Night and the City: In the Labyrinth

Night And The City (Directed by Jules Dassin)

‘Night and the City’ is Jules Dassin’s masterpiece and one of a string of superb film noirs Dassin made in the late 1940s and early 1950s which included ‘Brute Force’, ‘The Naked City’ and ‘Thieves Highway’. With his career in the United States over as a result of the McCarthy witchhunts, Dassin made his way to England and, with the backing of 20th Century Fox, began production on this dark uncompromising tale based on a novel by Gerald Kersh which tells the story of small-time hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) looking for his one big break. Dassin’s vision of post-war London is of a bleak, scarred Dickensian Inferno. From the opening scenes at St. Paul’s Cathedral to the final scenes at Hammersmith Bridge where Fabian’s journey ends, London is portrayed as a dark maze-like city from which there is no escape. Dassin’s remarkable use of camera angles, with the assistance of cinematographer Mel Greene, traps Fabian in a net of his own making. At the end of the film there is no redemption for Harry Fabian, just the bleak realization that he took on the city and lost. As part of the Criterion Collection’s DVD edition of ‘Night and the City’ film critic Paul Arthur contributed a fine essay from which the following extract is taken:

Within film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles – Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, to name three – none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities, the title of Jules Dassin’s underrated elegy for a self-annihilating hustler reminds us not only that darkness is the visual corollary of almost all consequent action in noir—the idea of a ‘daylight’ noir being as perverse as a ‘nocturnal’ Western – but that nighttime functions throughout the series as a sort of Platonic entity, embracing a host of nonliteral meanings. Along with common associations of mystery and moral ambiguity, darkness takes on a specifically urban coloration. Indeed, film noir caps a long-standing cultural tradition in which cities are cast as a dominion of shadows and corruption. And perhaps no noir city is quite so hellish, so imbued with the stench of mortality, as the London depicted in Night and the City...

Working in and around London’s Soho district, rather than the familiar haunts of New York or Los Angeles, Dassin and company did not have to subtly evoke lingering effects of wartime bombing; they are clearly inscribed in blasted, nightmarish landscapes recruited for the film’s climactic scenes... Like The Third Man, made in Vienna the previous year, Night and the City maps the downward journey of an unabashedly American adventurer against a prime locus of European destruction, yielding the specter of the ‘secret’ city to which all film noir, regardless of actual setting, pays unspoken tribute. 



Dassin’s tour guide to this anxious, fearful milieu is Harry Fabian, a nightclub tout and would-be wrestling promoter whose overweening desire to ‘be somebody’ is curdled by a relentless exploitation of human vulnerabilities, his own included. Harry, famously referred to by a romantic rival as ‘an artist without an art,’ is a figure of palpable instability, always in the midst of a surefire shady venture, some criminalized shortcut to what he describes as ‘a life of ease and plenty.’ Unfortunately, every jittery step he takes brings him closer to immanent disaster and death (in addition to morbid visual cues, variants of the phrase ‘You’re a dead man’ are a key dialogue motif). Worse still, his precipitous actions drag down everyone around him – although, with the exception of his mistreated girlfriend, Mary Bristol, these underworld characters largely deserve their malign fates. Mary works at the same sleazy club to which Harry lures unsuspecting tourists. The grotesque owner, Phil Nosseross, barely tolerates Harry’s loan requests but fails to register the illicit connection between Harry and his wife, Helen, a liaison founded less on sexual passion than mutual greed. Harry’s current scheme involves tricking an aging Greco-Roman wrestling champion, Gregorius, into matching his young protégé against the Strangler, a vulgar but popular entertainer employed by Kristo, shady kingpin of professional wrestling and, not coincidently, Gregorius’s estranged son.



Given Harry’s history of entrepreneurial fiascos, it is only fitting that his dream of a wrestling empire seems doomed from the start. Narcissistic to a fault, Harry pays no heed to warnings about Kristo’s vicious power and is slow to intervene in a chain of calamitous miscalculations until it is too late. Once the tenuous leverage he held on Kristo’s hunger for revenge vanishes in a heap of dying flesh, Harry must flee for his life, unsuccessfully seeking refuge with former underworld colleagues for whom he is now the mere object of a lucrative bounty hunt. Closing a circle that began with the film’s opening shots, Harry becomes the archetypal man-on-the-run, an image he himself sadly admits, pursued this time not by a single angry creditor but by an entire rogues’ gallery. In contrast to the majority of noir heroes, Harry is not an inveterate loner cut off from potentially redemptive social connections. Until near the end of Night and the City, he navigates smoothly through London’s subterranean network, engaging in a flurry of illegal transactions. Thus the early demonstration of a secure, outlaw niche makes his ultimate isolation even more emotionally wrenching. If noir protagonists in general lose markers of a stable identity as they descend the social ladder, Harry’s loss is particularly extravagant. 



The frenetically disjunctive movements accompanying Harry’s flight might well have expressed personal anxieties specific to Dassin’s life. On the heels of several relatively successful Hollywood outings, including pioneering work on semi-documentary techniques in The Naked City, the director was, like many of his creative friends, caught up in the anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s. Under imminent threat of being forced to testify before HUAC, and almost certain blacklisting, Dassin says he was told to ‘beat it’ to England to avoid persecution. The project that awaited him, a loose adaptation of Soho denizen Gerald Kersh’s 1938 novel, struck him as somewhat frivolous, and he would later downplay the film’s artistic merits. Nevertheless, it is not far-fetched to read Harry Fabian’s predicament in part as Dassin’s allegorical response to his own hasty emigration, and to the paranoid atmosphere of betrayal and cutthroat ambition he left behind in Cold War Hollywood. 



Stylistically, Night and the City represents the flipside of The Naked City, with overheated lighting patterns, bizarre angles, and claustrophobic compositions replacing the more methodical, unhurried organization of the earlier film. Further, the dire Dickensian—or perhaps Brechtian, given latent parallels with The Threepenny Opera – vision of London on display belies the kind of sober, social realist sketch of class divisions and antagonisms evident in The Naked City. 



At the heart of Night and the City is a master trope: the urban labyrinth. Cities in film noir are not simply dangerous, or bristling with iconographic menace—they are visualized as death traps, spaces from which there can be no escape. This common pattern finds summary expression in Dassin’s film. Nearly every setting is crammed with architectural grids, frames, culs-de-sac, narrow stairways, perspectives that choke off the mobility and freedom of human subjects. The wrestling ring is a venerable symbol of existential constriction; far more original, and more depressing, is Nosseross’ cage-like office and the vertiginous brick tower in which Harry takes brief refuge during his flight. In early scenes, Harry commands secret urban passageways, rooftop bridges, and back alleys that afford easy transit between private and public, legal and illicit sites of operation. Once he is branded an outcast among outcasts, his knowledge of the labyrinth can no longer save him from extinction. Instead, he is forced to abandon familiar routes as he plunges into the city’s forlorn margins: first, an eerie construction site whose minatory shapes resemble canvases by Bosch or maybe de Chirico, then the riverside shack of black-marketeer Annie, a last stop before his suicidal bid to complete one profitable con. By the end, Harry is a virtual zombie, his slimy ebullience reduced to morbid self-pity. Without engendering genuine sympathy, the exhausting gyrations of this character eventually produce a spark of recognition, albeit trailed by a black cloud of dread.

– Paul Arthur: ‘Night and the City: In the Labyrinth’. From the Criterion Collection DVD.

Bresson on Bresson

A Man Escaped (Directed by Robert Bresson)

A Man Escaped is based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo in France during the second world war for his work with the French Resistance. Bresson filmed A Man Escaped at Fort Montluc prison in Lyons, where Devigny was imprisoned, in an effort to maintain the credibility of his tale. In fact, the jail retained Devigny's ropes and hooks when he tried to escape, Bresson reproduced them diligently. Although Devigny is referred to in the film as Fontaine, the narative is so similar to his experiences that Devigny merits his remarkable preface: "This story is true. I give it as it is, without embellishment." Bresson had the moral right to claim such authenticity, he, too, had been imprisoned by the Germans during the war.

The way Bresson recreates the physically constrained picture of war is through the use of sound. Because the views of Fontaine from his confinement are so limited, he can only develop his cognitive map of the world which he cannot see, through noises, many of them terribly faint and sprinkled about him. These noises begin to grow and mutate inside his head and inside our minds, to become essential, to be weighted with fatal peril for a moment, and the next with faint optimism. 

There is no cohesive explanation of these noises at first. Fontaine merely attempts to put them together to work out what is happening beyond his surroundings. The initial sequence of the film establishes the tone of this strict restriction of information, and is well-known as one of the most understated passages of a film predicated on understatement. But soon, an escape scheme is formed in the feverish brain of the tireless Fontaine. Then there is only one question for him and us as we listen to every sound for the rest of the film: can they hear me? 

Bresson took painstaking care with all his films; throughout his lifetime he only finished 14 movies. A Man Escaped was the first film to be created without aid for a whole script, and, like every picture, it's defined by a precision of detail and reality, which Bresson thought was not just a filmmaker's grasp, but a moral request, the art of cinema made to all those who would practise it. 

Ascetic and idealistic, Bresson was one of his generation's very few directors who would be taken up by French New Wave film revolutionists. Eric Rohmer, who was a reviewer for the prominent cinema journal Cahiers du Cinema during the publication of A Man Escaped, was one of the best New Wave directors. Rohmer named his assessment of the film "The Miracle of the Objects" Because, even although the noises in the picture have been "explained" carefully, every sound has an incredible role in the desperate Fontaine's existence.

This is an extract from a 1970 interview with Bresson by Charles Thomas Samuels in which the great French director reflects on his career up to that point. In this section Bresson discusses ‘Pickpocket’ (1959) and the compelling ‘A Man Escaped’ (1956) based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a prisoner of war held at Fort Montluc by the Nazis during World War II. 

S: I want to ask some questions about A Man Escaped, which, by the way, seems to me your greatest film. Incidentally, does that judgment upset you?

B: I don’t know how to make such comparisons. But there may be something in what you say. When I finished it, I had no idea about its value. Yet I had, for the first time in my life, an impulse to write down everything I felt about the art of filmmaking, and for that reason A Man Escaped is precious to me...

S: A Man Escaped shares with The Trial of Joan of Arc an implication of French nationalism. Did you want that?

B: No, the prisoner could have been a young American or a Vietnamese. I was interested only in the mind of someone who wishes to escape without outside help….

S: Though you create very well the experience of being in prison, you never show the brutality. For example, you don’t show Fontaine being beaten. You only show him afterward. Why?

B: Because it would be false to show the beating since the audience knows that the actor isn’t really being beaten, and such falsity would stop the film. Moreover, this is what it was like when I was a prisoner of the Germans. Once I heard someone being whipped through a door, and then I heard the body fall. That was ten times worse than if I had seen the whipping. When you see Fontaine with his bloody face being brought back to the cell, you are forced to imagine the awfulness of the beating - which makes it very powerful Furthermore, if I showed him being taken from his cell, being beaten, then being returned, it would take much too long.

S: There is another wonderful effect of concentration in this scene: Fontaine says, ‘After three days I was able to move again,’ although only a few seconds of film time have passed. This suggests how quickly he restores himself and how much courage he has.

B: That is very important. His will to go on establishes a rhythm of inexorability that touches the public. When men go to war, military music is necessary, because music has a rhythm and rhythm implants ideas.

A Man Escaped (Directed by Robert Bresson)

S: Whenever we see the window in Fontaine’s cell, it glows like a jewel. Was that a special effect?

B: No, but I do remember that I worked with my cinematographer to obtain just the right degree of light from both window and door.

S: There is one thing in the film that seems uncharacteristic in its patness. When Fontaine is sentenced, the scene takes place at the Hotel Terminus...

B: Every city in France had such a hotel where the Gestapo stayed during the occupation.

S: You didn’t desire the pun?

B: Of course not. Everything in this film is absolutely factual. I had no trouble inventing details and was familiar with the history of the place. All of the characters’ actions take place exactly where they occurred in real life.

S: You search for mystery in your films. It seems to me that here you really attain it because although the title tells us that he will escape, the film is very suspenseful.

B: The important thing is not ‘if’ but ‘how’. Here is another mystery: Although every detail of the film came from the report of Andre Devigny, I invented the dialogue with the young boy who is finally brought to Fontaine’s cell. When I read it to Devigny, I was very worried about his reaction. Do you know what he said? ‘How true!’ This shows that truth can be different from reality, because in the actual event, as Devigny told me, he behaved as if the boy were a woman he needed to seduce in order to make good his escape. In my film, on the other hand, I show Fontaine dominating the boy. You know, I wanted to call the film ‘Help Yourself,’ and that’s why I showed Devigny as dominating in the last scenes. Help yourself and God will help you.

S: There are other great moments in the film. For example, when Fontaine tells the old man in the next cell that his own attempt to escape is being made for the old man, too, or the moments when a community is achieved by means of men tapping on the walls. I could go on. This film is your greatest, I think, not because it is technically superior to the others but because it is richer in content.

B: Mouchette is rich, too!

S: I would place Mouchette with A Man Escaped among your greatest films.

B: But it seems to me there is a little too much spectacle in Mouchette.

Pickpocket (Directed by Robert Bresson)

S: You added a lot to the Bernanos novel in Mouchette. Conversely, Pickpocket, which is an original, appears to be inspired by Crime and Punishment. For the viewer aware of this parallel, there is a problem in Pickpocket. In Crime and Punishment, whether justifiably or not, Raskolnikov thinks of his crime as benefiting humanity and thus earns a measure of sympathy. Your hero has no excuse for the crime and thus seems a little pretentious in his desire to be taken as a superior being.

B: Yes, but he is aware that pickpocketing is very difficult and dangerous. He is taken with the thrill of that. He is pretentious perhaps, like Raskolnikov, but on quite a lesser scale. Like Raskolnikov, he hates organized society...

S: What I am trying to explore with you is the emotional problem for the spectator.

B: I never think of the spectator.

S: But you can see that your hero might appear unsympathetic.

B: He is unsympathetic. Why not?

S: I am also puzzled, in view of your uninterest in psychology, at the heavy psychological emphasis in this film. Let me explain. As we see the hero stealing, we don’t know his motive, but toward the end of the film we find out that he previously stole from his mother. We then realize his psychological motivation; he stole from his mother, felt guilty about that, was ashamed to confess to her, and, therefore, commits crimes so as to be punished and fulfill his need for penitence.

B: Perhaps, but only a psychiatrist would explain it like that. As Dostoyevsky frequently does, I present the effect before the cause. I think this is a good idea because it increases the mystery; to witness events without knowing why they are occurring makes you desire to find out the reason.

S: But this doesn’t answer my question. Here, in the first of your films from an original story, you, who profess to dislike psychology, are at your most psychological. Why?

B: You think it’s psychological? I didn’t mean it to be. I simply showed a man picking pockets until he was arrested. I included the fact that he stole from his mother simply to provide evidence the police needed in order to be put on his track.

S: In other words, you didn’t put it in as explanation but rather as plot device?

B: Yes. It is only to make the chief of police certain that Martin is a thief. What interested me is the power this gave the inspector, because the inspector liked to torture him – as in that long scene, where the hero doesn’t know how much the inspector knows. In fact, I originally wanted to call the film ‘Incertitude.’

S: There is something else I rather doubt you wanted in the film. The hero of your film is a criminal in two ways: He is a thief, and he denies God.

Pickpocket (Directed by Robert Bresson)

B: On the contrary, I make him aware of the presence of God for three minutes. Few people can say they were aware of God even that long. This line of dialogue is very personal; it shows that although influenced by Dostoyevsky, I made my story benefit from my own experiences. At his mother’s funeral, a singer sings the Dies Irae in exactly the same simple way another singer sang it at my mother’s funeral in the Cathedral of Nantes, where, apart from ten nuns, my wife and I attended the service alone. Somehow this Dies Irae made a strange impression on me; I could have said then, like my pickpocket, ‘I felt God during three minutes.’

S: This raises another question. You are famous for maintaining your privacy. I didn’t even know you were married, and it was a great surprise when your wife came to the door. Isn’t Pickpocket a game of hide-and-seek since, according to you, it reflects so much of your personal experience, although if you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known it?

B: I hate publicity. One should be known for what he does, not for what he is. Nowadays a painter paints a bad painting, but he talks about it until it becomes famous. He paints for five minutes and talks about it on television for five years.

S: That reminds me of Godard. He makes bad films, but he defends them so interestingly.

B: His films are interesting. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. He taught films how to use disorder.

S: Don’t you think his purpose is more important than the individual results – which aren’t very good?

B: When he uses professional actors, I don’t like his films, but when he doesn’t, he makes the best that can be seen.

S: On this matter of your zeal for truth: There are moments in Pickpocket which seem to me to be true only to your peculiar style. For example, in the opening scene where the hero steals the purse, the people at the racetrack are preternaturally calm. I can’t believe that people watch a race so impassively.

B: But not every part of a racetrack crowd reacts in the same way. There are always certain people who watch impassively. I didn’t want him to commit his theft when people were shouting; I wanted it to happen in silence, so that one could hear the crescendo of the horses’ galloping.

S: But such a scene, even among sympathetic viewers, raises the question of whether we are seeing truth in your films or the reflection of a very deliberate and personal style. I ask myself that question occasionally in Pickpocket and almost always in The Trial of Joan of Arc.

B: If that happens, it is my fault. My style is natural to me. You see, I want to make things so concentrated and so unified that the spectator feels as if he has seen one single moment. I control all speech and gesture so as to produce an object that is indivisible. Because I believe that one moves an audience only through rhythm, concentration, and unity.

Interview with Robert Bresson – Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors, New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1972.

Akira Kurosawa on ‘Stray Dog’

Stray Dog (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

A bad day gets worse for young investigator Murakami when his gun is stolen on a sweltering, crowded bus by a pickpocket. Desperate to remedy the injustice, he goes undercover, combing the hot streets of Tokyo for the stray dog whose desperation has driven him to a life of crime. With each step, the lives of the cop and the criminal grow more inextricably linked, and the probe becomes a probe of Murakami's own shadowy side. 

Stray Dog (Nora Inu), starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, is more than a crime thriller; it delves into the sordid reality of postwar Japan and the criminal psyche.

Kurosawa portrays postwar Tokyo as densely populated, with individuals piled on top of one another. Worse yet, it's hot. No scenario shows this more than Murakami's opening scene on a crowded bus, sweat flowing down not only his face, but also the faces of everyone else on the vehicle. The voiceover reinforces this point by noting, “Murakami was beat. And then there was that awful heat. On the bus, the air was so thick, he felt woozy. A wailing infant shook with tears, and the woman beside him reeked with the stink of cheap perfume. ” Murakami frantically tries to untighten his collar, eager for enough breath. 

Or consider the passages in which Murakami disguises himself as an everyday man in desperate search, as many of the individuals he comes across are. Individuals in search of food, employment, and a place to sleep — something to do. At night, people sit next to fires, swapping cigarettes, or huddled together in one room to avoid the rain. Under any other director's direction, these episodes would appear fake and unsympathetic in their attempt to bring light to individuals on the periphery. However, Kurosawa stands out from other film directors in that he depicts these events with tremendous candour and takes care not to condemn them.

These are the kind of events that set Stray Dog apart from any other film noir, detective story, or cop film of its type. There is a true human understanding at work here, coupled with an uncommon amount of empathy.

If Kurosawa's ability as a director elevated Stray Dog to greatness, Mifune's equally measured performance as rookie detective Murakami elevates Stray Dog to near perfection. In truth, Stray Dog would not exist without Mifune, and it would be difficult to find somebody capable of matching his performance. Despite the fact that this is one of his early parts in his collaboration with Kurosawa, the two would be some time apart before collaborating on some of their more famous work, such as Yojimbo in 1961. Even so, one need not look too far into the future to understand that their collaboration is loaded with possibilities. Rashomon is just around the bend, as is Seven Samurai.

The following is a brief excerpt from Kurosawa’s autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography, in which he discusses the writing and production of Stray Dog.

Maupassant instructed aspiring writers to extend their vision into realms where no one else could see, and to keep it up until the hitherto invisible became visible to everyone. 

I first wrote the screenplay of Stray Dog in the form of a novel. I am fond of the work of Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime. This process took me a little less than six weeks, so I figured that I’d be able to rewrite it as a screenplay in ten days or so. Far from it. It proved to be a far more difficult task than writing a scenario from scratch, and it took me close to two months.

But, as I reflect on it, it’s perfectly understandable that this should have happened. A novel and a screenplay are, after all, entirely different things. The freedom for psychological description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a screenplay with­out using narration. But, thanks to the unexpected travail of adapting the descriptions of the novel form to a screenplay, I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. At the same time, I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expres­sion into the script.

For example, I understood that in novel-writing certain structural techniques can be employed to strengthen the impression of an event and narrow the focus upon it. What I learned was that in the editing process a film can gain similar strength through the use of comparable structural techniques. The story of Stray Dog begins with a young police detective on his way home from marksmanship practice at the headquarters’ range. He gets on a crowded bus, and in the unusually intense summer heat and crush of bodies his pistol is stolen. When I filmed this sequence and edited it according to the passage of chrono­logical time, the effect was terrible. As an introduction to a drama it was slow, the focus was vague and it failed to grip the viewer.

Troubled, I went back to look at the way I had begun the novel. I had written as follows: ‘It was the hottest day of that entire summer.’ Immediately I thought, ‘That’s it.’ I used a shot of a dog with its tongue hanging out, panting. Then the narration begins, ‘It was unbearably hot that day.’ After a sign on a door indicating ‘Police Head­quarters, First Division,’ I proceeded to the interior. The chief of the First Detective Division glares up from his desk. ‘What? Your pistol was stolen?’ Before him stands the contrite young detective who is the hero of the story. This new way of editing the opening sequence gave me a very short piece of film, but it was extremely effective in drawing the viewer suddenly into the heart of the drama.

Stray Dog is made up of many short scenes in many different settings, so the little sound stage we used was cleared and redecorated with lightning speed. On fast days we shot five or six different scenes on it. As soon as the set was ready, we’d shoot and be done again, so the art department had no choice but to build and decorate sets while we slept.

At any rate, the filming of Stray Dog went remarkably well, and we finished ahead of schedule. The excellent pace of the shooting and the good feeling of the crew working together can be sensed in the completed film.

I remember how it was on Saturday nights when we boarded a bus to go home for a day off after a full week’s hard work. Everyone was happy. At the time I was living in Komae, far out of the city near the Tamagawa River, so toward the end of the ride I was always left alone. The solitary last rider on the cavernous empty bus, I always felt more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy at being reunited with my family.

Now the pleasure in the work we experienced on Stray Dog seems like a distant dream. The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can't be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.

– Excerpt from ‘Akira Kurosawa: Something Like an Autobiography’ (Vintage Books, 1983)

Terrence Malick: Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven (Directed by Terrence Malick)

One-of-a-kind filmmaker-philosopher Terrence Malick has created some of the most visually arresting films of the twentieth century, and his glorious period tragedy ‘Days of Heaven’, featuring Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros, stands out among them. In 1910, a Chicago steelworker (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his supervisor, and he, his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and his little sister (Linda Manz) flee to the Texas panhandle, where they find work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer (Sam Shepard). A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire — Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating a timeless American idyll that is also a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor. (via criterion.com).

Where his debut feature Badlands was tightly scripted, Malick’s follow up film was a more loosely constructed affair. Malick allowed himself the latitude to film not just the principal actors but also on the earth, animals, and groups of extras. Malick took this method to higher and more experimental durations in his future films. This is a completely valid creative process that seeks – as in Wong Kar-wai or Jacques Rivette's cinema – to discover the film during its material production instead of in the 'abstract' stage in its writing. 

Writing remains, of course, crucial to Malick, an outstanding stylist of words. Days of Heaven's script isn't much like a final film—in many cases, complicated dialogue passages have been condensed into a sentence or two, a secret response shot and a cut off from some natural phenomena. The literary aspects of the concept are however already visible on the page: the elaborately stylized and poetic vernacular of speech, the expressive cycle of seasons and a fundamental line (in essence) gathered from many biblical sources. This early, mythical narrative, however, finishes as completely displaced in the New World as the mythology of John Smith and Pocahontas. It is scarcely surprising to find that Shepard, who is a beautifully frightening presence in the movie, believed he was playing someone who was less of a psychological flesh and blood than some sketch, shadow or ghost. 

The Australian reviewer, Meaghan Morris, previously stated that Heaven's Days is a picture in perpetual motion, in fact about all sorts of movement: human, natural, mechanical. Filmmaker Nestor Almendros — whose work on François Truffaut's "triangular" costume drama Two French Girls (1971) might have inspired Malick — likes to describe the form of the complex arrangements of the film: the camera tracking and dollying up and down in the farm house, the strange mansion in the middle of a huge field, while the different players enter and depart in the frame. Indeed, even the simplest shots have a trace of such structure: the layout of Days of Heaven aims less at fluid continuity in images or gestures — it is indeed a remarkably elliptical film— than it is when each filmic "unit" was created as a cell that nonlinearly refers to every other part of the film, through echos, comparisons, subtle flashbacks and flash-forwards. 

In May 1979, Terrence Malick candidly explained the origin of his ideas for Days of Heaven and how he went about making it happen. This interview was originally published in French and is sourced from the book Quinze Hommes Splendides by Yvonne Baby. 

It was in Austin, Texas that I had the idea for Days of Heaven. I found myself alone for a summer in the town I had left when I was a high school student. There were those green, undulating hills, and the very beautiful Colorado river. The place is inspired. It is inspiring, and there the film came to me all together.

I had not liked working at harvest time, I have a very good memory of it, of wheat, and the comings and goings in the fields, and of all the people I met. They were mostly petty criminals who were on their way to Phoenix, Arizona or Las Vegas for the rest of the year.

Like those of the film, these were not people of the soil, but urban dwellers who had abandoned their city, their factories. Rather than criminals, it would be fairer to say they lived on the margins of crime, fed by elusive hopes. At the time of the film, those who worked the seasons hated their jobs and the farmers did not trust them. They could not touch the machinery: if something was breaking, they had to signal by raising their hat on a stick. To distinguish themselves, they were always putting on their best clothes. I had noticed that myself when I was a teenager. To the farmers they were bringing – and this is still true – a piece of their homeland and of new horizons. And farmers sat down to listen – charmed – to hear the story of these workers. Already the farmers were almost nothing more than businessmen and they felt nostalgia for those days of yesteryear where they were themselves caretakers of their earthly riches. Workers and farmers were embodying people whose hopes were being destroyed, some more than others, by opulence or poverty. All were full of desires, dreams, and appetites, which I hope permeates the film. For these people, happiness comes and goes, they are fleeting moments. Why? They don’t know, just as they don’t know how to achieve happiness. If they see before them another season, another harvest, they feel unable to build a life.



Though this is familiar to a European, it may seem puzzling for Americans. Americans feel entitled to happiness, and once they manage to find it, they feel as if they own it. If they are deprived of it, they feel cheated. If they feel it has been taken away from them, they imagine they have been done wrong. This guilt I have felt from everyone I've known. It's a bit like a Dylan song: they have held the world in their hands and let it slip through their fingers.

As for the title, it is a feeling that a place exists that is within reach and where we will be safe. It is a place where a house will not rest on the sand, where you will not become crazier by fighting again and again against the impossible.

Linda [Manz], the teenage girl, is the heart of the film. She was a sort of street child we had discovered in a laundromat. For the role, she should have been younger, but as soon as I spoke to her, I found in her the maturity of a forty-year old woman. Non-judgmental and left to her own imagination, she had her own ideas [for the role] giving the impression of having actually lived this life instead of having to invent and play within another.

At first it was a bit frustrating to work with her. She couldn’t remember her lines, couldn’t be interrupted, and was difficult to photograph. Despite this, I started to love her and I believed in her more than anything else. She transformed the role. I am glad that she’s the narrator. Her personality shines through the film’s objectivity. Every time I gave her new lines, she interpreted it in her own way; when she refers to heaven and hell, she says that everyone is bursting into flames. It was her response to the film on the day when she saw the rushes. That comment was included in the final version. Linda said so many things that I despaired being unable to keep them… I feel like I have not been able to grasp a fraction of who she really is.

With Nestor Almendros, we decided to film without any artificial light. It wasn’t possible in the houses at night, but outside, we shot with natural light or with the fire. When the American team was saying, ‘This is not how we should proceed,’ Nestor Almendros, very courageously insisted. As we filmed, the team discovered that it was technically easier, and I was able to capture absolute reality. That was my wish: to prevent the appearance of any technique, and that the photography was to be processed to be visually beautiful and to ensure this beauty existed within the world I was trying to show, suggesting that which was lost, or what we were now losing. Because he is also a filmmaker, Nestor Almendros understood Days of Heaven in every way.

I wanted the omnipresence of sound, so I used the Dolby system. Dolby purifies sound and is able to record multiple audio tracks (e.g. wind, the rustle of corn stalks, the pulse of crickets). I wanted to remove any distance from the public. It was my secret intention; to make the film experience more concrete, more direct. And, for the audience, I am tempted to say, experience it like a walk in the countryside. You’ll probably be bored or have other things in mind, but perhaps you will be struck, suddenly, by a feeling, by an act, by a unique portrait of nature. That’s what I wanted, that is how the Dolby and technological developments improved our work.

It would be difficult for me to make a film about contemporary America today. We live in such dark times and we have gradually lost our open spaces. We always had hope, the illusion that there was a place where we could live, where one could emigrate and go even further. Wilderness, this is the place where everything seems possible, where solidarity exists – and justice – where the virtues are somehow linked to this justice. In the region where I grew up, everyone felt it in a very strong way. This sense of space disappearing, we nevertheless can find it in cinema, which will pass it on to us. There is so much to do: it’s as if we were on the Mississippi Territory, in the eighteenth century. For an hour, or for two days, or longer, these films can enable small changes of heart, changes that mean the same thing: to live better and to love more. And even an old movie in poor and beaten condition and can give us that. What else is there to ask for?

– An interview for Le Monde with Terrence Malick from 1979, translated by Hugues Fournier and Paul Maher Jr., from the book by Yvonne Baby, Quinze Hommes Splendides. Article available on Justin Wiemer’s blog here.

Ben Ripley: Writing And Sacrifice

Source Code (Directed by Duncan Jones)

Ben Ripley wrote the script for the sci-fi thriller Source Code while doing studio re-writes on horror movies. His initial pitches to studio executives left them baffled by the complex storyline. Eventually he had to put it on the page to make his case. 

The film is skilfully directed by Duncan Jones whose feature debut was the excellent Moon. Source Code is a thrilling and satisfying science fiction action-adventure story with nods to the films of Christopher Nolan and Hitchcock.

Source code ranges over a wide range of conspiracies and altered states, playfully unlikely but done with cool conviction. There is a resemblance with Christopher Nolan's Inception, which also focuses on altered states of minds,  time and spatial disruptions.

The film revolves around U.S. Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who has crash-landed in Afghanistan after running out of fuel. Upon regaining consciousness, he discovers himself onboard a busy commuter train in civilian clothing arriving in Chicago just in time for a beautiful summer day. Opposite sits Christina (Michelle Monaghan), who is seemingly unconcerned by their escalating flirtation but who grows increasingly disturbed as Colter becomes unstable and frantic. 

Once the 8-minute mark has passed, a cataclysmic event strikes, sending Colter back into a predicament that is at least as confusing. He is dressed in his military uniform, is hurt, and looks to be inside a damaged military aircraft. Is this the actual thing? Is it the train, or is it just our perception of it? He must now be able to speak with the lady who has replaced him as his commanding officer over a video display. Vera Farmiga's character, Goodwin, behaves in the same mysterious and unreadable manner that Kevin Spacey's android-like voice did with Sam Rockwell in Moon. 

Colter has been kidnapped and used against his will as a guinea pig in the application of future technology known as "source code" which forces him to replay the last eight minutes on a Chicago commuter train over and over again until he uncovers knowledge that can benefit society. Ripley and Jones, demonstrate how each metaphysically complex situation unlocks new information, with each resulting in Colter becoming more fond of Christina and making the possibility of losing her seem more painful. 

In a recent interview with Scriptshadow, Ben Ripley discussed his writing process:

‘Once I have an idea that I think works, my first step is to take pages and pages of notes, whatever comes into my head. Research is important. You need to steep yourself in whatever subculture you’re writing about, enough so that you develop a confidence to invent within it. Next I try to come up with some compelling central characters. This is always the hardest part for me to get right, but it’s a critical one. If your characters aren’t distinct, comprehensible and somewhat relatable, you’ll never hear the end of it from your readers. And it’s really about the hard work of understanding who these characters are and what makes them interesting.

‘I’m not much attracted to Everyman characters. I’m more intrigued with mysterious, unusual or even extraordinary characters. If you look at Stanley Kubrick’s films, most of his characters are compelling for who they are. They’re not ordinary people who depend on a movie situation to come alive in. The outline comes next, but I don’t get overly detailed with it. I like to leave some open spaces for discovery. Only when you get in there writing scenes, writing description and dialogue, will the best things about your script occur to you.

‘That said, I absolutely know what my three acts and midpoint are, even if they sometimes shift around during the writing. The more I write, the fewer pages per day I turn out. I wish I wrote faster, but I tend to consider pretty carefully each moment. I take my time with the language until it feels right. I never gloss over stuff. After that, I always go back and find material to remove. You can always say things with greater efficiency, always trim and tighten action. You look at any good film and you realize just how economical and propulsive the scenes are, especially in the first act as they work to set up the world. You can never get too good at that skill.

‘A midpoint is a plot turn that happens in the middle of a movie. The midpoint in Jaws is when Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss pile into the fishing boat and head out to the open ocean to hunt the shark. The midpoint of the original Star Wars is when the Millenium Falcon reaches the Death Star in order to rescue the princess. It’s the point to which the action of the first half of the story is ending and, as a result, sends the second half of the story in a new – or at least more focused – direction. A good midpoint turn will differentiate the action between the first and second half of the movie and keep things from seeming monotonous. The post-midpoint portion of the second act (pages 60-90) is often where you get much closer to the story’s real themes and you’re not as much focused on straightforward action.

‘The reason I’m a screenwriter today is that I believed in my talent and made the sustained sacrifices to become one. I eschewed other career paths. I worked day jobs to support myself. I wrote on weekends when maybe I would have had more fun at the beach. I started and finished scripts and then started new ones that were better. I kept at it. There are no shortcuts. The dues-paying process can be bewildering and lonely, but its job is to separate out the professionals from the merely curious, and when it’s over, you’re oddly thankful for having asked a lot of yourself…

‘I remember being so impatient for my difficult, outsiders life to stop and for my ’real’ life as a working writer to start. It’s easy for professional writers to be benignly nostalgic about their early days coming up, forgetting that those days often felt tedious, frustrating and unsustainable. But your life shouldn’t depend on getting an agent within the next month. If it does, there’s something wrong.

‘You should never let your life get to the point where you look at screenwriting as a lottery ticket that’s going to save you. What saves you is your belief in yourself and your commitment to getting better at your craft, regardless of when that craft is rewarded. And a decent script probably won’t get you an agent. If you’re still at the point where you’re writing “decent” scripts – as opposed to great scripts – you’re not ready for an agent. But the magic of Hollywood is that the appetite for great scripts far exceeds the supply of great scripts. So when and if you finally write that great script, word will get out. People will ask you to read it, not the other way around. Stay optimistic. Stay focused. Write well and the agents – and the success – will come.’

- Ben Ripley