by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was part fourteen (the next-to-last installment) of
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, with a
horrible subtitle (“The First Days of Digital: Reality Losing Its Realness in
America and Australia?”) indicating that digital cinematography — both as
computer-generated imagery (CGI) interspersed with photographic images in
post-production and as an entirely new medium in itself (both computer
animation à la Toy
Story and the later films that followed it
from Pixar and its competitors, and the use of digital video recording to replace celluloid film as the actual medium on which films
are created) — has made the movies “more real than reality.” I’ve been
faithfully recording all the episodes of this series thus far but had only
watched one previously, episode 10 (about the 1970’s and focusing on
politically themed films from both the U.S. and other countries), and this one,
like episode 10, seemed interesting but flawed, more an extended reel of
preview clips than a serious documentary on filmmaking. Both the strengths and
the weaknesses of this series (at least judging from the two episodes I’ve seen
so far) are largely projections of its director, writer and on-screen host, an
Australian named Mark Cousins, whose thick accent, homely appearance and utter
lack of charisma burden down the show and make it seem like you’re trapped in
your living room with a really obnoxiously opinionated movie buff who’s zipping
you through his DVD collection but only showing you a few bits and pieces of
each disc.
Cousins’ great strength is that he sees the history of film as
international — this, somewhat surprisingly from TCM, is a history of film and not a history of Hollywood — and his great
weakness is he’s a sucker for self-consciously “intellectual” filmmakers like
Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant and Matthew Barney. In case
you haven’t heard of Matthew Barney (which I hadn’t, though I knew quite well
who the other three were!), he’s best known for making five films in a series
called Cremaster, which I had heard of. I had thought the unusual title was short
for “cremation master” and the movies were essentially horror films about
people being cremated before they had quite died. In fact “cremaster” is
apparently the name of the male human crotch muscle that controls erections, and
the films — judging from the brief excerpts shown from Cremaster 3, in which a male hero (of sorts) ends up climbing up
the inner ring of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and meets a whole bunch of
scantily clad women — are wordless conceits that probably would work just fine
as music videos but I suspect they’d drag at feature length. One point Cousins
makes in this documentary is that in the 1990’s movies started being
self-referential, based less on life than on previous movies — though quite
frankly this is a trend that way
precedes the 1990’s; movies have been reflecting other movies ever since there
was enough of a catalog of them for other filmmakers to be inspired by their
predecessors. The parallels Cousins makes between new and old (or slightly older)
movies sometimes make sense — as when he shows clips of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir
Dogs in parallel with the Hong Kong action
movie from which Tarantino ripped off his basic plot and many of the actual
setups — and sometimes doesn’t; comparing Cremaster 3 to Harold Lloyd’s 1925 thrill comedy Safety
Last (the one in which he climbs up the
side of a tall building) really
seems forced. Lloyd actually wanted his audience to feel for his character and
root for him even as we were laughing; Cremaster 3 is so abstract one wonders what there is to evoke
any emotion at all.
Cousins was particularly nice towards Gus Van Sant and Baz
Luhrmann, mainly I suspect because they agreed to be interviewed by him (and
Luhrmann, despite the German-sounding name, is a fellow Aussie and Cousins
probably liked him on those grounds); I regard them as incredibly pretentious
directors who have made one great film each (Van Sant’s is Drugstore
Cowboy and Luhrmann’s is the virtually
unseen Australia, which Cousins
didn’t mention, probably because though it’s rooted in previous movies,
especially Red River and Gone
with the Wind, it’s directed in classic
Hollywood style instead of the frame-breaking methodology of all too many films
made today, with their quick cuts and virtual incomprehensibility) but have
otherwise acquired cult followings for precisely the things I don’t like about
them: in Van Sant’s case his obsession with making his central characters
unlikable and keeping us from emotionally identifying with them; in Luhrmann’s
his penchant for taking classic stories (Romeo and Juliet, Camille,
The Great Gatsby) and burdening them with
modern-day music and a showboating everything-including-the-kitchen-sink visual style. (I’d hope the United
Nations General Assembly would pass a resolution demanding that Luhrmann never
again make a movie featuring a fireworks display.)
When I reviewed Van Sant’s Gerry (which got glowing praise from Cousins and which I
would easily put on a list of the 10 worst films of all time) I quoted Van Sant’s
comments from the press kit — “Holding audiences in their seats: Why is that a
filmmaker’s job? I think there are a lot of ways of enchanting audiences, but
I’ve noticed that today, no matter what the subject is, the filmmaking is
exactly the same, whether it’s a really depressing story or one about a guy who
saves the world. It tries to get a rise out of the audience, and it’s got to be
exciting. Everything a filmmaker does is an effort to make it exciting for you
as an audience member” — and then noted that in Gerry “Van Sant put his principles into practice. Using
all his considerable skills as a director in a relentless attempt to avoid
getting a rise out of his audience, Van Sant has made a film that’s so
excruciatingly boring it seems to last twice as long as its actual 103-minute
running time.” Cousins focuses on three Van Sant films in particular — My
Own Private Idaho (another pretentious bore
but not quite as bad as Gerry), Gerry
and his virtually scene-for-scene remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (which I haven’t seen) — and he seems to love
everything I hated about Gerry:
the emotional detachment and arbitrary plotting. “Giving us any reason to
identify with his characters seems to hold as little interest for him as
getting a rise out of his audience,” I wrote about Gerry when it first came out. “Perhaps the reason Van
Sant’s remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was a flop is their diametrically opposed conceptions of their job; if
ever there was a filmmaker who understood that holding audiences in their seats
and getting a rise out of them is the essence of being a director, Hitchcock was he.”
The show does offer some film clips of movies like Tarantino’s Reservoir
Dogs and Pulp Fiction and the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski that make those films, none of which I have seen,
look like they might not be altogether oppressive experiences and might even be
entertaining (though I was thoroughly turned off to the Coen brothers by Barton
Fink, which remains the only film of theirs
I have seen and which appalled me
by its arbitrary plotting, its totally anachronistic depiction of an alleged
1940’s and the fact that the people who wrote the blurb on the box for the VHS
tape called it a “comedy” when it really wasn’t, thereby giving me entirely the
wrong set of expectations — though I can’t blame the Coens for that) — and as part of the full package of these movies
they also showed Reservoir Dogs
and The Hudsucker Proxy as well
as Gladiator, an important
milestone in the conversion of cinema from analog to digital. Cousins made the
same point I did when I reviewed Gladiator, which was that the availability of CGI had drastically changed the
nature of spectacle films from the time of Cleopatra, when a “cast of thousands” meant literally that and
you couldn’t do scenes like the aerial view of ancient Rome with which Gladiator opens. Not surprisingly, though, Cousins approved
and I didn’t; in my Gladiator
review I wrote, “The fight between Maximus [Russell Crowe] on one side and the
retired gladiator and three, four or five tigers — I lost count — was all too
obviously computer-generated and looked digitally fake: oh, for the days when the only way you could do ‘a
cast of thousands’ on screen was actually to recruit, pay and photograph that
many people!”
