem of war, Picasso’s Guernica.

  The hallucinatory images of The Tin Drum lead us to question their meaning. For example, what of the title? Depending on one’s perspective, it can refer to German militarism, a fiercely rebellious rejection of society, or an extension of the heartbeat that is a child’s first sound in the womb. The film is designed to make the viewer think critically not only about images but also about history and human identity. On one level, Oskar is the symbol of resistance to fascism, denying responsibility in the debased world of adults. His primary activity is playing the tin drum, aggressively beating his own rhythm. At a Nazi rally his loud tempo subverts a military band until the scene grows comic: the rally becomes a dance as everyone suddenly waltzes to the Blue Danube! And he chooses to grow only after his country’s last ties to Nazism have been severed.

  The Tin Drum raises more questions than it can—or should—answer. They are not merely about the World War II era but also its aftermath. For example, Schlöndorff called Oskar a prophetic image of post-1968 youth: “His most important trait is his regressive attitude towards women. He wants to be everything with a woman, to be a lover, to be coddled like a baby, to dominate—only he cannot accept the grown-up male’s responsibility towards women. This kind of attitude was prevalent in the thirties and is also widespread in the modern world. Oskar is obviously an ancestor of the post-’68 drop-out generation. The screaming of protests combined with the refusal to provide a realistic framework for change.”6 His diary entry of April 23, 1977—when he read The Tin Drum for the first time—recalls, “It could become a very German fresco, the history of the world seen from and lived on the bottom rung: enormous, spectacular paintings grouped together by the tiny Oskar.” He succeeded magnificently in his aims, as Jack Kroll perceived in Newsweek: “A sizzling ferment of myth, epic, satire, political polemic, religious symbolism, transmuted autobiography and more.”7 The film ends as it began, with a peasant woman in a field. The Tin Drum thus presents a cyclical vision of life rather than a linear tale.

  The screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière would go on to collaborate on another masterful film, one rooted in the idea of eternal return as well as connections between the erotic body and the body politic. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was released in 1987, adapted from a screenplay that director Philip Kaufman cowrote with Carrière.8 (This screenwriter was also Buñuel’s accomplice, and his script collaborations include Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre, Miloš Forman’s Valmont, and Peter Brook’s Mahabarata.) Its source is Milan Kundera’s seemingly unadaptable novel of 1984, filled with philosophical asides about eroticism and mortality. Nevertheless—together with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist (best known for Ingmar Bergman’s films)—they created an engaging visual tale as well as a complex meditation on voyeurism, politics, and morality. Its focus is Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), a philandering surgeon during the Prague Spring of 1968: he evolves from a playboy to a political hero when he refuses to sign a retraction demanded by Russian authorities. And his life is reshaped by Tereza (Juliette Binoche), who becomes his wife as well as a photographer. But he never renounces his mistress Sabina (Lena Olin), a bohemian artist who travels light, literally and figuratively. We follow our characters from the freedom of Alexander Dubček’s regime, to exile in Switzerland, and back to the new heaviness of Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

  Carrière and Kaufman offered fascinating insights during a New York University symposium honoring the screenwriter on April 8, 2016. NYU’s Center for French Civilization and Culture hosted a panel (at Cooper Union’s Rose Auditorium) during which I was able to ask them about the process of adaptation. Carrière acknowledged that he wrote the first draft of the Unbearable Lightness screenplay in French (as he did for The Tin Drum). While working in a language other than the original novel permits a certain distance (valorizing plot over literary style), it also raises questions about how much translators can change original meaning. For example, Kaufman acknowledged that Kundera’s title in French is L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être; the closest English word is not unbearable but unsustainable, invoking duration over time rather than heaviness. Similarly, Tomas’s signature line in the film is “Take off your clothes”—a far more seductive invitation than the curt “Strip” command of the novel’s English translation. Kaufman mentioned at the end of the panel that Kundera told him in Paris, “You must violate the book.” The director’s earlier playful remark, “A screenplay is a premeditation for a crime,” invites speculation about the degree to which a film necessarily “violates” its source.9

  Kaufman is repeatedly drawn to sophisticated material: after this film, he directed Henry and June (from the writings of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin) as well as Quills, about the Marquis de Sade. He acknowledged about Unbearable Lightness, “People would always say to us that the book seemed impossible to adapt. And they were right. The film is a variation on the book, a thread that comes from the book and leads back to the book. Maybe people who see the movie will refer to the book for references and reverberations.”

  A title card precedes the film’s action: “In Prague, in 1968, there lived a young doctor named Tomas” (see clip). Reminiscent of silent movies, the title introduces not only the protagonist but also his charged place and time in terms of sex and politics. In addition, its fairy-tale tone creates comic self-consciousness, heightened by the sense of a line translated into English from a foreign language. By having us “read” the screen, Kaufman thus begins not simply with an acknowledgment of a literary source but with a refusal of voice. This immediately separates his motion picture from Kundera’s novel, which opens with the vocal speculation of the first-person narrator:

  The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

  Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”10

  Instead, the film playfully celebrates the visual.

  The opening sequence consists of five scenes, beginning with a spark: a beautiful nurse strikes a match to light a cigarette, virtually igniting the film. “Take off your clothes,” Tomas says to her from under a towel. As she complies, the ca
mera pulls back to reveal that they are visible to a patient lying on the other side of the window, as well as a doctor standing next to him. With our own voyeurism shared by secondary characters, Kaufman invites our gaze at the same time that he makes us aware of internal frames. The juxtaposition of eroticism and self-consciousness continues in the second scene, introduced by the title “But the woman who understood him best was Sabina.” Tomas and this beautiful artist lie on her bed, his head covering her naked breast. Her bowler hat hides part of her face. As they move more fully into view, their lovemaking includes a vividly visual dimension: the oval mirror next to the bed not only permits them to look at themselves but also opens up another plane for the audience as well, reflecting itself into the heart of the frame. Kaufman thus invokes eternal return in a cinematic manner, the image repeating itself infinitely. It is noteworthy that Tomas and Sabina are laughing while making love, displaying an erotic jocularity rare in motion pictures.

  FIGURE 2.3  Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Sabina (Lena Olin) in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  The credits unfold in the third scene, as Tomas drives from Prague to a spa town. After a close-up of his eyes behind dark glasses, he removes them and we see his gaze. Kaufman thus continues the motif of interrupted sight: we move from Kundera’s text (an abstraction) to visual obstruction—whether a towel, a hat, a head, or sunglasses—followed by revelation. Later, during a frankly erotic scene, Sabina straddles the mirror on the floor and asks Tomas, “What are you looking at?” He replies, “Your eyes.” Kaufman does indeed replace the “I” of Kundera’s text with the “eye” of cinematic storytelling—an appropriate substitution for a work that alludes more than once to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. And it is eye contact that brings Tomas together with Tereza when he visits her spa town to perform an operation.