Clint Eastwood: On Realism in Movies

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

In his films, Clint Eastwood regularly mentions a quest for "realism." Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil [1997] piqued his interest since it featured  “real people, people whose differences make them interesting. Savannah, the setting for the film, is represented “realistically as if it were a character in the story.” The performers and the camera work together to capture the film's "immediacy and spontaneity," rather than forcing a viewpoint on it. 

“You can see the man in his work just as clearly as you can see Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.” Norman Mailer reportedly observed of Eastwood. Eastwood aspires to do what Hemingway did with words with unobtrusive camerawork—that is, to face the world as it is, simply, with the least amount of intervention.

Influenced by his mentor Don Siegel who directed Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff and Dirty Harry, Eastwood evaluates if the shot is satisfying as it unfolds—that is, what is revealed by and via the shot itself, rather than according to a rigid predesign. “I think a film is seeing it,” Eastwood says, “when you see it there live, when it’s happening right there in front of you.”  Eastwood explains. Eastwood does not employ video assist, which is a technique employed by other Hollywood filmmakers to see the shot on a monitor after the fact. He is completely at ease with and believes in his senses. In the end, Eastwood is a naturalist, committed to the present moment and the environment without idealising either. 

As the film critic Ric Gentry has noted, unlike Hemingway, Eastwood has the distinct privilege of experiencing the everyday, or tangible world while he captures it—this is the camera's unique privilege. As a result, one can imagine the envy of an artist like Hemingway or a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood when the former identifies the three most difficult obstacles to writing: “knowing what you truly felt rather than what you were supposed to feel”; putting “down what really happened in action”; and then finding “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion.” 

The aim is to go beyond one's previous experiences and tap into one's inner store of instinct and emotion in order to respond authentically to the new experience—instincts and feelings, like Nature itself, do not lie: they are the most authentic element of a person. Again, Eastwood's use of the camera may be viewed as a natural extension of Hemingway's own writing goals. 

Eastwood's characters, often wandering riders, drifters or drivers, men without homes and rarely with families, break free from the constraints of routine, conventional education, dogma, mundane responsibility, and society itself in order to reveal the true impulses of the self beneath the artificial.

The independence of Eastwood's characters, as well as the man himself, comes from inside, but it also relates to the isolation and purity of existence outside of regular physical and psychological boundaries. Eastwood is fundamentally American, with a pioneering mentality that takes him into "uncharted ground" on a regular basis. “There is perhaps no one more American than Eastwood.” writes Mailer.

RG: How did you become involved with the Midnight project?

CE: Well, about a year and a half ago the writer—this was before Absolute Power [1997], as a matter of fact—John Hancock was here on the lot (at Warner Brothers) working on the screen adaptation of the book [by John Behrendt]. He’d written the screenplay for A Perfect World, which I made a few years back [1993]. And John came to me one day and asked if I would have a look at the Midnight adaptation and tell him what I thought. I hadn’t read the book, though I knew it was a bestseller. John said he thought it was an interesting story and that he had the feeling they were going to take him off the project for some reason and put another writer on. He was developing it for the studio and wanted to get it going as a project, not for any particular producer.

So I said, “Sure, I’ll have a look at that.” I read the screenplay and I really liked it. I called John and said, “I think you did some very good work here.” So I called the studio; I think I spoke to [president] Terry Semel, and I said, “This is a very good screenplay. Are you unsatisfied with it in some way?—because I think I’d be very interesting in directing it.” He said, “Well, that’s great. We’d probably be interested in that. Let’s see what we can do.” I said, “OK, let me know. In the meantime, I’m going to go back and read the book itself.”

So I did, and I liked the book, too, but I appreciated the screenplay even more because I saw how difficult it was to translate all that material from the prose. There were a few things omitted from the book that I thought might go back in as well as a few other changes but once we all agreed that I would direct it we did a rewrite and then got ready to shoot.

RG: What were some of the changes you recommended?

CE: The protagonist was originally an attorney and I thought it should be changed back to the writer. I thought that was a bit more faithful to the book. Since part of the story would involve the courtroom, an attorney’s background and allegiances might muddle the point of view.

And then I wanted a few more of the characters back and a bit more detail in general about several of them. It seemed to me that the idiosyncrasies of the characters were important to the book’s appeal and that those who had read Midnight would feel more satisfied if they encountered some of those characters on screen. Obviously, when you’re working with material that’s so popular, you don’t want to tamper too much with what made it that way. At the same time, 90 percent of the movie audience isn’t going to be familiar with the material at all, so it has to be something that will attract them, too. Though presumably, if it was compelling to the readers of the book, why wouldn’t it be to movie viewers as well?

RG: And what was it that most attracted you to Midnight? Was it the characters?

CE: It really was. There are so many action-adventure films these days, and I’ve done my share of them, it’s just rewarding to do a story about people—people who are unique, who aren’t like you or me, whether it’s a woman who practices witchcraft, or a guy moving from place to place who wants to open a saloon or another guy who takes his pet flies into town on miniature leashes [laughs] or an antique dealer, eccentrics some of them obviously, but people in a very interesting and unique region of the country as subjects in themselves for a movie. The fact that they were all real people, people whose differences make them interesting, people from recent Savannah history attracted me. Most of them are still around. Some of the characters are composites but in the composites they still seem real...

RG: There tends to be idiosyncratic, even eccentric characters in many of your films. Bronco Billy [1980], High Plains Drifter [1973], The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976], Escape from Alcatraz [1979], Bird [1988], Unforgiven [1992] come readily to mind.

CE: I like individuals. I’m drawn to that, I guess. And I encourage actors to bring themselves into the performance, go for the take and try to be instinctive with their characters. I often like to be surprised by what’ll occur before the camera.

RG: John Cusack mentioned that there was a lot of improvisation on this film.

CE: There was. Quite a lot. There was a lot between his character of the writer and Chablis, for example, who were really great at just amiably provoking one another and really getting the most out of a scene. But there always is improvisation to some extent. I really like the actors to find their characters as we go along, not so much the dramatic direction but the soul of the character and in that respect what they’ll reveal in a given moment or situation, something ideally only that character or personality would do or express. Not think it out too much, but make discoveries as they happen right there in the scene, often as we’re doing it.

RG: You mentioned that you like to be surprised and John said that at one point he started to tell you what he was going to say to Chablis in a scene, something that wasn’t scripted, but you promptly told him not to tell you what it was he wanted to say but just to do it once the camera was rolling.

CE: I think a film is seeing it, when you see it there live, when it happens right there in front of you. Say John walks in and then Chablis walks in and the scene just goes, right at the instance of the first take. You know, a lot of times it’s a shock. You think, “Jesus, that worked terrifically.” At other times it doesn’t and you have to work until it does happen. You might have a little scene you think you’re going to get done in no time, with very little effort and before you know it you’ve spent a good part of the afternoon on it. But I like to keep everything moving and keep the actors from tiring and I think the best takes are usually the first ones, before the actors fall into a pattern. You see and feel the energy and immediacy of the first takes.

After Meryl Streep had a look at The Bridges of Madison County [1995], she said, “You know what I really like? You used all my mistakes, too.” And I said, “Yeah, but they were genuine mistakes.” In other words, they were human mistakes, not an actor’s mistakes. They’re more like how people really behave.

RG: As a director you don’t like to overplan. For instance, in terms of your camerawork, you don’t decide what the angles and composition are until you come to the set and to accommodate that, Jack [Green, the cinematographer] will light the set virtually 360 degrees so the camera can go in any direction. There’s never any fixed shot list or storyboards.

CE: No, because it’s a similar thing from that side of the camera, where you size up the moment as you encounter it. I come to the set knowing what we need to do and with very clear ideas of what I think will work, but I don’t like to walk in and impose on the setting with a lot of preconceptions. I like to see what we’ve got on that day, what the lighting is like, what’s in the environment, what’s interesting or can be made to become interesting and then to see where the actors are going to go. You size it up and work it out and figure where all the coverage is and I’ll confer with Jack [Green] and then shoot.

A lot of times I’ll have thought something out when we scouted the location, which may have been a month before, maybe just the night before. Sometimes all you’ve seen of the location are photographs the art director has brought in, a house maybe for a minor sequence. But nothing is ever the same the day you go out to shoot and so I like to be open to what I find. The light is never the same. You’ve got actors in the environment now, and they are going to be influenced or stimulated by the environment and they’re going to be doing the scene as a character or as characters they’ve been developing for the first time in that situation. I like to respond to all that, work with it and bring it into the film.

RG: Is there a certain heightened awareness that occurs while you’re shooting?

CE: Yeah, I think so. I think you become hyperaware as you work, as a director especially. I think you do see in a heightened way, with the adrenalin going, coming to terms with what’s in front of you and around you, kind of coming together with it all while you’re out there. I think that’s one of the virtues of working with film, really, that immediacy and that interaction.

– Clint Eastwood. Interviewed by Ric Gentry. In Gerald Duchovnay (ed): Film Voices 

Ingmar Bergman: The Strength of Surrender

From the Life of the Marionettes (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

From The Life of the Marionettes is a semi-sequel to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, which had been released seven years previously, with a new cast (Robert Atzorn and Christine Buchegger) replacing Jan Malmjso and Bibi Andersson. Bergman drew on his cinematic and theatrical expertise (as a playwright as well as a director) to create a visual and narrative tour-de-force that equaled his finest experimental work of the 1960s.

Made during his enforced exile in Germany while facing tax accusations in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman's From the Life of the Marionettes is a devastating depiction of a marriage in crisis and a complicated psychological examination of a murder,  Peter, a businessman, fantasises about murdering his wife, Katarina, until a prostitute becomes his substitute victim. After the crime, Peter and Katarina's doctor and others try to explain what happened. This intriguing picture, which jumps back and forth in time, swings fluidly between seduction and repulsion, and the German ensemble is outstanding.

From the Life of the Marionettes is Bergman's only German film. Conceived in Sweden and written during a time of personal crisis, Bergman had been working in the German theatre and had started to feel comfortable about making a film in his non-native language. 

Writing on the genesis of the film in Images, My Life In Film, Bergman notes: 

“During my second year in Munich (in 1977), I had begun writing a story I called Love with No Lovers. It was heavy and formally fragmented, and it mirrored an upheaval that clearly had something to do with my exile. The setting was Munich, and it dealt, as did my silent movie dream, with a large amount of film segments that had been abandoned by the director.[...]

Nobody in Sweden wanted to invest a penny in Love with No Lovers, even though I was willing to put my own money into it. I spoke with Horst Wendlandt, who was the German coproducer of The Serpent's Egg, but he had been burned by that experience. Dino De Laurentiis declined as well, and it was soon evident that this large, expensive project would not get off the ground. That was all there was to it. I had been around and knew that the more expensive your projects were, the greate the possibility of refusal.

I buried the project without bitterness and didn't think about it further. Later, in order to foster and strengthen the ensemble at the Residenz Theater, I thought it might help if we made a television play together. So I carved the story about Peter and Katarina out of the buried Love with no lovers.

There are a few scenes left from the original script, but, by and large, From the Life of the Marionettes is fresh.

The film is based on concrete observations and memories surrounding a theme that had haunted me for a long time: how two human beings who are insolubly and painfully united in love at the same time tryp to rip themselves free of their shakle.

The main characters of From the Life of the Marionettes, Peter and Katarina, appeared previously in Scenes from a Marriage, in which they acted as counterpoints to Johan and Marianne in the first episode.”

The following article by S. Masukor describes Bergman’s examination of the modern male psyche in Marionettes in relation to Bergman’s earlier Hour of the Wolf.

The shocking murder of a woman opens Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) and frames its plot, which explores an unceasingly gruesome vision of male brutality. Peter (Robert Atzorn), a bored middle-class man, simultaneously displaces and fulfills his vivid fantasies of killing his wife, Katarina (Christine Buchegger), by murdering a sex worker, also called Katarina (Rita Russek), and then violating her corpse. Twelve years earlier, Bergman had anticipated this killing in Hour of the Wolf (1968), another film that culminates in male violence. During a sleepless night, Johan (Max von Sydow) confesses to his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), his murder of a young boy. By the end of the film, Johan has shot Alma in a rage and disappeared, abandoning her and her unborn child.

The men in these films are similarly consumed by desire for domination and fear of losing control: both express their anxieties about masculine identity in violence; both are deeply homophobic but possibly gay and incapable of being close to women who are stronger and more open to life than they are. Yet by the time he made From the Life of the Marionettes, while in self-imposed exile in Munich, Bergman seems to have refined his notion of how these anxieties are weaponized: the confused, formless anger that propels Johan to madness in Hour of the Wolf has in Peter become directed and focused, his targeting of women made explicit. While each film is formally masterful—Bergman’s staging is impeccable, and Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer on both, uses light dynamically to create striking shots—their visual beauty does not mask the aggression and brutality enacted by their male protagonists.

So how are we to watch these films—in particular, how are women to watch such unrelenting examples of male anger and entitlement, and what can we draw from the portrayals of the women who incur this wrath? In her 1996 essay collection Reel to Real, the feminist theorist bell hooks, addressing dominance in heterosexual relationships, observes that “there are moments when submission is a gesture of agency and power, [and] a distinction has to be made between conscious surrender, an act of choice, and the submission of someone who is victimized and without choice.” For hooks, love is something that can fortify the person who loves, regardless of whether it is reciprocated. Throughout From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf are moments of such conscious and complete love, offered at some point by each of the three women; the two wives, Katarina and Alma, at least, gain strength from them. As the men disintegrate both mentally and physically—hunching into their clothes, their faces twisted into expressions of pain—the women, independent and engaged with the world in ways their husbands are not, do not diminish.

The key idea under investigation in From the Life of the Marionettes, adapted for German television from a longer script called Love with No Lovers, is the intertwining of passion and contempt—a theme that turns up time and again in Bergman’s work—which makes it difficult for either party in a relationship to break free. Through a series of vignettes, we observe the unraveling marriage of Peter and Katarina Egermann in the days leading up to Peter’s brutal murder and rape of the other Katarina. The Egermanns were first introduced as peripheral characters (played by Jan Malmsjö and Bibi Andersson) in Scenes from a Marriage, representing an alternative trajectory—they are unhappy but stay together—to that of the series’ central couple, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, Katarina Egermann is a more modern woman than the female characters in Bergman’s earlier films. Described disparagingly by the sleazy psychiatrist Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath) as a “career woman”—a perspective that does not stop him from trying to sleep with her—Katarina represents an independence that thwarts Peter’s idea of what a wife should be. But while Peter harbors fantasies of murdering his spouse and at one point kicks her roughly in the face after he has been talked out of a suicide attempt, Katarina remains simultaneously autonomous and open to their relationship. Bergman here gives his female protagonist a fuller humanity and a better aptitude for life than he does her male counterpart—something that had been increasingly the case since the early days of his career. Unlike Hour of the Wolf’s Alma, who is partially reliant on Johan for her livelihood and becomes independent only after he disappears, Katarina does not need Peter, and continues to thrive once he is gone.

Yet this freedom is granted only to the married Katarina. Her sex-worker double, who offers one of Marionettes’ most startling images of conscious empathy, is denied any form of renewal. The scene between Peter and this Katarina is shown twice: the first image of the film—shot in color, as is the final scene—is of her shoulder. Then we see her open, curious face and her finger tracing the outline of Peter’s face—a Bergman motif. The first time the scene occurs, it is a generous, tender image that is then disrupted by Peter’s sudden violence. But the second time it plays out, just before the end of the film (and now, like the rest of the movie, in black and white), it becomes clear how radical this gesture is. By now, we know that she has felt unsettled by him. “Something about you is strange,” she says. “One of the girls wanted to stay here and keep an eye on things. Maybe it was stupid of me to send her away.” Despite this, she chooses to be empathetic. The fact that the film plays out conservatively and kills her off, in the long-standing cinematic tradition of punishing prostitutes, does not diminish the symbolic power of her action: it is not because she has chosen compassion that Katarina is murdered but because the system in which she is caught offers no escape. As Peter repeats throughout the film: “All ways are barred.”

Like From the Life of the Marionettes, Hour of the Wolf portrays the spiral into madness of its male protagonist, which cannot be halted by his wife’s compassion and generosity. The moody, secretive Johan, a successful painter going through a bad patch, and his good-hearted wife, Alma, have been spending the summer on a remote island. (A similar location, the island Fårö-, would soon serve as the setting for Shame and The Passion of Anna, two other films from the late sixties featuring Ullmann and von Sydow as tortured couples—and the scenes that bookend it, in which the present-day Alma gives a documentary-style report directly to the camera on the events of the plot, prefigure similarly self-referential moments in those films.) The pair’s time on the island ought to be a pleasant one, but Johan is haunted by dark visions that fracture his sanity.

Hour of the Wolf is constructed in such a way that the audience can never be sure which actions are part of the material world and which take place within Johan’s visions. His murder of the boy, for example, could be read as a vision or as a memory, an indeterminacy effected by the image itself. The struggle between child and man is presented with a tangible vividness and attention to detail, yet it is shot in the overexposed, high-contrast cinematography that marks many of Johan’s hallucinations. When the couple visit the castle of their neighbor, the Baron von Merkens (Josephson), for a dinner party, von Merkens’s ghoulish guests chatter chaotically at Johan, their faces contorted under a hard, unforgiving light. Johan begins to break under the pressure, but Alma remains strong. As she and Johan walk back across the moonlit island, she tells him, “I’m not going to run away, no matter what they try,” even though she’s sure something terrible is about to happen. “I’ll stay,” she says, “I will. I’ll stay.” Although ultimately the power of her love is not enough to save him, like Katarina Egermann in Marionettes, she accepts that fact and moves on. Without Johan, there are no ghosts, and Alma is free to live with her soon-to-be-born child.

Addressing the hallucinatory figures who haunt him into madness near the end of Hour of the Wolf, Johan says, “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the shards reflect?” In Images, Bergman draws a connection between this identity crisis and the one sufferred by Peter in From the Life of the Marionettes. But the films offer no indication that these men can succeed in reassembling their broken psyches. Rather, it is the female characters here who have been able to make—in their fierce holding on to their capacities to love, within and against the structures of a patriarchy that is unrelentingly abusive—radical gestures of will and resilience. The men in these films have lost their senses of self, but the women have learned that, to return to hooks, “to love is to endure.”

– S. Masukor: Hour of the Wolf and From the Life of the Marionettes: The Strength of Surrender

Article here

Andrei Tarkovsky: On Dreams and Memories

Mirror (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Over a 24-year span, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) directed seven feature films. In 1975, he released Zerkalo (Mirror), which marks the midpoint of his career. It was followed by Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and Sacrifice, and was preceded by Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrei Rublev (1966), and Solaris (1972). 

Tarkovsky's final films were created in exile from the Soviet Union, and were shot in Italy and Sweden, respectively. Mirror has recently superseded Tarkovsky's other films, at least in terms of critical acclaim. It debuted in the top 10 of the Sight and Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time in 2012, finishing ninth in the Directors' Top Ten. (It was also Tarkovsky's highest-ranked work, coming in 19th place in the Critics' Poll.) 

This acclaim is undoubtedly due to the viewer's perception that this film provides privileged insight not only into Tarkovsky the man, but also into Tarkovsky the artist; for Mirror is not only the most autobiographical of all his works, but it is also the film that most succinctly summarises the filmmaker's aesthetic: his belief that cinema is, first and foremost, a medium of time, a medium that allows the viewer to experience the passage of time.

Tarkovsky had intended to write a novella on his boyhood recollections of the Second World War. He eventually gave up on this endeavour and began to consider replicating these recollections on film. The reproduction was the only emphasis of the initial draught. It was "filled with elegiac grief and yearning for my childhood," according to the author. At this stage, the title was A White, White Day. 

Unhappy with it, Tarkovsky opted to insert video interviews with his mother explaining her own memories of the time period as a point of tension or contrast in his second script. This concept would become Mirror. Despite his decision not to utilise interviews, he did include some brief photos of his mother, Maria Vishnyakova, and his second wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, as well as the voice of his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, reciting some of the poetry. 

Rather than remaining focused on a single time period, he decided to create a narrative that moves backwards and forwards in time to chronicle one man's life throughout the twentieth century, a life lived not solely in the present but in a complex temporal zone between past and present, one where the past is still present to us, where the past is not past. This character, who is given the name Alexei in the film, is a stand-in for Tarkovsky, who appears briefly at the conclusion of the film, resting in bed and cupping a bird in his palm before releasing it into the air.  He adds, "It's nothing, everything will be alright".

In Moscow, Tonino Guerra, Italian poet and screenwriter (who worked with Petri, Rosi, Antonioni, and with Fellini on Amarcord) met with Andrei Tarkovsky, when The Mirror, had just been released in France.

With respect to this nostalgic film about the persistence of our first memories, Tonino Guerra asked Tarkovsky about childhood, death, and the nature of dreams. At the time, it was expected that Tarkovsy would begin shooting a new film ltalian Journey, based on an idea by Tonino Guerra.

TG: What is your earliest memory?

AT: The first thing that I remember happened when I was a year and a half. I remember the house, the open terrace, the stairs from the terrace-only five or six steps-and the railing. Between the staircase and the angle of the house was an enormous lilac bush. It was a cool and sandy place. I would roll an aluminum hoop from the gate to the lilacs. At one point I hear a strange noise coming from the sky. I am seized with a panicked fear of dying, and hide myself beneath the lilacs. I look up at the sky since that’s where the noise is coming from. There’s a fearsome noise that becomes more and more intense. All of a sudden, between the branches I see an airplane pass. It's 1933. I never thought it might be a bird, but something very terrible.

TG: How did your parents get along with each other?

AT: It’s hard to talk about that. I was only three when my father left the family. Afterwards, we saw him but rarely. I’m left with two impressions. The first is this one: we lived in a small, two-room apart- ment in the old part of Moscow. My father, as you know, is a poet, and stayed up all night sometimes to write. He typed on a machine. I would hear him asking my mother every night, “Maruschka, tell me whether you like it better this way or that way,” and he would read her a line. My father generally accepted her suggestions. For the second memory, contrarily, I am a few years older; I have already started school. And my father came home very late one night. My sister and I were asleep already, and he started a fight with my mother in the kitchen. He wanted me to go to live with him in the other house. My mother didn’t want it. That night I couldn’t go back to sleep because I was asking myself what I should say the next day if they asked me who I wanted to live with. I realized that I would never go to live with my father, even though I missed not seeing him.

TG: How do you view death?

AT: I have no fear of death, really no fear. It does not frighten me. It is physical suffering that frightens me. Sometimes I think that death could give a surprising feeling of freedom. The kind of freedom that’s often impossible in life. Therefore I do not fear death. What is very sad, on the other hand, is the death of a loved one.

Clearly, when we mourn the loss of those we hold dear it’s because we realize that we will never again have the possibility of asking their forgiveness for all of our sins against them. We cry at their gravesides, not because we feel bad for them but because we feel bad for ourselves. Because we can no longer be forgiven.

TG: Do you believe that when a man dies everything is over, or that another kind of life continues?

AT: I am convinced that life is only the beginning. I know that I can’t prove it, but instinctively we know that we are immortal. It’s hard for me to explain because it’s very complex. I just know that a man who ignores death is a bad man.

TG: Tell me what you want to do with your next film. I don’t need the plot, just your point of departure, the idea that you like.

AT: I would like to film a scene against a window of a veranda with panes of glass that reflect the sun as it is setting. I already know that it takes five minutes for the sun to set. Then I would like the characters to speak their lines while the sun is setting so that very slowly the light in the windows will get dimmer and then go out. One moment the sun is there, and then five minutes later it is night.
I would also like to fiIm the instant when the first snow begins to fall, the kind of snow that whitens the ground and dissolves in two minutes. All the while the characters are in action.

Often we remove nature from films because it seems useless. We exclude it thinking that we are the real protagonists. But we are not the protagonists, because we are dependent on nature. We are the result of its evolution. I think to neglect nature is, from an emotional and artistic point of view, a crime. Above all it is stupid, because nature always gives us the sensation of the truth.

TG: I know that you have a little dacha in the country and that you retreat to it from time to time.

AT: It’s a log house about two hundred miles from Moscow. It’s the first time I’ve ever owned my own home. This is how I came to have a relationship with animals . . . a cat, a dog . . . I probably owe the possibility of knowing animals at all entirely to my wife. Since she started living in the country birds fly around her, perch on her shoulder, on her head. whatever it is, they never come near me but they walk alongside of Larissa.

TG: Do you give a lot of importance to dreams?

AT: There are two kinds of dreams. Those that you forget right away and the others that have a colossal importance. I would like to understand them deeply because they are messages.

TG: What is your most recent dream?

AT: Yesterday. One of my recurring dreams about war. War had just erupted. I seemed to be cold, marching with many others, stepping over bodies. We could only feel the bodies with our feet because we had our eyes fixed on an enormous television screen where a big expert con- soled us by saying that our scientists had succeeded in finding a way to increase the rotation of the earth so that our rockets would fire faster than the enemy’s. And in fact we could feel the earth turning beneath our feet as if we were bears on a giant ball, and there was this big TV screen with a fine grainy powder on it like snow over the face of the person speaking, and there was also snow on us and, very slowly, everything became a walk in the snow . . . almost a joyful moment. And then I’m walking and I see only white.

– Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky: Tonino Guerra 1978.

Visconti: Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti: Rocco and His Brothers

“At once lyrical and brutal, this family saga is fatalist film noir expressed through a purity of vision; like the saintly Rocco (Alain Delon) himself, it takes a lot of violence to daunt Visconti’s love. Rocco is a character like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin, or Robert Bresson’s Balthazar. He is the anomaly among the five sons of a poor but canny widow (Katina Paxinou) who brings her family from the south to Milan, where they “arrive like an earthquake,” unprepared for the strains of urban living. The film develops in five episodes, one devoted to each brother, but the structure is as complex as their lives are intertwined.”

– Judy Bloch 

Five boys and their mother migrate north to Milan in search of opportunity. In the boxing ring, Simone and Rocco discover fame and love in the same woman—Nadia. In this sharp, sensual, emotionally devastating classic from filmmaker Luchino Visconti, jealousy grows, blood is spilt, and a striving family confronts self-destruction.

Luchino Visconti's picture, a great, late neo-realistic combination of melodrama and tragedy features Alain Delon as Rocco, Renato Salvatori as the hapless Simone, Annie Girardot, and Visconti regulars Paolo Stoppa and Claudia Cardinale round out the multinational group (father and daughter in The Leopard, three years later). 

Giuseppe Rotunno's gritty black-and-white photographs of Milan is striking: not just Central Station, misty canals, and majestic cathedral spires, but also squalid working-class tenements and boxing rings — providing an evocative image of a pivotal moment in recent Italian history.

Rocco and His Brothers "represents the artistic apotheosis of Italian neorealism," according to A.O. Scott of The New York Times, with an operatic Nino Rota score and Giuseppe Rotunno's dazzling, on-location photography. Visconti organises his characteristic themes—modernity, social friction, familial discord—across an epic canvas that directly impacted later Italian-American sagas by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, drawing on Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. 

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1960, when it was met with controversy and awarded the Special Jury Prize. 

A distinct feature of Luchino Visconti's work is his realistic approach to individuals caught up in the conflicts of modern society, which led to the designation of Visconti as the "father of Neorealism" in Italian cinema. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, he began to distinguish himself as an inventive theatrical and opera director. 

From an aristocratic background, Visconti was familiar with the arts as his mother was a noted pianist, and his father hired professional entertainers to play at their own theatre throughout his boyhood. He spent around 10 years studying cello and, after that, worked briefly as a theatre set designer. He was well-educated in classical music, too. Visconti joined Renoir as his assistant in 1935, at a time when the French filmmaker was beginning to address social and political concerns in his films. 

The first major project to establish him as a filmmaker was “Obsession,” an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film he produced employed natural locations, paired professional performers with locals, and included footage captured with concealed cameras to augment the believability of the story.

This is an excellent example of Neorealism in the world of international cinema. Neorealist directors like as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were some of the most prominent filmmakers during the postwar period. "The Earth Trembles" (a documentary-style study of Sicilian fishermen) took home the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Senso from 1954 is widely acclaimed by critics.  Aming Visconti's other noteworthy works is Bellissima (1951; The Most Beautiful). White Nights, an adaptation of a story by Dostoevsky, and Rocco e I suoi fratelli (1960; Rocco and His Brothers).

His masterpiece, the 1963 drama Il gattopardo (The Leopard) is widely admired, which connects strongly with Visconti through his identification with the character of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, an aristocrat with liberal political convictions. When he died in 1976, Visconti was finishing the editing of his last picture, L'innocente (The Innocent), based on a novel by D'Annunzio. 

Martin Scorsese paid tribute to Rocco and His Brothers when it was recently restored to its original glory: “When Rocco and His Brothers came out, in 1960, a lot of people criticised it for what they perceived as emotional excess. It is operatic, as were all of Visconti’s films, but the remarks about excess made no sense to me. Rocco is Italian culture. I grew up in Italian-American culture, but there wasn’t much of a difference. For us – that is, me and my family and my friends – the physical and emotional expressiveness of the characters in the film, Katina Paxinou’s character in particular, seemed like an accurate and only slightly heightened reflection of the life we knew. We all saw that kind of ‘excess’ on a regular basis. Rocco is one of the most sumptuous black-and-white pictures I’ve ever seen. The images, shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, are pearly, elegant and lustrous – it’s like a simultaneous continuation and development of neorealism.”

The following extract is an interview with Luchini Visconto in which the great Italian director discusses Rocco and his Brothers.

B.C.: Could you say something about neorealism and the Italian cinema?

L.V.: The big mistake of neorealism, to my way of thinking, was its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What neorealism needed, and got in a film like De Sica’s Miracle in Milan [1951] and even Pietro Germi’s The Road to Hope [1950], was a “dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism....

B.C.: Let’s move to the subject of Rocco and His Brothers, a film that has more in common with Bellissima than one might think: its “improvement” on neorealism through a “dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism, as well as the fact that Rocco itself is star-centered: in Alain Delon. Why did you use Delon in the role of Rocco?

L.V.: Because Alain Delon is Rocco. If I had been obliged to use another actor, I would not have made the film. I wrote the role for him, and Rocco is the main character in the story. After all, the title of the picture is “Rocco and His Brothers.”

B.C.: What exactly is Rocco’s role?

L.V.: I really don’t want to recount the plot of my own film. Nonetheless, just for you I will do so. A mother and her five sons live in the Lucania region of southern Italy, but, in order to find work, they all eventually move north to Milan. Rocco is the first one seized by a desire to escape to the north. He wants to leave, so he just runs away from home, and, inspired by his example, the other brothers quickly follow suit. Though she would rather stay at home in the south, their widowed mother doesn’t want to be separated from her sons, so she too goes north along with her boys.

B.C.: It’s Rocco, then, who serves as a role model for his brothers?

L.V.: It’s more or less fated to be this way, but that is not immediately evident, nor is such a familial “fate” preconceived on Rocco’s part. In Milan, the family settles in a slum. At first everyone looks for work, but no one finds it. Very quickly, the situation there deteriorates and the domestic atmosphere becomes polluted.

B.C.: Even for Rocco?

L.V.: Yes and no. Rocco is pure, you see, the only one who can successfully resist this degrading environment and preserve his integrity. He is also the person who suffers the most, for he is conscious of the familial tragedy, of the irresponsibility of certain of his brothers in the face of the vicissitudes of life that are destroying them. Rocco’s drama is therefore double because, in addition to his own suffering, he takes upon himself the misery of every other member of his family.

B.C.: What are the stages of this domestic tragedy, the events that trigger it?

L.V.: Well, the situation is tragic at the very start. The events that follow are the natural consequence of the social situation in which this family finds itself. That is what I was always at pains to show. And, at the same time, I must insist on the communication gap between Italians of the north and those of the south. We also have our racists, you know, and they are not only of the linguistic kind.
Discouraged because they can’t find work—disheartened is perhaps a better word—three of the brothers end up by becoming boxers. But, above all else, please do not believe that I was out to make a boxing film. This is merely one element in the picture, almost an exterior one or an accessory; simultaneously, boxing is of course intended to be a symbol of physical violence in the face of the figurative violence that Rocco’s family encounters.

Confronted by the difficulties of life in the big city, the brothers fall from grace one after the other. The one who falls first, Simone, is Rocco’s favorite. (For this role I engaged the actor Renato Salvatori.) Simone arrived in Milan almost in rags, but soon he was outfitting himself in silk shirts; and the audience well understood the source of his newfound income without explicitly being shown that he had become a gigolo. In the end, this character plays a very important part in the drama. For what happens to Simone makes clear that the reasons for, or causes of, a family’s survival—or self-destruction—are not the unique location in which it finds itself, as you might expect. Basically, this family, had it remained united, in Milan or anywhere else, would have had a chance to survive intact. Staying together would have been its best strategy for success, if you will.

Another element apart from unemployment divides the family, however, and pits two of the brothers (the others are too young) against one another. In the same ghetto as theirs lives a call girl named Nadia. She is also poor by birth, but her job permits her to live better than those around her. Every day, she lures young men into her bed, and for them she represents luxury of a kind, even mystery. Only Rocco remains insensitive in the beginning to the charms of this urban princess. But such precise delineation or differentiation is unnecessary here, since all these characters are part of the same reality. I don’t need to assign it any poetic quality, for poetry emanates naturally from this environment—from the clash between fish out of water, as it were (Rocco and his displaced family), and the highly toxic water in which they now find themselves (the city of Milan).

Still, in her mysterious way, Nadia herself is a character apart from this environment, and one who intervenes directly—almost constantly—in the tragedy, precipitating its events. This is because she falls in love with Rocco, the family’s only hope for salvation. Nadia and Rocco’s rapport, which forms gradually, is difficult to fathom. There are so many “shades” to their relationship that I simply could not explain them all in mere words. You have to see the film. But the result of Rocco and Nadia’s liaison is obvious: it arouses the jealousy of others. And Rocco suffers as a result, because saving his family is more important to him than Nadia’s love.

It is the “fallen” Simone who is the first to fall passionately in love with Nadia, but she scorns him. Naturally, he is jealous of Rocco, who for his part feels guilty, yes guilty, at being loved by a woman whom he himself does not really love, and whose love, he knows, could only placate and even change for the better his favorite brother, Simone. But Rocco also wants Nadia, and this feeling at times shames him. Already trapped in a dizzying downward spiral where his material life is concerned, he now finds himself hounded by moral dilemmas to which he cannot find a solution. And because no material hardship can destroy him, it is his reason that begins to waver. Up to a certain point, though, Rocco is able to remain whole, spiritually as well as physically.

Already harassed and even harmed by a kind of social fatality, however, Rocco is remorselessly reduced to a slow death, to a more or less long decay. And it is Simone himself who will be the clumsy instrument of his demise: driven in the end by extreme jealousy (Nadia has ridiculed him at the same time as she has clearly stated her preference for Rocco), he loses his head and murders this girl who has sown discord among brothers. After Nadia’s death, Rocco finally becomes bereft of all reason, his “escape” to Milan having removed forever the possibility for him of a normal and healthy life. His mother, for her part, subsequently returns to southern Italy with the youngest of her sons.

B.C.: Is Nadia really the cause of Rocco’s folly-become-madness?

L.V.: To the extent that one can assign causes to madness, yes. These characters are linked: Nadia loves Rocco, who can no longer stand the sight of Simone, who is otherwise his favorite brother and the lover of Nadia. The lines of this story are simple yet unerring, and the very setting of “cold,” utilitarian Milan lends itself to such a narrative. I had no intention, however, of treating this film as a melodrama; for me, it is a realistic tragedy.

An Interview with Luchino Visconti. After Neo-Realism.

The Coen Brothers: Westerns and Greek Tragedies

No Country For Old Men (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

“[‘No Country for Old Men’] is a reiteration of the old myth that Death stalks the land. That is why West Texas has that desert look, the scorched air, and the heat that leaves brave men listless.”

– David Thomson, Have You Seen...? 

No Country's setting is a classic neo-noir milieu of malevolence and amorality. Moss, like many other Coen heroes before him, is driven by money and vanity, but he lacks the ability to assess the chances against him. The Coens' noir flicks Blood Simple and Fargo are situated outside of the traditional metropolitan atmosphere. They do it again in No Country, but this time they take a more serious approach to the Western themes of civilization vs. the wild, the rule of the gun vs. the rule of law, the morality of violence, and American individualism. 

Moss only comes upon the money when a narrowly missed shot wounds a deer, and he climbs down from his high vantage point to put it to rest. This act of sympathy on the part of the hunter puts his fate in action. Moss returns to the murder site with water to assist a badly injured man, nearly sacrificing his life in the process, as a result of the same impulse. Sheriff Bell's reminiscences of the early days of Texas and clashes between lawmen and outlaws are voice-over narrations performed by Jones in his gravelly Texas accent. He is presented with a heinous deed that he cannot comprehend. The ideals that have shaped Bell and Moss no longer appear to apply. 

Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem epitomises the new west. He kills without remorse and pursues Moss with zeal. He kills with a cattle-slaughtering airgun. The cowboy and the ranch have been replaced by industrial meat production. Chigurh believes that death is unavoidable and that every choice and action leads to it. He is only functioning as Death's tool, not being responsible for his deeds. In this new western terrain, compassion and honour have no place; it's just the hunter and the prey. 

McCarthy's grim picture of reality is well captured by the Coens. McCarthy's neo-Western debunks the romantic vision of the west that the classic Western promotes, omitting the brutality and racism involved in the genocide of aboriginal peoples, westward expansion, and the Manifest Destiny mentality. With some of their greatest filmmaking—exquisitely planned scenes, an incredible eye for the peculiarities of human behaviour, and the ability to cast precisely the right actors—the Coens bring the book vividly to life. 

No Country for Old Men is set in 1980, and returns to the territory of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple (1983), with the windy desolation of the Lone Star state externalising the mindset of a country that is "hard on people" – especially those who go against Reaganite self-sufficiency without thinking things through. 

If Ray (John Getz) of Blood Simple gets caught up in a web of deception and killing when he decides to tidy up a murder scene for which he falsely believes his sweetheart is to blame, Moss puts his head on the block via an ill-advised act of charity. "You're on your own down here," says the opening narration in Blood Simple. 

The Coen brothers have always referenced and parodied previous films and literature, but this is their first direct adaptation. It's easy to understand why they were drawn to Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, an extravagant found-cash period piece with a heritage that echoes William Faulkner and James M. Cain's grim pulp dramas. 

McCarthy's story is well-suited to the Coen brothers' upheaval of genre, and the film stays remarkably true to the novel's source material, condensing its dark humour and meditations on the depth of evil into a concise vision of grim fate and a relentless sense of the darkness released by criminal money.

In the following extract Richard Gilmore discusses the Coen Brothers western No Country for Old Men, and its relation to Greek tragedy.

The stories that the Coen brothers are interested in telling all seem to be very American stories. Their approach of choice is the genre of film. Their favorite film genre is very American, a genre the French call film noir, but No Country for Old Men is of another classic American genre, the western. Genre is an interesting way to try to say something about something because, as Jacques Derrida has made explicit, the “law of the law of genre” is that every new member of a genre set will deviate from and violate the apparent established principles of that genre. This is how Derrida describes the “law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.” This description of each new member of a genre set sounds to me a lot like what it means to be a (new) member of the set of Americans. Just as each new Coen film that has genre elements adds to and transforms the genre it participates in, so too, each new American adds to and transforms what it means to be an American.

No Country for Old Men, then, is and is not a classic western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western. There is a beautiful moment when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his sidekick, Deputy Wendell, are riding along, following a trail, and Deputy Wendell remarks on the tracks they are following in a way that recalls for me a moment in John Ford’s great classic (and revisionist) western, The Searchers (1956), when Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) are following some tracks that will be similarly fateful for everyone involved. It is an interesting connection (I won’t claim it is a reference) because in The Searchers, Ethan says, “We’ll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth”—and they do. They find ’em, sure enough; but in an odd, somewhat inexplicable twist, there is no final confrontation between Ethan and Scar (Henry Brandon), the hated Comanche chief he has been seeking for seven years. Instead, it is Martin who kills Scar, and he appears to have done it while Scar was asleep in his tepee. Sheriff Bell is pretty dogged for a while, but he will give up the search altogether before he finds his adversary, Anton Chigurh.

Anton Chigurh might as well be Melville’s Moby Dick for all of the human compassion, or even human motivation, that can be found in him. It makes as little sense to speak of him as evil as it does to say that raw nature, a blizzard or a flood, is evil. He has principles, the equivalent in a man to the laws of nature. Given his principles, he does not act irrationally or from passion; he is more of an inexorable force. He is not a rampaging killer on the loose; he has been summoned by a human will, a human desire, to achieve a desired end. He appears only because he was summoned. The recognizable and clear evil lies with the one (or those, since there may be others involved; the film is not explicit on this point) who summoned him. He was summoned because of greed, lust for power, an indifference to the suffering of others, and personal gratification. He who summoned him will learn, too late, that, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he has summoned a power that he cannot control, that it was pure hubris to think that he could control it.

That evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie. What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as a good and noble king. It is also because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, King Laius.

Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago. He has also married his mother and fathered his children/siblings. As a consequence, Oedipus’s wife/mother commits suicide, he blinds and exiles himself, his incest-produced children will fight and be responsible for each others’ deaths. Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the “last man standing” (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, “there must’ve been one”) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not at all clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus’s disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost.

Power, Hubris, and the Fatal Flaw

Anton Chigurh is a monster, in the sense that Emerson uses the word in his essay “The American Scholar,” that is, in association with “monitory” and “admonition,” drawing on its Latin derivation meaning a warning or an omen.The ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve that same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster. Tragedy was considered a source of wisdom as well as of entertainment, and the primary wisdom that the ancient Greek tragedies taught was also written on the wall at the famous and perhaps most holy of Greek temples, the Oracle of Delphi: “Avoid hubris.” Hubris is a difficult word to recover from the Greek, but it means something like arrogant ignorance, thinking that you are better or more powerful than you really are. The Greek gods hated hubris, and one of their primary occupations as gods was punishing humans for their hubris.

Hubris was such a problem for the Greeks not because they valued timidity or even humility but because they loved power, and they loved powerful, proud people. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them.” The Greek ideal was to manifest all of your true power, and to be very powerful, without overstepping your own limits, without presuming to have more power than you really have. This is a very difficult ideal to achieve because one does not know what one is capable of until one tries to do things beyond what one has done before. And yet, the Greeks (Aristotle, for one) assumed that one could know what one is capable of and thereby avoid the calamities of hubris. The above quotation from Aristotle concludes, “for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.” This Greek ideal, this wisdom, is, too, exhorted upon the wall at Delphi: “Know thyself.” Llewelyn Moss is a man of considerable resources, but his powers have been lying more or less dormant. He has innate powers of intelligence and determination as well as some acquired abilities learned while serving in Vietnam. Virtually all of these powers are banked, the way one banks a fire, because there is no way to exercise them in his day-to-day life. He has a good job as a welder that does not require all of either his intelligence or determination. He has a lovely young wife and a comfortable trailer home but no obvious way of improving his situation beyond this level of comfort. In many ways he seems to be happy and successful, but it is a difficult thing to have powers that you have no opportunities to use. Doing pretty well in America has never been the happiest of options if there is some chance that you could be doing better. Of course, that possibility of doing better becomes real for Llewelyn when he comes upon the briefcase full of cash. He barely seems to hesitate before he decides to go for it.

A key element of Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist’s hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means “off the mark,” signifying that one’s aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself, and this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one’s aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigured in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert at hunting: the way he uses his boot for a barrel rest, the way he adjusts the sight for the distance of the shot, his patience in taking the shot, his picking up his shell after he takes the shot are all signs of his expertise. All are signs of his knowledge, his ability, his power, but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter. He is clearly frustrated and annoyed with himself, and he heads out after the wounded antelope to try to finish what he has started.

It is a long shot that he thinks he can make. It is not a shot that he will make, but he is just good enough to actually hit the antelope at the distance of almost a mile. All of the elements of the movie are here, Llewelyn’s talents as well as his misjudgments, as well as certain implacable facts of nature; distance, heat, the movement of the antelope are the facts of nature that will undo his best intentions. His aim is good but not quite good enough, and the worst possible consequences eventuate because he was willing to try the difficult shot. His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

– No Country for Old Men. The Coens’ Tragic Western by Richard Gilmore in The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Edited by Mark T. Conard.